Specialists Offer Their Essential Knowledge-Management IngredientsSpecialists Offer Their Essential Knowledge-Management Ingredients

People who run knowledge-management programs each seem to have their own list of essentials. Here's a sampling of what some practitioners are preaching.

From Bill Baker, knowledge-management and benchmarking champion for Raytheon Co., which relies on a set of steps that comprise a Six Sigma approach to knowledge management:

• Visualize: Decide where you want a knowledge effort to go, and make sure you're aware of what's already been done so you're not reinventing knowledge that can be reused.

• Commit: Get company management to buy in to a knowledge-management program.

• Prioritize: Identify the low-hanging fruit--places within your company where knowledge management is most likely to make an immediate impact.

• Characterize: Understand the goals of the knowledge effort and plan around those goals.

• Improve: Always refine programs to prevent them from becoming staid.

• Achieve and celebrate: Ensure that you're getting the biggest impact by sharing your successes so others can duplicate them where appropriate.

Art Murray, managing director of the George Washington University Institute for Knowledge Management, describes four pillars to any successful knowledge management program:

• Leadership: every knowledge management program needs people to evangelize the effort throughout the company.

• Organization: without dedicated processes for capturing and sharing knowledge, knowledge management won't happen.

• Technology: even if they're only enablers, the quality of knowledge tools can make a big difference in how widely a program is embraced.

• Learning: encourage knowledge workers to play with tools, thus increasing the likelihood that they take advantage of the technological capabilities.

Rebecca McGlothlin, director of knowledge management for Unisys, has her own four critical ingredients of success:

• An organizational structure designed to make use of knowledge

• People who believe in the value of knowledge and will invest in contributing to and making use of it

• Processes that enable a company to capture knowledge in the flow of business activity and deliver it to employees in the context of their jobs

• Technology needed to support all of these areas--meaning knowledge workflows, collaboration tools, and intuitive user interfaces with which to access people, documents, and ideas.

Nicolas Gorjestani, senior adviser and chief knowledge and learning officer for the Africa region of the World Bank, believes every company should define its own essential knowledge-management program ingredients. "Each organization will have to find its own way as to what are the main obstacles to knowledge sharing," he says.

What's more uniformly needed, Gorjestani says, is an understanding of several general concepts that are key to the success of a knowledge-management effort:

• Leadership must walk the talk by leading as an example. "It's not somebody saying, 'Thou shalt share knowledge,'" Gorjestani says.

• There's no silver bullet. No matter what an organization's knowledge needs are, it will require numerous pieces in the areas of culture, process, and technology.

• It doesn't happen overnight. Organizational culture considerations make the development of a knowledge-management environment a long process.

• Technology is an enabler, not an end in itself. Knowledge programs that are built around technology will fail.

Dan Rasmus, VP at Forrester Research, doesn't offer a magic list of essential knowledge-management components, but he suggests that companies prepare themselves for two major developments he says are coming in the knowledge-management field:

• The evolution of collaboration into a set of services as the proliferation of places to collaborate becomes an obstacle to knowledge-sharing.

• Rationalization of information management and repository resources. Again, it's a matter of too many places--this time, too many places to put things.

The bottom line: simplified collaboration and a de-emphasizing of document-based knowledge. "We're not all huddled around the file cabinet or water cooler," Rasmus says. "That's why we think the collaboration is more fundamental than the repository."

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Illustration by Terry Miura