Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders
Part 119 – Karl Wiig

Karl Wiig is CEO of Knowledge Research Institute. He focuses on societal intellectual capital management and the building of competence.

Karl is one of the founders of the knowledge management movement. A technical and management consultant and researcher, he started the Applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) Center at Arthur D. Little that initiated the concept of KM in 1983. Karl is a former consulting partner at Coopers & Lybrand and was the co-founder of the International Knowledge Management Network.

Here are definitions for five of Karl’s specialties:

• Decision Making: The process of making choices by identifying a decision that needs to be made, gathering information, and assessing alternative resolutions.
• Expert Systems: Computerized systems that emulate the decision-making ability of a human expert; designed to solve complex problems by reasoning about knowledge, represented mainly as if–then rules rather than through conventional procedural code.
• Intellectual Capital: The sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge. A metric for the value of intellectual capital is the amount by which the enterprise value of a firm exceeds the value of its tangible (physical and financial) assets. It includes human, structural, and relational capital.
• Situational Handling: The ability to assess and respond appropriately to different events or circumstances as they arise, often requiring quick thinking and adaptability.
• Strategy: A set of guiding principles that, when communicated and adopted in the organization, generates a desired pattern of decision making. The way that people throughout the organization should make decisions and allocate resources in order accomplish key objectives. A strategy provides a clear roadmap that defines the actions people should take (and not take) and the things they should prioritize (and not prioritize) to achieve desired goals.

Karl created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field.

Books by Karl Wiig

Knowledge Management Foundations: Thinking about Thinking – How People and Organizations Create, Represent and Use Knowledge

We use knowledge on four conceptual levels:

1. Goal-Setting or Idealistic Knowledge or Vision and Paradigm knowledge. Part of this knowledge is well known to us and explicit — we work consciously with it. Most of it, our visions, is not well known; instead, it is tacit and only accessible non consciously. We use this knowledge to identify what is possible and to create our goals and values. (“Knowledge of WHY” the ideal is desirable and obtainable.)
2. Systematic Knowledge or System, Schema, and Reference Methodology Knowledge. Our theoretical knowledge of underlying systems, general principles, and related problem-solving strategies is to a large extent explicit and well known to us. We use this knowledge to analyze and reason in-depth and to synthesize new approaches and alternatives. (“Knowledge THAT” it is possible, methodologies exist, and it can be achieved.)
3. Pragmatic Knowledge or Decision-Making and Factual Knowledge (Know-How). Decision-Making knowledge is practical and mostly explicit; it is often based on scripts that we know well. We use this knowledge to perform our daily work and make explicit decisions. (“Knowledge HOW” it can be achieved.)
4. Automatic Knowledge or Routine Working Knowledge. We know this knowledge so well that we have automated it — most has become tacit. We use it to perform tasks automatically without conscious reasoning.

Knowledge Management: Where Did it Come From and Where Will It Go?

Most enterprises pursue one or more of the following knowledge management strategies:

1. Knowledge Strategy as Business Strategy – Focus: Emphasize knowledge creation, capture, organization, renewal, sharing, and use in all the enterprise’s plans, operations, and detailed activities to have the best possible knowledge available– and used — at each point of action.
2. Intellectual Asset Management Strategy – Focus: Emphasize enterprise-level management of specific intellectual assets such as patents, technologies, operational and management practices, customer relations, organizational arrangements, and other structural knowledge assets. Management may center on renewing, organizing, valuating, safekeeping, as well as increasing the availability and marketing of these assets.
3. Personal Knowledge Asset Responsibility Strategy – Focus: Emphasize personal responsibility for knowledge-related investments, innovations, and the competitive state, renewal, effective use, and availability to others of the knowledge assets within each employee’s area of accountability to being able to apply the most competitive knowledge to the enterprise’s work.
4. Knowledge Creation Strategy – Focus: Emphasize organizational learning, basic and applied research and development, and motivation of employees to innovate and capture lessons learned to obtain new and better knowledge that will lead to improved competitiveness.
5. Knowledge Transfer Strategy – Focus: Emphasize systematic approaches to transfer— e.g., obtain, organize, restructure, warehouse or memorize, repackage for deployment, and distribute—knowledge to points of action where it will be used to perform work. Includes knowledge sharing and adopting best practices.

Only outstanding organizations can pursue more than one of these value disciplines:

1. Operational Excellence – Focus: Emphasize industry leadership in price and customer convenience by minimizing overhead costs, eliminating intermediate production steps, reducing transaction and other “friction” costs, and optimizing business processes.
2. Product Leadership – Focus: Emphasize creation of a continuous stream of state-of-the-art products and services by being creative, commercializing ideas quickly, and relentlessly pursuing new solutions, often by obsolescing their own products.
3. Customer Intimacy – Focus: Emphasize continual tailoring and shaping products and services to fit an increasingly better definition of the customer’s needs to personalize offerings to make the customer successful.