InformationWeek

September 4, 2000

Knowledge Management
Keep Your Knowledge In-House

Knowledge management is designed to create an environment in which a company can leverage all of its knowledge assets. Developing systems to capture and apply your employees' repository of knowledge is one of the most vital tasks facing IT managers.

By Charles Trepper

More on knowledge Management:

Harnessing Corporate Knowledge (8/7/00)

Time To Put A Value On Intellectual Assets (7/31/00)

Knowledge Management In A Box: The Raven Project (6/19/00)

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ost successful companies will tell you that their two greatest assets are the people who work for them and the knowledge they possess.

For IT managers, retaining personnel and their applied knowledge and insights is vital. While the retention of IT staff must always have the highest priority, developing systems to capture and apply their often vast repository of knowledge is equally important.

In its broadest sense, knowledge management is the sharing of information throughout a company, even between business partners. The purpose of knowledge management is to create an environment in which the company leverages all its knowledge assets.

IT knowledge management is concerned with how to improve application development and system maintenance, which includes process and project management. IT departments are often involved in knowledge-management efforts designed to improve a company's competitiveness, but they rarely use knowledge-management techniques to improve the performance of the IT department itself.

In the past two weeks, we've examined methodologies ("Methodologies: Continuous Process Improvement") and process management ("Process Management: Getting An Edge On The Competition") as ways to improve the systems-development process. The capstone of the continuous improvement process is developing knowledge bases that let IT staff share best practices, experiences, and lessons learned.

Enterprise application integration projects in particular benefit greatly from IT knowledge management, because a knowledge base contains information about all of a company's systems. Knowledge bases provide EAI teams with a single, unified resource of information for integrating each of a company's current systems.

IT knowledge management builds on the implementation of methodologies and process-management systems. IT knowledge-management systems let companies join the quantitative information stored in process-management tools with the qualitative information stored in methodology documents. IT project team members must understand what has to be done (e.g., the steps and documents in a methodology), and they need an accurate set of the metrics with which to estimate and plan a project.

Once a methodology and a process-management system are implemented, IT knowledge-management systems let IT staff share methodology documents and the quantitative information (metrics, for example) stored in a process-management system. Sharing this information means that all project team members on all projects can stay current on what's happening on a specific project as well was look at examples of methodology documents filled out for other projects.

Shared examples of completed documents let IT staffers learn how to use methodology documents more quickly, reducing the cost and the learning curve for new hires and experienced staff working on unfamiliar systems. IT departments also use knowledge-management tools to create libraries of best practices to continuously improve the IT process.

Access to a shared knowledge base of project-management topics and best practices provides project managers with the ability to learn from the mistakes and solutions experienced by other project managers. This reduces the potential for project failures as well as rework, and ultimately means lower cost projects, delivered more quickly, with better quality.

For example, one large midwestern food wholesaler used Lotus Notes and Domino to automate its systems-development methodology. Until Notes was installed, methodology documents were created in Microsoft Word from a template, and then shared only via hard copy. Project teams would often end

up creating huge libraries of paper documents, which were usually stored in a closet or conference room. Future project teams working on similar projects rarely took the time to locate and review these large notebooks. The company installed Lotus Notes and created online templates that were much easier to create, catalog, sort, and review. It took about four people six months to customize Notes at a cost of about $100,000.