VideoThis requirement also means that companies must protect individual intellectual-property rights. Those who develop knowledge — not the people they report to or those who borrow the knowledge to make presentations — must be identified and credited as the authors. This provision is important not just for equity's sake but also to provide incentives for the best thinkers, whatever their seniority or position, to produce further high-value content in the future. There is nothing more demotivating to young people seeking recognition than for some senior figure to take credit for their thinking.
Keeping up competition. Inside companies, dialogue is the preferred method for exchanging valuable proprietary knowledge. If knowledge seekers find a willing expert, they can quickly pinpoint and acquire the knowledge they need. Whether meeting with them one-on-one or in a group, the knowledge provider usually has a sense that payment will come in the form of appropriate recognition from peers and superiors.
So why can't companies rely just on dialogue? Often the expert doesn't think through the problem rigorously or convert knowledge into a form that sufficiently helps the knowledge seeker. An even larger problem is that knowledge seekers may not know how to find the right person. But the biggest problem with relying solely on dialogue is that it takes time, particularly on the part of the person with the knowledge. If topics generate great interest, experts in a large company simply don't have the time to both do their jobs and talk to everyone interested in discussions about knowledge. By producing a knowledge object available to everyone, however, an expert is freed from that time burden. A knowledge object can at least provide a basic grounding before higher-level discussions take place.
Dialogue will always be a primary source of the knowledge exchanged in companies. But the promise of the knowledge marketplace lies in its potential to increase vastly the reach of distinctive knowledge, to the benefit of the entire company rather than just a few individuals. Since knowledge buyers can get what they need from several sources, however, a knowledge marketplace will work only if it can deliver a satisfying product. This requirement in turn means keeping authors motivated to produce high-quality content. In practice, that stimulus will take the form of competition among authors for recognition.
All markets, including knowledge markets, thrive on competition. As with any kind of intellectual property, knowledge objects compete for attention at the level of quality and popularity. Experience shows that companies providing recognition for those who produce the highest-quality knowledge objects (as judged by experts and senior management) or the most popular ones (as measured by download volume) ensure that internal authors will be motivated to compete with each other on both dimensions.
A set of standards. The market's transaction costs — the time and effort involved in creating and seeking knowledge — must be bearable. For internal knowledge markets to pass this test, companies need to develop standards, protocols, and regulations to lower costs that act as a deterrent to both buyers and sellers. Standards can include everything from the templates used to define the content that goes into a knowledge object to the taxonomy used to define how documents are categorized so that a search process will turn up relevant content. Protocols include everything from rules determining which kinds of knowledge will be traded in the marketplace to what kind of document qualifies as a knowledge object that can be traded there. Regulations include whatever internal compliance mechanisms are put in place to reinforce these standards and protocols.
Market facilitators. To date, the bulk of corporate investment in knowledge management has gone into providing the staff to build and maintain the technology platform. But that is not enough. In a true knowledge market, people are needed to apply standards and protocols and to exercise judgment in enforcing the regulations. These people become marketplace insiders, like brokers and specialists in a stock exchange, who facilitate the market's operation through familiarity with its mechanics. They don't have to constitute a large bureaucracy; no more than two dozen facilitators are needed to run and regulate an internal knowledge market at, say, a large investment bank. The alternative — relying upon authors and knowledge seekers to follow protocols and standards and to regulate themselves — simply does not work: they lack the familiarity, the interest, or the time.
One group of market facilitators comprises the knowledge-service employees at the center of the marketplace. They can, for example, ensure that each document traded there has an attached tag to provide the information enabling the search process to be effective, as well as enough context to let readers preview a document before they download or read it. It is also helpful to have editors who, through a little dialogue with authors, are efficient at adding text to a set of exhibits in order to convert them into a knowledge object of sufficient quality.
Another group of market facilitators consists of "knowledge-domain owners." In a large company, there can be hundreds of these domains, each representing different subsets of users with common knowledge interests. These are the kinds of decentralized units whose efforts to serve their common interests have produced the limited successes in knowledge sharing discussed earlier. Defining knowledge domains is a way of trying to replicate the conditions that have led to these decentralized successes but through an approach that utilizes the common standards and protocols of a company-wide marketplace. The "owner" of a knowledge domain is usually a senior executive who might make specific workers from the unit responsible for content listed in the knowledge market. They determine what meets the standard as a knowledge object or what if upgraded could meet the standard. They are also responsible for stimulating the creation and codification of new content by experts who have an interest in that knowledge arena. And they usually maintain and remove obsolete content and identify any knowledge gaps that need filling.
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