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- Establish a rewards and incentive policy for sharing knowledge. To ensure that
such people will share their expertise, AFMC management must make sharing more
lucrative than hoarding knowledge. To establish value, evaluation criteria should
be established, written, and eventually incorporated in the Human Resources
evaluation process so as to provide direct evidence of AFMC employees being
rewarded for sharing knowledge. The reward policies should be valuable, such as
substantial monetary awards, high recognition, salary increases, or promotions.
Such incentives promote a shift in behavior toward nurturing a sharing culture.
Technical Needs Assessment: Recommendation Descriptions
- Develop a technology evaluation and approval mechanism that explicitly links
requirements for new information technology to process improvements that
impact mission accomplishment and customer satisfaction. As organizations
have begun to recognize the value of KM to their future well-being, technology
providers have been scrambling to recast their data warehousing, intranet, docu-
ment management, workflow, and so forth, products and the ultimate KM solution.
All of these providers fall short in that KM solutions are not “one size fits all” but,
rather, organization specific. Without a business strategy, there is no rational basis
to evaluate the various technology solutions and craft a KM toolkit that delivers
value to the organization and its customers. Organizational evaluation, then, needs
to start with an assessment of the mission and business strategy. Value chain
activities (research, develop, test, acquire, deliver, and support) should be used as
the first level of indenture for evaluating AFMC’s KM system. - Review AFMC Web sites and identify improvements to increase their effective-
ness in making knowledge available to the users. When Web technology was new
and viewed as a supplement to accomplishing work, efficiency did not seem very
important. Web engineers were more concerned with the eye appeal and user
friendliness of the site than whether it provided valuable information. Users readily
accepted the fact that they would be directed through several Web sites before
accessing any meaningful information. Today, however, the Web is becoming a key
work tool for many of AFMC’s personnel. For this reason, reduction in search and
retrieval time and one-click access to information is no longer an option but a
necessity. All AFMC Web sites should be reviewed for their ability to provide
value-added knowledge to the workforce. - Establish a working group to reduce redundancy in transactional databases.
Much of the KM literature is focused on collaboration and the extraction of tacit
knowledge. However, the foundation of an organization’s knowledge and the
source of many of its business metrics are found in its rather mundane workhorse
transactional data systems. Several of the interviewees for this assessment
commented on their inability to trust the data without independent validation. They
reported that the same data element could be found in multiple sources with
different values. Technology in and of itself cannot fix this problem, but enforcing
the rules of good data management can go a long way to establishing trust in the
data. Among these rules is assigning responsibility for ensuring the validity of
each data element to the maximum possible extent. Each AFMC CoP should form