Preparing
for Conversation with Rony Dayan
Knowledge Creation:
The Third Leg of the KM 'Stool'
Rony Dayan
CKO
and Director of International Properties
Israel Aircraft Industries
Yahud, Israel
 Introduction
I owe former STAR
Series moderator Edna Pasher a debt of gratitude for connecting
me with Rony Dayan who has been the spark behind the development
of knowledge management programs at Israel Aircraft Industries
(IAI) in Israel and across locations throughout the world. Rony's
personal passion for KM has recently led him to pursue a PhD
in KM and he has reached that goal just this month with the acceptance
of his paper which examined the success factors for KM implementation
of KM based on evidence from case studies involving five divisions
of IAI.
His research showed
the following factors involving both the general manager and
knowledge manager of an organization had the most effect on the
implementation and success of a KM program:
- The profile of
the knowledge manager.
- The perception
of relevance of KM to the business.
- A structured framework
for the organization to follow.
- The acceptance
of long term value.
- Management support.
- The openness of
the general manager to external knowledge.
- The knowledge manager's
initiative.
A complete abstract
can be found at the bottom of this page.
But what drew me
to do a story on IAI's KM program for Inside Knowledge magazine
was the emphasis Rony and Edna place on creating new knowledge.
Because it is a somewhat different topic than we've covered in
previous STAR Series, I've asked Rony to use 'K Creation' as
his opening topic here. However, as you can see by his opening
remarks, Rony is eager to discuss the difficulties encountered
while implementing a KM program. Overcoming the barriers aren't
as easy as many reports claim.
Back
to top
Biography
A retired lieutenant
colonel of the Israeli Air Force (IAF), Rony Dayan has industrial
experience as deputy GM of MBT, one of the Israel Aircraft Industries
divisions belonging to the Electronics Group. Before that, he
was the corporate marketing representative in Southeast Asia
where he received the IAI President Marketing Award for outstanding
performance.
Rony has been leading
the effort to incorporate knowledge management in the company
since 2002. He has designed the program and has managed it since
the beginning. The program is currently being implemented across
the five groups and over 20 divisions of this two billion dollar
aerospace and defense company (www.iai.co.il).
He has given courses
in business and high-tech marketing in the School of Business
Administration at the Israeli College of Management and is preparing
a course for the implementation of KM in a learning organization
for the Israel Teachers Association. He holds an engineering
degree from the Technion in Haifa, Israel, and a Masters Degree,
both in electronics, from the US Air Force Institute of Technology
at Wright Patterson AFB, in Dayton, Ohio, US.
Rony's research
interests are in the field of knowledge management and of measuring
its performance and impact in a large corporation.
At the stage in
life in where most people think about retiring and resting on
the laurel leaves collected, Rony pursues two careers, one in
the IAF, and one in industrial management, he pointed to the
academy to research what he has been preaching for all along.
He now holds a PhD from the Cranfield University, School of Industrial
and Manufacturing Science, Department of Enterprise Integration
in the UK.
Rony (together with
Edna Pasher and Ron Dvir) authored a chapter in a book called
Real-Life Knowledge Management: Lessons from the Field,
written as a practitioner's guide to implementing KM. He has
published an article on KM implementation in The Knowledge Management
Review (2003), 6, (2), p.12-15, a number of conference papers
on various KM subjects as "Using a common taxonomy to implement
the 'One Company' value at IAI, Search and Retrieval Conference,
The ARK Group, Amsterdam; has collaborated with Stephen Evans
on the writing of an article on the commonality between KM and
the CMMI(SM) standard (CMMI is a service mark of Carnegie Mellon
University), published by the Journal of Knowledge Management
(2006), 10, (1), p.69-80; and has led workshops for the planning
of KM using the Hoshin Kanri methodology for the Marcus Evans
Conferences in Amsterdam and for the ARK Group in Singapore.
Back
to top
Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
Literature abounds
with definitions of knowledge, of management, and of knowledge
management. They are not the result of alternative rhetoric expressions,
but rather of different perceptions about the content of the
issue at stake, the context in which it takes place, the preferred
state one would like the issue to take, and the description of
the recommended path to that state.
It is not clear
whether KM can already be labeled as a discipline, but in any
case it would be a young one, age of twenty years or so. Some
are not convinced and regard it as a fad, a way to wrap normally
practiced management means, into a sophisticated package. They
say "We think we perform KM without calling it as such."
As one could draw
from skeptical answers of this type, the audience of the knowledge
manager is not an easy one and unless one can penetrate his/her
own perception about a good reason to implement KM, it will bang
on deaf ears.
The relationship
with the discipline of quality, and the precedence of the highly
publicized TQM process, which left many disappointed mainly because
they didn't manage it properly, thought it would deliver by itself,
and were not able to admit its failings, are to the detriment
of those trying to establish KM as a discipline, meant to help
organizations manage what they already recognize as their most
valuable asset --their knowledge.
Nevertheless, it
already has evolved through two or even three generations, the
first one restricted to the organizational memory and the way
it is populated, used and managed; the second dedicated to sanctify
knowledge flow rather than the knowledge itself; and the third,
not yet stabilized and with different definitions depending on
the various schools of thought.
- The importance
of a KM strategy structure
Cooking and serving
the implementation meal
Literature refers
to KM strategy as the overall picture and plan of the program
at any time along its institution, meaning the concepts and contents
that the program is concentrating on. I believe there is another
dimension to KM strategy, and this is the time dimension. Implementing
such an idea, abstract though it may be and yet self-evident,
is not a one-time affair or a one-off action.
It has to be carefully
cooked, it has to include ingredients serving the matters of
principle such as the wholeness of the program and its relationship
with the business; it has to take into account the special tastes
of the different users; it has to be served with awareness to
its shape in reality and in their perception; and it has to provide
support in a meticulous order starting with matters of culture
and not to bring in too early, technology solutions which could
spoil the appetite of the participants and derail the program.
The choice of
a framework
Previous research
discovered a profusion of alternative frameworks constituting
of KM program. These involve the three typical constituents of
KM being culture, processes, and technology in various dosages,
but what is stated to matter is its being systematic. As (Drucker,
1993), a father of modern management theory has asserted, one
of the most important challenges facing organizations in a contemporary
society is to build systematic practices for managing knowledge.
Link to business
Among other factors
identified to contribute to the sustainability of any KM program
is its link to the business strategy of the organization. I have
attempted to do it at IAI, using the KM measurement element and
relating it at three levels, first to the mere performance of
the program, to its implementation throughput, and last to the
operational and business results.
The general issue
of measurement needs to be approached with caution, trying to
answer the basic question on "why do we measure at all?"
before investigating the various available metrics for KM. The
dangers of measurement, and especially for an entity as abstract
and subjective as knowledge management, have been discussed in
literature; yet I believe that those people preventing themselves
from measuring KM in the name of these dangers, mainly do so
due to the difficulty in performing this important task, and
then theorize about the illegitimacy of measuring KM.
The importance
of management tools
One of the main
factors playing a crucial role for the implementation of KM in
IAI is the way it is managed. My experience has been with two
of the management tools I have used for the KM program in IAI:
the Hoshin Kanri method and the self assessment process.
Hoshin Kanri is
one of the most structured management tools that literarily connects
goals to actions through measures and does it in a coordinated
way across the whole company; this is a tool to practically deploy
a policy over all company's organizations and within them at
all its management levels.
The usage of the
Hoshin Kanri method as a management tool for the program enables
the establishment of a clear connection between the strategy
of the division, its goals, measures and targets, and the action
it is going to take in order to achieve those goals.
This is also supplying
transparency in the management of the program at all levels of
personnel across the whole company; it means that any employee
can see at any moment what are the achievements of any of the
organizations in implementing KM. This publicity and the will
of most managers to display a positive picture of the performance
of their organization are some of the generators of the program.
Combining this tool with the measurement method makes it a very
powerful means for the planning of the program, for its everyday
management by the knowledge managers, for its monitoring in a
perfectly transparent way across the whole company, and for achieving
its goals.
The self-assessment
method draws its value from its very basic definition -- its
being performed by the organizations themselves in a uniform
way across the company. Beyond this fundamental virtue, the staged
construction of the method depicts a natural evolution for the
organization that must be aware of the principles of the program
before it can train itself for it, on its way to understanding
it, as a prerequisite for committing to it, and before it becomes
a habit -- the five levels of the assessment test being: awareness,
training, understanding, commitment, and habit.
Back
to top
PDFs
- Flying
high
How Israel Aircraft Industries uses knowledge before it goes
stale
Inside Knowledge magazine, Vol. 9, Issue 7, 2006 (copyright)
- KM
your way to CMMI
Similarities between KM and CMMI (capability maturity model integrated)
Dissertation
Abstract
Purpose
Knowledge Management
(KM) is by now a recognized term, increasingly accepted in the
corporate community. This research contributes a better understanding
of its implementation by providing a list a factors -- though
each seems self-evident -- whose combination and experience acquired
in applying them would support practitioners applying KM, and
constitute a stepping stone for researchers for deepening knowledge.
Research context
Israel Aircraft
Industries (IAI), where this research has been conducted, is
a large aerospace and defense company that has gone through a
change process inclusive of KM implementation.
Research approach
A qualitative research
strategy with a constructivist paradigm using action research
(the author also being the director of knowledge of the company),
was used. A case study methodology has been utilized over five
divisions representing the average KM performance in the company.
Sources of information have included questionnaires, interviews,
data from the various management tools employed by the program,
and author's observations.
Success factors
for KM implementation
The factors relevant
to the general manager of an organization and to the Knowledge
Manager were found to be:
- The profile of
the knowledge manager.
- The perception
of relevance of KM to the business.
- A structured framework
for the organization to follow.
- The acceptance
of long term values.
- Management support.
- The openness of
the general manager to external knowledge.
- The knowledge manager's
initiative.
Originality is found
in:
- Application of
a comprehensive KM framework, its procedures and measures.
- A multi-level measurement
of KM goals as a link to the organization's business goals.
- Application of
the Hoshin Kanri method for the management of KM.
- Application of
a staged assessment of maturity for a KM implementation.
- The factors mentioned
above, their peculiar combination and further understanding of
the GM and the knowledge manager roles.
Back
to top
|
