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: ...

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I recently came across this blog-post by Marc Aafjes on what he calls the Shadow Organisation. Marc says:

"By connecting various participants across the company around the execution of our knowledge strategy we're cultivating a meta network - the shadow organisation - that enables the company to enhance the value we derive from the knowledge we have. Framing knowledge management in economic terms, the shadow organisation in effect is ‘making the market for knowledge' by connecting otherwise disparate parts of the company around knowledge needs. This shadow organisation consists of the change agents that help us execute the knowledge strategy and embed sustainable change in all parts of the company".

Now what Marc is doing is by no means new - he's weaving a network to build a community of practice! What he has done is come up with a clever name that markets his network weaving initiative. ...

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Coming up with good business performance indicators is not easy, and too often we get it wrong. I use a simple question to help me decide if the indictor is relevant - "Is the indicator a measure of how many children had a bath, or is it a measure of how many children had a bath and came out clean!?" I suggest you probably want a mix, but with a definite bias to "had a bath and came out clean"!

Coming up with business performance indicators for a knowledge management initiative is particularly difficult, but it is key to knowledge productivity™. Frankly it's too easy to report activity rates - how many children had a bath - because these are tangible and relatively easy to measure. Measuring and reporting the true impact of the initiative on the organisation - had a bath and came out clean - is much more difficult; if only because the impact will be variable, and not everyone will agree the strength of the outcome. ...

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Knowledge Matters™ has solid competencies in knowledge management, although we prefer the term knowledge productivity™. For us knowledge productivity™ is a disciplined, deliberate, purposeful, and conscious method to manufacture knowledge from data, information and experience. We use a set of guiding principles and our own holistic knowledge-based approach to integrate tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, organise, share, analyse, improve, and apply business expertise. This approach, coupled with some innovatively used tools, allows us to approach assignments in a robust and consistent way to meet our client's needs. ...

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The Journey of a Knowledge Management System in the Department of Defence - TARDIS . A presentation to the KM Australia 2007 Conference given in July 2007.

Knowledge Productivity™ in a Project-Focused Government Department . A presentation to the 7th International Conference on Knowledge, Culture and Change in Organisations given in July 2007.

TARDIS: Data Looks Small from the Outside, but the Information is Huge on the Inside . A presentation co-authored with Patrick Byrne and presented to the SEPG 2003 conference.

TARDIS - An Update: Moving Towards a Genuine Knowledge Management System . A presentation co-authored with Patrick Byrne and presented to the SEPG 2004 conference.

TARDIS: A Journey Through An Enterprise Knowledge Space . My Masters of Knowledge Management minor thesis presentation submitted in 2004.

TARDIS: A Knowledge Productivity™ Update . A presentation co-authored with Patrick Byrne and presented to the actKM 2005 conference .