Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

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KM Question of the Week

Q: To what extent do you use blogs internally at HP? Is the HP effort mainly external, or do you have internal bloggers supporting the workforce?

A: HP.com currently lists 39 external blogs. HP people use internal blogs mostly for expressing their ideas and insights, but there are a few other cases.

The leader of one business group is passionate about Web 2.0 and recently began blogging internally. This has generated a lot of activity, including new bloggers and many comments from employees with suggestions for innovation.

Some people use their blogs as laboratory notebooks, journals, and electronic notepads. This provides them with an archive of what they have learned, and at the same time, makes it available to others who can also benefit.

I use my internal blog to store each issue of Knowledge Sharing Weekly, an internal newsletter distributed through an email subscription service. Using a blog for the archives enables people to subscribe to its RSS feed if they prefer to receive it that way, or to read it online.

The volume of new internal blogs and posts has been rapidly increasing recently. There are currently over 200 internal employee blogs.

This question was sent to me by Dr. Hazel Hall of School of Computing at Napier University in Edinburgh, UK. She also sent me the following request:

"I was wondering whether you might be willing to help out with our research on internal blogging and knowledge creation? We would like internal company bloggers to respond to a short questionnaire. This covers topics such as their motivations to blog, and their perceptions of the impact of their blogging - for example, on their own creative processes and as a contribution to innovation.

If you were willing to help us with this, what we would ask you to do is alert your internal bloggers to the online survey and ask them to complete it. All data collected will be kept anonymous, and in the written report of the research it will not be possible to identify the individuals who contribute to the study, nor their affiliations."

If your organization would like to participate in this research, please contact Hazel to express your interest.

KM Blog of the Week

Provoking Thought by Kathy Hagen

Knowledge Management: Where do you start?

Organizations face many issues which can be addressed by efficient and effective knowledge sharing and transfer. Pick one. Pick the right one.

1. Is the issue well defined? If not, you will have a hard time making your business case.
2. Does it have a powerful, potentially far reaching impact? For people to sit up and take notice of the work you are doing, much less get involved and committed, they need to see the value in the outcome.
3. Is there a champion who will commit to visibly backing you to work it takes to solve the problem?

KM Link of the Week

George Mason University's International Center for Applied Studies in Information Technology (ICASIT) created KM Central, a resource for practitioners and academics of all levels.

KM Case Studies

A listing of selected case studies encompassing general case studies, industry specific case studies and academic case studies.

• General KM Case Studies
• Case Study Collections
• Case Studies from ABI - Inform Database
• Case Studies from Applied Science & Technology Abstracts Database
• Traditional Case Studies for Academic Use

KM Book of the Week

Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce by David DeLong

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I: The High Cost of Losing Intellectual Capital

1. The Landscape of Lost Knowledge

2. Diagnosing the Strategic Impacts of Lost Knowledge

3. A Strategic Framework for Action

Part II: Evaluating Knowledge Retention Practices

4. Developing an HR Infrastructure for Knowledge Retention

5. Improving the Transfer of Explicit Knowledge

6. Transferring Implicit and Tacit Knowledge

7. Applying IT to Capture, Store, and Share Intellectual Capital

8. After the Knowledge Is Gone

Part III: Implementing Retention Strategies

9. Stemming the Flow of Lost Knowledge: Stories of Early Adopters

10. Launching Knowledge Retention Initiatives: Principles for Action

11. Overcoming Organizational Barriers to Knowledge Retention

12. Creating the Future: Thinking Strategically about Knowledge Retention

Denham Grey, Bill Ives, and Michael Kelleher reviewed the book. Steve Inskeep of NPR interviewed Dr. DeLong.

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]