Knowledge centres - Knowledge Management

Knowledge centres

What are knowledge centres?

In short, an enhanced version of a library. The ‘enhancement‘ lies in a wider focus on knowledge as well as on information: a knowledge centre typically provides a focus for collecting, organising and disseminating both knowledge and information. This does not necessarily mean that the knowledge centre will actually perform all of these activities itself. Rather, it will create a framework and provide leadership, co-ordination, guidance and expertise.

What are the benefits?

A knowledge centre can bring core knowledge management responsibilities and activities under a single umbrella rather than leaving it to dispersed individuals and teams. Economies of scale can therefore be achieved through:

• avoiding duplication of effort and resources
• pooling expertise
• achieving bulk purchasing discounts
• reusing knowledge and information in a variety of contexts.

How do I go about it?

The services that a typical knowledge centre might provide include:

• Maintaining and developing knowledge repositories e.g. the organisation‘s intranet, key information databases and collections
• Providing content management services such as cataloguing, indexing and developing taxonomies for electronic knowledge repositories
• Co-ordinating the capturing of knowledge from projects and assignments and incorporating it into knowledge bases such as databases of best practices and/or case studies
• Identifying and forming links with sources of important knowledge, both inside and outside the organisation
• Providing pointers to people as well as to information - connecting people who need help with people who can provide it, identifying subject experts, maintaining a skills database, connecting people who share similar needs or are working on similar problems, etc
• Providing a ‘one stop shop‘ for multiple knowledge and information needs
• Providing pointers to resources and/or training in information and knowledge skills.

Good knowledge centres will put as much emphasis on connecting people with people - ‘know-who‘ - as they do on connecting people with information and document collections. They will be concerned with ‘active‘ not ‘archive‘ knowledge, so need to be fully up to speed with what is happening in the organisation including current priorities and work in progress - ‘who is doing what now‘.

Knowledge centres may also be created for very specific goals. For example in the 1990s, consulting firm Ernst & Young created three knowledge centres, each with a distinct remit: the Center for Business Innovation would create new knowledge through research, the Center for Business Technology would use existing knowledge to create predefined methods and automated tools, and the Center for Business Knowledge would gather and store the firm‘s internal and external knowledge and information resources. The services of the latter included a library, a call centre for answering consultant requests, and a database of consultant skills. Managers of the centre also had responsibility for identifying and tracking subject matter experts, and for organising knowledge networks around each key domain of knowledge within the business. Another key task of the centre was to develop a knowledge architecture and taxonomy, in order to specify the categories and terms in which the firm needed to gather and store knowledge. Key areas of knowledge were represented by ‘Power Packs‘ - structured sets of online resources and materials including answers to frequently-encountered issues.

Are there any other points I should be aware of?

• Knowledge centres, while similar to libraries, are not the same. A knowledge centre is based on the idea that knowledge resides primarily in people rather than in documents or computer systems. Hence in a knowledge centre there is a strong emphasis on connecting people with each other, as well as with information.