The Knowledge Engine


Book Description

Presenting new strategies for integrating learning and knowledge into performance and making these skills part of all employees' jobs in an increasingly competitive business environment, this book urges business leaders to build a "knowledge engine" that drives learning from experience back into performance. The authors explain the principle of creating and leveraging knowledge assets and give concrete examples on how to do it.




Performance Through Learning


Book Description

Performance Through Learning is a practical guide to the key issues surrounding knowledge management from a human resource perspective and provides incisive insights into developing a strategy linked to organizational learning. The authors present a framework and model that practitioners within organizations can adapt to increase performance through learning using knowledge management tools. The book is divided into two parts and includes: *An overview of theory *Case studies and practitioner stories from a range of KM initiatives *Tools and techniques for implementing an effective KM strategy. Written by a respected international author team, the book provides an understanding of the theory that supports knowledge management in the current business environment. Drawing upon real-life examples across a variety of organizational settings, from large global financial and professional services firms, to multinational oil and mining companies, to a small charity in the voluntary sector




Knowledge Solutions


Book Description

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO license. This book comprehensively covers topics in knowledge management and competence in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, as well as knowledge capture and storage. Presented in accessible “chunks,” it includes more than 120 topics that are essential to high-performance organizations. The extensive use of quotes by respected experts juxtaposed with relevant research to counterpoint or lend weight to key concepts; “cheat sheets” that simplify access and reference to individual articles; as well as the grouping of many of these topics under recurrent themes make this book unique. In addition, it provides scalable tried-and-tested tools, method and approaches for improved organizational effectiveness. The research included is particularly useful to knowledge workers engaged in executive leadership; research, analysis and advice; and corporate management and administration. It is a valuable resource for those working in the public, private and third sectors, both in industrialized and developing countries.




Performance as Research


Book Description

Performance as Research (PAR) is characterised by an extraordinary elasticity and interdisciplinary drive. Performance as Research: Knowledge, Methods, Impact celebrates this energy, bringing together chapters from a wide range of disciplines and eight different countries. This volume focuses explicitly on three critical, often contentious themes that run through much discussion of PaR as a discipline: Knowledge - the areas and manners in which performance can generate knowledge Methods - methods and methodologies for approaching performance as research Impact - a broad understanding of the impact of this form of research These themes are framed by four essays from the book's editors, contextualising their interrelated conversations, teasing out common threads, and exploring the new questions that the contributions pose to the field of performance. As both an intervention into and extension of current debates, this is a vital collection for any reader concerned with the value and legitimacy of performance as research.




Informed by Knowledge


Book Description

The focus of this book is on how experts adapt to complexity, synthesize and interpret information in context, and transform or "fuse" disparate items of information into coherent knowledge. The chapters examine these processes across experts (e.g. global leaders, individuals in extreme environments, managers, police officers, pilots, commanders, doctors, inventors), across contexts (e.g. space and space analogs, corporate organizations, command and control, crisis and crowd management, air traffic control, the operating room, product development), and for both individual and team performance. Successful information integration is a key factor in the success of diverse endeavors, including team attempts to climb Mt. Everest, crowd control in the Middle East, and remote drilling operations. This volume is divided into four sections, each with a specific focus on an area of expert performance, resulting in a text that covers a wide range of useful information. These sections present well-researched discussions, such as: the management of complex situations in various fields and decision contexts; technological and training approaches to facilitate knowledge management by individual experts and expert teams; new or neglected perspectives in expert decision making; and the importance of ‘modeling’ expert performance through techniques and frameworks such as Cognitive Task Analysis, computational architectures based on the notion of causal belief mapping such as ‘Convince Me,’ or the data/frame model of sensemaking. The volume provides essential reading for researchers and practitioners of Naturalistic Decision Making and those who study Expertise; Organizational and Cognitive Psychologists; and researchers and students in Business and Engineering.




Thinking for a Living


Book Description

Knowledge workers create the innovations and strategies that keep their firms competitive and the economy healthy. Yet, companies continue to manage this new breed of employee with techniques designed for the Industrial Age. As this critical sector of the workforce continues to increase in size and importance, that's a mistake that could cost companies their future. Thomas Davenport argues that knowledge workers are vastly different from other types of workers in their motivations, attitudes, and need for autonomy--and, so, they require different management techniques to improve their performance and productivity. Based on extensive research involving over 100 companies and more than 600 knowledge workers, Thinking for a Living provides rich insights into how knowledge workers think, how they accomplish tasks, and what motivates them to excel. Davenport identifies four major categories of knowledge workers and presents a unique framework for matching specific types of workers with the management strategies that yield the greatest performance. Written by the field's premier thought leader, Thinking for a Living reveals how to maximize the brain power that fuels organizational success. Thomas Davenport holds the President's Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College. He is director of research for Babson Executive Education; an Accenture Fellow; and author, co-author, or editor of nine books, including Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What They Know (HBS Press, 1997).




Strategy and Performance of Knowledge Flow


Book Description

This book constructs a model of the knowledge value chain in the university and analyzes the university knowledge value-added mechanism in the process of Industry-University Collaborative Innovation. The efficiency of university knowledge value-added of Provinces in China is measured. The book illustrates the operating mechanism between enterprise subsystems and college subsystems in the collaborative innovation system, and establishes a Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model with parallel decision making units to assess the performance of Industry-University Collaboration Innovation in China by considering the complex internal structure of the collaborative innovation system. The book also addresses various behaviors of knowledge agents in the knowledge sharing process. The research findings of this book will provide some policy implications to help policy makers to establish a more effective collaborative and interactive innovation system. The focus on China offers a unique contribution, because the form that university-industry collaborations take differs widely from country to country. The United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and China differ vastly in the way that they implement their respective R&D policies. Some of these differences stem from national culture, others from the historical evolution of the institutions that support innovation efforts, and some from the extent of available resources.




Job Aids and Performance Support


Book Description

Job Aids and Performance Support in the Workplace gives us everything we’ve ever wanted to know about these invaluable tools and techniques! Allison Rossett and Lisa Schafer have created a comprehensive, pragmatic, and very readable guide. The authors don’t exaggerate when they claim it’s ‘knowledge everywhere.’




Hyper-productive Knowledge Work Performance


Book Description

This book shows how to lead knowledge workers, manage knowledge work and build a hyper-productive knowledge work organization, by taming and managing the four flows of organizational performance (psychology, information, work and finance) to produce spectacular operational and financial throughput results. TameFlow is adaptable to nearly every industry, and can be applied to any knowledge work domain or organization that generates business value through knowledge. The TameFlow approach is explained within the context of knowledge work performed in a software development organization. The authors illustrate its application to Scrum and Kanban and demonstrate how constraints management (TOC) can improve them in powerful ways, bringing more predictability of behavior of the system as a whole, as well as to the individuals involved. Both Scrum and Kanban can be extended with features of the TOC, and help create a hyper-productive organization. --




Connecting Knowledge and Performance in Public Services


Book Description

The performance of public services is now more closely scrutinised than ever before. Every teacher, doctor, social worker or probation officer knows that behind them stands a restless army of overseers, equipped with a panoply of league tables, star ratings, user opinion surveys, performance indicators and the like with which to judge them. This increased scrutiny and performance measurement has undoubtedly produced improved public services. Yet we still have a limited understanding about how this information can be best used to bring about improvements in performance. What goes on inside the 'black box' of public organisations to move from information to action, or from 'knowing' to 'doing'? This book tackles this important question by reviewing a wide range of performance mechanisms. It explores how information about performance can be translated into improvements in services and, conversely, why this does not always happen in practice.