Posted by Denham on May 08, 2000 at 15:19:28:

In Reply to: Knowledge mapping posted by Jabi Odriozola on May 08, 2000 at 13:06:21:

Greetings Jabi,

I will be interested to hear anything you get hold of. My understanding is there are no books and the folks that do consulting work in this area, have their own methodologies based around knowledge harvesting, information flows, intangible property audits or social networks. When you come down to basics there are these approaches to knowledge mapping / audits:

Locating and documenting information sources:
Finding and describing the nature, medium, location, owner and access routes to databases, LAN folders, application specific repositories, document stores and filing systems. This is traditional information mapping and inventory with additional emphasis on buisness processes, customer interfaces, helpdesks and document management workflow.

Compiling yellowpages or expertise directories:
Developing a taxonomy of competencies and skills, rating individuals and designing a system for ease of updating and search. Try and record relationships and interests in addition to education, work history and training stuff, pull from the HRM / ERP system if available.

Inventory of knowledge assets:
Finding, intellectual property, determining market values, assesing security and management strategies to enhance the value. Here you will be looking at patents, trade secrets, license agreements, leverage of copyrights, brand values and customer loyalty programs. If you take this futher you will start to allocate value to human, social, and customer capital and map ways to enhance and realize the value of these intangibles alongside tradional accounting.

Social networks:
If you are looking to map knowledge sources, not just static information and intellectual property, you will be using social network analysis, mapping who knows who, who goes to whom for help and advice, where the information enters and leaves the groups / organization, which forums and informal communities of practice are operational and generating new knowledge, solving problems or forming alliances.

The key to knowledge mapping is having a clear picture of the types of knowledge (information) you expect to be working with, their relative importance in terms of the business strategies & practices and future markets. Once you have this, you will be in a good position to discover or surface knowledge related opportunities, gaps, issues and potentials. In my work, I prefer to take an ethnographic and anthropological approach, coach and help the client to understand what 'knowledge' means to them, focus on boundary objects which carry meaning across silos, concentrate on people relationships along which knowledge flows and try to make staff aware that knowledge mapping never ends, it is just the baseline data to assess future progress and a way to surface opportunities. What really matters is what happens after the mapping or audit!!

Finally here are some tools you can use, but I would caution: it is your conceptualization and appreciation of what knowledge means rather than application of a tool or mapping process that will yield the highest ROI in this exercise.

Please continue to ask questions.

• Knowledge mapping tools

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