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Title: Knowledge Management Case Book : Siemens Best Practises by Tom Davenport, Gilbert J. B. Probst, Heinrich von Pierer ISBN: 3-89578-181-9 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 21 June, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $55.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (3 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A comprehensive insight into KM in a global firm
Comment: This knowledge management casebook is one of the best documented case studies of knowledge transformation at work in a global business powerhouse. Siemens has been rated as one of the top ten KM-driven companies worldwide according to an international benchmarking exercise (MAKE ' most admired knowledge enterprise), thanks to its comprehensive efforts at fostering, promoting and optimizing knowledge utilization.
The 19 chapters covering Siemen's KM journey have been compiled by a team of 44 writers, including business executives, managers, interns, professors and graduate students. The material is divided into 7 sections, covering overall KM strategy, transfer techniques, communities of practice, e-learning, and organisational change.
With a diverse group of companies and almost half a million employees globally, Siemens is one of the world's oldest and most successful corporations ' which successfully adapted to the chaotic world of the Information Age to re-structure itself around its most valuable assets: its knowledge base and people.
'Companies today live in knowledge ecologies where one company feeds knowledge into another. What counts is a networked approach to KM, involving internal as well as external parties. The logic behind this is as simple as it is compelling: if you cut off the outflow of knowledge, you will also cut off the inflow. We believe, therefore, that the firm's openness to external experts and the sharing of ideas within a broad network will be a key driver for maintaining competitive success at Siemens,' begin the editors Thomas Davenport (KM expert) and Gilbert Probst (professor at the University of Geneva).
'Increasingly, information is either a part of, or an important facilitator of, Siemens' diverse businesses. Since KM is greatly enhanced by the effective use of IT, it's not surprising that Siemens was a relatively early and enthusiastic adopter of KM. The IT-driven nature of the company's businesses also provides a strong motivation to manage knowledge effectively. One attribute of these technologies is that they change very rapidly; keeping up with various computing and communications technologies is much easier when a company has a system for rapidly circulating new knowledge,' according to the editors.
But KM is more than technology, and Siemens has also focused on a culture of sharing, synergy, and customer focus, especially in markets and fast-moving technology areas where the customer needs are more for total business solutions and sector intelligence than mere technology components.
KM at Siemens began in a bottom-up manner via various mid-level initiatives in communities of practice and bodies of knowledge. Managers of these initiatives themselves formed a semi-official community of practice. This was then followed by a corporate knowledge function which officially supported and coordinated these various initiatives, via the creation of the Corporate KM (CKM) office in 1999.
The Corporate KM (CKM) office held an international meeting in Munich in May 2000, drawing over 200 managers and KM practitioners to formally reflect on the company's KM strategy via the CKM Council and CKM TaskForce. Moving beyond a loose association of KM followers, the company now has formal support, constancy, transparency and a joint approach for KM practices.
The vision statement, goals and roles at the company now formally emphasise the role of knowledge and sharing. CKM has initiated over a hundred KM projects divided across lines of geography, industry, and functions. It has received numerous awards across Europe and the US, such as APQC, MACILS, KVD and Teleos.
KM capacity building at Siemens is promoted by yet another initiative, the Knowledge Community Support (KCS) project, founded in 1999 with support from units like Corporate Technology, Siemens Business Services, and Siemens Qualification and Training. It promotes the use of knowledge communities within Siemens, via coaching, hotlines, resources, newsletters, and its own Web site. It maintains an employee portal and a directory of all knowledge communities in the company, Communities@Siemens. KCS expects that in future, community management will be as common as project management.
Yet another area of KM focus at Siemens is the use of e-business methodology. It formed the Centre for e-Excellence in May 2000 to analyse business transformation via the Internet. A quarter of the sales of Siemens itself is expected to be eventually transacted via the Internet ' 50 per cent or more of its consumer products.
Challenges faced by Siemens on the KM front include balancing energies, resources and rewards for local versus global KM initiatives on a daily basis, managing the knowledge-sharing tension between different business units, and nourishing KM during hard economic times.
Each of the chapters in the book ends with useful discussion questions and key propositions from each case study. It would be suitable to end this book review with a sampling of these propositions.
'The economic value of knowledge does not lie in possessing it, but in using it. Pilot projects for KM must have clearly defined, measurable objectives that can be achieved in less than six months. However, the changeover to a knowledge-based company involves a change process that can span several years,' according to the authors.
Knowledge management and learning management are two complementary disciplines that are continuously growing closer and support an innovative and agile enterprise.
Knowledge sharing should not be reduced to appendices to everyday practice, but must become intertwined with practice. Casewriting about this sharing is a useful learning tool, teaching method, and knowledge recap mechanism via its ability to tease out details and provoke or inspire further action. Such methods are already used by other companies like British Petroleum (Post-Project Appraisal) and Xerox (pre-thought and after-thought cases on KM tools). An interplay between writers from the outside and inside helps elicit crucial details in the case stories.
'When established procedures are not conducive to the sharing of knowledge, the company must be ready to restructure itself into an organization more amenable to knowledge sharing. Over time, the intrinsic benefits of sharing knowledge should become apparent and the system then becomes self-perpetuating, thereby rendering incentive systems obsolete,' the authors recommend.
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Madanmohan Rao is the author of 'The Asia-Pacific Internet Handbook' and can be reached at [email protected]
Rating: 5
Summary: Concrete case-based ideas on how to optimize knowledge
Comment: The Knowledge Management Case Book clearly illustrates how knowledge sharing can begin either as a bottom-up or as a top down activity. This book was developed through collective efforts of Siemens employees working together with external "case coaches" who acted as 'devil's advocates' in conceptualizing and writing cases. This book offers concrete case-based ideas on how Siemens is promoting and optimizing knowledge utilization on a worldwide basis. It is written in a very understandable, narrative style, and organized into five sections that flow well together. These sections offer case studies of knowledge transfer, communities of practice, added-value of knowledge management, measuring KM, and an epilogue written by Gilbert Probst. As Gilbert Probst states in his epilogue, this book is a kind of knowledge tool itself and has offers the reader many practical examples of KM in practice.
Part I of the book offers the reader cases addressing the fundamental issues of knowledge transfer, critical success factors, underlying principles, descriptions of know-how exchange, lowering knowledge-sharing barriers, KM strategies, and it addresses the need to weave best practices into the day-to-day work that everyone does. Part II is focused on communities of practice -- one of the major driving forces of KM. Its cases explain the challenges of set-up, implementation, coordination and the support required for managers and teams to systematize KM practices. Part III illustrates the added value of KM in innovative arenas such as neurological-disease centers, knowledge intensive medical solutions and services, mergers and acquisitions, or corporate learning programs. Part IV examines quantifiable measures of KM as a critical basis for developing incentives for stimulating knowledge sharing and networking. It suggests ways in which results can be promoted, and discusses the intersection of KM and e-business, incorporating knowledge from outside corporate boundaries with organizational knowledge.
Gilbert Probst proposes that the very process of case writing is instrumental in managing knowledge and reflecting on the process. Thus, according to Probst, the case method used in this book offers an excellent example of a knowledge-sharing tool. Each case is presented as an independent study. They can be read in any order. The consistent emphasis throughout the book is placed on an ongoing balance of identifying what knowledge is most relevant to the interests of managers, and illustrating how to transfer it. I really enjoyed reading this this book. I consider it a treasure trove of ideas on how to use an organization's best knowledge practices.
Rating: 5
Summary: Full Scale Knowledge Management
Comment: This is a premier book on knowledge management--a definite must read. Although it's a bit pricey and not in main stream distribution, please note that Tom Davenport is the co-editor. The book provides an inside perspective on how Siemens, a 400,000 person global company has scaled KM to be both part of their business practices and their business model. Since they operate in over 190 countries, it's easy to see why the communities of practice concept would be so appealing to them. Given the limited amount of available literature related to communities of practice, the how-to chapter about communities in this book by itself makes the book a must read. As you read about the KM work at Siemens you can get a good sense of how KM will eventually reside permanently in the main stream of management practice. I have collected quite a bit of the KM literature and would place this in a top ten read list.
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Title: Working Knowledge by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak ISBN: 1578513014 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Enabling Knowledge Creation: How to Unlock the Mystery of Tacit Knowledge and Release the Power of Innovation by Georg Von Krogh, Kazuo Ichijo, Ikujiro Nonaka, Kazou Ichijo ISBN: 0195126165 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: May, 2000 List Price(USD): $32.50 |
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Title: If Only We Knew What We Know : The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice by C. Jackson Grayson, Carla O'dell ISBN: 0684844745 Publisher: Free Press Pub. Date: 10 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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Title: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Knowledge Management by Melissie Clemmons Rumizen ISBN: 0028641779 Publisher: Alpha Books Pub. Date: 09 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Cultivating Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Richard McDermott, William M. Snyder ISBN: 1578513308 Publisher: Harvard Business School Press Pub. Date: 15 March, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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