This briefing contrasts the role of knowledge management in supporting both innovation and consistency.

While ‘knowledge sharing’ is a common goal for KM projects, it is often neither meaningful or effective.

Leading ChangeJohn P. Kotter It is widely recognised that organisations are under greater pressure than ever before to adapt to meet new conditions and challenges within their marketplaces. This has spawned many change management projects, reorganisations and strategic realignments. Most of these have failed. This book takes a much-needed look at how the process of organisational change must operate if it is to have both short-term impact and long-term sustainability. At the core of the book, is a eight-step process: Establishing a sense of urgency Creating the guiding coalition Developing a vision and strategy Communicating the change vision Empowering broad-based

A successful knowledge management strategy must identify the key needs and issues within the organisation, and provide a framework for addressing these.

I thought I would post a quick comment on a trend that I've been seeing in Australian public-sector organisations: knowledge management becoming records management. That is, the "knowledge management initiative" is handed across to the library/records management folk, who then implement projects such as: records management systems document management systems corporate taxonomies/thesaurii While these are all important things to do, they are obviously only a very small corner of knowledge management. Yet, in many organisations I've seen, this is all that's left of the initial enthusiasm about KM. In these situations, there is no focus on the people-related aspects (such

The intranet can serve as a platform for knowledge management initiatives, via approaches such as collaborative environments, staff directories, wikis and weblogs.

This week I was at the Act-KM conference on knowledge management, held in Canberra. Sitting listening to the presentations, and talking with my peers, something really struck me: A number of people are conducting what I would call "needs analysis" activities, including myself. A wide range of techniques and approaches are currently being used, including: James Robertson (Step Two Designs): reviews focused on the intranet, based on stakeholder interviews, expert reviews and workplace observation. Ends up identifying issues much more broadly than the intranet, including organisational-wide cultural and process problems. Robert Perey (Knowledge Index): conducts knowledge reviews builds around complexity

The front-line environment must be understood when implementing knowledge management initiatives.

This briefing focuses on who to select for stakeholder interviews. It provides some general guidelines, and lists some areas of the organisation to involve.

Stakeholder interviews are a very effective way of gaining an understanding of an organisation, and can be considered a form of ‘knowledge mapping’.