Getting to grips with knowledge management

The business world is a balancing act between bravado and bullshit. Client meetings that promote harmony while team members sharpen knives; customer charters hot off the press while profits are lapped up and call centres chirrup to the sound of hold music. Like receiving a kiss from Tony Soprano, you see the smile but you’re going to feel the bullet.

Anyone working in any office of any organisation recognises the gulf between what is said about a company and what is done within that company. But has there ever been a business area that embodies this gulf quite so perfectly as knowledge management?

Knowledge management is talked about all the time. Everyone does it, is about to do it, knows that it’s really important or knows a killer application that will help attain this nirvana.

But how many people really know what is meant by knowledge management? It is an area that is bedevilled by myriad explanations, all of which start roughly at the same point but are soon pinging off in all directions.

A marketing department within a B2B organisation is dependent on two main types of knowledge: tacit and structured.

Tacit knowledge can be any intuition that has been acquired through working with clients, on campaigns, or in a particular business sector. It is the unspoken business sense that enables good staff to hit the right notes. The challenge is how to disseminate it. This requires individuals within an organisation to share their insights, their hunches and their leftfield vision.

Drawing out the business acumen that comes from experience, lateral thinking and trial and error requires an environment in which staff feel rewarded, secure and able to float ideas without fear of embarrassment or loss of intellectual property.

Structured knowledge is brand properties, key messages, business processes, market share, awareness of competitors – anything that can be pinned down, formalised and documented. With structured knowledge, what happens when the marketing director leaves for a competitor? How do you prevent the knowledge leaving too? How do you ensure a junior member of staff, new to your organisation, is brought up to speed effectively and efficiently?

Companies cannot afford to be complacent in bestowing this knowledge. It is hugely inefficient to train and retrain each time a new member joins the team. It is even more inefficient if Team A continually encounters the same problems met by Team B just weeks earlier, and it’s bordering on the ludicrous if those two teams aren’t aware of the situation. Knowledge management can right these wrongs. With the correct processes, the right culture and effective technology these inefficiencies can be avoided.

Received wisdom is that knowledge management is all about technology. In fact, knowledge management is so enmeshed with IT that KPMG’s chief knowledge officer, Michael J Turrilo has claimed, “knowledge management cannot be done without technology.” That may be so, but such strident claims have been misinterpreted and repackaged. In today’s climate one could be forgiven for thinking knowledge is nothing more than technology. This is the first and biggest mistake businesses make. It is this assumption that has given knowledge management a bad press and has done more than anything else to diminish the effectiveness of such initiatives.

Denis Pelych, director of The National B2B Centre, says that to get the technology the organisation needs to drill right down into the team dynamics. “Understand what’s going on at a psychological level and get to know the processes you need to go through to realise your work. An intranet will be a great help as a repository for structured information, but it’s an irrelevance when the team is trying to work collaboratively and creatively.”

Professor Sue Cartwright, who heads up the department at Manchester Business School that deals with organisational psychology, claims that culture, psychology and human nature are huge obstacles to achieving this. Illustrating perfectly the credibility gap between what businesses say and what they actually do, Cartwright describes learning organisations as places where “knowledge isn’t seen as individual property, the organisational climate is all about developing mastery and people are encouraged and enabled to try things out.”

Sounds great, but the vision of an organisation where everyone buys the board a Coke doesn’t really exist. “I would love to find an organisation where it works as people claim it does,” laughs Cartwright. “Everyone heralds the fact their organisation is a learning organisation – people such as Rover or Motorola – but over the long term they haven’t proved to be any better.”

There are steps that can be taken to move your organisation in the right direction. These are all things that can be addressed before a switch is flicked.

• Reward individuals for team behaviour
• Break down hierarchies
• Create an environment of trust and respect for ideas.

Setting out these statements as bullet points can appear trite. But if these statements appear to be common sense, why do so many businesses get it wrong?

More often than not, organisations think they support team working and encourage an open forum for ideas and debate, but the reality for the staff is a different matter. “People are still rewarded as individuals,” says Cartwright. “If I have really good knowledge, I’m not sure I’m going to share it.”

While your organisation espouses sharing of information, do its HR processes and practices betray that position? For example, during staff appraisals are the items that will get boxes ticked actually about individual performance rather than being a team player? “It’s about looking at the systems you actually have in place,” adds Cartwright. “If the actuality is that people are truly only rewarded for personal performance and gain, you’re never going to create a learning organisation.” People need to feel personally rewarded for acting altruistically.

Paul Hewerdine, divisional director of B2B at Loewy, argues that hierarchies are obstructive. “The more open the better,” he says. “A few people within the team should be responsible for sharing key information, ultimately there should be as little gate keeping as possible.” Fostering this kind of environment is key in beginning to manage the tacit knowledge within your marketing department. It is also often the most difficult part of knowledge management. What is often seen as slightly easier is the management of structured information such as campaign wins, campaign evaluations, competitor information and brand collateral.

This is where technology is often harnessed. The most common way of storing and sharing this kind of information is an intranet or groupware solution. But even this can prove problematic. There can be significant cultural resistance, significant changes to working practices and there is always the danger that information will be published but rarely accessed or – worse still – the deluge leads to information overload.

Even when knowledge is shared in a flat hierarchy, technology implementations – that naturally carry a heavy burden of change management – must be led from the management and senior staff.

Hewerdine says, “There will always be resistance to anything that allows more visibility of your work. People will always feel they’re being held up to scrutiny and criticism. The explanation of why these things are being put in place and the demonstration of how such systems can benefit the organisation has to come from the top down.”

Some simple rules can help aid the implementation and the running of an intranet, and avoid some of the pitfalls of information overload, outdated and inaccurate data:

Allow everyone to publish and to have access to as much information as possible.

“Any member of the organisation can publish anything at anytime, so long as it’s business-related,” says Gordon Lindsay, head of knowledge management, PA Consulting. “And 95 per cent of content is visible by all.”

Encourage staff to put ideas forward.

“You want people to put their ideas forward, but the truth is that it’s scary,” explains Pelych of The National B2B Centre. “It’s imperative that management do all they can to remove these barriers and actually reward people when they make that leap of faith.”

Make sure the team works before the technology does.

“Knowledge works across networks and communities of practice,” says Davenport and Prukas co-authors of Working Knowledge: How Organisations Manage What they Know. “You’ve got to nourish and facilitate their functioning if you want to manage knowledge. Once they’re functioning on a human level then you can start applying technology to ease the capture and sharing of that knowledge. But don’t start with a technology.”

Create processes that drive people to the technology
“There have to be reasons why people would want to use these systems,” says Hewerdine of Loewy. “I’ve heard of CRM systems whereby the sales team will lose part of their bonus if they don’t input the correct information in the correct way.”

Keep it people-oriented
“A lot of intranets don’t tie in the personal element of knowledge management,” Lindsay of PA Consulting says. “We want to show that we’re a network of people rather than just a repository of information.”

With these measures in place the intranet should be a self-policing and effective tool that doesn’t become rusty through misuse. Networked information about campaigns and competitors can help at an organisational level and at a personal level too.

But fundamental to all knowledge management and any gains you may experience from it, is the culture and the ethos that underpins everything your business does.

1.  Culture before technology
2.  Understand how knowledge works in your organisation
3. Reward staff for team working and ideas
4. Create small teams with knowledge champions
5. Create a flat hierarchy of expertise
6. Implement technology but with a clear purpose 
7.  Get staff on board by demonstrating personal as well as organisational gains
8. Change processes and drive implementation from the top down.