Knowledge Management isn't just technology

My friend Isabel was executive assistant to at least three presidents of a major Canadian multi-national corporation over her long career. She was the fount of all knowledge about the company's history and philosophy. Anyone wanting to know anything about the company past or present went to Isabel, who either knew the answer or she knew exactly where to find it.

Sadly, Isabel died some years ago, and a treasury of company knowledge and lore died with her. What a pity Knowledge Management was less advanced than today, or all that knowledge could have been saved for present and future generations.

But would it?

It's almost twenty years since a fledgling discipline called Knowledge Management, commonly referred to as KM, made its first tentative entrance onto the business stage. Business anthropologists in Europe, North America and Asia brought their disparate influences to bear on the notion that corporate knowledge was an asset to be husbanded. Since then, the technological revolution has facilitated the gathering, sorting and dissemination of unimaginable quantities of data, making it available in myriad forms for a variety of purposes—some yet to be identified.

While the influence of KM on the modern corporation has undoubtedly been significant, the individual organizations' stories have not always been happy ones. Among the high profile successes can be found many more whose efforts have proved not only expensive, but frustrating and ultimately not of much use to the organization. What separates notable KM success from expensive flop?

Evidence suggests it's the human element—and in particular, communication.

Successful KM programs depend on interpersonal communication in the planning and early stages of the program, when employees must be educated on the objectives and persuaded to share their knowledge. Then, throughout the life of the program, the knowledge must be transferred from people's heads into the system and those employees must be encouraged to both contribute and use the knowledge.

Whether it's because conventional wisdom tells us "knowledge is power" or because it's simply too much trouble, people are often reluctant to share what they know. Successful proponents of KM have found their own ways to meet this challenge.

At a major Toronto law firm, they don't rely on people to volunteer information to add to the firm's collection of substantive legal knowledge. Instead, they search through the files looking for it in their own database. The KM professionals then go to the initiating person and ask if there is any reason not to make it generally available to the firm. This, of course, makes it less work for employees, and thus a more efficient process.

When they see the value of using the information in the database, that helps build a culture of sharing. People start by being knowledge users and move on to being providers of information too.

Even when people are willing to share their knowledge, they may not even be aware of what they do know, much less how to convey it to others. If you could ask Tiger Woods to explain how to become a champion golfer, he could probably pass along techniques he was taught early in his career, but it would be almost impossible for him to explain those things that he does well simply because he is Tiger Woods.

Even if you are not a champion, you may be so accustomed to doing what you do that, again, it is difficult to convey to others. The Vice President responsible for Knowledge Management at a major Canadian bank calls this type of knowledge "tacit knowledge," and agrees that gathering it can be a challenge.

"Someone might be very good at customer service due to a blend of their behavioural profile, their training and their instincts," he says, "but when you ask them to explain their skills to someone else, sometimes you're met with a blank stare because they simply don't know what they know."

Helping someone with this process requires excellent skills in the art of questioning, as well as listening to the answers, paraphrasing and adapting until the explanation perfectly conveys the information in a form suitable for the KM system. Whether employees must pass along information through the written or spoken word, the message must be clear, concise and accurate. Communication breakdown at this stage almost certainly puts the program in jeopardy, no matter how state-of-the-art the technology is.

When the law firm's KM specialists find a good model or legal precedent, they interview the initiator. The results are turned into a summary page with appropriate reference notes, which then becomes part of the firm's knowledge bank. Ensuring the clarity, accuracy and completeness of the information depends to a large extent on the communication skills of the firm's four full-time KM specialists.

Bringing a new product to market, of course, doesn't guarantee it will sell, and the same applies to the knowledge that is gathered, sorted and made available within an organization. People not only need to know it is available, but also understand its value to them so that they will buy into the system and use it. This calls for a certain amount of internal promotion.

The law firm runs professional development sessions to educate people on how to get the most value out of using the knowledge. The bank faces a different challenge as part of a large global organization, so they have created smaller "communities" to share information locally, before disseminating it through links within the larger network.

These are just two avenues among many for promotion of the program. It cannot be overemphasized that, whatever the process, its success depends on the quality of the human interaction, the inter-personal communication of those gathering the information as well as those providing it. That old expression from the early days of computer science, "Garbage in, garbage out," was never more appropriate than when applied to KM.

Near the beginning of the movie "The Lord of the Rings" is a wonderful line that could easily speak to the need for KM: "Much that once was is lost, for none now live that remember it." With the looming retirement of large numbers of baby boomers, the race is on to collect their knowledge before they take it with them. Knowledge Management must not be left to technology alone, for without the human element the race will be lost.

Note: This article original appeared in The Globe and Mail