The Future of Knowledge
published in the Conference Board's Across the Board, Jan.-Feb. 2005
By Dave Pollard
Dave Pollard, a former chief
knowledge officer of Ernst & Young, coaches entrepreneurs and
writes the "How to Save the World” weblog. This article is adapted from
several of his essays.
At a knowledge-management conference last year, I somewhat timidly
suggested to the audience that KM has become the organizational ghetto
for the most creative minds in business. I explained that almost
everyone I knew in senior positions in KM was brighter and more
inventive than their peers, and had self-selected or been handpicked by
management to lead their organizations’ KM programs for that reason.
There was a belief in the dotcom ’90s that knowledge was the critical
strategic asset of business, and the gateway to innovation. KM was
going to make a difference, and allow people enamored with creativity
and change to lead that change.
A decade later, most people left in KM are disillusioned. The culture
of big business has shifted sharply back right, and cost reduction, not
innovation, is Job One. There has not been much to show for all that
promise and creative ambition. But those in KM should not blame
themselves. They were unwittingly set up for disappointment. Executives
don’t know what to do with creative thinkers, and putting them into KM
was, at least in hindsight, a perfect way to "institutionalize” them,
to keep them visible as innovation role models but marginalize them so
they don’t actually do anything or spend much of the company’s money.
They are the corporation’s lip service to diversity and creativity. The
problem is that unless they want a life as starving artists or starving
writers, they really have no place to go. They’re trapped in this
creative ghetto.
When I said this to the KM crowd, I expected a lot of pushback—but
instead I got a lot of nodding heads. I’d come to know many of them
over the past decade, and I knew them to be an exceptional group: far
more imaginative, more intelligent, more right-brained, more stimulated
by ideas, and more idealistic than their organizational peers. But a
lot of them had also been misfits, nonconformists, constant
questioners, thorns in the sides of managers who wished they would just
shut up and do what they were told. KM provided a sanctuary for those
driven by ideas, but it was a sanctuary that was starved and
marginalized. It was a dead end. I’ve never met a chief knowledge
officer who made it any further up the organizational ladder.
The people who work in KM today report to a variety of different
bosses—some of them report directly to a CEO or VP, but most report to
a director of IT, HR/learning, marketing, or sales. Those who report to
sales directors are the unhappiest, because their bosses belong to a
totally different culture, driven by short-term results. To many people
in sales and marketing, KM is synonymous with research, and KM people
are just overpaid librarians. Those KM people who report to HR,
learning, or marketing directors tend to have more sympathetic bosses,
but those bosses are going through an unprecedented crisis of their
own: The prevailing view in many organizations is that almost
everything in HR, learning, and marketing can and should be outsourced,
and if the load can be lightened by outsourcing most of those KM people
as well, all the better.
Although the relationship between KM and IT was rocky from the start
(they compete for increasingly scarce resources), it has turned out to
be the healthiest, safest, and most logical and satisfying partnership
for KM people. For a start, IT has a budget—and so much tied up in
legacy systems that it’s harder to outsource (and even when it’s
outsourced, it’s often insourced again a couple of years later when
outsourcing fails to deliver cost savings). IT also has a much greater
appreciation than most other departments for what people in KM do, and
for the value they provide. They’re both part of "infrastructure,”
those back-office guys perceived to be eating up the profits that the
real workers on the front lines produce. If KM people are the most
creative in the company, IT people are the sharpest analytical
thinkers. They have a passion for their craft and are the world’s best
collaborators. Unfortunately, to senior executives (an echelon IT
people rarely penetrate—in most organizations, IT is a career dead end
and a revolving door), IT are the menial technical people who make sure
the clunky, horribly designed (by senior executive committees),
outmoded, centralized information systems spit out their management
reports.
As for knowledge management, once the darling of business schools and
business gurus, and the fastest-growing area in management consulting,
the writing is on the wall. The evidence is everywhere:
- Budgets for KM have been slashed everywhere, and whole KM departments eliminated;
- Many companies are now trying to outsource KM, no longer viewing it as a core competency;
- While at one time six of the top ten Books for Business best-sellers were about KM, very few KM titles now even crack the list;
- Writers are starting to predict "the death of KM,” lament, "Where did KM go wrong?”, and even decry "the autism of KM”; and
- Fortune 500 companies have fewer chief knowledge officers than five years ago.
The concept was a good one. There is no question that most
organizations, especially large ones, do a poor job at managing their
intellectual capital, and that this capital provides an increasingly
important part of organizations’ value. Desktop and laptop computers
have become ubiquitous in business, but the return on this investment
generally ranges from unmeasurable to unsatisfactory. The expectations
were that KM would be able to improve: growth and innovation in
organizations; productivity and efficiency (reflected in absolute cost
savings); customer relationships; employee learning, satisfaction, and
retention; and management decision-making.
It has arguably failed on all counts.
The reason for this failure was the unrealistic expectation that human
organizational behavior could be changed, in all kinds of positive
ways, by persuading people of the wisdom of capturing, sharing, and
archiving knowledge. Unfortunately, people change their behavior only
when there is an overwhelmingly compelling argument to do so (not the
"leap of faith” on which much of KM was predicated), or where there is
simply no alternative. Before KM, the way in which people shared
knowledge was person-to-person, just-in-time, and in the context of
solving a specific business problem. A decade later, that is still the way most people share knowledge, even in the "Most Admired Knowledge Organizations”:
- Growth is achieved by better selling techniques and beating or buying competitors.
- Innovation is achieved by listening to customers articulate business needs and developing creative solutions that address them.
- Productivity improvement is achieved by downsizing and outsourcing "non-core-competency” activities.
- Customer relationships are improved by increasing "face time” with customers.
- Employee learning is improved on the job, learning one-on-one from those doing the job now, and by making mistakes.
- Employee satisfaction and retention are improved when
bosses invest in face time with employees and offer them interesting
assignments, responsibility, and promising career opportunities.
- Decision-making is improved when management and front-line
people know their business, know their customers, know the business
environment, and apply this knowledge intelligently.
In all of these things, personal knowledge—of the market, the business,
and customer and employee wants and needs—is essential to success. But
in none of these things has knowledge management proven to be either a
critical element or a key differentiator. It has demonstrated no
competitive advantage to the organizations that have invested in it.
What has been the reaction of KM professionals to these problems?
Mandatory training for all in the use of knowledge tools and databases.
Adding more search functionality to the tools. Bribing or coercing
front-line people to contribute more and better content. Discouraging
people from delegating—rather, teaching them so that "do it yourself”
becomes easier.
These are, of course, naïve solutions. Things happen the way they do
for a reason, training works only if people are self-motivated to
learn, coercion and prohibitions merely drive prohibited behaviors
"underground,” and bribes work only for a short time and often produce
lip service rather than real compliance. There are better answers, but
they’re heretical, aren’t easy, and aren’t cheap; hardest of all, they
require management and KM leaders to understand and accommodate
front-line knowledge behaviors instead of trying to change them. Here
are a few of those answers:
- Change the job of knowledge professionals—assign your
researchers, analysts, librarians, database managers, and knowledge
trainers to go out and meet one-on-one with front-line practitioners,
listen to and observe their "knowledge work,” and provide
individualized coaching to show them, in the context of their
particular job, how to more effectively organize the information on
their hard drive, how to do research, how to find stuff. Teach ’em how
to fish instead of catching fish for them.
- Except for the prescriptive stuff (policies, regulations,
directories, and SOPs), quit collecting stuff centrally, quit
browbeating people to contribute knowledge, and redesign the knowledge
architecture to accommodate the private stocks, the knowledge that
people really value. Respect the concerns about the confidentiality of
this knowledge—they’re more likely to reflect concerns that misuse
could hurt the company than concerns that shared knowledge is lost
power or lost authority. You’ll probably find a lot more of these
private stocks than you thought existed, and your respect will surface
them and allow you, as a knowledge professional, to do what you do
best: helping to better organize and communicate knowledge that’s
valuable and available.
- Help people connect to experts inside and outside the
organization. Focus on capturing the organization’s (and the world’s)
know-who instead of the know-how and know-what. That’s a difficult task
that will require ingenuity, because you’re going to need to find ways
to "automatically” identify those experts and obtain (and keep current)
their contact information. Trying to coerce people to post and keep
their personal competency and contact information current is, in most
companies, an impossible task. Find a way to "harvest” that information
instead.
- Accommodate reintermediation. People delegate when it makes
sense, and rather than trying to stop it, acknowledge that knowledge
gathering is a skill, that it has a value, and that it has a cost.
Identify and help train the delegates, instead of (or at least before)
trying to train the delegators to do it themselves.
Peter Drucker identified improving front-line knowledge-worker
effectiveness as this century’s No. 1 management challenge. KM
professionals have the opportunity and responsibility to lead the
charge in this important task, and to do so in a way that understands
and supports the company’s existing knowledge culture, instead of
trying to transform that culture into something it’s not.
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