The Knowledge Management Systems—Requirements, ISO 30401 (shortened to, ISO KM Standard) was published in 2018 and provides guidelines for organizations to develop a management system to promote and enable value-creation through knowledge. As such, it offers definitions and a high-level framework and process for this purpose. It is meant to be used in any organization, and in any industry or sector, which makes it a good place to start when explaining how Radical KM fits within and enhances traditional KM.

There are four areas I will focus on: the definition of KM, the spectrum of knowledge, the knowledge development lifecycle, and knowledge management culture.

Starting with the ISO KM definition, which defines KM as a discipline focused on the ways organizations create and use knowledge that and says KM is a holistic approach to improving learning and effectiveness. The ISO Standard notes that knowledge is created by people and is intangible and complex. Radical KM supports and agrees with this definition in that what is added in Radical KM is creativity, which is about helping organizations and people create knowledge and to thrive in our VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. Radical KM supports breaking down silos and looking at things differently, questioning the status quo. Radical KM is definitely a holistic approach to doing that in that because it includes creativity, not just analytics and processes. It supports people because creativity is a human characteristic, helping people be who they are and facilitating people bringing their whole selves to work to be both creative and analytical.

Moving on from the definition of KM, the ISO KM Standard also references a spectrum of knowledge that starts from knowledge that is a tacit to the point that the individual isn't aware of knowing it, ranging all the way to the other end where it's documented, codified, and/or structured. Radical KM plays a role in the tacit knowledge end of the spectrum because it helps access it and make it explicit or at least move it along the continuum towards being more tacit allowing people to make new connections and putting the pieces they have together in a new or different way. Radical KM plays less of a role in codified and structured knowledge, although it can have a role there too, depending on what the purpose is.

Looking at the knowledge development lifecycle that ISO sets out, starting from knowledge development where knowledge is created, moving through consolidation, retaining, sharing, adopting, applying, and ultimately retiring. Radical KM plays a role most clearly in the development through the use of creative methods to inspire and create new knowledge, however, it can also play a role in sharing, adopting, and applying knowledge as it asks people to be curious and open-minded and to adopt through learning and decision making. Radical KM through the utilization of creativity thus makes the knowledge development lifecycle more holistic and complete.

Finally, the area where Radical KM potentially has the most significant role is KM Culture. There are many components of KM Culture, elaborated in the ISO KM standard including helping people be more open, more curious, feeling more empowered, helping them develop autonomy, and curiosity and being open to collaboration as well as helping them learn continuously and recognize the value of knowledge. The art-based interventions envisioned in Radical KM play a role in all these behaviours and helps build trust and respect which is also key to having a KM Culture.

In conclusion, through the addition of creativity, specifically arts-based interventions, Radical KM makes traditional knowledge management a balanced, integrated, sustainable whole, ready to meet the challenges of the 21st century.

Note: a more expansive version of this discussion will be published in the June 2022 edition of Business Information Review.

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Knowledge Management: Key Questions and Answers

Do you understand the difference between information and knowledge? In a business context, information gathering happens at all levels of an organization. It can include everything from customer interactions to internal company meetings. On the other hand, knowledge is what every member of an organization understands and uses in their everyday activities. 75% of companies realize that knowledge management is crucial for their success. Let's look at knowledge management and its benefits to your workplace. 

What is Knowledge Management? 

So, what is knowledge management? IBM defines knowledge management as a way to identify, organize, store and share information. A knowledge management system is a platform that gathers business information to help streamline operations such as:

- Recruitment
- Training, and
- Communication

Additionally, knowledge management can foster better:

- Transparency
- Accountability, and
- Collaboration

Each of which helps improve employee satisfaction and retention.   

What are the Goals of Knowledge Management? 

Knowledge management serves several key goals in an enterprise. The goals of a knowledge management system are to: 

• Keep knowledge in an easily-accessible form
• Share knowledge with the right people at the right time
• Break down information silos 
• Maintain knowledge if valuable employees leave the company
• Create a culture of continuous learning 

What are the Benefits of Knowledge Management? 

The main benefit of knowledge management is efficient business operations. A knowledge management system makes a business more agile because it: 

• Improves the quality of business data
• Boosts collaboration within your team
• Identifies skill and competency gaps for training opportunities
• Enables faster decision-making at all levels 
• Increases data security for intellectual property 
• Creates standardized business processes 

What are the Challenges of Knowledge Management? 

Like every business process, knowledge management can present challenges to an organization. Here are four of the top challenges organizations face when it comes to knowledge management:

• Some employees may hoard their knowledge to maintain their positions in the company
• Knowledge sharing is not a priority for employees because of their existing workloads
• Knowledge management systems need proper configuration with the right permissions. The aim is to protect sensitive business information
• A knowledge management framework takes more time and human resources to update and maintain

What are the Types of Knowledge in an Organization? 

Three main types of organizational knowledge drive your knowledge management process: 

1. Explicit knowledge

Documented information like policies, product specifications, service functionality, and other business-generated content.

2. Implicit or embedded knowledge

Information about business processes such as:
- Recruitment or merit systems
- Routines
- Manuals, and 
- Organizational culture

3. Tacit knowledge

This is practical know-how about business operations gained through experience. This includes subject matter expertise held by certain employees.

Practically speaking, these types of knowledge come from: 

• Organizational documents like reports, business records, and market research 
• Structural information such as:
  • Company hierarchy charts
  • Handbooks
  • Presentation formats workflows
  • Best practices, and 
  • Business strategies
• Group data like mentorship programs, project teams, and training groups
• Individual knowledge like customer inquiries, notebooks, or even a team member’s memory

Knowledge Management Use Cases

A knowledge management framework finds value in the following business processes: 

Onboarding

New team members can quickly search and find what they need on a centralized knowledge management system. This significantly reduces training time and increases competence levels. 

Customer support

Customer service teams can find quick references and answers for inquiries. 

Internal communications

Teams can seek out knowledge directly from the system and save emails and chats for priority queries. 

Inventory updates

All departments get notified of product changes like prices, upgrades, or shortages. 

What is the Knowledge Management Process? 

To manage knowledge in your organization, first you must understand how knowledge arises in business and how to make it work for you. 

The ideal knowledge management process has six steps: 

1. Knowledge discovery

Figure out your organization's implicit, explicit and tacit sources of knowledge.  

2. Knowledge auditing

Check that all your information is relevant, up-to-date, and error-free. 

3. Knowledge structuring

Organize your information into a searchable, accessible knowledge management database. 

4. Knowledge sharing

Grant your team secure access to your knowledge management system. Encourage them to contribute and share their knowledge on the platform and create an incentive program to promote the sharing process. 

5. Knowledge application

Reward team members who use the knowledge to improve their performance. 

6. Knowledge creation

Keep gathering and updating your knowledge management system according to the outlined steps. 

What are Knowledge Management Tools? 

Anything that captures business information and generates insights is a knowledge management tool. That qualifies your basic spreadsheets as one. However, knowledge management tools can be highly specialized to match your industry. The most common tools include: 

• Content management systems (CMS) for online publishing
• Intranets for sharing business information securely within an organization 
• Data warehouses that use machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to aggregate and analyze data
• Feedback databases for project management communications 
• Document management systems for hosting all digital business documents 

Conclusion 

Your knowledge management process depends on your company's size and structure. Smaller companies can build a goldmine of business data and scale up over time. Larger companies can put in place a system for digital transformation and business forecasting. Implement a knowledge management strategy to improve your business outcomes today!

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How many followers do you have on social media? Today, the 'social construct' has made us reason that having many followers on social media is a good measure of knowledge. On the contrary do you relate to your firm's 'social software' as a means for sharing your experiences that is of interest to others such that in-time they can learn from your explicit knowledge, have you given it a thought within your organization?

I am sure many of us are Following our favorite bloggers on professional networks; a place where the leader makes it a point to be consistent to share their thoughts around contemporary topics of interest; share relevant examples to make it relatable. They are moving from being an artist in their realm to becoming a conversational leader. 

Over a period, you as a reader makes it a habit to crave for that daily breakfast post. Intentionally what your mind is teaching you is to practice subconsciously some of their Lessons Learnt; you are now engaged with their 'Content' they are sharing and feel 'Connected'. Did you know you are practicing the 3C's of Knowledge Management, although you're not in sight of your organization?

So, as leaders are we missing out on critical knowledge that can aid in advancing our organizational social capital. If you now connect you know that there is a need to move from just being someone who from being an 'Artist' to becoming a 'Conversational Leader' someone who collaborates and helps their followers to share their experiences in a safe zone and feel acknowledged that truly the network is growing as one tribe.

As defined by educator Carolyn Baldwin, conversational leadership is “the leader’s intentional use of conversation as a core process to cultivate the collective intelligence needed to create business and social value.” 

The next question as leaders are we serving our calling to truly move from predator and sharing our knowledge to enable our followers to truly see us as instructors coaching us to become trainers?

Source: Facebook 'Just for Fun' Fanclub . The bitter truth : You start practicing to truly 'network' rather than 'artwork' something that not only we begin to enjoy but over time others follow us for learning our techniques, our tips and in-time become trainers.

In-Summary: So as leaders let us enjoy wearing our K-Hats and truly ensure we leverage organizational & community resources to produce greater strategic value. We ACE-IT !

A - Start with being an Artist and live our culture contrary to sharing falsehoods
C - We 'Connect' with our teams and truly become a 'Conversational Leader'.
E - We make our teams feel 'Engaged' to encourage critical knowledge-flow.
I - We coach our followers as 'Instructors' and are open to KM 'People approaches'.
T - We as leaders invest in individuals becoming 'trainers' and in-turn our network of followers grows to learn from our art; and ensure "KM is being Followed".

In contrast to knowledge management systems that use information technology (IT) to create, manage, store, share, and reuse knowledge, the healthcare industry faces unique challenges. Those include system complexity, medical errors, significant growth in medical knowledge, and increased healthcare costs. Thanks to knowledge management, experts and hospitals can apply worldwide techniques to satisfy medical needs. Knowledge may be used effectively to help future generations learn from past mistakes and build inventive solutions.

Healthcare is a knowledge-based business. Treating each patient's specific symptoms requires tremendous information and competence. The United States has the most prominent health industry, with 784,626 businesses. Patient care accounts for $1.068 trillion, or 64% of all healthcare revenue in the United States.

According to health statistics, healthcare is the largest source of employment in the country, employing one out of every eight Americans. These individuals must be trained to start a new job or transfer to clinics or hospitals. They must continue to be trained as treatments and procedures improve throughout their careers.

The tools, support, and expertise that health organizations have at their disposal determine the quality of treatment they provide. Using a knowledge management system fosters a culture of ongoing collaboration and innovation in the healthcare profession. Suppose a culture of information sharing is established in the healthcare industry. In that case, employees are more likely to participate in continual learning and education.

Benefits of having a Knowledge Base in healthcare 

Enhance Operating Efficiency

Calls are shorter for hospital call agents who have access to reliable, up-to-date information. It saves time searching and reduces patient wait times. With consistent client experiences, an effective knowledge management system like PHPKB optimizes operational efficiencies throughout customer service (frontline and back-office). A branded dashboard, feedback, and reporting metrics allow convenient management supervision.

1. Using private internal conversation and material exchange assists staff in providing better service.
2. Assists with the upkeep of current compliance forms and procedures throughout the firm.
3. Lowers the total operating costs.

Making Informed Decisions

Healthcare workers are continually bombarded with new information, yet they struggle to locate it appropriately. If healthcare workers can instantly access organized information from anywhere, at any time, it can genuinely save lives. 

The doctor can rapidly search for and identify symptoms, treatments, and other helpful information using innovative and meticulously decision trees in healthcare call centers, which could forever change patients' lives. 

Doctors, for example, may see up to 50 people every day. Individual appointments rarely allow for tracking down and consulting with additional doctors.

Fewer Errors

As employees leave or are laid off, their knowledge of procedures and current best practices is lost, increasing the number of errors. A blunder might result in tragedy or a multimillion-dollar lawsuit in the healthcare industry. 

Hospitals can use healthcare knowledge management technologies to standardize all operations and give easily accessible training. Doctors, nurses, and medical technicians can access procedures anytime, anywhere if the knowledge-sharing solution offers a sophisticated search and mobile interface.

Secure collaboration

Different professionals can learn from each other thanks to a knowledge-sharing system. Medical data from various sources can be converted to an electronic format and used by clinicians to improve therapy. 

Knowledge management aims to standardize all procedures and increase access to professional education. A knowledge-sharing solution is precious in the medical profession, where errors are costly and life-threatening.

On the other hand, the digital transformation poses new risks to patients' privacy, the doctor-patient relationship, and doctor-patient confidentiality. So, how do medical professionals communicate and benefit from one another's previous and current instances without jeopardizing their professional associations? While keeping the patient private, a knowledge management solution allows healthcare providers to document and discuss symptoms and any other information that may be useful.

In this manner, potentially life-saving information is not kept secret while safeguarding patients' privacy.

Creates organizations that are learning

The use of Knowledge management necessitates the creation of a data-driven continuous-learning environment that promotes experience-based organizational learning. In a learning organization, individuals are consistently learning to see the whole together, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are developed, where collective aspiration is set free, and where individuals are continually learning to generate the results they truly desire. 

Over the last two decades, organizational research has identified three critical variables for organizational learning and adaptability: a supportive learning environment, actual learning processes and practices, and reinforcement-oriented leadership behavior. 

Employees can evaluate our successes and failings regularly as we attempt to improve. This process fosters a learning-by-doing culture based on data-driven assessments of performance and outcomes. Learning from mistakes allows you to gain knowledge that you may utilize to improve care and operations over time.

Avoiding malpractice

Medical misconduct is costly in a variety of ways. Health care professionals will be able to participate in knowledge sharing in a way that has never been done before, thanks to a standardized knowledge management system of new findings and direct experiences.

Health informatics and information management systems would reduce fatal misdiagnoses and streamline medical decision-making at this level. A clinician may search for and use the findings of a study conducted worldwide to effectively diagnose a patient who would otherwise have been misdiagnosed and mistreated in minutes. 

This information could be fetched easily by building up repeatable processes and a library of medical information.

Conclusion

Like every other aspect of their culture, the healthcare community is more technologically connected than ever before. Healthcare companies will publish their discoveries on a never-before-seen scale by uniting global medical findings and making them searchable with straightforward tools. Health care systems will combine their results and provide new patient treatment by utilizing knowledge base tools.

Effective knowledge management system for call centers necessitates organization and must be user-friendly while also reducing the administrative burden on asset managers. The tools, support, and expertise that health organizations have at their disposal determine the quality of treatment they provide.

A knowledge management tool can bring together communities of practice, foster public health innovation, and boost the healthcare system's overall efficiency.

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Each of us growing up has heard the famous story of the "Six blind men and an elephant". The moral of the story is that humans tend to claim absolute truth based on their limited, subjective experience as they ignore other people's limited, subjective experiences which may be equally true.

Doesn't this sound relatable to you?

Spear: 'The Leader' finds it difficult to measure tangible business value of KM.
Rope: 'The Champion' is unclear on how to advance a user basis the tacit knowledge.
Snake: 'The HR' feel that the KM strategy is not aligned to organizational culture. 
Tree: 'The KM Team' must provide instant gratification moments each time.
Wall: 'The Users' say that the KM system does not address their unmet needs. 

There is a problem; we can see that! However, most of the time we KM Practitioners fail to get the team together to ensure that we define the same.

The reason is as humans we naturally develop patterns of thinking modeled on repetitive activities and commonly accessed knowledge. These assist us in quickly applying the same actions and knowledge in similar or familiar situations, but they also have the potential to prevent us from quickly and easily accessing or developing new ways of seeing, understanding, and solving problems. These patterns of thinking are often referred to as schemas, which are organized sets of information and relationships between things, actions and thoughts that are stimulated and initiated in the human mind.

As these schemas are stimulated automatically, this can obstruct a more fitting impression of the situation or prevent us from seeing a problem in a way that will enable a new problem-solving strategy.

Design Thinking is an iterative process in which we seek to understand the user, challenge assumptions, and redefine problems to identify alternative strategies and solutions that might not be instantly apparent with our initial level of understanding.

Challenging Assumptions is a sense-making technique designed to break apart a statement and discover where assumptions may be limiting your options.

Looking at the above graphic you can see how new assumptions have come in that help us form innovative ideas and improve our 'selection-mix' to solve a problem.

• Knowledge sharing is based on mutual trust > Create moments to recognize individuals 
• Culture contains falsehoods > Celebrate talking about Lessons Leant 
• Espoused values differ in leaders > Practice sharing knowledge folklore 
• User's past km experiences is discounted  > Run 360 feedback surveys with such users 
• KM systems do not answer semantic knowledge > Design AI/ML knowledge systems
• Increasing Profit Margin > Define critical information categories
• Bringing down OPEX > Build an Expertise database capture Best Practices 
• Difficult to recognize a novel idea that can become an IP > Link KM to Learn projects 
• Annuity on KM is negligible > Build innovation hubs like Topcoder that pay talent 
• Not visible to external network  > Sponsor conferences to present knowledge 

In Summary: Knowledge is critical to solving business problems, and as leaders we need to ensure that our business goals are mirrored to defining the most critical problems. However, without exploring Design Thinking principles we would fail to 'Ideate' and prioritize the right issues-at-hand, which could stop us from experiencing the true value of KM.