At a time when business leaders responsible for organizational change management and development are desperate for usable knowledge, I suggest that much KM is failing to support the resolution of ever increasing real business challenges.
KM has to be capturing real time information as it happens in the transformative process, if it is to contribute usefully to developing efficient and effective organizations
It amazes me that some of the problems I grappled with in the early 90’s with Knowledge Management (KM) whilst at Accenture are still being discussed and analysed today. I worked on the firm’s first Knowledge Xchange Project which was designed to increase employee engagement through the use of project collaboration software.
KM in my personal view has morphed through many guises over the years from document repositories, knowledge bases, discussion forums, information management best practice, communities of practices, taxonomies, collaboration, search and retrieval. Technologies such as Microsoft’s SharePoint Application provide many of these features out of the box today.
However persistent issues remain and cause concern, such as the control of the volume, relevance and effort in capture. Perhaps more important still is the lack of a way to efficiently link this functionality to the actual business processes, so that data is captured in real time from the tool, business activity or stage gate reviews and is made available to others collaborating in similar tasks, whether now or in the future.
A sample of recent real-life questions from my involvement with leading businesses undergoing major Transformation programs, underlines these concerns:
- “How do we harvest real value from our data?”
- “How do I communicate the value of our KM to all stakeholders and sustain employee engagement?”
- “What is in it for me?”
- “How can we capture the data, make it relevant and control the overhead cost of its management?”
- “How do KM methods and tools solve fundamental and specific business issues and then make it available to support others?”
These questions and many more like them have been substantively left unanswered for years, yet these are obvious fundamental business needs
There are an increasing number of collaborative technology solutions on the market, many of which provide valuable methods for collaboration to address a single element of these questions but still result in yet another medium for debate because they don’t fully address the above business needs
In my view what is needed is to stop thinking of KM as a bolt on activity and to integrate both the capture and release of data within the appropriate business processes themselves.
As a specific example, a conversation with a senior Transformation Director last week highlighted, the problems caused by this lack of integration. He told me ….”we capture all the experience of a project in status reports and end- of-project reviews and this experience is then available to all staff, but it’s all done manually in excel, word or PowerPoint”
However, during the discussion it became apparent that the total cost in man hours of generating all the status reports alone across a number of strategic organizational change management and transformation management projects was considerable and they were often received late and not acted upon.
Also, all of the projects were being run independently from each other by different Programme Management offices, with some people working on several work streams at the same time using a whole host of different tools, manuals and coaching materials and all of them spending time searching across the organisation to find out where similar things had been done before
When I asked him to share his views on the top requirements around transformation management, his response was a common one:
- Embedding a common set of organizational change management tools in the transformation process for use by everyone to focus training, and grow the organizational change management capabilities of the business
- A simple, low cost method to capture the data for re-use
- Ability to locate valuable data from previous initiatives
- Having a real time view of progress, volume velocity and impact of ALL activity
If you can’t honestly say that you have these abilities with what you use today then you may be going down a well trodden rabbit hole!!
At a time when business leaders responsible for organizational change management and development are desperate for usable knowledge, I suggest that much KM is failing to support the resolution of ever increasing real business challenges.
KM has to be capturing real time information as it happens in the transformative process, if it is to contribute usefully to developing efficient and effective organizations.