Day 27: Develop Task Based Knowledge Management for your IWMS

Posted on 27 August 2009
Tags: 31 Days, Implementation, Knowledge Management

Your Integrated Workplace Management System is an excellent management tool to maximize the Return on Investment of your Real Estate portfolio. In addition to that, IWMS’s streamline organizational processes within every organization to reduce costs and increase efficiencies, positively impacting your organizations’ bottom line.

However, software solutions are only contributing to the bottom line of organizations when people can actually use the software on a daily basis. It seems quite obvious, but managers tend to neglect this extremely important foundation of software success. If you want your software to be rewarding in terms of contribution to your organization, you need ensure that people use your software.

Although IWMS’s should be user-friendly in the first place, users can’t operate the system without knowledge. As knowledge creation / development in the IWMS domain is usually not part of the project, your task is to proactively support the creation / development of IWMS knowledge.

Today’s teaching

In today’s business climate strategic creation and usage of knowledge is essential for organizations. As more organizations are evolving to be information organizations of knowledge workers, strategic knowledge management can provide significant competitive advantages.

Knowledge Management (KM) comprises a range of practices used in an organization to identify, create, represent, distribute and enable adoption of insights and experiences. Such insights and experiences comprise knowledge, either embodied in individuals or embedded in organizational processes or practice. (Wikipedia)

The goal of knowledge management is to manage repositories of information to facilitate information access and reuse. This may involve providing tools that a user can apply to access information resources, such as data warehouses, or developing practices that encourage employees to contribute to knowledge repositories (O’Leary 1998).

The thin red line throughout literature about Knowledge Management is to support the creation and re-use of knowledge that will result in competitive gains for your organization.

Task Based Knowledge Management

Although a lot of both scientific and popular literature is available about Knowledge Management, far less exists about Task Based Knowledge Management (TbKM).

In TbKM knowledge is considered as embodied in actors, or “knowers” who engaged in activity. Accordingly, the TbKM framework is developed around an activity system. Its key tenet is the management of knowledge work rather than knowledge (Burstein and Linger, 2006).

This TbKM approach is particularly interesting for your IWMS. Instead of focusing on the pure knowledge, TbKM is focusing more on the management of the tasks.

Within your IWMS processes are dominantly present. Facility Management and Real Estate processes are to be found everywhere in your organization, and in most cases these processes have been embodied in the solution itself.

Therefore, a Task Based approach to effectively managing knowledge about the tasks should be your goal.

How to incorporate TbKM in your IWMS

Below you will find a strategy to incorporate TbKM in your Integrated Workplace Management System.

Identify

The first thing you need to do is to identify where TbKM can be applied. The most competitive gains can be gained when TbKM is implemented in:

Processes that are critical
Processes that have high volumes
Processes that cause a lot of errors

E.g. Errors in major events might be frustrating, but major events are only held once a year. On the contrary, errors in Conference Room Booking Processes have a lower individual impact, but due to the enormous volume have a much higher impact on the organization

Create

Before you can create knowledge, you need to be able to collect this knowledge from individual actors. You can capture knowledge in various formats however, I recommend collecting and storing it digitally. Storing insights and ideas of individual actors allows you to search, distribute and apply knowledge easily whenever you need to.

A few IWMS vendors have embedded a Knowledge Base as part of their solution which I would recommend to use. However, there are also specialized software applications for the Knowledge Base Management both proprietary and open-source.

To effectively use knowledge base software, it should at least support:

Advanced Search (incl. Free Text Search both in titles and body)
Categorization of items
Upload / include documents, screenshots, etc.
Most popular, Most viewed
Rating of usefulness
Linkable
Other users viewed

Apply

Knowledge about individual tasks should be available whenever required. This seems obvious, but is imperative for effective TbKM.

E.g. when an IWMS user is entering a lease abstract to a lease contract in your IWMS, and is not able to do so due to whatever reason, Task based Knowledge needs to be available to support this user.

In addition to that, the user needs to be able to add his / her own ideas, screenshots, etc. to the knowledge base as this might be valuable a source of learning for other users that encounter the same problem.

Manage

A knowledge base is only helpful when it contains relevant, useful and up to date items that are beneficial to the user that requires support for the completion of a specific task.

The only way to achieve this is to proactively manage the Knowledge Base. Therefore I would recommend you to include Knowledge Base Management as part of the Quality Assurance Organization.

Today’s task

In today’s task you are going to set up Task Based Knowledge Management for your IWMS. By using the methodology presented in today’s teaching you should be able to setup Knowledge Management for IWMS however, if you have any questions you can contact me.

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