Knowledge management solutions should follow business need.
This is the fundamental principle behind Business Alignment, and this can be broken down into two areas.
Firstly, the business strategy should set the key knowledge which should be the focus of your knowledge management efforts. One of the first questions the knowledge management professional needs to ask his management is "What knowledge?" What knowledge is important? What knowledge needs to be managed? What knowledge should be the focus of our KM activity. This critical knowledge will be knowledge which is crucial to the strategy of the organisation, and which therefore needs to drive your knowledge management strategy.
Secondly, you need to look at the specifics of the knowledge transfer which is needed, to make sure that this business-critical knowledge is getting to the right people at the right time in the right state. You need to ask the questions - Who needs the knowledge? Who has the knowledge? Where are they located? How do they work? What artifacts do they use, and what frameworks frame their activity? How can they work better?
Once you have fully worked through these specific questions, then you can start to tailor a solution.
You can decide whether it's possible to get these people together face to face and transfer knowledge through tacit interchange and rich dialogue, or whether they should collaborate online, or whether you need a more sophisticated process of capture and documentation.
So Knowledge Management needs to start from the business strategy, look at the specifics of the transfer needed, and then choose the knowledge management approach that fits those specifics, in order to make sure that our knowledge management solutions are fully aligned with the business need.
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