Stages of Implementation: A Guide for Your Journey to Knowledge Management Best Practices

Reid Smith, Schlumberger Limited, 2000
“This book is essential reading for knowledge managers and business managers alike.”

Tammi McVay, U.S. Department of Navy, 2000
“This is an invaluable guide to KM implementation for anyone who wants to know what really works.”

Jerry Garcia, Northrop Grumman Corporation, 2000
“It’s clearly a must read for anyone in knowledge management.”

Book Description
As one of the titles in APQC’s Passport to Success Series, this book will illuminate your path to knowledge management success, the same one taken by some of the world’s leading companies. It follows APQC’s Road Map to Knowledge Management Results: Stages of Implementation, a model developed by APQC after studying best-practice organizations in detail over a period of years. For those anxious to navigate toward true knowledge management results using the APQC Road Map, this book will serve as the perfect companion.

About the Author
Carla O’Dell is president of the American Productivity & Quality Center and director of its International Benchmarking Clearinghouse.

O’Dell, who led the design team that created, marketed, and delivered the Clearinghouse products and services, joined APQC in 1978 as an advisor and researcher. Her clients include manufacturing, service, and healthcare organizations. Her fields of expertise include knowledge management, total quality systems and re-engineering, organization design, team-based reward systems, and assessment and improvement using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award criteria.

The work of APQC and O’Dell in knowledge management (KM) dates to 1995 when APQC conducted the nation’s largest symposium on KM with more than 500 attendees. Based on issues raised at the symposium, APQC launched–under O’Dell’s direction–its first consortium study, Emerging Best Practices in Knowledge Management, with 39 companies. She later led a second study, Using Information Technology to Support Knowledge Management, with 25 of the leading KM companies in the world. Most recently she served as the subject matter expert for a study on successfully implementing KM. She currently heads APQC’s efforts to help clients design and implement knowledge management and best-practice transfer initiatives.

She is co-author with C. Jackson Grayson and Nilly Essaides of If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice, 1998. She is also co-author with Grayson of American Business: A Two Minute Warning, which Tom Peters said “gets my vote as the best business book of 1988.” She writes frequently for leading journals and magazines and is consistently among the highest-rated speakers at conferences.

O’Dell is also a nationally recognized expert in team-based operating and reward systems. In 1987 she designed and led for APQC the largest national study ever conducted on innovative reward systems. The study of 1,600 firms employing more than 9 million people encompassed reward systems such as gain sharing, profit sharing, pay for skills, and employee involvement programs. It still serves as the benchmark study in the field.

O’Dell began her professional career with the Ford Foundation and the American Center for Quality of Work Life. In the early 1970s she worked with companies that were just beginning to experiment with new forms of work and new ways to manage people. In 1983 O’Dell served as chairperson of the Rewards Conference of the White House Conference on Productivity.

O’Dell has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, a master’s degree from the University of Oregon, and a doctorate’s degree in organizational psychology from the University of Houston.