Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow

CHAPTER 4

Basic Requirements for Successful Knowledge Flow Management

Nothing of value happens without passion.

—Larry Prusak, 2000, then head of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management

PASSIONATE INITIATIVE SUPPORT

In Chapter 3, some of the prerequisites that you will need to get started or revamp your knowledge flow management initiative were discussed. This chapter and the following two chapters look at some new aspects and go into more detail on some areas already mentioned as success factors. Passionate initiative support, motivational drivers, and marketing are ways to get the people in your organization to participate in your initiative and stay with it.

These elements of knowledge flow management are especially important to make an initiative successful for an extended time. The effort to start and especially to embed an initiative into the organization is rather high, so you want it to survive and be around longer term to give you a return on your investment for some time. This does not mean that you should try to keep the initiative alive artificially, but as long as there is a chance it will still provide value, you should do everything to keep going. This type of ongoing survival often is harder to ensure than it is to get it started.

The one key success factor for a knowledge flow management initiative that is above all the others is passionate support. Passion will be the key driver for ongoing value if paired with skills to run those initiatives. It also builds ...