Knowledge organizations

Operationalizing Risk in Knowledge Organizations
Based on the work of Adrian "Zeke" Wolfberg at the DIA Knowledge Laboratory, this white paper will be a Crowdsourcing project of the Federal CIO Council's Knowledge Management Working Group.

The Knowledge Organization
- what are the characteristics of a knowledge organization? - how is different from the hierarchical model? - what are examples of a hierachical model, a knowledge organization model, and a hybrid of hierarchical/knowledge model?

Generation of Value
- what is "value" for a knowledge organization? - how does one create value?

Risk-related Strategies
- One strategy is risk-management: drives out variation in the system - What value does a risk-management approach provide? - Another strategy is risk-creation: brings new connections into the system creating turbulence - how does one create risk, and what happens when one does?

Support Mechanisms to take Risks
- Learning: which one - outcome-based or behavior-based? - What are the impacts of an outcome and behavior based learning approach? - Trust: which one - externally provided (structure/design) or internally generated? - What are the characteristics of internally generated trust, and how can this be achieved?

Cultural Change
- How/when does the benefit of knowledge creation and sharing outweigh the loss/cost of losing (fill in the blank)? - What adoption strategies can be used for introducing new technologies, process or behaviors? - How can one think about top-down and bottom-up approaches?

About Crowdsourcing
The crowdsourcing phenomenon is not a new one in the KM world. Collaboration and teaming on projects has been experimented with, refined in, and made a staple of many knowledge organizations.