KM in Accounting, KM Toolkit, and CoP Links
Over the past few days I’ve had a chance to catch up on quite a few of the items that have been piling up in my feed-reader and thought that I’d share a few that caught my eye.
Knowledge Management in the Accounting Industry:
CCH recently surveyed accounting professionals and have published the results.? The report, “New CCH Survey Guides Accounting Firms in Building More Intelligent Businesses” notes that Knowledge Management is a cornerstone for success in this industry.? An interesting snippet from the article:
“Firms with a formal knowledge management (KM) program consistently performed at a higher level as an intelligent business than firms without a program in place. Firms that are moving forward as intelligent businesses with formal KM programs identified significant benefits, including:
- 76 percent reporting increased efficiency;
- 69 percent improved client service;
- 63 percent increased productivity; and
- 62 percent increased revenue.”
Tools for Knowledge and Learning:
Odi.org.uk has published a good list of tools used in KM here: Tools for Knowledge and Learning.? There is a lot of good information in there and the tools are centered around five areas:
- Strategy Development
- Management Techniques
- Collaboration Mechanisms
- Knowledge Sharing and Learning
- Knowledge Capture and Storage
Communities of Practice Articles:
Stephen Dale discusses “Responsibilities and Guidelines for Communities of Practice“.
“I was looking for some inspiration in putting together some guidelines, rules and policies for online communities of practice. Nancy White over at Full Circle Associates is always a good starting place for this sort of thing.? Here is another example. Feel free to use or elaborate on…”
Anecdote has an interesting piece on “Finding the Domain for communities of Practice“.
“One of the key challenges in starting a community of practice is to find the right domain - the topic that people are passionate enough about and interested enough in to contribute some of their discretionary time and effort. One of the tests we use is…”
Gian Jagai shares an Update on Communities of Practice at Hitachi Data Systems with us.
Building a Community at Intel
Heath Buckmaster has shared a great post on building a community for IT over at the IT at Intel Blog. The post is great because it’s more than a “how-to” on building a community, rather, we’re provided some great context and?given the methodology to-date.? Heath takes the time to discuss the origin of the business problem, why communities were identified as the ideal solution, what tools?are used, and in general he shares the journey so far.? There are some great ideas in there that I encourage you to check out.? The post ends with what’s next for the community:
“Here’s the big challenge…and I don’t have an answer for you yet on this one… How do you make the move from awareness, to participation. In other words, if you’ve got thousands of people reading your content every day, how to get those thousand people to actually reply to, change, or add to your content? How do you get more people to create pages on a wiki, or add/answer questions in a forum? How do you turn visibility into action?”