FreePint Bar

Become a fan of FUMSI on Facebook »

Building an Effective Knowledge Management Programme

Introduction
The problem with building an effective knowledge management (KM) programme is that in almost all organisations KM activities often occur outside normal workstreams. KM teams are often found next to the research or information departments toiling away with little recognition, working hard to show their value. Over the last decade, there has been much emphasis on designing and building technology solutions that will, in theory, facilitate the capturing, analysis, dissemination and repurposing of organisational knowledge. Although things are changing and organisations are getting wise to the fact that it's not all about technology, the trend is still there. While the authors of this article were in Washington last November - presenting at KM World 2010 - we saw lots of examples of technology systems that attempt to solve KM. We believe the reason for this is two-fold. First, technology vendors recognise an easy sale when they see one and every new technology has a potential sale to a KM team. Again, this is because KM teams usually sit separately from standard/core operations so selling to them is less disruptive. The second reason is that most people still have trouble defining what KM is and what function it serves. Most people will say that knowledge management is important, but ask them how and why and the conversation comes pretty quickly to an end. Yet most companies continue to say they value knowledge management (and training for that matter), but rarely follow through with the necessary resources to move KM from a back office function to part of the core operations of the organisation.

Moving Knowledge Management from Back Office to Front Line
At A.T. Kearney Procurement & Analytic Solutions (ATKPAS), a unit of A.T. Kearney's international management consulting firm, we have had the unique opportunity to build a KM programme and embed it into our core operations. As a management consultancy knowledge is what we produce and becomes our competitive advantage. The ability to find, share, process, assimilate and repurpose knowledge quickly and effectively is critical to our success in the marketplace. Approximately three years ago ATKPAS undertook a transformation of our small KM function from back office support to strategic enablement that drives and adds value to our client delivery functions. At the core of this transformation was what we call our KM Programme. This programme rests on eight pillars - Knowledge Capture & Distillation, Different Forms of Knowledge, Syndication of Content, Results, Centers of Excellence (COE), Research, and Governance. Throughout the transformation process we embedded these pillars into the fabric of our client delivery operations allowing the knowledge we share to be turned into tangible monetised value.

Our transformation revolves around three key revelations. First, that solving the knowledge management problem requires more than just technology. There will always be breakthrough technologies that will enhance KM activities, such as all the social media tools, but at the end of the day knowledge management is simply about getting people to share what they have learned - their key insights or information on a specific topic. This means that proper attention needs to be applied to how and why people share, and the process of sharing information. Witness how easily people share on Facebook or update their LinkedIn profiles. What makes them do this? Why do they feel compelled to contribute or update their status? Once we understood why people share, then it was time to add the technology. Our second revelation was that documents do not equal knowledge. Most KM systems and processes revolve around gathering, collecting and storing documents. Recognising the failure of this strategy we started to look beyond the document. Finally, we realised that the key to a successful implementation of a knowledge sharing programme lies in the understanding that it is a change management effort. It was important for us to recognise that we were attempting to change the way people behave, which required a whole different set of expectations and efforts. This included understanding which triggers motivate our workforce - for example, rewards, competition, internal publicity.

Pillar One - Knowledge Capture & Distillation, Using a Wiki
This is the first step in our transformational journey to define what knowledge is. In our experience, sharing knowledge is almost always confused with collecting documents. The thinking goes, if one collects documents and stores them in a database then one is collecting knowledge. Further reinforcing this dynamic are technology systems that privilege the collection of documents - just look at the number of document management systems that pretend to be knowledge management systems! However, once we broke out of this restrictive thinking we came to understand that only a small fraction of the information contained within a set of documents is relevant and should be leveraged. So our goal became to distill the knowledge out of the documents and into another a centralised and more useful format. The format we chose was a wiki in SharePoint. SharePoint is our technology platform because it is the de facto collaboration platform for our client base. While we use SharePoint, any standard wiki technology can be used for this purpose. Using a wiki format allows the knowledge to become actionable, easy to find and governable. Users can collaboratively generate content, edit and add to content, as well as rate it and comment on it. Furthermore, the wiki technology enables us to track the age of the content, find out how often it has been updated (and by whom) and its user-generated rating. All this means that good content is easily shared, while not-so-good content is quickly weeded out. Taking this further, our clients are interested in a subset of the knowledge we distill out of our documents. So the process of distillation allows us to make our knowledge sharing more relevant, but it also allows us to take our knowledge and repurpose it for commercial value to our clients...

Jinfo Jobs in the FreePint Newsletter are supported through our partnership with Quantum², an innovative skills development programme offered by Dialog. Learn more at <http://quantum.dialog.com/>.

• Global Risks Report 2011
  
  
• EEOC Reports Job Bias Charges Hit Record High of Nearly 100,000 in Fiscal Year 2010
  
  
• Personal bankruptcies rose 8 percent in 2010
  
  
• Cancer costs projected to reach at least $158 billion in 2020
  
  
• Annual Growth Survey: advancing the EU's comprehensive response to the crisis.

Recent postings:

• Reference Shelf: U.S. Government: Congressional Oversight Manual Prepared by the Congressional Research Service
  
  
• A Look at the Canadiana Discovery Portal + Overview of Canadiana Metadata Repository
  
  
• In New Military, Data Overload Can Be Deadly
  
  
• Information Dissemination: "Will You Tweet This?"
  
  
• Reference Tools: Audio Interview with New Edition of Oxford English Dictionary Online.

Directions and maps: <http://www.freepint.com/contact.htm>