What Ever Happened to Knowledge Management?

The knowledge management craze began in the 1990’s as companies globalized and became acutely aware of how difficult it could be transfer valuable institutional knowledge from one part of the company to another.  Corporate leaders understood that their companies were experiencing the impact of a profound global transformation from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy, yet they struggled with how to capitalize on this trend.   They knew that valuable expertise was trapped in the minds and files of individuals or departments with no easy way for companies to catalog this knowledge or make it available to employees in other parts of the company.   Leaders of large global companies were eager to find a solution.

During the middle of the decade, several important enabling forces came together:

¶       An articulation of the challenge and opportunity.   In their seminal book,  The Knowledge-Creating Company, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi introduced the core idea of creating institutional knowledge by transforming tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge.  They offered some actionable ideas on how to manage a company’s knowledge base and spawned a flurry of research projects and business initiatives.

¶       Technology solutions.   The emergence of the Internet along with advances in search technology and collaboration software laid the groundwork for enterprise-level solutions for finding documents and identifying internal experts.

¶       Insight into organizational enablers.   As knowledge management became an explicit discipline, managers and academics began to identify organizational factors such as culture, incentives and work processes that enabled effective knowledge-sharing.

The Heyday of Knowledge Management

The first companies to embrace knowledge management were those whose businesses were based on intellectual capital.   Professional service firms like McKinsey, Accenture and PriceWaterhouse Coopers organized their initiatives around industry and functional practices with a focus on two types of knowledge:

¶       Formal, highly structured knowledge output such as industry overviews, benchmarking databases and results of proprietary research studies.

¶       Informal knowledge including on-line discussion threads, working documents from study teams and expertise directories that enabled people to speak directly with colleagues.

Corporations in highly technical businesses also launched significant knowledge management programs.   BP’s efforts are catalogued in the book Learning to Fly[1] and were particularly notable for their emphasis on peer coaching and after-action reviews.   Caterpillar took a different approach by focusing on communities of practice.[2]  They built a system that enabled informal knowledge exchange via e-mail and discussion threads for over 3000 tightly defined communities of practice that involved employees, retirees, dealers, customers and suppliers.   The company estimates that each discussion thread generated at least $600 in savings and the discussions that involved outside constituencies produced the greatest value.

Did KM Work?

The “knowledge management” buzzword has faded away as have some of the trendier practices:

¶       The “chief knowledge officer” role, with its pompous title with unclear operational and financial responsibility, has deservedly disappeared.

¶       Knowledge management initiatives that were run by IT and consisted primarily of technology development also tended to be short-lived, especially as special-purpose tools such as expertise directories were replaced by mainstream social networking applications.

¶       Some of the creepier technologies that tried to identify knowledge clusters by monitoring e-mail traffic or document content have also disappeared.

The professional service firms were highly successful in their efforts to codify practice knowledge and have moved from sharing lessons learned to making major investments to build proprietary databases or publish the results of large research projects.  Corporate initiatives like Caterpillar’s program that were woven into the fabric of the organization’s work processes have continued to thrive.   Others, like BP’s program, were pushed aside in favor of other corporate priorities and whether the company’s subsequent problems were linked to this change in priorities is open to debate.

So, What’s Next?

Knowledge management will cease to be a distinct initiative or activity, yet institutional knowledge sharing will flourish because of:

¶       Easy access to advanced search, social networking and collaboration tools that make “expert finding” and knowledge sharing a natural part of work processes.

¶       Global organizational structures that require people to reach out across geographic boundaries to exchange information and best practices.

¶       The relentless march of competitive pressure that forces companies to scour the globe for better and cheaper ways to operate.

I have recently been involved in corporate strategic planning process at Fortune 500 company in which business leaders were explicitly asked to provide examples of searching for and reapplying ideas from other business units.  This type of business-led knowledge exchange is far more effective than a centrally driven knowledge management initiative.

Global workforce trends are also accelerating the trend toward knowledge management as a basic business activity rather than a special initiative.   As employees have begun to take responsibility for their own careers and seek to build personal brands, they are taking advantage of the ability to self-publish on-line and use social networking tools to make their expertise profiles available.  Corporations might still choose to make a concerted effort to preserve specialized technical knowledge as parts of their workforce begin to retire but are unlikely to launch the type of broad-based programs.

One of the most compelling examples of the grass roots form of knowledge management is a set of web sites, companycommander.com and platoonleader.com, that were started by junior officers serving in the Iraq War.[3]  The Army had traditionally developed field manuals through a time-consuming process of debriefing soldiers returning from the field.   Young officers in Iraq did not have the luxury of waiting for the Army to produce training materials as they faced improved explosive devices (IED’s), a local insurgency and host of personal challenges rooted in repeat deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.   These officers took the initiative to post information on topics ranging from how to detect IED’s to how to manage long absences from families in an age of constant Internet communication.  As the Army began to review its experience in Iraq, it found that the material on these user-managed sites was the best source of important knowledge about how to fight a new type of war.

Knowledge management as a managerial fad is over but knowledge sharing as core source of competitive advantage will become more important than ever.

Managing a Successful Project Kickoff

At the beginning of a project, teams are sometimes so keen to begin their work that they rush into project planning before gaining clear agreement on what the project is supposed to accomplish.   Taking time at the beginning of a project to agree on the purpose and expected output can save time later and greatly increase the team’s likelihood of success.

In the kickoff meeting, teams must focus on five critical areas that are captured in the mnemonic “COINS”:

¶       Context

• Why is this project important now?
• What are the factors that led senior management to launch it?
• What are the key external trends that make this project relevant?

¶       Objectives

• What are the goals of the project?
• What will success look like for the company and for the team members personally?
• What metrics will be used to gauge success?

¶       Issues

• What are the top 5 issues that the project must address?
• What analysis must be done to resolve these issues?

¶       Non-negotiables

• What are the business constraints that the team must be aware of?
• Are there bank covenants, capital constraints or commitments to shareholders that the team must consider?
• Are there principles, values or prior strategic decisions that cannot change?

¶       Stakeholders

• Who are the key stakeholders?
• What are their interests and objectives?
•  How should they be involved in the project?

Investing 3-4 hours in a well-structured kickoff meeting will pay dividends as the team executes a well-structured project that is focused on the right issues and objectives.

Special project teams are an important engine of change in most companies. By following best practices in team and process management, internal project teams can outperform consultants in delivering tangible value.

Special project teams are a crucial vehicle for addressing strategic and operational issues at most companies. These teams often cross geographic or organizational boundaries and bring to bear valuable business or industry knowledge. Yet, internal project teams often fall short of their potential because they do not adopt basic process and stakeholder management disciplines that outside consultants practice routinely. By carefully managing the four critical aspects of team effectiveness, internal teams can deliver substantial business impact much more cost-effectively than consultants can on many projects.

Process Management

Many teams confuse process management with project management. It is essential that a team have a well-defined project plan and standard commercial project planning software is very effective in helping teams track tasks, deliverables and dependencies. Unfortunately, many project teams focus on managing tasks and fail to manage the broader process of ensuring that the project stays focused on the right issues, the stakeholders are aligned and the team is working effectively.

Effective process management involves four critical elements:

• Defining the operating rhythm of the team by establishing regular checkpoints and problem-solving sessions.
• Managing the team’s communication with key stakeholders.
• Planning the critical meetings and reviews that will set the pace and determine the focus of the project.
• Ensuring that learning and reflection occur within the team.

Problem-Solving Management

Excellent process management can never make up for a shortfall in problem-solving. There is no substitute for getting the diagnosis right and proposing recommendations that will work. The key elements of problem-solving that all of the top-tier consulting firms adhere to are:

• Performing issue analysis as the foundation of the project to ensure that the team is solving the right problem.
• Using a hypothesis-driven problem-solving approach to harness existing knowledge of the issues and focus the team’s efforts on the analyses that matter.
• Tying the team’s work plan to the key issues and hypotheses.
• Conducting frequent team meetings and internal reviews to ensure analytical rigor.

Stakeholder Management

A project will only be successful if key stakeholders buy in to the diagnosis and solution. One of the most time-consuming but important aspects of any project is to manage the relationships with stakeholders. The key elements of this discipline include:

• Stakeholder Analysis — identifying all of the key constituencies who will be affected by the project and understanding their objectives, interests and likely response.
• Stakeholder Communications – maintaining an ongoing dialogue that includes both listening to stakeholders’ input and sharing the team’s findings.
• Relationship Management – ensuring that a team member is assigned to cover each key stakeholder relationship throughout the project.
• Stakeholder Engagement – determining how to involve stakeholders in the project so that they will be problem-solving partners and will buy in to the recommendations.

Team Management

The final aspect of delivering a successful project is managing the team dynamics effectively. The key elements of this discipline can be denoted with the mnemonic CREW:

• Composition – ensuring that the right people are involved in the project as core or adjunct team members.
• Roles/Responsibilities – working with the team to define clear roles and responsibilities that will achieve the project’s objectives and provide for team members’ professional development.
• EQ/Interpersonal Dynamics – fostering interpersonal interactions that demonstrate a high level of collegiality and “emotional intelligence quotient”.
• Work Approach and Effectiveness – ensuring that the team applies a productive work approach and that differences in work style are addressed in a constructive way.

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These project management disciplines go far beyond creating a schedule in Microsoft Project. Project teams that master these core disciplines will deliver business benefit and develop strong leaders.