The more things evolve and change the more there is a constant. Everything in a company that's greater in size than the founder, is all about people (your employees) and process (how they get stuff done). Even flying solo, it's about that stuff too (you have customers, and they expect things).

I came across the following request this week on a ListServ on which I participate. The question, and my answer, relate to the discipline of knowledge management, or KM. I've paraphrased a bit on the question.

The Question:

Up until now, our company has not focused much on sharing valuable information and thus have missed some opportunities to save, to work more effectively, etc. In order to avoid this in the future, we would like to increase knowledge sharing. We do have some tools in place already, such as monthly newsletters, commercial newsletters, meetings, sharepoints, etc, however they are still not very effective.

Could anyone with some knowledge management experience/expertise give me some ideas how to make relevant information circulated and reach the people who need it?

My Response:

First, a couple of questions that you need to ask:

1. What do you mean by “not effective”, regarding your existing tools? Do you mean that you have some efficiency metrics in place and you’re not meeting them and you think that the KM is part of the issue? Are you basing this on ‘usage’ reports of the KM tools?
2. Have you articulated the goals of the KM solutions from the stakeholder perspective? Do you know what your KM users want from the system? Where have the ideas for your current solutions come from?
3. What type of training/evangelism/education have been done to get after the issue of ‘rolling out’ and ‘increasing adoption’ of the existing tools?

I’ve worked with KM in a couple of companies and I have a few thoughts to share generally on the topic.

Seek out why the users need a system like this and what will bring them the most value in using it. In some instances, I have seen adoption take years, while in others, it takes a matter of weeks. There is often a need to ‘cut over’ to a KM system of record and away from current methods. For example, if your salespeople are used to just calling someone to have them send brochures, put those brochures in the KM database (or Wiki, or Blog, or something similar) and enforce that as the only way to retrieve the info they need do a deep dive into the feature set that you users want and deliver on the highest value items. This is like marketing. You’re trying to make a product (tool) that’s ‘buzzworthy’ that everyone is just so eager to use. That is hard work to make the tool accessible in the ‘mode of work’ that your users find themselves in. Of course, it has to be web based in one mode, but if you have remote workers (travelers) who are not connected to the web, is the tool available for offline use as well? If you’re looking for ‘bottom up’ knowledge sharing or are trying to ‘crowdsource’ from your employees, think about motivation. What motivates them to contribute? How can you motivate them to contribute. Take a look at some of the popular message boards (Apple, and other technical products along with the MarketingProfs and AMA SIGS) and see what makes them tick.

There’s books & a ton of resources devoted to KM. I would suggest a quick tour through Amazon to see what’s out there and to do some Googling and look at the blogs of KM folks who have some insights to share. Lastly, look into brining on a KM consultant to help launch your project. It could save you several missed attempts at getting things right and seeing ROI out of the gate.

What's the net of all this?

There's a lot of 'change management' in everything we do as daily business in our companies. The question was first one about 'technology' but it's really an issue of process, people, and changing both.