Thursday, February 17, 2011

Better Knowledge Management for the Knowledge Worker

How many of you spend lots of time wading through the wikis, blogs and content in your organization trying to find a relevant place to deliver your new big idea?  A more likely scenario is that you add to the Collaboration-SPAM by creating a new wiki, blog or heaven's no - an e-mail!  An even bigger problem is, whom should you target with your new big idea?  Your typical Knowledge Management (KM) solutions is no different that this blog.  What if, I could target the members of this blog who can help me to collaborate and benefit from this post and notify them instantly that I need their input.  In a public blog this is not practical "yet", but why not within the systems of my organization?

Many Knowledge Worker's (KW) are unable to effectively collaborate and contribute to the strategic goals and mission of their organization.  Knowledge Management (KM) systems provide tools to find content and collaborate however many lack the tools a KW needs to know what to contribute to their organizations.  Communicating the goals that drive innovation to everyone is a daunting task for most organizations.  Even when the goals are made known to each employee, they often lack the innovation skills.

KM solutions must provide a "Knowledge Radar" (KR)  dashboard to help employees hone in on the information needed by the organization to accomplish its goals. WSN Insight is a KM solution for SharePoint that pushes the relevant collaboration requests (a.k.a conversations) and content for each employee to their customized KR dashboard.  The dashboard contains many conversation KPIs to help prioritize matters.  The solution also has the ability to find the members of the organization that can contribute to the conversation based on various attributes (skills, projects, experience, customers, etc.) of each employee.  This solves some of the biggest hurdles we face with many KM solutions.

Since it's never all about technology, employees in turn need to hone their innovation skills (I-Skills).  I-Skills help employees to "unleash the mindset, skill-set and tool-set of an innovator".  These I-Skills enable you to anticipate and rise to the challenge your organization faces in a hyper-competitive era.  Robert B. Tucker eloquently makes the case for I-Skills in his book "Innovation is Everybody's Business".

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