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"I sure wish I had access to
the project proposals we've bid on. It would be really great if I could
access just the ones that are relevant to the proposal that I'm working
on now," Ron muttered as he clicked through the folders on the
company fileserver at 7:15 one evening. "Clyde has been around for 8
years and has been key in building the relationship with our best
customer," John told Pat over a cup of coffee. "We
never expected that he'd be snatched up by one of those new dotcom's.
What will we ever do to replace him?" At a time when the three R's in
business -- recruitment, retention, and retraining -- are being
pressured by industry trends, the idea and practice of cultivating the
wisdom gained through experience of your people has never been more
important. Knowledge Management
(KM) is more than reshuffling the org chart and a few job titles. It's
about transforming the way business captures, manages, distributes, and
interacts with its critical information. KM uses breakthrough tools,
techniques, and strategies to develop an integrated knowledge-based
organization. Here are five key ideas of
getting a handle on Knowledge Management that you can put to use in
your organization. I've witnessed these ideas working and have helped
implement them in a variety of settings, from a manufacturing plant to a
large professional development association. 1. You need to know what's
knowledge from what's data. No matter what business you're in,
you've got to know what information is critical to your cash flow,
satisfying your customers, and strengthening your market position. Sure
you may nod when asked the question, but I would adopt the Missourian
stance of "show me" just to be sure. 2. You need a champion. Managing critical knowledge means
cross-functional representation. And you need a decision maker onboard
with the perspectives, smarts, and guts to overcome the inevitable
stumbling blocks and rough patches of road you'll encounter. Any
significant change initiative requires someone who has the vision and
willingness to move to a higher ground. 3. You need to see where to
start. Before "communities of
knowledge" can be built to share information and best practices,
you've got to assess where you are with respect to information sharing,
your greatest obstacles and greatest opportunities. The technology
will be the easy part compared to changing the culture, even when you
know this to be true at the outset. 4. You need to invest in a
jumpstart. Nothing speaks louder than success.
Design and pilot a process to succeed so that others within the company
can see that real people are achieving real results. Learning quickly
often means failing quickly, picking through the experience for what
lessons can be learned, and iterating improvements in the program. Bring
in the resources internally and externally to increase your odds of
success. 5. You've got to track results for feedback. Put another way, "You cannot
manage what you do not measure. "Determine the quantitative and
qualitative metrics for succeeding with KM. It might be improving
post-sales customer satisfaction as measured by the quantity and
distribution of support calls. You might set a KM goal of using your
extranet to share inventory information with partner suppliers to
improve the efficiency of your on-hand parts stock. It might be
embracing a new set of collaboration tools to decrease travel costs
while increasing review cycles during the design stage of a new product
or program using team members inside the organization as well as
consultants with specialized knowledge and experience. The benefits to your organization
of pursuing this path are numerous and allow you to leverage the most
important assets your organization has: it's human capital. KM is not a cure all, and clear guidelines for getting a measurable ROI are necessary and elusive. However, the Internet is raising the expectations of your suppliers, distributors, staff, and especially your customers, to be more responsive, more accessible, and more reliable. KM elevates those qualities, among others. Knowledge management, when done well, is good business no matter what it is called. It's up to you to lead your teams to craft, communicate, and instill KM practices throughout your organization. |
