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The U.S. Navy Knowledge
Management System:
A Case in Point

If you ask Alex Bennet, former Deputy CIO for Enterprise Integration, about knowledge man­agement, be prepared for a captivating answer. A pioneer in the area of knowledge management (KM) and one of its main champions in the Navy, Bennet believes KM is powerful enough to transform a whole organization, maybe even society as a whole. Advocating the need to cultivate oneself as an agent of change in one's environment, Bennet became one herself. As an agent for change, she worked on transforming the concepts of KM into comprehensible practices of rele­vant operational applications. How she accomplished this with the help of her team and other KM champions, in the Navy and other public agencies, is a case in point.

Bennet saw in KM the answer the Navy needed. The Navy has over 700,000 employees, including civilian and military personnel on active duty and reserve, some deployed all over the world. To be more accurate, the Navy is even bigger than that, with its diverse support networks including contractor organizations and other governmental, private, and academic organizations. Managing the knowledge of these diverse groups to support the Navy's mission of national defense seemed impossible initially—but not to Bennet, who met the challenge head on, realiz­ing the need to integrate knowledge from the far corners of the Navy. A few years after the con­cept of KM was introduced, the Navy emerged as a global leader in the area of KM.

BACKGROUND

Knowledge management is of particular importance to the Navy, unlike the stages of innovation and intellectual property (IP) management. This is because the Navy does not offer products or services, making the innovation management stage, in its definition as the new product development stage, irrelevant. Innovation in the Navy is related instead to the creation of new processes and work sys­tems that enable effective decision making. In addition, the Navy as a government agency cannot own patents or copyrights on technologies and works they develop; hence, IP management as well is not relevant. Though government labs are concerned with defining their rights when entering into research and development (R&D) collaborations with universities and industry, they do not use their IP for commercial gain. This makes KM by its definition—the stage at which intellectual resources of an organization are managed to enable the organization to meet its mission effec­tively—the most critical stage of intellectual capital management (ICM) for the Navy.

The Navy realized the value in cultivating KM as one of its core competencies. After all, the wisdom of war entails that knowledge, intelligence, and wisdom, properly applied, lead to suc­cess.1 Thus, KM to the Navy was not merely an addition to its information technology (IT) sys­tems but a means to becoming what Bennet calls a knowledge-centric organization. For that to happen, the Navy adopted KM as a way of doing business by implementing it at both the strate­gic and operational levels.

The first step was to introduce the concept of KM in a methodical way to facilitate its intro­duction within the structured system of the Navy. To do so, the CIO Office developed the "KCO Toolkit" CD-Rom (the Toolkit) and distributed over 15,000 copies within the Navy. The Toolkit introduced the concepts of KM, defined its stages, and provided various tools and best practices to guide the various Navy organizations in their KM initiatives. The CIO Office did not stop there. Instead, they demonstrated the value of KM by acting as the central organization in the Navy with prime ownership of the KM process by recognizing its strategic importance for the Navy's mission and vision. In addition, the CIO acted as an agent of change by continuously and consistently defining the parameters and practices of KM. In addition to the widely distributed Toolkit, the CIO targeted leaders to cultivate KM champions, and advance implementation of KM at the strategic level. That's when the ship was ready to sail.

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