The 8 Cs of Knowledge Management

In one of my discussions with a friend, the question of what would you look at when we create a KM framework came up. I thought this would be a good topic to cover for today's blog too!

Quoting from Madanmohan Rao's "Leading with Knowledge", the 8 C's of KM while developing a framework are:

1. Connectivity: What connectivity devices, bandwidths, interfaces, technologies and tools do your knowledge workers have when they are in the office or on the road?
2. Content: What knowledge assets are relevant to the context of your workflow, and what are your strategies for codification, classification, archival, retrieval, usage and tracking?
3. Community: What are the core communities of practice aligned with your business and what organizational support do you have for identifying, nurturing, and harnessing them?
4. Culture: Does your organization have a culture of learning where your employees thirst for knowledge, trust one another and have visible support from their management?
5. Capacity: What are your strategies for building knowledge-centric capacity in your employees, for instance, via workshops, white papers, mentoring and e-learning?
6. Cooperation: Do your employees have a spirit of open cooperation, and does your organization cooperate on the KM front with business partners, industry consortia and universities?
7. Commerce: What commercial and other incentives do you use to promote your KM practice? How are you "pricing" the contribution, acceptance and usage of knowledge assets?
8. Capital: What percentage and amount of your revenues are invested in your KM Practices, and how are you measuring their usage and benefits in monetary and qualitative terms?

These set of questions actually help us decide on a strategy to be taken when we look at creation of the framework of Knowledge Management in any organization.

Cheers,

Sujatha