KM is Back, Baby

"That's correct," said Carla. "Make no mistake, technology plays a major role. Just try to do global knowledge sharing without a great technology platform—such as the one our friend Chris here has—and see how far you get."

Premise #3

As we've often declared in these white papers, the emergence of social networking has been a two-edged sword for organizations. On one blade rests the promise of independent knowledge-sharing at its most pure and humane. On the other, there's a ton of crap that simply drags down the ability to hear through the noise. So, my next premise to my esteemed friends was this: Social networks can be viewed as the ultimate expression of knowledge management-collaboration, knowledge-sharing among peers, wisdom of the crowd and all that. At the same time, however, social networks have added to the noise, volume and diversity of information. The question is: do social networks help, or hinder, typical knowledge management initiatives?

"There's no question that social networking has given KM a shot in the arm," insisted Carla. "When it comes to social networks, the way we used to ask the question is: how much do you want to connect, versus how much do you want to collect? The new version of that is: how much do you want to curate, versus not curate?" Non-curated content, she explained to me, is the typical unmanaged social network content/Twitter feeds that just live out there in the ephemeral. The decision you have to make, Carla believes, is how much of it do you want to have control over, validate and "do brain surgery on," as she puts it. That's today's knowledge management challenge in a nutshell.

"The challenge, especially for SharePoint," (and, face it, SharePoint behaves very much like a social network) "is that SharePoint is very grassroots, very bottom-up. Easy to enter, but as it grows you run into management issues. Knowledge management and information governance has to come from the other direction—top-down," said Chris. So there's an inherent conflict.

"What always happens with SharePoint and its early adopters is that you get a small department that has success, and the other departments take notice and start their own SharePoint environments," Chris continued. "People just say ‘let's do it! Sounds like a good idea.' Suddenly you have small SharePoint instances pervading everywhere. What an organization should do, instead, is take those separate silos of SharePoint and combine them into one centrally managed environment. Again, it's a matter of having the plan in place first, then applying the technology to achieve those business goals."

"There must be an enterprise approach from the beginning," agreed Carla. "But the deployment may come in stages over time. If you don't start with an enterprise strategy, you're not scalable and you're never going to get there. But you DO have to start with a clear business plan. Here's what you need to ask: ‘What do I need to do the most? Is it the transfer of best practices between plants? Or is it to get my new consultants on-boarded more quickly?' Whatever... there has to be a specific reason. The KM team must communicate what it wants to accomplish in terms of what the CEO is also trying to accomplish. If those two things mesh, then you have a winner. It also helps if the component pieces—expertise location, content management, collaboration, all the rest—are transferable to ‘someplace else, too.' That's another key best practice—reusability," she said.

But to do that, you need a central KM group, which as I suggested earlier, is a luxury many companies don't wish to support. The average departmental middle manager doesn't gives a rat's tush about helping another middle manager somewhere else in the organization. But that viral spread is what makes KM a viable enterprise philosophy. So, you gotta speak the lingo.

"That's exactly right," agreed Chris. "Managers have their own responsibilities. Sales has quotas to meet. Marketing has its numbers to meet. If you frame it in those terms, you will get the top-level sponsorship necessary to get the initiative off the ground and going. If you focus only on small, encapsulated efforts that don't scale, then you won't make it happen."

"You have to identify the value proposition not just for the business leadership, but also for individual employees, to get them to participate," added Carla.

So move on to the following pages, and learn from the smartest brains in the world why KM is back, baby.