The first step towards understanding and valuing the knowledge of an organization is awareness; assessing the individual skills, competencies, experiences across the workforce. Assess the organization’s tangible knowledge sets, such as patent and intellectual property. Another critical assessment is to identify and evaluate the decision support systems, whether supported by IT or purely socialized. Here is where you should find the key knowledge patterns which are utilized, and therefore what knowledge sets are actually being utilized for decision making.

“Knowledge is profoundly social… it clumps in groups of people who share trust, vocabulary, interests, passions…” (Prusak, 2008)  The argument here provides that communities within an organization are the greatest source of knowledge; whether it’s the systems architecture unit or the senior executive assistant’s weekly poker game. An excellent evaluation then is to determine the social network dynamics of the organization, and assess the critical communications paths between individuals. Another excellent evaluation is locating all the data; from hard drives, servers and SANs; to evaluate the disparate data sets, which data is essentially inaccessible beyond an individual or community/practice unit.

The key realization of knowledge is the measure of its value. As cited above, patents and intellectual property has tangible value. The knowledge base of a staff, wherein lies the intellectual capital, also can provide a tangible value in an acquisition scenario; up to five times greater value to a company from the baseline physical assets and revenue streams; an immense demonstration of the standard organizational objective; “get and keep good people.” (Lynch, 2010) “The real unit of analysis for knowledge [in an organization] is groups; practices.” (Prusak, 2008) Beyond identifying and evaluating your knowledge networks, the next step must be a means of capturing this knowledge in a well-designed KM system, and incentivizing the practice organization-wide to utilize the platform for daily operation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Prusak, L. (2008). Knowledge Networks: The Good, The Bad and the The Ugly. Network/CoP Research Engagement Workshop. London: University of Warwick.

Lynch, D. C. (2010, March 13). IT Governance and Knowledge Management Lecture – TECM 745. (T. M. 2010)

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