Business-IT Alignment

June 12, 2026September 29, 2026

Stop Talking About Knowledge Management. Start Showing Its Impact

(This post was originally shared on my LinkedIn Profile.)

Your organisation doesn’t have a knowledge management problem. It has a credibility problem.

You can launch the most elegant KM programme, design the cleverest framework, or build the sleekest knowledge platform. But if nobody sees how it changes the way work actually gets done, they won’t care. And why should they?

The organisations that genuinely embed knowledge management aren’t the ones with the loudest programmes. They’re the ones where people notice that knowledge moves, decisions get made faster, and reinvention stops happening.

Here’s how that actually occurs in practice.

1. Anchor to outcomes, not terminology

Stop leading with “knowledge management.” Lead with the outcome your organisation desperately needs: faster decision-making, reduced reinvention, onboarding that doesn’t take six months, compliance that’s actually defensible, or customer responsiveness that beats your competitors.

The frameworks work behind the outcomes. Make them invisible. When a senior leader notices that new hires are productive in weeks instead than months, or that a decision gets made because the right knowledge actually arrived, they start valuing what made it possible. They just don’t call it “KM.”

2. Build credibility through small, visible wins

Don’t launch a programme across the enterprise. Pick one team—preferably one where knowledge clearly gets lost or repeated—and work with them quietly.

Document what changes: time saved, mistakes avoided, ideas that moved between people. Then let their story travel.

Peer testimony is infinitely more powerful than a pitch from the programme office. People trust other practitioners. They’re suspicious of consultants.

3. Make trust the visible difference

Here’s what I’ve observed: organisations that fail at KM typically have a trust problem they don’t know they have. Information gets hoarded. Knowledge is buried behind permission structures. Sharing is punished or seen as losing advantage.

You can’t recognise knowledge management in that environment because the conditions for knowledge to actually travel don’t exist.

The organisations I’ve seen shift? They model something different. Generosity. Honesty. The willingness to say “I don’t know” without it costing you. Inquiry before judgment. These aren’t soft skills. They’re the infrastructure that makes knowledge move.

And if you’re driving KM, you have to model them first.

4. Celebrate the human story, not the system

People don’t care about your knowledge base. They care that they’re not reinventing the wheel at 3 p.m. on a Friday, or that someone remembered a client context that completely changed the conversation.

Recognition happens when you celebrate the person who shared as much as the knowledge that was shared. When you tell the story of how an idea travelled across teams and landed somewhere unexpected. When you highlight the person who documented their thinking so clearly that six months later, someone else could understand the reasoning behind a decision.

Make knowledge sharing visible as a human thing, not a compliance requirement.

5. Make it a leadership conversation

KM recognition happens when your executive team starts talking about knowledge as how we work here—not as a project sitting in a corner.

This means asking leadership questions:

Are decisions documented in a way that the logic is actually recoverable?
Do people have permission to ask questions without it being seen as weakness?
Is failure treated as learning, or is it buried?
Do you privilege speed over understanding, or vice versa?
Does your culture reward knowledge-hoarding or knowledge-sharing?

These aren’t KM questions. They’re leadership questions. But they’re the ones that determine whether knowledge management actually takes root.

6. Measure what actually matters

Forget knowledge base articles indexed. Forget training completion rates. Those metrics measure activity, not impact.

Track what actually shifts:

How much faster are people becoming capable?
Are the same questions still cycling through support?
Do ideas travel between teams that normally don’t connect?
Are decisions getting revisited repeatedly, or is the reasoning clear enough that people move forward with confidence?

Be rigorous about it. “We saved time” is vague. How much? For whom? What else did they do with the time they reclaimed?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Recognition follows credibility, and credibility comes from solving real problems quietly and consistently.

The organisations that genuinely “get” knowledge management didn’t get there through programme launches and change management initiatives. They got there because someone in a position of influence—often a team leader, sometimes a practitioner—demonstrated that knowledge actually matters to outcomes. And that became the way things worked.

Stop announcing KM. Start showing what happens when knowledge moves the way it should.

January 19, 2026September 28, 2026

What does world-class knowledge management look like?

(This post was originally posted on my LinkedIn Profile and has been edited slightly.)

I’ve been reflecting on this question through the lens of the Global MIKE Award — the international benchmark that’s recognised organisations like Infosys, Wärtsilä, and Bangchak for excellence in knowledge and innovation management. As a member of the judging panel since 2022, I’ve had the privilege of reviewing submissions from organisations across sectors and geographies, and patterns emerge.

What strikes me is what doesn’t appear in the assessment criteria.

There’s no category for “most sophisticated technology stack.” No points awarded for the slickest search interface or the largest content repository.

Instead, the eight criteria centre on distinctly human concerns: empowering knowledge workers, transformative leadership, cultivating innovation culture, developing networks and connectivity.

The technology is assumed. The differentiator is everything else.

This resonates with something the Consortium for Service Innovation discovered when developing Knowledge-Centered Service methodology in the 1990s. They started by focusing on tools — and then realised that success “was more about people and their behaviours than it was about the tool.”

Three decades later, we’re still learning this lesson.

World-class KM isn’t a system you install. It’s a set of organisational capabilities you cultivate:

Knowledge created in the flow of work, not in isolation from it. Governance that enables rather than restricts. Frontline workers trusted as authors, not just consumers. Contribution recognised and celebrated. Learning embedded in daily practice.

In contact centres I see organisations investing heavily in AI-powered knowledge tools while neglecting the fundamentals: governance, culture, content quality, feedback loops. The technology can’t compensate for these gaps. It amplifies them.

The MIKE framework reminds us that intellectual capital has three dimensions: human, relational, and structural. Most technology investments target structural capital alone. World-class organisations invest across all three.

September 1, 2016

Knowledge vs. Learning vs. Information vs. transfer

I just recently received an email about disaster preparedness, it contained a scan of a document that the person who sent it to me had received. What does this have to do with KM?

Nothing and everything.

The point the person who sent me the scanned document was making was that he had received this document in the middle of summer, while people were away on vacation, it was poorly produced, there didn’t seem to be an electronic version available, and he believed that if any of these floods, fires, earthquakes etc. ever happened (or maybe that should be when they happen), he wouldn’t be able to remember the information in the document (which was about 10 pages long), and if he remembered that he had received this document, he wouldn’t be able to find it again.

Again, so what you say? What does this have to do with KM or learning or information or anything at all?

Well, if we are doing knowledge management, or learning management or information management we need to be concerned about how knowledge/information gets transferred and shared. How do the users want to receive it? What is their environment like? What circumstances will they be using this information/knowledge in? Who is going to be using this knowledge/information.

If we don’t design our systems and processes with the users in mind, all of the users, not just some of the users, they won’t use the knowledge/information and then what good is all the effort we put into implementing our KM/Learning/Information program?

January 26, 2016

Knowledge Management and Finance/Accounting

Some of you, who know me, will know that I started out my career in accounting; I have an undergraduate degree in accounting and was going to be a Chartered Accountant.

This is also how I got my start in KM, although it wasn’t called KM then, it was just how you worked—checklists and reusing last year’s files, talking to the staff who had worked on the audit/tax last year. If you had worked on the engagement the year before you were expected to be quicker in the subsequent year(s) because you were familiar with the client and the file.

15+ years into my knowledge management career, I still run into organizations that think that in order to help them better manage their knowledge that I have to be a specialist in whatever their content is, e.g. if it’s a law firm, I have to be a lawyer, if it’s a manufacturer I have to be an engineer, if it’s a hospital I have to be a doctor or a nurse or some other medical professional.

This isn’t always true, there are lots of organizations that understand that KM is a series of processes and activities, largely independent of the content. Organizations that understand having a depth of experience in how to get people to participate in knowledge sharing activities is more important than knowing the knowledge that they are actually supposed to be sharing.

Accounting is accounting is accounting. Yes, there might be some differences from industry to industry or sector, but in the end you are still trying to keep track of the financial resources of the organization, using generally accepted accounting principles.

Knowledge Management is no different. You are just trying to help facilitate the knowledge lifecycle from creation to sharing and management to disposal using a set of generally accepted knowledge management processes.

In both cases it’s important to understand the processes and principles, not the content.

January 19, 2016

Importance of a KM Strategy

Why do I need a knowledge management strategy? Why can’t I just implement some technology and be done with it? Why can’t I just implement Communities of Practice or Lessons Learned and be done with it?

I hear this sometimes from managers who want a quick fix, who are under a lot of pressure from time and resources (money and people).

The answer is, you can. I have worked with many organizations that have done just that, jumped in with both feet and “just done something”. I am usually there to fix it. Fix the technology because no one understood what it really needed to do to support knowledge work within the organization; fix the process because no one understands it and it’s not aligned with the rest of the activities in the organization and it’s created extra work for already over-worked staff.

Why do you need a strategy?

Would you jump in the car and set out on a journey of 5000km/3000miles without having some idea of where you were going and how you going to get there? Making sure that you had selected the right vehicle to get you there in time and a map to help direct you along the way?

A KM strategy does just that. It helps you figure out where you’re going, and the things you need to do along the way, the processes you need to support you and that need to be supported.

That’s not to say that you won’t make adjustments along the way, just like a friend of mine who drove from Toronto to Vancouver in September 2015, who ended up “detouring” through the United States, so that she could see some different sites, but she still knew where she was going and when she had to be there by—she made it with time to spare.

Isn’t that what you want from your KM strategy? To know where you’re going and how you want to get there, to meet the goals and objectives of the organization?

Why would you put a toaster over in the car for your trip, when you really needed a camp stove?

Why would you choose one technology because “everyone else is” when another technology is cheaper and better meets the needs of the organization because it requires less customization than the more popular software?

Isn’t it time you created (or updated) your KM strategy?

September 5, 2015

The Second KM Silver Bullet: One isn’t enough

As a friend of mine pointed out, it’s not enough to just create a strategy, it’s about the execution of that strategy.

And he’s right, strategies can sit on shelves, certainly I have had more than one client, that for various reasons did not implement the strategy we had developed together.

So what does it take to successfully implement a KM strategy?

A bunch of things, senior management buy-in and budget among them, but I would argue the most critical component, and the one that my friend posited, is Change Management.

There are many good books on Change Management by authors such as Peter Senge and John P. Kotter, to name two of my favourites. But what it all boils down to for me, is communication. Not just some manager decreeing, “thou shalt do knowledge management,” but a real conversation between the KM team and the rest of the organization. What do they need to be able to be effective in their jobs? How can the KM team help them? What do the users of the KM activities need to know about how to use the technology and the processes? What will aid them in their decision making and other things they are responsible for?

KM is there to serve the organization, to help it to be more efficient, effective, innovative, whatever the KM strategy identified as the business case for KM. It does that, in part, through the execution of the change management plan to support the transformational change that KM demands.

September 4, 2015

The KM Silver Bullet

KM is a lot of things to a lot of people.

It seems everyone wants the silver bullet, the one “right” answer to the question of how to be successful in KM.

Or they want the one “right” answer to the question of what is KM and what’s included in KM.

Well let me save you a lot of time and heartache, there is no one right answer, the answer is, it depends.

It depends on your organization’s strategy, objectives, culture, industry, regulations, size, budget, risk profile, staffing profile, technology strategy.

Figure out what KM is to your organization and create a strategy that supports that definition, that’s the silver bullet.

February 3, 2015

KM, Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma

Last week (January 28-29, 2015) I was in Amsterdam for KM Legal Europe, I provided some thoughts on that in my previous blog. Also in that blog post I mentioned that the subject of where KM fits with Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma came up. We had a discussion about it, but we ran out of time and I’m not sure that we really came to any conclusions.

First lets start off with some general definitions/explanations.

While Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma are all different activities and initiatives, and there are books and courses on each of them separately for the purposes of this blog post I am going to group them all together because for the purposes of this discussion their touch-point with KM is the same. So what are they? They are activities that have the objective of aligning organizational processes with the needs and objectives of the organization. They seek to remove inefficiencies and streamline work processes; they aim for standardization and the reduction of variability.

Knowledge Management, on the other hand, is about learning and sharing, and making sure people have the knowledge they need to do their jobs.

On the face of it, it doesn’t seem that there is much in common, but as they say, “the devil is in the details.”

Let me ask you this, “why do we learn?” and “what are we hoping to accomplish by learning?” Some organizations will say to be more efficient and effective, provide better customer/client service, to be better at what we do, whether that is provide a product, service, economic development, or something else. Hmmm…don’t those sound similar to what Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma are all about?

There are many ways to learn, Stan Garfield compiled a list of 80+ activities that can be considered KM activities. Where does learning overlap with Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma? In my mind, it’s in the Lessons Learned processes and activities. In Lessons Learned we are trying to understand what worked, what didn’t work, what we should do differently next time and what we need to do to make sure “next time” is better than the last time. That sounds like Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma to me.

Now in Continuous Improvement, Process Re-engineering, and Six-Sigma we may actually create the redesigned process. Whereas in Lessons Learned we may recognize that the process needs to be redesigned or a checklist created or some other such outcome and kick-off a sub-process that does the creation. But the Lessons Learned process does do a check and ensure that the outcome was completed and implemented, thus closing the loop on the whole cycle.

I know I have over simplified this, but I do believe the two sets of activities are very closely linked, and I wanted to get across that it’s just a change in perspective that’s needed.

KM isn’t something separate from everything else, it’s a key component of everything and recognizing that makes the implementation that much more complete.

November 15, 2014

Published: Designing a Successful KM Strategy

Advance copies of our book, Designing a Successful KM Strategy are now available from our publisher, Information Today, Inc.

It will officially be published in mid-January, so if you buy it before that, you get 40% of the regular price.

I did a workshop based on the book at KM World, on Nov 4th, that was well received, as well as a couple of book signings–it was great to talk to everyone about the book and how it can help them regardless of whether they are just starting with KM or at a point where they are re-evaluating their strategy after implementing KM for a few years.

Information Today has also made a chapter available for preview, you can access it here https://books.infotoday.com/books/Designing-a-Successful-KM-Strategy/Making-the-Case-for-a-Knowledge-Management-Strategy.pdf

Nick (my co-author) also has some helpful links up over on his blog at https://www.nickmilton.com/p/blog-page.html

I hope you enjoy it. Be sure to get in touch if you have any comments or questions.

September 18, 2014

Designing a Successful KM Strategy

I guess I have been busy, it’s been 6 months since my last post. One of the things that I have been busy with is finishing the book that I have co-authored with my Knoco colleague, Nick Milton.

Nick and I have written and book called, “Designing a Successful KM Strategy,” it’s being published by Information Today, Inc. Advance copies will be available at KM World, where I will be doing a workshop based on the book (Workshop W4) and a book signing.

I’ll post a link to their website once it’s available for order.

Also, I’m doing a second workshop at KM World called, “W14: Sparking Innovation: Creative KM,” in case any of you are interested in that.