This article focuses on a knowledge management initiative that was implemented at AstraZeneca, a large pharmaceutical company. Because of the expense of bringing a new drug to market, it became imperative for this company to harvest the knowledge gained on individual projects, so that the lessons learned could be transferred.

The knowledge management initiative, then, was to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing beyond project boundaries. Roth identifies two different knowledge activities that he sees as critical to the creation of common knowledge:

1. To effectively translate ongoing experience into knowledge

2. To transfer that knowledge across the boundaries of time, space, and units within the company

Expert versus distributed modes

The traditional conception of knowledge sharing has been the expert mode: a few experts embody the company’s critical knowledge, which is transferred through classes, journals, books, and consultant contracts.

A distributed mode transfers knowledge between teams and facilitates a much more dynamic exchange of knowledge.

Re-thinking roles

To create a true culture of knowledge sharing, you need to identify new roles, such as knowledge broker and knowledge activist. These roles will be assumed by boundary-spanning individuals who view the company from a broader perspective and can work across the boundaries that are inevitable in a complex organization.

The method used by AstraZeneca was Action Research. Defined as “an emergent collaborative inquiry process in which behavioral and social science knowledge is integrated with existing organizational knowledge for the purpose of generating scientific and actionable knowledge simultaneously.

Five Key Processes:

• Emergent task process
  
• Inquiry process
  
• Integration process
  
• Experimental process
  
• Diffusion process

Three Step Action Plan, using two facilitators

Step One: legitimatize and familiarize the facilitators with the landscape by interviewing project leader


Step Two: Unlock the tacit and structure the explicit. This process occurred during a brainstorming session, about two-hours long, with the core group. The motto was “Knowledge on Every Wall.” End result was a mind map of the common knowledge.


Step Three: Sharing via an interactive seminar or some other vehicle within company norms. Session lasted two hours.

One key result was that a tacitly known truth becomes explicit. As one participant commented, “It is so much work structuring what we know.”

What are the roles a knowledge facilitator plays?

• Catalyst
  
• Coordinator
  
• Provider of direction
  
• Connector of knowledge domains

How can this information be transferred to higher education? The time commitment for the three-step action plan was not huge. Employees showed some resistant to the idea of the seminar to share lessons learned, but with trusted facilitators leading the way, they quickly acknowledged the value.

Higher education staff are just as over whelmed with their tasks as those in business, but the opportunity to communicate and improve and to accomplish more in a creative and collaborative manner should outweigh the resistance to such a formalized process.

The article also contains an excellent bibliography and some highly effective charts.