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The Knowledge Management Cycle 41

not happen with a direct pay-per-contribution scheme, and also does not happen if
there is a punish-the-withholders mentality. In order for successful knowledge sharing
to occur, it must make sense, that is, the benefi ts to both the organization and the
individuals must exist and be clearly perceived as such. The other critical success factor
appears to lie with the successful deployment of knowledge brokers — professionals
who assume the responsibility of gathering, repackaging, and promoting knowledge
nuggets throughout the organization. Third, a good system should be in place to
maintain the results of organizational learning — a good organizational memory man-
agement system, often in the form of an intranet of some sort. Part of good organi-
zational memory management practice should be to always maintain attribution,
require authorization for dissemination, provide feedback mechanisms, and keep track
of knowledge reuse. One of the best rewards of contributing is for the user to be noti-
fi ed of how popular his or her contributions were (which is analogous to a citation
index for scholarly publications).
The assess stage deals more with the group and organizational level. Assessment
refers to the evaluation of intellectual capital. This requires the organization to defi ne
mission-critical knowledge and map current intellectual capital against future knowl-
edge needs. The organization must also develop metrics to demonstrate that it is
growing its knowledge base and profi ting from its investments in intellectual capital.
The theory of the organization needs to be expanded to include capturing the impact
of knowledge on organizational performance. This includes identifying new forms of
capital such as human capital (competencies), customer capital (the customer relation-
ship), organizational capital (knowledge bases, business processes, technology infra-
structure, values, norms, and culture), and intellectual capital (the relationships among
human, customer, and organizational capital). The assessment must take into account
these new types of assets and focus on how easily and fl exibly the organization can
convert its knowledge into products and services of value to the customer. A new set
of frameworks, processes, and metrics that evaluate the knowledge base must be incor-
porated into the overall management process.
The build and sustain step in the KM cycle ensures that future intellectual capital
of the organization will keep the organization viable and competitive. Resources must
be allocated to the growth and maintenance of knowledge and they should be chan-
neled in such a way as to create new knowledge and reinforce existing knowledge. At
the tactical level, the inability to locate and apply knowledge to meet an existing need
results in a lost opportunity. At the strategic level, coming up short on the right
knowledge delivers a much more serious blow — loss of competitiveness and ultimately
of organizational viability.