The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. In my first two posts on this topic, I asserted that in my experience, if you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t: try, try, and try again. Valuable tools for getting leadership sponsorship and support include telling stories, making the business case, and selling the benefits. Please read on to learn about selling the benefits, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting Knowledge Management.

Through being part of a digitization or processing project, embedded special librarians add value to catalogues and databases. Their “In-The-Know” positions mean they can act as liaisons between the project designers and managers and the processors, catalogers, and input specialists. Specialized vocabulary and carefully crafted thesauri add precision to catalogs, metadata, tags, and, best of all, search results.

The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. As mentioned in my previous post on this topic, if you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t, you must keep trying until you do. To get their sponsorship and support, tell stories, make the business case, and sell the benefits. Please read on to learn about making the business case, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting Knowledge Management.

In my country (Canada), mind mapping is in the curriculum from a very early age. This skill is a foundation for critical thinking and, indeed, project and report creation and development—as well as beginning the research, discovery and exploration process.

The single most important “KM sale” you can make is to your senior leaders. If you get them on board, everything else will be much easier. If you can’t, you need to keep trying until you do. To get their sponsorship and support, tell stories, make the business case, and sell the benefits. Please read on to learn about effective storytelling, drawn from my new book Proven Practices for Promoting Knowledge Management.

I’ll bet you’ve done SWOT a lot. It’s a classic technique but one which benefits, I believe, from fish bone force field diagramming. It’s easy to do and, with good facilitation, mines the brains in the room quickly.

In my latest book, Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program, I share a number of keys to success (Chapter 12) for KM practitioners implementing knowledge management initiatives within the corporate world.

In this third post in my series about interesting frameworks and tools for thinking about the value-add we can provide in our product and service design, I’ll outline three tools I use all the time—sometimes alone, and sometimes in collaboration with others.

You don’t have to go it alone to sell KM inside your organization. There are many avenues available that let you take advantage of outside help when you’ve run out of ideas (or steam!) and need to regroup or re-energize. These include joining and participating in KM communities, using industry analyst reports, and interviewing your peers in other organizations.

In my previous post, I wrote about how analyzing the ways in which thinking and decision-making happen offers interesting frameworks special librarians can use to strategize about the added value we provide in our product and service design. In this post I outline one of my favourites—Dr. Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats.

Sometimes special librarians struggle to define the right level of value-added service to deliver. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and considering what are the most important frameworks and ways to add value.

You don’t have to go it alone to sell KM inside your organization. Take advantage of outside help by scheduling visits with others who are doing KM well, joining and participating in KM communities, using industry analyst reports, or retaining an outside consultant.

Embedded librarians can be dedicated staff members, or available upon request on an ‘as needed’ basis. Which strategy works best for your organization, project, and budget?

Special librarians know that to ensure sustainability they must build a strategy, embrace change, and even create it. They know that the path to success includes doing more with the tools they have, and the skills they’ve built. But do special librarians truly recognize success when they achieve it? Equally important, do they focus on communicating the value of their success to leadership and peers?

I’m pleased to announce that my new book, Succeeding in the World of Special Librarianship, is now available from Lucidea Press. You may be aware that I am a regular contributor to Lucidea’s “Think Clearly” blog, so when they asked me to write their imprint’s next book, it felt like a great opportunity to share my perspectives in a more expansive form.

Embedded information professionals share their expertise across the enterprise—which benefits from increased awareness of internal resources and projects. Embedded special librarians add value by bridging information silos while disseminating information throughout the organization.

Embedded special librarians are contributing members of their departments or groups. They are in the thick of things, participating fully in the development of projects, integration of new services, or dissemination of materials and information throughout the organization and its clientele.

As part of the research for my current book, Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program, I interviewed widely recognized KM leaders to get their take on the secrets to successful KM strategy development and implementation. One of these leaders is with Microsoft.