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

Introduction

In Part 1 of this article I explored the opportunity for professional service firms to apply process management practices to their services and internal support processes to drive improvements in cost and service. In Part 2 I will discuss the key role that Knowledge Management could play in helping to realise this opportunity.

A key role for Knowledge Management

Some mid to large professional service firms have established internal teams to help coordinate and drive process improvement and re-engineering activities, in a mid-sized firm this can be simply one person in a coordinating role or as ‘Director of Transformation’. In larger firms, investment can be more significant. The major global law firm Clifford Chance, established a Continuous Improvement programme, focused on improving the firm’s efficiency and service. To support this programme they set up a core team, staffed by new hires with skills in Lean and Six-Sigma improvement methodologies. This group provides a skilled resource to support their internal process improvement activities. To date the firm reports that around 450 associates and partners have been involved in Continuous Improvement projects. The firm plans to have trained 20% of its lawyers in simple continuous improvement tools by the end of 2014.⁴

However, many firms would struggle to provide such a level of resource. An alternative approach is to utilise existing functions in a firm. The IT department is one obvious option, but its analytical skills and focus is naturally on technology, not business processes. I believe a better solution lies with the Knowledge Management function, as identified in the EU report referenced in Part 1⁵: ‘This is one reason why some service firms are looking intently at knowledge management systems and practices that would allow them to capitalise more on their accumulated knowledge. In some cases this may mean codified systems of problems and solutions; in others it may mean enabling access to tacit knowledge by facilitating mentoring, networking, and location of relevant expertise. Institution of such systems is likely to mean more attention to issues of intellectual property.’

However, in my experience, a solution focused on Knowledge Management (KM) systems and practices as currently operated within professional service firms would be insufficient. This is because Knowledge Management in most professional service firms focuses on ‘technical’ content (e.g. legal precedents, consulting bids) rather than process knowledge (e.g. service definitions and performance targets, standard operating procedures for services and processes, actual service performance v targets, client service feedback, improvement activities and outcomes). Despite this, I believe that KM is well placed to play an important role in process-based improvement activities for the following reasons:

• Knowledge Management is a recognised function within most professional service firms.
• Knowledge Management already has an infrastructure and budget in place in most professional service firms - with an organisation (typically small), some established processes, and a Knowledge Management IT system.

Process management within Knowledge Management

However, to play an effective role in process improvement, Knowledge Management (KM) would need to broaden its focus and establish new processes that better integrate with the daily business in the following ways:

• Widen the KM remit to include process knowledge within the firm.
• Use the KM support network in the firm to work with each service to develop the following key knowledge artifacts: 1. A service process description 2. Key service & internal process performance targets (e.g. service level targets, fee earner target times) 3. Key performance indicators for services and internal processes.
• Establish a ‘light touch’ process for gathering individual service performance on a regular basis (ideally monthly, but at least quarterly) and make this available to service leaders and firm management for improvement actions.
• Enable the KM system to capture and share new improvement ideas and results (or utilise a separate Ideas Management system).
• Support improvement initiatives in each service team or business group by providing the required performance information and developing improved support metrics.

These changes would enable firms to effectively capture and harness the knowledge of the performance and potential improvements in daily work and drive major improvements in service efficiency and value in firms. Making service performance available would be powerful in itself in driving improvement, as in most firms this information is difficult to get. Of course the KM function alone cannot do this, but they would provide critical support to business areas to enable it. In doing so, the role of Knowledge Management in professional service firms would be broadened and strengthened to become a strategic foundation for firm-wide innovation.

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[4] This case study is discussed further in pages 121 & 129 in ‘Innovating professional services – transforming value and efficiency’ by Alastair Ross. Published May 2015 by Gower. ISBN-13: 978-1472427915

[5]‘The future of R&D in services: implications for EU research and innovation policy’, a report commissioned by the Science and Technology Foresight Unit of DG Research By PREST - Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology (UK) TNO (Netherlands) SERVILAB (Spain) ARCS (Austria) March 2006.

Professional Service firms are facing a number of major competitive challenges including price-down pressures from clients, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, deregulation in some markets (such as the UK and Australian legal sectors), increasing competition from lower cost economies (such as IT services from India) and new internet-enabled business models (such as Freelancer.com in IT and design services, Crunch.co.uk in accountancy and RocketLawyer.com in legal services).

In response to these challenges, firms are increasingly recognising the need to innovate both in the services they provide and in their ways of working, to increase value to clients whilst reducing cost of delivery. A key opportunity in all professional service firms is in process-based innovation, applying techniques such as waste elimination, standardisation and right-skilling to reduce cost and improve service. This requires firms to establish and operate a systematic approach to assessing the performance of their services (for example a Due Diligence service from a law firm, an Audit service from an accountant or an internal support process such as Invoicing) and to use this information to identify and execute process improvements. And there is major opportunity for improvement – my own experience in process innovation projects¹ in major UK law firms, is that a 25-45% reduction in the direct cost of performing the service (and as much as 75% on one occasion) can be achieved. In addition there is opportunity for enabling revenue increase through improved value and service to clients. So this is an area of significant opportunity for firms.

Process management is key to service innovation

However to realise these benefits on an ongoing basis (rather than in the occasional consulting-led project) firms need to develop internal capabilities in ‘process management’, a discipline that is well established in industry with its roots in work study and more recently in Lean thinking. But this discipline is typically absent in much of services as noted in a 2006 EU report on service innovation:

‘Analysis of services innovation suggests that often services do not capitalise on on-the-job innovations: the knowledge established during service production and delivery is not "captured” and “reproduced” in successive innovations.’² This resonates with my own experience and I have found that the common reasons for firms being ineffective in process learning are:

• There is often cultural resistance to systemization of their work, especially in ‘traditional’ sectors such as law and accounting.
• Fee earners are not motivated to take time to perform post-matter analysis and capture resulting learning – it is not typically chargeable and thus does not count towards their chargeable time targets.
• Firms lack the systems and resources for process innovation to enable the capture, codification and deployment of such ‘on-the-job’ innovations.
• Firms are often heavily siloed around content areas (for instance in law firms, teams in Employment, Commercial, Real Estate and Personal Injury) and so will have little cross-fertilisation in learning.

The result of this that every day professional service firms are effectively flushing knowledge down the drain, as they are not capturing or using process knowledge.

Knowledge-driven systemization in expert-based work

A good example of the effective use of the use of knowledge to improve systemization of work in an expert culture is from Intermountain Healthcare³.
Intermountain Healthcare is a not-for-profit healthcare provider in Utah and Idaho in the USA, managing 22 hospitals and employing 33,000 people at the time of writing. Its clinical outcomes are among the best in the USA whilst it is able to operate at much lower costs than many competitors. This performance is based on a long term best practice programme run between 1995 and 2005.

The key element in Intermountain’s best practice system is the Care Process Model (CPM). This is a file which covers all steps of care for a particular type of case from Admission to Discharge and beyond. It assembles best practice in the form of flow diagrams, Decision Support tools, Practice guidelines and management information. The CPM is a collaborative endeavour, and is constantly updated as new ideas evolve.  Doctors use the CPMs as a default but can always override them if they see fit. Over 60 CPMs are now in use in the hospital group covering cases such as insulin dosing, treatment of pneumonia and lung disease.

A new Director of Research was the trigger for the programme, seeing the opportunities for improvement by capturing and sharing best practices and establishing a fact-based culture. CPMs were introduced slowly never undermining doctor’s autonomy. The philosophy as defined by the Director was:

“We are not trying to control doctors but to get the doctors to control the system”. This was a key philosophy in gaining the engagement of doctors in an expert culture, relying on inherent evidence-based peer pressure to change professional behaviours.

Clinicians from all the hospitals meet regularly to review evidence of outcomes and to agree changes to CPMs. A culture of openness has developed. Auxiliary workers can question and suggest improvements to the CPM without problems of authority.

The benefits of the formalisation of best practice were dramatic. A study in 2008 by the Institute for Health Care Delivery Research concluded that the aggregate cost savings from improved clinical performance totalled $100 million a year.

This type of ‘evidence-based’ peer pressure can be applied in professional service firms to drive improvement.

In Part 2, I will explore how Knowledge Management can play a key role to support the application of process management practices in professional service firms.

During a time of budget cuts you might be called upon to explain why Knowledge Management shouldn’t be axed.  What do you say?

Justifying why Knowledge Management is essential to your organization can be a difficult task.  However, failure to gain managerial and executive support for KM is a frequent cause of KM initiative and program failures.  To effectively justify the importance of KM, focus on the end results of KM:  operation efficiency, risk reduction, and competitive advantage through innovations.

In explaining the rationale for Knowledge Management, practitioners sometimes make the mistake of focusing on intermediate tactics.  When asked by leadership, “why is KM essential to our success,” KM practitioners might be tempted to cite the intermediate goals of KM such as employee engagement, community building and cutting across organizational boundaries.

While engagement and community building are valuable to an organization, they are the means for attaining higher goals.  Communities of practice cost time and resources and are not themselves an end goal.  All KM efforts must produce a return on investment outside of the intermediate goods KM produces like communities of practice, engagement of employees, and organizational unity.

Similarly, Knowledge Management buzz-phrases like “learning management,” “lessons learned,” “best practices,” and “benchmarking” are tactical means to an end and not the ultimate aim of companies. These KM byproducts exist solely because they support higher-level goals.  If these are cited as the primary rationale for sustaining a KM program, the program is much more likely to be axed when an organization’s “core goals” are in jeopardy.

Effectively communicating the value of KM means showing management and leadership that KM delivers cost savings through efficiency or risk reduction.  It also means showing how KM can increase earnings through innovations.  So how does one communicate the value of KM?

Try sharing the rationale for KM using simple, plain language.  You might try something like:

“Knowledge Management is an essential line of defense in our company because it ensures that we don’t waste expenditures repeating the same mistakes or inefficiently reinvent the wheel in our key projects.  On top of that, KM is our company’s strongest line of offense – the end result of sharing our knowledge is innovation. Nothing drives our success like the competitive advantage derived from innovation.”

To further bolster the case for KM, there is no better rationale than hard data and statistics.  By ensuring that your KM key metrics and performance indicators are carefully chosen and monitored, you will have evidence to support the case for keeping KM.

By effectively communicating KM verbally and backing-up those claims with data, the case for supporting KM in times of budget cuts can be clearly communicated to leadership.  Leadership will be much more hesitant to cut a KM program if they understand KM in terms of efficiency, protection from risks, and competitive advantage from innovation.

Across the spectrum of the Knowledge and Information Management services offered by Enterprise Knowledge, one of the common themes of late has been the design and development of knowledge bases for helps desks and call centers.  We’ve all heard the phrase that content is king, recognizing that knowledge and information management systems are only as good as the information within them.  This is especially true for knowledge bases, where getting quick access to a complete set of meaningful “answers” is directly related to customer satisfaction and end user service.

There are many aspects to the design and implementation of knowledge bases that will determine return on investment and overall success and adoption.  In our experience, the below are the most critical best practices to ensuring the appropriate information is captured and enhanced, ensuring your organization’s knowledge will be used and reused by those who need it.

Make it Easy

Through our many knowledge gathering activities at organizations around the world, we consistently hear that one of the greatest impediments to information sharing is that it is too hard to load information into the systems at hand.  Often times, this is an issue with poor user interface design or overly complex workflows.  Knowledge bases must be designed and configured to allow information to easily flow into them.  We often use email as a comparison for this:  It should be simpler and faster to load a piece of information into a knowledge base than it would be to send an email with an attachment.

There are several means to support ease of information sharing.  As mentioned above, one is user interface design and related content “uploading” functionality.  Creating a simple “drag-and-drop” type of interface will help users easily upload content.  Ensuring the process to upload content is simple and straightforward, requiring as few clicks or manual entry of information will help minimize the time and complexity of information uploading.
 
Make it Rich

Well-designed knowledge bases also offer significant opportunities to improve the state of content and enrich it to be easier to find and manage.  One way to achieve this is to ensure that knowledge base designs and systems go beyond text to allow for the inclusion of images, videos, logical decision flows, and integrated functionality.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a succinct video from an organizational expert is worth a million.  When designing your knowledge base, think beyond text to support the capture, management, and findability of a wide range of media in an integrated fashion.

Your knowledge base content can also be enriched with metadata tags to support its findability and discoverability.  This is especially important for non-text content, but is important for all.  Designing an easy to use and intuitive business taxonomy and applying it to all your content will support faceted navigation and the discovery of related content on key topics.

Of course, it is incumbent on knowledge base designers to ensure metadata can be applied quickly to support the aforementioned need for easy publishing.  There are three primary options for this:

    1.    If you are applying metadata manually and asking your business users to apply it, focus on the one or two most valuable fields that won’t take undue time or consideration to apply.
    2.    Consider leveraging supporting staff and a concise content governance plan to own the metadata application process, taking the onus off the business users.
    3.    Explore the use of automated metadata tools to speed and simplify the metadata application process.
Overall, a hybrid approach with all three of these options is typically the ideal but there are many permutations that can work.  For a more in depth discussion of ways to simplify metadata management see our blog “Six ways to Simplify Metadata Management.”
 
Embed it in the Business

Like any knowledge or information management system, a knowledge base should exist as one component within an integrated enterprise.  Defining the processes, technical integration points, and related governance between systems will help to ensure meaningful content consistently gets captured within the knowledge base.

Integrating your knowledge base with other knowledge and information systems provides easier means of information sharing.  For example, EK recently helped a client integrate their existing social platforms and content management system with their new knowledge base to allow key content to “flow” into the knowledge base with one click.  Now, select users can easily share their knowledge through a range of means, ensuring that it is captured for others to leverage and enhance
 
Provide Value-Added Constraints

Many organizations make a mistake of overly constraining the means by which information flows into a knowledge base, who’s allowed to publish into knowledge bases, or what types or formats of information may be placed within the knowledge base.  Overly constrained systems tend to choke.  At the same time, “Wild West” systems that allow anyone to load anything in any place will quickly run out of control, diluting the most valuable information to the extent that finding it will be like looking for a needle in a haystack, with an additional haystack getting dumped on top of the pile every few months.
Organizations have to endeavor to provide value-added constraints that walk the line between overly loose and overly tight governance models.  Simple workflow that provides quick content editing and metadata enrichment is great, but overly complex workflows that delay the publication of content must be avoided.  Equally, clear definition of article types and development of templates for consistently formatted content is a huge value-add, as long as it is designed with involvement from the business users to ensure the right article types are defined and the templates actually meet the business needs.
 
Support Evolution

Knowledge and knowledge systems, like the business itself, will die if they don’t continuously evolve.  As discussed above, content governance and supporting processes are critical to ensuring good information is consistently captured and enhanced within the system.

Smart application of technology also plays an important role.  For instance, we recently worked with one of our customers to design a two-tier knowledge base.  Official content that has gone through established content governance reviews is the anchor of the knowledge base, but working content in the form of collaborative blogs serves to support the evolution of the system.  The call center agents are empowered to use their time in between calls to create or edit working content, which is then reviewed by content reviewers and “graduated” as official content following review and approval.  This two-tier process makes the best use of agent time and knowledge, content processes, and supporting technologies.  It holds the added value of elevating call center agent responsibilities and giving them the welcome responsibility to enhance their own tools by sharing their expertise.
 
Listen to Your End Users

Along with the evolution of content, organizations must focus on understanding and serving the needs of their end users.  Ideally, this can be accomplished through a combination of active and passive means.  Active engagement will include polling your call center agents or providing them with technical means to report on commonly asked questions or topics and potentially engaging your end users directly to understand their satisfaction with the knowledge base, the topics they care about, and the areas they wish for more depth of content.  Passive monitoring will focus on knowledge base system metrics including common search terms, most popular content and topics, and navigational paths of users.

With a combination of Active and Passive metrics, organizations will have the means to focus their knowledge crtion on the topics that are most important to their users.  This also requires an active governance model and an investment in knowledge capture to ensure the evolution of content discussed above.
 
Reward Participation

Finally, the most successful knowledge base efforts will be those where content creators and contributors are rewarded for their efforts.  There is any number of means to do this.  This may simply mean identifying the most active or most valued contributors or providing them simple incentives.  One organization with whom EK works decided to reward additional hours of paid leave each month for the MVP content contributors.  Another provides gift cards each quarter.  Yet another took a much more advanced view of content contribution and created a gamification model that includes knowledge base content contribution as one of 10 factors that figured into bonuses and promotions.  Regardless of the specifics, content contribution should be celebrated and rewarded within an organization.

Getting the right knowledge into your knowledge base, and offering supporting processes and technologies to ensure this continues to happen over time is a key factor for success of your systems over time.  Whether you’re designing a new knowledge base or seeking to improve the value of an existing system, EK is poised to help by providing the strategic guidance, design, and implementation services necessary for success.  Contact us to learn more.