Module 1: Knowledge Management in Public Administration PDF

**[MODULE 1]** **GENERAL LEARNING OUTCOMES:** Contextualize the concepts of knowledge per se and knowledge management and its application to public administration. **SPECIFIC LEARNING OUTCOMES:** 1\. Examine the concept of knowledge; 2\. Trace knowledge management in public administration persp...

**[MODULE 1]** **GENERAL LEARNING OUTCOMES:** Contextualize the concepts of knowledge per se and knowledge management and its application to public administration. **SPECIFIC LEARNING OUTCOMES:** 1\. Examine the concept of knowledge; 2\. Trace knowledge management in public administration perspective; 3\. Interpret the dimension of knowledge management; and 4\. Contextualize the advantages of knowledge management. ### **[Lesson 1: Origin of Knowledge Management]** The concept and the terminology of KM sprouted within the management consulting community. When the Internet arose, those organizations quickly realized that an intranet, an in-house subset of the Internet, was a wonderful tool with which to make information accessible and to share it among the geographically dispersed units of their organizations. Not surprisingly, they quickly realized that in building tools and techniques such as dashboards, expertise locators, and best practice (lessons learned) databases, they had acquired an expertise which was in effect a new product that they could market to other organizations, particularly to organizations which were large, complex, and dispersed. However, a new product needs a name, and the name that emerged was Knowledge Management. The term apparently was first used in its current context at McKinsey in 1987 for an internal study on their information handling and utilization (McInerney and Koenig, 2011) First, KM can very fruitfully be seen as the undertaking to replicate, indeed to create, the information environment known to be conducive to successful R&D---rich, deep, and open communication and information access and to deploy it broadly across the firm. It is almost trite now to observe that we are in the post-industrial information age and that we are all information workers. Furthermore, the researcher is, after all, the quintessential information worker. Peter Drucker once commented that the product of the pharmaceutical industry wasn't pills, it was information. The research domain, and in particular the pharmaceutical industry, has been studied in depth with a focus on identifying the organizational and cultural environmental aspects that lead to successful research (Koenig, 1990, 1992). The salient aspect that emerges with overwhelming importance is that of rich, deep, and open communications, not only within the firm, but also with the outside world. The logical conclusion, then, is to attempt to apply those same successful environmental aspects to knowledge workers at large, and that is precisely what KM attempts to do. **[Lesson 2: Defining Knowledge Management]** A few years after the Davenport definition, the Gartner Group created another definition of KM, which has become the most frequently cited one (Duhon, 1998), and it is given below: \"*Knowledge Management* is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, capturing, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing all of an enterprise\'s information assets. These assets may include data- bases, documents, policies, procedures, and previously uncaptured expertise and experience in individual workers.\" The one real lacuna of this definition is that it, too, is specifically limited to an organization's own information and knowledge assets. KM as conceived now, and this expansion arrived early on, includes relevant information assets from wherever relevant. Note, however, the breadth implied for KM by calling it a "discipline."  Both definitions share a very organizational and corporate orientation. KM, historically at least, was primarily about managing the knowledge of and in organizations. Rather quickly, however, the concept of KM became much broader than that. Knowledge management is essentially about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time. This in itself may not seem so complex, but it implies a strong tie to corporate strategy, understanding of where and in what forms knowledge exists, creating processes that span organizational functions, and ensuring that initiatives are accepted and supported by organizational members. Knowledge management may also include new knowledge creation, or it may solely focus on knowledge sharing, storage, and refinement. Knowledge management (KM) is the interdisciplinary process of creating, using, sharing, and maintaining an organization\'s information and knowledge. It is a multi-faceted strategy for making the best use of organizational knowledge assets in order to achieve business objectives such as enhancing competitive advantage, improving performance, boosting innovation, sharing insights, and continuously improving the organization. Knowledge management (KM) therefore implies a strong tie to organizational goals and strategy, and it involves the management of knowledge that is useful for some purpose and which creates value for the organization. Expanding upon the previous knowledge management definition, KM involves the understanding of: 1\. Where and in what forms knowledge exists; what the organization needs to know; 2\. How to promote a culture conducive to learning, sharing, and knowledge creation; 3\. How to make the right knowledge available to the right people at the right time; 4\. How to best generate or acquire new relevant knowledge; 5\. How to manage all of these factors so as to enhance performance in light of the organization\'s strategic goals and short-term opportunities and threats.  KM must therefore create/provide the right tools, people, knowledge, structures (teams, etc.), culture, etc. so as to enhance learning; it must understand the value and applications of the new knowledge created; it must store this knowledge and make it readily available for the right people at the right time; and it must continuously assess, apply, refine, and remove organizational knowledge in conjunction with concrete long- and short-term factors. It is important to remember that knowledge management is not about managing knowledge for knowledge\'s sake. The overall objective is to create value and leverage and refine the firm\'s knowledge assets to meet organizational goals. Knowledge management systems are therefore part of the organizational learning process, although they focus more on strategic management of knowledge as a shareable business asset. The core goal of knowledge management is to connect people looking for knowledge within an organization to those who have it, with the ultimate aim of increasing the overall knowledge level of the team and organization. **[Lesson 3: Operational Components of Knowledge Management]** **A. The operational components of Knowledge Management are the following:** 1\. **Content Management.** The most obvious involvement of Knowledge Management is the making of the organization\'s data and information available to the members of the organization through dashboards, portals, and with the use of content management systems. Content Management is the most immediate and obvious part of KM. This aspect of KM might be described as Librarianship 101, putting your organization's information and data up online, plus selected external information, and providing the capability to seamlessly shift to searching, more or less, the entire web. The term most often used for this is Enterprise Search. This is now not just a stream within the annual KMWorld Conference, but has become an overlapping conference in its own right. See the comments below under the "Third Stage of KM" section. **2. Expertise Location.** Since knowledge resides in people, often the best way to acquire the expertise that you need is to talk with an expert. Locating the right expert with the knowledge that you need, though, can be a problem, particularly if, for example, the expert is in another country. The basic function of an expertise locator system is straightforward: it is to identify and locate those persons within an organization who have expertise in a particular area. These systems are now commonly known as expertise location systems. In the early days of KM the term 'Yellow Pages" was commonly used, but now that term is fast disappearing from our common vocabulary, and expertise location is, in any case, rather more precise. There are typically three sources from which to supply data for an expertise locator system: (1) employee resumes, (2) employee self-identification of areas of expertise (typically by being requested to fill out a form online), and (3) algorithmic analysis of electronic communications from and to the employee. The latter approach is typically based on email traffic but can include other social networking communications such as Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Several commercial software packages to match queries with expertise are available. Most of them have load-balancing schemes so as not to overload any particular expert. Typically, such systems rank the degree of presumed expertise and will shift a query down the expertise ranking when the higher choices appear to be overloaded. Such systems also often have a feature by which the requester can flag the request as a priority, and the system can then match high priority to high expertise rank. **3. Lessons Learned.** Refers to databases that attempt to capture and make accessible knowledge, typically "how to do it" knowledge, that has been operationally obtained and normally would not have been explicitly captured. In the KM context, the emphasis is upon capturing knowledge embedded in personal expertise and making it explicit. The lessons learned concept or practice is one that might be described as having been birthed by KM, as there is very little in the way of a direct antecedent. Early in the KM movement, the phrase most often used was \"best practices,\" but that phrase was soon replaced with \"lessons learned.\" The reasons were that \"lessons learned\" was a broader and more inclusive term and because \"best practice\" seemed too restrictive and could be interpreted as meaning there was only one best practice in a situation. What might be a best practice in North American culture, for example, might well not be a best practice in another culture. The major international consulting firms were very aware of this and led the movement to substitute the new more appropriate term. \"Lessons Learned\" became the most common hallmark phrase of early KM development. The idea of capturing expertise, particularly hard-won expertise, is not a new idea. One antecedent to KM that we have all seen portrayed was the World War II debriefing of pilots after a mission. Gathering military intelligence was the primary purpose, but a clear and recognized secondary purpose was to identify lessons learned, though they were not so named, to pass on to other pilots and instructors. Similarly, the U. S. Navy Submarine Service, after a very embarrassing and lengthy experience of torpedoes that failed to detonate on target, and an even more embarrassing failure to follow up on consistent reports by submarine captains of torpedo detonation failure, instituted a mandatory system of widely disseminated \"Captain\'s Patrol Reports.\" The intent, of course, was to avoid any such fiasco in the future. The Captain\'s Patrol Reports, however, were very clearly designed to encourage analytical reporting, with reasoned analyses of the reasons for operational failure and success. It was emphasized that a key purpose of the report was both to make recommendations about strategy for senior officers to mull over, and recommendations about tactics for other skippers and submariners to take advantage of (McInerney and Koenig, 2011). The military has become an avid proponent of the lessons learned concept. The phrase the military uses is \"After Action Reports.\" The concept is very simple: make sure that what has been learned from experience is passed on, and don\'t rely on the participant to make a report. There will almost always be too many things im- mediately demanding that person\'s attention after an action. There must be a system whereby someone, typically someone in KM, is assigned the responsibility to do the debriefing, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to create the report, and then to ensure that the lessons learned are captured and disseminated. The experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have made this process almost automatic in the military. The concept is by no means limited to the military. Larry Prusak (2004) maintains that in the corporate world the most common cause of KM implementation failure is that so often the project team is disbanded and the team members almost immediately reassigned elsewhere before there is any debriefing or after-action report assembled. Any organization where work is often centered on projects or teams needs to pay very close attention to this issue and set up an after-action mechanism with clearly delineated responsibility for its implementation.  **4. Communities of Practice.** It refers to a group of individuals with shared interests that come together in person or virtually to tell stories, to share and discuss problems and opportunities, discuss best practices, and talk over lessons learned (Wenger, 1998; Wenger & Snyder, 1999). Communities of practice emphasize, build upon, and take advantage of the social nature of learning within or across organizations. In small organizations, conversations around the water cooler are often taken for granted, but in larger, geographically distributed organizations, the water cooler needs to become virtual. Similarly, organizations find that when workers relinquish a dedicated company office to work online from home or on the road, the natural knowledge sharing that occurs in social spaces needs to be replicated virtually. In the context of KM, CoPs are generally understood to mean electronically linked communities. Electronic linkage is not essential, of course, but since KM arose in the consulting community from the awareness of the potential of intranets to link geographically dispersed organizations, this orientation is understandable. A classic example of the deployment of CoPs comes from the World Bank. When James Wolfensohn became president in 1995, he focused on the World Bank\'s role in disseminating knowledge about development; he was known to say that the principal product of the World Bank was not loans, but rather the creation of knowledge about how to accomplish development. Consequently, he encouraged the development of CoPs and made that a focus of his attention. One World Bank CoP, for example, was about road construction and maintenance in arid countries and conditions. That CoP was encouraged to include and seek out not only participants and employees from the World Bank and its sponsored projects and from the country where the relevant project was being implemented, but also experts from elsewhere who had expertise in building roads in arid conditions, such as, for example, staff from the Australian Road Research Board and the Arizona Department of Highways. This is also a good example of the point that despite the fact that KM developed first in a very for-profit corporate context, it is applicable far more broadly, such as in the context of government and civil society. The organization and maintenance of CoPs is not a simple or an easy task to undertake. As Durham (2004) points out, there are several key roles to be filled. She describes the key roles as manager, moderator, and thought leader. They need not necessarily be three separate people, but in some cases, they will need to be. Some questions that need to be thought about and resolved are: Who fills the various roles of: manager, moderator, and thought leader? How is the CoP managed, and who will fill the management role? Who will have overall responsibility for coordinating and overseeing the various CoPs? Who looks for new members or suggests that the CoP may have outlived its usefulness? Who reviews the CoP for activity? Are postings open or does someone vet or edit the postings? How is the CoP kept fresh and vital? When and how (under what rules) are items removed? How are those items archived? How are the CoP files made retrievable? How do CoP leaders coordinate with the enterprise search/taxonomy function? **B. Implementing knowledge management thus has several dimensions including:** **Strategy:** Knowledge management strategy must be dependent on corporate strategy. The objective is to manage, share, and create relevant knowledge assets that will help meet tactical and strategic requirements. **Organizational Culture:** The organizational culture influences the way people interact, the context within which knowledge is created, the resistance they will have towards certain changes, and ultimately the way they share (or the way they do not share) knowledge. **Organizational Processes:** The right processes, environments, and systems that enable KM to be implemented in the organization. **Management & Leadership:** KM requires competent and experienced leadership at all levels. There are a wide variety of KM-related roles that an organization may or may not need to implement, including a CKO, knowledge managers, knowledge brokers and so on. More on this in the section on KM positions and roles.  **Technology:** The systems, tools, and technologies that fit the organization\'s requirements - properly designed and implemented. **Politics:** The long-term support to implement and sustain initiatives that involve virtually all organizational functions, which may be costly to implement (both from the perspective of time and money), and which often do not have a directly visible return on investment. In the past, failed initiatives were often due to an excessive focus on primitive knowledge management tools and systems, at the expense of other areas. While it is still true that KM is about people and human interaction, KM systems have come a long way and have evolved from being an optional part of KM to a critical component. Today, such systems can allow for the capture of unstructured thoughts and ideas, can create virtual conferencing allowing close contact between people from different parts of the world, and so on. This issue will also be addressed throughout the site, and particularly in the knowledge m management strategy section. **[Lesson 4. Importance, Key Benefits, and Principles of Knowledge Management]** Knowledge management is important because it boosts the efficiency of an organization's decision -making ability. In making sure that all employees have access to the overall expertise held within the organization, a smarter workforce is built who are more able to make quick, informed decisions that benefit the company. Innovation is easier to foster within the organization, customers benefit from increased access to best practices and employee turnover is reduced. The importance of knowledge management is growing every year. As the marketplace becomes ever more competitive, one of the best ways to stay ahead of the curve is to build your organization in an intelligent, flexible manner. You want to be able to spot issues from a distance and respond quickly to new information and innovations. 1\. A merger or acquisition could spur the need for codifying knowledge and encouraging teams to share their expertise. 2\. The imminent retirement of key employees could demonstrate the need to capture their knowledge. 3\. An upcoming recruitment drive shows the wisdom in using knowledge management to assist in the training of new employees. The knowledge management (KM) category represents solutions that streamline the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge. When an organization is able to easily access, share, and update business knowledge, it can become more productive and cost-efficient. The ability to access the right knowledge at the right time, via a robust knowledge management system, informs accurate decision-making and stimulates collaboration and innovation. *Uses of Knowledge Management* Knowledge management is responsible for understanding: 1\. What your organization knows. 2\. Where this knowledge is located, e.g., in the mind of a specific expert, a specific department, in old files, with a specific team, etc. 3\. In what form this knowledge is stored e.g., the minds of experts, on paper, etc. How to best transfer this knowledge to relevant people, so as to be able to take advantage of it or to ensure that it is not lost. e.g., setting up a mentoring relationship between experienced experts and new employees, implementing a document management system to provide access to key explicit knowledge. *In other words:* 1\. It helps firms learn from past mistakes and successes. 2\. It better exploits existing knowledge assets by re-deploying them in areas where the firm stands to gain something, e.g., using knowledge from one department to improve or create a product in another department, modifying knowledge from a past process to create a new solution, etc. 3\. It promotes a long-term focus on developing the right competencies and skills and removing obsolete knowledge. 4\. It enhances the firm\'s ability to innovate. 5\. It enhances the firm\'s ability to protect its key knowledge and competencies from being lost or copied. Unfortunately, KM is an area in which companies are often reluctant to invest because it can be expensive to implement properly, and it is extremely difficult to determine a specific ROI. Moreover, KM is a concept the definition of which is not universally accepted, and for example within IT one often sees a much shallower, information- oriented approach. Particularly in the early days, this has led to many \"KM\" failures and these have tarnished the reputation of the subject as a whole. Sadly, even today, probably about one in three blogs that I read on this subject have absolutely nothing to do with the KM that I was taught back in business school. I will discuss this latter issue in greater detail in the future. *Key benefits of Knowledge Management in an Organization* Effective knowledge management reduces operational costs and improves productivity because it pro- vides benefits, for instance: *1. Spend less time recreating existing knowledge*. When information is easy to access and accurate, it reduces the need for coworkers to interrupt each other with emails, chats, and support tickets. Employees and especially support teams spend less time answering repetitive questions, freeing them up to focus on more important---and more profitable---work. *2. Get the information you need sooner.* If you've ever sent an email asking for information only to have that email forwarded multiple times to different people who might know the answer, you know how unproductive it is when finding information feels like playing a game of whack-a-mole. *3. Make fewer mistakes.* The old adage "history repeats itself" is as true in business as it is in all other aspects of life. When employees aren't sharing information, they're doomed to repeat the same mistakes others have already made. But this is avoidable when the lessons-learned from mistakes and failures are easily accessible to everyone. *4. Make informed decision.* When employees share their experiences, lessons-learned, and research on a searchable knowledge system, others can access and review that information in order to consider multiple pieces of data and differing viewpoints before making decisions. 5\. Standardize processes. If you've ever played the telephone game, you know exactly how distorted information is. *6. Provide better service to employees and customers.* Effective knowledge management allows support teams to resolve employee and customer requests quickly and correctly. Employees are able to stay happy and productive, and customers place more trust in the company, which makes them more likely to purchase. *Different types of Knowledge Management* Understanding the different forms that knowledge can exist is an essential step for knowledge management (KM). For example, it should be fairly evident that the knowledge captured in a document would need to be managed (i.e., stored, retrieved, shared, changed, etc.) in a totally different way than that gathered over the years by an expert craftsman. Within business and KM, two types of knowledge are usually defined, namely explicit and tacit knowledge. The former refers to codified knowledge, such as that found in documents, while the latter refers to non-codified and often personal/experience-based knowledge. KM and organizational learning theory almost always take root in the interaction and relationship be- tween these two types of knowledge. This concept has been introduced and developed by Nonaka in the 90\'s (e.g., Nonaka 1994) and remains a theoretical cornerstone of this discipline. Botha et al (2008) point out that tacit and explicit knowledge should be seen as a spectrum rather than as definitive points. Therefore, in practice, all knowledge is a mixture of tacit and explicit elements rather than being one or the other. However, in order to understand knowledge, it is important to define these theoretical opposites. Some researchers make a further distinction and talk of embedded knowledge. This way, one differentiates between knowledge embodied in people and that embedded in processes, organizational culture, routines, etc. (Horvath 2000). Gamble and Blackwell (2001) use a scale consisting of represented-embodied-embedded knowledge, where the first two closely match the explicit- tacit. Without question, the most important distinction within KM is between explicit and tacit knowledge. However, I find that the embedded dimension is a valuable addition, since the managerial requirements for this type of knowledge are quite different. For this reason, the discussions on this site will, when relevant, use all three categorizations of knowledge but the focus will always be primarily on the explicit-tacit dimension. *Explicit Knowledge* This type of knowledge is formalized and codified, and is sometimes referred to as know-what (Brown & Duguid 1998). It is therefore fairly easy to identify, store, and retrieve (Wellman 2009). This is the type of knowledge most easily handled by KMS, which are very effective at facilitating the storage, retrieval, and modification of documents and texts. From a managerial perspective, the greatest challenge with explicit knowledge is similar to information. It involves ensuring that people have access to what they need; that important knowledge is stored; and that the knowledge is reviewed, updated, or discarded. Many theoreticians regard explicit knowledge as being less important (e.g., Brown & Duguid 1991, Cook & Brown 1999, Bukowitz & Williams 1999, etc.). It is considered simpler in nature and cannot contain the rich experience-based know-how that can generate lasting competitive advantage. Although this is changing to some limited degree, KM initiatives driven by technology have often had the flaw of focusing almost exclusively on this type of knowledge. As discussed previously, in fields such as IT there is often a lack of a more sophisticated definition. This has therefore created many products labeled as KM systems, which in actual fact are/were nothing more than information and explicit knowledge management software. Explicit knowledge is found in: databases, memos, notes, documents, etc. (Botha et al. 2008) *Tacit Knowledge* This type of knowledge was originally defined by Polanyi in 1966. It is sometimes referred to as know- how (Brown & Duguid 1998) and refers to intuitive, hard to define knowledge that is largely experience based. Because of this, tacit knowledge is often context dependent and personal in nature. It is hard to communicate and deeply rooted in action, commitment, and involvement (Nonaka 1994). Tacit knowledge is also regarded as being the most valuable source of knowledge, and the most likely to lead to breakthroughs in the organization (Wellman 2009). Gamble & Blackwell (2001) link the lack of focus on tacit knowledge directly to the reduced capability for innovation and sustained competitiveness. KMS have a very hard time handling this type of knowledge. An IT system relies on codification, which is something that is difficult/impossible for the tacit knowledge holder. Using a reference by Polanyi (1966), imagine trying to write an article that would accurately convey how one reads facial expressions. It should be quite apparent that it would be near impossible to convey our intuitive understanding gathered from years of experience and practice. Virtually all practitioners rely on this type of knowledge. An IT specialist for example will troubleshoot a problem based on his experience and intuition. It would be very difficult for him to codify his knowledge into a document that could convey his know-how to a be- ginner. This is one reason why experience in a particular field is so highly regarded in the job market. The exact extent to which IT systems can aid in the transfer and enhancement of tacit knowledge is a rather complicated discussion. For now, suffice it to say that successful KM initiatives must place a very strong emphasis on the tacit dimension, focusing on the people and processes involved, and using IT in a supporting role. Tacit knowledge is found in: the minds of human stakeholders. It includes cultural beliefs, values, attitudes, mental models, etc. as well as skills, capabilities and expertise (Botha et al 2008). On this site, I will generally limit tacit knowledge to knowledge embodied in people, and refer separately to embedded knowledge (as defined below), whenever making this distinction is relevant. *Principles of Knowledge Management* Understanding knowledge is the first step to managing it effectively. Stately or slangy, it\'s a fact that knowledge is edging out buildings and gear as the essential business asset. Even advertising and marketing use such words as knowledge, intelligence, and ideas. When many companies must innovate or die, their ability to learn, adapt, and change becomes a core competency for survival. Most seek more knowledge through training, education, and career development. Every business is a knowledge business; every worker is a knowledge worker. The knowledge economy has brought new power to workers. Many are \"free agents,\" contingency workers that make up almost a third of the U.S. workforce. Workers own the means of production-their knowledge. They can sell it, trade it, or give it away and still own it. As a result, the ways we manage people have undergone a dramatic, fundamental shift. Knowledge is perishable. The shelf life of expertise is limited because new technologies, products, and services continually pour into the marketplace. No one can hoard knowledge. People and companies must constantly renew, replenish, expand, and create more knowledge. That requires a radical overhaul of the old knowledge equation: knowledge = power, so hoard it. The new knowledge equation is knowledge = power, so share it and it will multiply. Widespread noncompetitive bench- marking and best-practice sharing show how eagerly we are embracing the concept of knowledge sharing. Hubert St. Onge, who led the development of the knowledge management approach at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, sees the primary challenge as making an organization\'s unarticulated or tacit knowledge explicit so that it can be shared and renewed constantly. \"It is important,\" he says, \"to understand how knowledge is formed, and how people and organizations learn to use it wisely.\" *Nevertheless, here are 12 fairly steady principles about knowledge.* 1\. Knowledge is messy. Because knowledge is connected to everything else, you can\'t isolate the knowledge aspect of anything neatly. In the knowledge universe, you can\'t pay attention to just one factor. 2*.* Knowledge is self-organizing. The self that knowledge organizes around is organizational or group identity and purpose. 3*.* Knowledge seeks community. Knowledge wants to happen, just as life wants to happen. Both want to happen as community. Nothing illustrates this principle more than the Internet. 4\. Knowledge travels via language. Without a language to describe our experience, we can\'t communicate what we know. Expanding organizational knowledge means that we must develop the languages we use to describe our work experience. 5\. The more you try to pin knowledge down, the more it slips away. It\'s tempting to try to tie up knowledge as codified knowledge-documents, patents, libraries, databases, and so forth. But too much rigidity and formality regarding knowledge lead to the stultification of creativity. 6\. Looser is probably better. Highly adaptable systems look sloppy. The survival rate of diverse, decentralized systems is higher. That means we can waste resources and energy trying to control knowledge too tightly*.* 7\. There is no one solution. Knowledge is always changing. For the moment, the best approach to managing it is one that keeps things moving along while keeping options open. 8\. Knowledge doesn\'t grow forever. Eventually, some knowledge is lost or dies, just as things in nature. Unlearning and letting go of old ways of thinking, even retiring whole blocks of knowledge, contribute to the vitality and evolution of knowledge. 9\. No one is in charge. Knowledge is a social process. That means no one person can take responsibility for collective knowledge. 10\. You can\'t impose rules and systems. If knowledge is truly self-organizing, the most important way to advance it is to remove the barriers to self-organization. In a supportive environment, knowledge will take care of itself. 11\. There is no silver bullet. There is no single leverage point or best practice to advance knowledge. It must be supported at multiple levels and in a variety of ways. 12\. How you define knowledge determines how you manage it. The \"knowledge question\" can present itself many ways. For example, concern about the ownership of knowledge leads to acquiring codified knowledge that is protected by copyrights and patents. *Core Competencies of Knowledge* One way to organize a company around knowledge is to develop a knowledge competencies approach. Many people use the terms capability and competency interchangeably. But core performance capabilities and core knowledge competencies are distinct, though complementary, aspects of organizational identity. Core performance capabilities. They are the mechanisms by which core knowledge competencies are turned into products and services. Core performance capabilities are processes that enable a company to deliver high-quality products and services with speed, efficiency, and effective customer service. Core performance capabilities are key to a company\'s success. *Such capabilities include:* - bringing new products to market quickly - modifying or customizing products or services quickly - managing logistics - attracting and recruiting quality employees - sharing learning, insight, and best practices ***References*** - Dalkir, K. (2011). Knowledge Management in Theory and Practice (2nd edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. - Hislop, D., Bosua, R., & Helms, R. (2018). Knowledge management in organizations: A critical introduction. (4th edition) Oxford: Oxford University Press. - Holzer, Marc -- Manoharan, Aroon P. -- Melitsk, James I (2018). E-Government and Information Technology Management: Concepts and Best Practices. Melvin& Leigh, Publishers; 1st edition. - Reddick, Christopher (2018). Public Administration and Information Technology. Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning. - Manuel Pedro Rodríguez Bolívar and Laura Alcaide Muñoz (2018) E-Participation in Smart Cities: Technologies and Models of Governance for Citizen Engagement (Public Administration and Information Technology Book 34). **\*\*\*\*\*the END\*\*\*\*\***