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Knowledge Leadership at State

Knowledge Leadership is the State Department's name for knowledge management. Effective use of the Department's knowledge resources is important and urgent on numerous levels -- the success of American diplomacy, the Department's leadership of the foreign policy process, the efficiency of its organizations, and individual job satisfaction.

Knowledge management reforms in State received an important stimulus from the war against terrorism. The Overseas Presence Advisory Panel report that followed the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 recommended that the Department establish better knowledge management processes. The commissions that studied the 9/11/01 attacks and the issue over intelligence about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq also made clear that the U.S. Government as a whole needed to do better at sharing information and collaborating.

Accordingly, the Office of eDiplomacy developed the knowledge leadership initiative in 2003 after examining nearly two dozen public and private sector organizations with successful knowledge management programs. The Under Secretary for Management approved the strategy, which aims to strengthen the Department's leadership of foreign policy formulation at home and implementation abroad by putting the Department's knowledge resources at the disposal of personnel whenever and wherever needed.

This initiative calls for better ways to find information, network with others, and share knowledge. There are four main components:

• Use of self-forming, self-managing online communities for collaboration across geographic and organizational boundaries;
• Better access to knowledge resources;
• Better access to expertise;
• Widespread use of IT tools that build knowledge-sharing into the daily workflow.