12 principles for KM - US Army example

I blogged yesterday about Knowledge Management Policies and how they take over from Knowledge Management strategies once the implementation period is past.

One step towards this is to develop Knowledge Management principles. The US Army, for example, has both a KM Policy from 2012 and a published set of KM principles from 2008.

A summary of their 12 principles is below.

• 1. Train and educate knowledge management leaders, managers and champions.
• 2. Reward knowledge sharing.
• 3. Establish a doctrine of collaboration.
• 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.

This is an interesting list, and covers the aspects of Roles and Accountabilities (number 1), processes (numbers 7 and 8), Technology (numbers 9, 10, 11, 12) and Governance (numbers 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6).

I don't this it can be used as a standard set of principles for a Knowledge Management Framework, but it is a good place to start from.