After nearly twenty years of Knowledge Management Consulting, I’ve developed core themes to what I believe comprises good KM. EK’s definition of KM embodies many of these themes:

“Knowledge Management involves the people, culture, content, processes, and enabling technologies necessary to Capture, Manage, Share, and Find information.”

We supplement this with our KM Action Wheel. The wheel represents the many uses of KM:  

• Creation of knowledge and information; [KM Action Wheel]
• Capture of knowledge and information (from tacit to explicit, and/or into KM systems);
• Management of knowledge and information, often using an array of technologies including knowledge bases, intranets, content management, document management, and records management;
• Enhancement of knowledge and information, making it better over time through increased collaboration, adding tags to improve its findability, and linking it to other knowledge and information to tell a more complete story;
• Ensuring that the appropriate knowledge and information is findable by the right people in intuitive ways, maximizing its use and reuse; and
• Connecting, creating links between knowledge and information, between the holders of knowledge (your experts), and between your various repositories, resulting in a web of enterprise knowledge that builds on itself over time.

Most importantly, though, is the word ACT in the middle of the wheel. For us, effective KM doesn’t happen for the sake of KM, it happens to enable specific actions and results. All KM efforts should be grounded in a deep and clear understanding of the results you’re seeking and the actions you’re attempting to enable.

Unfortunately, KM as a concept continues to be sullied by overly academic viewpoints and an unfortunate association with projects that are all talk and big ideas, but are unacceptably short on results and practical thinking. A look at Google Trends expresses this unfortunate reality all too clearly, with a steadily declining interest in the term since 2004.

I, along with my colleagues at EK, have worked extensively to realize Practical KM that results in meaningful business value, supported by the best principles in Agile, IT, Information Management, and Change Management. All of this, integrated, is EK’s version of KM and we have the success stories to prove its effectiveness.

What I hope to see in 2017, and what we have been and will continue to work toward, is this concept of KM and ______. Our work will be to apply these concepts for our clients and continue to offer the latest thought leadership on them through our blogs and conferences.

KM and Business Value

The two concepts that I feel are most important to be intrinsically linked are KM and Business Value. KM initiatives have too often been seen as the “nice to have” when there’s budget leftover. Every KM project, big or small, should begin with a clear understanding the the KM Actions we are seeking to enable and the resulting value to the organization (ideally hard ROI) we anticipate achieving. At every turn, decision-making should go back to that core question, “Will this decision result in the business value we’re seeking?” If the answer is no, reassess and adjust.

KM and Information Management

I’ve written previously about my lack of interest in trying to draw a line between Knowledge and Information Management. These two concepts exist on the same spectrum, harnessing People, Processes, Content, Culture, and Technology to translate tacit knowledge, experience, and expertise into content that may be captured, managed, enhanced, and found by others. KM and IM (or KIM) belong together in most engagements where organizations are trying to get a handle on their knowledge assets or are concerned about losing knowledge, duplicating effort due to knowledge that wasn’t found, or wasting time looking or waiting for knowledge insteading of acting.

KM and Technology

There are those within the industry who wish to draw a hard line between Knowledge Management and IT within Knowledge Management Systems. I see technology as an enabling factor to effective KM. Using this broad definition, any number of Content/Document/Records Management products, knowledge bases, Learning Management Systems, Enterprise Search Tools, Taxonomy Management Tools, or Semantic Web Technologies fits within the box of KM Systems. This is not to say that simply installing SharePoint means you’re “doing” KM. On the contrary, an effective KMS requires a perfect merger of KM and IT best practices, ranging from knowledge sharing processes to content governance, KM culture change to KM systems adoption strategies, and KM content capture to IT systems migration.

KM and Agile

At EK, we’re firm believers in agile principles and have worked hard to promote these concepts and drive change and transformation for our customers. KM and agile are a natural fit for each other. KM efforts consistently benefit from maximized touch points with end users and stakeholders. They also require iterative progress in order to a) drive support and encourage adoption, b) demonstrate regular business value to ensure support and focus on action-oriented results, and c) ascertain whether we’re “getting it right” before going too far down a particular path. Since KM is so much about culture and adoption; getting your stakeholders to want to change is a critical success factor, and we think agile can help get you there.

KM and Measurable Results

Finally, as we define Agile KM road maps to help organizations realize their end user’s goals and maximize business value, it is critical that we’re able to measure our successes. This is important to ensure we’re reflecting on our progress and, as mentioned above, that we’re “getting it right.” Measurable results are something that we establish when we’re designing a road map so we can assess our progress iteratively throughout the effort. Measurable results need to be more than checkmarks in a project plan that say a particular deliverable has been completed. Instead, they must show the business impact of completing the action. They also play a great role in establishing “celebratable moments” that can be used to communicate the team’s successes and communicate progress to potential stakeholders.

Do you need help making KM and ______ a reality in your organization? EK is here to help.

Launching their knowledge management initiatives, organizations often resemble oil extraction companies. They start to drill their knowledge wells and rub their hands in anticipation of the upcoming boost to their business. However, knowledge management often turns to be even harder than real oil extraction from the entrails of the earth. That is, even with such a sustainable resource as knowledge, only few companies succeed in making a good use of it.

After finding the optimal ways to externalize and store their corporate knowledge, organizations often stop halfway forgetting how important it is to actively use it. This leads to negative consequences: provided with the access to all the necessary knowledge, both tacit and explicit, employees just don’t retrieve it and thus underperform. But what can be the reasons of such inertness?

Why knowledge lays idle

The problem of poor knowledge use can have two reasons: technological and organizational ones.

The technological reason points to defects in knowledge management tools themselves. Instead of stimulating knowledge use, they impede navigation across knowledge sources or don’t let employees reach out to knowledge owners. As a result, organizations get exposed to the following issues:

Explicit knowledge is hard to access. Badly structured, non-indexed, non-rated knowledge assets can be really annoying for employees. However, the case is pretty common. According to the TSIA survey The state of knowledge management 2015, 66% of respondents state that they don’t index their knowledge base, while 58% confirm they don’t index community content.

Tacit knowledge is underused. When a knowledge management system has no hands-on collaboration tools, employees lose the opportunity to exchange tacit knowledge. As a result, knowledge gets stuck in employees’ heads only and hardly crosses departmental borders. In this case, knowledge flows are very short, as knowledge is shared among limited groups of people.

Apart from technical issues, there can be organizational barriers. A corporate culture with poor knowledge use can bring up the following scenarios:

Knowledge use is optional. In the absence of official guidelines on knowledge use, employees perceive it as an unnecessary, futile procedure that only eats their working time. As a result, employees rely on their own knowledge exclusively, which makes working processes inconsistent and deficient.

There is no formal procedure for knowledge maintenance and update. Obviously, employees are interested in using up-to-date and relevant information, so as soon as they find their internal knowledge sources outdated and misleading, they won’t return to them anymore. There are 2 critical situations that can put knowledge use to a stop:

• Chaotic knowledge generation and storage. When managed chaotically, knowledge sources quickly become overloaded with information noise. Therefore, users have to spend a lot of time trying to sift out relevant information and, eventually, stop searching for it at all.
• Knowledge isn’t maintained and upgraded. If nobody controls how adequate knowledge is, it quickly becomes obsolete and useless. Surprisingly, the percentage of companies neglecting knowledge updates is pretty high. TSIA’s statistics shows that less than 50% of the surveyed companies regularly review their knowledge base content for accuracy, and 27% admit that knowledge hasn’t been updated for a very long time.

Stimulating knowledge use with technology

To increase knowledge use, companies can take a few feasible steps to adjust their knowledge management solutions or tools. Taking corrective actions, organizations can tailor software features to be knowledge use accelerators.

Convenient and pervasive search that will enable users to quickly find required information across all knowledge sources. For example, companies using SharePoint-based solutions can fine-tune the platform’s search capabilities to provide users with a direct way to knowledge located on different sites and site collections. Even a bigger advantage have the owners of SharePoint 2016 that allows an instant, hybrid search across different SharePoint environments, both on-premises and cloud.

Knowledge rating tools will allow classifying knowledge assets by their value and relevance. This will help users to get the most valuable knowledge ranked first in knowledge search results.

Automated workflows for knowledge updates will help knowledge owners to carry out knowledge reviews as soon as the relevancy of a knowledge asset expires. Such workflows will allow organizations to keep updated such important knowledge assets as market researches, internal policies, methodologies and more.

Collaboration tools for tacit knowledge exchange will facilitate dissemination of tacit knowledge among employees by allowing them to connect to knowledge owners regardless of their location. Companies that use SharePoint intranets can enhance knowledge use with the help of diverse built-in collaboration features, for example, knowledge discussion hubs, knowledge exchange and Q&As.

Fostering knowledge use on the organizational level

To improve knowledge use on the organizational level, companies should aim at intensifying cross-departmental knowledge exchange and make knowledge use an essential part of daily working processes. To reach this goal, companies can:

Provide employees with ready-to-go knowledge. Developing SharePoint-based knowledge management solutions, we at ScienceSoft advocate the push approach to knowledge dissemination that encourages companies to distribute available knowledge among employees with the help of:

• In-house trainings and courses aimed at showing available knowledge, introducing knowledge owners and bridging knowledge gaps. Trainings can be allocated in a corporate learning management system (LMS) that will be integrated with a knowledge management system so that employees’ new knowledge and competencies can be then fixed in a knowledge base and added to the knowledge map.
• Collaborative knowledge transfer that should stimulate more active knowledge flows throughout the company. To facilitate collaborative knowledge transfer, companies can focus on creating both formal and informal Communities of Practice (CoP) and provide them with the possibility to carry out knowledge exchange workshops supported with discussion forums and blogs.

Make knowledge use obligatory  

Corporate knowledge use should be considered as a critical factor in a company’s success. A high importance of knowledge use should be communicated to employees during their working process and supported with relevant internal policies. For example, a knowledge management policy can stipulate an obligatory use of available corporate knowledge in employees’ daily tasks. Moreover, a regular knowledge use can become an essential element of employees’ performance reviews. Therefore, employees not following the policy will be subject to penalties.

Bringing the accelerators together

Even clearly understanding the value of knowledge and having invested into knowledge management, many companies still don’t stimulate knowledge use. As a result, employees continue to ignore corporate knowledge and apply ineffective methods that impede their working process. Since the reasons for poor knowledge use can be technological and organizational, companies should take relevant measures to eliminate barriers at all levels.

Organizations that already put their efforts into developing knowledge management tools, can start with reviewing their current functionality and focus on features that would stimulate knowledge use (pervasive search, rating tools, automated workflows for knowledge updates, etc.). If corporate knowledge has barriers to its use on the organizational level, then companies should concentrate on creating a favorable knowledge environment where employees can freely reach out to both knowledge assets and knowledge owners.

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.

Taxonomy management typically follows a Library and Information Science paradigm. The taxonomist is a keeper of knowledge, who is responsible for updating and managing the “Source of Truth.” Each version of the taxonomy is published and subsequently distributed to separate systems to help perform specific functions.  Such change control processes are effective for ensuring stability and quality, but they can be a costly use of time and resources.  The costs are even more apparent when organizations analyze the opportunity costs associated with employing a slow process that may take months to implement.  Compare this to agile IT teams who are significantly cutting the length of time it takes to deploy system changes.  The fact is, taxonomists can reap many of the same benefits by adopting an agile approach:  properly scaled releases, quicker delivery, better engagement with user communities, more relevant search results, and reduced overhead.

Many agile practices that support continuous delivery in software development, like DevOps, are emerging as an approach to taxonomy maintenance. DevOps emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. With the alignment between taxonomy maintenance and systems, there are emerging possibilities for employing Continuous Delivery and DevOps strategies to greatly enhance the effectiveness of taxonomies throughout their lifecycle.   

Benefits of DevOps for Taxonomies

Software companies that embrace the agile approach of Continuous Delivery readily respond to change as they significantly increase the speed of delivery of applications and services.  The gains in efficiency and effectiveness are shown in all areas where development and operations are merged in an environment known as DevOps.  DevOps methods promote continuous delivery by rapidly moving software development (to include features, configuration, changes, and bug fixes) into production.  A DevOps environment is characterized by:

• Small cross-disciplinary teams
• Short iterative releases throughout the entire software lifecycle 
• Adaptability and resilience to change

A natural outgrowth of this movement toward efficiency is its spread to many other areas of business and operations.  Naturally, leaders in the field of information science are asking how they can streamline the maintenance of taxonomies in order to keep in step with continuously evolving information architecture.

In order for a taxonomy to stay relevant and adaptable to change, it is critical to engage stakeholders and subject matter experts through each iteration of its maintenance.  However, it is often difficult to enlist the valuable time of experts.  In a DevOps environment this challenge is addressed by promoting short term involvement on ad-hoc teams that come together in a few brief meetings to suggest, design, and validate new concepts and terms.  A  large active pool of participants in DevOps will yield the added benefit of ownership among a broad base of stakeholders and SMEs without incurring significant overhead.    

An Agile Approach to Maintaining Taxonomies

Traditional approaches to maintaining a taxonomy using a  governance plan are becoming outdated.  Taxonomies are a key element of software information architecture.  Like other areas of system architecture, taxonomies are barely noticed when they serve their purpose, but any lapse in quality compromises the integrity of the system and causes users to grow frustrated or lose confidence.  Therefore, taxonomies must be maintained with robust and frequent quality control monitoring.  To do so in the current dynamically changing environment, taxonomists must embrace new ways to optimize the design/development/release cycles for taxonomies to keep up with software’s rapid movement into production for feature releases, configuration, changes and bug fixes.   

A best practice for taxonomy maintenance is to employ simple guidelines for a build-measure-learn iterative process for governance.  A Taxonomy DevOps team is a small ad hoc group of subject matter experts with expertise relevant to the business use case for the taxonomy terms in question.  It is also a best practice to employ the use of tools that provide a common easy-to-use space for the team to make changes and test them prior to deployment.  Lastly, the review cycle should be truncated to meet the expectation of frequent releases.  In all cases stakeholders and technical members come together in the DevOps environment to assist with the rapid deployments.

5 Principles of Continuous Delivery for Taxonomy¹

Instead of prescribing procedures, taxonomy maintenance in a DevOps environment should apply the 5 Principles of Continuous Delivery in order for it to meet its goals.

1. Everyone is Responsible 

A taxonomy must be like the lexicon it captures: adaptable to change and reflective of the business. Stakeholders and Subject Matter Experts must be empowered to suggest, edit, and validate a subset of the concepts that are represented in the taxonomy. In instances where taxonomies serve the purpose of unifying an enterprise, these stakeholders and SMEs need to work across lines of business to make decisions about changes.  Whether the collaborative effort is coached using an agile framework or facilitated by the taxonomist, SMEs and stakeholders must understand their role as owners who can directly influence the taxonomy at all stages of DevOps.

2. Build in Quality 

Identify system quirks and build in a mechanism for addressing problems as soon as taxonomy changes are applied.  Build simple rules into the system to identify improper syntax, spelling errors, or duplicate terms, to name a few of the pesky problems that generally plague taxonomies in production.  Use a staging environment with workflows so that SMEs can use a common space to collaborate, review, and validate changes before they are deployed.

3. Work in Small Batches

Avoid the risks associated with adhering to a rigid cadence.  Make changes as they organically occur or, if necessary, schedule short intervals for changes to be made. This approach is less likely to cause major disruption for the end-users, easing the change management challenge.  By deploying changes in small batches, incrementally, end-users will grow accustomed to a dynamic taxonomy that is updated and in step with business changes.

4. Computers Perform Repetitive Tasks, People Solve Problems 

Implementing changes is a much easier task than it’s been in the past.  The key to greatly reducing the administrative tasks associated with the taxonomy publishing process, as well as the duplication of effort that often comes with importing them into separate systems, is to leverage technology that uses linked open data² to reference the terms and concepts represented in the taxonomy.  Today’s standard Web technologies significantly cut the time spent performing data entry and quality control. Additionally, these technologies can be used to dynamically incorporate changes without having to go through the much riskier re-indexing process.   

5. Relentlessly Pursue Continuous Improvement

Because a taxonomy is never really complete, the review of the terms and concepts must be an ongoing process: not to be ignored but instead made easy and quick.

Summary

Current and accurate taxonomies make information more findable. Making information more findable increases the time available for people to spend on innovation and meeting other mission focused goals. When it comes to Continuous Delivery, the benefits truly outweigh the costs.   

Taxonomy is not as daunting as it seems. In this blog series, one of EK’s taxonomy experts, Ben White, provides 4 practical steps to designing and validating a user-centric taxonomy.

Step #4: Measure the Findability of Your Content

Search, which is central to enterprise-wide knowledge transfer, is simple in theory; a user enters a set of key terms in a search engine and the search engine retrieves records that match the key terms. In reality, the architecture of a search engine is nothing more than:

Search Outputs: Search results the user sees after requesting information
Query Management:  The way a system formats and matches requests for information
Search Inputs: Content a system looks through to find the requested information

Yet while it’s true that search is a simple and well-understood progression, creating an effective enterprise-wide search is a multifaceted process that requires in-depth analysis. In my previous blogs, I’ve talked about some of those necessary steps, such as designing a user-centric taxonomy, making sure that facets are consistent, as well as testing the taxonomy. In my final blog of this taxonomy series, I’ll be discussing the metrics that can be used to measure the effectiveness of a taxonomy.

The addition of a taxonomy supports accurate search and guided navigation, which cannot be achieved with a search engine alone. However, implementing a taxonomy requires consistent maintenance and refinement of the search data in order to ensure its effectiveness. Objectively scrutinizing enterprise-wide search data allows us to tune search and update the underlying taxonomy to create a positive search experience. When examining search data, there are a number of metrics that can help us measure the effectiveness of a taxonomy:

Metrics, Definitions and Benefits:

Search Refinements:   The number of times a visitor searched and then performed another search. Provides information on the effectiveness of the terms used to search
Search Depth:   Average number of pages viewed after performing a search. Provides information on the effectiveness of the search results.
Bounce Rate:   Percentage of visitors who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. Also shows us the effectiveness of search terms.
Time after Search:  How many searches made before reaching a desired page. Allows us to see if search terms retrieved adequate results.

These analytics can be used to better identify the most effective search terms and determine if they are reflected in a taxonomy.

To capture this information, we can simply ask users to search for specific content and analyze their search habits, making note of search depth, bounce rate, time after search, and any search refinements that occur. There are also a number of tools that can be used to help calculate these analytics. Google Analytics and PIWIK are two popular choices that can be used for both intranets and public facing websites.

Once you implement these metrics, the taxonomy should be updated periodically to reflect the search trends, which will result in a more efficient and accurate search system. The key to properly updating a taxonomy with effective search inputs is to understand user intent. This is no easy task, it involves a deep understanding of the keywords used by employees when searching. Therefore, in addition to the metrics provided above, it is also important to look at:

Where users searched and what they did next:  Did the user reach the desired page or attempt another search? Are users generally visiting the same pages when searching the same key words?

Measuring search quality:  By looking at search refinements, search depth, bounce rate, and time after search while paying close attention to the search terms used to reach the page, we can get a good idea of the quality of the search.

For example, if a high number of users searched the intranet using a specific keyword and 80% of users left the page the keyword led to immediately, correcting the underlying taxonomy is necessary.

In short, understanding the intent of the user allows us to get into the minds of the searcher. Therefore, a better understanding of the search terms used by users allows us to create a better taxonomy and a better search experience.

Although the concept of search is a relatively simple idea, there are many considerations that go into the implementation process. Despite the challenges that come with developing an effective enterprise search, the benefits to doing so are clear. Sue Feldman of IDC found that knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information and 40% of corporate users reported that they couldn’t find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets. The subsequent costs are significant; in another recent survey conducted by IDC, the time spent searching for information averages 8.8 hours per week, at a cost of $14,209 per knowledge worker per year. In short, the time and costs associated with unstructured information are too significant to ignore.

We hope that through this blog series, you have a better understanding of how much thought and consideration goes into designing and evaluating a quality taxonomy and enterprise search. To learn more about how you can improve the findability of your content, connect with one of our knowledge management experts by contacting Enterprise Knowledge.