A leading think tank in the field of second-generation KM is the Knowledge Management Consortium International (KMCI). Founded in 1997, KMCI is today a leading developer of KM reference models, best practices, and methodologies, and has been teaching KM practitioners about all of that and more for several years now.

iThink Chosen by KMCI

In 2003, KMCI undertook the development of a comprehensive KM methodology called K-STREAM^TM (an acronym for KM Strategy and Methodology). K-STREAM^TM is the most rigorous methodology for KM in existence, and is mainly designed for serious KM practitioners and/or corporate KM functions around the world. K-STREAM^TM is currently taught by KMCI in public and private programs held several times throughout the year.

One of the challenges in developing K-STREAM^TM was to select and integrate a toolset that would support the activities of KM practitioners as they progress from one part of the methodology to another. After careful deliberation, KMCI chose iThink from isee systems, inc. as its recommended tool for performing causal and dynamic modeling in the course of implementing K-STREAM^TM.

The use of iThink as a causal modeling tool in K-STREAM^TM arises in the context of users evaluating the potential impact of KM strategies and interventions before they are made. iThink makes it possible for practitioners to create representations (models) of the social systems they're trying to have impact on (organizations), as well the learning- and innovation-related behaviors of particular interest to them, and then to "run" these models to simulate the impact of alternative strategies and interventions.

KM and Dynamic Systems

One of the things that makes iThink so appropriate for K-STREAM^TM is the extent of the underlying compatibility of its outlook to the KMCI view that KM is deeply rooted in complex adaptive systems theory, and the view that learning- and innovation-related behaviors in organizations are emergent and nonlinear. A system dynamics tool, such as iThink, is one of the best available alternatives for representing non-linearities and the emergence of unanticipated side-effects of feedback and related dynamics in complex living systems.

To better appreciate the role of iThink in KMCI's K-STREAM^TM methodology, it may be helpful to use an analogy - a physician and her patient. In the case of KM, however, the patient is the organizational learning and innovation system, a social system; and the physician, or doctor, is the KM practitioner. And how, or whether, she treats her patients with one type of intervention or another depends on how (a) the patients' metabolic system works, and (b) how it will likely react under the influence of the physician/practitioner's interventions.

Thus, iThink gives KM practitioners the ability to codify, in a dynamic model, an understanding of the self-organizing pattern of organizational learning and innovation in real organizations. As people at work encounter problems, challenges, or gaps in their knowledge, they tend to self-organize in response in broadly predictable ways. The pattern of related individual and group behaviors can then be represented in a dynamic (iThink) model, and the practitioner (physician) can then ply her trade in a simulated form before having to go in for surgery, as it were, in the real world of the organization (the patient).

Once captured in a simulated form, then, organizational learning and innovation processes can be subjected to an array of KM interventions (represented in the same models) as a way of testing and evaluating them and their impacts before any real interventions are made by practitioners in the real world. In this way, the costs and risks associated with the implementation of real KM solutions can be minimized, even as the value or impact of such interventions are increased by such virtual experimentations.

iThink Plays Multiple Roles

iThink is K-STREAM's^TM core tool for causal and dynamic modeling, but it also plays another role in the broader context of K-STREAM's^TM causal and dynamic modeling process. The process begins by using drawing tools to visualize cause and effect relationships. It continues by using ExpertChoice^TM, a commercial software tool for implementing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), to elicit judgments from practitioners and develop ratio scales measuring cause and effect relationships.

K-STREAM^TM next captures the results of AHP modeling and uses them to formulate an initial iThink model to evaluate the quality of the assumptions used in the AHP model, and to further develop the causal model using iThink's capabilities. Finally, the causal and dynamic model resulting from iThink simulation-based evaluation, is further refined by using multivariate analysis tools, including neural network modeling, to arrive at better estimates of the causal relationships underlying system dynamics.

Thus, iThink's role in K-STREAM^TM includes refining the relatively untested initial formulation of the causal model into a much more precisely specified causal and dynamic simulation model, which can serve as a basis for testing and evaluating the relationships underlying the model using multivariate and neural network estimation techniques. The quality of KM interventions made by practitioners as a result are all the better for it.