KM is Writing Itself a New Lease On Life

LAUREN: “We see a certain higher level of knowledge management in the high-risk/high-reward industries….oil and gas, the military, aerospace. Places where a mistake can cause lost lives, or millions of dollars. Then there are the spaces where you get a really big bang for your buck, such as pharmaceutical. There are uneven levels of maturity, but I would not call it a rich man’s game.”

CARLA: “The fastest growing segment of our practice is with mid-sized companies. They’re now just big enough that they need processes. They’ve got enough heft, and enough resources—because you have to have enough money to spend on SOME infrastructure and the additional staff required—but they have growth prospects. There are some organizations that have never turned back, but there are others that got burned the first time, and are just now coming back. But midsized companies are a very attractive spot; they have money and they don’t have a lot of legacy systems to get rid of.”

ANDY: What is driving the adoption of KM? Is it simply the looming loss of expertise? Or something else?

CARLA: “There is certainly a concern about loss of expertise, but the driver for KM is the rapidly changing technology landscape—how do you engineer a new space rocket? Or a car bumper? Or make a new drug? And KM is terrifically prepared for solving those problems—expertise location, communities of practice, repositories if they’re done well…

But we still go back to tried-and-true approaches—training, mentoring and accelerating the rate that people are exposed to the content they need in order to keep up.”

LAUREN: “It’s important to not only find the ‘official’ subject matter expert, but also finding hidden expertise that may not be clear from someone’s job title. And that’s complicated because expertise is dynamic, and may change from day-to-day.”

CARLA: “It’s important that systems can find information just-in-time, whether it’s in content or whether it resides in a person—if you’re lucky. And sometimes it means going outside the boundaries. That’s why large companies, such as big pharma, invest in university research… they want to have someone thinking about these things, so it’s ready when they need it.”

ANDY: I like that term that you like also: “nex’perts.”

CARLA: “Yeah. Us too. We noticed that companies were not really nurturing their nex’perts, and yet that was going to be where their biggest payoffs would come from.

The Social Need

ANDY: Test my theory: I have a theory that “social media” has had enormous buzz but little actual  business effect…OUTSIDE of customer service engagements. That part makes sense…customer feedback, user forums, blogs etc…I can see that playing a role in that very discrete part of the business. But it has had, in my view, very little impact elsewhere. Perhaps it’s oversold?? The “promise” of  social media has actually not come true in general business processes…true or false?? And why or why not?

CARLA: “Social has gone through—is going through—the same hype cycle that most technologies do. But social is different; there’s a pony in there somewhere! We see people using internal wikis to converge knowledge from lots of different domains and lots of different people. “

LAUREN: “We’ve asked about cost-justifying social deployment. And one of our customers asked back: ‘Do you cost-justify email?’ No, you don’t. But you know its crucial to the way work gets done and how people communicate.”

CARLA: “It’s just a communication channel. It’s admittedly not a deep information channel; it’s for just blurting it out. It could be a request for information; it could be ‘here’s what I had for lunch.’ It’s undifferentiated blurting out. It’s not a venue for deep reflective dialog.”

LAUREN: “If you combine these technologies—you start from a piece of content, look up the author, learn about his or her expertise profile, then you connect with them through a microblogging tool or Yammer, then the value becomes more apparent. If you can flip through all those environments from a single interface, then you have something that creates value.”

ANDY: While we’re on the subject of social… This is not so much a question as an observation—it has occurred to me that after all the haranguing about ‘incentivizing’ people to share knowledge, it seems that the key element turns out to be ‘ego gratification.’ People share information because they want their co-workers to know how smart they are! Do you agree with this? And if it’s true, has social had a subtle and unexpected encouraging effect on this resurgence of KM?

CARLA: “I see what you mean. Those social tools are excellent for personal brand-building. Or I should say attempted personal brand-building. What happens is, it typically backfires. Building your brand as a know-it-all is very different from being helpful. Those of us who are introverts, and consider it a noisy channel, are not going to participate.”

ANDY: PS: I do not consider you an introvert, but I know what you mean.

LAUREN: “I think that’s true of the public Internet, when people want to talk about their hobbies and so forth. But we find that the incentives in business social media are different. Many companies, especially the professional-services companies, have gone the ‘gamification’ route, where people get points for sharing and being helpful. Or formal awards of recognition. It comes down to the culture of the organization, and having an environment where people share information because they align it with their success—that’s what gets you promoted and recognized in a meaningful way. Not just showing off.”

CARLA: “The word ‘incentivize’ makes us look at the wrong end of the carrot. The key is ‘what’s the pay-off’ for engaging in certain behaviors. What we should think about is ‘reciprocity.’ If I help you find a piece of content that is exactly what you need to finish your project, then you will help me the next time I need something.”

ANDY: Why has it changed so much? It used to be that ‘knowledge was power,’ and you hoarded your knowledge and didn’t share it, because that was your ticket. Now, it’s the opposite. Why is that?

CARLA: “Demographics are destiny. If you were part of the baby-boomer generation, there was an enormous number of people who were exactly as skilled as you, and willing to take your place right away. Now, people with expertise are scarce, AND they work in a virtual environment. Today, the way to get ahead is to do something useful that other people can see.

“It also has to do with motivational psychology. There are attribution errors that people make. For example, I don’t eat doughnuts, but if you put one in front of me, the odds of me eating it go WAY up! That doesn’t mean I always like doughnuts.”

So lean back, have a doughnut and read the rest of our lovely white paper. Enjoy!