KM - Best Practices

Reference:

KM Queries

KM - Training Needs

KM - Competency and Skill

KM - Organizational Knowledge Base

KM - Individual Domain Knowledge

KM - Project Management

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How does KM help in the identification of Best Practices?

Does KM drive or simply enable this? Drive

Traditionally: In earlier times, I guess most of the best practices would be left to the management to be discovered and spread across the organization. Benchmarking practices, meanwhile, would enable formal best practices transfer from across the industry. Apart from discoveries and promotion by the senior management, board meetings and internal conferences would perhaps serve as a convenient platform for identifying, discovering and sharing of best practices within the organization. Word of mouth would probably be heavily relied upon among other things.

KM’s value-add: KM can bring in a formal process for best practice identification and transfer and can also provide an efficient technical platform for the purpose. KM can also add value by targeting tangible business benefits from best practices transfer and formally monitoring and reporting these benefits to the top management. This in turn will provide more tangible reasons for its pursuit.

The idea: One of the best examples of how KM can drive best practices transfer can be found in the book Learning to Fly. Please read my previous post on this here. This book outlines every detail that one may require in planning and executing a best practices transfer initiative. Starting from bringing people together, identifying best practices, deciding on who should learn from whom, how it can be sustained and monitored etc. For organizations really serious about best practices transfer, the KM team can be engaged to even develop exclusive dashboards that help the top management perceive the benefits and progress.

The details- culture, process and technology: The culture will have to be driven by the top management, exclusive campaigns and advertisements, incentives and recognition for sharing and reusing best practices and so on. The process is best explained in Learning to Fly. The technology could be in the form of a platform for listing and rating best practices, forming groups of people who want to learn from the group that shares – repository, discussion boards etc, and a dashboard for monitoring the progress and benefits of the best practices initiative.

5S Philosophy

Ilker explains what the Japanese 5S philosophy is all about. Sort, Straighten, Shine, Systemize, and Sustain. Sounds like plain and simple common sense. I don’t know if everyone feels the way I do, but I think most of the Japanese philosophies and methods are embarrassingly obvious in retrospect. :)

Motivation in the Army

I recently went to a training program on leadership and we happened to discuss how organizations can learn from other industries other than their own and use what they learn to get creative with their own problem-solving endeavours. One of the examples that came up was how organizations could learn from the Army about motivating people. Though I appreciated the idea, I was under the impression that the Army would anyhow largely comprise motivated people. I wasn’t able to imagine people who were not passionate about protecting the country joining the Army – and I am talking about India (not countries where it is mandatory to at least temporarily serve the country as a member of the Army). So, I posed the question and was told by at least three people in the class that I was mistaken and that there are people who join the army because they can’t join elsewhere. That was mildly surprising. Moreover, since performance as a member of the army is literally a question of life or death unlike many other fields, aren’t people bound to be “good”? So, doesn’t that automatically make motivating people a job that – I am oversimplifying it a bit here - simply means telling them to perform or perish and let that fundamental rule sink in????

I need some views on this topic. I mean, do let me know what you think.