Knowledge Management 2.0

Connnecting Experts versus Codifying Content

2014-09-09T08:07:00.000-04:00

I recently read about an upcoming SCIP (Strategic and Competitive Intelligence Professionals) conference session focused on Talent Networks. See link at bottom.

So often in Knowledge Management the focus is on capturing, codifying and organizing knowledge. While this is great for explicit knowledge, it fails to address the tactic information we all have in our heads around subject matter,expertise and relationships that is much more difficult to capture.

I used to laugh when I was at Morgan Stanley around the ways Investment Banking looked to share information; all very content-capture focused. Yet the nature of the business was much more around personal connections, and due to the sensitive nature of ongoing deals, bankers could often not explicitly post content to be broadly shared unless it was meticulously sanitized. In Financial Services especially, synergies of expertise sharing could similarly have been accomplished by simply connecting people with the right expertise and giving the organization better knowledge around 'who knows who' and 'who knows what' versus trying to codify all content.

Maintaining and Tracking Internal Expert Networks: Keys to Competitive Intelligence Success
Wed, May 8, 2013
http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&discussionID=208243935&gid=68320&commentID=-1&trk=eml-anet_ancmt-b-0&ut=2wS84whiuiHRA1

Ways to think about Legal KM strategy

2014-09-07T11:03:00.000-04:00

In thinking about the areas you may want to address in a Lawe Firm's Knowledge Management strategy, here is one segmentation to consider.

1. Content (or Know What)
This may include Research, e-Discovery, Court Filings, Rulings, Declarative Knowledge

2. Processes (or Know How)
This may include forms, templates, process tutorials, training and development

3. Relationships (or Know Who)
This may include firm expertise, CRM data about existing clients, etc.

Putting in place solutions for each of these area should probably be a part of your strategy. And each may have its own set of solutions. This of this as the basis "Knowledge Management Foundation" for your firm or practice.

A more advanced approach for each area could then extend this to thinking about including Business Intelligence and ways to glean insights and make your practice more efficient.

Under Category 1, examples of this would be adding Insights about market or legislative news. Not just publishing out the news or new rulings, but allowing attornies to add commentary around the news.

Under Category 2, adding real-time collaboration about work product creation could be one example of improving existing processes. Automated contract systems that dynamically add appropriate clauses and phrases depending on the situation versus just a standard template could be a way to take contract or letter creation to the next level.

Under Category 3, mining your CRM data to help attornies discover who knows who. This could be used for enhancing an existing relationship or facilitating new business development can connecting attornies with attornies in other practice areas who potentially already have connections to a particular client or prospect.

There are lots of areas to focus knowledge management on in a legal practice. There was just one approach to breakout the various areas. It doesn't mean you need to focus on all these areas, but it does give you a way to think about all the potential focus area and then prioritize your initiatives and resources from there.

How does your law firm or practice think of the core focus areas for KM?

Legal KM - storing legal advice

2014-08-14T10:54:00.000-04:00

The challenge of storing Legal Advice?

Many Legal departments and law firms have the challenge of how to share legal advice obtained through research around one particular Matter, and make it available for re-use by other attornies.

The biggest issue here is two-fold.

1. First, the format of the content. Much of the content is initially gathered through e-mails back and forth between inside and outside counsel, or research performed and not captured anywhere. Either way, the result can be a long string of e-mails - very hard to consume for a reader unfamiliar with the matter without some background and context, or nothing is captured at all.

2. Second, is the billable user base. The same problem that existed in my days at PricewaterhouseCoopers. You cannot build in process to capture content and expect billable personnel like Consultants or Attornies to do it, unlesss you can make it part of their normal business processes (or required) or if you make it billable back to the issue client as part of the admin of the engagement at the time. In absence of doing this, no attorny is going to be able to spend alot of time reformatting content or codifying legal advice gathered on a particular matter.

One solution is just capturing anything and everything; e-mails, e-mail threads, files, etc. Easy enough to mail-into a database or wiki and make searchable, but still incrdibly difficult to consume.

Has anyone done anything with Legal Advice?

Any suggestions on how your firm may have solved for this?

Sharing Confidential Content - The Need to Sanitize?

2014-07-09T18:30:00.000-04:00

In relationship businesses like Financial Services, Management Consulting and Law, there is often a need to safeguard the identity of clients to the other parts of your company; where someone else may be working with a competitor as an example. The challenge becomes...

How to share when you can't share everything?

Many companies follow some type of sanitization practice; a way to mask out the names of companies, financials, and other information used in presentations and proposals that could be used by others to assess who the client is or was.

This process is time consuming for the submitter and creates a barrier for open and easy sharing, or creates a workload for Knowledge Managers and content editors. It becomes useful therefore to think about alternative approaches and which may work best for your organization.

Some models to think about are:

A. Review then Post
This model requires santization of sensitive information prior to publishing. As mentioned above, it creates a higher bar for submission or work for your Knowledge Managers and creates an artificial delay in getting content published in real-time.

B. Post then Review
This alternative model is a way to support the un-sanitized publishing of content to a more restricted audience at first and then establishing a post-publishing review process by Knowledge Managers to identify content that is appropriate for more broadly sharing - once a sanitized version is obtained. This model, some argue makes ti too easily to post content to a restricted audience with no incentive for broader sharing. The benefits of this approach however is that it gives your Knowledge Managers and editors more "pushed" content to work with; without having to solicit it, and from there, they can focus their efforts on review and escalation of access versus hunting down content.

Ways to think about levels of sharing under this model could include:
Deal Team Sharing ==> Industry or Group Level Sharing ==> Broad Sharing

Confidentiality and legal requirements will tend to increase as entitlement access is opened up moving from left to right above. Publishing and collect of content will be easier on the left.

C. Who Has What Content versus Content Sharing
A third model which can work hand in hand with the models above, or as an alternative, is where the content is very sensitive, eliminate the need to sanitize by moving from a content sharing model to a model where you just share who has the content.

The analogy would be a Gartner Group or Forrester Research executive summary. A brief abstract is used to give an idea of the strategic value of the content without sharing the details. Contact information is then provided to the author if you want to get the full version.

With this model, a senior banker or practice manager can relay they have implemented a unique solution in a specific industry for a client with this type of issue without relaying the details of the clients name or deal specific. They are not sharing the content, but simply marketing the knowledge they have. Once contacted, they can vet if it is appropriate to share the content with the requestor on a case-by-case basis. The disadvantage of this approach is that authors may get inundated with requests they then need to service. The advantage however is the ability to share what they know without the effort required for making the content itself broadly available.

Sharing "who has what" can be equally as effective as sharing the content itself.

KM for Investment Banking

2014-06-23T17:34:00.000-04:00

The challenge for Knowledge Management is what initiatives to focus on? Choice of initiatives distinguishes the successful KM organizations from the unsuccessful. Ideally, you want to avoid focusing on the softer "fluffier" initiatives like building a more "sharing friendly" culture or developing content repositories for shating with no core business objective in mind.

Focus on measurable initatives that impact the direction and growth of your business. These all don't need to be the most complex or expensive initiatives either. Many of the most impactful initiatives can be quite simple as long as impacting some aspect that advances a core goal of the business; identifies new customers, closes sales faster or delivers higher quality product.

In Investing Banking or other engagement-related businesses, think about what impacts the Deal Life Cycle; what processes and content areneeded at each stage of the Deal Life Cycle.

The Deal Life Cycle can be categorized into 3 main buckets:

A. Relationship Development
Relationship Development activities involve helping to develop new client relationships or extend existing relationships. Ways to facilitate development include tools and content to enhance prospecting, knowing who else in your organization has previously or is still currently working with a prospect, learning "who knows who" at your prospect - which can include employees or board members of existing clients, implementing ways to communicate more real-time with customers using Web 2.0, etc.

B. Selling
Selling activities involve senior bankers or practice managers crafting solutions to met the needs of their clients. Selling can be facilitated by assisting with product and solution selection, sharing of thought leadership content and best practices from prior engagements, facilitating innovation, helping identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, etc.

C. DeliveryDelivery activities involve producing the work product to close the sale or deliver the final solution. Delivery can be facilitated making its production more efficient, improving its quality or speeding up the time to market. Activities to facilitate delivery might include offering access to re-usable content such as credentials and qualifications, slide libraries, offering tools to collaborate with other team members more efficiently, providing ways to connect with others in the company who may have worked on similar solutions before, etc.

What would you rename "Knowledge Management"?

2014-05-12T08:11:00.000-04:00

In response to Art Schlussel's question in the LinkedIN Knowledge Management Experts form: "If the term "KM" could get a do-over what would you call the discipline?"

Response:
I might call it very simply "Business Transformation".

The greatest challenge for me with Knowledge Management has always been that the easy part is coming up with a million things you can do in the space. The hard part is selecting the types of targeted initiatives that can have a meaningful impact on the business. While searchable content repositories are useful, there is clearly higher ROI on KM initiatives that impact new business discovery, client delivery and time to market, and identifying cross-selling opportunities.

When Web 2.0 came along, it suffered from the same challenge as KM. There's lots of things you can do in the space, but the different between companies successful at it versus those not, tends to be in the types of initiatives targeted and the execution. For Web 2.0, as an example, you could deploy a wiki or blog platform as a grassroots effort and see where it goes in 2-3 years, or alternatively, identify existing processes and informal networks in your organization that already exist, and use web 2.0 technology to enhance and facilitiate those processes and networks.

You'll note, I have stayed away from the world "information" in my name above, because I do not think KM is all about information or content. Tacit knowledge is as important as explicit knowledge, and while it is possible to try to codify tacit knowledge, probabyl the best way to leverage it is developing reference knowledge in your organization around "who knows who" and "who knows what", and getting people to the right resources quickly. For this reason, I think the Talent Management aspect of KM is important - and it's as much about finding people as it is explicit content.

Lastly, for KM to be really successful, I believe KM platforms should not be stand-alone. I recall an old APQC Conference where the discussion lead to "how you create 'slack' time" in your organization for workers to use your KM tools. Well, in a billable law or consulting firm there is no such thing as 'slack time', but regardless, having to go someplace else outside your daily processes to find KM-related information seems to create work versus efficiency. Another key underpinning of KM success is a very tight integration of KM content and tools into existing business process; deliverying the knowledge that is needed in a contextual, real-time way, and making processes more efficient or tranforming them (aka BPR).

Thus, for me, it's all about managing content, people and processes in a way to improve operating efficiency or drive revenue growth. And at least for now, "Business Transformation" is the best I can come up with - though BPR or IBT would work as well.

What do you think?

See here for rest of thread and other responses.

Where to focus online networking in the Enterprise?

2014-04-18T10:23:00.000-04:00

According to a colleague, there are probably three categories for online communities:
1) Facilitated groups
2) Existing real-world groups
3) Ad-hoc, non-facilitated groups

(Actually two since #2 is a sub-set of #1.) So the question becomes, where best to focus online networking efforts as organizations attempt to migrate social networking into the Enterprise?

Two approaches could be as follows.

1. Ad-hoc, non-facilitated groups
One approach is to deploy a platform for networking with discussion forums, and see where a need organically takes hold. There is a mindset in the Web 2.0 camp that says "you don't have to identify communities, they will identify themselves if provided the appropriate platform." The question here is what will be the topic of those communities and how effective will they be are innvoation and collaboration that will be truly meaningful the the organization. Letting people to connect and then seeing where it goes of course could be a good way to initially introduce the technology.

2. Facilitated groups (including extending existing real-world groups and existing informal networks)
A second approach is to establish a taxonomy by which to organize online networking forums. The taxonomy could be focused on specific products, clients or processes with the goal of cutting across existing organizational structures. One way to help pre-define where some of these targeted networks should focus is to identify the informal networks that already exist in your organization. For example, an informal network might be a a go-to-person or group that is called for specific expertise. Or a person that is organizational positioned to be aware of cross divisional opportunities. (It have been shown that more information today flows through informal networks in organizations than formal organizational structures.)

From the informal networks that already exist, the next step would be to determine which connections can benefit most and provide the most value to the firm by being enabled and formalized.

Lastly, and most important, success will depend on identifying facilitators or network leaders to help guide topics and monitor content. This is much of the same lesson I learned when observing huindreds of collaborative forums being deployed in the early days of Lotus Notes at PricewaterhouseCoopers. The ones that succeeded had strong purpose, leaders and support, fostered or leveraged an existing trusted community, and generated value creation for both members and the firm at large.

Potential areas where online networking in the Enterprise should focus includes:Generating revenue
- Improving cross-selling
- Product innovation
- One Firm Approach to Clients
Boosting productivity
- Improving the allocation of resources
- Eliminating inefficiencies
Career Development
- Mentoring
- Mobility
- Diversity networks

Overall, there is clearly a place for both ad-hoc, emergent networks, and more structured targeted ones. For me, I would rather see an organization have 3 or 4 really well targeted onlie networking that can measurably impact operating efficiences, cost savings or revenue generation versus hundreds of networking groups; with many focused on less impactful business topics such places to eat or the latest sports news. May be here is one of those fundamental differences between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. In Web 2.0 it's currently all about connecting - with the purpose and vale of such connections yet to be seen or measured. In the Enterprise, driving efficiencies and revenue should be the primary objective - which unfortunately may require a bit more structure and targeting of how online networking technology is deployed and where and how it is topically focused.

From the McKinsey Quarterly article "Mapping the value of employee collaboration":
"Targeted action is dramatically more effective than promoting connectivity indiscriminately, which typically burdens already-overloaded employees and yields network diseconomies. A more informed network perspective helps companies to identify the few critical points where improved connectivity creates economic value by cutting through business unit and functional silos, physical distance, organizational hierarchies, and a scarcity of expertise."

Innovative Idea Sharing

2014-03-12T10:18:00.000-04:00

A very cool new tool for sharing ideas in the enterprise. Historically, suggestion boxes have been less than successful, since there in no incentive to submit, little method for vetting ideas and recognition is often lacking.

Knowledge Managers have often debated how to incent knowledge sharing. Should the corporation build in performance or financial incentives for those sharing content? Or responding to inquiries?

MyIdeaShare.com takes the idea of the suggestion box to the next level. By integrating idea sharing into a gaming environment in the form of a stock market or exchange model, a grassroots concensus can be built around new ideas and less valuable ideas can be 'sold' - losing value. In addition, submitters with a portfolio of really good ideas can be easily recognized for their contribution.

Check it out at myideashare.com. I would be curious to know what you think?

Facebook versus LinkedIn

2014-03-04T09:28:00.000-05:00

An interesting McKinsey Quarterly article:
When Job Seekers Invade Facebook

I would be interested in hearing other people's views of how they compare Facebook versus LinkedIn.

More typically Facebook is about personal networks and sharing information with friends (and less about finding new friends as with MySpace). LinkedIn is more about professional business networking; connecting with new business acquintenances, job networking, etc.

Do you see a business application for Facebook in the near future?
What are the ramifications (example, need for separating personal info from business info)?
Given LinkedIn has more of a business tenor, what role can it play in the enterprise?

Your thoughts?

Establishing a Successful KM Strategy

2014-02-12T14:54:00.000-05:00

A successful Knowledge Management Strategy should:

Support the overall business strategy

Support core value creation processes

Focus on where value can be created internally in the Business and externally for Customers

Prioritize KM initiatives based on ROI, where possible

Produce measurable results

Embed KM initiatives into existing business processes vs. creating new stand-alone processes

What do you think are elements of a successful KM strategy?

Web 2.0 versus KM

2013-12-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

There was a great debate at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last year around whether Web 2.0 is really anything new and how much of an impact it will eventually have on organizations as it is adapted and introduced into the Enterprise.

Tom Davenport, one of the mainstay luminaries of Knowledge Management and author of many books on the topic, took the more doubtful or questioning position on the impact that Web 2.0 will have on the Enterprise. Harvard professor Andrew McAfee, who helped coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0', took the more protagonist position. Watch for yourself:
http://www.veodia.com/portal_scroller2.php?portal=1043&user=pargandhi

Here is an example of some of Tom's comments:
http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/davenport/200703/why_enterprise_20_wont_transfo.html

And some of Andrews:
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee/index.php/faculty_amcafee_v3/watching_the_film_of_the_fight/

There are a number of arguments. One is about whether Enterprise 2.0 will democratize the organization; raising the voice and power of the employee versus the top-down hierarchical organization. I personally am not sure this should be or needs to be a goal of Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. The more basic question is whether Web 2.0 technologies will improve the way employees in the organization publish, distribute, share and re-use knowledge?

The answer is of course YES.

Yuo have to laugh however at all the Web 2.0 evangelists out there that naively think Web 2.0 is really anything new? The answer is NO. The concepts of distributed publishing (blogs), collaboration (wikis), online networking (personal web pages, corporate online directories) and personalized news feeds (RSS) have been around since the mid-90's and early days of the internet. All these concepts were successful tools that could be enabled in any Knowledge Management strategy back in the day (and I'm aging myself here). While at Coopers & Lybrand and then PricewaterhouseCoopers, I helped deploy hundreds of collaborative discussion forums via Lotus Notes, and later Lotus Domino on the web. These were asynchronous discussion forums that would allow for all sorts of free-form discussions and collaboration to take place online. Lotus Notes also enabled personalized online published and workflow around that publishing effortlessly, in a way that Microsoft in 2007 has still yet to enable. Of course, beyond Lotus, there were many other web tools and sites available as well to do similar things. Remember eGroups or Delphi Forums (collaborative spaces) or Geocities (personal webpages\sites a decade prior to MySpace)!

For the most part however, I think the main reason Web 2.0 seems so new is that the current generation of young Generation X'ers are seeing this technology for the first time in the broader consumer-based sites like MySpace and Facebook. Sure, of course, there is some new stuff in Web 2.0 too. The viral way social networking sites have been positioned and are taking off, and the ease of Mashups in creating new applications on the fly.

So back to Tom and Andrew's debate. Will Web 2.0 technologies significantly revolution the way knowledge is shared within organizations? The answer is a definitive MAYBE. This is the same issue faced by all of us 10 years ago as we looked to deploy successful Knowledge Management programs in the enterprise. Some will be very successful. And others will not be.

At Enterprise 2.0, I could not help the deja vu of the type of questions being asked from what was asked in the 90's around Knowledge Management.

What does it take to make Web 2.0 successful in the Enterprise?
What types of methods can be used to foster use of Web 2.0 applications?
How is senior management buy-in obtained?
How do you define the value provided by these initiatives?
For what purposes should you target a Wikis, Blog or Collaborative Forum?

And the answers are all the same.

A successful Enterprise 2.0 strategy, just like a Knowledge Management strategy of the 90's, needs to be focused on the business objectives of the enterprise. Wikis and networking needs to be focused on topics and purposes related to business processes or products. There needs to be evangelists or super-users that foster use of the technology and monitor the content. There needs to be leadership and cultural changes that support use of the technology. In some cases, training around it.

If you look at Case Studies of many of the successful Web 2.0 implementations today (successful as defined by not just being used, but by providing value to the organization), they deployed the technology with a specific purpose or focus in mind; sharing information across globally dispersed groups, across industry groups or organizational boundaries; exposing product experts to a broader audience; etc.

Unsuccessful Web 2.0 implementation, just like their KM counterparts, are those than lacked purpose. That put the technology out there in the hopes it would be used and find it's own purpose. The "build it and they will come" approach. One of the main challenges that knowledge management had in the 90's is the same that Web 2.0 has today in translating to Enterprise 2.0; how to avoid "implementing technology for technology's sake."

Many knowledge management initiatives fail when the initiatives selected have longer-term payback, drive soft changes like "trying to create an information sharing culture" and are not that measurable in terms of ROI or tie into revenue. The knowledge management initatives that most often succeed have shorter-term payback with measurable results like improved productivity, cost savings or revenue generation.

As in KM, two approaches to follow are:

1. Define pointed Web 2.0 solutions within the Enterprise where the technology can make an impact to networking, relationships, expertise sharing or finding, improving business processes, etc.

2. Define a top-down strategy for the Enterprise; where core business objectives are identified, KM goals defined for each of those objectives, and then the "right" technology selected to facilitate each of those goals.

You can always deploy a blog or wikis technology in the organization, and see where it goes. But in absence of a direction or purpose, you will most likely just be giving your employees a "cool new tool" to have fun with and may delay the timeframe for extracting meaningful value by a couple of years.

How does Web 2.0 impact the enterprise?

2013-10-22T01:44:00.000-04:00

Web 2.0 tools include unstructured content capture tools like Wikis and Blogs, content distribution tools like RSS Feeds, easy to change user interfaces to help drive personalization, and user-driven application integration services such as Mashups. Web 2.0 tools primarily empower end-users (just like Lotus Notes did in the 90's) to more easily create web-based content, personalized their web experience in terms of content search and delivery and facilitate social networking through more open content sharing.

Enterprise 2.0 is the application of Web 2.0 tools in the corporate or enterprise space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_2.0

Through the appropriate application of Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise, end-user personalization, content acquisition, distribution and collaboration can be empowered. Strategically, there really isn't anything new here. Fundamentally, organizations need to continue to focus on the same thing that Knowledge Management has always focused on; driving real business goals through knowledge sharing, process improvement and relationship management.

Web 2.0 tools should become part of the tools looked at to implement an organization's Knowledge Management strategy and more easily enable it. Application developers should become aware of these new tools, like any others, as they develop new applications. While implementing Web 2.0 tools in the enterprise should not be an end goal unto itself, may be more than anything, Web 2.0 is driving companies to think about, once again, the impact that knowledge sharing and collaboration can have.

Publish Content or Knowledge About Content?

2013-09-13T10:28:00.000-04:00

As an extension of the discussion on when to publish content or pointed to content, we can think to a few different buckets when thinking of how to codify knowledge. Or should I say "when to codify or not codify".

Codification was part of Arthur Anderson's problem in the 90's. They built a large repository, capture a hord of content, and then realized they needed to thinking about usage. And of course, integration with existing business processes.

In Financial Services, the ability to share information about deals in progress or even closed can be difficult since information about the company and its strategy can be included in case studies and pitchbooks. This information may not be shareable for many reasons, including another Deal Team working with a competitor in the same industry. Thus, the conversation around santization. Even sharing information in Case Studies around Product Strategies used can be equially difficult for the same reason.

Santization is one answer. As we have learned at Morgan Stanley, this is a huge barrier. It requires manual effort by Investment Bank Analayst and Associates to scrub the data and allow it to be posted. Without the right performance incentices in place, no one is compelled to spend the time doing it. Other options include:

* Devloping a central content publishing group to scrub the data. Both costly and injects time delays. Offshore is probably not an option due to data sensitively. A central group was tried here, but got disbanded during the 2008-2009 downturn.

* Putting in place an automated scrubbing process. We have never attempted this, but while entities like blinding Company Names can be easily done, knowing which numbers, charts and deal details need to be taken out or blinded requires manual oversight of someone on the deal team familiar with the deal.

This leads me to the 'buckets'. Some content is easily captured, codified and made searchable for re-use. And other content is not.

Bucket 1 - Explicit Content (Not Sensitive)
This is perfect for codification, storage, tagging and re-use

Bucket 2 - Explicit Content (Sensitive or Difficult to Stage)
In this case, the content is available, but is either too sensitive, requires too much manual intervention to reformatted, or if in a format too cumbersone to stage. This is perfect for codification, storage, tagging and re-use

Bucket 3 - Tactic Knowledge
This is either information that people know in their heads about clients, processes, or products that is not currently codified anywhere.

If your content falls into Buckets 2 and 3, rather that tried to capture everything, a simple template that briefly describes the best practice or product strategy might be the better answer. This could be as simple as:
- Problem We Were Solving For
- Solution Used
- When This Strategy Would Make Sense
- Contact Information
- Keywords for tagging

By doing this, others can understand the strategy without knowing anything about the deal of client. They can then follow up with the person(s) listed as Contacts to learn more, and that person can assess what is relevance to be shared.

Bottom line, knowledge management is NOT all about storing content. It's about managing a company's Intellectual Capital. Sometimes this can be done by storing content for search and re-use, other cases by providing summaries (as described above) for sharing who know's what or what has been done with the goal of connecting people, and in other cases, just connecting people.

There are lots of reasons by the capture of explicit content is not always the answer. In our current 'Google' world, we have the tendency to want to frame all content problems in terms of search and retrieval, but strategies for sharing and optimizing intellectual capital are much broader.

Goals of Knowledge Management

2013-08-10T10:55:00.000-04:00

Goals of Knowledge Management should include:

* identifying new market opportunities (globally, new industry niches, cross-selling existing products)

* responding to opportunities more quickly

* increasing time to market with products and services

* improving the way information-based products are delivered; including collaboration between a company and its customers

* improving the way client relationships are managed

* creating new information-based products

* increasing the revenue yield on products; either reducing costs to expand margins or adding new sources of value

* making operational processes for efficient

* optimizing placement and utilization of existing talent pool

* strengthening existing talent pool (growing competencies, exposing existing competencies, exposing tacit knowledge, leveraging relationships, fostering innovation, etc.)

What do you think some of the goals of Knowledge Management should be?

The role of Search in KM

2013-08-05T11:34:00.000-04:00

Search and retrieval of content into itself should not be a primary goal of Knowledge Management initiatives. Seach and retrieval of content is only relevant in the context of the business processes they are supporting.

Similarly, relevancy scoring of search results is important, but the challenge becomes how should relevancy be measured? As a baseline, relevancy can be gauged based on how well search terms are matched to the particular content of a web page or document. A more evolved model however would be incorporating business use cases into the relevancy score and deriving a relevancy score that incorporates knowledge of the business purpose or process that the search is being performed to support.

How can they same search against the same set of web pages or documents yield different search result relevancies? Knowledge of what the person has previously searched on or queries letting the user specify in greater detail their particular purposes might be methods for better identifying the purpose of a particular search beyond just the search terms entered.

Goals of a Knowledge Management program

2013-08-04T01:39:00.000-04:00

Examples of goals on a Knowledge Management program could include:

* Foster Cross-Selling
* Grow Revenue
* Increase Productivity
* Retain Intellectual Capital
* Grow Intellectual Capital

Each of these goals could be potentially addressed through initiatives that focus on:
1. Content and Knowledge Sharing or KNOW WHAT
2. Business Processes or KNOW HOW
3. Relationship Management both internally and externally or KNOW WHO

Fundamentally, a broad thinking Knowledge Management program should encompass or work closely with all of the following areas:
1. Content Management
2. Learning & Development
3. Talent Management

Where KM Belongs in the Organization?

2013-07-24T07:31:00.000-04:00

There are many ways to organize the KM function in and organization. There is no 'right' way but there are clear pros and cons to each.
1. Enterprise or Divisional. Enterprise KM leaders are best position to identify cross-divisional synergies and rationalize what initiatives should take place at the corporate versus business unit level. Divisional KM leaders are best positioned to understand the specific business and its processes to identify ways to drive revenue or create efficiencies.
Divisional lead models may make most sense when the business units of a company are diverse.
2. Business versus Technology.
Whether at the enterprise or divisional levels, KM initiatives led by the business are well positioned to support the core goals of the business as well as consider other typically KM success factors; leadership sponsorship, culture issues, business process integration, etc.
KM initiatives driven by Technology need to take extra measures to ensure business support and adoption, and avoid the common pitchfall of deploying a cool new technology or system for technology's sake versus focusing the mission around core strategic business drivers. The latter is the same risk of deploying Web 2.0 technologies without a business mission in mind.

Organizational Models for Sponsoring KM Initiatives

2013-07-21T11:39:00.000-04:00

There are four basic models for how Knowledge Management initatives are typically sponsored or driven in different organizations:

1. IT-Driven, Bottom-Up initiatives can be found in organizations when there is not a formal KM strategy for the firm, but some really good ideas bubble out of the IT organization. The challenge with bottom-up, grassroots initiatives however can often be obtaining proper funding; not only for development, but for business side activities such as training, marketing and content maintenance once the initiative is made operational.

2. IT-Driven, Top-Down initiatives can be found in visionary IT departments out of the CIO's office or areas responsible for corporate infrastructure or desktop productivity. One of the primary challenges with this model is to ensure that initiatives are aligned with business objectives. Often times, IT-driven firmwide initiatives can easily become large R&D efforts focused on rolling on out cool new collaborative or content management technologies without full consideration for how the new technology with facilitate core business strategy and objectives.

3. Business-Driven, Bottom-Up initiatives can be found within specific Business Departments when there is a very specific need that can be addressed through better knowledge capture and re-use. These initiatives are almost always very well aligned with the business objectives of the department. With these types of initiatives, it is often good to spend some additional time on due diligence to ensure that similar technology or initiatives have not been implemented elsewhere that can be easily re-used, and to find a way post-implementation to let other areas of the organization know about what has been put in place for possible leverage in other areas with similar needs.

4. Business-Driven, Top-Down initiatives are found in organizations with a well-formed KM department. This model is typically the best model whereby KM initiatives are most always aligned with business strategy and objectives. Unlike the risks of IT-driven models, the chances of deploying a new cool technology for technologies sake is minimized. In addition, the problems of localized duplication that can arise with Business-Driven, Bottom-Up models is avoided. Business-Driven, Top-Down KM programs can holistically look at both firmwide business strategy and departmental objectives to identify initiatives with the most firmwide impact.

From an implementation perspective, this model is often best positioned as well to examine both existing local initiatives to determine which initiatives can be expanded to a firmwide level and avoid the pitfalls of deploying new cool technologies for technologies sake.

This model while common to the top consulting firms like Deloitte and E&Y is found less frequently in other industries. Firmwide, top-down KM programs typically require a vision and commitment from senior management; without which one of the other three models is much more likely.

Making content capture successful

2013-07-02T04:21:00.000-04:00

Different organizations have tried various knowledge capture incentives, including making content submission manditory and incorporating rewards into performance measurement plans. More successful approaches typically include incorporating knowledge capture into exiting business processes.

For example, when a consulting engagement ends, a Standard Operating Process for the firm is for the consultant to submit the proposal that won the business for that engagement or altenratively, write up a post-mortem of the engagement with lessons learned.

Similarly, in investment banking, at the end of a new deal, the bank analyst could have a standard procedure to submit the appropriate deal documents that represent the unique strategies or learnings that made the particular deal a success.

Prioritizing Knowledge Management Initiatives

2013-06-16T12:44:00.000-04:00

Prioritizing KM Initiatives

They are many types of different Knowledge Management (KM) Initiatives. One of the greatest KM challenges is identifying the appropriate KM initiatives for your organization. I recall visiting the World Bank back in the late 1990's when they were just starting a formal KM program. They had a laundry list of hundreds initiatives, and didn't know where to start first.

Knowledge Management initiatives can fall into one of the following broad categories:

Knowledge capture and dissemination

Business Process Improvement

Continuous Learning

Product and Service Development

Find below a detailed list of potential areas where Knowledge Management initiatives can focus:

Identifying, qualifying, synthesizing knowledge

Storing or mapping knowledge for re-use

Embedding “knowledge re-use” into business processes

Leveraging existing customer relationships, e.g. identifying cross-selling opportunities from other business units

Leveraging customer contacts and individual networks

Identifying ways to shorten the sales cycle

Automating content re-use to quicken RFP responses

Capturing information on firm expertise

Developing processes to leverage firm expertise

Ensuring new opportunities get routed to the right people

Ensuring the right people can be identified for specific opportunities

Identifying ways to shorten time to market

Improving delivery of products & services

Fostering product & service innovation

Developing new information-based products & services

Improving customer collaboration for product development, delivery and post-engagement

Collecting customer feedback

Leveraging customer experiences and “best practices” from sales

Publicizing successes

Creating a knowledge sharing culture

Sharing information on products, services, and resources

Developing individual and team expertise

Providing continuous learning

Delivering structured knowledge for training, answering need to know and innovative solution development

Fostering collaboration

Facilitating research & development

Fostering KM Thought Leadership

Managing intellectual property (e.g. patents)

With so many areas of potential focus, it is important to prioritize KM Initiatives based on:

Impact on the business strategy & objectives

Return on Investment

Implementation time

Measurability of results

Since Knowledge Management should be part of core value generation, not just a cost center, it is really important to prioritize KM initiatives based on ROI. It is also important a few early on initiatives that are not resource intensive. Creating a few early "wins" is a great way to establish longer-term support and adoption of KM programs. It can also be a good way to obtain resources later on when needed for larger, more complex initiatives.

Product Management Goals

2013-06-04T12:40:00.000-04:00

Product Management Goals

Ensuring the “right” set of product features to retain customers and grow sales

Getting products and services to market faster

Ensuring high product quality

Supporting sales to both existing and new customers Generating products to break into new markets

Overall goal = Grow Revenue!

Role of Product Management

Defining Product Strategy and Vision

Performing Competitor Analysis

Positioning Product in Marketplace

Managing New Product Releases

Supporting Sales and Customer Service

Providing Product Expertise for Sales

Product Management Support for Sales

1. Create a Feedback Channel for Sales into Product Management

Establish e-mail or form process

Provide visibility into fixes and enhancement ideas submitted

2. Provide View into Product Roadmap

Provide summary of long-term roadmap with timeframes for use with prospects

Provide view of timing of new features, including priority rationalization

Publish known product issues

3. Provide Sales Support Tools and Collateral

Work with Marketing to generate positioning presentations for each Product Line

Provide positioning content; including value propositions, positioning versus competitors, pricing and sales qualifiers

Develop Sales collateral

Develop easy-to-use demos

4. Provide SME to help with sales calls, trade shows, etc.

Is "Slack Time" Needed for Successful KM?

2013-05-18T10:51:00.000-04:00

While attending an APQC conference years ago, I recall the term "slack time" raised as a requirement for successful KM initiatives. The concept was you need to build in time for employees to stop they normal day-to-day operational tasks to use your Knowledge Management application. Being from Coopers & Lybrand LLP, an hourly billable consulting firm, I cringed at the concept. Clearly, the folks introducing this concept were not froom a consulting or law firm that is billable to customers.

The concept of "slack time" infers that you are building stove piped KM applications not connected to day-to-day business processes. Doing this, as a company, you will inevitably encountered a series of additional challenges around incentizing usage. In thinking about how to avoid the need for "slack time" the answer we arrived at we fairly simple - though rarely followed. KM applications needed to be tightly integrated with the day-to-day business processes of the employee. The employee should not have to stop what they are doing to find time for KM, or leave one application and go to another. And KM initiatives should not introduce new time consuking tasks. In fact, if you take the concept of business process integration one step further, KM initiatives should actually be defined and designed to support specific components of already existing business processes.

Existing business processes (and in some cases re-engineered, improved processes) should be the starting point for identifying which KM initiatives to focus on. KM initatives should support, facilitiate and improve specific components of your company's business processes; whether those processes are finding sales leads, finding network contacts within your company to the prospect, identifying products to cross and upsell to customers, quickly compiling a best practices proposal to respond to an RFP, putting together an experienced engagement team, or delivering products and services. If you map our all your core business processes that drive revenue, this should be the road map for where all your KM initiatives plug into the business and integrate with specific processes along the way from customer acquisition to delivering products and services.

How does site "stickness" translate in the Knowledge Management space?

2013-05-12T11:14:00.000-04:00

There are two threads that sort of come together in the KM world. Think about the different between Google and Yahoo! Google relies much more on a syndication model of distributing advertisements through AdSense using their network of partner sites. Yahoo! however still needs to focus on driving users to their site and retaining them there as long as possible.

In the KM world of internal corporate KM initiatives, which model would you prefer?

Historically, KM initiatives has looked for ways to motive employees to come to a central site. Motivating usage is a huge KM topic. As KM initiatives evolve, it makes complete sense for them to look more towards a Google model of syndication. Why? Because syndication will allow employees to leverage KM applications more effortlessly as part of their existing business processes. See: http://alanbaren.blogspot.com/2005/12/is-slack-time-needed-for-successful-km.html

Leveraging web services to create portlets that integrate with other corporate applications is one way to think about syndication in the KM space. In what ways should KM initiatives think about integration leveraging portlets?
* Allow content contribution from other applications in the company; ideally during the authoring process.
* Allow content searches to be driven from other applications where information needs are required within the appropriate business workflow
* Allow content to be served up into other applications on request
* Allow content to be automatically served up to other applications contextually depending on what other content is being accessed

With tight integration into other corporate applications, the issues of "slack time" and "motivating usage" go away.

Successful KM Initiatives

2013-04-30T09:28:00.000-04:00

The two most important successful factors for a Knowledge Management initiative are having a measurable return on investment, and being integrated with existing business processes to ensure effortless usage.

What do you think are important measures for a success KM initiative?

Skills for Knowledge Management Leaders

2013-04-22T14:33:00.000-04:00

Five core areas of skills should typically be sought in leaders charged with implementing or managing a Knowledge Management Program.

Most CKOs or KM Directors are typically either business practitioners with strong industry subject-matter expertise, or KM practitioners. In the former case where you have a subject-matter expert with little KM experience, the intricacies of establishing a KM Strategy and prioritizing the "right" KM initiatives can often be a difficult learning curve. Selecting the wrong KM initatives early on is one of the surest roads to KM failure. Selecting large resource-intensive efforts, or ones with poor measurability can leave reduce support for future initiatives.

In the latter case where you have a KM practitioner with little subject-matter expertise, learning the current business processes, goals and challenges becomes the primary learning curve. And one that is not insurmountable, especially if subject-matter experts are brought in as Knowledge Managers in support of specific lines of business.

In the ideal world, CKOs or KM Directors should have as many of the required skills below as possible. The five core areas of required skills should include:

1. Knowledge Management Experience
2. Learning Industry Experience
3. Technology Project Management
4. Matrix Management Skills
5. Industry Subject Matter Expertise

Knowledge Management Experience

In-depth understanding of KM principles

Knowledge of how to establish an aligned KM strategy

Experience prioritizing KM initiatives

Experience leveraging existing KM solutions and technologies

Experience successfully implementing new KM initiatives

Familiar with KM best practices and other corporate implementations

Industry thought leader in the KM space

Experience in community building, collaboration, workflow and change management

Learning Industry Experience

Experience with continuous learning solutions

Experience with various learning modalities and when to apply them; classroom, e-learning, synchronous web casting

Understanding on how KM and Learning integrate

Technology Project Management

Experience in technology project management

Experience translating business requirements into technical functional specifications

Experience as a liaison between the business and technology

Experience indirectly managing shared technology resources

Experience with various enterprise and web technologies

Experience in rolling out new technology solutions to the business

Matrix Management Skills

Comfortable in a matrix reporting environment

Skilled at enabling cross-functional teams

Skilled at consensus building and establishing business owner buy-in from multiple stakeholders

Service orientation from both an internal and external perspective

Industry Subject-Matter Expertise

Knowledge of the core business(es) KM is supporting

Knowledge of the strategy and goals of the business

In-depth knowledge of existing business processes and challenges

Familiarity with the industry including competition, market opportunities, etc.

Knowledge of the key stakeholders and influencers of the business(es)