Addis Ababa University

School of Information science

Graduate Program
INss 626: Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning
Knowledge management tools and techniques

IT is an enabler not the brain of KM

 Ruggles (1997) provides a classification of KM technologies as
tools that
 Enhance and enable knowledge generation, codification, and
transfer.

 Generate knowledge (e.g., data mining that discovers new

patterns in data).

 Code knowledge to make knowledge available for others.

 Transfer knowledge to decrease problems with time and space

when communicating in an organization.
 We classify KM technologies according to the following
structure:
 1. Communication
 2. Collaboration
 3. Content creation
 4. Content management
 5. Adaptation / reworking
 6. E-learning
 7. Personal tools
 8. Artificial intelligence
 9. Networking
 Theinitial knowledge capture and creation phase does
not make extensive use of technologies.
Eg. Methods of converting tacit knowledge
into explicit knowledge

A wide range of diverse KM technologies may be used

to
 support knowledge sharing and dissemination
 Support knowledge acquisition and application.
 IT playing vital roles in KM
 IT is a tool used to increase the efficiency and capability
of Knowledge Management.
 IT facilitates
 documents management,
 data storage,
 access of information, dissemination, exchange and
sharing of ideas,
 KM tools as examples
 Confluence as knowledge management tools
 https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence/kno
wledge-management-software
 Google docs
 https://www.quora.com/Can-we-use-Google-Docs-
and-Drive-for-knowledge-management
 Learning management system
 https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=76083
Management of Organizational memory
 Avoiding corporate amnesia/
Creation of corporate memory

1. Understanding fully what the business is all about? Vision,

mission, objectives, structure, etc.

2. Building a repository of Lessons Learnt and best practices

3. Embracing its informal knowledge

4. addressing the cultural and technical factors that influence

effective organizational memory management.
 Understanding the business….

 This
is the logical starting point for deciding how to organize
and manage intellectual assets.
 What knowledge assets are needed to maximize value for
customers, shareholders, employees, and other stakeholders?
 Study your assets
 e.g., values, culture, people, technology, and business
capabilities need to be clearly identified,
 Make a knowledge flow analysis
 Where does the critical knowledge exist and where does it go?
 Analyze the gaps that exist in key competencies .
 How institutionalized the knowledge has become ?
 Building a repository….

 Lessons learned and best practices are flip sides of the same
coin
 they represent the accumulated results and
 learning from trial-and-error experiences that the organization
has accumulated.
 We should not be ashamed of our mistakes, rather learn from
them?
 Employees should be encouraged to try and document best
practices and lessons learnt
 Building a repository….

 An Example case
 case of specialized school for students with severe behavioral
problems
 Motivation
 there was a high turnover among teachers employed by the
school.
 The average stay was about two years,
 most left owing to burnout as the responsibilities are quite
demanding.
 School’s case…..
 KM applications
A number of best practices and lessons learned were gathered
and preserved.
 Templates were developed and used in order to facilitate this
knowledge capture process,
 Access was provided through each student’s profile.

 The greatest benefit

 It was no longer necessary to reinvent the wheel each time a
new teacher works with the same student.
 The new teacher will have access to all of the accumulated
successes and failures of the various techniques that have been
tried out by each previous teacher working with the same
student.
 Embracing informal knowledge….
 Most organizations focus on preserving, organizing, indexing, and
retrieving only the formal knowledge as it is stored in documents
and databases.
 An organizational memory that consists only of formal knowledge
is bare and lifeless;
 Formal, structured content lacks the history and context behind
the formal documents.
 the organizational memory is essentially a big pile of disconnected
items,
 If an organization embraces its informal knowledge,
 the rationale behind decisions and documents becomes the glue that
holds the formal knowledge documents together and preserves their
meaning.
 Embracing informal …
• Most knowledge work addresses problems for which there is
no clear and agreed-upon definition of the problem, and,
indeed, in which the problem itself is apt to change over
time.

 For some tasks, formal knowledge alone is sufficient;

 for example, when it is time to write the new annual
report, you might start with last year’s annual report as a
template.
 Embracing informal…

 Formal documents are not rich enough to support knowledge

work.
 For
example, a team may come together for many meetings in
the course of resolving a problem,
 Thus meeting minutes are summaries that often represent only one person’s
point of view, and they usually capture only a small part of the
conversations that took place.

 Projects can often stretch into months and years, which necessitates some
form of project memory.

 An explicit project memory provides more continuity among these sessions,

allowing the group to pick up where it left off, with a minimum of repetition
and loss of important issues.

 As team membership changes over time, or the project is handed off to a

completely new team, the project memory can in principle reduce the
likelihood of false starts and duplication of previous work.
 Cultural and technical factors to KM
 Potential cultural barriers include:
 Resistance to knowledge capture because of the effort
required,
 the fear of legal actions, and the fear of loss of job security.
 Resistance to knowledge reuse because of the effort required,
 The low likelihood of finding relevant knowledge.

 Potential technical barriers include:

 How to make the knowledge capture process easy or even
transparent.
 How to make retrieval and reuse easy or even transparent.
 How to ensure the relevancy of the retrieved knowledge.
 Questions for practical assignment

 How often does your organization take inventory of assets

(Human, structural, operational, processes, customers, etc.)

 How often does your organization conduct bench marking

activities?

 What type of information technology is being used for

knowledge sharing?
 social Media Tools
 Social media
 media for social interaction, using highly accessible and scalable
communication techniques.

 use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into

interactive dialogue.

 the move toward more social, collaborative, interactive and responsive

web.
Collaboration and document sharing tools
 helpcollaborators such as scientists, professionals,
students, colleagues and peers to work together in
professional and personal project-based settings.

 require only Internet connection.

 Provide
tools for groups of people to Add, Edit and,
Remove content in “real time”

 Useful
for collaborative writing or information collection
and sharing
 Collaboration and document sharing platforms
 Google Drive
 Jira
 Trello
 Slide share
 Flickr
 Blogs
 Photo sharing platform / flickr
 Slide share
 Social medial tools