People-focused knowledge management

Provide Effective Governance for the Knowledge Management
Practice — Management must monitor, evaluate, and guide the
KM activities and their plans, results, and opportunities.
Create Supportive Infrastructure Capabilities — Management
must implement new or adapt existing capabilities to provide
needed and effective supports for KM.
Deliberate and systematic KM does not mean top-down autocratic
determination of which knowledge must be utilized to perform
desired work competently. Instead, it means the creation of a knowl-
edge-vigilant culture guided from the top with a stewardship men-
tality, where each individual and each department, as part of their
daily work, continually look out for the knowledge perspective to
ensure that appropriate expertise and understanding are used to
deliver the desired work. Such practices lead to the creation of 
synergistic knowledge-focused mentalities and cultures. The com-
prehensive KM culture recognizes a particular aspect of personal
behavior. This aspect deals with the realization that many individu-
als deliver outstanding work in unusual situations without having
extensive topic knowledge. Instead, as discussed in Chapter 2, they
have strong metaknowledge that enables them to make sense of novel
situations and create effective approaches to handle them.
New Generation Knowledge Management Foci
In some ways NGKM provides a whole new direction for corpo-
rate leadership and practices as has been demonstrated by several
organizations. It requires new efforts from both suppliers and user
organizations. By being better engineered cognitively, socially, and
technically, NGKM practices are easier and more natural to use and
become the preferred modes of operations by managers and the
workforce alike.
NGKM leads to higher levels of effectiveness and performance in
personal, enterprise, and regional or national innovation, and success
in securing competitiveness and viability.