RESEARCH - AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW

AUSTRALIAN FINANCIAL REVIEW KM SPECIAL

'THE CORPORATE WORLD IS WISING UP' by Mark Lawson

— DEBRIEF —

KM is an enterprise-wide business process. It is getting properly branded after some years of searching for an identity. It dramatically enhances business unit competence such as seen in SKM's case of proposal writing and project management. ARDU's usage of KM achieves strategic knowledge that can lead to innovation at the operations level and enterprise-wide. This latter approach is particularly seen to achieve best practice transfer across an organisation.

There are various gradations of KM process maturity. Many Australian financial firms can now be said to have started on the road to developing advanced KM processes and practices. But it will mean assigning certain people formally with chief knowledge officer positions or informally with team leader/facilitator responsibilities to champion and maintain the knowledge sharing culture needed. It is a newer set of work practices. It is asking knowledge workers to document their outputs (reports etc.) and their inputs (the processes they take) and more importantly, to transfer others' learning into their own work practices.

The Meta Group warns that the people processes must be in place before introducing technological storage and collaborative tools. This is a new finding.
Technology cannot drive good interpersonal work relationships. These social skills can be trained for and must be in place first to gain any real leverage from the technology processes of KM.

Nothing was said about the communities of practice, arguably the most central component of the KM process. Till now SKM's and ARDU's efforts could be achieved without interacting directly with fellow knowledge workers. However, we learn best through social learning groups called communities of practice (see Pfizer case study) and this would be their next point of KM evolution. Nevertheless, KM initiatives are already producing dramatic returns-on-investment for many Australian companies.

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