September 4, 2000

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Knowledge Management
Keep Your Knowledge In-House

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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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Project teams are now able to easily find project and system documentation online. Project leads and managers can also view project-management documents stored online. They can use project schedules and budget sheets of completed projects to see how to estimate similar projects in the future. A "lessons learned" document database also provided project teams with the ability to build on the experience of other IT staff and avoid repeating the same mistakes.

IT is a relative newcomer to the idea of managing knowledge in a structured manner. Marketing departments have collected, created, and used knowledge bases or data warehouses to store customer buying habits for many years, but IT shops are just now beginning to realize that there are benefits to managing knowledge.

IT departments are learning how to create shared best-practice databases and to store project metrics in process-management tools. Some typical IT processes include:

• New application development and package installation;


• Application maintenance;


• Configuration management;


• Project management;


• Computer and network operations;


• Change management.

These tasks are unique to IT, and require specialized knowledge-management tools to let the application development staff share systems information, development tips, and project documents during development. Knowledge bases also help maintenance teams find information on systems faster and more easily, which reduces the time and cost of system updates.

Knowledge bases that are well-structured and easy to access can help configuration-management staff easily track changes and issues when problems occur. Project managers can also review past project documents for information on metrics for comparable projects, which will guide the manager through the estimating process.

Computer and network operations can use knowledge bases for storing network architecture diagrams, problem resolution logs, network equipment configurations, and job schedules.

Knowledge bases also provide an excellent storage mechanism for change-management records. The logs can be sorted, categorized, archived, and easily shared. To access a wide range of knowledge bases requires an open tool such as Lotus' upcoming Raven portal product, which uses standard Web-based access for data sources.

While the benefits seem obvious and clear-cut, company management will probably have to be convinced that the investment will actually result in the anticipated results. In part, this is due to the fact that knowledge management was overhyped in the mid-to-late '90s. This led to the inescapable, inevitable, large-scale disillusionment with knowledge-management systems.

Case tools, client-server technology, and knowledge management are all victims of "silver-bullet syndrome." IT departments and knowledge-management vendors attempted to sell company executives on the "savior" qualities of knowledge-management initiatives.

When knowledge management failed to live up to its grandiose expectations, there was the usual cry of disappointment and the requisite finger-pointing. As a result, one of the major problems faced by any IT department attempting to implement a knowledge-management solution will be the skepticism fostered by earlier failures.

Project managers and leaders must learn to share best practices among teams. This can be a major hurdle, because there's often competition to see who can deliver the best project results. Again, project managers and leaders must understand that they also have to help other project managers and leaders run their projects better.

IT staff must be encouraged to communicate openly, which can be a huge change to corporate culture. As with any part of a company, IT departments have just as much politics to deal with as other parts of the business.

Open communication among project teams is usually done informally among peers in IT departments. In many cases, projects are labeled top-secret, even when it's unnecessary. This not only prevents open communication, but also prevents IT staff from learning from the experience of others.

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