What is the organisation that delivers your knowledge workstream?

Any organisation that makes product, also makes knowledge about that product. Products are made through projects, projects have beginnings and ends, but the knowledge needs to be collected from each project and passed from one to the other. It is this knowledge, passed from one project to another, that allows old products to be improved and new products to be developed. 

There is a project workstream, within is intermeshed and interoperative with a knowledge workstream.

As Michael Kennedy says about Toyota – 

“Product development is not about developing cars, its about developing knowledge about cars. Great cars will emerge from the interaction”. 

As we know, Toyota has a whole organisation dedicated to delivering products. In their case, they have car factories; other organisations have factories making cellphones, or shavers, or chocolate, or (to stretch the definition of “factory”) making legal products, or training courses, or advice to clients.

All of these production organisations are well developed, and are focused on delivering product.

If there is a well-defined “factory” producing product, and accountable for the product workstream, then there where is the well-defined “factory” producing knowledge, and accountable for the knowledge workstream?

Toyota have such a knowledge factory, and so do many of the world’s leading Knowledge Management organisations. These “knowledge factories” generally consist of a framework something like this:

• Knowledge owners, accountable for specific areas of knowledge
• Clear accountabilities for knowledge within the operating units and projects
• A “Body of Knowledge” – accessible to all who need it; maintained, synthesised, collated and updated
• Communities of practice, acting as contributors to, and co-creators and users of, the body of knowledge
• Learning from Experience systems, where new knowledge can be harvested from projects and used to update the body of knowledge
• Collaborative technologies which allow the body of knowledge to be maintained by the community
• Discussion technologies for the community
• Effective enterprise search
• Clear governance.

If you try to create a knowledge workstream using the same organisation that creates products, you will run into difficulty. You need a knowledge organisation as well.