Knowledge management is about desire
November 19,  2001 issue of New Thinking

Knowledge management is about desire

By Gerry McGovern

The reduction in time to market for products and services has been a key driver for successful organizations. The success of knowledge management can be measured in relation to how it contributes to the right idea being developed into the right product at the right time at the right cost.

Knowledge is a critical asset for modern organizations. Yet knowledge management is a discipline that is little understood. Managers believe in the theory but few have come to grips with how to actually manage knowledge in a productive manner.

McKinsey recently published a survey entitled 'Creating a knowledge culture.' It focused on knowledge management practices in some 40 companies on a global basis. The study was carried out between 1995 and 1998 and had two key findings:

- Companies that fully embraced knowledge management reduced the time it took for order generation and fulfillment by 15 percent during the survey period, as against a 1.6 percent reduction for those who had less developed knowledge management strategies.

- Product development time was reduced by 4.6 percent, as against a reduction of 0.7 percent.

McKinsey summarized its findings as follows: "Successful companies build a corporate environment that fosters a desire for knowledge among their employees and that ensures its continual application, distribution, and creation."

If you want to be successful at knowledge management you must do three things:

1. Foster a desire within people to gather knowledge

2. Foster a desire within people to create knowledge

3. Foster a desire within people to share knowledge

Organizations who fail at knowledge management tend to:

1. See knowledge as something that primarily flows from the top down

2. Implement technology solutions and wait

3. Fail to address human attitudes which see hoarding knowledge as a route to power

There are two essential ways knowledge can be transferred:

1. By person-to-person interactions

2. By people reading, viewing or listening to content

Historically, the primary way knowledge was transferred was by people getting together. The Internet, however, is a direct response to the need to offer alternative ways by which knowledge can be efficiently transferred. (Its interactive elements also facilitate new ways by which people can 'get together.')

When we use email and the Web we are attempting to transfer information with the objective of creating knowledge in the mind of the person who receives our communication. The increased use of email and the Web reflect a significant shift in how we communicate knowledge. We are becoming more formal. Today, information gets written down a lot more than it did ten years ago. It's called publishing. (Also known as content management.)

Despite this profound shift in how knowledge is created within commercial organizations, the role of publishing is little understood. Look inside the intranets of most organizations today and you will find a chaotic approach to publishing. Time, money, effort and knowledge are being wasted in such information dumps.

The right knowledge can make us all more productive. A professional publishing strategy is a proven way of transferring knowledge. Desire, and not technology, should be the foundation of such a strategy: the desire to create, find and share knowledge.