This survey presented by the Center for Digital Government examined how city governments have progressed in adopting and utilizing digital technologies to improve the delivery of services to their citizens.
Chief Knowledge Officers (CKOs) build programs that help businesses capture and reuse organizational knowledge. CKOs help organizations overcome an internal flaw in knowledge management (KM) theory — sharing knowledge is often not in an employee's best interest. In many workplaces, information is power. Status and rewards go to the knowledge owners, not the knowledge sharers. This article from Katherine C. Adams presents what CKOs at some of the world's leading knowledge-driven organizations are doing to foster a climate of knowledge sharing and innovation during uncertain times.
Laura Gordon-Murnane reviews FirstGov.gov and American FactFinder, two tools designed to provide access to a wide range of government information now available electronically. Each of these new government Web tools has been designed to help end users find answers to specific questions. How well these tools deliver on this goal is the subject for discussion.
This document by the U.S. Economic Development Administration shows that the use of KM tools in economic development is just emerging. The author believes economic development organizations need to learn and experiment with these tools and techniques. One chapter of this report is completely dedicated to KM tools and techniques for economic development. The main themes are: Using computers and the Internet; Techniques for uncovering and developing local intellectual assets; Techniques for impoved economic development activities.
The NASA Academy of Program and Project Leadership (APPL) initiative contains several approaches including a competency model, live training courses in project management, web-cast courses, direct project support for teams, research on project management based upon benchmarking studies of other federal agencies, and the knowledge sharing component of NASA's KM program. Essentially, this involves identifying the leaders and best managers and listening to their stories.
This article from Christopher A. Thorn explores the application of Knowledge Management techniques to educational information systems—particularly in support of systemic reform efforts. The first section defines knowledge and its relationship to information and data. The second section explores some of the fundamental design elements of an educational KM system. Section three outlines the benefits that organizations expect to gain by investing in KM. Section four is a case history of the introduction of a district-level data system and the parallel efforts to support the aggregation and reporting of high-stakes educational outcomes for 8th grade students in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) district.
