I
just got back from a two-day conference in Ottawa on Knowledge
Management, sponsored by the Conference Board of Canada. The entire
discipline is at a crossroads, and the discussion was urgent and
intense. I have already written about where I think KM is headed:
- From content to connectivity,
with social networking applications and expertise-finding and
community-building processes taking over in priority from the
populating and management of massive, just-in-case, context free
repositories of documents, and
- From corporate content management to personal
content management, with simple, intuitive tools, personalized
processes and one-on-one personal effectiveness training taking over in
priority from complex, one-size-fits-all intranet tools, portals,
'productivity' software, and undifferentiated training
What was eye-opening to me was the perspective of the substantial
number of representatives from the public sector present at the
meeting. I tend to think about KM in the context of large corporate and
entrepreneurial environments, which I'm most familiar with, and how
their information needs dovetail with those of individual citizens and
consumers. But I often forget that public sector organizations have
different needs, and it's dangerous to assume that the answers that
make sense in the private sector translate to not-for-profit
organizations.
So I decided to see if I could develop a Knowledge Management model that would work for any
user, public or private, organization or individual. Models that focus
on strategy, systems, information structures and value propositions
didn't work -- they vary too much by organization type and size. I
found only two bases for KM models that seem to apply ubiquitously: principles, and processes.
I've addressed what I believe to be the ubiquitous principles of KM in a recent article, and will have more to say about that soon. But as I started to think about the processes of KM, I realized that we have been looking at it all wrong, from above, from a systems perspective, instead of from ground level, from an activity
level. The best-known KM process models are Nonaka's four-step
'knowledge creation' process -- codification, enhancement,
internalization, sharing -- and the consultants' megaprocess model --
acquire, store, add value, apply/deploy. Show either of these models to
a front-line worker or an individual citizen/consumer, and you're
likely to get either yawns or raised eyebrows. They just don't describe
in a meaningful way what people do -- their 'knowledge activities'.
After a few hours' research and discussion with some of my KM colleagues, I came up with this alternative model:
This chart would be enough to make most systems people shudder: it has no sequence, no flow.
Instead, it is an undifferentiated set of twelve 'knowledge activities'
that, for most of us, comprise most of what we do at work, and no small
part of what we do in our personal lives as well. It describes human
intellectual activity, and the reasons we partake of it. The rest of
human activity is either instinctive, emotional or physical -- not the
domain of 'knowledge management'.
I've never liked the term 'Knowledge Management', so having
circumscribed the set of activities that KM was supposed to be about, I
decided to ponder what would be a less presumptuous and more precise
name for a discipline that would purport to improve the effectiveness
and efficiency of how we do these things. It is broader than just
'thinking' or 'information processing' or 'learning', but narrower than
'productivity' (which can describe physical as well as intellectual
activity). It has much to do with helping people carry out these
activities better -- enablement and facilitation and making work
easier. There are no words for this in the English language, or any
other language I'm familiar with, which is perhaps why the awful term
Knowledge Management came to be used. How do you reduce making workers' intellectual activities easier, and more effective
to a couple of words? The best I can come up with is the clumsy
'Intellectual Work Effectiveness Improvement Facilitation', and since
most work today is intellectual, and most of what support departments
do is facilitation, we might drop the first and last words. But 'Work
Effectiveness Improvement' is perilously close to the '90s fad called
Business Process/Performance Improvement (BPI, also known as
Re-engineering).
As noted above, KM has traditionally been about building and populating
databases with useful content, creating portals -- generally, making
more information readily available. The consequence has often been to
drown workers in hard-to-find information of dubious value just in case
they should find themselves in a position to use it. We have actually
made workers' intellectual activities harder
rather than easier, by presuming, top-down or
back-office-to-front-lines, to understand what information they need,
and how, when and why they need it. In a world where jobs are more and
more specialized, and everyone's information needs are increasingly
unique, it's not surprising that KM has failed to live up to its
promise.
If we were to start over again, with the mandate to help make people's
intellectual work (the 12 activities in the chart) easier and more
effective, what would we do differently? Consultants will tell you
there are four ways to make work more effective: Improve the tools, the
information (content), the processes, or the behaviours. Tools have
always been the primary domain of the IT people, and behaviours
(culture) have always been the primary domain of the HR and Learning
people. Re-engineering tried to focus on the processes, only to
discover that standard business processes and procedures still exist
only in a few highly-prescriptive jobs, most of which are subject to
automation or offshoring. That left only content for the KM people to
focus on, and they've done their best for a decade to improve the
amount of information available to front-line workers, working with the
IT and Learning people. But for the most part, the information people
want either doesn't exist, or is only valuable with the context of the
person who provides it (most effectively communicated in
conversations), so the plethora of massive new databases and
information feeds are of limited use.
What is the problem KM has been trying to solve? What problems do
front-line workers have doing the 12 intellectual activities in the
chart above? I surveyed the people of Ernst & Young about this
three years ago, and here's how some of them answered this question:
- "We don't know how to effectively organize, manage and find
the information we have now, in our offices, on our laptops, and in the
few shared databases we use, so we waste a huge amount of time 'looking
for stuff'."I heard this a lot, and only personalized, one-on-one coaching, can alleviate this problem.
- "We don't know who to talk to, to get information we need quickly, inexpensively and effectively." I
heard this a lot, too, which is why I'm such a fan of
expertise-finders and other social networking applications, even though
the first generation of such tools fall short.
- "When we do know who to talk to, we can't get hold of
them." It's a tragedy that we have these wildly over-engineered
communication tools with 1001 useless functions, but no one has
grappled with the very human, critical problem of setting priorities
for conversations, and getting the people who most need it access to
the experts quickly. There has to be a better answer to telephone-tag
and e-mail tag.
- "Meetings, training courses, presentations and other group
activities are largely a waste of time -- they're badly managed and
often unnecessary, but we participate because we're told we have to.
Teaming and collaboration are largely management myths -- the real,
important, effective, valuable work is individual or one-on-one, and we
know how to do it." Many business-people spend up to 30% of their time
in group activities scheduled by others.
- "We need to find ways to stop doing a lot of things that aren't important." E-mail
and other new technologies are causing people to spend more and more
time doing things that are urgent but not important, and sometimes
things that are neither urgent nor important but easy to do, so the
important things get deferred and added on to an already long and
onerous workday. Paperwork from management is another contributor --
front-line people say it's all one-way communication (up), that most of
it is unnecessary or automatable, and that cutbacks in administrative
support staff simply shift this administrative work to front-line
people, adding to their job.
- "We don't know what we don't know. When we fail (to win a
proposal, to complete a project on time or on budget, to keep an
important customer or employee etc.), it's almost always because of
what we didn't know, not because we did our jobs badly. If that
knowledge was available, we'd have it, and we'd never fail. It's not,
and nothing anyone can do will change that. The famous saying 'If only
HP knew what HP knows' is wishful management thinking -- HP does know,
99% of the time, what HP knows. And in the other 1% of cases, the
problem is size and bureaucracy, not bad knowledge management systems."
- "We're past information overload, we've reached information
exhaustion. There's not enough time in the day to read everything we
should, let alone everything we'd like to." How can we help workers
filter and rank the material in their various reading stacks and
inboxes, and how can we get it to them in more succinct form without
sacrificing important context?
- "We spend far too much time wordsmithing and writing, and
not enough time talking to people -- customers, employees, colleagues,
experts and thought leaders in our field." 'Face time' is a critical
factor in relationship building, in selling, in customer and employee
satisfaction, and in learning effectiveness. Key decisions are made and
key contracts won more often on a few well-spoken words than on a
finely-crafted written report or proposal. And most workers' oral
communication skills -- one-on-one and in group settings -- are sorely
lacking.
So if we started KM over again as Work Effectiveness Improvement
(Drucker, who saw this as precisely the greatest business challenge of
the 21st century, would surely approve), what would our 'Job Description' look like, to address the eight problems above? Here's a stab at it:
- Identify and introduce easy-to-use, intuitive personal content
management and social networking tools to improve workers' facility in
finding the information and the experts they need to do their jobs
effectively.
- Work one-on-one to understand the problems each worker is having
acquiring and processing information, and finding, contacting and
working with experts; provide them with personalized training, tools,
suggested processes and 'cheat sheets' to address these problems; and,
if these problems are endemic to the organization or can't be solved at
the individual level, bring them back to management with
recommendations for more systematic changes. [this is the only element
of this job description that would require any staff -- all the rest is
a one-person job]
- Identify, and then with executive sponsorship establish
standards, procedures, filters and measurements to reduce unnecessary
e-mails, information flows, paperwork, meetings and interruptions that
prevent and interfere with critical work activities. Track and aim to
halve the aggregate amount of 'non value added' time.
- Work with Learning leaders to develop voluntary training programs
that can enhance time management, information management, work
prioritization and oral communication (including story-telling!) skills.
- Assess the aggregate cost to the organization of information
(buying it, storing it, looking for it, reading it, figuring out what
it means, managing it) and also the aggregate cost to the organization
of not knowing -- the cost of
failures (lost contracts etc.) and errors that demonstrably could have
been prevented or mitigated had there been more or better information
available. Use these measures to objectively evaluate information
adequacy, quality, and overload, and recommend changes to tools,
repositories, and processes.
- Develop a set of Work Effectiveness Principles customized for the
organization that can be used to influence and drive strategy,
structure, policy, and behaviour in the organization.
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Ten years ago when I was first appointed Chief Knowledge Officer, one
of my first tasks was to pull together my own job description. At the
time, I did my best, but after reading all the hype about KM I fell
victim to it -- my job description was all about establishing a
Knowledge Vision, Knowledge Strategy, developing Knowledge
Infrastructure and Architecture, and changing Knowledge Culture from
"knowledge hoarding to sharing, collaboration and innovation". Pretty
high-falutin' stuff. It was fascinating, but ultimately futile,
misdirected, overly ambitious, and endlessly frustrating. If I'd had
the foresight to have put the six bullets above on my job description
instead, it would certainly have raised lots of questions and eyebrows,
but ultimately would have probably achieved much more substantial
results, and made everyone happier, especially those poor, abused,
neglected, front-line workers who, a decade later, are still waiting
for the realization of KM's extraordinary promise, and promises. If
only they'd named me Chief Work Effectiveness Improvement Officer
instead.
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