The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management – Carla O’Dell

I just finished this excellent book, The Executive’s Role in Knowledge Management by Carla O’Dell, and am doing reviews in two media, a tradition print magazine and this blog. My review for KM Review will appear in the November issue. It will focus on the primary intended audience, senior managers who want their investments in knowledge management to be successful and provide real business value. There is another related audience to this group, those responsible for knowledge management who want to educate their senior leadership on how to support their efforts. While there are many books on knowledge management, including some excellent ones by APQC, I know of no other specifically designed for this purpose and highly recommend it. You can get it through Amazon or the APQC site and give it to your management. The pay off will be large.

For this blog post, I will address another audience, one probably not intended by the authors, but one no less important – those who want to successfully implement blogs within their corporations for business purposes. Blogs can serve many business purposes and knowledge management is one of these, but certainly not the only function. Blogs are also not the same as knowledge management, but they can supplement a knowledge management capability.

However, regardless of the intended business use for blogs in your corporation, there are certain factors, especially non-technical ones, which are essential for success. This work by Carla O’Dell covers many of the related issues. The successful use of both knowledge management and blogs involves the creative use of technology and processes to support workforce performance aligned to business goals.

For example, Carla provides a series of steps for successful implementation. These are similar to ones I have suggested for KM and portals, and ones I completely support as critical for both blogs and knowledge management.

1. establish a business need for blogs
2. create a solid business case
3. establish tangible measures of success
4. create a framework for technical support
5. cultivate a knowledge sharing culture
6. lead an internal communication strategy to support the business use of blogs

The book is organized around these steps and provides many practical examples from knowledge management efforts than largely can be extended to blog efforts. I will let you find the details in the book. It is a quick initial read that you will go back to as you move forward with an implementation.