At the conference presentation last week, a slide that resonated with a number of people I spoke with was one on guiding principles for knowledge management.

I’m a big believer in guiding principles (you can define them many ways: rules, beliefs, philosophy, basis of reasoning or action). I like the way they force you to articulate, and agree on, what you are striving for. They are a great way to start an initiative, and as you always need input and sign off from a number of stakeholders, they get the project rolling. And I’ve found that if you are working with teams who have been around the block a few times, they are an essential tool to re-focus energies and direction.

Depending on your project, they might actually be a critical step that you bypass at your peril. I’ve used them in business and IT strategy development, corporate communication and investor relations, and IT development projects. On a major IT sourcing strategy project, we used them to turn lessons learned from the original outsourcing deal into guidelines for the next.

This Harvard Business Review article, Transforming  Corner-Office Strategy into Frontline Action, remains one of the most interesting things I’ve read on strategic principles and how they can guide and transform business.

So in developing guiding principles for knowledge management, I have my business hat firmly in place. If someone was trying to sell a new round of knowledge management initiatives to me, what would I want to hear?

Here are five guiding principles for KM that might provide some food for thought:

1. Make knowledge tasks and activities part of the way people work.
2. Embed knowledge management in your key business processes.
3. Target business processes that deliver real benefits to teams: save time, cut costs, prevent errors, simplify activities.
4. Market your achievements and benefits to existing and new customers as if it were a product you were selling on the open market.
5. Don’t make people switch between too many toolsets. Leverage your intranet, and turn it into an internet scale knowledge system.