cdu – school of information technology hit342 lecture 10 - slide 1 enterprise it management...

CDU – School of Information TechnologyHIT342

Lecture 10 - Slide 1

Enterprise IT Management

Managing Knowledge and Content Introduction.

Definitions.

Developing a KM Strategy.

Building a knowledge infrastructure.

Organizational cultures that support KM.

KM and people.

Key questions in KM.

Keys to success in KM.

Technology and KM.

CM & the challenge of KM.

Buying CM software.

Growth areas for CM.

Three trends in CM.

Gartner Case.

Conclusion.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Introduction

Knowledge management (KM) begins with a solid understanding of what KM is all about — a “big picture” for KM. That includes a definition in addition to clear implementation objectives. KM succeeds when this big picture is made relevant to the enterprise. Thus, the big picture of KM is:

Mapped to the enterprise’s business objectives.

Implemented through the enterprise’s business and workplace applications.

Focused on the extended enterprise’s intellectual assets.




KM is an important enterprise and management discipline.

Within 3 years, every IT and business professional should know about KM and be able to apply it within their business activities, in interactions with their customers and across their value chains.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Definitions

A simple definition for KM is formalizing the management of an enterprise’s intellectual assets. Enterprises look to manage their intellectual assets because of the capital embedded in them. This embedded capital is not financial — rather, it is human, organizational and relationship capital.

Those forms of capital are often hidden, are not highly leveraged and are difficult to value. Yet, they are clearly available as an investment.




Intellectual assets are part of an enterprise’s overall intangible asset base. For most enterprises, intellectual assets represent more than half their market value. Generally three categories of intellectual capital found within an enterprise’s assets…




Human capital — the experiences and knowledge of the enterprise and its employees, customers and partners. Employees can access and use this human capital.

Organizational capital — knowledge that has been represented and structured as data files, documents, networks, business processes, software, patents, Web sites and other forms.

Relationship capital — knowledge about customers, markets, competitors, industry and the business environment.




A confusing point for many businesses is that knowledge exists in two forms — explicit and tacit. KM needs both.

One of the points of confusion concerning KM is often this explicit vs. tacit issue. A common question is “How can we capture tacit knowledge?”

The simple answer is “You can’t and you don’t need to.” KM includes both explicit and tacit knowledge processes.




Explicit knowledge is simply knowledge that has been captured and is represented in an explicit form (such as a database, Web content, a document or e-mail).

Explicit knowledge is pervasive in information management. It is embedded in business rules and metadata that drive work management and business process automation. It is stored in structured records of customer transactions, business intelligence about customer preferences or behaviors, and recorded in documents.




Tacit knowledge is, by definition, uncaptured. People carry tacit knowledge around in their heads in the form of insight, judgment, craftsmanship and creative talents – this knowledge can be expressed or represented in some way, but never fully captured. Employees carry around much of an enterprise’s tacit knowledge. They know “how things are done around here,” why they are done in a certain way, how to calm an irate customer, how to sell the enterprise product or service, and other concepts or practices.




Some of this tacit knowledge can be shared, but typically that happens in a very informal manner (such as during phone calls, lunches or meetings). This implies that very little leverage is possible.

From an business perspective, some of the most valuable customer knowledge is tacit. Customers generally know why they like or dislike a product, service or interaction, they have un-stated wants or needs, and they have perceptions about enterprise people, service or sales.




It is interesting to note that most of an enterprise’s knowledge is tacit (as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of what a person knows will never be captured). At the rates people learn, enterprises could never keep up with what they know, even if they could somehow capture the complex knowledge into explicit form.

Therefore, human interaction is needed to get at tacit knowledge. People must transfer knowledge to each other through collaboration and interactions among employees, with customers and with business partners.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Developing a KM strategy

Developing a KM strategy requires understanding where KM can help the most, in terms of return on investment (ROI) and in enabling the enterprise to execute its strategic plans.

Implementing a KM strategy requires the enterprise to develop KM processes to suit the type of knowledge being managed, and select the right KM technology for those KM processes and sources of knowledge.

Enterprises also must understand what operational support they need from the IS organization, business units and KM specialists such as knowledge managers, information architects, librarians and virtual community managers.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Developing a KM strategy

The following questions will need to be addressed:

How can enterprises determine their readiness to undertake KM programs?

What areas of the business should KM projects target?

How do enterprises gauge the maturity of their KM programs?

How can enterprises integrate strategies for content management, KM, portals and collaboration?

How do enterprises protect their intellectual assets from misuse?



Managing Knowledge and Content… Building a Knowledge Infrastructure

The key step in building an business’s KM capabilities is to understand the value of KM and how it can best serve business interests.

Essentially, KM formalizes the management and leveraging of intellectual assets. That process requires some new business processes, technology and other enabling infrastructure, but much of an enterprise’s current infrastructure may be leverageable for KM.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Organizational cultures … KM

Another success factor is an organizational culture and discipline that promotes three key KM “values”:

1. Employees share their knowledge rather than hoard it.

2. Employees rely on the knowledge of others rather than “create it themselves.”

3. Employees work collaboratively as fluidly as they work individually, with collaboration preferred over competitive work styles.



Managing Knowledge and Content… KM and People

A business will achieve the value from KM by the following:

Designing KM to engage people actively and specifically in knowledge sharing, collaboration and innovation activities. Most businesses make investments in technologies for knowledge work that mainly affect individual job performance based on a firm belief that productivity initiatives have relatively short payback times. However, investments that focus on collaboration and innovation, in addition to individual productivity, can be more rewarding for the enterprise.

Prioritizing investments in human processes ahead of knowledge base and information access.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Key questions in KM

How will enterprises achieve returns on their investments in knowledge management?

How will knowledge management be integrated into real-time business processes?

How will businesses use knowledge management practices to leverage the dynamics of virtual teams, communities and collaboration?

What emerging practices will enable intellectual assets to be formally declared as part of an enterprise's balance sheet value?



Managing Knowledge and Content… Key questions … RIO

Failures to achieve ROI can be traced to one of three shortcomings:

Lack of focus on people and activities — how knowledge management supports their work and interactions.

Failure to align knowledge management strategies with business strategies.

Failure to link knowledge processes to business processes.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Key questions … IntegrationWork in a real-time business will be accomplished through computer-mediated networks of people, business processes, technology & relationships.

Businesses require a robust technology base — business applications, network management, middleware and various integration capabilities — as well as a set of management disciplines that include knowledge management, business process modelling, business intelligence, distributed decision making & collaboration.

Each of these disciplines is a well-defined approach to managing work & leveraging knowledge among & between the business's people, technologies & networks.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Key questions … KM practices

Globalization and network connectivity are driving more businesses to conduct business across time, geographic and cultural boundaries.

An increasing amount of the mission-critical work of the enterprise will be done by workers who are physically disbursed but share objectives, accountabilities and work activities.

These "virtual teams" accomplish work and collaboration using technology-mediated communication systems and processes.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Key questions … Intellectual Assets

Intellectual capital is the currency of the 21st century. Businesses can continually produce economic value by converting intellectual capital into innovative products, services, ideas and business models.

However, business accounting has not kept up, & there is no satisfactory (or accepted) approach to systematically measure the assets employed and the value created.

Leading-edge thinkers have been working on these processes for at least 10 years, but recent unscrupulous actions by business accountants and Web-based businesses make the need for solutions more critical.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Keys to success in KM

From these questions we can deduce 4 keys to success in KM:

1. Manage and leverage intellectual assets.

2. Support critical business processes.

3. Support knowledge work and knowledge workers.

4. Formalize the management of critical intellectual assets.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Technology and KM

KM is not about technology — it is accomplished through business processes, specific objectives (sales collaboration, marketing information access or product innovation) and strong human interaction.

All of the business processes, sociology and objectives aside, however, KM is critically dependent on technology. In the absence of technology, many KM processes would exist only in narrow domains and with limited capabilities.



Managing Knowledge and Content… CM and the challenge of KM

One reason why businesses invest in KM and supporting technologies (for example, content management (CM), document management and search) is because their workers, customers and business partners must be able to find information to do work and make effective decisions.

Often, these firms are disappointed in the ROI. Why? Because their newly acquired technology to gathers a lot of content from many different sources — paper, electronic repositories, paid electronic services, even hard drives and e-mail — and pull it all together, into a single repository.

Then what do they have? A giant “bucket” of digitized content that even the best search engine can’t sift effectively.




Commercial content - the term content has several

definitions. Here it describes commercial information that is

produced for external consumption over the Internet and other

emerging interactive mediums to enhance an enterprise’s value proposition and value chain position.

Business-facing commercial content can include an enterprise’s exchange, portal or Web site, Web services directory, procurement and commercial catalogs, or other forms of information. Alternative types of content that have commercial value for consumer audiences will also evolve.




The goal of any CM (content management) system is to allow users to be able to easily create, retrieve and share content.

How this content is organized must be determined by the people who create and use it. This fact can be overlooked when busineese implement CM systems.




Users are central to both content creation and content organization. Give them the tools they need to maximize the business value of enterprise internal content.

The concept of knowledge organization systems can and should be applied directly to content management for internal business use. Most enterprises will require a mix of these “content organization systems.”




This is where KM comes in. KM’s role is to manage knowledge in the context of the enterprise by:

Optimizing collaboration within the business and with the business’s partners, suppliers and customers.

Improving organizational responsiveness to everything from day-to-day customer requests to competitive challenges.

Enabling the reuse of knowledge (content). Fostering innovation.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Buying CM software

Web content management (WCM) functionality is now available in a wide variety of products & embedded in many more, such as portals, application servers and collaboration tools. Tool vendors Ektron or Macromedia and open-source vendors Zope or Midgard now offer WCM products outside the traditional enterprise-software direct sales model.

The ubiquity of content functionality across a broad range of products, however, increases risk for pure-play vendors. As major vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and SAP focus more closely on the WCM market, it becomes more difficult for niche players to build awareness for their offerings. Vendors with other software revenue streams will be more viable long-term sources than those that offer only WCM products.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Growth Areas for CM

1. Corporate Accountability – recent corporate and individual scandals that undermine trust has focused attention on the need for disciplined records management.

2. Content Integration – linking disparate databases and repositories is emerging as a leading driver in the acquisition of CM technology.

3. Web Services for Content – adopting architectures that enable content functionality.

4. Web Content Management Outsourcing.

5. Digital Rights Management – preventing copyright violation.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Three trends in CM

Trend 1: Enterprises will increasingly be hindered in their ability to form profitable relationships with trading partners and business customers through a content “infoglut.”

Trend 2: Shared content in real time fuels participation on the emerging value web, and in cross-enterprise collaborative activities.

Trend 3: Static content becomes actionable through predetermined rules. Content “trustworthiness” emerges as a key “actionable” requirement.



Managing Knowledge and Content… 3 Trends … Infoglut

The explosive growth in volume and diversity of content available to enterprises is diminishing the ability of key decision makers to locate relevant content. Content value and reliability are becoming increasingly obscured in an “infofamine” that is a result of the exponentially increasing “infoglut”.

The content infoglut is primarily caused by exponentially increasing volumes of information from a wide range of external sources, uncoordinated projects and crossenterprise activities, and increasing numbers of “information islands” that hinder the ability of the knowledge worker to find relevant information.



Managing Knowledge and Content… 3 Trends … Emerging Value Web

Many businesses are forming more-effective relationships by exchanging greater and more-complex types of business content. Different types of content must be prepared for trading partners. Alliances, partnerships and joint ventures are expanding and becoming more efficient in an emerging value web, and in cross-enterprise collaborative activities.

The value web is fuelled by shared content that can be simultaneously exchange and transacted in real-time situations, and will allow participants to engage in inter-enterprise processes. Individual value webs and specific value chains for vertical sectors will consist of multiple organizations that unite to supply a complete set of goods and services.



Managing Knowledge and Content… 3 Trends … Content Trustworthiness

Businesses have increased concerns about the trustworthiness of content received from external sources. Actionable content will be required to compete on the emerging value web. On the value web, and in direct B2B transactions, content will need to be actionable, by triggering a response that a machine or a human being will take.

Additionally, content in support of e-commerce and other ebusiness activities will increasingly be context-driven in the future. Context will be attached to, and travel with, e-business content through the network of enterprises that transforms a trading partner request into a response.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Gartner Case (see attached)

Content Management: Key to Success in Knowledge Management (recommendations):

Develop a framework for managing the evolution of the company's KM processes and supporting systems.

Think big and start small. Adopt the approach that seems to have worked for most

successful initiatives. Incrementally expand the pilot to include other knowledge

domains of high business relevancy. Keep in mind that the successful deployment of intellectual

capital management systems is a journey, not a destination.



Managing Knowledge and Content… Conclusion

Content management is more than an infrastructure issue. Managers in businesses that will compete on the emerging value web, and in expanding cross-enterprise collaborative activities, must take into account the impact that key trends will have on business content in the future.

Trading partners, industrial consortia and network-liberated enterprises engaged in outsourced and partner-sourced activities will need to develop joint strategies for dealing with the emerging content “infoglut.” In addition, enterprises need to prepare for a technical environment that enables the development of joint strategies for publishing and retrieving relevant, applicable content and knowledge in a real-time environment.

cdu – school of information technology hit342 lecture 10 - slide 1 enterprise it management...

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