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Digg it UP - Knowledge Mapping
It's time to beat the old bad customer service drum again. I know, I'm sick of beating the drum, too, but as long as bad customer service runs rampant through so many businesses I feel it is my entrepreneurial duty to bring it to your attention. So grab a pew and prepare to listen to the sermon I've preached before: bad customer service is the bane of business. If the Almighty smote down every business that dispenses bad customer service the world would be a much friendlier, albeit much sparser place. Consider a world without malls and fast food joints… would it really be so bad?What puzzles me most is if bad customer service is such a death knell for business, why do so many businesses allow it to go on? Don't they read my column, for Pete's sake? I think the problem is that most bad customer service is doled out (or at least condoned) by business owners and managers who have ceased caring what their customers think. When you stop caring what your customers think it's time to close the doors. Go find a day job. You'll make someone a wonderfully disgruntled employee. My latest parable of lousy customer service was actually experienced by my better half while attempting to buy my daughter a pair of basketball shoes. I won't mention the name of the sporting goods chain store in which the bad customer service took place, but I will tell you that its name is similar to the sound a frog with hiccups might make.As my wife waited for someone to assit, the four or five teenagers who had been charged with manning the store stood in a clump at the cash register giggling and flirting with one another as if they were at the prom instead of at work. When my wife pointed out this fact, one of the employe
-IBM Global Services
How are the Knowledge Maps created?
Knowledge maps are created by transferring tacit and explicit knowledge into graphical formats that are easy to understand and interpret by the end users, who may be managers, experts, system developers, or anybody.
Basic steps in creating K-maps:
Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task
- The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
- Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
- Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
- Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}
When companies enter into negotiations with venture capital firms, there are several issues which need to be defined and agreed upon. This article describes the key issues.Valuation. Valuation is the most prominent negotiating issues. Valuation is the price of the company in which the venture capitalist invests. Valuation determines what percent of the company the investor is buying for their capital.Timing of the Investment. Many investors will commit a large amount of capital, but will contribute that capital to the companies in installments. Often, these installments are only made when pre-designated milestones are met.Vesting of Founders' Stock. Like capital, investors often prefer that stock is given to company founders and key employees in installments. This is known as vesting.Modifying the Management Team. Some investors insist that additional or substitute management employees be hired subsequent to their investment. This gives investors additional security that the company will execute on its business model. An important issue to negotiate with regards to modifying the management team is the amount of stock or options that will be issued to new management team members, as this will dilute the holdings of the founders.Employment Agreements with Key Founders. Venture capitalists typically do not want companies to have employment agreements that limit the circumstances under which employees can be fired and/or set compensation and benefits levels that are too high. Other key employment agreement issues to be negotiated with venture capitalists include restrictions on post-employment activities and employee severance payments on termination.Company Proprietar
Key Questions
- What is K-map?
- What does the K-map show, and what do we map?
- Why is K-mapping so important?
- What are some of the key principles, methodologies, and questions for K-mapping?
- How do we create K-map?
Background
Each of the past centuries has been dominated by single technology. The eighteenth century was the time of the great mechanical systems accompanying the Industrial Revolution. The nineteenth century was the age of steam engine. After these, the key technology has been information gathering, processing and distribution. Among other developments, the installation of world wide telephone networks, the invention of radio and television, the birth and unprecedented growth of the computer industry and the launching of communication satellites are significant. Now people started to think that only information is not enough, what matters is Knowledge. So there has been seen shift from Information to Knowledge.
A bit of information without context and interpretation is data such as numbers, symbols.
Information is a set of data with context and interpretation. Information is the basis for knowledge.
Knowledge is a set of data and information, to which is added expert opinion and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used or applied to aid decision making. Knowledge may be explicit and/or tacit, individual and/or collective.
The term -Knowledge Mapping- seems to be relatively new, but it is not. We have been practising this in our everyday life, just what we are not doing is - we are not documenting it, and we are not doing it in a systematic way. Knowledge Mapping is all about keeping a record of information and knowledge you need such as where you can get it from, who holds it, whose expertise is it, and so on. Say, you need to find something at your home or in your room, you can find it in no time because you have almost all the information/knowledge about -what is where- and -who knows what- at your home. It is a sort of map set in your mind about your home. But, to set such a map about your organisation and organisational knowledge in your mind is almost impossible. This is where K-map becomes handy and shows details of every bit of knowledge that exists within the organisation including location, quality, and accessibility; and knowledge required to run the organisation smoothly - hence making you able to find out your required knowledge easily and efficiently.
Below are some of the definitions:
It's an ongoing quest within an organization (including its supply and customer chain) to help discover the location, ownership, value and use of knowledge artifacts, to learn the roles and expertise of people, to identify constraints to the flow of knowledge, and to highlight opportunities to leverage existing knowledge.
Knowledge mapping is an important practice consisting of survey, audit, and synthesis. It aims to track the acquisition and loss of information and knowledge. It explores personal and group competencies and proficiencies. It illustrates or "maps" how knowledge flows throughout an organization. Knowledge mapping helps an organization to appreciate how the loss of staff influences intellectual capital, to assist with the selection of teams, and to match technology to knowledge needs and processes.
- Denham Grey
Knowledge mapping is about making knowledge that is available within an organisation transparent, and is about providing the insights into its quality.
- Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Samuel J. Driessen, Jan W. M. Jacobs
Knowledge mapping is a process by which organisations can identify and categorise knowledge assets within their organisation - people, processes, content, and technology. It allows an organisation to fully leverage the existing expertise resident in the organisation, as well as identify barriers and constraints to fulfilling strategic goals and objectives. It is constructing a roadmap to locate the information needed to make the best use of resourses, independent of source or form.
-W. Vestal, APQC, 2002
(American Productivity & Quality Center)
Knowledge Map describes what knowledge is used in a process, and how it flows around the process. It is the basis for determining knowledge commonality, or areas where similar knowledge is used across multiple process. Fundamentally, a process knowledge map cntains information about the organisation?s knowledge. It describes who has what knowledge (tacit), where the knowledge resides (infrastructure), and how the knowledge is transferred or disseminated (social).
-IBM Global Services
How are the Knowledge Maps created?
Knowledge maps are created by transferring tacit and explicit knowledge into graphical formats that are easy to understand and interpret by the end users, who may be managers, experts, system developers, or anybody.
Basic steps in creating K-maps:
Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task
- The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
- Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
- Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
- Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}
Customer refunds can be such a big issue for both small and even large companies. Most companies just don’t like giving money back that they believe they have already worked hard for and to them it is just a drain on profits. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!Customer refunds are not a drain on profits and in fact it has been the experience at my company that customer refunds actually add to the bottom line net profits. My business partner and I run several successful fire and flood restoration companies in British Columbia, Canada and we profit from our customer refunds.How do we profit from our customer refunds? First off we as a company have a belief that almost all our customers are honest and that if they have a complaint or want a refund it is an opportunity to learn and profit from the situation.Secondly we know that if we have an unhappy customer and we can do whatever it takes to make them happy we will have one of our best customers for life. In fact it is usually a customer who has come in with a complaint or wanting a refund that once made happy will become a cheer leading customer referring us to all their friends.The amazing thing about customer refunds is that I have seen so many companies big and small who would not handle customer refunds properly go broke over time.. Any time my wife and I deal with a new company and have a problem I can predict with 100% accuracy whether that company will still be in business in a few years time.If a company won’t give to its customers first that company will not be able to receive healthy profits. This is the law. What ever you want you must first give it away. If you don’t have the faith that your custom
A bit of information without context and interpretation is data such as numbers, symbols.
Information is a set of data with context and interpretation. Information is the basis for knowledge.
Knowledge is a set of data and information, to which is added expert opinion and experience, to result in a valuable asset which can be used or applied to aid decision making. Knowledge may be explicit and/or tacit, individual and/or collective.
The term -Knowledge Mapping- seems to be relatively new, but it is not. We have been practising this in our everyday life, just what we are not doing is - we are not documenting it, and we are not doing it in a systematic way. Knowledge Mapping is all about keeping a record of information and knowledge you need such as where you can get it from, who holds it, whose expertise is it, and so on. Say, you need to find something at your home or in your room, you can find it in no time because you have almost all the information/knowledge about -what is where- and -who knows what- at your home. It is a sort of map set in your mind about your home. But, to set such a map about your organisation and organisational knowledge in your mind is almost impossible. This is where K-map becomes handy and shows details of every bit of knowledge that exists within the organisation including location, quality, and accessibility; and knowledge required to run the organisation smoothly - hence making you able to find out your required knowledge easily and efficiently.
Below are some of the definitions:
It's an ongoing quest within an organization (including its supply and customer chain) to help discover the location, ownership, value and use of knowledge artifacts, to learn the roles and expertise of people, to identify constraints to the flow of knowledge, and to highlight opportunities to leverage existing knowledge.
Knowledge mapping is an important practice consisting of survey, audit, and synthesis. It aims to track the acquisition and loss of information and knowledge. It explores personal and group competencies and proficiencies. It illustrates or "maps" how knowledge flows throughout an organization. Knowledge mapping helps an organization to appreciate how the loss of staff influences intellectual capital, to assist with the selection of teams, and to match technology to knowledge needs and processes.
- Denham Grey
Knowledge mapping is about making knowledge that is available within an organisation transparent, and is about providing the insights into its quality.
- Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Samuel J. Driessen, Jan W. M. Jacobs
Knowledge mapping is a process by which organisations can identify and categorise knowledge assets within their organisation - people, processes, content, and technology. It allows an organisation to fully leverage the existing expertise resident in the organisation, as well as identify barriers and constraints to fulfilling strategic goals and objectives. It is constructing a roadmap to locate the information needed to make the best use of resourses, independent of source or form.
-W. Vestal, APQC, 2002
(American Productivity & Quality Center)
Knowledge Map describes what knowledge is used in a process, and how it flows around the process. It is the basis for determining knowledge commonality, or areas where similar knowledge is used across multiple process. Fundamentally, a process knowledge map cntains information about the organisation?s knowledge. It describes who has what knowledge (tacit), where the knowledge resides (infrastructure), and how the knowledge is transferred or disseminated (social).
-IBM Global Services
How are the Knowledge Maps created?
Knowledge maps are created by transferring tacit and explicit knowledge into graphical formats that are easy to understand and interpret by the end users, who may be managers, experts, system developers, or anybody.
Basic steps in creating K-maps:
Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task
- The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
- Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
- Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
- Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}
I read an amazing statistic in an article written by the Canadian Management Centre.“The average company loses half their customers in 5 years and half their employees in 4 years?. This has significant impact to overall customer, employee, investor and supplier loyalty.”Wow! Think about that statistic. 100% customer turnover in 5 years and 100% employee turn over in 4 years. Management at all levels must understand the changing role and importance of front-line customer service operations to achieve the core mission of the business, i.e., customer retention, customer acquisition, customer satisfaction, employee retention and increased profitability.When managers do not envision the relationship between management practices and front-line actions, the business has not recognized the evolution of the customer’s Service Output Demands (SODS). Nothing short of service excellence will initiate and maintain customer relationship equity, which is the cornerstone of customer retention and increased customer spend. The most successful businesses in any industry are those that maintain relationships through ongoing customer satisfaction earned by meeting changing customer expectations, versus those that focus just on new business and new sales but lose existing customers. Consequently, customer service requires a priority focus on existing customer relationship equity. Customers have become accustomed to receiving “The Ultimate Customer Experience.” Today’s customers are just smarter and utilizing the internet and the proliferation of information available to them your customer is poised to expect your absolute best. They may know an awful lot about your company before you ever walk in their d
Below are some of the definitions:
It's an ongoing quest within an organization (including its supply and customer chain) to help discover the location, ownership, value and use of knowledge artifacts, to learn the roles and expertise of people, to identify constraints to the flow of knowledge, and to highlight opportunities to leverage existing knowledge.
Knowledge mapping is an important practice consisting of survey, audit, and synthesis. It aims to track the acquisition and loss of information and knowledge. It explores personal and group competencies and proficiencies. It illustrates or "maps" how knowledge flows throughout an organization. Knowledge mapping helps an organization to appreciate how the loss of staff influences intellectual capital, to assist with the selection of teams, and to match technology to knowledge needs and processes.
- Denham Grey
Knowledge mapping is about making knowledge that is available within an organisation transparent, and is about providing the insights into its quality.
- Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Samuel J. Driessen, Jan W. M. Jacobs
Knowledge mapping is a process by which organisations can identify and categorise knowledge assets within their organisation - people, processes, content, and technology. It allows an organisation to fully leverage the existing expertise resident in the organisation, as well as identify barriers and constraints to fulfilling strategic goals and objectives. It is constructing a roadmap to locate the information needed to make the best use of resourses, independent of source or form.
-W. Vestal, APQC, 2002
(American Productivity & Quality Center)
Knowledge Map describes what knowledge is used in a process, and how it flows around the process. It is the basis for determining knowledge commonality, or areas where similar knowledge is used across multiple process. Fundamentally, a process knowledge map cntains information about the organisation?s knowledge. It describes who has what knowledge (tacit), where the knowledge resides (infrastructure), and how the knowledge is transferred or disseminated (social).
-IBM Global Services
How are the Knowledge Maps created?
Knowledge maps are created by transferring tacit and explicit knowledge into graphical formats that are easy to understand and interpret by the end users, who may be managers, experts, system developers, or anybody.
Basic steps in creating K-maps:
Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task
- The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
- Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
- Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
- Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}
I had an e-mail from Karon of Wollongong, Australia who finally plucked up the courage to ask her employer for some outside professional development training to be attended in working hours. Here is what she had to say.Encouraged by your newsletter I thought I would check if my company was willing to pay for training in company time so that I could advance my career within the company.I enjoy my job and I know they value my expertise, but they had never thought of staff development and although surprised by my request, and my sales pitch as to how it can benefit them, they said yes. That was the beginning of a nightmare. I knew I wanted to do Project Management, but had no idea how to look for an accredited course, if possible.I tried the Universities and TAFE colleges. None offered courses specifically dealing with Project Management, so I turned to the Internet. It soon became apparent that you needed to belong to an Industry Association or Professional Organization to find relevant training in business hours.One Industry Training company was prepared to take me if they could not fill places with members. It was also costly - $6,000 just for a two day course! There was a possibility of a Project Management course starting the following month, but I wouldn’t expect my company to pay for what I thought was an outrageous cost.I turned to a friend, Margo, because I couldn’t take up any more time looking around. She got back to me and said. “ I have Googled and Yahooed, and I could only come up with Distance Learning.” This sounded ok because I could take time off work to complete my assignments, which was an alternative option. She said she wanted to know what I thoug
- Denham Grey
Knowledge mapping is about making knowledge that is available within an organisation transparent, and is about providing the insights into its quality.
- Willem-Olaf Huijsen, Samuel J. Driessen, Jan W. M. Jacobs
Knowledge mapping is a process by which organisations can identify and categorise knowledge assets within their organisation - people, processes, content, and technology. It allows an organisation to fully leverage the existing expertise resident in the organisation, as well as identify barriers and constraints to fulfilling strategic goals and objectives. It is constructing a roadmap to locate the information needed to make the best use of resourses, independent of source or form.
-W. Vestal, APQC, 2002
(American Productivity & Quality Center)
Knowledge Map describes what knowledge is used in a process, and how it flows around the process. It is the basis for determining knowledge commonality, or areas where similar knowledge is used across multiple process. Fundamentally, a process knowledge map cntains information about the organisation?s knowledge. It describes who has what knowledge (tacit), where the knowledge resides (infrastructure), and how the knowledge is transferred or disseminated (social).
-IBM Global Services
How are the Knowledge Maps created?
Knowledge maps are created by transferring tacit and explicit knowledge into graphical formats that are easy to understand and interpret by the end users, who may be managers, experts, system developers, or anybody.
Basic steps in creating K-maps:
Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task
- The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
- Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
- Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
- Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}
The point of a quality improvement program should not only be to improve a product or the delivery of healthcare but it should also be to save time and money by reducing or eliminating waste or errors. For example, a doctor or nurse practitioner writes a prescription. We wouldn’t deliver some of the best quality pills along with a few randomly chosen pills and we wouldn’t completely incorrectly fill the prescription. To do either could create serious consequences. Rather, we want to only deliver the best quality. But there is another side to not achieving the best quality. If we incorrectly fill the prescription, even if there is no patient harm, there is waste. Once the error is found, the prescription must be refilled and paperwork redone. Wasted time and money for the healthcare provider!Quality projects build processes that prevent errors and waste. In fact, the main goal of lean healthcare is to eliminate waste in a structured approach. The Japanese use the term kaisen event. They use this idea to eliminate waste in any environment, whether manufacturing or service orientated.Quality projects that I have done have always resulted in avoidance of waste and thus a savings in time and cost. Almost all projects I have read about in journals present the savings of cost and time. Hence, if you are involved in a quality project you need to calculate the costs in time and money of accomplishing a process as it currently exists and then do the same for the “quality improved” process. There should be a substantial savings of both time and money. After all, time is money.To make the required analysis I suggest that one of the project team members be your cost accountant
-IBM Global Services
How are the Knowledge Maps created?
Knowledge maps are created by transferring tacit and explicit knowledge into graphical formats that are easy to understand and interpret by the end users, who may be managers, experts, system developers, or anybody.
Basic steps in creating K-maps:
Basic steps - creating K-maps for specific task
- The outcomes of the entire process, and their contributions to the key organisational activities
- Logical sequences of all the activities needed to achieve the goal
- Knowledge required for each activity {gives the knowledge gap}
- Human resource required to undertake each activity {shows if recruitment is needed}
What do we map?
The followings are the objects we map:
- Explicit knowledge
- subject
- purpose
- location
- format
- ownership
- users
- access right
- Tacit knowledge
- expertise
- skill
- experience
- location
- accessibility
- contact address
- relationships/networks
- Tacit organisational process knowledge
- the people with the internal processing knowledge
- Explicit organisational process knowledge
- codified organisational process knowledge
What do the knowledge maps show?
Knowledge map shows the sources, flows, constraints, and sinks of knowledge within an organisation. It is a navigational aid to both explicit information and tacit knowledge, showing the importance and the relationships between knowledge stores and the dynamics. The following list will be more illustrative in this regard:
- Available knowledge resources
- Knowledge clusters and communities
- Who uses what knowledge resources
- The paths of knowledge exchange
- The knowledge lifecycle
- What we know we don?t know (knowledge gap)
Activity: 1
>> Can you create your personal knowledge map which shows the types and location of knowledge resources you use, the channels you use to access knowledge?
Where does knowledge reside?
Knowledge can be found in
- Correspondents, internal documents
- Library
- Archives (past project documents, proposals)
- Meetings
- Best practices
- Experience
- Corporate memory
Activity: 2
>> What are the other places where you can find knowledge?
What are the other things to be mapped?
Benefits of K-mapping
In many organisations there is a lack of transparency of organisation wide knowledge. Valuable knowledge is often not used because people do not know it exists, even if they know the knowledge exists, they may not know where. These issues lead to the knowledge mapping. Followings are some of the key reasons for doing the knowledge mapping:
- to find key sources of knowledge creation
- to encourage reuse and prevent reinvention
- to find critical information quickly
- to highlight islands of expertise
- to provide an inventory and evaluation of intellectual and intangible assets
- to improve decision making and problem solving by providing applicable information
- to provide insights into corporate knowledge
The map also serves as the continuously evolving organisational memory, capturing and integrating the key knowledge of an organisation. It enables employees learning through intuitive navigation and interrogation of the information in the map, and through the creation of new knowledge through the discovery of new relationships. Simply speaking, K-map gives employees not only -know what-, but also -know how-.
Key principles of Knowledge Mapping
- Because of their power, scope, and impact, the creation of organisational-level knowledge map requires senior management support as well as careful planning
- Share your knowledge about identifying, finding, and tracking knowledge in all forms
- Recognise and locate knowledge in a wide variety of forms: tacit, explicit, formal, informal, codified, personalised, internal, external, and permanent
- Knowledge is found in processes, relationships, policies, people, documents, conversations, links and context, and even with partners
- It should be up-to-date and accurate
K-mapping - key questions
Knowledge map provides an assessment of existing and required knowledge and information in the following categories:
- What knowledge is needed for work?
- Who needs what?
- Who has it?
- Where does it reside?
- Is the knowledge tacit or explicit?
- What issues does it address?
- How to make sure that the K-mapping will be used in an organisation?
Note:
- K-maps should be e
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