CSS3133 Knowledge Management

Unit 02: The Knowledge Management (KM) Cycle

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Learning outcomes
• Describe how valuable individual, group and
organisational knowledge is captured, created,
codified, shared, accessed, applied and reused
throughout the KM cycle
• Define, compare and contrast major KM processes
• Identify the major challenges and benefits of local,
global or distributed KM processes

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Introduction
• Effective KM requires an organization constantly
go through the process of identifying,
generating, acquiring, diffusing, and
capturing the benefits of knowledge that
provide a strategic advantage to that
organization.

• This is known as the knowledge management

cycle.

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Major KM cycle approaches
• There are a number of major approaches to
describing the major steps in the KM cycle:
– The Meyer and Zack KM cycle
– The Bukowitz and Williams KM Cycle
– The McElroy KM Cycle
– The Wiig KM Cycle
– The Carlile and Rebentish Knowledge Transformation
Cycle
– The Evans, Dalkir and Bidian KM Cycle

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The Meyer and Zack KM cycle (1) #1
• Derived from work on the design and development
of information products.
– Information products are broadly defined as information
“sold” to internal or external customers such as databases,
news synopses, and customer profiles.
• Meyer and Zack (1996) propose that research and
knowledge about the design of physical products
can be extended to serve as the basis for a KM cycle.
• This approach’s cycle processes are composed of the
technologies, facilities, and processes for
manufacturing products and services.

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The Meyer and Zack KM cycle (2)
• Information products are best viewed as a repository
comprising information content and structure.
– Information content is the data held in the repository that provides
the building blocks for the resulting information products and is
unique for each type of business or organization.
– The overall structure defines how an information unit (a
formally defined atom of information) is stored, manipulated, and
retrieved. Different businesses once again make use of unique
meaningful information units.
• The structure further includes schemes for labeling, indexing,
linking, and cross-referencing the information units that
comprise the content of KM.
• The repository becomes the foundation upon which a firm
creates its family of information and knowledge products.
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The Meyer and Zack KM cycle (3)
• Meyer and Zack analyzed the major developmental
stages of a knowledge repository and mapped these
stages onto a KM cycle.
• They are (5) stages:
– Acquisition: relates to the sources of “raw” materials such as scope, breadth, depth,
credibility, accuracy, timeliness, relevance, cost, control, and exclusivity.
– *Refinement: a crucial stage where the primary source of value is added and it may be
physical (migrating from one medium to another) or logical (restructuring, relabeling,
indexing, and integrating). Refers also to the cleaning up or standardization of
information.
– Storage/Retrieval: forms a bridge between the upstream acquisition and refinement
stages that feed the repository and downstream stages of product generation, and may
be physical or digital.
– Distribution: how the product is delivered to the end user and encompasses not only the
medium of delivery but also its timing, frequency, form, language, and so on.
– Presentation or Use: the effectiveness of each of the preceding value-added steps is
evaluated here: there must be enough context to make this content else the KM cycle
would have failed to deliver value to both the individual and the organization.
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The Meyer and Zack KM cycle (4)

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The Bukowitz and Williams KM Cycle (1) #2
• This cycle describes a knowledge management process framework that outlines “how
organizations generate, maintain and deploy a strategically correct stock of
knowledge to create value”.
– In this framework, knowledge consists of knowledge repositories, relationships, information
technologies, communications infrastructure, functional skill sets, process know-how,
environmental responsiveness, organizational intelligence, and external sources.
• The 7 stages are: get, use, learn, contribute, assess, build/sustain, or divest.
– The get, use, learn, and contribute phases are tactical in nature and are triggered by market-driven
opportunities or demands.
– The assess, build/sustain, or divest stages are more strategic, triggered by shifts in the macro-
environment.

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The Bukowitz and Williams KM Cycle (2)
• The stages of the Bukowitz and Williams cycle:
– Get: seeking out information needed in order to make decisions, solve problems, or
innovate.
– Use: combining information in new and interesting ways in order to foster
organizational innovation.
– Learn: the formal process of learning from both successful (best practices) and failed
(lessons learned) experiences as a means of creating competitive advantage.
– Contribute: getting employees to post what they have learned to a communal
knowledge base or repository, to be made visible and available across the entire
organization, where appropriate.
– Assess: the evaluation of intellectual capital and requires that the organization define
mission-critical knowledge, and map current intellectual capital against future
knowledge needs, through the use of metrics.
– Build/Sustain: ensures that the organization’s future intellectual capital keeps the
organization viable and competitive by allocating and channeling resources to create
new knowledge and reinforce existing knowledge.
– Divest: the organization should not hold on to assets, physical or intellectual, if they
are no longer creating value. This involves understanding the why, when, where, and
how of formally divesting parts of the knowledge base.
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The Bukowitz and Williams KM Cycle (3)
• The Bukowitz and Williams KM cycle introduces two new
critical phases:
– the learning of knowledge content, and
– the decision as to whether to maintain or divest the organization
of this knowledge content.
• This makes it more comprehensive than the Meyer
and Zack cycle, by incorporating the notion of tacit as
well as explicit knowledge management.

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The McElroy KM Cycle (1) #3
• Describes the process cycle of knowledge
production and knowledge integration, with a
series of feedback loops to organizational
memory, beliefs, and claims and the business-
processing environment.
• Emphasizes that organizational knowledge is held
both subjectively in the minds of individuals and
groups and objectively in explicit forms.
– Together, they comprise the distributed organizational
knowledge base of the company.

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The McElroy KM Cycle (2)
• Knowledge use in the business-processing
environment results in outcomes that either match
expectations or fail to do so.
– Matches reinforce existing knowledge, leading to its
reuse.
• Whereas mismatches lead to adjustments in business-
processing behavior via single-loop learning.
– Successive failures from mismatches will lead to doubt
and ultimately rejection of existing knowledge.
• Which will in turn trigger knowledge processing to
produce and integrate new knowledge, this time via
double-loop learning.
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The McElroy KM Cycle (3)
• In the McElroy KM cycle, the key processes are:
– Individual and group learning: knowledge is information until it is validated by
the individual or groups.
– Knowledge claim validation: involves the receipt and codification of individual
and group innovations at an organizational level.
– Information acquisition: the process by which an organization deliberately or
serendipitously acquires knowledge claims or information produced by others,
usually external to the organization. This formulates new knowledge claims at the
organizational level.
– Knowledge claim evaluation: the process by which knowledge claims are
evaluated to determine their veracity and value, implying that they are of greater
value than existing knowledge in the organizational knowledge base.
– Knowledge integration: the process by which an organization introduces new
knowledge claims to its operating environment and retires old ones. This includes
all knowledge transmission such as teaching, knowledge sharing, and other social
activities that either communicate an understanding of previously produced
organizational knowledge to knowledge workers or integrate newly minted
knowledge.
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The McElroy KM Cycle (4)
• One of the great strengths of the McElroy cycle:
– the clear description of how knowledge is evaluated
and
– a conscious decision to integrate it into the
organizational memory.
• The KM cycle does more than address the storage
and subsequent management of documents or
knowledge that has been warehoused “as is.”
– It focuses on processes to identify knowledge content
that is of value to the organization and its employees.

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The Wiig KM Cycle (1) #4
• This KM cycle focuses on the three conditions that need
to be present for an organization to conduct its business
successfully:
– it must have a business (products/services) and customers.
– it must have resources (people, capital, and facilities), and
– it must have the ability to act.
• According to Wiig, the major purpose of KM is to make
the enterprise intelligent-acting by facilitating the
creation, accumulation, deployment and use of quality
knowledge.
– The focus is on working smarter: making use of all the best
knowledge we have available.
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The Wiig KM Cycle (2)
• Wiig’s KM cycle addresses how knowledge is built
and used as individuals or as organizations.
• The cycle focuses on identifying and relating the
functions and activities that we engage in as
knowledge workers to make products and
services.
• There are four major steps in this cycle:
1. Building knowledge.
2. Holding knowledge.
3. Pooling knowledge.
4. Applying knowledge.
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The Wiig KM Cycle (3)
• Building Knowledge refers to five major activities:
– Obtain knowledge: R&D projects, individual innovations, experimentation, reasoning
with existing knowledge, hiring of new people, and even through knowledge importing
(from experts, manuals, joint ventures, and personnel transfer).
– Analyze knowledge: extracting knowledge from obtained materials, abstracting
them, identifying patterns from them, explaining relations between knowledge
fragments, and verifying them against original sources.
– Reconstruct/synthesize knowledge: generalizing analyzed material to obtain
broader principles, generating hypotheses to explain observations, establishing
conformance between new and existing knowledge, and updating the total knowledge
pool by incorporating the new knowledge.
– Codify and model knowledge: involves how we represent knowledge in our minds
(mental models, for example), how we then assemble the knowledge into a coherent
model, how we document the knowledge in books and manuals, and how we encode it
in order to post it to a knowledge repository.
– Organize knowledge: for specific uses and according to an established organizational
framework, and is usually done using some form of knowledge ontology (conceptual
model) and taxonomy (classification rules).

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The Wiig KM Cycle (4)
• Holding Knowledge consists of:
– Remembering knowledge: an individual has retained or remembered that
item of knowledge, having been internalized or understood by the individual.
– Accumulating knowledge: a computer-resident knowledge
base/repository has been created and that knowledge has been encoded,
permitting it to be stored in organizational memory.
– Embedding knowledge: ensuring that it is part of business procedures.
– Archiving knowledge involves creating a scientific library and
systematically retiring out-of-date, false, or no longer relevant knowledge
from the active repository. This typically involves storing the content in
another, less costly, or less bulky medium for less frequent future retrieval.
• In this way, the organization’s holdings of valuable knowledge are
documented in repositories or in people and are therefore available
for future reference and use.

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The Wiig KM Cycle (5)
• Pooling Knowledge consists of:
– Coordination of knowledge: typically requires the formation of
collaborative teams to work with particular content in order to create a
“who knows what” network.
– Assembling knowledge: combined into background references for a
library or repository in order to facilitate subsequent access and retrieval.
– Access and retrieve knowledge: consult with knowledgeable people
about difficult problems, obtaining a second opinion from an expert, or
discussing a difficult case with a peer, or accessed and retrieved directly
from the repository.
• Organizations may pool knowledge by contacting others in the
organization who have solved similar problems either
– by obtaining the information from the organizational knowledge
repository, or
– by finding an expert through the expertise locator network and
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contacting that person directly.
Unit 02: The Knowledge Management (KM) Cycle
The Wiig KM Cycle (6)
• Finally, Applying Knowledge includes:
– Using established knowledge to perform a routine task.
– Use general knowledge to survey exceptional situations at hand.
– Use knowledge to describe the situation and scope of the problem.
– Select relevant special knowledge to handle the situation.
– Observe and characterize the situation with special knowledge.
– Analyze the situation with knowledge.
– Synthesize alternative solutions with knowledge.
– Evaluate potential alternatives using special knowledge.
– Use knowledge to decide what to do.
– Implement the selected alternative.
• When knowledge is applied to work objects,
– Routine or standard tasks are typically carried out using “compiled” knowledge
that we can readily access and use almost unconsciously or automatically.
– Difficult tasks are usually performed in a more deliberate and conscious manner,
for knowledge workers cannot use automated knowledge in unanticipated
situations.
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The Wiig KM Cycle (7)
• The major advantage of the Wiig KM cycle:
– the clear and detailed description of how organizational
memory is put into use in order to generate value for individuals,
groups, and the organization itself.
– The myriad of ways in which knowledge can be applied and used are
linked to decision-making sequences and individual characteristics.
• Wiig also emphasizes…
– the role of knowledge and skill
– the business use of that knowledge,
– the constraints that may prevent that knowledge from being fully
used
– the opportunities and alternatives to managing that knowledge, and
– the expected value added to the organization.

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The Carlile and Rebentisch Knowledge Transformation Cycle (1) #5

• Looks at how knowledge became integrated in

complex technologies and products
– emphasizing on the path-dependent nature of knowledge
transfer from one organizational group to another.
• Carlile and Rebentisch discovered that:
1. New knowledge is often created through the integration
of knowledge of different sources
2. Knowledge can move from one person to another as
well as from one organizational unit to another.
3. Knowledge is preserved in some type of organizational
storage system (organizational memory).

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The Carlile and Rebentisch Knowledge Transformation Cycle (2)

• The high-level cycle consists of 3 major stages:

– Storage: consists of adding new knowledge to existing knowledge. The
cycle always begins with this process as there is always some
organizational knowledge already exisiting.
– Retrieval: carried out from explicit storage (databases, reports, etc.), as
well as tacit knowledge from people. This involves identifying, searching,
finding and assessing the knowledge to see if it is relevant, accurate,
useful and up-to-date.
– Transformation: knowledge is never reused “as-is”. It tends to be
changed, or at least updated, before being reused. Once knowledge is
deemed useful, transformation begins. This involves documenting
undocumented knowledge, refining it, adding new metadata and updating
the knowledge.
• Metadata: description of the content that give context to any given
knowledge. The more metadata we can capture, the more likely
knowledge is reused.
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The Evans, Dalkir, and Bidian KM Cycle #7
• A holistic view of KM processes that incorporates 7 major steps:
– Identify: determine whether the knowledge exists or needs to be created.
– Store: kept in some type of organizational system
– Share: both within and outside, when appropriate, the organization.
– Use: to solve problems, make decisions, improve on products and
services, innovate, etc.
– Learn, Improve & Create: document metadata, update, refine and, as
needed, correct existing knowledge, add to it and extend the knowledge.
• Single-loop learning: incremental improvements
• Double-loop learning: not just improve but recast the knowledge to
make it more effective.
• Major contributions of this cycle are a clear distinction between
identifying existing, typically explicit, knowledge and creating new
knowledge, as well as double-looping learning.

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An integrated KM cycle
• A synthesis of the 6 approaches to KM cycle:
1. Knowledge capture/creation/contribution
2. Knowledge filtering/selection
3. Knowledge codification
4. Knowledge refinement
5. Knowledge sharing
6. Knowledge access
7. Knowledge learning
8. Knowledge application
9. Knowledge evaluation
10. Knowledge reuse/divestment
• The KM cycle is then reiterated as users understand, decide to
make use of content and validate its usefulness.
• Users will quite often come up with new content, resulting in more
individual, group and organizational learning.
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Strategic implications of the KM cycle
1. Knowledge represents the decisive basis for intelligent, competent
behavior at the individual, group, and organization level.
2. Only a conscious and organized reflection of lessons learned and best
practices discovered will allow companies to leverage their hard-won
knowledge assets.
3. A knowledge architecture needs to be designed and implemented…
• to enable the staged processing and transformation of knowledge.
• to ensure that the knowledge objects reach intended end users and put to good use.
4. The objective is to retain and share knowledge with a wider audience.
5. Information and communication technologies, such as group-ware,
intranets, and knowledge bases or repositories, provide the necessary
infrastructure to do so.
6. Business processes and cultural enablers offer the necessary
incentives and opportunities for all knowledge workers to become
active participants throughout the knowledge management cycle.

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Practical considerations for managing knowledge

• Understanding the different stages of managing

knowledge throughout the KM cycle is important,
though not enough.
• From a practical perspective, managing
knowledge requires a framework that will help
classify the different types of activities and
functions needed to deal with all knowledge-
related work within and between organizations.
– This framework is often encapsulated in the form of a
KM theory or model (to be discussed in the next
lecture).
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Summary
• There are a number of different approaches to the knowledge
management cycle such as those by McElroy, Wiig, Bukowitz and
Willams, Meyer and Zack, Carlile and Rebentisch, and Evans,
Dalkir and Bidian.
• By comparing and contrasting these approaches and by
validating them through experience gained to date with KM
practice, the major stages are identified as knowledge capture
and creation, knowledge sharing and dissemination, and
knowledge acquisition and application.
• The critical processes throughout the KM cycle:
– assess the worth of content based on organizational goals,
– contextualize content in order to better match with a variety of users, and
– continuously update with a focus on updating, archiving as required, and
modifying the scope of each knowledge object.
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Unit checkpoint
1. Discuss the different KM cycle approaches and how to integrate them
into a comprehensive, integrated approach to the effective
management of knowledge within an organization.
2. Provide an example of how each major KM cycle stage listed below
can add value to knowledge and increase the strategic worth of the
knowledge asset:
a) Capture
b) Codify
c) Create
d) Share
e) Acquire
f) Apply
3. Where are the key decision points in the KM cycle? What types of
information would you require in order to decide whether the
knowledge content would continue to the next step of the cycle?
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