1.12 Groupware and De-engineering

Chapter 1: Groupware - The Changing Environment

By David Coleman

ISBN# 0-13-727728-8, Copyright 1997, 720 pp.
Now available through Prentice Hall

1.13 Defining Knowledge Architectures

Table of Contents

Today we hear more and more about the Knowledge Economy and the belief that the future of business success will be based on the ability to manage and leverage an organization's intellectual capital. What does this mean? And how do you create a framework to manage enterprise knowledge?

Companies are realizing that the ability to better manage the knowledge of the firm will have tremendous benefit to all levels of the organization. For example, the ability to stop re-inventing the wheel every time a new project starts because the knowledge learned from past projects is available and accessible by all; to collaborate and work with team members around the world - applying the best ideas and experts to problems regardless of where they're located; to coordinate and organize information so that the appropriate knowledge is shared with the appropriate people to avoid information overload and redundancy of information. These are just a few examples of how organizations are benefiting from using groupware technology in support of knowledge management.

Many of these initiatives started as grass roots implementations with initial applications supporting discreet problems such as issues or document tracking. The problem comes as the organization begins to see the benefit of these applications and desires to ramp up the implementation to higher strategic levels to solve broader sets of knowledge management issues. Because the initial projects were discreet in nature and only focused on single processes or issues, the ability to scale the applications to encompass multiple processes or groups becomes extremely difficult.

They haven't taken the time to create a framework or knowledge architecture under which to map the knowledge of the firm. The relationships between groups, divisions, and teams are not clear and therefore, when it comes to creating seamless connectivity throughout the firm, they are unable to "see" the big picture.

When an organization takes the time up front to create a knowledge architecture or framework, they create a high level blueprint. A knowledge architecture is not a detailed map of all the knowledge of the firm but rather, a representation of the knowledge - a set of mental models or frameworks.

1.13.1 Building a Knowledge Architecture

The first step in building a knowledge architecture is to gain an understanding of the organization's overall strategy and understand what role knowledge plays. (See Chapter 20 for more information on Knowledge Managment.) Many times we find that organizations have not built any thoughts around knowledge and the leveraging of intellectual capital into their current strategy. Therefore, the first step is to gain a clear vision from leadership on where they see knowledge playing a key role and how they would like to communicate the value of knowledge to the organization.

The role of leadership is to create "intention" or vision so that the organization understands the direction it should be moving. The goal is to create order not control, and therefore intention creates the direction that the organization should be moving toward.

This strategic piece is critical because it drives many other steps in the process of creating knowledge architectures. Without it, assembling multiple cross-organizational teams to map integrated processes is virtually impossible. Without guidance from leadership, groups have no opportunity to understand how they connect and link with other groups in the organization.

We are currently working with a consulting firm to design their knowledge architecture and implement groupware systems to support collaboration and knowledge sharing. The project is designed in three phases; building a knowledge architecture, developing the underlying knowledge infrastructure and the groupware implementation. The initial phase of the project established leadership's vision of knowledge management and potential benefit for the organization. By helping the client gain a better understanding of their business processes—how knowledge is used in their organization today—and what the potential benefits could be, we were able to help articulate a clear strategy for the project.

Once the vision and direction were established, joint teams began defining the knowledge architecture and its underlying domains. Leadership has played a strong role throughout the project, further articulate the knowledge strategy has created a whole new set of questions to be explored by the organization.

1.13.2 Aligning with Work

Now that the organization has created a vision and strategy for knowledge management, the next step is to understand how knowledge currently exists within the organization and how it is used today. It is also critically important to understand how information and knowledge interplay with the work of the organization.

When thinking about how information flows through an organization, imagine how water flows down a hill. It finds its own path and the water pools naturally in different locations along the journey. This is very similar to how knowledge flows through an organization. The difference is that knowledge is tied directly to the work of the organization. Work defines the paths that knowledge takes and the "pools" of knowledge are formed where groups of people have a need to gather and share knowledge. Changing the flow of knowledge in the organization requires changing the path of work.

Many companies will attempt to capture the learning and knowledge of the firm by building groupware applications to hold the knowledge. Thinking they have implemented a excellent solution, they stop. Then they can't understand why no one is using them. Building the groupware application is a critical first step, but not the last. Consider that most employees regard their most important tasks to be the ones which directly contribute to getting their jobs done. If capturing knowledge is viewed as extra work, or something 'nice' but not essential, to have, they have no incentive to capture the knowledge. Providing specific rewards for sharing provides incentive for them to invest the time and energy to use knowledge management tools effectively.

Any knowledge management or learning system must also play a role in helping users to get their work done easier, faster, etc... This is the trade-off to get users to share their knowledge. If their efforts contribute to making their job easier (or their perception of their job), it will help to change the behaviors within the organization. Remember, you must answer both "What's in it for me? "and "What's in it for the organization?"

The concept of knowledge architectures will continue to evolve as more and more companies attempt to manage their intellectual capital. It's important to remember that knowledge architectures are not data architectures - rather they are frameworks and mental models for mapping knowledge from a strategic business perspective.

1.13.3 Groupware and the Preservation of Intellectual Capital

Intellectual capital is that information about the organizations' operations, customers, history, policy, databases, and records. Intellectual capital takes two forms, explicit and tacit. It is the tacit knowledge that never gets quantified into a manual or other accessible form, but resides in the minds of the people who have worked with and developed that information. The problem is that when someone leaves, either to a different assignment within the company or out of the company, this intellectual capital in his/her mind leaves also. As you may have surmised from the above discussion, nothing is more important in today's competitive market than preserving and leveraging intellectual capital.

Two Japanese management consultants Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotak Takeuchi talk about knowledge creation in their book The Knowledge Creating Company (Oxford University Press). They draw the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge: Tacit knowledge is in your mind, but not quantified through either spoken or written communication. Explicit knowledge is spoken and/or written knowledge. The Japanese function very well with tacit knowledge because of their high context culture. In other words, the internationality of their communication is influenced by the context in which it is presented. In western cultures, we are good with explicit knowledge, we like to write things down. My point is that organizations must capture both kinds of knowledge. In order to remain competitive, organizations cannot continue to squander this type of intellectual capital.

1.13.4 Keeping the Corporate Assets

Maintaining confidentiality and ownership of intellectual assets presents a significant challenge to corporations. Jeff Conklin, CEO of Corporate Memory Systems notes, "Storing corporate knowledge and experience is becoming more critical as more and more companies become distributed across the globe, and both the products and the organizations become more complex."

For example, John, a hypothetical manager, has worked for XYZ Company for 40 years. When he retired, his knowledge about specific clients, products, organizational systems, etc. left with him. But if John had shared his knowledge over time, through an electronic conferencing system, that knowledge would now be part of a collective, corporate memory or learning, which could be leveraged across the organization. In this way, John's knowledge becomes an asset, intellectual property, of the organization as he develops it. His co-workers have access to the information while he's still at XYZ. His successor has the benefit of John's understanding the history, needs and preferences of his customers as well as a better understanding of the corporate operation.