Knowledge Management Toolkit

Citation

Morris, A. (2001), "Knowledge Management Toolkit", The Electronic Library, Vol. 19 No. 3, pp. 184-188. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2001.19.3.184.1

This loose leaf, photocopiable resource is subtitled “A resource for creating policy and strategy, with practical guidance for managing knowledge at all levels within the organization”. The aim of the Toolkit is to help identify questions and issues that need to be addressed when developing a knowledge management strategy in organisations and to give practical guidance in the form of facts, figures, techniques, checklists and management tools to help managers through the process. It is aimed at HT specialists, IT specialists, managers, trainers and project managers.

The Toolkit comes in three parts. The first part is an introduction to knowledge management with chapters devoted to “What is knowledge management?”; “Where do we find knowledge in organizations?”; “Why manage knowledge?”; and “How do we manage knowledge?”

The second part covers the knowledge management process and has three chapters. “Planning and preparation” examines the organisational factors affecting knowledge management, the development of a business case for knowledge management, the knowledge audit and knowledge mapping. “Implementation” focuses on capturing knowledge, classifying knowledge and the technology for storing and disseminating knowledge while the final chapter in this part, “Next steps” attempts to draw the previous sections together and sets out the roles and skills for knowledge management and provides links to knowledge management resources.

The final part “Tools and techniques” introduces the toolkit; provides checklists to identify current human resources, internal communications and technology practices; and goes through the process of gaining agreement to proceed with a knowledge management project. It also details how to plan and conduct a knowledge audit and a knowledge management project; provides advice on how to implement the knowledge management process and how to communicate with and train staff. The final chapter examines action planning and future steps.

Although useful information is contained in the Resource, overall I was disappointed. I found the contents rather superficial; I would have liked more detail and more emphasis on cultural change. Examples are few and those provided are not very inspiring. The structure too is confusing. The title is Knowledge Management Toolkit yet “Introduction to the knowledge management toolkit” is Chapter 8!Much of the contents of Part 2 could have been combined with Part 3. At present, several topics occur in both parts, making it confusing for readers. “Classifying knowledge” is a section title in both Chapter 6 and Chapter 12, for example. Knowledge auditing is also repeated in Part 2 and Part 3. There are also some typos and inconsistencies such as the capitalisation of chapter headings and the use of dashes in “out‐of‐date” but not “up to date”. The list of resources is rather limited, some expected companies, such as Autonomy, for example, are not listed. The authors do not provide either a bibliography or an index. At £99.00 I would therefore question whether the Resource is good value for money.