How to Structure a KM Team (Video)

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

KM programs must continue to evolve, align with the business or focus of their organization, and improve the knowledge sharing among employees. At KMWorld 2019, Collins Aerospace's Lynda Braksiek and Emie Timmerman discussed essential knowledge and change strategies in KM team-building.

"To me, knowledge management is the key to sustaining the major changes that you're incorporating in your organization," said Braksiek.

Braksiek said her organization is structured to address four pillars as they relate to managing knowledge: Knowlege, Learning, Innovation, and Change.

"We don't own any tools, we don't drive the purchase of any tools, but we are a big contributor in how tools are used across the organization," said Braksiek. "We focus our solutions from a knowledge management perspective on the knowledge capture and transfer and dissemination and the curation of the actual knowledge and helping organizations to identify the critical and most relevant knowledge that they need to be concerned about. Not everything, not everything needs to be captured and shared today, what is the most relevant knowledge that will support the business objectives that are right in front of you. If you keep it relevant, it feels a little less overwhelming is how I'll say that."

In addition to the knowledge pillar, there is a learning pillar as well. "We have folks on our team who actually develop real training curriculum and multimedia solutions for training, and some delivery of training but we also offer instruction to our technical leaders so that they can become better teachers themselves. Because by nature, our technical subject matter experts are not always the best teachers and they want to get better, so we help them with those skill sets," said Baksiek.

There is also a pillar for change management, and formal change management is embedded into the most critical improvement initiatives across the organization. "I wish we could do it on every single thing, but sometimes the resources just aren't there, so part of what we do in every aspect of my team is, we are in service to our organization. Whether we're providing the service ourselves to them, if we cannot do that to support an actual project, we have the model of creating playbooks so that people can become more self-sufficient in how they do work and we teach them and we consult with them so that they can become their own advocates and do some of these things themselves."

And in the innovation pillar, there is a little i, said Braksiek. "We have an amazing amount of innovation that happens at our company from a product perspective, to me that's the big I; they're developing the newest solutions that go in airplanes that make them safer, fly faster, give us more data, make them more automated, all of those things, right? But the little i, to me, is how you're managing within your organization. How you roll out your initiatives. How you put in place new processes, new tools, and things that are going to change how people do work every day."

It is very important for to include all of these aspects when rolling out  major initiatives because without change management, there will be resistance. "We will have misunderstanding of what's happening. Without good knowledge solutions, that change will not be sustained."

To access the full session video, go to A301. Re-Evaluating & Evolving Your KM Program.

Videos of KMWorld 2019 awards presentations, keynotes, and many sessions can be found here.

Many speakers at KMWorld 2019 have also made their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2019/Presentations.aspx.

SAVE THE DATE FOR KMWORLD 2020: NOVEMBER 16-19, 2020