KM in Practice

Knowledge Management analysis and design, aims at sketching out the way to implement the specified, by strategic planning, actions. In doing so, guidelines for their incorporation into business practice are provided and supportive tools are developed. More specifically, injecting business processes with a knowledge orientation is achieved through the identification of their knowledge aspects and their partial reengineering and enrichment in order to support the active leveraging of knowledge.

This phase is broken down into four discrete parts that correspond to the analysis and design of the key KM components, namely organizational structure, knowledge, systems and processes.

The Design Parameters of the KM Ecosystem©KMinPractice.com

Organizational Structure refers to the special positions, roles and groups that are required in order to carry out the organizational procedures for managing knowledge. The organizational structure component deals with the identifications of the required roles and positions, along with the description of their responsibilities and interrelations.

Knowledge is a basic input and output of business processes and particularly the knowledge intensive ones. This component attempts to analyze knowledge recourses, examining them in terms of their key attributes and attempting to link them to business processes.

Systems, though not a panacea, constitute a fundamental success factor for KM initiatives. The scope of this component is to specify the required knowledge technology by articulating a complete requirements specification report, which can be used for the evaluation of existing KM technologies and at the same time serve as a specification manual or even as a Request for Proposal (RFP) for future Knowledge Management Systems.

Processes are a core part of an organization’s operation. KM has to be successfully integrated into business process in order to achieve results and gain acceptance. In order to achieve so, the process component analyses processes from a knowledge perspective and particularly in terms of their knowledge inputs and outputs.