Sustainable competitive advantage derives from strenuous efforts to identify, cultivate, and exploit an organization's core competencies. Libraries can look for opportunities in strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage.

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Knowledge Solutions for
Libraries
Olivier Serrat
2014

2. Knowledge Management: A Vital
Tool for Change Management
Challenged by the internet, libraries worldwide are
reconsidering the products and services they offer. But,
creating shared visions and plotting organizational directions is
one thing; delivering the dream is another. At a time when
increasingly advanced skills are required for success in life and
work, all libraries must retool.
Competence is a specific range of knowledge, skills, or
behaviors utilized to improve performance. Sustainable
competitive advantage derives from strenuous efforts to
identify, cultivate, and exploit an organization's core
competencies. Opportunities exist in the areas of strategy
development, management techniques, collaboration
mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge
capture and storage.

3. Contents
The Five Competencies
Framework aims to
build strengths and
ADB's Knowledge
Solutions series has
since 2008 offered
handy, quick reference
guides to tools,
methods, and
approaches that
promote this intent. A
selection of Knowledge
Solutions for libraries
follows:
Strategy Development
Management
Techniques
Collaboration
Mechanisms
Knowledge Sharing and
Learning
Knowledge Capture
and Storage

4. Strategy Development
• Building a Learning
Organization
How can a strategy support and energize
organization, people, knowledge, and technology
for learning?
• Creating and Running
Partnerships
Does your strategy leverage partnerships and
recognize their drivers of success and failure?
• Design Thinking
Is your strategy the outcome of a human-centered,
prototype-driven process for the exploration of new
ideas?
• Future Search
Conferencing
How might futurizing enable diverse and potentially
conflicting groups find common ground for
constructive action?
• On Resilient
Organizations
How might investments in leadership and culture,
networks, and change readiness build resilience to
survive and thrive in turbulent times?

5. Strategy Development
• A Primer on Intellectual
Capital
How might you realize your organization's true
value?
• Reading the Future
How emergent is your strategy? Does it consider
other scenarios?
• Seeking Feedback on
Learning for Change
How would you gauge perceptions of competencies
to learn for change?
• Social Network Analysis
How might your strategy make out social networks
and analyze the actors and the relationships
between them?
• The Premortem
Technique
Working backward, does your strategy integrate
alternatives that emerge from the perspective of
future failure?

6. Management Techniques
• Business Model
Innovation
What are business models and how might they
enable your organization to capture, create, and
deliver value to meet explicit or latent needs?
• Conducting Effective
Meetings
Do you manage meetings before, during, and after,
with appreciation of their different kinds, to make
them productive and fun?
• Engaging Staff in the
Workplace
In what ways might your organization benefit from
staff engagement and how could that be driven?
• Fast and Effective Change
Management
How might your organization overcome resistance
to change and secure as much discretionary effort
as possible?
• Forestalling Change
Fatigue
If transformation change rarely succeeds, what
rationale is there for bottom-up approaches?

7. Management Techniques
• Managing by Walking
Around
How does one manage by walking around to
emphasize the importance of interpersonal contact,
open appreciation, and recognition and build
civility and performance in the workplace?
• Managing Knowledge
Workers
Why should you empower knowledge workers to
make the most of their deepest skills and perform
best?
• New-Age Branding and
the Public Sector
How might we embrace branding to drive
organizational behavior and behavioral change?
• Picking Investments in
Knowledge Management
How might you prioritize investments in knowledge
management?
• A Primer on
Organizational Culture
What are the components of organizational culture
and what is the role of organizational learning for
change?

8. Management Techniques
• A Primer on
Organizational Learning
How do organizations learn?
• A Primer on Talent
Management
How can one give talent strategic and holistic
attention to make it happen?
• Sparking Innovations in
Management
Why should we drive management innovation?
• The Five Whys Technique
How might we investigate deeply the cause-and-
effect relationships underlying problems?
• The Reframing Matrix
Do you enable different perspectives to be
generated and applied in management processes?

9. Management Techniques
• The SCAMPER Technique
How might one brainstorm to resolve a problem,
meet an opportunity, or turn a tired idea into
something new and different?
• Understanding and
Developing Emotional
Intelligence
Do you have the ability, capacity, skill, or self-
perceived ability to identify, assess, and manage
the emotions of yourself, of others, and of groups?

10. Collaboration Mechanisms
• Bridging Organizational
Silos
How might one bridge silos to promote effective
cross-functional teams?
• Building Communities of
Practice
How do you build a community of like-minded,
interacting people to ensure more effective creation
and sharing of knowledge in a domain?
• Building Trust in the
Workplace
How should we earn, develop, and retain trust for
superior results?
• Collaborating with Wikis
How do you harness the power of collaborative
minds to innovate faster, cocreate, and cut costs?
• Delegating in the
Workplace
Why, in organizations, is it better to understand
delegation as a web of tacit governance
arrangements?

11. Collaboration Mechanisms
• Distributing Leadership
How can one distribute leadership if it is an
outcome, not an input to business processes and
performance?
• Drawing Mind Maps
How does one represent, link, and arrange
concepts, themes, or tasks under a central topic?
• Exercising Servant
Leadership
Why would you support people who choose to
serve first, and then lead, as a way of expanding
service to individuals and organizations?
• Informal Authority in the
Workplace
How can reciprocity intensify mutual influence in
organizations?
• Leading in the Workplace
What is the new context for leadership in the public
sector?

12. Collaboration Mechanisms
• Learning in Strategic
Alliances
Why should strategic alliances manage the
partnership, not just the agreement, for
collaborative advantage?
• Managing Virtual Teams
How can we organize and coordinate with effect a
group whose members are not in the same location
or time zone, and may not even work for the same
organization?
• On Networked
Organizations
Why are hierarchy, market, and network forms of
organization not mutually exclusive?
• A Primer on Corporate
Values
What role can corporate values play in guiding
behavior and decision-making?
• Sparking Social
Innovations
How can you generate good ideas that meet
pressing unmet needs and improve people's lives to
foster smart, sustainable globalization?

13. Collaboration Mechanisms
• Surveying Communities
of Practice
How might one design and analyze a survey of
communities of practice?
• Wearing Six Thinking Hats
How can we actualize the thinking potential of
teams?
• Working in TeamsHow does one develop a successful team?

14. Knowledge Sharing and Learning
• Asking Effective QuestionsHow do you know what question to ask when?
• Building Networks of
Practice
What are the forms and functions of networks of
practice and how do you monitor and evaluate
performance?
• Coaching and Mentoring
How can we coach and mentor to inspire and
empower employees, build commitment, increase
productivity, grow talent, and promote success?
• Conducting After-Action
Reviews and Retrospects
When a critical milestone has been reached, why
should we discuss successes and failures in an open
and honest fashion?
• Conducting Effective
Presentations
How can an ordinary presentation become a lively
and engaging event?

15. Knowledge Sharing and Learning
• Conducting Peer Assists
How can individuals come together to share their
experiences, insights, and knowledge on an
identified challenge or problem?
• Conducting Successful
Retreats
How does one step back from day-to-day activities
to think about the future?
• Dimensions of the
Learning Organization
How do you harness, individually or in association,
useful models of learning and change to reflect on
the dimensions of a learning organization?
• Drawing Learning
Charters
How can an organization demonstrate commitment
to learning, against which provision and practice can
be tested and serve as a waymark with which to
guide, monitor, and evaluate progress?
• Embracing FailureIs failure a way to an opportunity?

16. Knowledge Sharing and Learning
• Harnessing Creativity and
Innovation in the
Workplace
What are the stimulants and obstacles to creativity
and innovation that drive or impede enterprise in
organizations?
• Identifying and Sharing
Good Practices
How can one suggest that a process or
methodology that has been shown to be effective in
one part of an organization and might be effective
in another too?
• On Knowledge Behaviors
Why must motive, means, and opportunity be
aligned to invest resources productively across the
knowledge-sharing landscape?
• Social Media and the
Public Sector
How can the public sector use Web 2.0 applications
to forge, build, and deepen relationships?
• Storytelling
What is the potential of stories or narratives as a
communication tool to value, share, and capitalize
on the knowledge of individuals?

17. Knowledge Capture and Storage
• Conducting Exit
Interviews
How do you garner feedback on why employees
leave, what they liked about their job, and where
the organization needs improvement?
• Critical Thinking
By what process can one analyze and evaluate
thinking to improve it?
• Harvesting Knowledge
How do you draw out and package tacit knowledge
to help others adapt, personalize, and apply it; build
organizational capacity; and preserve institutional
memory?
• Staff Profile Pages
How do we build dynamic, adaptive electronic
directories that store information about the
knowledge, skills, experience, and interests of
people?
• Writing Weblogs
How can groups discuss electronically areas of
interest and review different opinions and
information surrounding a topic?

18. Further Reading
• ADB. 2008–. Knowledge Solutions. Manila.
www.adb.org/knowledgesolutions
• ——. 2008–. Knowledge Solutions. Manila.
www.adb.org/publications/series/knowledge-solutions
• ——. 2010. Compendium of Knowledge Solutions. Manila.
www.adb.org/publications/compendium-knowledge-solutions
• ——. 2014. Toward a Library Renaissance. Manila.
digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/intl/380/

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