 The Idea: A
current state overview of KM, with particular emphasis on Personal
Knowledge Management (PKM) and The Cost of Not Knowing.
I
had the great pleasure of speaking, alongside Howard Deane, CKO of KPMG
Canada, with the students and faculty of Ivey School of Business
yesterday, on the subject of Knowledge Management. They asked us some
excellent questions, and since I'm a fan of the FAQ format, I thought
I'd summarize some of their (excellent) questions, and some of my answers, not all
of which we had the time to address during our meetings with them.
Special thanks to Mazi Raz, Prof. Darren Meister and alumnus Alina
Polonskaya for the invitation, facilitation and hospitality during our
day in London.
Q: How do you help management become aware of
knowledge gaps in their organization?
I'm not sure you can expect management to know what the gaps are, in
this era when, as Drucker says, for the first time most employees know
more about their jobs (and hence more about their 'knowledge gaps')
than their boss. That's why it's so important to do what Dave Snowden
calls 'Cultural Anthropology' -- talk to the people on the front lines,
not just to the business unit leaders and managers. And even when you
do, you have to be creative in identifying the gaps and needs -- if you
just ask 'what additional knowledge do you need', you'll get less
constructive ideas than if you offer possibilities, ask about real
business problems and obstacles, and iteratively agree on how
'knowledge' could help address them.
Q: How do you address resistance to change when it occurs at the implementation stage of a KM project?
Resistance to change is natural -- things happen the way they do for a
reason, and you can't create a sense of urgency for change where there
isn't one. You need to find the existing areas of urgent need for
change -- areas of high risk and unsatisfactory productivity for
example, and show how KM addresses them. If you're getting push-back at
the implementation stage it may be time to stop and reassess whether
what you're proposing will actually effectively address these urgent
needs. You also have to make it easy to change.
Q: What are the main factors that make organizations realize they have a need for KM?
It's usually precipitated by a crisis -- the collapse of Enron, the e
coli deaths in Walkerton, Ontario, SARS and Avian Flu and even 9/11 had
a huge impact on the perceived quality of existing knowledge and the
need for more and better knowledge in affected organizations. Every
organization whether they have a formal KM system or not is assessing
the cost of knowledge against the cost of not knowing,
as the chart above indicates, and judgementally picking the level of
investment in knowledge and in KM that balances these costs (K1 in the
diagram). When a crisis occurs, the perceived cost of not knowing
soars, and this equilibrium point shifts sharply to the right (K2) as a
result, and there is an appetite for investing more (K2-K1) in
knowledge and KM. What was always perceived as important suddenly
becomes urgent as well.
Q: What are the most important elements of, land-mines to watch out for in, any KM project?
A KM project is like any other change project, and the key is to ensure you follow John Kotter's Leading Change
approach. If you don't have, or lose, a sense of urgency, if you don't
have, or lose, executive sponsorship, if you don't have a clear,
well-articulated and communicated vision of where you're going and why,
if you don't have a well-researched plan to realize that vision, your
project is in trouble.
Q: What
do you use as incentives to encourage contribution to and use of KM systems? How
do you overcome resistance to sharing knowledge?
Dave Snowden's famous first rule of KM is "Knowledge can only be
volunteered, it cannot be conscripted". Incentive, rewards, contests,
bribes and coercive approaches may be effective for a short period, but
they will not be durable, and the quality of what they will produce is
doubtful. Employees need to believe that their peers will get value
from what they contribute, you can't make them believe that if they
don't. You also need to make it easy to contribute.
Q: How do you pitch and implement KM differently in
smaller companies?
In smaller companies budgets are smaller and most of the
knowledge-sharing is external rather than within the organization. So
you need to use simple, inexpensive, commercial tools that work between
organizations -- IM, Skype, and collaboration tools for example -- and
whatever you implement needs to work seamlessly with the organizations
of alliance partners, customers and advisers. That means striking the
delicate balance when developing applications between ability to work
around firewalls and protecting the confidentiality and integrity of
the organization's own knowledge.
Q: Once you have executive sponsorship, what's the biggest challenge in developing an effective KM system?
In my opinion there are three great challenges: (1) Getting sufficient
budget and dedicated resources to do the job right, (2) narrowing the
project list to focus on a few things you can do really well instead
of juggling a mass of projects, and (3) balancing the KM pet projects
of managers (who have the budgets and resources and power to support or
block you, but who often have mistaken views on what their employees'
real needs are, and just as often an unwelcome passion for playing a
heavy personal role in the fine points of design and look-and-feel of
the system) against the favoured projects of the people on the front
lines. Politics, in other words.
Q: What role should blogs play in KM systems?
My view on this is that off-the-shelf blog tools are not yet ready for
prime time in business organizations: They are too complicated for busy
employees to learn and use effectively, and their hard-wired
reverse-date organization and indexing doesn't match users' needs to be
able to browse blog content other ways. There are three constituencies
in organizations who could benefit from doing some experimentation now
with blogs before they're improved: (1) Subject Matter Experts who are
inundated with requests for information and advice, who could benefit
from having their 'electronic filing cabinet' accessible to and
browsable by others in the organization, (2) those in the company who
are already publishing newsletters and similar regular bulletins, and
(3) those who are coordinating Community of Practice networks. These
three groups will more readily see the benefits of using blogs and will
be more patient with their current shortcomings.
Q: What
are the best KM tools to start with?
Those that are easy to use, free or nearly free, and focused on
providing contact or context more than content e.g. Google Desktop (or
its imitators), IM, Skype, contact management tools.
Q: How
to you measure the impact and success of KM in your company?
This is the question we all shudder to answer, because there are no
good answers. I think you have to use a mix of quantitative (e.g. usage
stats, average currency of content) and qualitative (e.g. user survey
scores). And then you need to find some way to connect improvement in
KM infrastructure to improvement in more high-level critical business
measures (e.g. revenue per employee, speed-to-market measures). But
this is KM's toughest challenge.
Q: What
are the characteristics of a good KM implementation?
(1) It clearly meets, in the assessment of users, an urgent,
well-articulated and important business need. (2) It was completed on
budget and on schedule. (3) It's so easy to use that you don't need
training. (4) Users like it so much they spread the word about it, so you don't have to.
Q: What
is your preferred framework/model for KM, and how do you see it evolving?
Using the 'information highway' analogy, I've used the Architecture,
Infrastructure, Culture model. Architecture: Is it well-designed for
'traffic flow'. Infrastructure: Is there enough (but not too much) in
place that the user's experience is a pleasant one, free of bottlenecks
and other hassles. Culture: Is it 'friendly' to the users and the
communities in which it is placed, consistent and connected with other
infrastructure, or is it just contributing to (information) pollution
and congestion.
In future I see it evolving quickly to a decentralized model based on Personal Knowledge Management:
Decentralized content (on your hard drive, where you'll care enough to
maintain it properly, not on some huge impersonal centralized
database), Personally-set sharing and permissioning protocols (for
subscribing and publishing 'your' content), focus on finding Who to
have a context-rich conversation with instead of What context-free
content they have produced in past), and a shift from Just in Case
knowledge warehousing to Just in Time knowledge canvassing.
Q: What is the CKO's most difficult task? What is KM's greatest risk?
Getting enough budget and resources to do the job right, and assessing
the real cost of not knowing. The greatest risk is raising expectations
in management's and users' minds that you can't possibly meet.
Q: Which company do you think has an exemplary KM system and why?
I have never seen an exemplary KM system. Ernst & Young's in the
1990s was extraordinary, but it stopped evolving as new needs and new
technologies emerged. I've been told by reliable sources that Google,
Yahoo and IBM have great knowledge-sharing systems. Hill & Knowlton
has a very dynamic system with some real innovation in it.
Q: What will take for KM to make it into the core strategic
business goals of organizations?
Unless you work for organizations like NASA, the CDC, the WHO or the
CIA where the cost of not knowing is enormous, I believe the only way
you're going to tie KM closely to the core strategic values of the
organization is by re-branding it as Personal Productivity Improvement or Work Effectiveness Improvement.
Q: Where do you see KM fitting organizationally in the future?
Depending on the nature, culture, structure and industry of the
organization, it may find a 'home' as part of IT, Learning or Sales
& Marketing, or split between all three.
Q: How
do you assess the companies' and employees' readiness for a formal KM system?
This is a great question. I've promised to develop a KM
Readiness/Urgency criteria checklist to answer it. I suspect it will
entail talking to people on the front lines of the organization to
understand what they do and what their 'knowledge problems' are.
Q: What
are the biggest "don'ts" in implementing KM?
Don't obsess over content and ignore contact and context. Don't do it
all top-down. Don't do it until you understand the culture of the
organization and how they're 'working around' knowledge problems now.
Don't expect to get credit or insist on taking credit for your success.
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