A lot is hot in the knowledge management world these days: "communities of practice," taxonomies, k-logs, e-learning--and discussing whether the discipline has been a failure.
Is knowledge management still a viable discipline, providing value to business? Or is the concept going the way of reengineering? We decided to devote this issue of our Knowledge Management Supplement to this question.
Steered Into "A Bad Patch"
First, let's address the term "knowledge management" itself. It's true that the moniker has lost a great deal of its initial cachet, and, in fact may even seem downright unappealing to some. Why did this occur? What have the problems been?
Knowledge management initiatives have frequently failed to meet businesses' expectations, thereby bringing that name into some disrepute. A succinct summary of the state of this field was recently offered by one of the recognized founders of the discipline, Thomas Stewart. Stewart, who currently serves as editor of Harvard Business Review, is the author of several leading books on knowledge management. In a recent issue of the journal Strategy & Leadership, Stewart was asked to "assess the current state of the practice of knowledge management." His reply is excerpted below:
Knowledge management steered itself into a bad patch, but seems to be regaining a productive road. The discipline got caught up in a software vendor and consulting firm sales frenzy. It also suffered guilt by association with the Internet bubble and by its connection with the idea of the new economy. During that sales frenzy, people undertook it because it was in vogue rather than for business reasons. Five years ago an analyst at Forrester Research reported that six out of seven knowledge management projects were being undertaken without anybody ever having asked for, or anyone offering, a promised return on investment....
Source: Knowledge is Today's Capital: (interview with Thomas A. Stewart), Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 31, No. 2, 2003, p. 48.
Editor's note: The above interview was published in an excellent issue devoted to the topic of creating scenarios. We'd like to note that we were quite impressed with the depth and quality of the articles in this journal. Strategy & Leadership is published by the U.K. scholarly publisher journal Emerald, and costs $359 per year for a six-issue subscription.]
In addition to Stewart's point that knowledge management often did not succeed because firms made the mistake of beginning the program without clearly defining their business purpose, there were other poor practices and problems in implementing KM that led it to fail to meet a company's expectations, such as:
* Overemphasizing technology and IT as a total knowledge management solution
* Ignoring the need to motivate employees to invest their time and effort in sharing information and expertise
* Implementing knowledge management software that was time-consuming and difficult to learn
* Not anticipating the overwhelming amounts of new information and documents created or made available by knowledge management software
* Not bothering to create reliable methods and metrics to measure the Return on Investment (ROI) from a knowledge management initiative
Current State
CI and KM: Double Jeopardy
To learn more about the current state of knowledge management, we spoke with Jerry Miller, the director of the Competitive Intelligence Center at Simmons College in Boston. Miller is an authority in both the competitive intelligence and knowledge management arenas.
Miller began our discussion by clearly outlining the difference between the two disciplines. Knowledge management (KM), Miller explained, is the harnessing of insights and information that the corporation already knows, while competitive intelligence (CI) is the gathering of information that the organization does not know--which is primarily obtained from outside the corporation, although it may also include gathering what is already located within it. After the data is gathered, the company analyzes it and incorporates it with internal information already known to the firm. A CI analyst then makes suggestions and recommendations to key decision makers. Afterwards, the report is placed in the firm's KM portal for possible use in the future.
After pointing out these differences, Miller noted that the two functions have something in common: they are both in jeopardy. The reason, says Miller, is that both disciplines rely on information technology to warehouse, analyze, and disseminate information. But in today's economic environment, the IT infrastructure in corporations is flat, and little new investment is being made. This, Miller says, has caused a ripple effect, with a significant impact on the viability of both areas.
As a result, some companies have downsized or eliminated their CI and KM operations. Miller says this has occurred primarily in corporations that have not developed metrics to measure the value of these functions; many had added KM and CI in the boom 1990s when these disciplines were seen as new and sexy, but they were implemented without anyone really understanding them or getting top-level buy-in. In some cases, he said, companies purchased a large, complex KM system, and rolled it out without ever really explaining to staff how to properly use it.
Elements of Success
We asked Miller what steps he would take if he were in charge of initiating a knowledge management program today. "I'd get buy-in from the key stakeholders and decision makers," he replied, and would make sure that "they recognize the value of harnessing internal and external information. Then I'd get the buy-in from the rest of the institution so that steps can be taken to support these functions.... Once this is agreed upon," Miller said, "then things will be taken care of as resources permit."
Miller said he would also be sure to set up a solid incentive system to reward employees for sharing information. "If you have a salesperson sitting in his Marriott hotel room at 10 p.m., who had just heard some news that would be important for his colleagues to know about, what added value is it for him to sit there in his room at night and enter it into his laptop? What are the rewards and incentives for him to contribute his insights?"
KM and You
What about the role of the corporate library? What do the information professionals need to focus on today? Miller noted that librarians have a tendency to be insular, which can be counterproductive in a corporation. "The information professionals need to get out of their offices and schmooze with the decision makers and find out what their information needs are," Miller advised. He sees information professionals playing a particularly important role in the areas of taxonomy and thesaurus creation as well as database construction. Miller also sees the job of identifying and acquiring the knowledge management software as falling to the info pros, not the IT people. He feels that IT personnel do not typically have as in-depth an understanding of search engines and databases as do the information professionals.
An Outsourced Future
So, how does Miller see the future of knowledge management now? In his view, corporations will still perceive KM (and CI) as necessary, but no longer as core functions that require internal staff. As a result, he believes that there will be increased use of third parties and outsourcing for these activities in the near future.
Our View
Where do we feel knowledge management stands today? First, it should be pointed out that certain basic truths precede the origin of knowledge management as a specific discipline. These are:
1. That the ideas, knowledge, and expertise of a company's employees are, indeed, its most valuable asset
2. Much of that knowledge is "tacit" or unexpressed knowledge
3. It is advantageous for companies to encourage employees to share their know-how and expertise with the rest of the staff so the organization as a whole can benefit
It follows, then, that it would be a worthy endeavor if a firm created and implemented systems, practices, tools, and technologies to assist in this information sharing--in other words, what we now call knowledge management.
The fundamental thinking and theory behind KM, then, is sound, perhaps even obvious. But what does it say about the discipline: that the theory is good but the practice has so often been bad? As stated earlier, much of this can be explained by the fact that many firms have gone about the knowledge management process very badly, virtually guaranteeing its failure. And the software vendors have tried to make knowledge management all about technology, which is not what KM is about at all.
But there may be even deeper reasons why it has been so hard to make this good theory work in practice. People's desire to create and share knowledge emerges organically in a company when the overall climate and context of the organization supports it. But if a firm ignores its culture, and believes that it is possible to isolate, capture and aggressively compel knowledge sharing, such an endeavor is bound to fail. *
What a company can try to do is create a positive, healthy atmosphere that demonstrates in practice that knowledge is valued and that sharing information is naturally rewarded. Then, the firm can take the time to study how the information is flowing in its organization, identify bottlenecks, and develop some simple tools (both high- and low-tech) to help staff find out who knows what, and where the useful information can be located. This is plain and simple smart management, which must always precede knowledge management.
Further Resources
To learn more about the current challenges and future of knowledge management, we recommend the following articles:
Knowledge Management Lessons
Charles, Susan K.
Online, Jan/Feb 2002, pp. 22-28
KM Conference Report
Koenig, Michael
KMWorld, July 2002, p. 34
Building a Brand: Got Librarian?
Shamel, Cynthia L.
Searcher, July 2002, pp. 60-72
The Third Stage of KM Emerges
Koenig, Michael
KMWorld, March 2002, p. 20-21, 28
* Of course, not only does the culture of the individual firm determine whether knowledge and knowledge sharing is valued, but the wider culture does as well-perhaps even more than the individual organization. We may follow up on this matter in a future issue.
RELATED ARTICLE: About the Competitive Intelligence Center.
Jerry Miller says that Simmons. Competitive Intelligence Center (www.cic.simmons.edu), which began in January 2001, offers more courses in competitive intelligence than anywhere else in the world. The types of students who take courses at the Center are varied. They include students studying to get their MS in CI; those who want a post-masters certificate, non-credit students getting CEUs (continuing-education units), and students in other degree programs who take the CI courses and transfer the credits over to their own program.
Miller has been teaching at Simmons since 1989. He has served on the board of directors of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (SCIP) and has given numerous talks on CI. Most recently, Miller spoke on the relationship between CI and knowledge management at this year.s InfoToday conference, held May 6-8 in New York City.
RELATED ARTICLE: Being smart about knowledge management.
Remember these basics pointers when considering a knowledge management initiative:
* Clearly identify the specific business problem(s) that the knowledge management plan is supposed to fix first.
* Examine your culture and business practices. Are building knowledge and knowledge sharing recognized values? Is sharing information explicitly rewarded? If not, a knowledge management plan won't stick.
* Do not begin your efforts by reading the various knowledge management vendors. brochures. First, figure out what kind of information and expertise needs to be identified and shared. Then determine if and how technology can be used to facilitate that process.
* Keep the project as simple as possible and as easy for staff to learn and use. You might even consider a weblog or WIKI as a substitute for a full-blown KM solution. (See our article on how information professionals can start a knowledge management blog in our March 2003 Knowledge Management Supplement).
RELATED ARTICLE: One giant leap into KM.
We recently came across an example of an information professional who has moved full speed into taking a major role in her firm's knowledge management initiative. Jill Konieczko is an MLS with the tile Knowledge Management Administrator/Librarian for Giant Eagle Business Systems in Pittsburgh PA. We recently asked her to share her thoughts on how she has managed to take on a leadership role in this area. Here's what she said:
Giant Eagle is unique in that it had executive support out of the gate, but its KM zealot also recognized the need for adding professional librarians to the core KM team. Tapped for our proficiencies in identifying, organizing, retrieving, analyzing and packaging information, we librarians provide the information architecture behind the tool, help to build client-relevant knowledge navigators and facilitate in the promotion of the KM program.
With a core KM team of ten, including two librarians, four trainers, and two KM administrators, Giant Eagle's KM program is available to 6,000 of its retail employees, with plans to roll it out through the corporate offices in 2003. A portal and KM toolkit is available in every department of every corporate store, providing one-stop access to policies, communications, regulations, forms, reference materials, and more, including a collaborative tool through which employees can communicate. Current plans are to develop a proprietary taxonomy and increase training and promotional efforts.
This is the kind of position of which librarians dream!
The above case is recounted in our recently published booklet for information professionals titled: 50 Ways to Make Yourself Indispensable to Your Organization. The retail price for the 67-page guide is $79; but is available to Information Advisor subscribers for $59 (+$3 shipping). To order a copy contact Sonia Bedikian at: sbedikian@findsvp.com or call 212-645-4500.
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