More on The Cost of Not Knowing and Where KM is Going

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.