The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management by Carla O'Dell

Product Description

The absolute, most critical success factor in knowledge management (KM) success is senior-level support. The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management can help senior managers set sensible, yet aggressive, expectations and goals for a KM initiative and help KM practitioners who must establish a compelling business case to gain senior-level support.

For those who grasp the potential of their organizations' knowledge assets and want to develop strategies for leveraging them, this book can act as a guidebook. For those who are actively involved in crafting their organization's knowledge-based business strategy, this book offers the perspectives of leaders who have faced this challenge and succeeded. For those who want to use knowledge and learning to support existing core competencies, as well as create new ones, this book offers excellent examples. Most importantly, this book is for senior managers who lead by example and want to adapt successful approaches that will result in significant gains.

With examples from Ford Motor Co., the World Bank, IBM Corp., Caterpillar Inc., NASA, Best Buy Co. Inc., Schlumberger Ltd., Air Products and Chemicals Inc., Millennium Pharmaceuticals Inc., Xerox Corp., and more, this book draws on APQC's years of research and pares down the information to the core KM principles and proven practices, with an unwavering focus on the bottom line.

What others are saying about The Executive's Role in Knowledge Management:

Nobody has more knowledge than Carla O'Dell and APQC about how to make knowledge management pay off. If knowledge is important to your business--and isn't that true everywhere?--you can't afford not to manage it. This book goes well beyond theory, with tangible measures, real-world examples of financial gains, and a frank discussion of what elements of KM implementation will cost.--Thomas H. Davenport, president's distinguished professor, Babson College, and Accenture Fellow

As you move down the path from knowledge sharing to being knowledge-driven as an organization, the lessons learned by APQC in their research of best practices in more than 300 organizations are invaluable in providing guideposts for executives to lead their organizations forward. You could not have a better guide to the future. --Robert H. Buckman, former president of Buckman Laboratories International Inc.
Product Details
Amazon Sales Rank: #404842 in Books
Published on: 2004-04-28
Binding: Paperback
129 pages
Editorial Reviews

Thomas H. Davenport, president's distinguished professor, Babson College, and Accenture Fellow
This book goes well beyond theory, with tangible measures and a frank discussion of what KM implementation will cost.

Bob Paladino, senior vice president of global performance, Crown Castle International Corp.
A practical approach to translate intangible, knowledge-based assets into tangible outcomes for shareholders, customers, operations, and people.

Robert H. Buckman, former president of Buckman Laboratories International Inc.
You could not have a better guide to the future.
Customer Reviews

An Invaluable Source of Information and Wisdom

In a previous book, If Only We Knew What We Know, Carla O'Dell and C. Jackson Grayson focus on what they call "beds of knowledge" that are "hidden resources of intelligence that exist in almost every organization, relatively untapped and unmined." They suggest all manner of effective strategies to "tap into this hidden asset, capturing it, organizing it, transferring it, and using it to create customer value, operational excellence, and product innovation -- all the while increasing profits and effectiveness." In this volume, O'Dell explains how to devise and then sustain a systematic process of connecting people to people and people to the knowledge they need to act effectively and create new knowledge. Her observations and recommendations are based on several decades of research conducted by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) of which she continues to serve as president, and, on her own direct association and involvement with knowledge management initiatives at all manner of organizations.

O'Dell's focus is on knowledge management (KM) leadership and that includes but by no means is limited to C-level executives. She correctly insists that effective KM must be achieved and then sustained at all levels and in all areas of the given enterprise. Of greatest interest to me is what she has to say about communities of practice (CoP). With rigor and eloquence, she examines several examples (e.g. Caterpillar's Knowledge Network, Ford Motor Company's CoPs, best practices transfer, and After-Action Review, Halliburton's Energy Services Group, and IBM's CoP that focuses on expertise, content, collaboration, and learning), all of which illustrate these common components:

1. The skill of the community leader rather than senior management is the most critical success factor.

2. The CoP reflects a necessary and natural grouping of people to create and share knowledge.

3. Because supply-driven efforts are rarely successful, their CoP creates and maintains its content, rather than having content created for it by other sources.

4. Those involved recognize as well as experience the value of collaborative interaction between and among them.

5. Local community knowledge transcends the local context and personal experience of contributors, thereby creating critical knowledge for "the global community."

Although O'Dell's exemplary organizations are all major corporations, it is important to keep in mind that any organization (regardless of size and nature) can establish and then sustain a CoP, one that has an effective content management system. O'Dell explains how to devise, implement, and then maintain one.

In the final chapter, she responds to a question several of her readers may ask: "Where do I go from here?" She recommends a nine-step process that begins with "getting smart" by understanding knowledge-sharing behaviors and support systems. "Read. Benchmark. Get feedback." The last step is to sustain improvements while planning to "scale up" by extending as well as enhancing them.

I highly recommend this book and the aforementioned If Only We Knew What We Know as well as the APQC resources identified on Pages 127-129. Also Thomas H. Davenport's Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning (co-authored with Jeanne G. Harris) and Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Results from Knowledge Workers; Stephen Denning's The Springboard: How Storytelling Ignites Action in Knowledge-Era Organizations and The Leader's Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative; Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization and The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (co-authored with Art Kleiner, Charlotte Roberts, and George Roth); Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success; Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman's X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate and Succeed; James P. Andrew's Payback: Reaping the Rewards of Innovation; and Richard Ogle's Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas.