Do you know what you know? You especially need knowledge management in high changing environments; if all remains the same, why should we think about the knowledge we need? Knowledge management is an iterative process of making tacit knowledge explicit and visa versa. But why would you make implicit knowledge explicit?

Knowing something without knowing it is very useful. You can just trust on your actions. You can continue with what you did yesterday. The same rules apply. You can delegate as before.

But then there has been a structural change. For example:

Your (sales) organization has organized activities in the way that different experts where relatively autonomous in dealing with clients. They sold the product of their expertise in a both efficient and effective way.

In the new situation this (product) expertise of the sales representative was of minor importance. More relevant was the knowledge of different client behavior. The different product specialists where "grouped” together in a specific client team, dedicated to contact clients with certain characteristics. The (product) specializations of the sales representatives where spread over different teams.

So the new situation - after the organizational changes - leads to a knowledge gap. Each team has proper targets and cooperation between the teams is therefore difficult. If there were more calls than a former specialist could handle, there was no way of level with someone (product specialist) of the team next door. In fact that was not the new strategy. In the new approach the sales employee is to ask different questions and to suggest other opportunities. This is another approach and takes time.

Once this knowledge gap is clear, you could determine your actions. They are to organize people, systems and infrastructure. In that order; knowledge management is about people, communication and interaction. Filling a knowledge base on the intranet is normally not the first step to take.

A next step is to get the supportive element of knowledge management entangled in the primary process. To do this you need to stress certain principles. Principles your organization was not accustomed to use; because of other priorities.

© 2006 Hans Bool