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Leveraging Organizational Knowledge

This site focuses on how to leverage the knowledge held, created, shared in an organizational context; with the objective of fostering creativity and innovation for competitive advantage.

About The Wisdom of CrowdsDecember 8 2008

In his book “The Wisdom of Crowds – Why the many are smarter than the few”, James Surowiecki makes - indirectly but nonetheless powerfully - a very good case for Knowledge Management or the leverage of individual and collective knowledge.

Simply put this way, that the many are smarter than the few is hardly a contentious statement. After all, a croud of say 1000 individuals should be smarter than only 500 of this same croud most of the times. You have more minds available to solve a problem/find an answer. However, what Surowiecki means is that a croud of 1000 can be – with the right conditions – much smarter than the sum of its parts even when it acts/decides in a completely uncoordinated way (meaning each individual acts/decides in isolation from the others). In fact, such a group can be (and Surowiecki gives plenty of examples) smarter than the even best experts in a particular field!

The three conditions for this group wisdom to materialise according to Surowiecki, are that it must be diverse, independent and decentralized.

On diversity, Surowiecki writes (chapter 2, part III):
The fact that cognitive diversity matters does not mean that if you assemble a group of diverse but thoroughly uninformed people, their collective wisdom will be smarter than an expert’s. But if you can assemble a diverse group of people who possess varying degrees of knowledge and insight, you’re better off entrusting it with major decisi

Heathrow T5 opening fiasco continues to haunt travellers minds!August 31 2008

Back in April, I wrote about Heathrow irport Terminal 5 opening fiasco.
I explained why I believe that on the part of British Airways, it was mostly due to a lack of training and lack of user acceptance testing of all the new systems and procedures.
I also deduced from this that BA probably had an authoritative management style, a very hierarchical structure, and a corporate culture that didn't allow individuals at the bottom of the pyramid to voice concerns and constructive criticism in an effective manner.

Later on, I watched amazed on BBC TV news , BA's CEO Willie Walsh acknowledging that his company's management did anticipate a difficult T5 opening, but that it was decided that the costs of delaying it would be greater than the potential costs of a failed opening!

The costs directly attributed to the fiasco was estimated at £16m, already a big sum. However, I wonder if Mr Walsh and his team did account for this: Virgin sales are up thanks to T5 troubles

Insightful KnowledgeAugust 24 2008

I am currently reading the very interesting marketing book "Creating Market Insight. How firm create value from market understanding", written by Dr Brian Smith and Dr Paul Raspin (Wiley edition).

I will surely write a few posts about this book but I'll start here with their definition of an insight in a business context:

For knowledge to be considered insight, it must pass what the authors call the VRIO test. Knowledge must be
"Valuable": Does this knowledge enable the firm to respond to environmental threats and opportunities?
· "Rare”: Is this knowledge currently held only by the organisation and not by its competitors?
· Not easily Imitable: Is it costly or difficult for other organisations to obtain or develop this knowledge?
· Organisationally aligned: Is the firm organised, or can it be organised, to exploit this knowledge?
>>
The authors do not mean that non-insight knowledge isn’t useful of course. But they attempt to differentiate knowledge that is merely useful from knowledge that is insightful.

I think it is an interesting framework but I am not convinced about their definition of valuable knowledge:
“Knowledge is valuable if it enables us to change something, rather than maintain things, and that change is valuable to either the customer or to the firm.”

Although the authors approach this fro

Knowledge Management in ITIL v3July 28 2008

Read this very clear and insightful white paper from Peter Dorfman (dated May 2007):http://www.thinkhdi.com/hdi2008/files/ITIL3.pdf

I agree with nearly all of it. Let me highlight one of Peter's concluding point:

For end users, ITIL 3 is an opportunity to get KM onto executive radar screens, maybe for the first time.Managers who have tried to promote KM adoption may see this as a golden moment to advance a personal objective, and they may be right.>>

This is absolutely correct but based on my experience, I would not advise IT Managers to seek the implementation of a KM specific software solution that would somehow sit on top of or alongside the Service Desk Management system. You will not succeed in making 1st and 2nd line technicians switch to a different tool to record or search for valuable knowledge.KM must be integrated with all the other processes (Incident/Request/Problem Mngt, etc...).To succeed, it must become part of the technician's normal activities to resolve issues or satisfy requests. As always, KM is first about people, culture and processes well before being about tools! And ITIL v3 actually does emphasize on this, and this is maybe one reason why it does not litteraly consider KM as a separate support process.

5 real life examples to make the case for KM in a sales environmentJune 23 2008

”[..] an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value” (Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., former CEO of IBM)

Consider the following five simple scenarios based on real situations I have witnessed during my time in the Richemont Group. I must stress that I expect these to be relevant today to a majority of retail Organizations, and not only in the luxury sector:

1. “Reinventing the wheel.”

The Logistics Manager of a regional distribution centre believes that he could greatly improve his team’s efficiency during inventories with the use of about 5 barcode readers. He contacts the IT department for advice since the idea will be to interface with the main IT system.

When the stock controller is consulted, she decides that barcode readers would be too expensive if they were to be used also for boutique inventories (you would need at least 20 readers). Since laptop PCs are used in boutiques, it is decided that they would also be used for the distribution centre, against its manager’s preference. It then turns out that if laptops are adapted to boutique stocktaking, they are not practical in a warehouse: too heavy to carry around the aisles and with much less autonomy on battery.

The Logistics Manager asks the IT Manager if he could find out from his counterparts what has been implemented in other regions. Logistics Managers have very little contact with one