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that the knowledge they need is available. The knowledge may be held in the orga-
nization and correctly identifi ed, but may simply be in the wrong form for the task —
the essential information may be only implicit in the repository. The knowledge may
have to be reconfi gured in some way to meet the requirements of the task in hand.
It may be that the knowledge requires some partial modifi cation (e.g., updating). Here,
understanding the knowledge requirements of both the users and their tasks is the
key to understanding, identifying, and using the correct knowledge from the various
sources. This in turn would enable more leverage to be gained from the knowledge
already at hand, thereby increasing the return on investment in those knowledge
assets.

Practical Implications of Knowledge Application

At a minimum, do these things:
• Create an organizational knowledge base to house the intellectual assets.
• Create a corporate yellow pages so that knowledge workers can fi nd out who is
knowledgeable in which areas of expertise.
• Capture best practices and lessons learned and make them available to all others in
the organization via the knowledge base.
• Empower a Chief Knowledge Offi cer to develop and implement a KM strategy for
the organization.
• Ensure that the organizational culture will help facilitate the key phases required for
the KM cycle (to capture, create, share, disseminate, acquire, and apply valuable
knowledge).
Make sure that it is fairly easy to continually update and feed the corporate
memory. Users should be able to contribute best practices, lessons learned, comments
and questions about content, tips and tools they would recommend, working exam-
ples, and case studies. Openly encouraging and applying new ideas fosters the coop-
eration and innovation that is critical to a learning organization.
Knowledge application is far more likely to succeed if the type of content that is
being made available can “ hit the ground running ” — in other words, it is not just a
repository of “ stuff ” but chunks of executable knowledge. The knowledge nuggets
should always include tacit and contextual knowledge of when this should be used,
where it can and cannot be applied, why and why not, and the ground truth or knowl-
edge of how things really work and what is required for successful performance.