Elevator Questions

"I see from your transcripts that you took a course in KM. What is KM?"
Who the hell gave you my transcripts?
I keed, I keed….
Put simply, knowledge management revolves around the ability for an organization to capture, codify, and easily serve established knowledge from an organization. KM lies on the bedrock that organizational knowledge can be a powerful resource inside an organization and should be easily transferred between different internal and external parties.

"Tell me how you would apply KM in my organization."
Well it would be incredibly important to see what problems or issues currently prevent KM from being effectively applied in the organization. Once we can determine the root causes we must then solve them and employ one or many different techniques to establish an effective knowledge management system for the organization.

"What KM technologies would you recommend here?"
Again, this is a difficult answer to give you without fully knowing what the organization needs are and what barriers, if any, there are to effective knowledge management.

"KM sounds great, but how do I justify KM here?"
KM is not just something that should be added to your current operations, but it should be seen as the very lifeblood of operations. While it might be hard to quantify the amount of knowledge lost due to ineffective KM, it’s easy to monetize knowledge lost and to see knowledge as an essential resource of your organization. KM not only saves time, energy, and money, it also can provide a competitive advantage over others in your market.

"KM sounds great, but what KM metrics do you recommend?"
It's hard to discuss metrics before deciding on a technology. Overall it's important to see if a KMS has added value to organization instead of just disrupting your processes. You can determine that in a variety of ways: output, behavior, etc.

"Tell me the main barriers to adopting KM I can anticipate. How would you overcome them?"
People. For many different reasons people will be your main barrier. Some people will be resistant to the work involved in KM, some will not really understand it’s purpose, and others will be threatened that their knowledge will be in a system instead of their head, making them feel expendable. Besides people, processes are another huge barrier. If your business processes are not properly setup for KM, KM here will certainly fail.


"Summarize for me what you learned in that KM class."
Well, the most important thing I learned is that all problems are knowledge problems. But about KM specifically is that Knowledge is one of the most important resources in any organization, and the better an organization can manage knowledge, the more they’ll stand to be an industry leader in whatever field or discipline.