Posted by Denham on August 04, 2002 at 21:43:25:

In Reply to: KM in an small VC-funded R&D nano tech company posted by Karen Jacke on August 04, 2002 at 19:59:36:

Hi Karen,

Here are some suggestions:

1) Spend time formulating what knowledge means and is for your organization. Help everyone to understand the value and leverage that comes from adopting a true knowledge approach. Focus on knowledge related practices that help communication, creative thinking and innovation. Even PhD's can benefit from practices such as deep dialog, creative abrasion, rapid protoyping, speeding idea cycles, learning from failure, building trust and social capital.

2) Promote knowledge sharing at a deep level by supporting existing communities of interest and practice. Change reward and recognition systems to value group learning, sharing, mentoring and collaboration. Do knowledge mapping to discover the key information sources, constraints, tacit stores and unexploited potentials liked to business objectives.

2) Take time to craft a workable taxonomy so there is common ground, alignment and shared meaning. This will help surface assumptions, capture key distinctions and make it easier to communicate abstract and fuzzy concepts.

3) Establish persistent conversations using web conferencing, blogger or Wiki type applications. Get away from e-mail and files on individual hard drives, moving to many to many dialog that can be revisited and minned for commitments, questions and insights.

4) Make business intelligence everyones task. Do a relationship audit to find gaps and suggest opportunities for alliances and knowledge access from external sources. Encourage contributions and appoint someone to synthesise information from vendors, customers, conferences and monitoring the competition.

5) Consider using a template (patterns?) to capture existing experience, key solutions and insights. Craft, shepherd and share patterns that give the forces, specify the context, describe the problem / issue and provide the current best solution in clear steps. Shepherding patterns

Good luck.

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