Posted by Kees de Vos on September 19, 2002 at 07:14:04:

In Reply to: New insights into KM and IC posted by Mezei on September 06, 2002 at 17:44:06:

It is always useful to retrace your tracks. The last year and a half I have spent on various Enterprise Information Portal and Knowledge Management implementations and I found the old Venkatraman model to be the most useful.

In all simplicity Venkatraman states that Knowledge Management is concerned with the following value chain:

data -> information -> knowledge -> action -> results

In between are various gaps:
-> data
COLLECTION GAP
The company is unable to collect the relevant data for steering its operations.

data -> information
DESIGN GAP
The company is unable to present the data in the right way for its various target audiences (abstracted profiles of functions)

information -> knowledge
EXPERTISE GAP
The professionals in the company are unable to derive the correct conclusions from the information presented, due to a lack of compentencies and knowledge (the do not have the proper skill set for the abstracted profile of their function).
NOTE: do not mistake an EXPERTISE GAP and a PRESENTATION GAP. Someone with the right competencies might come to the wrong conclusion by the misrepresentation of the data/information (see the blind men and the elephant analogy)

knowledge -> action
LEVERAGE GAP
The employees of a company are unable to translate their knowledge into action. This might be due to a lot of things:
- attitude (laziness);
- misalignment of responsibilities and autorisations;
- communication problems (unclear strategy, unclear function specification, etc.)

action -> results
EXECUTION GAP
Might also stem from a wide variety of reasons:
- failing management;
- fierce competition, etc.

Most issues I encountered in pratice dealt with the Expertise and Leverage Gap, which is as Venkatraman predicted. (The IT functions of) Most companies are quite capable of overcoming the Design Gap, and most companies are pretty well set up to overcome the Execution Gap (as it is the prime focus of Operational Management).

If you look at the value chain and the various gaps I came to the conclusion that basically:

Tactical Knowledge Management = Information Management + Human Resource Management + Operational Management

Strategic Knowledge Management is more or less the same, but focuses on the growth and development of the Value Chain (Management of Innovation, Strategic Compentence Development, Strategic Scenario Planning, etc.).

And as a final note I am glad my old thesis still lost nothing of its truth:

"You can not share knowledge, you can only share information on that knwoledge".

As the issues I encountered most frequently seem to stem from miscommunication, misinterpretation and paradigm barriers.

---

Follow Ups:

---

Click Here to Post Follow Up in New Forums

    Knowledge Management Think Tank (New)

  

 Subject: 

Message: