KM in Talent Management

Talent Management is often referred to Human Capital Management. Many organizations are faced with the problem of retaining talent as well as capturing the knowledge of the talent as it moves in and out of the organization. Knowledge Management (KM) plays an important role in converting individual knowledge into corporate knowledge making it available to be cataloged and shared throughout the organization.

As part of a comprehensive KM strategy applied to Human Capital Management it is vital to establish a program that is executed when staff enters your organization and continues until the time that staff member leaves the organization. How is this accomplished? Initially through employee orientation, establishing a mentor protégé relationship, mapping their roles, responsibilities and their work products to the specific duties that are being performed and executing a comprehensive exit interview. These are all aspects of a KM strategy aimed at moving your human capital to corporate capital.

This strategy does not begin and end here! As staff members evolve in their roles the sharing, and cataloging of knowledge continues through the use of Communities of Practice (Cops), the creation of knowledge repositories, capturing lesson learned, and instituting a culture that values life-long learning and sharing of knowledge. Getting started with a KM strategy entails a collective visioning as to how sharing knowledge can enhance organizational performance, and the reaching of a consensus among the senior management of the organization that the course of action involved in sharing knowledge will in fact be pursued. Implicit in such a process is a set of decisions about the particular variety of knowledge management activities that the organization intends to pursue, including how the knowledge assets of the organization will be leveraged and the execution of the process and tools that will enable sharing and innovation to occur.

Here are a couple of links to additional information to kick start the process of effectively managing your human capital: Human Capital Management – Capturing Worker Knowledge, The Case for Human Capital Management, Human Capital Institute, The Benefits of Effective Human Capital Management.

I look forward to your comments and understanding how your organization is tackling this Human Capital Management Challenge!

KM for Collaboration and Innovation

This blog post is centered around a conversation I had with Preston Simons, CIO of Abbott Laboratories during the National BDPA Technical Conference   in August. Our conversation was initiated from a question I posed to Mr. Simons concerning how Abbott was utilizing Knowledge Management (KM). At the heart of his response he mentioned how Abbott researchers were using KM as a collaboration and sharing mechanism to foster innovation and leverage similar research across the organization. Over the past couple of months, the idea of leveraging KM within the research areas of organizations came up several times in conversations with marketing, product owners, and technical colleagues at other organizations. The central theme here is that research areas are critical to new product creation and the speed to market for new products are essential to stay ahead of your competitors. KM plays a central role not only from the perspective of innovation by knowing what has been done and/or what is being done in other areas of research that can be utilized, but also from the collaboration and knowledge sharing among researchers contributing to the speed of new products to market.

To foster and support an environment of knowledge sharing and collaboration for researchers, KM offers a process of Connect -- Collect -- Catalogue -- Reuse -- Learn. This process is supported by several KM tools such as Communities of Practice (CoP), Wiki, white boarding and brainstorming tools, knowledge maps as well as knowledge Cafes. Instituting KM will uncover what you know, who knows it and facilitates the diversity of thought you need for innovation and speed to market.

One questions remains... What is your organization doing to assist researchers in fostering innovation and to speed these products to market? If you are not leveraging what KM will do for you I bet your competitors will!

The Obama Affect – Knowledge Sharing and Reuse

An important aspect of any knowledge management strategy is to establish an environment of continuous sharing, collaboration and knowledge reuse. During the democratic primary and the presidential campaign the Obama team leveraged email list gathered partly through their internet site and their push for campaign donations through the mail, including list harvested during Obama’s run for the United States Senate. The emails were leveraged (and are still being leveraged) to push out information and knowledge to supporters, solicit donations and to solicit additional email list of people that want to get involved, partly enticed by the possiblility of winning certain promotional items identified by the Obama email (see example - http://www.pic2009.org/page/invite/tickettohistory).

The Obama team would utilized these email list, determine where in the country these supporters live and dispatch teams to these locations to mobilize these and other supporters to get out the vote for Barack. This process was repeated (reused) all over the country. This created a “grass roots” effort to gain support and votes for Barack Obama. The emails served as a vehicle to build organic Communities of Practice (CoP) for Obama, to disseminate knowledge and build support for the Obama campaign and subsequent presidency. This strategy empowered supporters to hold their own functions (lunches, dinner parties, other special events) to showcase Barak Obama’s message and to talk about the issues.

Through targeted email marketing, development of communities as vehicles to share knowledge, and creating and executing a repeatable process, established a foundation to a knowledge management strategy that was able to expand. I will post more about this iterative expansion of the Obama Knowledge Management Strategy as we continue this dialog. I look forward to all thoughts and comments.

Happy New Year!