Summary:

What is a Corporate Infrastructure?

Infrastructure assets are a wide range of assets which include management philosophy, corporate culture, management and business processes, financial relations, methodologies and IT systems.

Characteristics of a Knowledge Management System (KMS)

• KMS needs to be embraced by all that use it
• Has to be sustained over a long period of time
• KMS must be measured and monitored in order to ensure it is delivering return on investment
• KMS can be grown as an extremely valuable corporate asset

• Corporate Culture
• "the way we do things around here"
• the widely shared philosophy
• Management Philosophy - sets the context for employee attitude to knowledge management in the company
• Management Processes - reinforce the culture for knowledge management which might include:
• job reviews
• salary raises
• training programmes
• mentoring programmes
• HR planning

• Networking and verbal sharing - formal and informal networking and knowledge sharing among employees
• Know-how bases - identifying a group that would benefit from knowing more about their colleagues; "know what you know"
• Groupware knowldege sharing - an exmaple given is the use of Lotus Notes in sharing knowledge within the organization although this type is only one dimension of the knowledge sharing opportunity
• Decision support systems - assists the user to evaluate and make decisions based on "expert" perspective
• Expert and knowledge based systems - embody knowledge which has been typically gathered from one or more individuals. They function in a limited world or "domain", and will perform as an expert based on the data and information given to them
• Intelligent infrastructures - these systems do not exist yet; extensions of all the types of knowledge management systems discussed