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Title:
Common Knowledge - How Companies Thrive by Sharing What They Know
Review:
Nancy Dixon is an Associate Professor of Administrative Sciences at
The George Washington University, Washington, DC. The book is based on
a two-year study of organisations that are leading the field in
successful knowledge transfer, including Ernst & Young, Bechtel, Ford,
Chevron and British Petroleum.
From this study Dixon identifies five methods of knowledge transfer:
- Serial transfer - applies to a team that performs a task and then the same team repeats the task in a new context
- Near transfer - transferring knowledge from a source team to a receiving team that is doing a similar task in a different location
- Far transfer - transferring knowledge about a non-routine task
- Strategic transfer - complex knowledge transferred to a team separated by time and distance
- Expert transfer - transferring explicit transfer about tasks that are routine, but carried out infrequently
Each chapter comprises a number of quite detailed case studies that
are very readable. For example the chapter on Near Transfer is based
on KM practices at Ford, Texas Instruments and Ernst & Young. The
characteristics of Near Transfer are then presented and then a set of
best practice guidelines is offered, neatly summarised in a concluding
table. Two final chapters provide first an overview of the five
transfer models, and then recommendations for building an integrated
(in the sense of accommodating al the models) KM strategy.
There are of course several hundred books on knowledge management and
I have read only a dozen or so of them. I cannot therefore position
Common Knowledge in a ranking list of KM books. What does appeal to
me is that this is a very practical book that provides a rather
different perspective on the management of information. There is a
certain amount of inevitable blurring between the five approaches, but
this does not detract from the value of the book. The detailed case
studies to my mind also confirm the benefits of the story-telling
approach to KM strategy development that has been developed by
Victoria Ward at Spark Knowledge and David Snowden at IBM.
There is a good index, but the references are confined to particular
articles or books that support the text of each chapter. This somewhat
restricts the value of the book as a starting point for someone knew
to knowledge management. However I would recommend this book both to
managers starting out on the KM path, and also to experienced KM
practitioners that are looking for new models for KM strategy
development.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Martin White is Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd.
<http://www.intranetfocus.com>. He has 30 years' experience in the
information business, in information management, publishing and
consulting roles. His areas of interest include the design and
management of intranets, the deployment of enterprise information
portals, and business development strategies electronic information
vendors. A regular contributor to Information World Review and Free
Pint, he is also a columnist for the US periodical EContent on
intranet issues and is currently completing work on a book on intranet
management. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the International
Journal of Information Management.
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