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When it comes to needs analysis, knowledge managemant brings a lot to the table.
I could tell that this training manager liked knowledge management. She grinned when I talked about capitalizing on untapped resources and sharing lessons regardless of turf and geography. A long-time warrior in the battle against hoarding knowledge, she nodded when I emphasized the importance of a trusting, generous culture, dedicated staffing, technology, and access to information. And she jotted notes as we discussed Thomas Stewart's use of the metaphor of an iceberg to describe organizational knowledge, focusing on the wisdom beneath the surface, only hinted at in course catalogues.
At the conclusion of my presentation, she greeted me with a smile and a question: "I'm convinced. But what do I do now? I'm working on a technology rollout project. I think knowledge management could help me approach this task, but how?"
The answer would be what we think of as a traditional needs analysis. This article is my attempt to add beef to that response by beginning to bring analysis and knowledge management together. What does KM bring to planning training? How does it enhance the way we figure out how to serve our clients and customers? It starts with definitions.
What is analysis?
In a nutshell, analysis is the planning we do in order to figure out what to do. Through analysis, we take a fresh and data-driven look at the work, worker, and workplace-seeking to base our training recommendations on wideranging opinions, practices, and work products-not on habit, whim, or fiat.
Bracketing the training profession as we move into the next century are enthusiasm about workplace training and cynicism about the ability of training in and of itself to influence what really matters: performance improvement linked to strategic results. Analysis is the systematic basis for decisions about how to influence performance.
These ideas dominate analysis:
* Analysis is where it all begins-establishing relationships, exploring strategies, and defining solutions.
* More sources of information are better than one.
* It is important to seek the gap between the current situation and the desired situation, focusing resources where they're most needed.
* The analysis must determine root causes, or drivers, to define systemic solutions-recognizing, for example, that a question about...