The secret to edging out the competition is discovering where your organisation’s knowledge lies, and managing it effectively.
The wheel was invented long ago—and so were most of your company’s business practices.
Why, then, do so many employees spend so much of their time working out how to do things that have already been adequately accomplished in the past? In most cases, a chronic inability to share knowledge is to blame. And despite years of progress, most organisations have made only a little progress improving their knowledge sharing.
That’s a major problem, considering the oft-quoted maxim that most of an organisation’s knowledge is contained not on paper, but within the minds of its workers. Although it’s hard and perhaps meaningless to put numbers on this phenomenon, consulting company Delphi Group nonetheless did just that in a survey that revealed 42 percent of corporate knowledge was unmanaged—in other words, within employees’ heads—while the rest was spread across paper and electronic repositories.
Other estimates place this figure as high as 80 percent. Yet no matter how high the percentage is within your company, odds are that it’s too high. This is simply because knowledge that’s only available to one person, only benefits that one person. And if that person leaves the company, his or her knowledge benefits your competitors.
This places significant pressure on companies to both provide a way to extract that information into a manageable, reproducible form, and also to introduce incentives to keep those workers from leaving the company. The answer to the second challenge relies on a host of human resource related factors, but meeting the first challenge has in recent years become a focus of obsession for IT vendors, consulting companies, and many of their customers.
Define it first, manage it later
One of the major obstacles to better knowledge management (KM) lies in defining just what knowledge is. Does “knowledge” refer only to what’s in employees heads—in other words, the practices and procedures that contribute to an overall business process—or does it also involve reams of paper documents, painstakingly filed away in cabinets somewhere? Are electronic documents also knowledge? What about phone calls, voicemails, instant messaging (IM) conversations, or casual chats at the water cooler?
Longtime reliance on paper documents has made it relatively easy to collect all manner of momentary knowledge in huge collections of information. Yet finding and utilising meaningful elements within this information is difficult and time consuming. And while the easy searchability of electronic records makes them a desirable target for archiving knowledge, it’s not always clear how to best move often intangible information from analogue to digital form.
The digital design of newer communications methods—for example, IM, e-mail, and unified messaging—makes them intrinsically easy to incorporate into a knowledge store. Yet this ease of access is a double-edged sword: it takes mountains of storage space to archive all this information, commensurately increasing the cost and complexity of information retrieval.
And, let’s face it: do you really need to archive every e-mail your employees ever send and receive? Sorting the wheat from the chaff could mean more lost time and productivity than doing things manually. Don’t be afraid to settle for less than a 100 percent solution. “Information doesn’t really become knowledge until you use it in a meaningful way,” says Zohdy Rateb, financial and professional services industry marketing manager with Fuji Xerox, who sees effective KM as “information in action”.
“It doesn’t exist until you choose for it to exist, and you’re collecting all this information in your data warehouse and trying to be everything for everybody. But you don’t know what you know until you decide what you want to know about it; if companies [decided to collect] 80 percent of their information for the business, they would probably get a better ROI.”
The KM equation balances up differently for different companies. In a construction business, a valuable piece of knowledge might come from an employee who figures out how to better adhere wall panels to a building frame, while a panel beater might value a better method of blending automobile paint.
Consulting companies have been early and ardent supporters of KM—not only because they can show customers their money is where their mouth is, but because it helps them improve overall quality and extend consultants’ access to subject matter experts around the globe. Yet knowledge doesn’t have to be so potentially world-altering, points out Bridget Williams, knowledge manager for IT within the IT@AMP business unit of financial services giant AMP. While charting IT@AMP’s knowledge management strategy (see sidebar on page 36), Williams says the company asked itself some hard questions about just what constitutes knowledge.
“If you’re not careful, there are some people you can have a conversation with and get dragged into a philosophical discussion,” she explains, citing an exchange that arose when one worker questioned whether the system should include such basic information as the location of the company’s colour printers.
“If you’re working on the ninth floor and need to print a presentation but your local colour printer is down, knowing where there’s another one is everything,” Williams explains. “Knowledge is anything you want it to be.”
As with so many enterprise strategies, KM is about the business first and technology last. Whatever your goals, effectively plotting the right KM strategy first requires careful examination of your company’s business processes. Take careful inventory of the points where knowledge enters your organisation, the repeatable processes where that knowledge might be useful down the road, and the obstacles that hinder the dissemination of crucial knowledge throughout the organisation.
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