Chapter 5

Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge Transfer

 How can an organization transfer knowledge

effectively?
 Hire smart people

 Let them talk to one another

 How does knowledge transfer?

 Knowledge Transfer Dilemmas
 Looking nearby only, Larger corporations
Strategies of Knowledge Transfer

 MCC vs Sematech
 MCC tried liaisons, assignees, workshops,
training, technical reports, third-party licenses,
production and support of products, and many
other techniques  FAILED

 Sematech success due to sponsors (assignees)

who come to participate in research
Water Cooler Discussion

 Place of knowledge transfer

 IBM Chairman, John Akers

 Stay away from water coolers, get back to work

 Water cooler discussion – “hit-or-miss”

Talk Rooms

 Japanese Pharmacy Company – Dai-Ichi

 20 Minute Talks With Co-Workers
 After hours get togethers
 Hardly use email to communicate
 Prefer face-to-face

 “When you need to transfer knowledge, the

method must always suit the culture.”
Knowledge Fairs

 Informal & unstructured gathering of co-

workers
 Allows for knowledge transfer, co-workers to
interact and meet one another
 Companies: Ernst & Young, CSIRO

 Versus Structured Corporate Seminars

 Tightly woven schedules, no chance for
interaction among co-workers
Other Strategies

 Mentorship program
 Bringing together experienced employees with
less experienced employees
 Database of co-workers
 Who is willing to meet with what expertise
 Videoconferencing System
 Link people with knowledge to who need it
Knowledge Transfer Friction

Friction Possible Solutions

Lack of Trust Build relationships and trust
through face-to-face meetings

Different cultures & vocabularies Create common ground through

education, discussion, teaming,
job rotation
Lack of time & meeting places Establish times and places for
knowledge transfers

Status and rewards go to Evaluate performance and

knowledge owners provide incentives based on
sharing
Direct Contact

 Contracting firm for Boston Harbor Tunnel

project
 Overseen similar project in New Zealand
 Tried to transfer the tacit knowledge explicitly via
email, phone, memorandums  Unsuccessful
 Engineers gathered, face-to-face interaction and
transfer of knowledge  Success

“In some cases, there’s no substitute for direct contact”

The Status of the Knower

 Be cautious that successful knowledge

transfer can depend heavily on who it is
coming from

 People may judge by reputation

 Case: CEO (Market Conditions Malaysia)
 Librarian, Senior VP
Reflect - Strategies of Knowledge Transfer

 Try to focus more on the human aspect of

knowledge transfer

 Don’t confine knowledge transfer to email,

improved access, communication, document
repositories, etc
Chapter 6
Knowledge Roles & Skills
Knowledge Oriented Personnel

 Planning managers, business analysts,

design & manufacturing engineers, marketing
professionals, secretaries, clerks
 Create, share, search out, and use knowledge

 Knowledge management is everyone’s job

Knowledge Management Positions

 Growth in Knowledge management jobs

 Andersen Consulting – 200 KM Jobs
 Knowledge integrators – expert in one domain
 Knowledge administrators – capturing, storing,
maintaining knowledge that others produce
 Ernst & Young, McKinsey, IBM ~ 200 KM Jobs
 Coca-Cola – 40 KM Jobs
 Hewlett-Packard – 20-30 KM Jobs
Managers of Knowledge Projects

 Functions:
 Developing project objectives
 Assembling & managing teams
 Determining & managing customer expectations
 Monitoring project budgets & schedules
 Identifying & resolving project problems
 Comfortable with technology
 Web-accessed databases
 Should speak the common language & understand
values
Managers of Knowledge Projects

 “A little humility goes a long way when you’re

managing a knowledge project.”

 Be humble or knowledge may be withheld

Chief Knowledge Officer

 Function:
 “evangelize” for knowledge and learning from it
 Design, implement, oversee firms knowledge infrastructure
 Manage relationships with external providers of information
& knowledge (negotiate prices)
 Provide critical input to the process of knowledge creation
 Design / implement a firm’s knowledge codification
approaches
 Measure and manage value of knowledge
 Manage the knowledge managers
 Lead the development of knowledge strategy
Chief Knowledge Officer

 Three most important roles of a CKO:

 Building a knowledge culture
 Long term plan, hinge on whom you hire, educate
 Creating a knowledge management infrastructure
 Managers, databases, knowledge bases, various
applications
 Making it all pay off economically
 Blend of technical, human, financial skills
How To Implement CKO?

 Implement with HR / IS Functions

 By implementing with HR / IS one may dilute the
importance of knowledge

 Stand-alone role
 Senior level executive position
 Position is important & complex
 More desirable  Shows importance of
knowledge
Review: KM Positions

 Line workers

 Knowledge Management Workers

 Knowledge Management Managers

 Chief Knowledge Officer

Chapter 7
Technologies For Knowledge Management
Technologies For KM
 Case in Point: Hewlett-Packard
 Electronic Sales Partner (ESP)
 Hundreds of thousands of documents to help sales force
 White papers, presentations, technical specs, etc
 Readily available to all with access to the intranet
 Anyone within HP can submit to ESP
 Reviewed by a ESP team to determine if appropriate
 Based on how system is being used, being called a
success – “most successful implementation of software I
have seen in twenty years.” –HP Managers
 Only problem: becoming difficult to navigate with too
many documents
Technologies for KM

 Case in Point: Hewlett-Packard

 “Connex” – Web-based system to connect HP
employees with experts within the company
 IE: electrical engineer that is expert in ISDN, lives in
Germany

 Difficulty: Scientists don’t like to be connotated as

“expert” and they don’t want to post a lot of info
Artificial Intelligence

 Case in Point: McDonnell Douglas

 Developed computerized expert system to scan
aircraft approaching a runway
 Humans could intuitively determine what a good
landing looked like
 Attempted to put this into a computer
 After considerable expenses, the system was
found to be only 80% – 85% accurate (compared
to a 2 second human glance)
Broad Knowledge Repositories

 Lotus Notes
 Lotus Notes Programmers, Lotus Domino Web
Server, Education (How to use Notes)
 Web Technology
 HTML publishing tools, web server, relational
database system, search engines, an approach to
managing the knowledge, some education
 Some use both technologies
Focused Knowledge Environments

 Expert Systems
 Helps enable the knowledge of one or a few
experts used by a broader group of workers who
need the knowledge
 Constraint Based Systems
 Suited for situations where there are high levels of
data but less quantitative data
 Capture and model the constraints that govern
complex decision making
Real-Time Knowledge Systems

 Case Based Reasoning (CBR) systems

 Branch of AI found in the customer support and
service process in firms
 Leading vendor: Inference Corp
 Works best when there are a few experts who
construct & maintain the ‘cases’
 Must also have a domain expert – decide on when
a new case should be created, when an old one
has become obsolete and whether a submitted
case is valid
Real-Time Knowledge Systems

 SoultionBuilder
 Built by Primus Corporation for the Customer
Support Consortium
 Breaking down a problem or situation into its
knowledge components
Long-Term Analysis Systems

 Neural Networks
 Statistically oriented tool that uses data to classify
cases into one category or the other
 Systems that learn
 Need a very knowledgeable user – at least initially
 Problem – Difficult to explain why it did what it did
 Also used along with other statistical analysis
tools in data mining
What Technologies can & can not do
 Technology alone
 Won’t make a person with expertise share it

 Won’t make an employee who does not seek knowledge to start

using a knowledge base
 Won’t create learning organization, a meritocracy, or a
knowledge-creating company
 Technology not useful when it comes to knowledge creation itself
– still a job for individuals or groups & their brains
 However,
 Technology can help in expanding access & helping in getting the
right knowledge to the right people
 Presence of knowledge technologies may also positively impact
the culture of the organization itself
Chapter 8 – Knowledge
Management Projects in Practice
Key Points

 Studied 31 projects in 20 different companies

to draw conclusions
 None an optimal model
 Million dollar question – Is it really
KNOWLEDGE being managed?
 Most fall short of knowledge based
organizational transform
Types of KM Projects

 Self funding projects

 Company funded projects
 Hybrid projects
 Centralized Coordination
 Decentralized projects
Common Characteristics

 Defined Objectives
 Dedicated champion for the project
 Specific financial and human resources
committed to the project
 Distinction between knowledge and
information
Objectives Shared

 Create knowledge repositories

 Improve knowledge access
 Improve knowledge culture & environment
Knowledge Repositories

 Three basic types

 External knowledge (e.g. competitive
intelligence)
 Structured internal knowledge (e.g. product
oriented marketing materials and methods,
research reports)
 Informal internal knowledge (e.g. discussion
databases)
Knowledge Repositories

 External Knowledge
 E.g. Automobile company
 GrapeVINE
 Structured internal knowledge
 E.g. Hewlett-Packard
 Electronic Sales Partner
 Informal internal knowledge
 E.g. Hewlett-Packard
 Trainer’s Trading Post
Knowledge Access & Transfer

 Objective: Finding the right person with the

required knowledge and transferring it to the
person who needs it
 Knowledge Repository = Library
 Knowledge Access = Yellow Pages
Knowledge Access & Transfer

 Implementation Strategies
 Build & manage expert networks a.k.a maps of
knowledge
 Consolidating and categorizing knowledge
 Microsoft’s SPUD project
 Tacit knowledge transfer
 BP’s Virtual Teamwork Project
 Human Communication
 Sematech
Knowledge Environment

 Measure/ improve the value of knowledge

capital
 Building awareness and cultural receptivity
 Changing behavior when it comes to
knowledge
 Improving the KM process itself
Reality

 Most projects examined a combination of one or

more of the types mentioned
 Would expect KM projects working with more than
one focus more likely to succeed
 Drawbacks
 Absence of clear demarcations of project types and
fuzziness of project objectives may cause measurement
problems
 Prioritizing different aspects of a hybrid project becomes
difficult
 Linking knowledge and financial gains is difficult at times
Success in KM Projects
~Attributes to define success~
 Growth in
 Resources attached to the project
 Volume of knowledge content & usage
 Project sustains beyond individuals involved
 Comfort level throughout the organization
with KM
 Some evidence of financial return either to
the project itself or to some unit of the
organization
Factors leading to project success

 Knowledge oriented culture

 Technical & organizational infrastructure
 Senior management support
 Link to economics & industry value
 Modicum of process orientation
 Clarity of vision & language
 Non trivial motivational aids
 Some level of knowledge structure
 Multiple channels for knowledge transfer
Chapter 9 – The Pragmatics
of KM
Common Sense about KM

 Place to start is with high value knowledge

 Start with focused pilot project & let demand
drive additional initiatives
 Work along multiple fronts at once
 Don’t put off what gives you too much trouble
until it’s too late
 Get help throughout the organization quickly
Getting started in KM

 Start small, achieve something and then harp about

it
 Start with a recognized business problem that
involves knowledge
 Consider the importance of the specific knowledge
domain to the firm
 Do not pick a domain that is under your control
 Knowledge is too complex a phenomenon to entrust
to narrowly targeted change programs
Leveraging Existing Approaches

 Most existing projects have better

management of what the organization knows
as a key component

 Already takes into consideration existing

organizational issues
Leading with Technology

 Most firms start KM in the domain of

technology
 Should not implement IT just for the sake of
KM
 Would be most likely to succeed in a
technology oriented organization
 E.g. Andersen Consulting
Leading with Quality/ Reengineering/
Best Practices
 Build KM on the quality/ reengineering efforts
of a company
 Should only be used as a springboard to
other forms of KM
 Could prove problematic if considered the
ONLY form of knowledge worth collecting and
sharing
Leading with Organizational Learning

 Focus on organizational learning ideal for

start
 Rarely ever done
 Problem:
 World of organizational learning does little to
structure knowledge, to capture & leverage it
Leading with Decision Making

 Knowledge proves useful to organizations

because of the ability to improve decisions
and actions taken on the basis of this
knowledge
 ‘Who knows what when’
 Tricky business
 Difficulty in linking specific knowledge to specific
decisions
 Politics
Leading with accounting

 Not recommended as a starting place for

managing knowledge
 Accounting systems and practices unlikely to
change
 Sisyphian cause
KM Pitfalls

 If we build it……
 Let’s put the Personnel Manual online
 None dare call it knowledge
 Every man a knowledge manager
 Justification by faith
 Restricted Access
 Bottoms Up!
QUESTIONS?