One interesting case of knowledge management implementation occurred for Cisco at a time when the company was trying to grow rapidly.  With the goal of hiring 250 new service and support managers (SSMs) within 18 months, Cisco needed a solution that would provide new hires fast access to all the necessary information they needed to perform their duties. To accomplish this Cisco needed to capture and share the expertise of its experienced service and support managers. The problem that Cisco faced was providing knowledge and training to new hires and supporting their information needs with only a limited number of experienced staff. Cisco chose to use a knowledge management tool with the objective of minimizing time to proficiency of new SSMs. In addition Cisco wanted to maximize performance and sharing of knowledge and foster ongoing learning and communication (Schneble, 2002).

In order to fully utilize a knowledge management system, an organization must first answer the question, how do we gather knowledge? Often times, this is tacit knowledge, or knowledge that is intuitive and difficult to express without putting the knowledge into action. In Cisco's case, they wanted to capture the knowledge of their existing SSMs in how to deal with customers and other best practices. In other cases organizations may want to gather the knowledge of members who are leaving or to share knowledge and practices between different branches.

Once an organization has gathered knowledge, it must then ask how can we make it usable? How can this information be accessed quickly and easily? In the case of Cisco getting information out in a timely and effective manner to reduce training time and prevent new employees from repeating the mistakes of those with more experience was a high priority. With the help of VisionCor, a knowledge management solutions provider, Cisco developed effective categorizations and knowledge objects to create a knowledge portal to share this information. Answering the question of making knowledge usable depends on the organization and how the content is going to be used.

Once an organization has decided the format in which they want to gather, store and disseminate knowledge, they must investigate what the best tools are for the job. Intranets, wikis, forums, knowledge databases and many others are all options for an organization. Cisco worked very closely with VisionCor to determine that developing a knowledge portal based on the current corporate Intranet was the best option. The vast array of choices and combinations make this a difficult question that can have many possible answers.

Finally, the last question an organization must investigate is how to best implement a knowledge management system. In order to make the knowledge management system a success there must be a well thought out plan for system implementation and long term support. Employees must be motivated to use the new knowledge management system and business processes may need to be changed. If an organization cannot discover the best practices required for proper use of a knowledge management system, then the system is useless.

References
Schneble, John (May, 2002). Case Study: Knowledge Portal at Cisco. Retrieved May 5,
2007, from http://www.learningcircuits.org/2002/may2002/schneble.html