Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Knowledge ...

Chris Blodgett
<strong>the</strong> military mind on Needleman’s “staff <strong>of</strong>ficer” pyramid and not on <strong>the</strong> institutional leadership
perspective.
Figure 4: NATO Information Management Life-Cycle
3.1 Knowledge Management Champions
While <strong>the</strong>re is no NATO KM Champion, IM organizations and <strong>the</strong>ir champions have produced a robust
set <strong>of</strong> NATO IM doctrinal/policy documents, formal directives and formal training (NATO IKM Course
at NATO School, Oberammergau). NATO’s two Bi-SC headquarters (HQs) do have sub-organizations
to address KM sense-making (<strong>the</strong> identification <strong>of</strong> organizational objectives): <strong>the</strong> Strategic
Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) has an Organizational Development cell and <strong>the</strong>
Supreme Allied Command Transformation (SACT) has a Strategic Plans and Policy section. While
both <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>se organizations support <strong>the</strong> institutional top-down leadership responsibility for sensemaking,
<strong>the</strong> associated ‘institutional leadership’ competencies are <strong>of</strong>ten not cascaded down into <strong>the</strong>
subordinate organizations; ie, each child organization should be taking <strong>the</strong> desired objectives <strong>of</strong> its
parent as an input into sense-making for its own strategic change management planning.
3.2 Knowledge Creation = Knowledge Development (KD)
Knowledge creation is <strong>the</strong> first part <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> action-oriented Integrated KM Cycle (Figure 5) that focuses
on <strong>the</strong> operational requirements <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> organization’s information holdings (Dalkir 2005). Newcomers
to NATO KM completely ignore <strong>the</strong> top-down KM definition (multi-disciplined approach to achieve
organizational objectives) and myopically focus on <strong>the</strong> bottom-up operational requirement.
Figure 5: Integrated KM Cycle
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