Knowledge Management – Defies definition

"There are many words and definitions I have never lost. But some I am only just beginning to truly understand"

~Mary E Pearson

How often have we used words fully comprehending the context in which we are using it, yet when asked the meaning of the word we would be stumped to give an accurate definition? Knowledge is apparently one such word; and when that becomes "Knowledge Management" you could actually end up writing a book of definitions.

This is how the Oxford English Dictionary defines knowledge. If so, how can knowledge be managed? Peter Drucker is credited with the quote "You can't manage knowledge. Knowledge is between two ears and only between two ears." And quite rightly so. If you were to manage the acquisition of skills through education, then that would be termed training and what is gained through experience can hardly be managed. An ancient Sanskrit text describes the process of how people acquire knowledge:

"Achaaryaath paadam aadatthe

paadam sishya swamedhayaa

paadam sa brahmachaaribhya

sesham kaala kramena
cha"

It explains:

From the teacher you receive a quarter of your knowledge
A quarter the disciple learns by his own efforts (practice)
A quarter he gains through interactions with his peers (fellow students)
The remaining comes only as time passes by (from experience)

I found this quite insightful, because it delineates the knowledge acquisition process and therefore gives us access to managing the acquisition process. It also appears that this could be equally effectively applied in the context of the organization. The organization, like the individual also learns in a similar manner; the only difference being that the teacher here might actually be the market place (in the case of organization's learning) and in some cases the market regulator.

Given this definition, I was trying to fit it into the current context of organizational knowledge and definitions by different leading knowledge management experts. Every organization which engages in some form of learning intervention, be it formal training and development programs or more unstructured learn-on-the-job forms, is providing employees with a "teacher" who imparts some learning. Similarly, as employees use their skills on a regular basis and learn from their experiences, they begin to know more than what they knew previously; the third kind of learning happens when employees engage in social interactions with other colleagues, customers, partners, suppliers etc. Every interaction will leave the employee enriched with a new learning and experience. The question then is, how can the organization manage these individual experiences and learning such that the sum total of this far exceeds the individual knowledge of each employee. And when this is put to use effectively, the organization benefits many fold than would be possible if each individual or group were to work in silos.

So, Knowledge Management then is the process by which an organization taps into the education and experience of individuals and makes it available in a manner that it can be used for the productivity and growth of the organization. This becomes possible by creating an ecosystem that fosters the creation, acquisition, collation and dissemination of knowledge. And we will know that such initiatives have been successful when we can measure the impact of this process on the ability of the organization to grow and profit from such knowledge.

With the advent of social collaboration and knowledge repositories, technology will also play a big role in enabling knowledge management by:

1. Making it possible to have social interactions and capture such tacit knowledge
   
2. Providing a structured and collaborative learning environment
   
3. A mechanism to capture insights and share it with other employees
   
4. And allowing people to benefit from the experience of others
   

While, seemingly it may not be possible to hasten the knowledge acquisition process, in an organizational context, what is important is how individual experiences can be collectively employed by the organization such that the organization's knowledge far exceeds its experience. Knowledge Management, then becomes a process of enabling individual skills and experiences to be gathered, collated and used contextually for enabling the organization progress in a sustainable manner.

A good knowledge management system would therefore have elements of collaboration and learning in order to be effective. By being able to integrate this to the performance of the organization it would enable the organization drive strategy and innovation.

When viewed from this perspective, we are able to appreciate the reason for Knowledge Management to exist as a strategic tool in organizations. We also realize the complexity of being able to gather such knowledge, process it in a meaningful manner, and share it with the entire organization such that it is available for use when needed. The challenges in enabling such a mechanism are multi-dimensional and involve people, processes, technology, organization structure, human behaviour and culture. When we look at the magnitude of activities that this will then encompass, it is quite easy to understand why a single definition eludes this subject.

Here are some definitions that are commonly used to define this subject:

• Knowledge Management is a concept in which enterprises consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares and analyses its knowledge in terms of resources, documents and people skills
  
• Knowledge Management is the process of applying a systematic approach to the capture, structuring, management and dissemination of knowledge throughout an organization to work faster, reuse best practices, and reduce costly rework.
  
• Knowledge Management is the deliberate and systematic coordination of an organization's people, process, technology, and organizational structure in order to add value through reuse and innovation.
  
• Strategies and processes designed to identify, capture, structure, leverage, value and share an organization's intellectual assets to enhance its performance and competitiveness
  
• Knowledge Management is a collaborative and integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of an enterprise's intellectual assets
  
• Knowledge Management is understanding the organization's information flows and implementing learning practices which makes key aspects of its knowledge base available to the organization when required….
  

And so on it goes…

What is your definition of Knowledge Management? How would you go about explaining it?

 

 

 

 

Knowledge Management - The hydra-headed jargon

“Knowledge is as old as the rocks and as changing as the sea, enmeshed inextricably in its ways. And you want a clear definition of Knowledge Management? You must be daft!”

                                                                                         ~Paraphrasing Bedford in “The Quality of Travel”

One of the biggest challenges I have faced, especially facing people from a non-IT background is to explain what I do! “Knowledge Management? What exactly does that mean?” is a question I frequently encounter.  This post is a result of my quest to come up with an answer that will get me past a response that I hear “That’s very interesting”…but which I know really means “ I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about”!!! J

The reason for this ambiguity is not very hard to understand; Knowledge Management as a term entered the lexicons only about thirty years ago.  And even when it did, it came as an offshoot of an attempt to explain other terms like “knowledge acquisition”, “knowledge-base systems”, artificial intelligence, expert systems and computer-based ontologies – sort of a “basket-term” for all of these and much more.  Early management theorists like Peter Drucker, Paul Strassman and Peter Senge contributed to the growing understanding of knowledge as a key organizational resource with Senge contributing the cultural dimension with his seminal work “The Fifth Discipline” where he introduced the concept of “the learning organization”.  By the mid-1990s the word had become pretty much part of organization strategy with important contributions from researchers like Christopher Bartlett, Dorothy Leonard-Barton, Chris Agyris, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi…to name a few.

Knowledge Management became the new mantra for consulting companies; organizations that had not had much success with TQM and other business process re-engineering initiatives now embraced KM as the panacea for all their previous management blunders.  Along the way, the term came to acquire attributes of performance management, Quality management, Business Intelligence (the new Decision Support Systems), and what have you.

The rise of the digital age has added new flavours to knowledge management; Web 2.0 introduced social collaboration to the list of things that KM already stood for.  And with the number of social tools available in the market, and their attempts at capturing a slice of the enterprise space, Knowledge Management has never had it so good…in terms of popularity.  Never mind that people still are unable to define what it really means! J

Cloudy with a chance of knowledge nuggets

“Have you ever felt like you were a little bit different? Like you had something unique to offer the world, if you could just get people to see it. Then you know exactly how it felt to be me.”

 ~ Flint Lockwood (from the film: Cloudy with a chance of meatballs)

Knowledge Management has come to mean different things to different people.  Starting with a document management system to a social intranet, knowledge takes on various hues and shades depending on what organizations expect out of such a system.  There is no single definition of Knowledge Management.  However, what everyone does agree on is the fact that Knowledge Management is the process through which organizations generate value from intellectual and knowledge-based assets.  With “social” acquiring a new dimension in the digital world, the ability to transform tacit knowledge, which usually exists in conversations, into explicit knowledge has increased the value that KM systems are able to deliver to enterprises.

This has been further enhanced by making such knowledge available on the cloud.  Is knowledge on the cloud likely to be different? Different, that is, from what you might get served if you had it in your enterprise knowledge repository?

In common usage, the term “cloud” is essentially a metaphor for the internet.  This has further popularized the phrase “in the cloud” to refer to software platforms and infrastructure, that are sold as a service, i.e. remotely through the internet. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing)

What this essentially facilitates is the ability for end-users to simply log on to the network and start using an application without requiring them to install anything; it also enables device-independent access to the application. The core functionality will continue to remain the same.  However, with a lot of preference being given to mobile-only users, we now have a new jargon to contend with – mobile-first design.  Historically, most designs have started out with a web interface and then been down-sized for smaller viewports.  However, with an increasing number of mobile-only users, there is a growing need to design interfaces with these users primarily in mind.  This therefore calls for a progressive and responsive design – one that keeps the limited screen space and concomitant constraints in the forefront.  It also means that the way the users interact with the application cannot change drastically from one device to another.   

Irrespective of how the application is accessed the core functionality will essentially remain the same.  The user interface design will however, give priority to those interactions with the application that happen primarily through a mobile device; the interface will need to be device agnostic, nevertheless.  The features and functionalities which are more likely to be accessed from a desktop or laptop (read, larger viewport, lesser frequency, more analytical and less transactional) may or may not be available across all interface devices; some features – for example complex admin configurations, or large text manipulations are probably best left to devices with larger user interfaces, namely laptops or desktops.

What is significantly important, and cannot be compromised irrespective of the device is the actual value of content being delivered to the end user.  A cloud-based deployment, because of its ubiquitous nature, lends itself well to fulfil this important criteria.  It is therefore, more important to be able to deliver knowledge to the end user in an intuitive manner – one that will make knowledge itself omnipresent.  When these knowledge nuggets manifest themselves to users in a manner that makes it easy to apply them in day-to-day work, it is only then that a KM system, irrespective of where or how they are available, will actually transform the way an organization works.

NEPHILA™ (www.kriostechnologies.com) is uniquely positioned to access such knowledge nuggets from the corporate enterprise repository and deliver them to end users at the point of action.  Where a large field force is involved, the ability to deliver this at their workplace – which is usually outdoors, provides the critical leverage for successful usage of enterprise knowledge.

How does your KM deliver knowledge nuggets to your users?  

Learning from Lessons Learned

In a recent post I had mentioned how lessons learned would become visibly useful when it became possible to substantiate the impact of lessons learned.  Where knowledge is closely integrated to business operations, it becomes easier to track the use of such knowledge and the impact it has had on the business – either in terms of improvement in business performance measures, a positive impact on process measures, or measurable impact on people metrics.  However, the challenge usually lies in the fact that lessons learned are seldom directly linked to performance measures.  More often than not, they remain as lessons identified in the knowledge repository, with no measurable or tangible evidence of such lessons actually being put in use.

With the proliferation of enterprise social collaboration, does it make the task of tracking the dissemination of lessons learned any easier?  Is there any way of finding out if the lesson learned from a previous project or experience has been implemented elsewhere?  Or has some similar work been carried out in any other part of the organization which is quite similar to the experience based on which this lesson was learned?  A community of practice is probably the first place one is likely to check for such instances.  When groups of people with similar interests share a platform in which discussions happen, it is quite likely that such topics are discussed, and more evidence can be gathered about such lessons.  Evidence of a lesson learned elsewhere which crops up in discussions in a community of practice is one of the first signals that a lesson is being taken seriously, and is likely to find implementation elsewhere in the organization. 

Tracking the network of people associated with a particular community of practice can provide pointers to how well the information has been dispersed across the organization.  Where formal learning structures are integrated as part of the enterprise social network, it is also possible to associate these lessons learned to the formal learning structures.  For example, a simple survey or a quiz usually evokes a lot of interest among the community; and the response can be an indicator of how well this lesson has been picked up across the network.  Further, a link to the lesson where the answers are incorrect, or even providing that as a reference is likely to increase the people who will get to read this.  However, this does not necessarily guarantee implementation of a lesson learned.  All we can inference from such statistics is that there has been sufficient dispersion of this message across the network.

The package of practice is the other likely place one can possibly evidence the impact of lessons learned.  Where a process or a procedure has been changed, being able to trace it to the influence of the community, and to the set of lessons learned that caused the change in process or procedure is not hard to trace.  More often than not, where there is sufficient automation of processes or where processes are executed through standard software, it is quite easy to track the change request and be able to associate it with the appropriate lessons learned.  In such cases, we have far more solid evidence that a particular change in the process or procedure was initiated because of the lessons learned.  The actual implementation is itself traceable.  A word of caution: since we haven’t linked it to actual business performance, we still don’t know whether this finally did result in some positive improvement to the business result.  Nevertheless, we are still ahead of the game in terms of at least being able to quantify the impact of lessons learned to process improvement and / or people improvement.

At the end of the day, the ability to influence a large section of the network is itself going to result in the creation of the tipping point where positive impact will automatically start to flow.  The key then remains as to how enterprise social collaboration can be made an effective tool of engagement such that it brings in more people to contribute and share knowledge.

Would love to hear about actual experiences in organizations where impact of social collaboration has had a positive impact on the business, and how it has been measured.

Putting Lessons Learned into Action

Acronyms and jargon have a wonderful way of locomotion - especially around my being.  They manage to enter the ear and leave through the mouth, silently, stealthily without a trace.  And as I continue to struggle with AAR, LLR, RCA and the like, I came across yet another term - A3.  Fortunately, this time around it was not an acronym, but just a hook to hang a process on.  A3 is a process followed by Toyota to record process improvements, and the name is derived from the paper size they originally used to write these reports - they probably still do!

So, the topic is about how organizations learn from their mistakes, and ensure that these lessons stay with the organization.  Most quality programs statute an improvement process which usually starts with something called the Lessons Learned. This is usually a stand-alone document or gets associated with a Project Legacy Report or something similar.  The intention, of course, is to record the lessons learned during the execution of a project, or in the process of identification and resolution of a problem or issue the organization was faced with.  However, in most cases, this gets recorded more as a matter of following due process and usually gets stored in some remote location, never to be retrieved again.

In a "social enterprise" - one where people in an organization are networked, have easy access to each other, are able to have conversations on ideas, insights and issues and knowledge is easily transferred through people or content - making the switch from tacit to explicit rather effortlessly - it ought to be easier to make lessons learned available across a larger cross-section of people.  However, what is more important is to ensure that this lesson is put in action, institutionalized - either through a process improvement or a skill improvement program and results in tangible benefits to the organization.  This can happen only when knowledge (or rather the use of knowledge) can be measured.

Lesson Learned Reports also have a rather tedious method of being static and inhibiting exchange of ideas - even after the report has been prepared.  This can be avoided by making the report preparation itself a dynamic process - one which happens as the problem identification occurs and the solution is identified.  And when such a process becomes interactive, and happens in a collaborative environment, chances are that there are a lot more people following the progress, and therefore stickiness or ability to recall the lesson is higher.  Also, in the process of tracking progress, there are other teams of people who are simultaneously experimenting with the solution and coming up with modifications and suggestions.  The dynamic nature of such a solution has the ability to impact a practice (or a process) making the institutionalization of such a change much quicker.  The impact of such a change is also quickly shared across the organization and becomes measurable.

How are lessons learned (LLR) or After-Action-Reviews (AAR) conducted in your organization? Share your feedback on how good this tool is in causing business improvements.

Making sense of chatter - the knowledge manager's role

“In a post-Cold War era of ‘openly available’ information what you need are observers with the language ability, with understanding of the religions, cultures of the countries they are observing. Inman thought we needed fewer spies and more ‘slightly batty’ geniuses”

– From “What the dog saw”

As we observe organizations from the perspective of Knowledge Management maturity, the ones lower down the scale are still struggling with the problem of making information available, while the ones that have gone past that stage have a different kind of problem – one of information overload.  These organizations that have implemented core solutions and sophisticated business intelligence applications have a new problem to deal with – how to make sense of all the information that is being pushed out to them.  One the one hand you don’t want to set off alarm bells at every trough or dip in a trend graph because of an over-sensitive intelligence system; at the same time you don’t want to be caught napping because you have made your trigger-points less sensitive.  Many a time we are able to connect the dots only post-mortem; perhaps a lesson learned a little too late.  And with Big Data and the rest of the talk about integrating noise from twitter, linked in and what-have-you…this problem is only going to get bigger.

Knowledge Management is full of such ambiguities.  How do you trust decision making tools that are based on probabilistic inferences based on incomplete and fragmentary information? Or would you rather wait for evidence-supported narratives that perhaps reduce your ability to prepare a response in time to avoid a disaster?  Is it possible for organizations to create a system that will allow fragments of information to be deciphered – to see a pattern even as it starts emerging, and then prepare an appropriate response? Can organizations become adaptable enough to be able to create an ecosystem that will allow such information to flow so that such analysis is possible? Is the knowledge manager supposed to be this “slightly batty” genius who can enable this?

The year 2009 was when we first heard about Cognizant becoming a serious threat to the Big Three.  A Forbes article of 2010 explains the rise and rise of Cognizant to a position where it has even overtaken Infosys.  While there is quite a detailed note on the strategy adopted by Cognizant to become a dominant player, what has probably been left unsaid is the preparatory work it has done to metamorphose into a serious challenger.  The integration of so many acquisitions, the transformation of its culture, and the transition from a process-driven organization to a knowledge driven one has surely played a significant part. The subsequent years of continuing dynamic growth seem to suggest that the decision to use Knowledge as a primary driver of growth was indeed one of the key factors responsible for such a quantum jump in Cognizant’s fortunes.  In 2007, together with the young and dynamic CEO, the Chief Knowledge Officer - the “slightly batty” genius, R Sukumar charted a course for Cognizant 2.0 – their integrated and pervasive, collaborative knowledge management system.  I have been following his impassioned speeches on Knowledge Management, and what little is available in the public domain s probably sufficient to provide evidence that they have a very vibrant and impactful KM system in the organization.

Sukumar is one who I would like to call a truly “batty genius”; the idea of bringing on someone like him to a role that is generally considered a “put-to-pasture” function was path-breaking and indicative of the importance accorded to the knowledge management initiative.  Although many companies already had some form of knowledge management going on, most of them were under the garb of quality initiatives; Cognizant took it a step further by making it a prime driver of strategy.  And being someone who had been in the system for quite some time, he was the kind of person who understood the culture of the company and could speak the language.  He had worked in the frontline and knew the pains and pressures; it is this kind of a person who is best suited to don the mantle of a Knowledge Manager.  I wonder if Sukumar can give an inside perspective that goes just beyond the tools and technology aspect of Cognizant 2.0, and provide an insight into the role the KM team performed. 

In a sense, the role of a Knowledge Manager in an organization is quite similar to what countries do in war time (or even peace now) – to follow closely events occurring in countries that can be potentially detrimental to their domestic and international interests.  Where there is a veil of secrecy surrounding such operations, a corporate entity requires a lot more openness.  The information that is “openly available” needs to be transformed to insights; this transforms the function to into one of collaboration – one in which the knowledge manager enables the organization consume the extant content, while facilitating active conversations that will throw up interesting insights.  And like top secret government organizations, the process of integrating the insight into the strategy becomes a centralized role.  However, the information, the analysis and the insights themselves are crowd-sourced, in other words, obtained locally from the people who are best informed.  The knowledge manager has a team of knowledge stewards who constantly scan the “chatter” while enabling subject matter experts ensure that the entire organization receives value from the content that is available in the knowledge repository.   Their role becomes one of interpretation and analysis of these conversations, engaging with the organization in enabling these conversations take on new meaning, influencing conversations that drive the organization towards their knowledge-driven strategy to the end objective of achieving sustainable competitive advantage.

Does your organization have a Knowledge Manager?  What kind of structure do you think best suits an organization – one in which information analysis is centralized and becomes the function of a specialized team? Or one in which there are silos of information analysis, but a centralized function that is responsible for transforming insight into learning and then to knowledge?

#disclaimer: I have no personal or professional interest in Cognizant, nor do I hold any shares in this company.   My fascination for this company primarily stems from their involvement as one of the key participants of the KCommunity in Chennai. 

Knowledge Management and the ketchup conundrum

“There is another lesson in that household scene though.  Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes.  They would, when confronted with something strange on the plate – tuna fish, perhaps, or Brussels sprouts – want to alter the food in some way that made the unfamiliar familiar.  And so she turned to ketchup, because, alone among the condiments of the table, ketchup could deliver sweet and sour, and salty and bitter, and umami* ( a loan word from Japanese meaning pleasant savoury taste – umami is the taste that the tongue perceives distinct from the other four)”

- From “What the dog saw”

This seems quite similar to the experience we come across when we speak about Knowledge Management solutions too.  Managers having experience Business Intelligence, Analytics, Content Management, and Collaborative tools, now baulk when they are confronted with anything else that is new.  They seek to understand Knowledge Management from this familiar territory and would like to experience KM from one of these standpoints. 

So, for a KM initiative to succeed, perhaps it is important that we are able to make the unfamiliar familiar by bringing in ingredients that the neophobic manager is familiar with.  Introducing the concept of KM from a perspective of what they encounter in their daily work situation perhaps will make it more easily adopted within the organization.  The challenge then, is to find the right flavour that will appeal to the manager.

The other aspect of the ketchup is that the ingredients need to be so well blended together that none of these flavours stand out distinctly.  Well, yes, different people have different preferences for tastes, and so you have variants of the ketchup – Maggi’s hot and sweet tomato chilli sauce…which is…well different…and many other such combinations which try and cater to individual preferences.

The learning here is to bring in the appropriate blend of these tools that will allow the user to get familiar with the KM tool from a familiar territory.  So, how can knowledge be served with the right blend on top of your daily work in a manner that this allows you to benefit from the value being added, whilst still keeping you in familiar territory.

Do you see this as a possible mechanism for making knowledge management an easy-to-implement tool in organizations?

*ps: copyright acknowledged for the paragraph taken out of “What the dog saw”, Malcolm Gladwell, Back Bay Books.