Recommended Book

The Knowledge Management Fieldbook

by Wendi R. Bukowitz and Ruth L. Williams
Reviewed by Michael J.D. Sutton

The Imperative for a Fieldbook?

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, describes a "fieldbook" as: "an illustrated book that provides descriptions of plants or animals found in nature." This is a reasonable analogy for the manner in which this book has been set up to help the executive survey the landscape of knowledge management.

The Fieldbook attempts to describe mechanisms for circumventing the inertia or outright obstacles to this emerging discipline of knowledge management. The reader is lead through numerous case studies, profiles and vignettes reviewing how corporations have risen to the challenge of knowledge management.

The authors suggest a very workable and concise definition for knowledge management: "Knowledge Management is the process by which the organization generates wealth from its intellectual or knowledge-based assets."

This leads into a second definition of intellectual or knowledge-based assets, which the authors provide: "anything valued without physical dimensions that is embedded in people or derived from processes, systems, and culture associated with an organization."

Though broad, it gives the practitioner significant leeway in addressing intellectual assets.

These assets may include:

• competencies
• customer and relationship maps
• expertise
• intellectual property
• licenses
• name brands
• organization repositories (in databases, document bases, text bases)
• patents
• process and business rules repositories
• trademarks

Executives often describe the employee-based assets as "collaborative intellectual assets" since the employees "volunteer" to part with it as an integral part of their value contribution to the enterprise. There is a critical difference between knowledge-based assets and traditional tangible assets. The knowledge-based assets are retained in the minds of the employees and not owned by the enterprise. The traditional assets show up on the balance sheet.

These intellectual or knowledge-based assets can be manipulated, diffused, and enriched by appropriate information technology. In fact, the Fieldbook helps to support the argument that IT positively transforms the economics of information and knowledge management.

The Knowledge Management Fieldbook is based upon the authors' Knowledge Management Process Framework (KMPF). The blueprint encompasses two parallel branches of activity within the enterprise: tactical (day-to-day) and strategic (long-range). It attempts to outline the life cycle surrounding knowledge-based assets.

There are four steps composing the tactical continuum of the knowledge management process:

1. Get - making or acquiring information from selected sources or internal resources
2. Use - making use of the building blocks through innovation and idea generation
3. Learn - formally recognizing the value of applied education
4. Contribute - packaging and transferring what has been learnt

Consequently, there are three steps encompassing the strategic continuum of the knowledge management process:

1. Assess - mapping current knowledge assets to future knowledge requirements
2. Build/Sustain - ensuring the organization that it will remain viable and competitive by means of its future knowledge assets
3. Divest - disposing through destruction or re-sale the knowledge assets after they have outlived their usefulness

Knowledge Management Diagnostic

The Knowledge Management Process Framework spawns the Knowledge Management Diagnostic (KMD). Each division of the diagnostic tool corresponds to a step in the KMPF:

1. Get
2. Use
3. Learn
4. Contribute
5. Assess
6. Build/Sustain
7. Divest

This qualitative tool will incite introspection, reflection and contemplation of the issues and concerns that surround knowledge management in your organization. This subjective tool can trigger quantitative and objective metrics that will provide justification and support for Return on Investment (ROI) analysis. Moreover, as an assessment or auditing tool, you have the capability to create systematic baseline measurements to track a knowledge management program's performance. If you come back to the results and outcomes annually, you can easily determine if you are sliding backwards or progressing steadily forward in managing the knowledge processes of the organization.

The cover of The Knowledge Management Fieldbook states without hesitation that "this is the only book that provides you with the tools and techniques to set up, manage and exploit a knowledge management system within your organization." Ms. Bukowitz and Ms. Williams raise the expectations of readers from the very outset, and upon finishing the Fieldbook, most readers would agree with the promotional moniker.

Wendi Bukowitz is Director of the Intellectual Asset Management Practice of PriceWaterhouseCoopers in Chicago, IL. Ruth Williams is also a member of PriceWaterhouseCooper's Intellectual Asset Management Practice.

To order:
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