Behind a simple question "Why so many KM systems fail?" is an even simpler answer "Because they are not implemented to solve a business need".
There are many definitions of the term knowledge management, as it is a process that everyone executes differently.
What all definitions agree on is that knowledge management is a business process that defines the way organisations manage both documented and undocumented knowledge and the know-how their employees have about their services, products organisational systems and intellectual property.
Knowledge management consolidates the strategies and processes an organisation employs to pinpoint...
Posted by TallyFox on 21 November 2016
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Posted by TallyFox on 21 November 2016
"Too many KM solutions focus on aggregation and summarization which only works for highly structured knowledge and information needs.", Dave Snowden said in his interview for our blog. Many of our readers agreed with him adding that it has already become a pattern. We believe that this pattern needs to be broken, as KM solutions need to be able to capture tacit knowledge and make it available.
Capturing tacit knowledge in a way that can be leveraged by the organisation is one of the largest challenges in KM processes, and it has been widely ignored in traditional knowledge management systems.
Let us take customer support industry as an example.
...
Posted by TallyFox on 05 November 2016
For people in the Knowledge Sharing industry, the name Jane Dysart is well known.
She is the principal of Dysart&Jones Associates and the program director for KMWorld, the most important event in our industry, gathering dozens of experts and hundreds of visitors each year, which we supported last year by becoming a platinum sponsor and presenting Tallium to the audience.
We opened our interview with a hot topic: the conference itself.
TallyFox: What's the goal of this year's topic: Hacking KM: people, processes and technology?
Jane Dysart: It's about trying to see KM in a different way. If you keep doing the same...
Posted by TallyFox on 13 October 2016
In business, technology is used to facilitate everyday tasks, organise data or automate processes, but people are the ones who make success happen. However, in IT, the focus of the software development process has been placed on technology capabilities, not the needs and abilities of end users.
The complexity of software systems has come to a point where the tools seem to be too complicated and difficult to operate. They cease to support the users in their work and become a waste of money, rather than a sound investment.
The market urges organisations to explore new technologies, and they do so, by constantly adapting to new tools which arise from technological discoveries and...
Posted by TallyFox on 07 October 2016
Dr Dixon is one of the early thought leaders in the Knowledge Management field.
Her book, Common Knowledge, which was based on a research study of how fifteen of the most successful companies were leveraging their knowledge gets to the heart of one of the most difficult questions in knowledge transfer: “What makes a system work efficiently in one organisation but fail miserably in another?”. This has set a path for her work as her consulting company conducts in-depth assessments of knowledge sharing efforts within organisations.
If you asked her, she would simply say that her work is dealing with the human side of Knowledge Management, always interested in bringing people...
Posted by TallyFox on 30 September 2016
Organisations today are becoming very successful in making a plenitude of information available to their employees.
The problem lies in a word "plenitude." Anyone who has searched for information on an enterprise KM system will verify that finding exactly what they need is difficult.
The problem can be solved by contextual search.
But what exactly is contextual search?
In simple terms, contextual search aims to improve search results by either user-provided context or system analysed context.
There are three dominant approaches within the major areas of modern information retrieval: ...
Posted by TallyFox on 29 September 2016
Setting up a KM system across an organisation may sometimes appear like an unattainable goal.
Organising knowledge within an organisation systematically calls for information structuring which must cover all that the organisation can potentially touch upon.
The same process applies to both documented and undocumented (tacit) knowledge, and it requires extensive meta-knowledge about the organisation.
Organisational taxonomies are an excellent approach for helping meet this need for meta-knowledge, but many organisations fail in structuring them because they are basing their process on two "best practice" solutions that don’t work....
Posted by TallyFox on 08 September 2016
The question that defines a company that cares for its customers is: "How can we deliver effortless customer service?". The answer is not that simple as there are many communication channels, and each one of them has its benefits and its challenges.
With the increased use of self-service channels as the first point of contact for customer service, the desire to improve this channel is growing, and many companies are using knowledge management to do it. We say improving is not the answer. They need to be reinvented.
In this article, we identify many challenges that both customers and companies are facing, and outline the way Tallium can...
Posted by TallyFox on 30 August 2016
David Gurteen is a well-known name in the Knowledge Management industry and an advocate for conversation in the knowledge management process. He stands proudly behind Gurteen Knowledge Café, a powerful dialogue tool for bringing people together to have meaningful conversations and he regularly gives keynote talks, runs workshops and Gurteen Knowledge Cafés around the world.
Some of you who are reading this interview may not know that we held successful workshops with David Gurteen as one of the speakers and we appreciate his opinion on many topics. And we are not the only ones.
David Griffiths, David Gurteen and Dave Snowden with The TallyFox Team in Frankfurt, 9 October 2013
As an...
Posted by TallyFox on 24 August 2016
For some companies, innovation is just a buzzword. Their innovation process is siloed and it is inhibiting the organisation’s ability to profit from its collective expertise. To others, innovation is an integral part of the work process. They brainstorm internally, and they invest a lot of time and effort to encourage employees to come up with ideas, solutions and plans.
Collaborative communities work best when participants can accumulate and recombine ideas, sharing information freely, regardless of their location, and software is intrinsic to this process.
Many companies are now starting to focus on developing various types of cross-organizational innovation programs and if...