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We should emphasise that the core of KM is about the creation, sharing and enrichment of knowledge, and not risk trivialising the difficulties involved by thinking in terms of flow and capture.

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Implementing Knowledge Management in an Innovation Intensive Firm: Some Ideas.

Neil Pollock
August 2002; revised July 2003

Summary

Strategically planning for knowledge management for a small software and website development firm is essential for survival. However this is a confusing field. Finding a path which promises to provide practical outcomes and is achievable through limited resourcing is difficult.

I seek to clarify the fundamental issues around key concepts such as knowledge, information, know-how, expertise and communities of practice. Having a clear view includes being able to select appropriate theoretical and ideological viewpoints and appreciating where we sit within the historical continuum of the firm.

My conclusion is the fundamental means of production for small high tech firms is the application of know-how and expertise. We must think how we can best organise the firm and structure activities and practice around the creation and sharing of this central resource.

Knowledge creation is fundamentally a social activity, built around shared world views, and objectives. Management can do much to develop strategies and provide support for management of a socially constructed knowledge environment, and we can all do much better by understanding the mutual-benefits of sharing our knowledge.

1. Introduction.

The CEO of the firm has summarised his philosophy for managing knowledge workers as follows:

‘It's about partnership between workers and management. It’s about support, not control. ….Not telling them what to do, but supporting them, smoothing over the ruffled feathers, whatever. That is more of an orchestra leader role than traditional management. You choose objectives, you let people loose. You lead, you link (and how often ‘linking’ is neglected). You recognise, you counsel. You do not tell. You need those factors if you want to have a culture where people can flourish and achieve’.

The statement shows considerable synergy with the increasing focus on people rather than technology in knowledge management. It is also includes the insight that knowledge management is about a new way of managing people, rather than simply adding knowledge onto the list of things to manage.

It is not my task here to sell the concept of knowledge management (KM), nor the concept of managing in a non-traditional manner within a knowledge-intensive firm. These are already widely understood. The task is rather to suggest a framework within which we can think lucidly about challenges and foster a climate of strategic planning around knowledge.

There is much about KM that is simply hyperbole or inappropriate for implementation within this firm. What I aim to do is to identify KM perspectives that we should dismiss, and to identify directions we would be wise to explore further. I hope to stimulate discussion, so that we can build towards consolidating a KM strategic direction.

2. KM Initiatives So Far.

We have come a certain way down the KM path already. Without having formulated a specific KM strategy, the firm has taken a large number of initiatives aimed at improving the sharing of knowledge and access to information. These include efforts to:

Increase the visibility of the knowledge held:

• - skills auditing, and
• - staff presentations of new solutions, functionality and applications.

Improve the information infrastructure:

• - the Intranet as the foundation of the desktop;
• - a file server as a organised document repository;
• - a product catalogue;
• - documentation templates and ‘boilerplate’, and
• - content versioning of code and documentation.

Create a culture of knowledge sharing:

• - mentoring;
• - peer review;
• - ‘hothousing’, and
• - encouraging teamwork and ‘communities of practice’.

These initiatives have been at best only partially successful. Responsibility for establishment, evaluation, maintenance and further development has often been either diffused or unclear. Such initiatives need to have an identified place in the firm’s strategic plans, be prioritised, co-ordinated, and driven by accountable people to the point where they are considered successful or otherwise. They need then to be maintained, further developed - or abandoned.

What is the critical path for KM initiatives? What types of activities should be first, which are the most critical, what are the criteria for assessment, which may provide quick-wins, what is most likely to work, etc? But you can’t determine a critical path unless you know what the requirements are.

In determining the requirements we need to reflect on two areas:

1. Where do firms like ours sit in terms of the historical development of the means of production? Are we in a new era where the lessons that we know are no longer appropriate?
2. What does knowledge and information mean to us? How is it important, and how are we to maximise its potential? What knowledge is most important to us?

3. Major KM Issues Within the Firm.

Let’s look firstly at some of the knowledge-related problems we face.

1. Loss of Expertise.
   We have lost leading experts, thus reducing our capacity to deliver. These losses have been at least partly the result of ‘burn-out’. We have ‘rewarded’ the most knowledgeable, responsible and committed members of staff with unsustainable work regimes. We have failed to support them. For those remaining and with emerging know-how we could change this, by:
   - providing them with training in the skills to assist others to learn their know- how;
   - assigning ‘apprentices’ to them, or
   - integrating ‘communities of practice’ around them.
   They need the time to invest in working collaboratively with others, communicating their knowledge (rather than nights and weekends working alone), so that the cycle of long-hours can be broken, chance of departure reduced, and departure less costly.
2. Knowledge Gaps.
   Often the gap between the expert and the trainee is too great for the latter to share the same language and vision. Learning becomes slow, cumbersome, fraught with mutual frustration - and even abandoned.
3. Poor Documentation.
   Often documentation is required but either does not exist, is outdated, cannot be found, or it is unclear which is the latest version.
4. Insufficient Assessment of Relative Knowledge Value
   Given a wide choice of knowledge for people to learn, it is often unclear which is more valuable for the firm and the individual. Which skills will be used well into the future and which are project-specific and ephemeral?

I’ve introduced a lot of terms so far which haven’t been clearly defined: knowledge, information, communities of practice, skills, know-how, expertise. To think clearly about the issues it is important to be clear on what such terms mean in context.

4. What Is Knowledge?

The terms knowledge and information are so broad and loose that they become meaningless unless given contextual, operational definition. Much KM thinking fails to do so and doesn’t provide the epistemological basis for discussion. There are two key ways of looking at knowledge - as a thing, and as a process.

Knowledge-as-thing is that which is resident in the minds of individuals. It simply cannot be ‘managed’. Even as individuals we can’t really manage the knowledge that we have. That someone else would be able to claim to management knowledge-as-thing is thus nonsense. Such claims arise largely because of confusion between knowledge and information.

I’ll define information as messages that have the potential to impact or alter the knowledge held by an individual. People then construct knowledge from information. When people communicate their knowledge they are providing it in the form of information (not knowledge). Thus, we can manage some of the information, but none of the knowledge. Much of what is claimed to be knowledge management is information management, and in the main this means document management.

‘Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, and expert insight that provides a framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations, it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices, and norms (Davenport and Prusak, p5).

The second part of this frequently-used definition introduces the concept of knowledge-as-process. It undergoes a process of being ‘embedded’. Knowledge-as-process is about knowledge creation and sharing (as well as knowledge loss, relearning etc). Thus ‘embedded knowledge’ is in my opinion, best considered as either information (as in documents or repositories referred to in Davenport and Prusak’s definition) or socially constructed shared knowledge (as in the case of shared ‘routines, processes, practices and norms’). This shared knowledge still resides in the minds of individuals.

Much of the knowledge management literature asserts that knowledge can be readily converted by a mechanistic process into information and vice-versa. This has serious consequences for practice, because it introduces simplistic concepts such as that knowledge can be captured, and of that it flows from one person to another. It is as if it was as simple as sending around electronic packets.

We should emphasise that the core of KM is about the creation, sharing and enrichment of knowledge, and not risk trivialising the difficulties involved by thinking in terms of flow and capture.

We know that we can provide a lesson to a class of people and there will be many different responses from individuals and different impacts on the their pre-existing knowledge. We know how hard it is to bring others up to our levels of knowledge in areas where we are experts, and how much effort was required to become experts in the first place.

5. Types of Knowledge

There are various ways to categorise knowledge.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

Explicit knowledge can be expressed as that knowledge which can readily be articulated; that is, written down or verbally communicated. Thus, where knowledge is wholly explicit the knowledge and the information have similar value. An example may be the procedures to enable someone to install a search engine for a web site. However even in that example there is likely to be elements of “know-how” that can’t readily be articulated.

Tacit knowledge is more intangible. It is to do with insight, understanding, experience, capability, skill, expertise and even wisdom. It cannot be articulated. ‘We know more than we can tell’ (Polanyi 1966, p4). Nonaka and Takeuchi describe the ‘embodied skill’ in the tacit knowledge associated with the expert bread maker (Nonaka & Takeuchi 1995, ch. 4). Tacit information then is often equated with ‘know-how’. Fred Nickols says that tacit knowledge ‘cannot be articulated but it can be communicated or transferred’ (Nickols 2001a, p19). This ‘transfer’ requires close social interaction through shared practice.

One of the great dangers of limited KM thinking is that only the type of knowledge that can be readily codified and thus included in information management systems is considered to be important. Such thinking focuses then on explicit knowledge, or worse - tries to represent tacit knowledge in a explicit form.

The biggest challenge for innovative and knowledge-intensive organisations, where the main intellectual activity is problem solving, is not the storage of information in intranets and file servers, but how to share and build tacit knowledge. In other words, to increase and spread know-how and expertise. As in Nonaka’s bread making example – tacit knowledge can only be gained by action, doing, practice, reflection and repetition.

A Hierarchy of Knowledge

Michael Polanyi, who developed the concept of tacit knowledge, has also developed a useful hierarchy of knowledge:

1. Skill
   The ability to act according to rules. Skills might be the ability to enter data into a spreadsheet. The actor is able to judge whether the action has been successful or not.
2. Know-how
   This includes skill and is the ability to act in different contexts. Other actors establish the rules. Know-how implies problem solving. Programming can be said to require know-how.
3. Expertise
   This is know-how plus the ability of reflection. People with expertise influence the rules of their area of know-how. (quoted in Sveiby; see also Hatchuel, p32).

Shared language is important for shared understanding, thus I will use the familiar terms of know-how and expertise, rather than tacit knowledge.

The Stability of Knowledge Objects

Hatchuel and Weil have proposed a third typology of knowledge ‘that takes into account the relative stability of knowledge objects and of relationships within the action taking place’ (quoted in Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil, p32). Knowledge objects are products, procedures and systems that are the results of the application of knowledge. Within the innovative-intensive firm these objects as destabilised by rapid change, as are the skills areas (professions, techniques and expertise). This means that we must also consider knowledge according to how rapidly the requirements for different know-how and expertise and the related procedures and documentation are likely to occur. Is it stable or unstable?

There is no longer the luxury of the age-old masters-apprenticeship relationship, where relatively static knowledge can be learned until we have shared wisdom. In software development we increasingly discard expertise in superseded tools and technology and pick up new ones. We exist in a state where new technologies need to be mastered quickly – often from the position where an individual needs to move quickly from skill, to know-how to expertise – and without a mentor.

6. Epistemological Viewpoints

How one develops strategic thinking around knowledge is also deeply influenced by one’s epistemological viewpoint.

There are of course many such viewpoints, but perhaps the most dominant today are:

(1) Scientific rationalism.
(2) Cognitive viewpoint.
(3) Social constructionism.

Scientific rationalism considers that knowledge creation can be understood as a set of scientific principles and can be seen as process. Human behaviour is seen as an extension of natural science. A scientific rationalist position is likely to lead to an information technology focus, and, to my view, an over-simplified notion of knowledge transfer. We are far from understanding what processes are involved in knowledge creation. However we know that it is complex and looks more like art rather than science. Adherence to a scientific viewpoint is likely to lead to frustration, as there will be an expectation that the articulation of knowledge will lead to a shared understanding.

The cognitive viewpoint emphasises the differences between how individuals perceive, learn and create. It’s roots are in psychology. A cognitive perspective may place the emphasis on individual knowledge development programs for each staff member and fail to take into account the importance of social interaction and shared meaning.

Social constructionists contend that knowledge creation is influenced by the full social context in which an individual exists. We may all be individuals, but what we think, say, create and write is grounded in a system of shared meanings and language, as well as action and practice involving others. The roots are sociology. Social constructionists may place greatest value in teamwork or nurturing communities of practice, but fail to provide sufficient emphasis on individual differences in learning abilities or enabling technologies.

If we are to develop a strategic approach to KM a common epistemological basis is valuable. If this is not achievable, than an appreciation of the philosophical basis of the different viewpoints operating is vital.

My viewpoint is social constructionist. This is not to say that codifying, storage and retrieval of information, or individual attention to each person’s progress, is unimportant. But the emphasis is on the belief that maximising the intellectual capital of a firm is about knowledge creation and sharing knowledge – and that takes place within a process of socialisation. This means that codifying is not as important as communication, that practice or action with others is particularly important, as is making sure that we share a common language, common vision and a similar set of values.

This is in contrast to much of KM that reduces the task to simplistic mechanistic approaches, rather than treating it as a complex socially related matter (McAdam, p97).

7. Ideological Viewpoints

Management is also an ideological activity. The dominant literature of KM is about managing capitalist enterprises (and especially large corporations) which are wrestling with the realisation that much of the knowledge within the business is neither understood nor controlled by management. This may even reflect a new era within post-industrial society.

Corporations are trying to find a basis for the efficient management of knowledge and information in the same way that Frederick Taylor developed his scientific principles for the manufacturing economy (see Hatchuel 1995, p766). The dominant orientation is to look at knowledge and information as an asset. From those of us schooled in the anti-social strictures of capitalism there are problems with this viewpoint.

Alan McKinlay claims that ‘the audacity of KM is breathtaking, ….corporations are not just satisfied with appropriating and codifying the specificities of individual experience, but also want to capture as corporate assets even the meditations of workgroups on their collective activities and perceptions’ (McKinlay 2002, p77).

If we want to treat knowledge as an asset we must remember that it is a very different kind of asset. The advantage is that it appreciates over time and with use. The disadvantage is that it requires much more intensive attention to the social relationships that nurture and protect it than what management has traditionally considered warranted. Further, whatever their efforts, corporations will never be able to own and control it. That much of KM is still about control and appropriation is both disturbing and a folly.

The more effective political strategy is to maximise the opportunity for ownership of shared success gained through effective KM. People need to see that by sharing their knowledge, focusing their skills on delivering the vision of the collective organisation and engaging with the concept of the learning organisation, the organisation benefits, their career benefits and their bank balance benefits.

8. Hatchuel’s View – The Call for a Fundamental Change in Management Thinking.

Armand Hatchuel’s call for a fundamental reinvention of management to accommodate the new type of firm, based on a new means of production, is something for serious consideration. He argues that the re-emergence of KM as an over-hyped fad from the mid-1990s was the result of the management crises companies were facing in trying to come to terms with a new era of capitalism (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p25).

Hatchuel identifies three previous twentieth century movements for harnessing knowledge:

1. Production Management. Where the need for skilled industrial workers led to the establishment of a personnel/training office charged with developing and renewing workers’ skills.
2. Research Labs. The rise of specific R&D departments and labs in order to create new knowledge.
3. Administrative Expertise. The rise of business management schools to drive best practice and internal efficiencies (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p26-27).

These movements are all still with us, but knowledge intensive - time intensive - change intensive firms, are operating in a highly competitive environment, and need to understand the new paradigm.

This paradigm consists of:

(1) A Power Shift.

The basis of the firm has moved from material assets to intellectual capital. This results in a power shift from managers and owners to specialists holding portable expertise. The complex tasks undertaken by these specialists are usually outside the full understanding of management. There is less need for administrative managers and they are being replaced by specialists leading teams of other specialists. Some consider this is itself a serious problem. For instance Peter Drucker claims that knowledge worker productivity is abysmal and is the biggest challenge for management (Drucker 2000).

(2) Innovation-Intensive Capitalism

The consumerist movement has created a need for highly differentiated products, and changeability of fashion and tastes. Few people want a three-year old mobile phone, probably fewer still a three year old web site. Firms are both responding to and feeding this demand, thus intensifying it (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p29).

(3) Short Time to Market and Complex Problem Solving.

Agonisingly brief project timelines and the need for flexibility to quickly implement different solutions produces pressure-cooker research, development and production environments. There is usually not sufficient time to document the results of problem-solving in order to prevent others repeating the process (and the same mistakes). Anyway the documentation effort doesn’t capture the know-how and expertise and is likely to remain largely composed of ‘black boxes’. Further, by the time knowledge is coded into information for dissemination it may be out of date. It also may have a life-expectancy so short as to make documentation ineffective and costly.

(4) The Predominance of ‘Tacit’ Knowledge.

Thus knowledge increasingly remains ‘tacit’ rather than ‘explicit’. Know-how and expertise are increasingly the focus rather than procedures and documentation. This places increasing pressure to work in teams and ‘communities of practice’ in order to facilitate learning from people rather than documents.

(5) Heightened levels of Competition

The increased market intelligence available to companies means that business opportunities are being better identified and exploited. Any failure of a firm to effectively satisfy a market, or identify an appropriate new technology, is likely to result in a competitors both knowing, and taking advantage of it.

Hatchuel asserts that knowledge management to date has not come to terms with this new paradigm, being preoccupied initially with a technicist vision (information technology, intranets, information management systems). The failure of the technicist vision then leads to adoption of the ‘connectionist-strategic’ vision centred on knowledge ‘transfer’. He considers both these visions to be in the ‘realm of caricature’ (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p30).

He claims that the ‘the crisis of the model of collective action within firms’ needs to be addressed (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p31). Organisations shouldn’t develop their knowledge management strategy around the existing organisation. For him ‘the process of knowledge production is the starting point from which the aims, work organisation and operator motivation are created and revised’ (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p34).

So as Taylor’s concept of the ‘scientific’ management of production created a new type of business structure centred around manufacturing and production, we now need to create a new organisation centred around knowledge creation as the basic means of production. ‘What is involved is the piloting of processes that create new concepts, objects and occupations’ (Hatchuel, LeMasson & Weil 2002, p35)

9. Communities of Practice

Some believe that practice of active support of the socio-psychological needs of knowledge workers will ipso facto produce the communal environment necessary for effective work and sharing of information. This perspective is aligned with Brown and Duguid who are the leading writers on communities of practice. However, maximising the potential of communities of practice is perhaps not this simple.

[Communities of practice] are relatively tight knit groups of people who know each other and work together directly. They are usually face-to-face communities that continually negotiate with, and coordinate with each other directly in the course of work. And this negotiation, communication, and coordination is highly implicit, part of work practice, and….work chat (Brown and Duguid 2000a, p.143).

In this firm such communities can currently be identified.

According to Wenger and Snyder communities of practice may not be aligned with the segmented or professional structure of the organisation. There could well be external participants and cross-sectional and cross-functional communities. ‘Typically it has a core of participants whose passion for the topic energizes the community and who provide intellectual and social leadership’ (Wenger and Snyder p.142). Brown and Duguid suggest that practice to date has concentrated too much on developing a sense of community and not enough on the ‘implications of practice’ (Brown and Duguid 2001, p198).

Below are some of the issues I believe may be worth exploration in relation to communities of practice:

(1) Assessing the Value of Ideas.

Organisational adaptability and creation of new knowledge in this firm is largely dependent upon communities of practice. The mechanisms for responding to, and filtering ideas coming from such communities of practice are weak. It is if we have an abundance of ideas but there is not the decision making and support structure to assesses the ideas in terms of practicality, value and priority. The result is that key initiatives may be inadequately resourced, and knowledge creation of marginal value may take scarce resources. As we have seen with the many KM-related initiatives mentioned earlier, many initiatives are neither adequately sustained, nor formally abandoned.

(2) Balkanisation

A shared world view is important for knowledge sharing and creation.

‘People with different practices have different assumptions. Different outlooks, different interpretations of the world around them, and different ways of making sense of their encounter’ (Brown and Duguid 2001, p.207)

A highly effective community of practice then can be counter-productive in the sharing of knowledge between practices, becoming at once the most effective unit for knowledge sharing within itself, as well as the most isolated section of the organisation. The challenge is to ensure that the visions of the communities of practice remain aligned with the firm’s world view.

(3) The Balance Between Direction and Support

According to Wegner and Snyder, management’s key role should be to promote, cultivate and support communities of practice.

‘That means intervening when communities run up against obstacles to their progress, such as IT systems that don’t serve them, promotion systems that overlook community contributions, and rewards structures that discourage collaboration’ (Wegner & Snyder, p146).

Brown and Duguid consider management of communities of practice a balancing act – between ‘capturing’ knowledge and killing it (Brown and Duguid 2000b).

However Hatchuel has criticised this American-based interest as utopian:

‘Once more we are faced with the contemporary Utopia of connectionist company management, in which executives are no more than easy-going organisers of ‘open forums’ or message services’ (Hatchuel, LeMasson, Weil 2002, p.33).

For him they offer no direct solution to the ‘contemporary problem of learning dynamics in the process of innovation or production of new knowledge. He believes that authority structures and top down prescription will always be necessary and that firms would go out of business where communities of practice do not have clearly defined objectives aligned with the firm’s business objectives. For Hatchuel it is critical that the key specialists across the firm have shared ‘models of reality’ and the ‘collective decision-making motor is the search for a focal point towards which all concerned are working’ (Hatchuel, LeMasson, Weil 2002, p.34)

10. Small Business and KM

Most writers broadly considered to be ‘significant’ in KM seem to operate out of Fortune 500 companies such as Xerox (Brown and Duguid), IBM (Prusak and Snowden), and Arthur Andersen (Davenport), or they are allied to the top business schools which service the Fortune 500 by acting as their management preparatory schools.

The needs and realities of small firms have been given relatively little attention, although observation would lead us to conclude that most innovative and knowledge intensive businesses are small ones.

I see three significant differences between a small firm and the archetypal KM-embracing corporation.

The following are advantages:

1. Communication within communities of interest and across the company is made easier by everyone actually knowing each other and their stories.
2. There is a higher capacity for flexibility, in that there are relatively few entrenched practices and internal fiefdoms.
3. There is probably a higher commitment to the firm rather than the profession.
4. We virtually have no administrative (middle) management. Managers can almost all be seen as specialists who lead other specialists (in communities of practice). This makes the co-ordination, implementation and review of KM initiatives across the organisation problematic – unless the initiative can be driven and managed effectively by the directors.
5. Experts work long hours. This presents the vicious circle where they do not have the time to invest in the knowledge sharing and mentoring which would be an investment with positive personal and collective outcomes.
6. Funding is extremely tight. Small firms are usually not in a position to invest resources in KM initiatives which don’t produce near immediate financial returns.

Research tends to show that the requirements underlying KM are similar for small and large organisations. However Lim and Klobas have shown that small organisations:

1. have a narrower scope of business,
2. have less financial and administrative slack,
3. have managers who tend to be very focused on the daily running of the core business,
4. do not use the expensive consultancy services used by larger firms,
5. rarely have dedicated ‘information professionals’ on staff,
6. see KM as something that corporations are concerned with, not small business,
7. are highly susceptible to loss of know-how as they cannot match the salary levels of large organisations,
8. generally do not have effective methods for ‘environmental scanning’ for external competitive threats or opportunities,
9. have a high degree of employee autonomy, trust and co-operation.(Lim & Klobas 2000)

Doswell and Reid in surveying the barriers to KM initiatives in smallish Scottish firms found that the main impediments were attitudinal (39% – ‘cultural’, fear of sharing and ‘professionalism’) and structural (39% – lack of processes, lack of time, geographical dispersion). The other impediments were technology (16%) and business strategy (6%)(Doswell & Reid 2000, p6). Responses included ‘we’re on a hamster wheel – getting nowhere fast’, ‘lack of delegation from managers, lack of assertiveness from employees’, ‘no appraisal’ system, and we ‘only know what’s going on because there isn’t a wall in the office’ (Doswell & Reid, p9). The impediments were thus largely identified as relating to people and process.

These observations were also reflected by Norwegian studies which sought to identify directions for small firm KM solutions. Carlsen and Skaret have summarised five ‘lessons’ for KM in small firms which accommodate their resource and time limitations:

(1) Link Knowledge Creation to Short and Long Term Revenues.

Management should identify the ‘knowledge related key success factors for increased earnings’ and increased customer satisfaction. (Carlsen and Skaret 1998, p6)

(2) Don’t Try to Analyse or Manage All Knowledge Held.

This follows from (1). Mapping of all individual knowledge is not cost-effective. Knowledge mapping can be enabled through ‘analysis of experiences linked to an activity’ (Carlsen and Skaret 1998, p7). My interpretation of this is to organise informal post project reviews to share the lessons learned. Encouragement of storytelling can do much to map and provide analysis of the knowledge we have, or wished we had.

(3) Knowledge Analysis Must be Process Oriented.

All staff need to be involved in understanding the use of knowledge in day to day activities. Management and staff working together in ‘building shared mental models of the organisation’s knowledge landscape may contribute to empowerment and increasing employee-participation’ (Carlsen and Skaret 1998, p8).

(4) Collective Knowledge is Under-rated.

Most of the important knowledge is tacit. There is a mismatch between documentation and practice. KM then should focus on discussing routines and practices as the first step in improving them. (Carlsen and Skaret 1998, p9).

(5) Distinctive Knowledge is Encultured.

Define what knowledge and culture constitutes the ‘soul of the company’ or ‘way of life’ that distinguishes it from other firms. (Carlsen and Skaret 1998, p10). Intellectual capital development should be leveraged around these areas where we have competitive advantage and know-all and expertise others would find hard to emulate.

This leads to some tentative conclusions and suggestions for planning KM strategies in Social Change Online.

11. Suggestions for the Small High Tech Firm

I agree with Dave Snowden that KM is a people thing and to be successful it has to ‘win the hearts and minds of individuals at all levels’ (Snowden 2000, p53). I also agree with Brown and Duguid on that: ‘Knowledge, in short, runs on rails laid by practice’ (Brown and Duguid 2001, p204). It is the expertise and know-how that is most important and shared practice is the venue for creation and sharing this.

Alan McKinlay has identified the limitations of the information infrastructure dominated KM initiatives we and others have taken to date’

We’ve connected desks and tasks, but not people and imaginations. Knowledge management – so far – has hard wired what we do already. We’ve wired our existing processes’ (McKinlay 2002, p80

While the focus in the innovative-intensive organisation may have moved from management to specialists, this is not to say that the optimisation of knowledge creation and sharing can be left to the staff.

Management has many significant roles to play:

1. Rethinking the composition of the organisation around the key activities of intensive innovation, knowledge creation and sharing;
2. Creating a strong sense of vision and organisational commitment. This includes maximising the opportunities for knowledge development in informal, social settings;
3. Identifying priorities in the kinds of knowledge that are currently important;
4. Fostering and monitoring the communities of practice;
5. Ensuring that bridges between communities of practice are well travelled;
6. Implementing and improving enabling technologies that support knowledge creation and sharing, and;
7. Evaluating where we are beyond the financial bottom line, to include status reports of knowledge creation and sharing, infrastructure development and client satisfaction.

One of the most difficult balancing acts for an organisation is on the one hand to provide for organisational flexibility so that it can quickly develop the competencies to master new opportunities and technical directions, yet at the same time protect intellectual capital and prove a high-sense of commitment to the firm. The former is about responding to market and an unstable environment, the latter is about providing people with the security and stability they need.

The other challenge (and perhaps the biggest) is enabling time to think.

References

Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. 2000a, The social life of information. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. 2000b, ‘Balancing act: how to capture knowledge without killing it’. Harvard Business Review, May-June, p73-80.

Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. 2001, ‘Knowledge and organization: a social-practice perspective’. Organization Science, vol.12, March-April 2001, p198-213.

Carlsen, A. and Skaret, M. 1998, Practicing knowledge management in Norway: lessons from processes in small firms. Available at: http://www.indman.sintef.no/kos/publikasjoner/Arbeidsnotat_4-98.pdf (Accessed 18 August 2002)

Davenport, T.H and Prusak, L. 1998, Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know. Harvard Business School Press, Boston.

Doswell, A and Reid, V. 2000 , Investigation of impediments in the practice of knowledge management. Available at: http://bprc.warwick.ac.uk/km023.pdf (Accessed 18 August 2002)

Drucker, P.F. 2000, ‘Knowledge-worker productivity: the biggest challenge’. California Management Review vol.41, no.2, p79-94

Hatchuel,A. 1996, ‘Coordination and Control’ in International encyclopedia of business and management, ed. M. Warner. Routledge, New York, p762-771.

Hatchuel, A, Le Masson, P and Weil, B. 2002, ‘From knowledge management to design-oriented organisations’. International Social Science Journal vol.54, no.1, p25-37.

Lim, D. and Klobas, J. 2000, ‘Knowledge management in small enterprises’. The Electronic Library, vol.18, no.6, p420-432.

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