Knowledge Management: Get Started, OK?

by Anthony S. Vlamis

Knowledge management is the new frontier for leveraged learning and best practice sharing. You'll be hearing much more about this brilliant emerging concept in the future. Why? Its promise for the organization is strategically and competitively substantial.

Imagine an organization where the intellect and experience of all the working people is collectively shared and coupled with the institutional memory of the organization. An organization where customer solutions are reused and brought to bear on the day-to-day operations, the customer relationships, and the problems that inevitably develop in the process of delivering a product or service to the customer. All brought together to bring about a good experience and positive result for the customer. Is this a fable? No. It's a process called knowledge management, an idea whose time has finally come.

Knowledge management holds enough promise to become the greatest strategic competitive advantage of the decade. If you find a way to develop a KM initiative at your company and make it an integral part of your long-term strategy, the rewards can truly be amazing.

That's the promise and the vision. The reality, so far, is that nobody is doing a really good job of knowledge management. It's no slam-dunk to get there, even among the corporate elite. Ninety-four percent of the IT managers surveyed by Information Week Research in April 1999 said they considered KM strategic to their business. However only 36% said they had formal policies in place for sharing knowledge assets. And fewer still have a formal structure for capturing them. Overall they felt they were losing more than half of their intellectual capital.

What's the Motivation Here?

Why should you care about knowledge management? Simple. There's a growing awareness that leveraging knowledge, and bringing it into play in day-to-day transactions with the customer, will greatly improve customer relationships and increase customer intimacy. When asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, the legendary Willie Sutton replied, "That's where the money is." In business, the money is where the customer is. The closer you get to your customer the closer you are to a rewarding and lucrative relationship. It is just as true for small cap companies as it is for the Fortune 500. That's positive reinforcement and motivation enough to implement a KM initiative. Here's another, more compelling reason.

Fleeting Intellectual Capital

In the new economy intellectual capital (IC) is extremely vulnerable. Entrepreneurial environments, emerging growth companies, the pace of change in the high tech industry, fast moving free agents and pirating of top guns with the promise of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice -- through the magic of stock options and IPOs -- all make for a very unstable business atmosphere.

Let's face it: At many Internet companies, if the top inspirational and creative employee or head technologist were to suddenly walk out the door, the company would vaporize. Among critical corporate assets there's hardware, software and "wetware" -- new era lingo for human creativity. A/K/A brainpower. Lose your wetware or smartest employees in the information age and you've lost just about everything.

Suppose you run an information-based business. what if the hottest programmer in your Internet software company were to stop a train on the way to work? Without the proper and systematically updated documentation -- copies of all the lines of code -- the company might as well have had its brain lobotomized. Investors would be left holding the bag. Most employees, including a lot of senior execs, would be out of work.

Or imagine a small group of key people walking out the door and opening up shop across the street to compete head-to-head with you. (That's what happened to Palm recently when a handful of execs left to start up Handspring.)

Does that get the survival instincts going for you? Good. It should. And now that I have your rapt attention, here are some key ways to start a knowledge management initiative. As with all enterprise initiatives, knowledge management has to start at the top.

Three Ways To Get KM Started

Carla O'Dell and Jack Grayson, authors of If Only We Knew What We Know, an insightful guide on getting KM activated at your company, explain that whatever the makeup of the individual systems they surveyed, knowledge management approaches fall into three categories:

Self Directed. This is a typical setup. The company provides a technology platform and software (like Lotus Notes or Domino) and the employee uses it to find whatever information he needs. There may be some bells and whistles, like a pointer system that directs the user to a subject matter expert (SME), or an expediter, or even a search engine. These systems are usually hubbed by a database designed to capture best practice information.

Pluses. Low cost, low resource requirements. Good at capturing the explicit (known and procedural) knowledge in the organization.

Minuses. Relies entirely on user initiative. No proactive prompts. Not very good at capturing the tacit knowledge that is in people's heads. Doesn't deal with cultural and personal barriers to KM effectiveness.

Some companies doing this now. AT&T, Chevron, and Texas Instruments.

Knowledge Networks. Contains all the self-directed components mentioned above but has the value added knowledge management network of people who come together to learn from each other "face to face and electronically." Additional networks augment the centralized database and other tools and services designed to enhance the collective intelligence and knowledge transfer process.

Pluses. Can develop into a one-stop point for remote employees to leverage information and access legacy databases to help serve clients better.

Minuses. Requires a more sophisticated IT infrastructure, Intranet, Internet or Private Virtual Network. Managing the content of the knowledge database and keeping it current.

This is especially well suited to consulting organizations. Why? It works as a central warehouse of information on products, services, clients, past engagements, consultant skill sets and competitive intelligence.

Who's using it? All the major consulting organizations - Andersen, E&Y, Price Waterhouse Coopers, McKinsey and KPMG.

Facilitated Transfer. O'Dell and Grayson call this the "full service approach." It has all the previous components and also designates individuals who spend at least part of their time proactively involved with integrating best practices and acting as catalysts to facilitate knowledge transfer throughout the organization.

Pluses. Records and leverages the institutional memory. Use of facilitators to collect keyword and database best practices. They may assist with best practice implementation and help others get up to speed with knowledge sharing and transfer techniques. Can produce substantial payoffs as benefits from knowledge transfer and best practice sharing become embedded in the organization.

Minuses. Requires dedicated resources and long-term commitment

Who's using it? Best in Class companies like Raytheon, Amoco, Chevron, Ford and Texas Instruments, to name a few. Are you?

Obviously, we have just touched on the types of knowledge management systems that are out there. KM isn't one initiative but a series of them, including changes in corporate culture, measurement systems to verify "best practices," rewards and recognition initiatives for those who practice KM, and the like. But however you begin, you need to begin: You need to think about implementing KM before your competitors figure it out.

Anthony S. Vlamis has been in the field of business, professional, technical, and reference publishing for 25 years. A former executive editor at Simon & Schuster, Prentice-Hall, AMACOM books, and Van Nostrand Reinhold, he has edited and published hundreds of titles in the business, industrial engineering, finance, and technology areas. He was a founder of Alexander publishing and Marketing, a newsletter publisher and direct marketing services agency.