Web 2.0 for KM

Technology seems to be impacting society and human life more quickly now than ever before. Social networking sites, for example, seem to be making big news every day. The latest case is Google's announcement to acquire the video sharing site YouTube for an amount of $1.65 billion. YouTube is not a large company, with only 65 employees and several years of life. And it has not begun to make profit. It remains to be seen how this acquisition is going to impact the industry.

It has never been easier for ordinary people to post and share music, pictures, and videoes through the Internet. For knowledge works, wiki and blogging sites promote crowd authoring and collaboration. The participation has never been so easy and attempting for many people who would never thought it would be possible for them to own that much control over a webpage. It's this kind of convenience and power that makes these tools so relevant and valuable for knowledge workers.

How do knowledge management and Web 2.0 technologies join force to impact business strategy? Take mass customization as the example, a company can use blogs to communicate expert insights regarding its products and services to the customers. Customers can be encouraged to dialog with the company regarding their thoughts and feelings. Wiki technology can be used to involve customers in designing new products. The online communnity, if properly nurtured, can represent a cost affordable, technically flexible and scalable, and user friendly tool for gaining susttainable competitive advantage that is difficult to replicate.

Or, what about document processing Websites that let you create, edit, and even share documents without a proprietary word processing software? For small businesses, these tools and social networking tools are not just very useful but also very affordable.

Web 2.0 technologies are everybody's KM tools.

Emergence of Second Wave e-commerce and Web 2.0 services

During the first years of e-commerce phenomenon, the widespread connectivity and the friendly user interface of Internet technologies promised to revolutionize most major business practices and thereby transform the traditional business competition landscape. Like the case with other major technological developments in the recent decades, the expectation pendulum quickly swung from the extremely optimistic to disappointing pessimistic, following the bursting of the dot-com bubbles at the turn of the new century. In the meantime, many new start-ups continue to offer experimental but highly innovative Web-based services. Established enterprises also diligently integrate e-commerce capabilities into their overall business strategies to streamline their business processes and enhance their customer contact. The Internet has continued to be the center piece in companies’ technological as well as business infrastructure. While the investment in Internet-related businesses between 1997 and 2000 was more than $100 billion, much more (more than $200 billion) was spent to purchase e-commerce businesses that were in trouble to start new online ventures between 2000 and 2003 (Schneider, 2007), a sure sign of the second wave of e-commerce steadily emerging. The demise of e-commerce that was once so widely reported was really more of a slowdown than a true collapse, in other words. The annual sales volumes of major e-commerce sectors, such as B2C and B2B, have continued to increase.

Among the differences between the first and the second waves of e-commerce, the most striking are the convergence of the participant roles and the connection technologies. On the technological side, broadband access and wireless transmission greatly enhance the convenience of communication and facilitate exchange of multimedia contents. Furthermore, the anywhere and anytime computing offered by wireless transmission technologies, stimulates rich and real time communications between the various e-commerce participants. From the service provider’s perspective, these Web 2.0 services represent a new wave of innovative business model that threatens the future of well-established technology giants.

The Wikipedia defines Web 2.0 as a collection of Websites that “refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that let people collaborate and share information online in previously unavailable ways.” Web 2.0 services are characterized by user-centered services to provide a technological platform for user participation in content development. The rapidly growing web logs and wiki sites demonstrate the effect of the network effect that once was considered one of the most powerful features of the Internet as a business strategy implementation technology. The network effect predicts the benefit for the network participants resulting from linking a group of entities grows at an exponential rate. In the Web 2.0 scenario, both buyers and sellers are actively involved in collaborated activities of value creation. Those companies that successfully harness this shared power and responsibilities are making Internet a truly interactive mass media and are capturing an increasing share of customer attention. The most publicized examples include http://www.google.com/, http://www.myspace.com/, http://www.youtube.com/, and some well-participated wiki sites. It must be noted that these services are used by businesses as well as individuals for a wide variety of purposes, including knowledge management.

Reference:
Schneider, G.. (2007). Electronic Commerce (7th Ed.). Boston, Massachussetts: Course Technology.

What's coming up next?

The first exam shows me how we are communicating on knowledge management. It also allows me to fine tune for the rest of the semester.

We will continue to read articles on knowledge creation, distribution and application. On the technology side, we'll discuss Web 2.0 services, data mining technologies, concept mapping, mind mapping, software agent, content management, expert systems, neural network, etc. We'll also experiment with wiki, a convenient Internet tool that has been used by many companies to support collaboration projects.

Some other topics worth discussing include: community of practice, organizational culture, knowledge accounting, knowledge management program implementation methodology, and knowledge management for important business activities such as customer relationship management and e-commerce.

Knowledge Integration is the key to providing effective and efficient health care service

The article, Just-in-Time Delivery Comes to Knowledge Management, brings up major issues regarding knowledge sharing and application. In a highly specialized application domain such as healthcare, both existence and usage of high-level expertise are crucial to the success of the healthcare system. While high-level expertise is typically owned by a small number of experts who develop their expertise through long years of practicing experience and learning, such expertise should be made available to and deployed by a relatively larger number of practicing physicians. It’s apparent that the availability of high-level expertise does not automatically means every physician gets to use it. Here is where KM technology can help tremendously.

A problem common to physicians is the great quantity of information and knowledge items. There are almost: 10,000 different diseases and syndromes, 3,000 medications, 1,100 lab ests, and many of the 400,000 articles added each year to the biomedical literature.

Partners HealthCare itself produces about 200 articles on hypertension, 139 on asthma, and 313 on diabetes. Lots of facts and information mean lots of knowledge is required to stay on top and know how to best match with the patients’ specific situation. This is overwhelming for left-alone physicians!

An effective treatment requires a perfect match among the characteristics in three categories: disease, medication, and patients. Doctors gather information about patients’ illness symptoms. Computer systems, especially database systems, record medication data and information, and experts know a lot about diseases. When these three categories of knowledge are properly integrated, only positive outcomes and no negative ones are produced.

Nucor Steel vs. Partners HealthCare

The power of knowledge is often revealed in specific contexts. In a manufacturing setting where operational excellence is top priority, knowledge creation, sharing and application is a natural part of daily operation. Nucor Steel management and workers are proud of their products as a result of relentlessly pursuing zero-defect work outcome. Knowledge management practices are enthusiastically embraced because every body's compensation is determined by their work quality and productivity. For example, maximizing knowledge sharing is usually difficult if left to voluntary participation and no explicit incentive is provided. At Nucor Steel, however, it is a norm because only half of the bonus is based on individual performance, another half comes from group performance. To me, this is a smart design for it ties self interest and common interest together.

The daily operations of Partners HealthCare do not involve team work as thoroughly as those of Nucor Steel. Order entry, lab test ordering and online referral, for examples, mostly are decisions of individual physicians. The highly specialized nature of the knowledge required to achieve high accuracy and cost efficiency means the expertise of domain experts not only valuable but also scarce. But linking the domain experts' expertise to every physician's daily work, Partners HealtCare gets to improve its overall performance, in terms of better health care service and reduced operational cost.

At Nucor Steel, knowledge management primarily centers around people and management. Partners HealthCare, however, bakes knowledge into automatic systems. The people-orientation vs. system-orientation continuum provides a useful framework to analyze knowledge management implementation in the real world. Which approach is the best for the organizations looking for wisdom to enhance the possibility of success? The answer depends to a great degree on the nature of the settings.

Baking Knowledge into Work Practice

While most KM principles and frameworks are applicable to different sectors and industries, the design and implementation of KM initiatives must be adaptive to unique domain situations in order to succeed. The doctors in the Partners HealthCare use highly specialized, domain-specific knowledge to provide healthcare services. The knowledge base in particular and knowledge management program in general implemented to support their works also must exhibit high levels of expertise. Expertise comes from experts, well respected experts. Since experts in the medical field usually are not familiar with best ways to extract and formulate knowledge, someone familiar with knowledge acquisition and organization must work closely with them to transfer their medical expertise into computer-processible forms. According to the experience in expert system development, this is one of the major bottlenecks in the first-generation knowledge management systems development. The challenge in transferring highly specialized, domain-specific knowledge into computerized knowledge base can not be overly emphasized.

However, it's precisely because it's not a trivial matter, whoever doing it right gets to enjoy nontrivial benefits.

Once the first version is released for regular use, the system must be subject to ongoing update and maintenance. If not designed properly, the system structure can get more and more unwieldy as system size grows. This is another hurdle that must be jumped to keep the system working.

Knowledge Management is for Everybody

Knowledge management is an important issue for companies in all sectors. The knowledge/information component of the product/service offering often increases in order to obtain differentiation benefit in the knowledge economy. The experience of Nucor Steel demonstrates the crucial role everybody plays in bettering the entire company's competitive advantage. To them, human resource management measures matter as much as (in many cases even more than) technology deployment. When the management measures are consistently practiced, a knowledge-friendly organizational culture gradually emerges. Technology can be purchased, the use of technology can be unique and difficult to duplicate. Reputation earned through long years of excellence can be seriously challenged when customers are disappointed. Advantageous location is great, but only up to a certain extent. Look at in this Businessweek special report how people in the steel products manufacturing company get motivated to actively engage in continual innovation. Much inspiration can be drawn from this company for those who are contemplating where competitive advantage comes from.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982075.htm?chan=search