paper -
10 Knowledge Management: A Cookbook for Beginners
Geoffrey
Marsh, Center for Information Technology, NIH
Knowledge Management is a necessary and integral part
of an effective and successful support organization, yet it is also a buzzword
that is perhaps over-hyped and over-used. How can a support operation initiate
a KM project in a manner that will bring them up to speed quickly, efficiently
and at a low cost, while still positioning them to take advantage of current
and future trends in the industry? This paper will explore the lessons learned
by one organization, the Center for Information Technology (CIT) at the
National Institutes of Health (NIH). CIT initiated a KM project in 1996,
building a Knowledge Base that now contains over 10,000 discrete knowledge
objects.
The paper's focus will NOT be on hardware, software,
bits or bytes, but rather we will look at what steps an organization can take
to build a successful KM initiative from the ground up. These lessons can be
applied to any organization regardless of their technical infrastructure
already in place. Additionally, this paper will also discuss how these lessons
learned relate to what are currently considered best practices in the KM
industry.
Target Audience: IT and Project Managers, as well as technical staff and anyone else interested in initiating a KM project. Keywords: knowledge management, knowledge database, project management