KM principles froim the US Army

I blogged last month about knowledge principles from the UK government. Here is another set from the US Army.

Here you can find a document by the United States Army, listing (and illustrating) their 12 Knowledge Management principles.

These principles are as follows:

1. Train and educate knowledge management leaders, managers and champions.

2. Reward knowledge sharing.

3. Establish a doctrine of collaboration (they explain the principles of collaboration as 1. Responsibility to Provide - 2. Empowered to Participate - 3. User-driven)

4. Use every interaction as an opportunity to acquire and share knowledge.

5. Prevent knowledge loss.

6. Protect and secure information and knowledge assets.

7. Embed knowledge assets (links, podcasts, videos, documents, simulations, wikis and others) in standard business processes and provide access to those who need to know.

8. Use legal and standard business rules and processes across the enterprise.

9. Use standardized collaborative toolsets.

10. Use open architectures to permit access and searching across boundaries.

11. Use a robust search capability to access contextual knowledge and store content for discovery.

12. Use portals that permit single sign-on and authentication across the global enterprise, including partners.

An interesting list, and also interesting to see what's missing - nothing there about institutionalising capture and reuse, nothing there about accountabilities and ownership for knowledge, nothing there about linking KM to the primary issues; presumably because these three are all now firmly embedded in the US Army structure and ethos.

Nothing about "learning before, during and after" - in fact nothing there about the processes of KM itself. I would not use this list as a generic list - it must work for the US Army, but I suggest that it would need modification to be used elsewhere.

But nevertheless, it is a very interesting and instructive set of principles.