What is the TOP most responsibility of a KM champion in an organization?

[Lakshman Pillai A]

Please list one. Just one that comes from top of your head.

[Nirmala Palaniappan]

Lead by example (sharing, collaboration, reuse etc)

[Lakshman Pillai A]

Nirmala: Thanks for keeping this community alive through "leading by example". Outside the organization, I have not seen many KM champions sharing knowledge. In your opinion, does it happen more within the organization?

[Nirmala Palaniappan]

Thanks for your kind words! I am not sure I have a bird's eye view of the behaviour of KM Champions - outside of the organizational context - but I think, typically, they do make use of opportunities like conferences and gatherings to share what they know - either through papers or presentations. And many of them do write blogs...!

[B. SRINIVASAN]

+ Need to be a good Evangelist among different community/department/section of people to meet the basic objectives of the KM.

[Lakshman Pillai A]

Srini: Agree. Just for the reference, I would like to include http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangelism. Marketing people in companies like Oracle borrowed this term to create product evangelist.

Yes, KM champions should spread the good values of KM across the organization and turn many or all of them into true followers of KM values and practices.

How good are we in doing evangelism?

[Alakh Asthana]

Very outsourcing environment specific - Business Development. Create practices that can go on the business development deck!

[Lakshman Pillai A]

Alakh: Kindly elaborate little bit. In my understanding, business development (as per common terminology) is about sales & marketing. Are you saying that it is business process specific?

If so, I agree that metrics, roadmap, type of solution, strategy etc., could be different. Can you generalize the key responsibility (not the complete action items) and list what you think is the top most expectation out of the KM champions?

[Subash Thyagarajan]

Dear Lakshman long time ....

KM Champion in some organisation could mean people working for a specific project and has additional responsibility of KM. In that case the top responsibility could include understanding the knowlede gaps within the project and ideating it with the central KM team and coming up with a strategy to mitigate the risk

If Its KM Champion/Knowledge Managers who are a part of the central KM team then the top most responsibility would be to understand knowledge needs of employees by spending a good amount of time with them everyday and slowly put yourself into their shoes. If someone could do that successfully ROI would automatically follow

[Sumantra Nag]

Keep your eye on the goal? I am thinking of the case of Matsushita Electricals in Nonaka and Takeuchi's seminal book "The Knowledge-Creating Company", where a "home bakery" was created after three divisions were amalgamated into one division. The direction for learning through the use of knowledge was set by the needs of the ultimate product.

[Lakshman Pillai A]

This remains me one of the seven habits of highly effective people by Steven Covey - "Begin with the End in Mind". I guess, you are referring to actual business activity & business improvements as goal (or primary responsibility of a KM champion).

I agree, learning is not an end but the means to achieve the end in mind.

[Lakshman Pillai A]

Subhash: Thanks for your contribution. In both the cases you are (directly or indirectly) talking about the critical thing in KM - "Understanding the Knowledge Gaps". Knowing what we don't know is very much essential.

To learn, we should know our gaps in LINE WITH what we supposed to deliver (or do) and how productive we should be.

[Sumantra Nag]

Lakshman, I am taking the role of a KM Champion as different from the role of, say, a Knowledge Officer who would deal with the general flow of knowledge across the organization. I am assuming that the KM Champion is concerned with effective utilization of knowledge for a specific project. But this definition of a KM Champion may be too narrow. A KM Champion may well be trying to get his organization to become more aware of the importance of knowledge management and work towards getting KM institutionalized. While in SAIL (Steel Authority of India Ltd.), during 1985-2003, I was engaged in market research, demand forecasting and corporate planning. Wide direct interaction was required with knowledgeable people outside SAIL in order to grasp the fundamental forces and structures of steel consumption in a highly dispersed market before we could start quantitative assessments of demand. Our findings were then disseminated within the organization across the steel plants and branch offices. Without actually invoking the term Knowledge Management, I suppose our work in market research in SAIL involved a great deal of this activity and particularly the capture of Tacit Knowledge which appears to be a comparatively neglected aspect of KM in our country in terms of specific attention. SAIL began work on Knowledge Management some years ago, to address the productive process in the steel plants. In the Corporate Planning Directorate (around the year 2000) I was interested in Knowledge Management and I was nominated to attend a one-day Workshop by Karl Wig in Delhi. So I suppose a KM Champion in the broadest sense should first work at educating the organization - at all levels - about the nature of organizational knowledge and its different dimensions. Sorry if this reply is a bit too lengthy. Regards. Sumantra