This book can act as a guide for those who grasp the potential of their organizations' knowledge assets and want to develop strategies for leveraging them.
The absolute, most critical success factor in knowledge management (KM) success is senior-level support. With a bottom-line perspective, The Executive’s role in Knowledge Management can help senior managers cultivate a learning organization. By detailing sensible, yet aggressive, expectations and goals for a KM initiative, this landmark book pares down a decade of KM research to the core guiding principles and proven practices.
A knowledge management initiative enhances the performance of the organization and its people. The goal is not to share knowledge for its own sake, although that is a valuable byproduct of the process. The goal is to enhance organizational performance by explicitly designing and implementing tools, processes, systems, structures, and cultures to improve the identification, capture, validation, and transfer knowledge critical for decision making.
Since APQC began focusing on knowledge management in 1995, the KM arena has evolved rapidly in both scope and practice. The most significant change has been in the business community’s level of understanding. Eight years ago, we did not have tools to analyze how knowledge flows in an organization; we did not have the methodologies for improving the flow and use; and we did not even know how to see the work of the organization in terms of what was productive knowledge to manage. Today, KM has come of age. The formulation of crisp methodologies and the ability to blend various approaches to KM to tackle real business problems has made a dramatic difference.