Best Practices in Knowledge Management

This section is currently under development, but we've added a few tools to get you started - see below and right-hand menu. This page gives a preview of what will follow.

"Sharing best practices" is a commonly heard mantra in many organizations. It is also a popular method found in many KM initiatives. Its basis is that replication of a proven method in one part of an organization can be replicated elsewhere resulting in significant cost savings through sharing of knowledge of what works best. We can apply this generic process to knowledge management itself, using the techniques of knowledge management to identify best KM practice.

KM Tools and Techniques

Our in-depth analysis of KM in practice has identified some 100 different techniques in use. These range from very specific methods, such as After Action Reviews or Decision Diaries, to more general approaches, such as Bridging Mechanisms. We therefore expect this section to finish as '101 Best Practices in KM'.

The diagram below just gives a flavour of some of these techniques, positioned roughly where they are used in the knowledge sharing cycle.

There are also many tools that knowledge managers use. Many of these are IT-based, but others are simply questionnaires or check-lists. We shall also have a section on tools that we have found useful.

As a start here are a few tools and techniques we have already published:

• Know-10 Assessment - a 10-question questionnaire to give a quick assessment of your KM capabilities
• Knowledge In-Out - a template to map knowledge inputs and outputs from a specific task or activity
• Benefits Tree - a hierarchy of benefits that can be achieved through knowledge management, including efficiencies in handling information through to customer and bottom-line benefits
• After Action Review - a checklist (PDF format) of the main questions that should be addressed in a 1-2 hour AAR session
• Personal toolkit - an overview of factors to be assessed for individual knowledge worker effectiveness
• Team toolkit - factors that underpin high-performance teams, especially virtual teams that operate in a knowledge-intensive environment
• Policy makers' toolkit - factors to be addressed by policy makers striving to ehlp their region thrive in the knowledge economy.

Deepa Singh
Business Developer
Web Site:-http://www.gyapti.com
Blog:- http://gyapti.blogspot.com/
Email Id:-deepa.singh@soarlogic.com