Performance Based Knowledge Management Dr. Mohsen Shawarby Professor of Information Systems, AUI President, American Assn of Intl Mgmt, NY Sr Advisor, Intl Executive Service Corps, Washington, D.C. www.aaimglobal.com mas@aaimglobal.com Page 1
Knowledge Management -- KM? Building organizational intelligence to improve performance Serve citizens needs. Plan budgets and allocation of funds. Optimize Resources Management. support ongoing improvement across the local government sector. Helps people tap into this knowledge. Offer tools to improve the capture, share and use knowledge. Reveal what works and what doesn t. Build on experience to ensure better practice, strategy and policy. Achieve democracy. Offer reporting. Counter fraud, mismanagement, and terrorism. Achieve transparency. How? Performance Based KM systems preliminary audits of the internal govt. resources. Page 2
Data: Data Set of objective facts about events or structured records of transactions. These records may give quantity, cost, color, size, but usually fail to record why the purchase was made, how likely is a repeat purchase. Data exists in abundance in government organizations. It is often collected but not always linked to qualitative analyses. The above framework can assist governments in identifying their knowledge assets. Data Form: Structured Data: reports, documents, law, procedures, Raw Data: memos, emails, targeted data, etc. Page 3
Information? Form of a document or an audible or visible communication. Information has a sender and receiver Intended to change the way the receiver perceives something. It's data that makes a difference. Information moves around organizations through hard networks with definite infrastructure, wires, delivery vans, satellite dishes, post offices, addresses, electronic mailboxes and soft networks or informal networks often invisible and less formal. Page 4
Steps to Performance-Based KM: What are the knowledge assets and core competencies? [lists] How to manage and make use of these assets to get maximum return? [format] Identify categories and sub-categories [sets and subsets] Specify relevance [time, places, events] Define with existing manual and legacy archival systems. Page 5
Constraints: KM must be citizens defined Knowledge takes time to experience and acquire. Employee retirement and management turnover, leading to loss of knowledge and continuity. Increased complexity as changes in strategic direction may result in the loss of knowledge in a specific area. Increased diversity of knowledge bases. Reversal in policy lead to renewed requirements for this knowledge, but the employees with that knowledge may no longer be there. Supply chain depends on knowledge of diverse areas including raw materials, planning, manufacturing and distribution. Volume becomes too vast to manage with manual or limited info systems. Lack of resources and expertise. Page 6
Knowledge Assets: Tacit and explicit knowledge regarding cost, budgets, resources, services, needs, priorities, citizens, markets, products, technologies, organizations How to Apply KM to Achieve Governance Objectives: 1. Identify and analyze available knowledge assets. 2. Define knowledge assets and the business processes. 3. Build on existing manual systems. 4. Or, build parallel KM systems Ex: TF. 5. Create and use of electronic repositories for human interaction. Page 7
Processes for Implementing KM: Selecting relevant data, information, knowledge bases: the process of selecting and deselecting must be ongoing in keeping with the organizational strategy. Capturing knowledge and publishing in a central area where all members of an organization who have a need to know, have access to it. KM Cross Reference: making connections among pieces of information to create new approaches. Disseminating knowledge and transferring it to people when and where they need it. Example: International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canadian govt. agency, all projects funded catalogued so that all staff can review these projects by topic, organization, or by subject, and lessons learned. An important aim was to establish linkages between projects, and to take advantage of the experience in projects already funded. Page 8
Developing a KM Framework: (Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) Edinburgh, Scotland). The KM framework based on work by van der Spek and de Hoog. It identifies the knowledge assets in terms of business processes requiring answers to the following questions: Where is the knowledge asset? What does it contain? What is its use? What form is it in? How accessible is it? How can the knowledge asset add value? What are the opportunities for using the knowledge asset? What would be the effect of its use? What are the current obstacles to its use? What would be its increased value to the company? What actions are necessary to achieve usability & added value How to plan the actions to use the knowledge asset? How to enact actions? How to monitor actions? How to review the use of the knowledge asset to ensure added value How to determine if its use produces the desired added value? How can the knowledge asset be maintained for this use? Did the use create new opportunities? Page 9
E-Government? Meet citizens requirements and engage citizens. Making specific pieces of information available electronically. Most governments have websites for ministries, departments, corporations, and agencies to communicate information and in some cases to receive feedback. KM portal for each ministry department or corporation with a strategy. An important difference between business and government is that the number of citizens who are likely to use the services. Page 10
7 Essential Milestones for E-Government: According to Janet Caldow, Director of the IBM Institute for E- government, "leaders who define e-government in a narrow sense simply moving services online - miss larger opportunities which will determine competitive advantage in the long run" Caldow identifies seven leadership milestones as integral to becoming an e-government: 1. Integration of content and Infrastructure, [how? One stop approach] 2. Economic development, 3. E-democracy, 4. E-communities, 5. Intergovernmental operations, 6. policy environment, 7. Plan for Next-Generation Internet. Page 11
Conclusions Why KM? Optimize govt. performance and effective leadership. Contribute to the competitive advantage of governments. Optimize resources How? 1. Planning and budgeting, 2. Allocating and deploying resources, 3. Reducing cost and expenditure [duplicates, fraud, mismanagement, timely, investment, etc.] Governments should begin to undertake information and audit knowledge. Create strategic deployment of resources available. Develop methods to evaluate and assign accounting value to intangible assets. KM is heavily dependent on the existence of reliable infrastructure for developing services and for enabling citizens access to electronic based services. Ensure there is reliable information and communication infrastructure. KM in government must involve the intra-governmental integration of resources to reduce the number of locations a citizen has to consult to obtain a given product or service. Governments should implement automated financial planning and audit IFMS. Page 12
Knowledge Assets: Tacit and explicit knowledge regarding cost, budgets, resources, services, needs, priorities, citizens, markets, products, technologies, organizations How to Apply KM to Achieve Governance Objectives: 1. Identify and analyze available knowledge assets. 2. Plan and control of actions to develop both the assets and the processes. 3. Create and use of electronic repositories for human interaction. Page 13