Take Two Aspirin and Call Me in the Morning?

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned  

Everyone knows that aspirin is one of the world's true wonder drugs. For literally pennies a day, it can do everything from alleviate pain and reduce fever to improve cardiovascular health and, potentially, keep Alzheimer's disease at bay.

If you think about it (and that's what I do for a living), knowledge management works a lot like aspirin for the corporation or organization. Even in very small doses it's proven time and time again to alleviate pain, improve fiscal health and keep the corporate brain from atrophying.

But how, exactly, does it do this? As with aspirin and the human body, to figure this out you have to step back and take a multi-disciplinary look at the "execution" layer of the corporation, the place where things get done, where most real work is performed. (The other main layers are environment and strategy.)

The main components of the execution layer are: Processes, Organization, Technology, Communication, Leadership and the Worker. Let's briefly examine how KM helps each.

Processes

The most important thing that KM can do for processes is to document them. Most businesses don't have a clear and complete understanding of exactly how they do what they do, what are the allowable exceptions to rules, etc. Documenting all this can greatly improve training, dealing with needed process changes and general …

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