Enabling Knowledge Flow

Organizations are facing many challenges to remain relevant in the face of new technology, emerging markets, and changing consumer behaviors. Many organizations look to become learning organizations with knowledge management strategies to leverage their knowledge assets and continuously innovate their strategies and products. However, organizations struggle to achieve success with knowledge management because their organizational culture does not support knowledge-sharing and must be adapted for this new behavior. Knowledge must flow through the organization, and so, therefore, these necessary behaviors must work within the existing corporate culture. Observations from a case study at a software company are discussed, and a new knowledge management model, the Knowledge Management Triangle, is introduced. The Knowledge Management Triangle is a simple model to explain and implement knowledge management within organizations and is customizable to work within the organization's culture to ensure the new knowledge management behaviors are appropriately adopted.

Why Do Lessons Learned Often Fail?

Organisations know they should do lessons learned. Standards like ISO9001 and ISO30401 say they should. Many try; few succeed. Traditionally, the first answer to the question is “lessons were observed, but not learned,” which reflects meaningful action was not taken as a result of the reported lesson. A lesson may have been identified, but nothing changed. As a result, learning did not happen. So why is this so? It is important to identify the ways in which the process towards effective lesson learning is becoming lost within the stages and how knowledge practitioners and those responsible for lessons learned can best help. This chapter will attempt to drill down on this answer, concentrating on the processes deployed and the real-world issues around the lesson-learning process.

Knowledge Management in Emergent Amateur Organizational Cultures

This chapter examines issues of knowledge management and cultural knowledge in the context of Formula SAE student engineering teams. Approximately 500 student teams field a small formula-style racecar in a series of annual competitions held globally. Despite being small, student-run teams with limited resources and high organizational turnover, strong teams have developed strategies to sustain knowledge creation and work to build the team's cultural knowledge over multiple annual design cycles. This chapter highlights three knowledge management challenges: organizational renewal due to graduation of senior members, capturing vital yet departing tacit and explicit knowledge, and engaging multi-year and collaborative projects. The chapter recommends that strong faculty and institutional support can help FSAE teams develop into stable knowing organizations with deep tacit, explicit, and cultural knowledge bases.

Knowledge Sharing in a Digital, Remote, and Disrupted World

Trust is a critical element when building knowledge management practices within an organization. For individuals and teams to share knowledge and collaborate, they must form a relationship that is based on trust. The role of trust within knowledge-sharing, and therefore collaboration and cooperation, will be discussed. In a multinational, distributed, remote work environment, colleagues will interact with content created by their peers before they interact with them, and therefore, digital repositories and content become an extension of the trust relationship between colleagues and even the organization itself. The trust required to facilitate knowledge-sharing will need to be extended to these digital environments so that the organization can maintain its competitive advantage and the benefits of effective knowledge management practices.

It's in the Vault

This chapter is a case study of the rebuild of Shopify's internal wiki (intranet) and describes the approach of updating the wiki and explores the elements that made the project a success. The problems with the existing tool are presented along with the strategies used to remedy these issues and rebuild the wiki. The project harnessed Shopify's culture of trust, accountability, and transparency to create a tool authentic to the needs of the company. At the heart of the project's approach is the people, process, and technology trifecta that the project team was built upon. This cross-functional team intersected change management, communications, knowledge management, and developers. Readers of this chapter will learn the approach and methodology of composing a project team based on this trifecta and how it led to the successful rebuild of Shopify's wiki. Although Shopify had the opportunity to build its tool internally, this chapter is not a showcase of the tool; the focus is on the approach and strategies of the project team, which can be applied to any intranet-like project.

Effective Knowledge Sharing

This chapter explores the enablers and inhibitors to effective knowledge sharing practices within different contexts and fields of work. It covers the benefits of knowledge sharing and explores some of the most commonly used methods referencing the experiences within the banking and financial sector, the higher education sector, the automotive industry, and within the field of community development. Reference is also made to the experiences of knowledge sharing in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter concludes by asserting that a ‘one size fits all' approach to knowledge sharing and knowledge management is not feasible, but argues that there is equally strong evidence to support the view that knowledge sharing should be a key priority for all organizations in order for them to be sustainable and relevant in the longer term.

Towards a Learning Organization

A learning organization is one that is consistently capable of adaptive change in response to signals from its environment. However, knowledge management initiatives to enact learning organizations have not been uniformly successful. This chapter focuses on the role of the psychological environment of the individual in enabling or hampering organizational learning. Six theories drawn from multiple fields are reviewed to identify both opportunities and barriers to fostering change at the level of the individual. These include orientation to learning, motivation to act, and capacity for change. However, the authors argue that organizations ought to be regarded as complex social systems. Change strategies intended to foster a learning organization are more likely to succeed if they embrace the idea that designing change for complex social systems requires a special approach: design thinking. This is characterized by iterative prototyping, experimenting, trialing, and piloting changes to work processes, structures, and tasks.

Motivations of Knowledge Management Practitioners

Knowledge management as a set of activities has been around for as long as humans have been able to communicate. In the modern world, knowledge management has become a multiple billion-dollar industry. Organizations know that their existence and growth rely on effective knowledge management programs and systems. But knowledge management efforts continue to experience high failure rates. Contributing to those failures is a lack of understanding the most important element of the system: the human. It is humans that have and create the knowledge. It is humans that build on the knowledge. And it is humans that are asked to share their knowledge. But there has been limited studies on understanding the motivations and behaviors of users in the context of knowledge management systems. This chapter explores the use of psychological contracts and positive psychology theories to explain and predict users' behaviors in knowledge management systems.

A Closer Look at Concept Map Collaborative Creation in Product Lifecycle Management

One of the greatest challenges of effectively managing knowledge in an organization is promoting seamless connections of operations between departments. Historically, information systems supporting operations have been developed with a specific department's culture in background. Therefore, connecting data, information systems, and people across the product lifecycle is an ongoing puzzle for organizations. Theorists and practicians agree on the need to include employees' expertise and vision in this process. This chapter explores a tacit knowledge capture tool and a methodology to use it as a means to voice the interaction and negotiation among employees to support KM and IT strategy and development choices. Concept maps collaborative creation can provide a usability tool focused on meaning throughout the product lifecycle. A literature review of the challenges involved and of the proposed tool is presented, followed by a use case and the methodology for the concept map collaborative creation session, concluded with recommendations drawn from theory and practice.

Information Culture and Effective Use of Information Tools at Work

Office work is increasingly collaborative in the 21st century. ‘Information culture' is a broad set of values and behavioural workplace norms pertaining to information management and use. To investigate whether information culture influences use of collaborative information tools, conceptualization and measurement instruments are presented for information culture and measuring effective use. ‘Group adoption' is a behavioural proxy for effective use, and ‘information sharing' and ‘proactive information use' were selected as behavioural proxies for information culture. In a study of an engineering firm, group adoption was correlated with actual use of an information tool and with two tool attitude measures. Group adoption was also correlated with both information culture measures. The findings here suggest new avenues of research into the broader applicability of group adoption, and the ways in which conceptualization and measurement of information culture may be further developed.