As a junior officer in the Australian Army I was taught many principles. These included the 10 principles of warfare, the six principles of administration, and the seven principles of medical support. These principles were supposed to be enduring, and used as guides against which plans were tested. Now it seems we have 12 principles of knowledge management , or at least the US Army does. Their principles are:

• Principle 1.  Train and educate KM leaders, managers, and champions.
• Principle 2.  Reward knowledge sharing and make knowledge management career rewarding.
• Principle 3.  Establish a doctrine of collaboration.
• Principle 4.  Use every interaction whether face-to-face or virtual as an opportunity to acquire and share knowledge.
• Principle 5.  Prevent knowledge loss.
• Principle 6.  Protect and secure information and knowledge assets.
• Principle 7.  Embed knowledge assets (links, podcasts, videos, documents, simulations, wikis...) in standard business processes and provide access to those who need to know.
• Principle 8.  Use legal and standard business rules and processes across the enterprise.
• Principle 9.  Use standardized collaborative tool sets.
• Principle 10.  Use Open Architectures to permit access and searching across boundaries.
• Principle 11.  Use a robust search capability to access contextual knowledge and store content for discovery.
• Principle 12.  Use portals that permit single sign-on and authentication across the global enterprise including partners.

Now this is a pretty interesting list, especially when I compare them to the TARDIS principles used in one part of the Australia Defence Force, and developed five years ago. The TARDIS principles were:

• Principle 1. Individual and collective discipline is required to follow organisational process to achieve business objectives.
• Principle 2. The organisation's outputs drive data and information production and management, including its storage.
• Principle 3. Data and information are created once and used many times.
• Principle 4. Data and information exist in one location, wherever possible and practical.
• Principle 5. An open data and information architecture is used to facilitate collaborative work.
• Principle 6. A cradle to grave approach is employed for data and information for every project and initiative.
• Principle 7. There are multiple access paths to data and information.
• Principle 8. Data and information management, production processes, and tools are standardised wherever possible and practical.
• Principle 9. Data and information matures over time.
• Principle 10. Data has a visible quality attribute (meta-data).
• Principle 11. All data and information is owned by the organisation, rather than the individual.

I don't see too many differences, but I do see a lot of similarities. I also find the US Army definition of knowledge management interesting.

"Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, retrieving, evaluating, and sharing an enterprise's tacit and explicit knowledge assets to meet mission objectives. The objective of the principles is to connect those who know with those who need to know (know-why, know-what, know-who, and know-how) by leveraging knowledge transfers from one-to-many across the Global Army Enterprise".

When I was working in the TARDIS project we avoided the term knowledge management, using knowledge productivity in preference. We defined knowledge productivity as:

"... a trans-disciplinary approach that integrates tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, organise, share, analyse, improve, and apply business expertise. It is a disciplined, deliberate, purposeful, and conscious method to manufacture knowledge from data, information and experience. Of necessity it involves the design, implementation and review of processes to improve knowledge creation and sharing behaviours. Ultimately knowledge productivity relies on individual and collective discipline to follow organisational process to achieve business objectives".

Again I don't see any great differences, but I do see a lot of similarities.

Sadly TARDIS is all but dead in the water. Funding cutbacks and changing priorities have reduced the help-desk to a skeleton of its former self, and the databases are no longer being maintained. Yet TARDIS would appear to be ahead of its time. Given the propensity of the world to follow everything American, just how long will it be before a new initiative is embarked upon? And what principles will be used - the new US Army principles? Are they right and do they even matter? Time will tell.

Regards, Graham