knowledge asset | Liya's journal

A Knowledge Asset is an explicit managed resource which supports organisational decision-making and action. It contains synthesised, validated and organised knowledge.

Knowledge Assets consist of guidelines, set within business context, enlivened by stories and quotes from experience, and linked to people and documents for further investigation. The role of knowledge assets in knowledge management is to provide the means by which one team or person can transfer their knowledge to many teams or people, separated in time and distance. Although the most effective mechanism for knowledge transfer is face to face; this is not always possible to arrange. Your knowledge management system should provide the means to transfer knowledge between people, even if the timespan between capture and use is years. A knowledge asset can usefully be hosted on a Wiki or in a Knowledge Base.

There’s some confusion and discussion around the term “knowledge asset”

A Knowledge Asset is a single set of documents, or a single document, containing compiled, structured and validated guidance on a specific area of practice.

The key aspects of Knowledge Assets are that they are
- Validated (by a process owner, practice owner or CoP)
- Collated (from many sources)
- Structured (in the most useful way for the reader)
- Contain Guidance – tells the reader how to perform a task or a practice. They are Know-How, rather than Know What. So Wikipedia is not really a Knowledge Asset.

Knowledge assets are likely to include
- Process documents
- Guidelines
- Checklists
- FAQs
- Templates

Knowledge assets will not include
- Project documents (unless they are selected by the practice owner as being a very good example that others should follow)
- Contracts (unless they are selected by the practice owner as being a very good example that others should follow)
- Cases (unless they are selected by the practice owner as being a very good example that others should follow)
- Lessons learned
- Job descriptions

Knowledge Assets

Could be on a wiki (supported by a folder where linked files can be kept)
Could be on a portal (with different parts of the asset being files in the portal e.g. guidelines, templates, examples)
Could be a document
Could be a book

Could be expressed as

Procedure
FAQ
Checklist

Could be structured by

Practice/topic taxonomy
Steps in a workflow

Knowledge assets may be linked to training material

Knowledge Asset on its own is not a complete Knowledge Management solution. Far from it. The Knowledge Asset can codify, structure and store the core explicit guidance, but can never capture everything you need to know, at every level of detail.

Source: Knoco

Methods for organisational learning

Learning Before, During and After (LBDA) (Collison and Parcell 2001):

The LBDA model is deceptively simple yet can have powerful effects. It is a knowledge management method with an explicit learning purpose that can be applied to any activity. The purpose of the LBDA approach is to avoid the reinvention of existing knowledge by

creating knowledge ‘assets’ which can be accessed by anyone in the organisation. The main features of the LBDA method are illustrated in the Figure below.

Learning before is facilitated by having a shared understanding in the organisation of ‘who knows what’ and by a process called ‘peer assist’, which is a meeting or workshop where people who are thought to be experienced or knowledgeable about an issue are invited to share their experience and knowledge with an individual or team facing a particular challenge, for example designing a project or planning an advocacy campaign.

Learning during can be helped by a system of after action reviews (AARs) that bring colleagues together after a specific event to discuss what happened, why it happened, and how to sustain strengths and improve on weaknesses.

The learning after is captured by learning reviews leading to the agreement of specific actionable recommendations (SARs). The LBDA model Communities of Practice form a crucial part of the process which focuses on interpersonal relationships but these are supported with ICT, such as databases.

Knowledge Management/Sharing Toolkit «Sharing Knowledge and Learning»

1. Knowledge Management approaches

Taxonomies development
Process for critical knowledge Identification
Processes for knowledge harvesting
Concept mapping
Diffusion, transference, utilization of captured knowledge

2. Methods for Knowledge Management

After Action Review	Knowledge Map
Brainstorming	Knowledge Network
Briefing and Debriefing	Lesson Learnt
Collegial Coaching	Mentoring
Community of Practice (CoP)	Open Space
Exit Interviews	Peer Assist / Peer Review
Experience Capitalization	Story Telling
Facilitation	SWOT
Good Practice	Visualisation
Knowledge Fair	World Café
Expert yellow Page