I’ve been in the business of Knowledge Management Consulting for the vast majority of my career and, in my experience, one of the most challenging aspects to KM is its intangibility. I’ve helped an array of organizations to define their KM Success Metrics and KM Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in order to make KM measurable and tie it to business value and hard return on investment. In these cases, though, many of these KM KPIs are only measurable over years and often have a stronger demonstration of value to the organization rather than the individual. 

Since good KM is integrated into the business, enterprise KM programs are often largely invisible when they work, and only visible when they’re causing the end user “pain.” For example, a seamless tacit knowledge capture program feels like natural conversation, whereas a badly designed program will feel forced and overtly time-consuming. A natural content governance plan will be integrated into the enterprise and simply feel like how business is done, whereas a poorly designed governance plan will slow down work and create barriers to sharing and connecting.

As a result, KM runs the risk of not being “felt” by the average end user in a way that inspires engagement and support. Though a KM effort may be meeting long-term organizational goals, it nonetheless runs the risk of a decreased focus or dwindling support over time if the individual business stakeholder doesn’t feel the benefit of it.

One key area where the individual, as well as the business, can experience meaningful value from KM on a daily basis is through enterprise search. Though I’m not suggesting a technology is necessary for all aspects of KM, the reality is that for large organizations, a great deal of KM will be enabled through supporting technologies. A well-designed, implemented, and governed enterprise search is one of the key systems where KM becomes real for the average end user.

Several exciting things are happening within the enterprise search world at this point:

• Enterprise search tools are increasingly able to index both structured and unstructured information, creating greater linkages between different types of knowledge and information.
• It is becoming easier to design more creative user interfaces within search that better reflect the needs of the end user and the actions they want to take.
• Once advanced features, like type-aheads and faceting, are now readily available.

In order to really make enterprise search work, foundational KM activities are still critical. For instance:

• Content Audits and Cleanup – Content has to be cleaned up and enhanced with tags to ensure the right content appears in search and is weighted appropriately. Content cleanup alone is time-consuming and dry, but linking it to a search effort shines a critical light on why it is important. Without a content cleanup, search will end up being “garbage in, garbage out” no matter how slick it is.
• Taxonomy Design and Tagging – Taxonomies have to be designed and applied to key content repositories as well as integrated into the search design to ensure faceting works and different types of content from different sources can be seamlessly integrated. Taxonomy by itself can be esoteric and easily set aside, but when its value surfaces as faceted navigation, it becomes a critical tool for findability and discoverability.
• Content Types – Content Types continue to be one of the more misunderstood elements of a KM architecture, despite our efforts to make them more approachable. Content Types can serve as templates, guide workflows and security, and inform tagging. When designed correctly, they can also translate into search hit types. That said, they tend to be relatively confusing until seen in action.
• Tacit Knowledge Capture – Almost every organization with whom we’ve worked agrees Tacit Knowledge Capture is critical to ensuring expertise isn’t lost as employees leave and new employees are up-scaled faster and more effectively. Good Tacit Knowledge Capture can take a broad array of forms, from traditional mentor/mentee pairings, to email capture tools, to communities of practice (both live and virtual). Though there can be substantial visibility for a great deal of these mechanisms, their full value isn’t felt just in their existence. Tacit Knowledge Capture really only pays off when individuals can find and engage with the captured knowledge. Search can play a key role here, and can also allow for the integration of a range of result types in a manner that allows the end user to find the “official” published answer as well as related “social” answers from experts (as well as, potentially, the experts themselves).
• Knowledge Sharing Culture – Developing a strong culture of knowledge sharing is one of the foundational activities we seek to implement in the early stages of any KM engagement. Specific activities for this venture vary greatly amongst organizations and depend on from where they’re starting. Approaches may range from a simple commitment from leadership, to the establishment of a KM Leadership group, and to more advanced gamification and analytics efforts. At the end of the day, however, nothing shines a light on good knowledge sharing behavior like something that will surface that newly shared knowledge in a form that is easy to find and discover.
• Governance – Governance, specifically content governance, is another building block and truly foundational activity for enterprise knowledge management efforts. Like a culture of knowledge sharing, nothing helps to show the importance of governance as much as a search initiative that shows what happens in very real terms when people DON’T follow it. Content governance will get a huge boost in importance as soon as it’s easier to find and expose content.

Each of these pieces alone is an important part of a comprehensive KM strategy. Together, they make up many of the core KM foundations I seek to put on KM Roadmaps for my clients. Integrating a search pilot into that roadmap ensures the hard work that will go into the aforementioned efforts, as well as the overall KM transformation, will be seen, and made clickable, for your end users.

For this first in a series of videos about knowledge management, creativity, and innovation Stephanie Barnes (www.realisation-of-potential.com) is interviewed by John Girard (www.johngirard.net) and shares her thoughts knowledge management’s challenges and the possible role creative leadership plays in creating a culture that supports organisational learning.

Click anywhere on Video image to launch.  A new window will open on YouTube.

I find that quite often when we say Knowledge Management, we actually mean Content Management or other aspects of explicit knowledge. That is a logical starting point for most of us, for historical reasons but also because it is the easier of the two knowledge dimensions to quantify and measure both progress and business impact.

But what about our tacit Knowledge Assets? This is the collective knowledge comprised by different personalities, experiences (past and present, personal and professional) and passions, that is the main intellectual capital for any knowledge worker organization. Are we leveraging tacit knowledge in a way that drives our business forward? And are we able to effectively combine and balance the needs and desires for tacit vs. explicit – including return on investment (ROI), cost of creation, harvesting and curation? Is tacit knowledge the secret sauce that can help us maximise investments made on the explicit side?

I believe that we can and should. But before designing a solution or planning the next tacit KM initiative, it may be worth spending some time thinking through your tacit knowledge needs, how existing tacit knowledge is shared, collaboration forums etc., because most likely there are several initiatives already existing (likely in pockets) that you can build on:

1. What constitutes tacit knowledge in your company and what is its value to your business?

2. How and where does tacit knowledge sharing happen today: Is it informal or formal knowledge sharing and are there ways we can standardise to drive synergies?

3. How can you capitalise on tacit knowledge and demonstrate clear business value?

What do we mean by Tacit Knowledge?

For the sake of simplicity, I am using a broad definition of Tacit Knowledge: “any skills, experiences and expertise that exists in our people’s heads”.

For a professional services organisation like my own or any knowledge worker organisation, this is core intellectual capital. It is important to create environments where people can share experiences and have conversations about common interests, central to innovation. The key is to support the tacit knowledge exchange in a way that makes the knowledge accessible for others at a later point in time, to capitalise on it at scale, without stifling creativity.

How and where does Tacit Knowledge sharing happen in your organisation?

Most of us subscribe to the thinking that diverse teams are more creative, innovative and productive, and we strive to foster collaborative environments that can enable those teams to achieve more, by leveraging both explicit and tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge sharing can take many forms–from experiences and expertise shared in meetings and projects, collaboration platforms (formal as well as informal ones), Communities of Practice, Expertise Location Services, to new hire buddy-systems and peer mentoring.

It’s a good idea to start by identifying any such formal and informal occurrences before making plans to extend or attempt to merge to a common platform. It is likely to find informal forums with more engagement than formal ones.

Once these tacit knowledge sharing pockets have been identified, it is worth looking at the success and user adoption of them, to understand why some are more popular or more effective than others. This is especially valuable when looking at KM solutions. It’s very easy to jump on the social collaboration bandwagon and think that a new collaboration platform will magically solve all problems and be immediately adopted. This is highly unlikely as the “Build it and they will come” approach rarely works, in KM, or elsewhere!

The main challenge then becomes how to standardise and align where collaboration, or other forms of tacit knowledge sharing happens, so that it can be harvested for re-use and/or become available for broader consumption. We need to be careful here, that the organisation’s need for reporting and measuring impact or value, does not take priority over usability and impacts adoption.

How can you measure the value of Tacit Knowledge?

We tend to assume that if we can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist, or has little value to the company. So how can we measure the monetary value of peer-to-peer interactions and capturing knowledge currently not documented? It may be valuable to consider at least these two aspects of “value” dimensions:

Activity metrics–designed to show and drive behavioural change and encourage or incentivise knowledge sharing and collaboration. Metrics can be very effective in driving behaviour, but we need to be careful to drive the right behaviour for the right reason, so that it doesn’t become a tick-box exercise.

Value metrics– with intent to monetary impact, which is always hard when trying to show $ value of intangible assets, like productivity or efficiency. It’s important to acknowledge this and consider indirect metrics (correlations) between knowledge sharing and business results.

In summary, tacit knowledge is as important, and sometimes more so, than explicit knowledge and you need to look at both when planning a KM initiative. Sharing and usage of tacit knowledge can be a differentiator for your business, as a foundation for innovation and collaboration, driving revenue, efficiencies and employee satisfaction. All of which can’t necessarily be directly translated into monetary value but are nonetheless contributing to business objectives.

Law firms, like other professional services, are constantly looking to improve our knowledge-management strategies, i.e., to share and reuse valuable work product and leverage institutional knowledge. When properly executed, these programs translate into efficiency, higher quality work, happier clients, and more engaged employees.

"The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple."

White & Case, a global law firm with 41 offices in 29 countries, set out to do exactly this in 2014 when it decided to invest in its intranet as a key knowledge tool for the firm. It took more than two years of research, design and development but the Knowledge team produced an award-winning product that supports 5,000 lawyers and staff and gives White & Case a platform to continue innovating.

There were several factors critical to success.

Homepage of the new White & Case intranet

Knowledge Reputation

When taking on a high-risk project, it helps to have a reputation as an innovative department. The Knowledge Department was formed in 2008 to help collect, organize and connect people to the firm’s collective knowledge. By the time the intranet project came about, Knowledge had pioneered expanding a successful professional-support-lawyer function and instituted an enterprise search tool for the firm. Through the success of these programs, the department had built strong relationships with lawyer allies and become known for driving change.

Leadership Buy-In

The old intranet was known for being inflexible and difficult to navigate, which created big challenges but also opportunities. The project was not an intranet upgrade but a complete revitalization. Since this was a priority project, Chairman Hugh Verrier created a partner-led Steering Committee at the outset. This team of 10 partners and business leaders helped define a clear mandate: the new Connect had to win its audience back. It had to be trustworthy, reliable and intuitive—built around the user’s needs.

Broad Engagement

Early on, the Knowledge team realized the project also needed a broad group of colleagues to serve as a sounding board and test group for new ideas. The 400-person Sounding Community, a demographically representative group of White & Case colleagues, was established. At its inception, this community represented 10 percent of the firm and throughout the project answered surveys, gave feedback, and tested the product prior to launch. The project team made a point of following up after an outreach to let the full group know the results, which made for a more powerful engagement.

The Sounding Community used interactive software to conduct usability tests like this. 

By the time the new intranet launched, the Knowledge team had ready ambassadors in most local offices. Each member of the Sounding Community was given a branded mug, to visibly note that they were part of the intranet team. Their involvement made a global project resonate on a local level. 

Quality Product

None of the change-management processes would have made a difference if the new intranet did not deliver. With the strong partnership of the Steering Committee, Sounding Community and Knowledge team, the firm were able to produce a new intranet that was fast, easy to navigate, integrated with key firm systems, and mobile-friendly. It delivered on the Steering Committee’s vision. Shortly after launch, a survey of end users found a 97 percent satisfaction rate, as opposed to 53 percent with the old system.

One of the best innovations from the new intranet was an improved search experience.

The Knowledge team took an incredibly complex backend product—one that searches a content-management system, matter-profiling system, client database, HR database and lawyer bios—and made the experience feel simple.

Whereas the enterprise search had been siloed from the old intranet—and built largely for advanced searchers—on the new intranet the Knowledge team simplified the point of entry into a single search bar for both intranet and enterprise search and kept users within the frame of the intranet when viewing results.

In addition, the team knew from interviews that many users preferred to search for intranet content rather than browse for it. In order to accommodate this, the search bar was built to serve as a navigation tool; after three keystrokes, it fills in the names of colleagues, sites and global tools as recommended results. 

Search bar showing predictive typing, and recommended results for sites and people.

Summary

White & Case was able to successfully bring the firm back to a new intranet, and begin using it as a valuable knowledge-management tool, by prioritizing the project at the highest levels and having a plan for broader engagement across the global platform. Now the challenge is to keep growing the product to help move the firm into a truly digital workspace. 

What is KM about?

It depends on who you ask and what their experience is with it. Some people/organisations focus on technology, some on people, some on process, a very few recognise that it needs to be a balance among the three, and for good measure also create a strategy to support their plans and ideas and to ensure alignment with the organisation.

But beyond that, what is knowledge management about? Why do we/our organisations do it? 

For many organisations and people the answer, has to do with learning, and being able to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. I always liked to say it’s about giving people the knowledge they need to do their jobs, whatever form that knowledge took. But, what if it’s not quite that easy, especially as jobs, like life, are becoming ever more complex?

It’s really not enough to give people a database or app or platform to share knowledge. It’s not enough to implement a lessons learned process, or communities of practice. All good and noble pursuits, but what if that’s not enough to deal with the complexity?

The World Economic Forum’s most recent Future of Jobs Report, a summary of which you can read here, says we need to be life long learners. It also lists the top 3 skills that are growing in need/importance:

1. Analytical thinking, and innovation
2. Active learning, and learning strategies
3. Creativity, originality, and initiative

What struck me most about the #1 item on that list, is that is is both analytical and creative, it requires “both sides of your brain” (yes, I know that we have found that that’s not physically how the brain actually works, but I like the metaphor of it, so I’m using it anyway). But so for so many people their creativity was educated and socialised right out of them. They needed to get good marks in school, do well at their jobs, etc. and so in order to fit in they learned to regurgitate facts and think like everyone else.

However, in today’s world, and in the world that is quickly coming at us, regurgitating facts and doing what we’re told, isn’t enough, doing the “same old, same old” isn’t enough. It’s time to look at things differently, to learn new ways of doing things, to re-learn our lost creativity. KM programs should be supporting that, after-all they are about organisational learning, creating new knowledge (which is innovation, by the way).

And, one of the best things about focusing on creativity and innovation is, people understand what those terms mean, no one understands what knowledge management is. Another great thing about creativity and innovation, is that there is lots of research that supports its importance to people and the workplace, something that can’t be said about KM (mostly because KM can’t decide what it is, not that it’s not useful).

So, for all you KM people out there, don’t you want to take your KM activities to the next level of organisational learning? Help make your organisations innovative and creative? Help them meet the challenges of the age we live in?

Let’s talk about helping people re-learn their creativity!

Note: this was originally posted at https://www.realisation-of-potential.com/creativity/taking-your-km-program-to-the-next-level/