How would you like to be a Guest Blogger for KMI? Email us at: info@kminstitute.org and let us know your topic(s)!

Using Design Thinking for Creating Scalable Knowledge Management Solutions

February 3, 2021

‍

Innovation is at the heart of any organization. All organizations strive towards:

  • creating products and services for improved customer experiences.
  • overcoming complex business problems using innovative processes and business models for increased impact and revenue.

In this era of digital disruptions and uncertainties, innovation is the key to create a competitive advantage and “design-thinking” is one of the most innovative tools to achieve Innovation and streamline organization knowledge.

So how does design thinking align with KM?

Knowledge Management helps organizations retain their experiences and knowledge to innovate, improve efficiency and productivity. However, many a times true KM transformation remains a struggle for many organizations when it is not seamlessly integrated with employees needs and challenges.  KM framework cannot be a success if it is too technology driven, people find it as an extra task, and they do not want to change especially when they do not see any direct benefit out of it.

Knowledge management should not be an abstract concept but should focus on solving concrete issues of employees by providing them seamless access to relevant information round the clock. Design thinking can be the key to meet employee needs and encourage the knowledge sharing culture.

Below are my thoughts on how design thinking can be a lifesaver and help organizations establish a successful knowledge management framework and enable it to thrive.

  • Design thinking inspires innovation by putting end-users at center of the real challenges to be solved.
  • Embracing collaboration by breaking silo culture and bring people together to come up with innovative ideas for increased business value and feedback for evolving KM framework.
  • Empowering the end-users by putting into perspective their needs and creating solutions centered around their problems.
  • Design thinking follows a progressive approach with room and tolerance for failure, making KM an iterative process for designing more appropriate solutions that are aligned to the needs of end-user.
  • Focus on solution: Design thinking is the way to ideate on a solution to address a problem. It is focused on solutions coming from end-users rather than problems. It makes the solutions directly relevant to end users ensuring its absorption and adaptability.  

Follows a bottom-up approach for problem solving factoring 360-degree input from stakeholders from management to the end-user employee.

By following a design thinking centered approach while tailoring KM solutions, organizations can foster innovation, and develop KM solutions that are end-user centric resulting in improved work-experiences and innovative empowerment for improved business results.

Stay tuned for my next article on step-by-step approach on incorporating design thinking in your KM framework.

~~~

Read Post

Folksonomy for Knowledge Management 2.0

January 20, 2021

One of the biggest challenges faced by most organizations is organizing, finding, and marking information in the knowledge repository in such a way that it is easily accessible as and when needed by the employees. The classical approach used widely is indexing documents to help users in deciding documents relevancy and retrieval. Classical methods comprise classification systems (taxonomies), thesaurus, and controlled keywords (nomenclatures) [Aitchison et al. 2004; Cleveland and Cleveland 2001; Lancaster 2003; Stock and Stock 2008].

Folksonomy is a most recent knowledge management (km) tool of web 2.0 for searching, accessing, and labelling information by the content creator and the user in a way that makes sense to them. Folksonomies include novel social dimensions of tagging [Mathes 2004; Smith 2004]. It is a new model for content indexing based on collaborative tagging with user generated keywords that broaden the spectrum of knowledge interpretation methods. Folksonomy is a valuable addition to the traditional KM methodologies since it facilitates tagging input from the end user, promote the use of active language, and most importantly allows community navigation of an organization’s knowledge base in new ways.

With the introduction of folksonomy end user is no more a passive user but an active contributor to the indexing and retrieval of content. These tags are written in common language rather than the pre-conceived formal list based on the user’s understanding of the content. The tags created by the end-users are searchable for everyone beside the interpreter-created controlled terms and the author-created text words and references (Stock, 2007). Keywords are no longer keywords now, but tags and the collection of tags used to classify content on any different platform forms a Folksonomy. This makes the content scalable and easy to find and use.

The purpose of knowledge management is to encourage collaboration for knowledge sharing and innovation by making internal knowledge available for one and all anytime and anywhere in a structured manner. There are definitely major issues in relying solely on folksonomy in the context of knowledge management. The lack of semantics connections, spelling variation, tags ambiguity, use of acronyms are some of the issues that create problems for documents only tagged with folksonomy. Using parallel indexing strategy on the other hand can create more confusion.

The key is to integrating folksonomy with traditional tagging methodology like taxonomy to knowledge discovery and sharing efficient and easier. It is the only way forward for KM 2.0 to be sustainable and successful in organization wide setting.

Coming up in next article difference between taxonomy and folksonomy... Stay tuned!

~~~

Read Post

Putting Knowledge at the Heart of our Development Strategy

January 19, 2021

It is heartening to note that discussion is taking place after the release of the 4th edition of the Global Knowledge Index (GKI), jointly produced by the UNDP and Dubai-based Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Knowledge Foundation. Bangladesh ranked low in GKI among 138 countries. Dr. Saleemul Huq, Director of the ICCCAD at IUB, in an op-ed in The Daily Star on December 30 rightly stressed the need for a "national consensus" to make the necessary paradigm shift to transform Bangladesh into a knowledge economy over the next decade.

Click here for more...

Read Post

The Role of Community Champions in Fostering a Successful Community of Practice

January 17, 2021

Communities of Practice are collaborative networks (can be both formal or informal) depending on to foster sharing of ideas and knowledge outside the structured learning environment.

Communities are always developed around a certain skill, profession or learning purpose. In fact, a shared identity is the glue that binds the members of a Community together (Wenger, 1998).

Community champions play a key role in fostering successful communities. Champions are recruited from the practice, so they are deeply aligned to the purpose of the specific community and are best positioned to connect members and the business to better serve their clients. They work as the bridge between the business and the KM practice.  Champions are instrumental in ensuring that the business goals and the associated knowledge programs of the community are well-defined and met.

Listed below are the ground level responsibilities of a smart community champion:

  • Follow the community and relevant hashtags to surface the community activity to the intended audience.
  • Regularly seeds and monitor the discussions on community feed.
  • Initiates, support roll-out and facilitates community activities aligned to the business goal.
  • Monitor and provide input to ensure community content relevancy.
  • Promote community activity, campaigns, and resources across their personal network for better visibility.

Monitor content metrics to determine community health and suggest appropriate actions to update, retire or refresh the community.

The list above is not exhaustive and varies with the changing business priorities. However, they define the basic guidelines for any champion role to moderate an impactful and successful community.

~~~

Read Post

Facilitating Knowledge Management Through Storytelling

January 15, 2021

Quite often a good story is the best way to impart knowledge (Davenport and Prusak 1998).

Storytelling is the oldest technique of knowledge transfer and has been touted as the most effective medium to pass across a message to someone since we tend to memorize stories better than dry facts and can easily link them to our personal experiences. Medical technologies have also proved that storytelling is a natural way for brain to capture and retain information.

During the recent years “power of storytelling” has garnered a lot of attention from the perspective of Knowledge Management and harnessing the tacit knowledge of an organization. In a domain that has been primarily dominated by charts and facts, storytelling has a great potential as a knowledge transfer and learning tool. Capturing tacit knowledge is a pain point for most organizations so no wonder, storytelling is fast gaining recognition as a KM tool.

Let us see below how the role of storytelling in a KM framework.

Fostering collaboration – In an organization people often come together as teams, groups, communities. Using narrative techniques during these sessions help people collaborate and learn from each other’s experiences as they have a context missing in the traditional form of meetings.

Transfer of tacit knowledge and understanding - Stories allow tacit knowledge to be shared more easily as stories provide context and focus on issues relevant to the listener. Storytelling allows a seamless leap from information to knowledge.

Ideation leading to Innovation – Ideas pave the way for Innovation. Employees have hands on experience with processes, clients, products, and customers. When they collaborate to share their stories while collaborating formally or informally, they create a new paradigm by introducing new ideas with potential for improvement and innovation.

Organic way to learn - The wider purpose of any KM framework is to equip employees with knowledge for greater good of the organization, and the medium of learning is vital. Various studies have proved that story telling is most effective in imparting and capturing of knowledge. Tacit knowledge from experienced members and outgoing employees can be embedded in narratives to help inexperienced employees learn and upskill.

If the question is why stories work so well in knowledge management, then the answer–simply–is that “our brains seem to be wired to easily and almost automatically organize information into stories” (Reamy, 2002).

~~~

Read Post