The managing of knowledge through systematic sharing is assuming a larger role in organizations around the world, including those involved in development assistance.

Sharing knowledge: The idea that knowledge should be shared is obviously not new. The pursuit of any significant human activity, including economic development, typically leads to the acquisition by those involved of know-how and expertise as to how the activity may be successfully conducted. Insofar as what is learned in the process can be captured, and communicated and shared with others, it can enable subsequent practitioners — or even generations — to build on earlier experience and obviate the need of costly rework or of learning by making the same repetitive mistakes. In the village, from time immemorial, the elder, the traditional healer and the midwife have been the living repositories of distilled experience in the life of the community. Even in highly sophisticated modern knowledge organizations, the most valuable knowledge – the know-how in terms of what really gets results and what mistakes to avoid – often resides mainly in people’s minds. Interactive knowledge-sharing mechanisms have always been used — from palavers under the baobab, village square debates, and town meetings, to conclaves, professional consultations, meetings, workshops, and conferences – all functioning to enable individuals to share what they know with others in the relevant area of knowledge. Migrations of people have been a  principal mode of knowledge transfer across continents. Today, a range of technologies from computers to video-conferencing for distance learning offers unprecedented opportunities to disseminate know-how and insights rapidly and cheaply  to a worldwide audience.

     Explicating knowledge: The reach of know-how and experience possessed by individuals can be greatly extended once it is captured and explicated so that others can easily find it and understand and use it. In ancient Greece, the philosopher, Plato, in his dialogues, captured and elaborated the thinking of his mentor Socrates, and so succeeding generations have been able to discover and share that thinking, and in turn reinterpret those thoughts and to be stimulated to achieve fresh insights and creativity. In other cultures, the Analects of Confucius, The Art of War of Sun Tzu, or the pyramids of Egypt and Mexico, have served similar knowledge sharing functions. In modern times, reports of activities, minutes of meetings, memoranda, proceedings of conferences, and document filing systems maintained by organizations are traditional commonly-used devices for recording content in paper format so that it can be transferred to others. More recently, electronic databases, audio and video recordings, interactive tools and multimedia presentations have become available to extend the techniques for capturing and disseminating content. Although these tools are not yet everywhere available in the developing world, they are spreading rapidly and present a unique opportunity for developing countries to benefit most from the technological revolution now unfolding: low-cost telecommunications systems will help countries to leapfrog ahead through distance education, distance health services, and much better access to markets and private sector partners abroad.  Nevertheless, even with modern tools, the process of knowledge transfer is inherently difficult, since those who have knowledge may not be conscious of what they know or how significant it is. Thus know-how is “sticky” and tends to stay in people’s heads.

     The reach of the new technology for knowledge sharing:  Many factors have transformed the way in which organizations now view knowledge, but perhaps the pivotal development has been the dramatically extended reach of know-how through new information technology. Rapidly falling costs of communications and computing and the extraordinary growth and accessibility of the World Wide Web present new opportunities for knowledge-based organizations, to share knowledge more widely and cheaply than ever before. Thus organizations with operations and employees around the world are now able to mobilize their expertise from whatever origin to apply rapidly to new situations. As a result, clients are coming to expect from global organizations, not merely the know-how of the particular team that has been assigned to the task, but the very best that the organization as a whole has to offer. Knowledge sharing is thus enabling — and forcing — institutions that are international in the scope of their operations, to become truly global in character by enabling knowledge transfer to occur across large distances within a very short time.
Which organizations have most actively taken up the challenge of formal knowledge management? Some regard the major international consulting firms as the early adopters. Others point to the work on communities of practice at Xerox PARC and the Institute for Research on Learning. Whatever the origin, the popularity of such programs is spreading rapidly across all sectors of business in the United States and Europe1. 
The diverse efforts of organizations around the world to share knowledge are being pursued under various labels, including “knowledge management”, “knowledge sharing”, “the learning organization”, “intellectual capital management” or “intellectual asset management”.  But whatever label it chooses, any organization embarking on this course must confront a number of key choices about the dimensions of its knowledge management system. 
 

Box 2 What is knowledge?      In everyday language, it has long been the practice to distinguish between information — data arranged in meaningful patterns — and knowledge — something that is believed, that is true (for pragmatic knowledge, that works) and that is reliable.       In recent times, theoretical objections to the concept of truth (e.g. by post-modernists) or to that of reliability (e.g. by positivists) have led to some blurring of the distinction. The interchangeable use of information and knowledge can be confusing if it is not made clear that knowledge is being used in a new and unusual sense, and can seem unscrupulous insofar as the intent is to attach the prestige of knowledge to mere information.  It also tends to obscure the fact that while it can be extremely easy and quick to transfer information from one place to another, it is often very difficult and slow to transfer knowledge from person to another.      In assessing attempts to define knowledge it can be helpful to remember that the human mind has often been seen as capable of two kinds of knowledge — the rational and the intuitive.       In the West, intuitive knowledge has often been devalued in favor of rational scientific knowledge, and the rise of science has even led to claims that intuitive knowledge is not really knowledge at all.  However, recognition of the difficulties inherent in transferring knowledge from one person to another has tended to highlight the importance of tacit knowledge e.g. notably in the writings of Polanyi (The Tacit Dimension, 1975), and Nonaka and Takeuchi (The Knowledge Creating Company, 1995). Some analysts have tried defining “knowledge” as wholly tacit (i.e. as capacity in action), thus consigning what others have considered as explicit knowledge to mere information.     In the East, the tradition has been to celebrate the importance of the intuitive, in comparison with the rational. The Upanishads for instance speak about a higher and a lower knowledge, and associate lower knowledge with the various sciences. Chinese philosophy has emphasized the complementary nature of the intuitive and the rational and has represented them by the archetypal pair yin and yang.      Debates about the meaning of knowledge have continued for thousands of years, and seem likely to continue for some time to come.

      The next section describes some of those choices and the tensions that underlie them, while the final section discusses some additional challenges that apply to development institutions.

Key dimensions of knowledge management programs
      The most important decisions that an organization must make in establishing its knowledge- management system can be summarized as: deciding with whom to share, deciding what to share, deciding how to share, and deciding to share.
      Deciding with whom to share: One of the major decisions concerns the intended beneficiaries of the knowledge-sharing system. Knowledge sharing programs may aim at sharing with either an internal or an external audience. Internal knowledge sharing programs typically aim at making the existing business work better, faster or cheaper, by arming the frontline staff of an organization with higher-quality, more up-to-date and easily accessible tools and inputs to do their jobs, and so add value for clients or save costs. Internal sharing was the initial motivation for knowledge sharing in the major international consulting firms in the early 1990s. 
 
 

Box 3 Can knowledge be managed?       There is no agreed definition of “knowledge management”, even among practitioners. The term is used loosely to refer to a broad collection of organizational practices and approaches related to generating, capturing, disseminating know-how and other content relevant to the organization’s business.       Some would argue that “knowledge management” is a contradiction in terms, being a hangover from an industrial era when control modes of thinking were dominant. Thus knowledge is not just an explicit tangible “thing”, like information, but information combined with experience, context, interpretation and reflection. Knowledge involves the full person, integrating the elements of both thinking and feeling. Hence some object to the implicit suggestion in the use of the term “knowledge management” that knowledge can be so managed, as revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of knowledge.      Many practitioners increasingly see “knowledge sharing” as a better description of what they are about than “knowledge management”.  Others would prefer to emphasize “learning”, since the real challenge in implementing knowledge management is less in the “sending” and more in the “receiving”, particularly the processes of sense making, understanding, and being able to act upon the information available. Overall, whatever the term employed to describe it, knowledge management is increasingly seen, not merely as the latest management fashion, but as signaling the development of a more organic and holistic way of understanding and exploiting the role of knowledge in the processes of managing and doing work, and an authentic guide for individuals and organizations in coping with the increasingly complex and shifting environment of the modern economy.      More recently, some of these firms — such as Arthur Andersen and Ernst & Young — have started offering external knowledge sharing services, so that clients can have direct access on-line to know-how offered by the firm.2 The World Bank’s strategy for knowledge sharing has been explicitly external from the outset.  Its objective is to make know-how and experience accessible not only internally to World Bank staff, but externally to clients, partners and stakeholders around the world, and in the process, reaching many who currently have little or no access to the organization’s expertise. External knowledge sharing poses greater risks than internal sharing programs — raising complex issues of confidentiality, copyright, and in the case of the private sector, the protection of proprietary assets — but it may also offer greater potential benefits.  Some analysts believe that during the next five years, knowledge-sharing programs will broaden from their current employee focus to encompass suppliers, business partners and, in particular, clients and customers.3

     Deciding what to share:  Knowledge-sharing programs may aim at making available various types of content.  Some, like that of Manpower, Inc., provide customers with content that enables them to better use the firm’s services.  Others, such as those of the software manufacturers Broderbund and Symantec, provide solutions through on-line service and support that aim at helping customers resolve issues related to the use of software they have purchased. Still others, such as the programs of the international consulting firms and the World Bank, aim at sharing know-how and best practices related to the core expertise of the organization. 
 

Box 4 Knowledge management at the World Bank      A task team leader for the World Bank in Yemen urgently needs to respond to a client about setting up management information systems in an education ministry.  He contacts the education advisory service in the Human Development Network, which in collaboration with the relevant community of practice, ascertains that there is similar and relevant experience in Kenya. The material is dispatched to Yemen, so that the task manager can respond to the client within 48 hours, rather than weeks later, after returning to headquarters and searching for the answer. An Indonesian official needs to know the international experience on private sector involvement in vocational training. Through the help of the Human Development Network, the relevant task team leader is able to give to the official within a short time frame a comprehensive analysis of the international experience, performed jointly with UNIDO, and some potential partners identified through IFC.       These are illustrations of the initial functioning of the World Bank’s knowledge management system. Relevant know-how so identified can then be captured and entered into the knowledge base so that it is accessible by all staff. By the year 2000, relevant parts of the system are planned to be externally accessible so that clients, partners and stakeholders around the world will be able to have access to the know-how of the organization.       This approach, launched organization-wide in October 1996, aimed at making the Bank a clearing-house for knowledge about development — not only a corporate memory of best practices, but also a collector and disseminator of the best development knowledge from outside organizations.  In mid 1998, knowledge management is moving ahead rapidly on a broad front, led principally by sectoral networks through eight principal activities: (i) building communities of practice (of which the core members are called thematic groups) (ii) developing an on-line knowledge base in which Bank’s know-how is stored and from which it can be made widely accessible; (iii) establishing help desks and advisory services; ·(iv) building a directory of expertise; (v) making available key sectoral statistics; (vi) providing access to transaction or engagement information; (vii) providing a dialogue space for professional conversations; and  (viii) establishing external access and outreach to external clients, partners and stakeholders. These network-driven initiatives are being complemented by programs managed out of the regions, including the establishment of  (i)  data bases of up to date regional  macro-economic statistics, (ii) collections of country information, (iii) programs to enhance the ability of client countries to collect and process information and to connect themselves to the internet, (iv) the tailoring of sectoral  best practices to regional circumstances, and (v) the building of communities of practice that work on specific countries (called country teams).     Knowledge management is still at an early stage of implementation but is expected to change the way in which the World Bank operates internally and transform the organization’s relationships with external clients, partners and stakeholders to become in effect a key strategic thrust for the 21st Century.

     Comprehensive, organization-wide programs for sharing knowledge typically emerge when the organization’s know-how is perceived as critical to its mission, where the value of the organization’s knowledge is high, and where the enterprise is geographically dispersed.  Some examples:  the knowledge management strategies and programs at Ernst & Young, Arthur Andersen, and the World Bank.  In other cases, knowledge sharing programs are limited to a specific function, such as sales and marketing, or a specific area of expertise such as engineering3. 
But the question of “what to share” includes not only the type of knowledge, but also its quality.  In organizing knowledge-sharing programs, it is common to put processes in place to ensure that the content that is shared reaches a certain minimal threshold of value and reliability. Some programs make no explicit distinction between different levels of reliability of the material offered, once the initial threshold has been met, thus allowing users to reach their own conclusions as to its ultimate value (for example, the knowledge sharing program at One World Online). Other programs, particularly those that offer external knowledge sharing, provide explicit guidance on whether the material has been authenticated, so that users can make inferences about its reliability.  Most knowledge-sharing systems also allow in varying degrees the inclusion of new and promising ideas that have not yet been authenticated and in this sense are not yet knowledge.

     Finally, the “what” must go beyond generic prescriptions.  As discussed in the previous section, knowledge-sharing programs have to cope with the issue of adapting know-how to the local context in which it is to be applied. Where the know-how is extremely robust and the local context largely predictable, this may not pose so much of a problem. But in most areas of development assistance, know-how is typically less than fully robust, with continuous evolution, and the local context is often unpredictable; hence knowledge of the local context and local know-how become very important. An important aspect of capturing local know-how concerns indigenous knowledge (see Box 6).
 

Box 5 Knowledge sharing at OneWorld Online     OneWorld Online (www.oneworld.org) is a gateway for the public into issues of sustainable development worldwide. It takes as its information content the web sites of 250 partner organizations, including Government departments, institutes, NGOs, news wires and international agencies.  Partners include: the European Center for Development Policy Management (Netherlands), The Institute of Development Studies (UK), The International Institute for Sustainable Development (Canada), The Center for Science and Environment (Delhi) and Inter Press Service (Italy). This now adds up to a virtual library on development and global justice issues numbering more than 70,000 articles in six languages. Unlike a bibliographic database, these documents are available in full text form and are free to read.  The partners have come together on the basis that the those using the Internet to find information on development are generally looking for a theme rather than an organization, so that packaging their material under topic headings across different organizations makes it much more readily available.  The headings used by OneWorld Online include: guides to key development themes , ‘Think Tanks’ for professionals, news from a global perspective, educational resources, radio programming and training opportunities. This gateway approach is proving very popular with a worldwide audience: the partnership is currently receiving more than 4 million hits a month from more than 120 countries, 60 of them in the South.       OneWorld Online is owned by a charity and is run by a team of 15 people based near Oxford in the UK, with additional editorial centers being established in the Netherlands, India, Africa and Central America. These are intended to provide a genuinely ‘one world’ perspective on the way that information is presented, especially through the use of languages other than English. They also work to support local NGOs in maximizing the potential of the Internet as a tool for development.      All the partners’ 250 web sites on different servers around the world are monitored everyday through powerful searching and database software (based on Verity software), which analyses, indexes, keywords, clusters and summarizes all new documents from the partnership. This concept of a specialized search engine dedicated solely to the theme of sustainable development is key to OneWorld Online’s approach, offering the public a way to avoid the needle-in-a-haystack problems of  searching with an all-purpose search engine. The person using the OneWorld search engine knows that the domain being searched contains only relevant material of known date and provenance.      OneWorld Online sees knowledge sharing as not only a matter of efficient information retrieval but as also needing a popular touch, presenting themes in interesting ways to different audiences. This is a journalistic function in the best sense, and OneWorld tries to present text and pictures in a way that will best contribute to the sharing of knowledge rather than the mere transfer of information.                        Peter Armstrong

     Deciding how to share: Knowledge management programs may be seen as having both a collecting and a connecting dimension.  The first “how” question for the organization to decide is how to balance the two.  The connecting dimension involves linking people who need to know with those who do know, and so developing new capabilities for nurturing knowledge and acting knowledgeably.  Connecting is necessary because knowledge is embodied in people, and in the relationships within and between organizations. Information becomes knowledge as it is interpreted and made concrete in the light of the individual’s understandings of the particular context. For example, help desks and advisory services (small teams of experts to whom one can call to obtain specific know-how or help in solving a problem) can be very effective in the short term in connecting people and getting quick answers to questions, thus accelerating cycle time, and adding value for clients.  At the World Bank, such services have tended to prove more immediately productive than has the building of knowledge bases, which takes longer.  Organizational “Directory of Expertise” (that is, a “Who’s who” indicating who knows what) can enable staff to connect to the right people and know-how more efficiently. However, an organization that focuses entirely on connecting, with little or no attempt at collecting, can be very inefficient. Such organizations will fail to get the leverage of sharing, and may spend much time in “reinventing wheels”.
 
 

Box 6 Sharing indigenous knowledge through the World Bank      Indigenous knowledge is the traditional know-how, built-in living skills, and coping mechanisms that exist in all societies. These systems play a vital role in the poorest countries. Traditional healers, for example, minister to physiological and psychotherapeutic needs of the majority of the poor in many least developed countries, and traditional authorities have been instrumental in rebuilding war-torn communities in Africa far beyond the efforts of governments and donors. The World Bank’s knowledge management system not only captures and shares knowledge from and between development experts, it also at draws on indigenous knowledge available in countries and sectors in which the Bank is active.      Understanding and drawing on indigenous practices will maximize the impact of Bank assisted operations among the poor, allowing communities to actively pursue their own development, thus contributing to sustainability. For instance, traditional farming systems in the humid tropics often emulate a natural vegetation cover by allowing trees, shrubs, and a variety of other plants next to their crops. This reduces the risk of erosion, pests and diseases. Based on this indigenous practice, projects in the Usambara Mountains in Tanzania, assisted by our development partners, the European Union, the German Agency for Technical Cooperation and the World Conservation Union, have jointly developed with farmers a sustainable land use that increases production and reduces the pressure on natural resources in an area famous for its rich biodiversity.      Internally, there are already a number of World Bank operations that have worked in parallel with or built upon traditional practices. Externally, a global network of public, private and non-governmental organizations has formed to promote the study and exchange of indigenous knowledge. Considering the promise of modern information and communication technologies to facilitate a more equitable exchange of information, the World Bank has joined with other bi- and multilateral agencies to study the potential of information technology in the exchange of indigenous knowledge. Also, there is an ongoing discussion on the subject, developed in the context of the Global Knowledge 97 conference.       In June 1998, the World Bank through its Innovation Marketplace awarded an initiative to help to collect, document and disseminate indigenous knowledge as part of a collective effort with development partners to improve the impact of development assistance. The initiative will foster the South-South exchange of indigenous knowledge to facilitate direct access to solutions for those that are in need of them. Indigenous knowledge will be gathered through field interviews, participatory community assessments, and focus group sessions with NGOs and communities, and will be catalogued by country/regions and sectors/themes. The information will also be incorporated into the World Bank’s knowledge management system, thus making it widely available to development practitioners everywhere.

     The collecting dimension relates to the capturing and disseminating of know-how through information and communication technologies aimed at codifying, storing and retrieving content, which in principle is continuously updated through computer networks. Through such collections of content, what is learned is made readily accessible to future users. Even where comprehensive collections of materials exist, effective use may still need knowledgeable and skilled interpretation and subsequent alignment with the local context to get effective results, just as reading a newspaper article on brain surgery which does not qualify or enable a reader to conduct brain surgery. Thus the organization that focuses completely on collecting and makes little or no effort to foster people connections tends to end up with a repository of static documents. 
     Most knowledge management programs, particularly organization-wide programs such as those at Ernst & Young, Arthur Andersen or the World Bank, aim at an integrated approach to managing knowledge, by combining the benefits of both approaches and achieving a balance between connecting individuals who need to know with those who do know and collecting what is learned as a result of these connections and making that easily accessible to others.  For example, if collected documents are linked to their authors and contain other interactive possibilities, they can become dynamic and hence much more useful.
     A second “how” question concerns creating the social process within which knowledge sharing can occur. In undertaking knowledge sharing programs, most organizations  have found that the nurturing of knowledge-based communities of practice is a sine qua non to enabling significant knowledge sharing to take place. Such communities are typically based on the affinity created by common interests or experience, where practitioners face a common set of problems in a particular knowledge area, and have an interest in finding, or improving the effectiveness of, solutions to those problems. Various tools can be used to strengthen such communities, including the establishment of specific work objectives for the community, the provision of adequate resources and management support to enable it to conduct its activities. 
     A third “how” question concerns the use of alliances and partnerships. Few, if any, organizations know everything necessary to conduct their business. Access to top quality expertise can be enhanced where needed by the establishment of knowledge sharing partnerships. These partnerships may be with fellow practitioners, as in the World Development Indicators — a partnership in the development field building on the social and economic data and supporting expertise in development statistics of the UN family of agencies, NGOs and private sector groups — or with clients as in Manpower Inc.  Such partnerships are sometimes the extension and continuation of the communities of practice which exist inside an organization. They can also contribute to other objectives of the partners such as the acceleration of content creation, the enhancement of content quality, the division of labor between partners in handling issues of common concern to the partnership, and the building of mutual trust that leads to additional benefits (see box 8).
     The fourth “how” question concerns the choice of information technology.4 The availability of recently available technologies, particularly the World Wide Web, has been instrumental in catalyzing the knowledge management movement.  Information technology may, if well resourced and implemented, provide a comprehensive knowledge base that is speedily accessed, interactive, and of immediate value to the user. However there are also many examples of systems that are neither quick, easy-to-use, problem free in operation, or easy to maintain. The Web, for example, frequently creates information overload. The development of tools that support knowledge sharing in an appropriate and user-friendly way, particularly in organization-wide knowledge sharing programs, is not a trivial task.
     Most of the technological tools now available tend to help dissemination of know-how, but offer less assistance for knowledge use. Tools that assist in knowledge creation are even less well developed, although collaborative workspaces offer promising opportunities, by enabling participation, across time and distance, in project design or knowledge-base development, so that those most knowledgeable about development problems — the people living them on a day-to-day basis – can actively contribute to their solutions. Some of the more user friendly technologies are the traditional ones — face-to-face discussions, the telephone, electronic mail, and paper-based tools such as flip charts. Among the issues that need to be considered in providing information technology for knowledge sharing programs are:

·  responsiveness to user needs: continuous efforts must be made to ensure that the information technology in use meets the varied and changing needs of users.
·  content structure: in large systems, classification and cataloguing become important so that items can be easily found and quickly retrieved.
·  content quality requirements: standards for admitting new content into the system need to be established and met to ensure operational relevance and high value.
·  integration with existing systems: since most knowledge sharing programs aim at embedding knowledge sharing in the work of staff as seamlessly as possible, it is key to integrate knowledge-related technology with preexisting technology choices.
·  scalability: solutions that seem to work well in small groups (e.g. HTML web sites) may not be appropriate for extrapolation organization-wide or on a global basis.
·  hardware-software compatibility is important to ensure that choices are made that are compatible with the bandwidth and computing capacity available to users.
·  synchronization of technology with the capabilities of users is important so as to take full advantage of the potential of the tools, particularly where the technology skills of users differ widely. Knowledge sharing programs that focus on the simultaneous improvement of the whole system, both technology tools and human practices, are likely to be more successful than programs that focus on one or the other.

     Deciding to share:  Even if the organization has a clear vision that includes the answers to these questions — with whom, what, and how to share — its knowledge-management efforts will founder if they are not backed up by management commitment.  A real commitment to sharing usually requires substantial changes in resource allocation and organizational procedures.  First, formal knowledge programs can require a substantial commitment of financial resources to be successful. The typical organization-wide knowledge management program may need as much as 5 percent of the total enterprise budget on an annualized basis. The large international consulting companies are believed to spend on average between 6 percent and 12 percent of revenues on knowledge sharing activities and infrastructure.5 The knowledge management program of the World Bank is at the lower end of these scales, with an allocation of around 4 percent of the annual administrative budget. 
     Second, the organization’s incentive structure can significantly affect the pace of knowledge sharing.6 An open sharing culture will promote the success of knowledge-management programs, and incentives can help in turn to make this culture possible.  Some organizations like Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young have made knowledge sharing an integral part of their formal personnel evaluation system, to apparently good effect, and other organizations such as the World Bank are planning similar approaches. Knowledge fairs (company-wide events during which knowledge professionals present their services to communities of practice) and knowledge-sharing awards have also been used by various organizations. A recent study of successful knowledge management projects has identified the introduction of incentives as one of the critical success factors in virtually all the sample projects. 7 (See  Box 7)
 

Box 8 Knowledge partnerships for the environment     Partnerships play a key role in the “Knowledge Bank”, based on the recognition that achieving sustainable development requires the collaborative efforts of a wide range of stakeholders, working together towards common, clearly defined  goals.  The Bank’s role is increasingly to act as a “hub”, facilitating the interchange of knowledge between these stakeholders — and especially between the institutions of the developed and developing world.  One example of this approach in action is the Bank’s increasing engagement in sustainable forestry. The Bank has set itself ambitious targets, intended to protect large areas of the world’s remaining tropical forests.  Achieving these will require buy-in and support from a wide range of stakeholders.  To this end, a range of partnerships and on-line discussions have been established, including the World Bank/World Wildlife Fund Alliance, the CEO Forum – a group of the world’s top private forestry companies, and an active discussion area surrounding the review of the Bank’s forest sector policy.       A second example concerns our partnership with the Biodiversity Conservation Information System (BCIS) – a consortium of twelve of the world’s leading conservation non-governmental organizations.  The BCIS members are working to improve access to their large databases on, for example, the protected areas of the world, threatened ecosystems/species  and,  environmental law. By becoming partners with BCIS we will be able to join these knowledge resources with our own and make this wealth of information available to our operational staff and clients.  Equally as important, we will be able to facilitate the increased flow of data and knowledge from our in-country operations back into the international system – while at the same time ensuring that project-based activities have access to the best available environmental data and best practices.                 David Gray

     Finally, the organization must be prepared to accept some ambiguity, or at least to rely on non-traditional measures, when it tries to evaluate the impact of knowledge-sharing.7  Measuring that impact, either in terms of return on investment (for private companies) or development impact (for international development institutions), remains problematical.  In principle, inputs lead to activities, which generate outputs, which in turn produce outcomes, which in turn result in overall impact.  But each link of this chain causes measurement problems.
It is difficult to disentangle knowledge-sharing inputs and outputs from other operational activities, although the formal definition of specific knowledge management activities has proved helpful in some organizations such as the World Bank in terms of clarifying the communication and monitoring of progress. Outcomes can be illuminated by the use of surveys, focus groups, and groupware sessions but it is often not easy to interpret the meaning of the results for the overall system.  Impact can be assessed through correlations with other metrics, but causal connections are difficult to trace and often speculative at best. The bottom line is that the assessment of knowledge management programs usually comes down to a value judgement: is it working?

Managing knowledge for development assistance:  Special challenges
    Like other organizations, international institutions and the development community enjoy an unprecedented opportunity to use new methods and technologies for knowledge management in order to get better and faster results on the ground.  But for these organizations, the choices that have been created by the new technology have broader ramifications.  They require decisions not only on the technical issues described above, but also on the larger principles that go to the heart of the development process.
    History records many examples where the authentication of knowledge and the means of its dissemination have been used as tools for exclusion and control, rather than inclusion or human betterment.  Now that new technology makes sharing potentially much easier and cheaper than ever before, it is vital that the tools be used in a spirit of inclusion, and for the public good.  To achieve this, collaboration and openness need to become the dominant principles of operation, particularly in the area of international assistance. The issue has many facets, six of which are discussed here.
    Fostering north-north knowledge flows:  For collaboration and openness to become the modus operandi of development assistance organizations, stronger partnerships among the major players are needed. The World Development Indicators is a promising model, as are the partnerships emerging in various sectors such as environment (see Box 8) The international community thus needs to function as an efficient connector and facilitator to promote the creation and dissemination of knowledge to enhance global welfare.
 

Box 9 Intellectual capital     Intellectual capital can be described as a company’s intangible resources and can be assessed as the difference between its market value and its book value (or the replacement cost of its fixed assets). Intellectual capital is often seen as embracing employees as well as customers, business relationships, organizational structures and the power of renewal in organizations.      Since intellectual capital is a key determinant of a company’s future earnings capability and is not adequately reflected in traditional accounting practicies, significant efforts are under way around the world, particularly in Europe, to measure intellectual capital.      In Skandia, the Swedish insurance group, intellectual capital is seen as arising from a value-creating process based on the interaction of human and structural capital where continuous renewal — innovations — transform and refine individuals’ knowledge into enduring value for the organization. Skandia has devised various indicators to measure shifts in intellectual capital over time.     The effort to measure intellectual capital in private sector companies, is now parallelled by a movement to apply the same methodology to understand the intelllectual capital of whole economies.

    Fostering north-south knowledge flows.  International institutions should take particular care to orient knowledge-sharing programs to the needs and technological capabilities of users in developing countries.  One aspect of this challenge concerns technical design.  Systems must be geared toward users who have limited technical means, such as low speed modems and minimal computing capacity, so that their low-end technology does not become a barrier to access.  The systems should use public rather than proprietary software where possible, and should provide other means of access for those with no computers. Finally, the imposition of user fees for access to knowledge bases should avoided where they risk becoming a barrier to access.
    A second aspect concerns the authentication of content.  Since human beings often fully trust only the knowledge that they themselves have helped create, development knowledge bases will reach their full potential only if practitioners in developing countries have an appropriate role in authenticating the know-how that is contained there. In the case of explicit know-how, participation in such authentication can be facilitated by opening up knowledge bases for comment and review, and by providing the means to register alternative viewpoints.  Where knowledge remains tacit, there should be active participation from developing countries in all phases of knowledge creation — for example, in project design and in building new knowledge bases.  A participatory process will make possible joint ownership and use of the knowledge.
    Fostering south-north knowledge flows: Development assistance needs increasingly to be seen as not simply a process of financing physical facilities, such schools and cars, but also a process that is invigorated by people’s abundant ideas and inspirations. In this way, a culture can draw on its local know-how, including indigenous knowledge, which is then reinterpreted and developed in light of the most useful approaches from elsewhere.  Knowledge systems in the international institutions need to be open and responsive to inflows from whatever source. 
    Fostering south-south knowledge flows: Developing countries often learn best from each other, since the real experts on development are often those who live the reality of the problems on a day-to-day basis.  Programs such as those in EDI which link practitioners in developing countries through real or virtual conferences across national boundaries can greatly accelerate these high value knowledge flows, for example a course on Health Sector Reform and Sustainable Financing, bringing together 78 participants from 32 countries to explore crosscutting issues affecting health system development, or the Partnerships for Poverty program that has established an informal network of Latin American universities and research centers in eleven countries to identify, study, and share concrete cases of public/private partnerships to alleviate poverty, using EDI methodology.
    Fostering free information flows: A prerequisite for knowledge sharing is freedom of information flows.  To date, the Internet itself has been open and inclusive in spirit, although there are continuing efforts from various quarters to make inroads on that freedom.  Some countries use prohibitive pricing to preclude access to the Web for much of their populations.  There is a need for continued watchfulness to ensure that the Internet as a whole remains an international and freely accessible public good, and that approaches to limit access under whatever guise – commercial priorities or moral values or national pride or linguistic predilections – are weighed against the enormous opportunity costs involved in interfering with the freedom of information flows.
Helping developing countries manage knowledge.  The same logic that drives the international community to manage its knowledge applies with equal force in developing countries themselves. Ultimately they must establish their own knowledge-bases, authenticate them from their own experience, interpret what is meaningful from their own perspectives, and create a future that meets their own needs.  As international institutions themselves learn how to share knowledge more effectively, they can and should help developing countries to understand what is at stake in terms of managing knowledge and to nurture similar capacities there.  This will be a large-scale and long-term undertaking; international institutions and developing countries can make a start by establishing the appropriate facilitative institutions that can catalyze the process. (see box 10)
 

Box 10 Helping developing countries manage their knowledge      The World Development Report of 1998 proposes that we look at development in a new way—that a big part of the challenge for developing countries lies in adopting policy initiatives to narrow knowledge gaps and resolve information problems. Narrowing knowledge gaps between and within countries is a matter of moving from worst or average practice to better or best practice—as it pertains to technical knowledge in agriculture, in industry, in services, in policies. Tapping knowledge through such channels as trade, technology transfer, foreign direct investment, and extension and dissemination campaigns can help to narrow these gaps. And clearly, the opportunities are large for developing countries to take advantage of knowledge produced elsewhere.     In developed countries, centers such as the American Productivity and Quality Center, Asian Productivity Organization, and the European Association of Productivity Centers have  been helpful  in enabling corporations to make progress by using four methods to improve the knowledge transfer process, including 1)  Knowledge Management; 2)  Benchmarking; 3)  Knowledge Bases and 4)  Facilitator Networks.      Similar centers could prove useful in developing countries.  A wide range of organizations (“networks”) around the world are dedicated at least in part to improving productivity and quality. These organizations survive, and a few even thrive, despite a general lack of international coordination or support. Virtually all of them consider themselves “short of funds,” in part because they are populated by the kind of entrepreneurial people whose reach exceeds their grasp. Most of them have some government support, sometimes explicit and budgeted, but more often partly hidden in the form of low-cost use of government office facilities, staff members loaned from the government, “research” grants to key network employees or the network itself, and government sponsorship of fund-raising events.      New opportunities are emerging. First, many countries or sub-units have developed quality or productivity awards administered—or at least influenced—by the local network. This has brought wider community interest, especially among business people. Second, the advent of benchmarking and the Internet has allowed previously isolated organizations to get advice and support from other parts of the world.     Support for such centers in developing countries by the international community could help such countries make faster progress on coping with the demands of the knowledge era, through training; benchmarking; consulting; information and reference services; publications; study tours, research, and advocacy for informed discussion of productivity issue.     In many developing countries, in particular the poorer ones, an important part of increasing access to international knowledge and increasing knowledge management capacity rests in strengthening and reforming their informatics and telecommunications so as to allow better access to the internet, as well as the strengthening of basic data and information gathering capabilities.

 

References
1   American Productivity & Quality Center, “Knowledge Management, Consortium Benchmarking Study: Best-Practice Report”, 1996, Houston, Texas: American Productivity & Quality Center, “Using Information Technology to Support Knowledge Management, Consortium Benchmarking Study: Best-Practice Report”, (1997) Houston, Texas; American Productivity & Quality Center, “Knowledge Management and the Learning Organization: A European Perspective” (1998) Houston, Texas.
2 Ernst & Young offers an on-line knowledge services entitled “Ernie™” aimed at small and medium businesses. Arthur Andersen offers knowledge services on-line through KnowledgeSpace™ with varying levels of service aimed at different segments of its clientele.
3 Gartner Group: March 31, 1998; Research Note; R. Desisto, K. Harris: “Powerful Marketing and Sales Solutions With KM”; KM: SPA-04-1863
4 Thomas K. Davenport, Laurence Prusak, Working Knowledge : How Organizations Manage What They Know,  Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 1998, pp.88, 123-143; “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow?” by Hugh Wilmott, in “Knowledge Management:  A Real Business Guide”, London, Caspian Publishing Ltd, pp.25-31. 
5 Gartner Group; KM: SPA-03-5005. March 30,1998; Research Note; J. Bair, R. Hunter; “Introducing the KM Project Viability Assessment”; Gartner Group; May 29,1998; Research Note; R. Hunter, “KM in Government: This Is Not the Consulting Industry”; KM: KA-03-6492).
6 American Productivity & Quality Center, “Knowledge Management, Consortium Benchmarking Study: Best-Practice Report”, 1996, Houston, Texas. Davenport and Prusak, page 93-5;  American Productivity & Quality Center, “Using Information Technology to Support Knowledge Management, Consortium Benchmarking Study: Best-Practice Report”, Houston, Texas;
7  “Successful Knowledge Management Projects”, T.H.Davenport,  D.W.De Long & Michael C. Beers,  Sloan Management Review, Winter 1998, pages 43-57.
8 Box 1 is drawn from On Knowing and the Known, ed. Kenneth Lucey, (1996) Prometheus, New York. 
9 The Knowledge Creating Company, (1995) by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi OUP, New York.  The Tacit Dimension, (1957), by Michael Polanyi, Doubleday, New York. The Tao of Physics (1976) by Fritjof Capra, Fontana, London.

Acknowledgements
This paper was prepared as a background paper for the World Development Report.  Its principal author is Stephen Denning, Program Director, Knowledge Management, at the World Bank, Washington D.C. The box on OneWorld Online was written by Peter Armstrong, Director of OneWorld Online, London. The box on partnerships in the environment was written by David Gray, Environment Department, World Bank. The box on indigenous knowledge was based on material from Roberto Chavez, Nicolas Gorjestani and Reiner Woytek, World Bank. The box on helping developing countries manage their knowledge drew on materials prepared by C. Jackson Grayson Jr., and Bruce Ross-Larsen.  Help with references was given by Alison Brandt, Arti Kirch and Marie Keech, World Bank. The paper received useful advice from many, including  Debra Amidon, Alison Brandt, Paul Cadario, Roberto Chavez,  Leif Edvinsson, Osvaldo Feinstein, Rian Gorey, Nicolas  Gorjestani, Patrick Grasso, Adnan Hassan, Robert Hiebeler, Seth Kahan, Eski Kilpi, Arti Kirch, Catherine Kleynhoff, Bruno Laporte, Kim Murrell, Carla O’Dell, Michel Pommier, John Roome, Charles Savage, Alistair Scott, Lesley Shneier, Suzanne Smith, Marcus Speh, Paul Strebel, Klaus Tilmes, Aubrey Wiliams and Reiner Woytek.

A background document to the World Development Report