# Knowledge Management Study: Focus on Leadership and Culture

The purpose of the article, study and website is to encourage the reader to take a step back from the technology component of knowledge management and widen his or her field of vision to include performance drivers around leadership, culture, organization and process.

The study is based on in-depth interviews with key executives in some of the most admired knowledge enterprises in the world. Study participants include BP, Buckaman Laboratories, PeopleSoft, Sainsbury's, Simens and the World Bank. Some participating enterprises have chosen not to be directly named.


**What is knowledge management?**

Knowledge management is capturing, structuring, enhancing and disseminating the knowledge of an organization. Knowledge management involves:

Getting the right information, to the right person, at the right time and cost

Organizing, distilling and presenting information in a timely, relevant, accurate and simple manner

Leveraging both tacit and explicit knowledge in a systematic way

Using the information delivered to enable informed decision making

Knowledge management helps problem solving, dynamic learning, collaboration, strategic planning and decision making, and also protects intellectual assets from decay. With this in mind we have developed a knowledge management framework to establish how enterprises achieved great success.

**What does knowledge management best practice look like?**

Leadership and culture are the critical success factors in building world-class knowledge management - enabled by good process and technology practice. We looked at knowledge management best practice against a number of performance dimensions: strategy, leadership, culture, process and technology.

**KM Strategy**

Alignment of knowledge management with the business strategy is a clear benchmark of success. We identified the following best practices: The development of an enterprise-wide knowledge strategy which links all knowledge management initiatives:

It is important to identify organizational and knowledge priorities
Promote full organizational participation
Knowledge strategy clearly aligns with a core component of business strategy - for instance:
A customer centric approach: KCS (annual efficiency saving of US$ 1.5 million)
A drive towards operational excellence: BP (US$ 2billion over 4 years)
The knowledge value chain is managed at an enterprise level:
Determine knowledge needed
Determine knowledge available
Assess knowledge gap
Developing or buy relevant knowledge

Depending upon a person's position within the organization, and his/her viewpoint, encouraging a team approach to sharing knowledge and skills may benefit all employees, or may even prove to be a strategy by which the senior management can extract individuals' key knowledge in order to take advantage of the 'knowledge creation pool' existing within the organization.


However, in an organization which is aggressively competitive and rewards individual achievement rather than teamwork, employees may be reluctant to share their ideas for a new service with their manager, simply to avoid the manager receiving a performance bonus for someone else's idea(s).

Therefore, an organizational climate of trust and mutual respect would seem to be essential in developing effective **[pkm guide](https://www.taskade.com/blog/zettelkasten-method-software-remote-work/)** Knowledge Management Systems.

Finally, knowledge creation in an organization assumes that employees, especially at the middle and senior levels, actually know more than what they are perceived to know, even though they may not provide solutions to all of the organization's ills.

Hence, the imperative for organizations will be to create an organizational climate wherein tacit knowledge can replace existing/traditional systems of knowledge-sharing; such a climate necessitates systematic training interventions appearing alongside the routine scheme of things.

This will offer exciting new horizons for HR practitioners and managers at all levels, ultimately contributing to enhanced employee performance and organizational well-being and effectiveness.