The Central Knowledge Management Office (CKMO) is comprised of Senior Management and Core Team members and is the vehicle for implementing and keeping under review the KM initiatives that will be championed by the organization. The CKMO will support KM innovation, and enhance individual and organizational performance, by delivering improved learning, collaboration, and knowledge sharing into the culture of your organization’s environment.
The challenge of knowledge management is to determine what knowledge within an organization qualifies as “valuable.” All information is not knowledge, and all knowledge is not valuable. The key is to find the worthwhile knowledge within a vast sea of information. Oftentimes, knowledge management is misunderstood as simply maintaining websites or other technology. Besides what is mentioned above, the following list outlines what a CKMO delivers:
- CKMO is orderly and goal-directed. It is inextricably tied to the strategic objectives of the organization. It uses only the knowledge that is the most meaningful, practical, and purposeful.
- CKMO is ever-changing. There is no such thing as an immutable law in CKMO. Knowledge is constantly tested, updated, revised, and sometimes even declared obsolete when it is no longer practicable. It is a fluid, ongoing process.
- CKMO is value-added. It draws upon a vast amount of knowledge located throughout many repositories across your organization.
- CKMO is visionary. This vision is expressed in strategic business terms rather than technical terms, and in a manner that generates enthusiasm, buy-in, and motivates managers to work together toward reaching common goals.
- CKMO is complementary. It can be integrated with other organizational initiatives such as KCS and ITIL.
Once the process captures the organization’s knowledge, the real power occurs when an organization’s members act on that shared knowledge.
The following are essential components to establish and maintain the CKMO (Vision, Mission and KM Governance)
CKMO Vision
The CKMO enables the retrieval, creation, sharing, collaboration and management of knowledge and through the implementation of workflow, search and collaboration capabilities, the CKMO vision is to quickly provide reliable solutions to questions and support the organization’s knowledge management needs.
CKMO Mission
The CKMO mission is to support the vision of CKMO and implement the initiatives that support the best practices identified by the CKMO strategy. The CKMO Team will execute a Knowledge Management program that embodies situational understanding, organizational learning and decision making by providing knowledge products and services that are relevant, accurate, and timely.
CKMO Governance
Knowledge Management Governance ensures policy adherence and provides controls to guarantee that the knowledge stored and accessed provides the best value for the organization. CKMO Governance describes the policies, procedures, roles, and responsibilities to successfully maintain the organization’s knowledge assets. Effective governance planning and the application of the governance plan are critical for the ongoing success of knowledge management within the organization.
The governance plan will establish the processes and policies to:
- Avoid proliferation of unnecessary knowledge by defining consistent review process (workflow).
- Ensure that knowledge quality is maintained for the life of the knowledge asset by implementing quality management policies.
- Provide a consistently high quality user experience by defining guidelines for knowledge creators.
- Establish clear decision-making authority and escalation procedures so policy violations are managed and conflicts are resolved on a timely basis.
- Ensure that the solution strategy is aligned with business objectives so that it continuously delivers business value.
- Ensure that knowledge is retained in compliance with organizational retention guidelines.
As always, I look forward to comments and conversation on this topic.
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