Administrative+Information

=Corporate Knowledge Management Workshop=

Purpose, Need Statement, Outcomes
This workshop is designed to aid the implementation of an organization-wide Knowledge Management program which is in the early implementation process. After decades of practicing knowledge hoarding, and an overall low degree of knowledge transfer, the organization needs to cease these practices and begin to document its lessons learned and share them with the next generations of workforce. We no longer have the luxury of taking a new analyst 10 years to become a subject matter expert--we need to get them up to speed quickly! Developing the characteristics of a Learning Organization will bring us to that point much sooner.

This workshop will be the first of many that will provide constructive guidance to workforce personnel on the way to building the organization into a Learning Organization. It focuses on changing the culture of the organization, and why some traditional practices and beliefs were not constructive. The target audience for this workshop knows that the status quo is no longer acceptable--they just need some guidance and rationale. This workshop provides both.

The projected outcome for this workshop will be a series of new blogs on the internal blog site which will be indexed by keyterms and can be searched, adding to the corporate knowledge base. Workshop participants will have produced several different lessons learned, which they can immediately post to their blogs, and will take away a list of suggestions for additional post topics. This effort will assist in collecting some of the innate knowledge that has been acquired by the older members of the workforce during their careers, and will serve in place of formal debriefings prior to retirements or separations.

Target audience
This course is designed to target employees with at least 10 years of experience or more at the organization, and provides them with some basic background information about the use and value of knowledge management, and helps to elicit some lessons learned, which will be published in an individual blog created by the employee. Course completion credit will be granted through the use of linking employee PKI account identification with the creation of a blog.


 * Method of Delivery**

Asynchronous learning provided to student's desktop via the intranet. Students will work at their own pace and are not time-constrained. It is recommended that students allow approximately 5 hours to complete the course activities and readings.

I recognize that one of the objectives of this overall project was to create a group activity for learning, but given the individual nature of what I am trying to accomplish, and to keep it congruent with organization policies for training, this is better done via an individual, self-paced activity. To bring this into a classroom setting would likely result in intimidation ("Compared to them, I haven't done anything interesting and important" or "How could I possibly match that person's accomplishments?").


 * Materials required**

Students will need an account on the intranet that is PKI-enabled, and the standard suite of Office software, including Microsoft Word. This course will be based in VuPort [our internal asynchronous training delivery system), with content entered via the e-Content interface (it reformats files for compatibility, and also indexes content into learning objects that are SCORM-compliant). Additional reading materials will also be available as an electronic document. There are no copyright issues with this material, as it is a Rand Corporation report. Technical support will be provided by the VuPort Help Desk.

A graphic organizer is provided for this workshop


 * Criteria for Completion**

Sudents will be creating a blog on the intranet blog site. The courseware will link to the student's PKI account, and the creation of the blog will authenticate the student's completion of the workshop. At that point, credit will be automatically assigned to the student through the Learning Management System, and will be noted on student's permanent training record.

For the purposes of this project, creation of a learner's blog will construe a passing grade (the course itself will be graded Pass/Fail in accordance with existing internal policies)


 * Workshop Evaluation Plan**

Level 1 evaluations will be done using the standard Program Evaluation form (PEAK). A copy is attached:

Level 2 evaluation will be the student completion of the course final project and creation of a blog.

Level 3 evaluation is probably not particularly useful for this workshop, as the behaviors and cultural changes that the workshop strives to change are not directly mission-related and are likely to have little impact on individual job performance. However, after the workshop's completion population reaches several hundred, a Level 4 evaluation might be considered, as the data that can be mined from the individual blogs and lessons learned will add significant value to the organization's missions and functions, and will serve to propel the corporate Knowledge Management initiatives to a wider circle of practitioners.