QUESTION: Can you explain the relationship between knowledge management and e-learning and suggest some resources to help me learn more?

Hartley

Both e-learning and knowledge management fit under the larger umbrella of learning methodologies and they are in some ways parallel. E-learning entails courses or knowledge nuggets delivered through technological means--generally, over the Internet, on an intranet, or with media such as CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs. Some people also classify the management, tracking, reporting, and administration of technology-enabled learning as e-learning.

E-learning can be one component of knowledge management, which involves the capture, storage, and distribution of a company's knowledge assets. Those assets can include data, information, processes, policies, and anything else important to an organization. KM can also be used to capture the "tribal" or tacit knowledge that abounds in an organization. For example, who is the person to call when you need to set up a videoconference? What company has a tool to help you close a sale with a large client?, and so forth. Sometimes just knowing whom to contact in an organization can save you hours of wasted effort.

Systems and software on the market now can facilitate that process (or claim to). But one of the issues with traditional knowledge management systems is that they often have to be front-end loaded. In other words, the system is only as smart as all of the information that's entered up front. That can be a problem for large corporations. An alternative to front-end loading is to create knowledge management systems on the fly. These systems mine information from people as they work or from simple questionnaires created for the workforce. (See abuzz.com and tacit.com for examples of these.) With these systems, collecting information doesn't take a lot of additional work. However, because some of them mine key words from business emails, privacy issues may arise.

I did a quick search on knowledge management at google.com and got 706,000 matches. I think we need some KM for knowledge management.

Voci

Knowledge management and e-learning are two strategies that organizations use to achieve corporate goals. Knowledge is culture-dependent and specific, and since culture is the glass ceiling of any organization’s performance level, culture is the key limit that must be overcome if innovation and continuous learning are to be achieved.

A learning organization is one that is skilled at acquiring, creating, transferring, retaining, and applying knowledge to achieve results. Where KM is an active component of the culture, business practices promote cross-fertilization in the value chain. Creativity and risk-taking are encouraged, valued, and rewarded individually and organizationally. The work environment is one that celebrates spirit, is responsive, and provides inspiration for employees to innovate and take risks.

In such an organization, the role of technology is to enable easy access to people and information that is "just in time." The system has a capacity to distribute knowledge to anyone, anytime, anywhere, and the organization has developed the discipline to share knowledge--in fact, sharing knowledge is a core value of the organizational culture. The business environment supports informal and formal learning, face-to-face interaction, and distance learning.

What characterizes businesses that integrate KM and e-learning? The business processes require "after action" reporting, annotating the actions taken in order to define the learning that resulted. This is then shared and distributed so that everyone can benefit from what took place. Another characteristic of integrated e-learning and knowledge management programs is that the culture values and rewards employees' experiences and the sharing of knowledge among all levels of workers. In fact, knowledge sharing is built into performance review measures. Also, at this type of organization, intellectual capital is systematically maintained and accessible via technology, and the environment nurtures and strengthens the sense of community and bonds between people while stimulating and supporting the translation of knowledge into job performance.

In such an organization, business processes are integrated to ensure that people are engaged in mission-critical assignments, a key component for employee retention. Technology provides user-friendly tools to enhance individual job performance.

Best practices include

• a clearly defined sense of identity and purpose as a knowledge-centered company
• an explicit set of expectations for sharing knowledge in a systems approach to provide direction for knowledge-centered activities
• cultural openness so people know where and how to get information
• flexible tools, technologies, and equipment that foster communication
• connectivity and knowledge harvesting.

Types of projects most often undertaken to build a knowledge network or culture include

• creating an intranet
• building knowledge repositories
• forming networks of knowledge workers
• mapping sources of internal expertise
• establishing new knowledge roles.

The most difficult challenges facing organizations when starting a KM initiative include changing people’s behaviors, measuring value and performance of knowledge assets, and determining what knowledge should be managed.

For more on the ties between e-learning and knowledge management, see "A Smarter Frankenstein: The Merging of E-Learning and Knowledge Management." Other helpful resources on knowledge management include these articles:

• "The Human Element: Knowledge Management's Secret Ingredient"
• "Knowledge Management Goes Mainstream"
• "The Birth of the World Café," www.theworldcafe.com/storybirth.html.

Other links for knowledge management resources include

• www.kmworld.com
• www.kmresource.com
• www.kmnews.com/links.htm.

Voci also recommends these books:

• Allee, Verna. The Knowledge Evolution: Expanding Organizational Knowledge. Newton, MA: Butterworth Heinemann, 1997.
• Bennett, Sharin and Brown, Juanita. Learning Organizations: Developing Cultures for Tomorrow’s Workplace. Ed. by Sarita Chawla and John Renesch. Portland, OR: Productivity Press, 1995.
• Edvinsson, Leif and Malone, Michael. Intellectual Capital: Realizing Your Company’s True Value by Finding its Hidden Brainpower. New York: Harper Business, 1997.
• Hamel, Gary and Prahalad, C.K. Competing for the Future. Boston: Harvard Business Press, 1994.
• Helgeson, Sally. The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations. New York: Doubleday, 1995.
• Koestenbaum, Peter. The Heart of Business: Ethics, Power and Philosophy. San Francisco: Saybrook, 1987.
• Owen, Harrison. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1997.
• Saint-Onge, Hubert. "Tacit Knowledge: The Key to the Strategic Alignment of Intellectual Capital." Strategy & Leadership, v24n2, March/April 1996.
• Schein, Edgar H. Organizational Culture and Leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1991.
• Senge, Peter. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
• Vaill, Peter B. Learning as a Way of Being. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1996.
• Wheatley, Margaret. Leadership & The New Science: Learning About Organization from an Orderly Universe. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992.
• Zohar, Danah and Marshall, Ian. The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics and a New Social Vision. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1994.
• Zukav, Gary. The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. Toronto: Bantam, 1979.

Published: May2002