Bukowitz and Williams’ KM Model

Introduction

Bukowitz and Williams (2000, p. 8) describe a Knowledge Management Process Framework that outlines “how organizations generate, maintain, and deploy a strategically correct stock of knowledge to create value.”

When to use?

For Knowledge Creation and Maintenance Processes

Model

Bukowitz and Williams’ Model from Dalkir (2017), pg.47

Stages

Get

• Seeking out information needed in order to make decisions, solve problems, or innovate.

• Information is generally easy to find, however, identifying the correct information required from the enormous volume of information available proves to be a challenge

Use

• how to combine information in new and interesting ways in order to foster organizational innovation.

• focus is primarily on individuals and then on groups

Learn

• The formal process of learning from experiences as a means of creating competitive advantage.

• An organizational memory is created so that organizational learning becomes possible—from both successes (best practices) and failures (lessons learned).

• a strong link between organizational strategy and organizational learning activities.

Contribute

• Individual employees must share what they have learned to the communal knowledge base (e.g., a shared repository) which is then generalized for all to consume e.g. best practices or failures so that these are not repeated.

Assess

• deals more with the group and organizational level whereby the evaluation of intellectual capital occurs

• the organization must

  • define mission-critical knowledge and map current intellectual capital against future knowledge needs

  • develop metrics to demonstrate that it is growing its knowledge base and profiting from its investments in intellectual capital.

Build and Sustain

• ensures that future intellectual capital of the organization will keep the organization viable and competitive.

• Resources must be allocated to the growth and maintenance of knowledge, as well as, the creation of new knowledge and reinforce existing knowledge

Divest

• An opportunity cost analysis of retaining knowledge should be performed to determine if resources would be better off spent elsewhere e.g. no longer providing training on a system that is considered legacy and to be decommissioned.

Conclusion

• Learning in organizations is important because it represents the transition step between the application of ideas and the generation of new ones. Without Learning, content will be simply warehoused only

• Strengths

  • clearly distinguishes between strategic and tactical/operational cycles for KM

  • the model has been considered more comprehensive than Wiig’s model