Question 7

Compare Hallmark Cards' knowledge management strategy with Brighham & Women Hospital's. Discuss their similarities and differences. Also discuss why the differences.

Hallmark Cards' knowledge management strategy is very different than the knowledge management that took place at Brigham & Women Hospital. Hallmark deployed a strategy that helped them connect with their customers. Their purpose and focus was primarily in the innovation of new ideas, while the hospital's purpose and focus was a more of a tool to empower doctors with the knowledge they need to stay "on top of their game." While both of these systems placed extended emphasis on technology, the communities created at Hallmark seemed to be more people oriented than that at the hospital. I feel like this is true, because of the relationships formed between contributors of those communities. In both examples, the knowledge initiatives created opportunities and advantages within that company.

On the other hand, both companies' knowledge management initiatives had a focus on communication between diverse groups and effective transfer of knowledge as a resource. These companies both had to overcome obstacles in order to bring their prospective groups together.

Question 6

(6.1) What is organizational culture (OC)? the value perspective? the behavioral perspective? Are these two perspectives related to each other in any way?

Organizational culture is a significant knowledge resource through its ability to facilitate the creation, storage, transfer, and use of knowledge. The values perspective of culture consists of four sub-types - involvement, consistency, adaptability, and mission. It also examines the relationships of these types and organizational effectiveness. The behavioral perspective focuses on culture as defined by actual work practices. The behavioral perspective distinguish the sub-cultures of organizations better than that of the value systems. The value perspective seems to be more tacit-based, while the behavioral can be more readily observed. They are similar in the fact that both are part of organizational culture, and influence the knowledge initiatives of a company.

(6.2) How does OC influence knowledge creation?

Knowledge is created, shared, and amplified through social and collaborative processes. These processes are strongly embedded within an organizations culture. Knowledge creation is not a formal process, it is a socially constructed process that occurs over time through informal human networks. The author of this article suggests that cultures with a high degree of change and flexibility will have a positive effect on knowledge creation.

(6.3) How does OC influence knowledge transfer?

Knowledge transfer is based in knowledge sharing and knowledge acceptance. One of the elements of a culture is it's openness or closedness. An open culture will cause employees to feel at home almost immediately. Cultures will tend to transfer knowledge more efficiently where there is an open culture. The two other elements of OC that will cause more efficient knowledge transfer are a parochial system (rather than professional) and an employee-oriented culture (rather than task oriented).

(6.4) In your opinion, how can knowledge management initiatives impact OC?

According to this article, there are a number of ways that knowledge management initiatives can impact OC. Examples include the "Buckman Code of Ethics" and the metaphor of a waterline. In my opinion, it is very difficult to create a KM initiative that can fully create or properly adjust OC. Culture can be impacted by these KM initiatives, but the amount of community acceptance of the proposed "culture" is not estimable. People may reject the proposed initiative.

Question 5

Does the framework presented in the collaborative advantage article suggest anything useful for the Hallmark Cards' knowledge community? Explain your answer.

The collaborative advantage article shared many of the same topical areas as the Hallmark Cards' knowledge community article, with a different focus of application. With Hallmark, their primary example of effective community is the relationship that they established with their customers, and the way that they were able to connect with the end-user of their product. The MIT article seems to discuss the value and means of collaboration with the focus on inter-unit collaboration. Regardless of these differences, I feel like the concepts in the MIT article could be useful within the scope of Hallmark's knowledge community.

The value of this collaboration is seen in cost savings through the transfer of best practices, better decision making as a result of subsidiary advice, increased revenue through shared expertise and products, innovation through the cross-pollination of ideas, and enhanced capacity for collective action and company swiftness. These are all values that Hallmark would surely embrace. The concept of barrier removal within the company is the focus of the MIT article. Hallmark could apply this concept in their communities by making expertise available and fostering their communities to encourage members to work together and share knowledge.

Question 4

The knowledge community of Hallmark Cards is initiated by the company and membership is by invitation. Would this "top-down" approach to the community development cause any problem in achieving its effectiveness? Discuss.

Communities as defined by Hallmark are knowledge groups devoted to growing the business by sharing innovative ideas and building on the ideas of others. I do not believe a "top-down" approach to community development would be effective based on the fact that the entire community relies on the informal structure and dynamic membership created by voluntary participation. In work groups, people are motivated to participate because it is their objective, but in a knowledge community, people are motivated by their own internalized sense of purpose and rewards. If a company were to create a community with the top-down approach, I believe this would not be an effective "community" at all, but rather a work group created for a specific purpose. Even if the purpose was some sort of knowledge initiative, the overall effectiveness of the "community" would be minimal.

Question 3

Use an example to discuss the importance of active participation in a community of practice (CoP). Discuss the pros and cons of online CoP vs. offline (traditional) CoP.

Efficient communities of practice have the potential to encourage knowledge sharing, learning, and change. This will improve a companies performance and competitiveness. Active participation in a CoP is needed in order for it to fulfill it's purpose of promoting learning, solving problems, or developing new ideas. The value that derives from a CoP hinges upon the input of knowledgeable, active, and committed members. Some CoP's will meet more regularly, while others may only interact on occasion. For example, if you view our class as a community of practice, it is important that each student participate in community as a whole. The more each student participates and contributes, the more value is created within the classroom community. If nobody were to write blogs, comment on blogs, or discuss our topics today, the entire class would not benefit or grow (not to mention fail!).

An online CoP has the benefit of uniting individuals across a much larger scale than a traditional CoP. This promotes collaboration across all divisions in a company, and helps the entity be quick-moving and focused in growth. This will also grow individual "spheres of influence" beyond what a traditional CoP is capable of. Online and offline CoPs will also have different needs and support activities. Specifically in the areas of management, technical infrastructure, and culture.

Communities of Practice

The article, Creating and Facilitating Communities of Practice, focuses on the unstructured organizational form that have been emerging in organizations called communities of practice (CoPs). According to the article, these CoPs have the ability to create competitive advantage through knowledge sharing, learning, and change, but have one central weakness. Management cannot control the focus or content of CoPs.

This makes CoPs a double edge sword. It can boost your organization's performance and efficiency, but also can lose focus. This seems to question the importance of management within knowledge organizations. In my opinion, it is not a matter of lack of manageability--the issue at hand is the lack of knowledge involving how to manage these communities. My hypothesis is that effective management of communities of practice should be based in leadership, rather than in management. A manager tends to demand control and performance, while a leader can influence people in a positive way in order to generate the same performance. Organizational leadership is a skill that needs to be developed in order to promote CoPs, which in turn promotes effective knowledge management.

Culture

Most organizations view culture as an underlying set of values that determines how firms perceive and react to their environments. Under this perspective, culture cannot be measured or controlled. The article, Organizational Culture as a Knowledge Resource, offers an alternative perspective of culture, diverging from the element of control involving culture. Culture can be effectively managed if viewed as a competitive resource. Cultivated knowledge culture can create competitive advantage in knowledge creation, storage, transfer, and application.

The part of this article that I found most interesting was the specific criteria that they used to describe cultures. The trade off between stability and control versus flexibility and change. Different cultures will excel in different criteria, and thus create competitive advantage in knowledge creation, storage, transfer, or application. The article also offers a number of unconfirmed hypothesis about the impact of organizational culture and the competitive advantage created.

Collaboration

Collaborative advantage is the new competitive advantage for industries that are already established. Economies of scale in these veteran industries fail to create a competitive advantage, while collaboration will help a company leverage their dispersed resources and capabilities in each subsidiary or division--even globally. The article, How to Build Collaborative Advantage, discusses this phenomenon. Some of the advantages a company will experience are a cost savings, better decision making, increased revenue, innovation through cross-pollination of ideas, and collective action potential.

A large part of the article discusses the barriers that must be removed to achieve interunit collaboration. These are unwillingness to seek input and learn from others, inability to seek and find expertise, unwillingness to help, and inability to work together and transfer knowledge. Most of these issues involve the networks and community established at the organizational level. By focusing on furthering such topics, companies will achieve competitive advantage.

Community of Believers

The concept of sharing knowledge to create value is also one that is clearly visible in a christian community. According to Brailsford, many things need to "move" in order to create value. Electrons must move to generate electricity, money most be moved to have value, and knowledge must be moved so it can become useful knowledge. In a community of Christ followers, the more efficiently knowledge is transferred within it's members, the more effective the entire church becomes.

The steps needed in order to create that element of transfer within the community of believers are also similar to those described in Hallmark's communities. The removal of boundaries is the first step mentioned. I would suggest that in our culture, people create barriers around things that they consider personal (religion, politics, or even music), in order to gain an feeling of protection. This type of isolated perspective is one of the central barriers that must be removed in order for the church community to create effective encouragement at the individual level.

Community

Yesterday I read through the article, Bulding a Knowledge Community at Hallmark Cards, and I found some interesting assertions about community. The primary characteristic that I noted is that a community is generally composed of volunteers, rather than mandatory assigned participants. I attended church yesterday, and as I looked at those that were around me, it became clear that they were all there by their own choice. The church is a perfect example of a knowledge community devoted to growing, innovation, and sharing knowledge of the teachings of Jesus Christ.

I also observed the dynamic membership within the church community. As described at Hallmark, there is 10-20% of those that are willing to commit to serve additional time beyond Sunday to uphold other duties. The rest of the people I observed would be "lurkers" and "non-contributors." In the case of the church, a non-contributor would be a guest or irregular attender.

An Effective Social Ecology

The article, Knowledge Management's Social Dimension: Lessions From Nucor Steel, focuses primarily on the effectiveness of the social ecology at Nucor Steel Corp. In order for an organization to become an efficient knowledge base, they will need to understand the premise of what defines a social ecology.

1. Drives an organization's formal and informal expectations of individuals
2. Defines the types of people who will fit into an organization
3. Shapes individuals' freedom to pursue actions without prior approval
4. Affects how people interact with others in and out of the organization

Nucor gained access to superior human capital through the location of their plants, while offering lofty compensation to select the best workers. Through shared incentives, they were able to boost productivity, share knowledge interplant and intraplant, and increase acceptance of new practices across the company. The social ecology at Nucor turned the company into a knowledge powerhouse, creating a competitive advantage and increase profits for 30 years in the shrinking steel industry.

Importance of Knowledge Management

The necessity of knowledge management can be debated in each field. In some cases, the cost of creating efficient knowledge networks may exceed the benefit. Based on the article, Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management, it is very clear that the medical field has a dire, specific need for efficient knowledge management systems.

According to the article, an average physician needs to know 10,000 different diseases, 3,000 medications, 1,100 laboratory tests, and over 400,000 articles each year to the biomedical literature. That is a significant amount of information! Decisions that these physicians make, in some instances, can be life or death. Placing a high value on the life of a human being, it is my opinion that an effective knowledge management system is needed, regardless of the costs incurred. The hope in this type of system would be the reduction of human error, and a overall better medical field.

Nucor Steel

The article, Knowledge Management's Social Dimension: Lessons From Nucor Steel, revealed many ways an organization can build an effective social ecology. The importance in of the social ecology in any organization involves the accumulating and mobilizing of knowledge. This is the essence of knowledge management.

Prior to this article, the only true example I had imagined in order to make a knowledge-based organization was a efficient information technology (IT) system. In reading about Nucor Steel, it has become clear that efficient IT is only one part of an effective social ecology. Some of the other parts are the knowledge acquisition and retention, as well as knowledge identification, outflow, transmission, and inflow. In the case of Nucor Steel, this was best seen in their group-based incentives. These incentives pushed the employees to do exactly what the company wanted: expand, accumulate, and mobilize knowledge to gain a competitive advantage.

Second Step

Today I ordered the two books required for my Knowledge Management course. They should provide further enrichment to both my knowledge and the content of this blog.

I also finished reading through the suggestions in the Does Accounting Account for Knowledge article. Kaplan's Balanced Scorecard and Skandia navigator both involved strategic, focus areas that a company would report to the investors (i.e. financial, customers, processes, learning and growth, etc). I believe this type of supplementary information could be useful, but it would require some of the elements that the value chain scorecard discussed. Investors would desire something quantitative, while auditors would require standardization and confirmation through empirical evidence. In my opinion, the best model would be a combination of Kaplan's balanced scorecard and the value chain scorecard.

I am still skeptical as to whether you could measure non-physical assets such as knowledge in a quantitative and standardized way. I would need further detail on this process.

A Thought on Accounting

The article, Does Accounting Account for Knowledge, poses thought-provoking questions about the future of accounting and current accounting inefficiency. The major issue at hand seems to be our knowledge (i.e. non-physical) based economy coupled with the current accounting system for measuring physical capital. I have never considered this issue in the past, but while reading this article, the problem seemed obvious.

The article concludes with a discussion of six alternatives to better account for non-physical future economic benefits. I hope to look further into these alternatives later, but my impression of the first two were an entire reworking of our current conceptual framework with an estimate-based earnings realization model. This includes redefinition of assets, liabilities, and equities, which are the part of the core for all current accounting. The real issue that I had with both of these solutions (TVC and AFTF) are that they simply have management estimate profits and expenses for projects in advance. This could be problematic when management has been proven to serve their own agenda and earn benefits based on their high estimates.