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Management and participation
If you introduce Knowledge Management after Knowledge Retention and Traceability, the actual knowledge producers will be more active partners in the setting up and negotiation of the separation of roles and the organization of the infrastructure.
This increased participation will result in a greater control on the knowledge contents, as the knowledge management organizational unit will not be the only organizational structure in charge of all the knowledge management tasks.
If the Knowledge Management organization is in place before the rest of the organization is able to provide usable knowledge, the net result is usually an "ivory tower" approach.
Should this be the case, the Knowledge Management organization, for lack of contact with sources that understand its "lingo", starts generating knowledge and assumptions, instead of structuring knowledge produced by the actual Knowledge Providers.
In turn, this will give less incentive to the other organizational units to become part of a process that adds overhead but whose value (i.e. knowledge that can be extracted to be reused) is questionable.
Interestingly, some organizations that misused Knowledge Management tools and methodologies found themselves with an increase of the use of external consultancies, used by some organizational units as a way to circumvent rules that were applied only to internal knowledge production.
Knowledge Management based on Knowledge Retention also simplified the identification of "core" knowledge items, whose understanding should be kept inside your organization.
These "core" items are those relevant to ensure that any "outsourcing" activities do not reduce your own organization business continuity capabilities.
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