I am coming back to a popular and dear topic to many here: e-mail vs. conversations (I’ll use ‘conversations’ loosely, to refer to ‘enterprise social’ platforms in general). The discussion that seems to occur most often in my own experience, is regarding the “WHAT” (e-mail or ‘social’ tools) but not nearly as often on the “WHEN”, "HOW", or even more importantly in my opinion: the “WHY”.

If your team is currently debating over whether to use e-mail, or a social tool like Yammer or Groups in Outlook (available to Office 365 users), my advice is to first think through and discuss at least the following:

• What is the Business Problem you are trying to solve?   Or, what are your objectives?
• What is your Strategy for meeting these objectives?
• What Tactics will you use, to implement your strategy?

Let's go with a not to un-common example I think, to illustrate why it is so key to start with these essentials, before jumping into the tools side of things.

1. Business Problem:  Due to current market pressures, you need to cut costs but your team is already very streamlined and processes are standardized and largely automated. There is little room for further cuts, or any remaining cuts having much impact other than temporary relief. Hence you decide to maintain costs as much as possible, while instead increasing productivity. You know that there are inefficiencies around e.g. decision making and problem solving between and within your teams, so you decide to focus on the organisational structure. 
2. Strategy:  The current organisational structure is hierarchical: decisions are made at the top (the Executives), routed there by middle management that does nothing more than enforce policies and routing decisions up and down the chain. At the bottom of this pyramid, you have the teams who are supposedly the subject matter experts but they are not empowered to make decisions, only to implement them. You decide as your strategy, to eliminate unnecessary lead time through in-efficient decision making, by flattening the organisation and empowering the experts (possibly those are the people facing your customers on a daily basis too), retrain middle management to support and develop their teams instead of routing decisions and giving orders. The executives will still make the strategic or critical decisions, but they will now make more educated decisions, as they will base them on input and advise from the experts.
3. Tactics:  This is where you build your Communications, Training, Incentive plans etc. You are implementing a major change, that impacts every single person in your organisation and you need to make the change happen together with them, not make the change for them (or even worse: do it to them!). Unless you have trained Change Management Professionals in-house, my recommendation really would be to train and certify some key staff members, or in-source an Adoption Change Management service. Change is not achieved by making the decision, informing your teams and forcing a new tool or rule book onto them.

Have you noticed? I still haven’t talked about implementing a single tool yet!

After you start driving the change within your organisation and people start to adopt to the new requirements and opportunities, you may realise that to enable your now empowered teams, you need better communications and ways for your teams to co-operate within and across teams. You may also find that people need better and quicker access to information and new ways to share their knowledge, to be able to make decisions on the front lines. You now need to develop a Collaboration Strategy and a plan for how to implement it. At some point one of your tactics will surely be, to find the knowledge collaboration (Knowledge Management; KM) solution that meets your needs, and best supports the knowledge sharing and collaborative team culture you have evolved.

So what is my key take away here? What is the point that I am trying to make? A simple Pareto analysis, based on my own experiences of driving adoption change management in the KM and Collaboration space for almost 3 years now, and the learnings my team has made, which says: it is 80% about people and process (culture); and only 20% about the tools or technology.

Learn more about how we work with Knowledge Management internally, in Microsoft Enterprise Services, from this brief customer success story: Microsoft Services Reimagines Knowledge Collaboration with Cloud-Based Platform (Campus). It also emphasizes the importance of leading this as a people- and culture initiative first and foremost, following with the solution. We have presented our own learnings at several international KM conferences, and shared and exchanged knowledge, with many of our global customers already. And all seem to agree: it’s 80% people & culture – the rest is technology.

PLEASE NOTE:  1)  The views and opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer; 2)  The Business example is freely based off of the story about how "flattening the pyramids" was Jan Carlzon's key strategy, to turning SAS (Scandinavian Airlines System) around in the early 1980's. He shares his story in Moments of Truth (Riv Pyramiderna!). I just re-read it and guess what... It still applies, just in a different dimension.  Thank you for inspiring a few generations of leaders, and aspiring leaders, by now @Jan Carlzon!

We now want the same digital experience and service levels at work as we get in our personal life

The world of work is undergoing significant change. Worker expectations have shifted in so many ways. Employees want to use their own devices and applications to get their work done. They expect to have their views and ideas aired and to get rapid feedback. Access to information and to decision makers is often more important than financial remuneration. Transparency and Collaboration are the new corporate mantras.

Why has all of this happened so suddenly? Is it the rise of the so called millennials? Or is there something more widespread at play here?

The clue to understanding this profound shift in workers and the workplace lies not inside the organisation but rather what is happening outside company life.

Start with yourself. Examine the way you manage your life today and the service levels you expect:

• You want to find information from your local council or give instruction to your doctor’s surgery. You go online and within seconds you are able to execute on those needs.
• You want to move money from A to B, you cut through any bureaucracy and complete the transaction quickly, silently and often on the move.
• You want to research a holiday but avoid the sales and marketing machine of the provider. So you go to a site like Trip Advisor where you can compare notes with ‘people like me’. Trusted sources obtained for free and on demand.
• You want to solve a problem or plan for a situation that pertains to both your private and organisational life - e.g. travel updates and bookings, weather checks in multiple locations, route planning, dining arrangements, car hire - all of these actions you now source an application for and execute from your smart phone.  

Now at work you become frustrated with the relative poverty of the communication tools at your disposal. You want to collaborate with a group of co-workers to get a project or task completed efficiently. You know how to do this in your private life – e.g. you have a Facebook group for local child care sharing or what’s app group for organising football training. So you explore collaborative technologies for the workplace and find that there are indeed similar tools available that are focused on your work needs and objectives.

In this world of self-service, the idea that the IT department (or any other department) can continue to prohibit employees from using collaborative tools of their choice to get work done is both impractical and ultimately self-harming.

Workers now demand the same digital experience and service levels at work as they get in their personal lives.

And this is where we arrive at what is known as the Social Knowledge Management imperative. If disparate group of employees go off and start collaborating on a self-service basis then they are in a sense destroying the very thing they are seeking to remedy. Several collaborating groups with no obvious visibility of each other are in fact creating new organisational silos. Valuable company knowledge and learning opportunities which were once (or are currently) locked away in hard to access folder structures are now trapped in multiple uncoordinated collaboration groups. This situation will not work and someone (and their team) has to take responsibility to get this right.

Providing a well-thought-out space for company collaboration, a digital place that accommodates rising employee expectation and marries with organisational objectives is not something that can ever happen of its own accord. Social KM managers (and their team) have to act as custodians of Collaboration Culture. They have to plan, plant and nurture the Company ‘collaborative garden’ with tremendous attention to detail, to both business and individual needs and they have to do this over a long term.

Rooven Pakkiri will be covering these topics in his Social KM course February 22-23, 2016 - London, UK.  Course details posted soon.  Contact KMI for details.

The course is aimed at anyone in organizational management or leadership who is trying to figure out how to meet worker expectation or executive directive for increased transparency and collaboration in a business context. Throughout the 2 days the course moves continuously between theory and hands-on practice as participants get to experiment with collaborative technology in a safe and bespoke business focused arena.  (NB: a Wi-Fi enable laptop is essential for this course)

 . . . 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.

We are now operating in a world where the commoditisation of IT is fast becoming a reality for the current workforce. And it will be totally non-negotiable for the future workforce. BYOD is rapidly becoming BYOA. In this brave new world of Internet 3.0, the playing field has shifted - company size and history is less important than responsiveness and agility. The now legendary story of Blockbuster's rejection of the Netflix offer to form a partnership is instructive. The way in which talent finds its desired company and the terms on which it wants to engage are evolving rapidly. Going forward the single greatest differentiator for a company will be its ability to consistently leverage the talent and knowledge of its workforce to the maximum. Companies who are bound by tradition and hierarchy will struggle to compete and many household brands will become obsolete.

In this presentation, Rooven discusses this shift and talks about how he is helping clients to transform the way they engage and empower their workforce with digital strategies based on ‘Social Learning’, ‘Talent Insights’ and 'Decision Sourcing'.

Icon uk 2015 from Rooven Pakkiri

Join KMI and Rooven Pakkiri in London for a 2-Day Course on "Social KM"

February 22-23, 2016

Click Here for details!

What You Will Learn

This hands on course will enable you to:

• Understand the implications that social KM has on your organization
• Examine collaboration tools – blogs, wikis and forums to determine effective collaboration platforms for your own community of practice
• Drive the role of the community manager to gain and sustain user adoption
• Develop a strategy to create and manage your own community platform 

Let’s begin by determining the difference between a KM Program and a KM Project. In many of my Knowledge Management (KM) engagements, organizations look to initiate KM through a specific initiative or project. Once that project is concluded many of these organizations believe that their KM involvement is done and they move on to the next initiative. In order to have a sustainable KM presence at an organization we must move from the tactical approach of a KM project to that of a strategic approach of a KM Program. In order to accomplish this a Knowledge Management Strategy has to be developed.

To increase the opportunity for success, the KM Strategy must be positioned at the Program Level and this strategy will drive specific initiatives that align with the mission and objectives of the KM Program. The KM Strategy includes formal procedures to collect knowledge throughout the organization, a well-established infrastructure, networks for transferring knowledge between employees, and tools to facilitate the process. The KM Strategy will lay the foundation to align specific tools/technology to enhance individual and organizational performance. This is accomplished by incorporating the following three (3) components into the fabric of an organization’s environment:

• People, those who create, organize, apply, and transfer knowledge; and the leaders who act on that knowledge
• Processes, methods of creating, organizing, applying and transferring knowledge
• Technology, information systems used to put knowledge products and services into organized frameworks

According to an April, 2013 article by Robert Simmons a principal within Forsythe’s IT operations management practice on implementing a Knowledge Management Program, he points out eight specific steps as follows:

Step 1: Establish Knowledge Management Program Objectives

Simmons points out that articulating the end state is important to establishing the appropriate program objectives, identifying the business problems and the business drivers that will provide momentum and justification for the endeavor (Simmons, 2013).

Step 2: Prepare for Change

Simmons indicates that a major component of establishing a KM Program is to execute change management. The change management strategy will address the cultural changes that need to take place on how employees perceive and share knowledge, as well as addressing the changes within the organization’s norms and shared values that need to take place. A change management strategy will establish an approach for managing cultural change and produce a knowledge-sharing, knowledge-driven culture end state of the KM Program (Simmons, 2013).

Step 3: Define High-Level Process

To facilitate the identification, capture, cataloging, use and maintenance of the corporation’s knowledge assets, effective KM processes need to be established (Simmons, 2013).

Step 4: Determine and Prioritize Technology Needs

Simmons indicates that depending on the program objectives that have been established as well as the process controls and criteria that have been defined, a prioritization of the knowledge management technology needs can occur (Simmons, 2013). It is important to understand how the knowledge Management technology will address the knowledge processing and cultural knowledge needs of the organization as well as how the KM solution will be adopted by its users.

Step 5: Assess Current State

Assessing the current state of knowledge management within your organization should focus on the five core knowledge management components: people, processes, technology, structure, and culture (Simmons, 2013). This assessment according to Simmons should uncover the gaps between current and desired states, and the recommendations for addressing/closing these gaps. This assessment will become the foundation for the KM Roadmap (Simmons, 2013).

Step 6: Build a Knowledge Management Implementation Roadmap

Simmons stresses that “before going too far, you should re-confirm senior leadership's support and commitment, as well as the funding to implement and maintain the knowledge management program” (Simmons, 2013). This is crucial to the development and execution of the program.

The KM Program Strategy should be presented as a “roadmap of related projects, each addressing specific gaps identified by the assessment” (Simmons, 2013). The roadmap will indicate timelines, milestones as well as dependencies. The roadmap should indicate the initiation of specific projects to execute the KM Program Strategy.

Step 7: Implementation

Implementing a knowledge management program and maturing the overall effectiveness of your organization can require significant personnel resources and funding. Implementation of the KM Program will involve the execution of the roadmap, insuring that short term goals and wins are realized to gain momentum and maintain the support of key stakeholders (Simmons, 2013).

Step 8: Measure and Improve the Knowledge Management Program

In order to understand if your organization’s KM Program and its associated initiatives (projects) are effective, establishing the appropriate metrics/measurements are necessary. These metrics must be utilized in a way to measure the actual effectiveness and comparing that to anticipated results (Simmons, 2013).

The failure rates for knowledge management initiatives are at 50% (Frost, 2014). Knowing this we must determine, what is the cause and effect? Is it because of lack of senior leadership/support? Is a cultural issue? Or much more? I believe the reason why knowledge management initiatives fail are varied and it stems from the key indicators listed below.

In examining why KM Programs/Projects fail, besides the lack of a KM strategy other key indicators include:

• Lack of Executive Leadership/Sponsorship
• Inadequate Budgeting and Cost Expectations
• Lack of participation from all levels of a corporation
• Inadequate processes and technology
• Lack of Knowledge and Resources
• Lack of education and understanding of KM
• KM does not become ingrained into the corporations work culture
• Lack of a Knowledge Sharing Environment
• Lack of metrics to measure the impact of KM on the corporation or insufficient/incorrect metrics being captured
• Lack of monitoring and controls in place to ensure the knowledge is relevant and is current and accurate

The organization must view knowledge management more than just a function of the call center or a cost of doing business. KM is a method of enhancing the collective know-how of the organization, improving productivity, and enhancing overall organizational value. KM will improve efficiencies that will increase a corporations’ profitability, enhances the quality of work, performance, and overall value of the corporation. KM allows tacit knowledge to be leveraged, transferred to increase the quality of work performed across the corporation. This tacit knowledge allows KM to eliminate the “reinvent the wheel” syndrome. This transfer of knowledge is a core value of knowledge management.

Lack of Executive Leadership/Sponsorship

Successful KM initiatives depend greatly on management backing and has been documented and proven over many years of implementing KM initiatives (Davenport, De Long, and Beer, 1998; Chong and Choi, 2005; Wu et al, 2010). In contrast, failure of KM initiatives have been a consequence of inadequate management support (Singh and Kant, 2008; Weber, 2007; Pettersson, 2009).

Developing and operationalizing a KM strategy and subsequent program involves the creation, acceptance, and adoption of processes, values, and systems that are either company-wide or in the very least span across functions, departments, and communities. The implementation and long term success of such far reaching changes require top and central management backing, both from the perspective of resource and political support but also to ensure day-to-day acceptance and use of knowledge management.

Sustained management support in particular senior leadership support is necessary for continued KM success because of the following factors:

• KM requires strong guidance, decision-making, and change implementation
• KM efforts require a clear vision and the example set by management, as well as implementing policies that serve as a way to legitimize KM and highlight its importance in the organization
• In order to prevent lack of enforcement of responsibilities and lack central management responsibility
• Failure can occur due to a lack of leadership support in the organization
• When KM is used as a political instrument to gain influence and leverage within an organization
• To incentivize the use of KM a standard for rewarding that enforce appropriate behavior need to be set by management. The extent to which this is useful should be discussed among leadership.
• Management must provide the resources necessary for KM implementation. KM requires a great deal of financial, human, and material resources; this includes the assignment of competent professionals and a sufficient budget.
• Management must stem the lack of understanding of the benefits, complexity and requirements of KM by instituting an awareness campaign that includes but is not limited to lunch-n-learn briefings, KM training both instructor lead and online, and the ability to attend and participate in KM conferences.
• Management needs to ability to present ROI. The need for solid performance indicators is extremely important for management to continue investing in KM.
• KM must not be just another task to do, it should be a part of what is done by everyone in the organization. It must become part of the corporate DNA to have longevity and lasting success.

Without the enforcement of managerial responsibilities, an organization may end up with no control of the shared or reused knowledge. Management can mitigate this through the creation of the Knowledge Manger, KM liaison and KM Champion roles within the organization. These roles will be an extension of management and will facilitate the distribution of managerial responsibilities of KM and increases the level of KM acumen and at all levels of the organization.

- excerpted from Dr. Rhem's book, Knowledge Management in Practice, due out at the end of the year.