Managing Within Networks [1]  examines in detail the operational requisites of fourteen of these emergent entities, incorporating federal and state government officials working with local governments and nongovernmental organizations to address cross-boundary issues, particularly intractable problems at the field level.  These networks are in different areas: transportation, economic and rural development, communications systems and data management, watershed conservation, wastewater management and services for the developmentally disabled.  The study identifies four different types of networks based on their purposes, and focuses on differences between organizational and traditional management structures and leadership, the kinds of public value added by networks, the relationship between networks and public bureaucracies, as well as how the networks engaged in knowledge management (KM).

Knowledge management (KM) has two dimensions, explicit knowledge, or that which can be codified and communicated easily in words, numbers, charts or drawings, and tacit knowledge, embedded in the senses, individual perceptions, physical experiences, intuition and rules of thumb.  KM is the process of bringing together explicit and tacit knowledge and displaying and manifesting it, as it involves skilled interactive or collaborative performance.

In the networks the process of KM in many ways defined the major focus of their standing committees and working groups.  First, essentially all of them began by surveying the universe of data and information that its partners developed or could access.  They also searched for external data bases of use.  Second, extant data was then used to develop their ¿own source¿ explicit knowledge, through such means as libraries, map inventories, strategic plans, fact sheets and policy guides, focused studies, surveys, conferences and workshops, electronic bulletin boards, process reviews, long range plans, models and simulations, and market studies.

Third, tacit knowledge was rarely formally codified, but it was regularly approached through stakeholder consultations, best practices booklets, workgroups as ¿communities of practice,¿ study project report panels, expert presentations, specialized workshops, SWOT workshops, hands-on technical assistance, community leadership development sessions, forums on ¿what works,¿ direct agency outreach, ¿help desks,¿ and public hearings.  Fourth, the PMNs tried to organize the explicit/tacit interface not through codification but through informal feedback on the myriad of KM activities they engaged, usually through some informal post-project assessment or at its board/steering committee meetings.

Finally, most networks directly served some of the KM needs of their partner agencies through formal reports, responses for data requests, supplying modeling and planning data, circulating policy reports, sponsoring in-agency forums and report sessions, providing technical expert linkages between the PMN and specific agencies, and in some cases providing agency-requested studies.

All of these KM activities are now supported by the use of different types of information and communications technology: E-mail, teleconferencing, web-based geographic information systems, decision-support software, and the like.  These are essential tools since partners are situated in disparate organizational locations.  However, because of the collaborative nature of their tasks, they were not a substitute for face-to-face, the normal mode of detailed KM work.  In the same way that organizations seek structured predictability, networks try to use their open-ended processes of coordinating purposeful individuals who can apply their unique skills and experiences to the local problem confronting the collaborative undertaking.  They are part of the distributed knowledge systems that are created across boundaries, possessing somewhat fewer constraints or rule-bound actions, approaching those problems that are beyond the scope of any one agency or organization.

Engagement in KM by the networks revealed several interesting challenges to the field of public sector/nonprofit management.  Most important, the networks did not operate as hierarchies, but as ¿communities of practice¿, that is self-organized systems that share the capacity to create and use knowledge through informal learning and mutual engagement.  This process involved managers and specialists working at the same table on common cross-agency problems.

They also took advantage of the presence of participating epistemic communities, that is professionals from different disciplines and organizations who share common outlooks and solution orientations.  This was particularly the case with the networks that involved transportation, communications technology, watershed management, rural development, economic development, and developmental disabilities.

Another challenge involved the need to go beyond technical solutions and secure political support.  Any network agreement or action required the political knowledge that policy support would be forthcoming by the top governmental decision-makers.

Further, the networks regularly found the need to combine interdisciplinarity with disciplinarity, as they worked on creating their own problem-related policy/program knowledge.  Partners were constantly asked to input important legal and professional requisites and at the same time yield ground when necessary to make a solution work with the person from another discipline sitting next to them.

Finally, ¿discoverers¿ proved to be needed in the policy knowledge seeking game, particularly in discovery through deliberation.  Working together, these networks tried to emulate Senge¿s learning organizations (Peter M. Senge. 1990. The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday).  This means continually expanding collective capacities for creative futures by adaptive and generative learning, enhancing our ability to be creative.

In the era of wicked public problems human capital is the most essential ingredient to finding solutions.  As the late management guru Peter Drucker often said, contrary to Frederick W. Taylor a century ago, one does not manage people, the task is to lead people.  The keys to such leadership of human capital, involve Thomas Davenport¿s (Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005) eight rules for contemporary managers: 1) participation by managers in the work instead of overseeing work; 2) from organizing hierarchies to organizing communities; 3) retaining workers rather than hiring and firing them; 4) building knowledge skills rather than manual skills; 5) assessing invisible knowledge achievements instead of evaluating visible job performance; 6) building knowledge-friendly cultures instead of ignoring culture; 7) fending-off bureaucracy rather than supporting it; 8) relying on a variety of human resources, wherever they may be located, instead of reliance on internal personnel.  As interorganizational public entities the 14 networks followed virtually all of these ¿new managerial¿ precepts.  In regard to KM they are learning communities that were devoted to enhancing and utilizing human resources in their self-constructed non-bureaucratic and interdisciplinary cultures.

[1] Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, June 2007 http://press.georgetown.edu/detail.htm?id=1589011546