Do you assume people will adopt your new knowledge management initiative, or is adoption something you are actively investing in? Resistance can be the death knell for a KM project, and can lead to technology being left unused, processes being ignored, and knowledge being hoarded.

If you’re currently experiencing some of these challenges, a change management strategy can help. One of the key benefits of a change strategy is that it creates opportunities to have conversations with end users and stakeholders, and learn how to communicate in the user’s terms. As a result of these conversations, users and stakeholders will better understand the value and outcomes of the KM project. The more conversations, the better: for a change strategy to be most effective, it should be included in a KM project at all stages of the process, including the very beginning.

Here’s how we have applied change management techniques to KM projects at EK:

1. Technology Changes

Nearly all knowledge management projects involve some sort of technology, such as an intranet site, social media tool, or wiki collaboration platform. Resistance to these tools often looks like a sad, blank tool that is gathering dust.

In my experience, many of these change failures can be prevented by tailoring end user training to the value the technology actually adds to people’s daily work. For example, I’ve taught basic SharePoint classes on the benefits of version control, co-authoring, and storing files outside of an email platform. For groups that are less tech-savvy, these simple lessons are much more impactful than teaching them about why they should stop using navigation and start using search to find documents.

2. Process Changes

Knowledge management frameworks are often built around processes: content authors need to tag their content correctly, admins need to follow a records management schedule, or staff needs to follow a standard publishing process.

The change management principle of co-creation can help with process changes. A new process that’s designed without the input of the people actually using it will almost certainly fail, by leading to workarounds. For example, in terms of a publishing process, a low percentage of “emergency” publishing will be a good indicator of success. In addition, taking an agile approach to content development and gradually improving processes over time will help make change manageable.

3. Cultural Changes

Promoting knowledge sharing and growing communities of practice are cultural aspects of many knowledge management projects. These types of changes are often the most difficult to manage because they are difficult to “force” – they address behaviors and habits that are ingrained in an organization.

Applying change networks can help you surface issues and build excitement and trust in these cases. A change network is a group of people outside of the management team who is serving as “ambassadors” for the change. They are a motivated group that will help spread the value of KM and will bring issues to the group that people don’t feel comfortable saying publicly. In the past, I have also used a change network as an informal focus group to test project communications, new tools, and other KM ideas.

Over the years I have felt extremely frustrated with the so-called knowledge repositories, such as SharePoint, and the many other solutions for collaboration that exist around an intranet. Many years ago I joined an engineering consultancy firm in London called Fulcrum (which a few years later merged into Mott MacDonald). That was back in 2008 and we were around 150 employees, with small offices in Edinburgh, Madrid and Hong Kong. Those were the days were sustainable building design was going strong. The six directors were (and are) an extremely cool and forward-thinking lot and they put together a great team of sustainability consultants and building engineers. I was one of sustainability guys.

As you can imagine, sustainable building design touches on many aspects of the building; insulation, air-tightness, energy efficiency, daylight, building controls or thermal comfort, to name a few. Knowledge was very important and we had a Knowledge Base (SharePoint). As we were constantly researching new technologies and design principles, we were continuously coming across very interesting documents and articles. We were devouring them and uploading them on the Knowledge Base. We had categories and tags and all the rest, and we were not too bad at applying metadata to the files. But nonetheless, it was a phenomenal mess.

Soon it was obvious that we were uploading stuff much more frequently than downloading files. The main reason for this was that any ‘search’ would yield a large number of results and there was no way we could obtain anything which actually matched what we needed in the moment without opening and reading a lot of documents. Now, many years later, I have a better understanding of the problems we were suffering then, but the truth of the matter was that we all had our own repositories of knowledge on our computers, and any time we had a need or an itch, we would turn to our reliable contacts (for instance, Tom, just across from my desk) who would send us an email with the document in an attachment.

We had built a platform which was to be a knowledge sharing platform, but we did not know the difference between a library and a collaboration environment. As a result, we ended up doing none, because we could not tell information from knowledge. To illustrate this, I will reproduce here the definition of Knowledge Management by Kimiz Dalkir and Jay Liebowitz: ‘Knowledge management develops systems and processes to acquire and share intellectual assets. It increases the generation of useful, actionable, and meaningful information, and seeks to increase both individual and team learning. In addition, it can maximise the value of an organisation’s intellectual base across diverse functions and disparate locations.’ Our knowledge base had tons of information with little use, relatively low meaning, and it was certainly not actionable.

KM is the Supermarket and your Project is the Kitchen

I often use this analogy. A knowledge-sharing platform is the supermarket you go to find the ingredients to take home to your kitchen. Once there, you can mess around with the alchemy of your project. I still work in the construction industry, sadly not anymore at Fulcrum, but at Werner Sobek, which is another very good firm. We are building engineers and designers doing pretty much all the things that architects do not do: structural engineering, façade engineering, heating and cooling, etc. As you can imagine, our kitchen can get pretty messy and we have all sorts of things going on at once.

I’ll give you a small example. We were recently approached by an architectural firm in Philadelphia to support them in a cool and confidential competition in Hamburg. It’s something like a museum and it will be small-ish, 2,500 m2 of net floor area. We have three weeks to cook up our magic and there are no fees involved, so we don’t want to spend too many hours cooking.

After a few days we received the architectural drawings, showing the exhibition areas, back of house offices, circulation, toilets, and so on, but there isn’t a single technical room for us to put our equipment in. This is quite common, by the way. One of the dishes on our menu takes priority and has to come out of the kitchen really fast, as all starters should. -This is: To Tell The Architects How Many and How Big Our Technical Areas Should Be-. Speed is key, because everybody is working away and the sooner we get our foot in the door, the easier our life will be for the next two years.

Now that you know the context, let’s go back to Knowledge Management.

So now that we know the breakdown of areas in the building, we rush to the supermarket and check out the different aisles and shelves. Navigating the supermarket is very easy and we quickly find an aisle call ‘Spatial Allowances’ (that’s the lingo). We walk along the aisle taking a look at the different products on display. It is very clear in our minds what the final dish shall be, so we easily identify the ingredients we can use:

• Template booklet for spatial allowances
• An excel spreadsheet with benchmarks for other museums
• A tool to estimate the loads (power demand, heating, ventilation, water, etc)

Furthermore, while looking around, we find other related ingredients that we did not know existed and which will give our dish extra flavour such as case studies of technical areas in museums we did in the past and a couple of diagrams we can adapt to fit our project. In fact, the architects won’t notice this, but we also took a couple of ready-made meals from the freezer, but hey, economies of scale, right?

Three Principles of Good Practice

In order to provide such an experience (navigating the supermarket), we had to establish a few requirements. Or rather, define a brief which is not too abstract nor too narrow; as Tim Brown puts it in his book ‘Change by Design’. The way I see it, the knowledge-sharing platform should conform to the following three principles.

• Knowledge should be very easy to create, share and rearrange 

The members of the organisation should be able to share their explicit knowledge in the easiest way possible, as any burden to the process of creating and sharing knowledge will dramatically reduce the level of engagement and the amount of contribution. Similarly, any knowledge domain is organic and will evolve with time, so the different domains and the different knowledge assets will need to be re-arranged (forgotten even). This process should also be extremely easy. In my experience, SharePoint and Wikis don’t fulfil this principle, especially when it comes to re-arranging.

• Knowledge should be organized as an ontology, not as a taxonomy

In case I am not using these big terms in the proper way; by taxonomy I mean a tree diagram, and by ontology I mean something like a network. A well-known taxonomy is the animal kingdom (or parts of it, rather). Under such organisation, any given species will only be in one place, and there is only one path leading to that species. So next time someone in your organisation needs to do some work about rabbits, he or she will have to access the folder of chordata (I just learned this word), then the folder of vertebrates, and so on until reaching the rabbit and accessing the knowledge your organisation holds on rabbits. But in reality, the way our brains reach different domains of knowledge is by navigating a network of domains, so different people will access their domain ‘rabbits’ by a myriad of different paths. Notably: carrots.

• Whatever the KM method, it should be built from the ground up 

Another barrier to a successful KM system is when the system comes from above. This now seems obvious to me, but not when we started implementing the KM platform back in the day. Back then we had a series of workshops between a bunch of senior guys where we devised the KM system including the major domains all on our own. We then passed it on to the wider company expecting them to start  populating and using it. It was not well received and it obviously failed.

This third principle is quite straight forward: whatever the KM system, it should be built from the ground up. Furthermore, I recommend building it around communities of practice and start small. The way I do it is as follows: first choose a specific company objective that is closely connected to knowledge (low hanging fruit), second define a small community of practice around it and give them a clear goal, and then start working on that specific domain for that specific target. By so doing, you will create a small but functional KM environment, which is useful for everybody from day one. People within this community will feel ownership, will look after their domains and will feel comfortable using the platform.

Knowledge Mapping on a Mind Mapping Platform  

Now, discussion on technology is unavoidable and so far I have only found a way to do this: communities of practice and collaborative knowledge mapping. In particular, we use mind mapping software. I don’t think there is much point in mentioning the particular software we use, since many commercial products out there provide the necessary functionality.

Mind mapping is a very simple and very powerful technique to organise your thoughts (and in our case, our collective thoughts). This is the Wikipedia description: “A mind map is a diagram used to visually organise information. A mind map is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the centre of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those.”

For the last six years we have been using collaborative mind mapping to manage our knowledge. It’s been the most successful platform I have ever used. It is simple, intuitive, easy to use and fully complies with the three principles of good practice. It provides an ontological navigation experience, so that different people reach the same domains following different paths. I can’t stress enough how important this is. Every now and then, when I have shared a new knowledge asset, I go for a walk and ask some random colleagues if it would be ok to carry out a test for me. I ask them to go to the knowledge map and see if they can find (or rather, access) something in particular. Invariably, they all find it in a matter of seconds. I observe the paths they follow and it is very interesting to see how different they can be.

The aim of this article is just to provide an insight into what I believe to be an effective knowledge sharing and collaboration platform, and what the principles should be to govern such an initiative. It all comes down to people and to influencing the organisation’s culture. I believe it should be down to the users to curate the experience of navigating the company’s knowledge. I do not want to overextend and lose your interest, and I hope you have found this story useful so far. I would be delighted to hear from you:

• What do you think?
• What is it like in your industry? What do you use?
• Is knowledge mapping a sensible solution only for engineering disciplines?

 . . . and an essential driver of Business Transformation!

I had the great opportunity to sit down with two CxOs from a European police organization a couple of weeks ago. The topic for discussion was to share experiences and discuss the common challenges and opportunities, that the business transformation of moving into a Mobile-first, Cloud-first world creates.

This was a 2.5-hour discussion, in a casual setting, with no slideware. My favourite kind of meeting, as there is no technology to hide behind or slides that create unnecessary barriers, for a free-flowing conversation and open dialogue.

So what can a Professional Services organization have in common with a police force, you may ask? Quite a lot actually, as it turned out. I am sharing some of the topics and questions we discussed below, as it builds upon a previous blog post, by adding more perspective and detail to those initial high-level points.

We had agreed on the following talking points beforehand:

• Business Transformation to a Mobile-first, Cloud-first world
• Project Management, processes & methodologies
• Change Management, progress tracking and success metrics

The world is transforming rapidly & we need to transform with it! As touched upon in my last blog, most companies and corporations are facing an environment and market pressures, where productivity gains and cost reduction (hard savings/gains) by streamlining the organization, no longer does the trick. We need to find other ways to improve productivity and maintain/grow margins and actively driving Knowledge Management (‘KM’) is one area, where many organisations (unknowingly?) are sitting on large unrealized potential gains.

The rate at which the business is currently changing, means we need to shorten Time To Decision and Time To Execution/Release, substantially. The traditional waterfall-approach no longer scales and the search for the holy grail that is perfection, is starting to undermine ROI and consume margins faster and faster. So we need to work smarter as working faster isn’t a realistic option in most cases.

Here are some things to consider, when trying to help your work-force work smarter:

1. Agile methodologies There are great advantages in running agile projects but there are also challenges as with any approach as one size never fits all.

• Simplicity and flexibility – as you run short development sprints, test, release and adjust, you can better incorporate user experiences from an early stage. It allows you to start simple and add complexity as needs arise and business requirements are identified.
• Incremental documentation – not necessarily less documentation, which many think is the case, but it is different from the traditional approach where documentation is created up front. There is a risk that development starts going in circles, unless requirements and decisions, including business reason for making them, are well documented and structured.
• Better user experience and easier adoption – assuming that users are involved from early on, as it enables you to ‘start small’ (or keep it simple) and add functionality as needed rather than design the entire solution before test/release.

2. Project Structures   Not only how a project is structured and scoped is essential but so is how it is governed. For larger project initiatives it may be much better to break projects up in smaller chunks and coordinate through a Program Office or PMO. Orientation should be by business owner/area and aligned with all up company strategy. This puts additional pressure on governance and best practice is to have each Business (process) Owner/Business Decision Maker represented in a formal Steering Group, with the objective to make business-based decisions and prioritisations between projects as applicable.

This applies to waterfall, as well as agile projects but the traditional multi-year waterfall projects should be avoided, as the changes in the business environment/market are so many and so fast, that in most cases running 2-3 year long projects doesn’t work. Neither do monolithic-style SW implementations, where development goes on for years before anything is actually released to the end users by the way…

3. Business & Solution Requirements  Teams need to be able to quickly and effectively connect, and easily collaborate on documentation and other content, to keep up the pace. By re-using knowledge and content, quality can also be maintained/improved, in spite of the faster pace, and avoid endless review cycles and revisions. 

Another area which is absolutely critical is to capture and manage business requirements, as most users are becoming much smarter, hence pickier, by the week. At the same time documentation of requirements need to be balanced with the shorter lifecycles and shorter Time To Release, so the traditional 120 pages long Vision Scope, may not be ideal, although a high-level scope and shared vision is critical.

Technology is transforming even faster – “I can’t keep up….!”  But it is not only the speed of change that is adding pressures on our organisations. It is also the growing complexity of the environments and eco-systems we operate in (I will intentionally exclude financial- and market pressures for sake of simplicity and focus on topic). Everyone can no longer be an expert in everything, so we need better ways to connect people and information, as to leverage the experts in our organisations wherever they may be located.

You may think this is where the sales pitch comes, pushing Office 365 and SharePoint Online for effective collaboration? But it is not. I am focusing this piece solely on the people and process dimensions of KM as a vehicle for Business Transformation; not the Tools aspect. Implementing a KM solution, is our own experience 80% about People and Process and a mere 20% about Technology/Tools.

Shifting your organization to a true Knowledge organization, is a cultural change effort – not an IT project, or even a process implementation. It’s a cultural shift which requires every single individual in the organization to adopt some new mind-sets and leave some old behaviours behind. Here are a few:

1. Knowledge is no longer power – knowledge is a commodity and information hoarding no longer puts anyone at an advantage. Collaboration and knowledge sharing however, does.

2. Perfect is the enemy of good  - A common mind-set is that any document or artefact (solution) has to be absolutely perfect, before it is put in front of the intended audience/end user. Wrong! Users bandwidth is shrinking as fast as our bandwidth and most would rather get something fast that is continuously improved, than get nothing for 6 months. The more people who can review and provide structured input, throughout the process, the better the outcome and quality of end product but it is key to organise all input well as to avoid chaos

3. User centric approach - This is an absolute must in a day and age where, at least in the US, the Millennial portion of the population has now exceeded the Baby Boomers. The requirements on speed and ease of accessibility across any device or platform, is therefore becoming more and more critical, as user behaviours start shifting towards Mobility and Cloud as primary choices.

It is hard managing this type of intangible changes – like mind-sets and principles – that a cultural shift requires. And it is even harder to track progress and measure business impact as data is correlative, as opposed to causal, at best. Hence the need for many of us, as well as our Business Decision Makers, to start acknowledging and accepting that perhaps not everything can be tracked by hard numbers?

Thoughts? Comments? Questions? Your comments are as always very welcome!

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

First generation KM, nicknamed the tool era, was crawling with technology solutions.  Many years later we are still looking hard at technology and we seem to be heading towards a new generation nicknamed the Sharepoint era.

It seems clear that the future is likely to involve more technology, not less. The temptation therefore is to engage more with it and, in terms of KM, we are now presented with an array of tools which have taken up center stage in the development of the strategy. Careful consideration is now given to the social component which was missing from 1st generation KM. Developing KM meant spending money on intranets which finally ended up being used as information repositories. Today that drab outfit has been replaced by social platforms which actively engage users and are looking to become authentic knowledge creation and transfer stations.

What cannot be overlooked, however, is that technology is not the core solution. KM effectiveness won´t be measured for the quality of the platform; it will be measured by how much it has impacted in the organization´s results. You need to design the KM strategy, carried to the point of identifying and developing the organization´s critical and strategic knowledge. This goal requires creativity, deals with complex issues and requires coordination among many functions in the organization. Also, avoiding culture carries some severe penalties.

Once we have connected the dots and developed the strategy we can start to look at technology. What has changed from 1st generation Knowledge Management is that “social” technology has being integrated into the fabric of people and we didn’t have this before.  Workspace collaboration is changing as we speak and we can´t turn a blind eye to Gen Y and Millennials social behavior.

So if you’re looking to start your KM journey don’t get carried away and start off with technology. Yes we live in new and exciting times, but technology is powerless unless you have a clear strategy. Don’t get hooked to the “Sharepoint Era”.

Knowledge Management is becoming more important as organizations continue to grow and face numerous challenges. As Wiig stated, “Competitiveness in the new world is directly dependent not only on the value and sophistication of the knowledge assets but also on how well they are renewed and utilized to conduct competent work” (Wiig 1999). Recently, the board of directors of the African Development Bank Group (ADBG) approved their Knowledge Management strategy, declaring that “knowledge and innovation have emerged as crucial features of development strategies in many parts of the world”.

Knowledge management does not only allow organizations to become smarter and in turn generate higher levels of competency, but it also reduces the cost of losing critical knowledge when talent walks out the door. According to Zenworkplace.com, companies can spend as much as $250,000 per 12 employees that leave the company. The costs are associated with training, lowered productivity, recruitment, but above all things, replacing critical knowledge. “It’s not just about putting numbers in a spreadsheet, writing code, or selling a product. It’s about knowing the people, the traditions, the location of relevant information, what the boss likes and a million other things that come from working for a company for a long period of time. All that goes away when someone quits.” (Lucas, S. 2014).

(credits:  dilbert.com) 

The key element in knowledge management is critical knowledge. This knowledge is derived from analyzing a series of elements related to the organization´s strategy such as its value preposition, market segments, new product development, balanced scorecard and any other relevant information which the organization applies in order to steer forward it´s strategy. This statement is also supported by Wharton management professor Martin Ihrig: “When you look at knowledge management [historically], there was a tendency to try to capture all the knowledge in an organization. First of all, this is not possible. It’s really hard to capture all the tacit experience and put it into a computer system. But even if it were possible, you’d suffer cognitive overload because it’s just too much. So what we propose is [to] really focus on the knowledge assets that are critical for success and underpin performance. Those critical knowledge assets should be mapped so that the management can decide how to further develop [them] to create growth and competitive advantage”

From the above we can declare that knowledge management deals with the identification and development of critical knowledge. This entails nurturing a knowledge driven culture as people are at the center of the strategy.  Although technology is becoming more relevant in terms of connectivy, co-creation and collaboration (also known as the three C´s thrusting forward the new generation of knowledge management), we need to bear in mind that technology is not the core solution. As I mentioned in a recent post (Knowledge Management and the Sharepoint Era),  Knowledge management effectiveness won´t be measured for the quality of the platform; it will be measured by how much it has impacted in the organization´s results. You need to design the strategy, carried to the point of identifying and developing the organization´s critical and strategic knowledge. This goal requires creativity, deals with complex issues and requires coordination among many functions in the organization.

© Jose Carlos Tenorio Favero