What is your vision on Knowledge Management future ? What do you think the main trends are today and will be in the next years ?

In my opinion, I think Knowledge Management is going to be more valued by companies. The economic context provides the real value of knowledge and skills used every day by employees, team managers have to explore different ways to achieve their goals, customers claim more agility to get the right service at the right moment for the right price. So to get or to save more customers, companies would have to manage and improve every day their Knowledge Networks. A Knowledge Network is an environment in wich people share and capitalize connections that provide access to the right item, employee, process, information, supplier, customer. In other words, I call this environment the RELATIONSHIP ECONOMY.
 

How organizations can use Knowledge Management to improve their competitiveness and optimize their businesses results? And what are the main expected benefits?

First organizations have to launch pragmatic actions to demonstrate the benefits, to become aware of the organisational change, and to involve more business communities in future Projects. Change managment has to be built by everybody, everyday, and become a new behavior in the culture of the organization. Knowledge Management is a new way to work with all stakeholders, KM gives the power to empower business communities. The big challenge is to know what is the right knowledge I could use to be more efficient. And the right knowledge is the cognitive trigger to extract, to capitalise, to share and to improve everyytime it is necessary.

What are your recommendations to start an effective Knowledge Management project and its successful roll-out?

To be pragmatic, to begin with a little project, to put in place an open-minded environment where skateholders could exchange with complete transparancy. Do not forget to put in place measurement criterias in accordance with business work unit to demonstrate benefits.


In your opinion, what are the major hurdle to overcome and the pitfalls to avoid?

To forget to put in place an individual and a collective, and a internal and external reward system.


Do you think there are cultural specificities on Knowledge Management maturity depending on your geographical location?

Oh yes, the culture of the organization is one major point to manage at the beginning of the project. On the same subject the approach and the meaning of each stakeholders  is often different. The community manager has to foster exchanges between members of the community to build a common language and meaning share by everybody. Then the mutlicultural community is able to build knowledge capitalisation and transfers.