Category: Change Management

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Creativity and Knowledge Management, part 2

Okay, so back for part 2 of Creativity and Knowledge Management, picking up where we left off.

We were talking about left-brain and right-brain and the different KM activities that fit in each area, and that’s fine, but what about right-brain activities that aren’t knowledge management activities that use knowledge management activities in their creation?

For example, one of the experiential exercises we did at the conference was recreating  stylized watercolours of a frog and a spider. We each got a piece of the picture, which had been cut up into squares and we had to reproduce our square onto a bigger, rectangular piece of watercolour paper. Both the squares and the rectangles were numbered on the back, which made putting them together again easy. This was collaborative, it used meta-data (the numbers on the back) and we had the opportunity to go back and add additional detail to any of the pieces after we’d seen them all put together–all KM activities, but with art as the content matter.

Are there other KM activities that could be demonstrated through art? Lessons Learned? Peer Assists? Content and Document Management? Communities of Practice? Innovation?

So art becomes a metaphor for knowledge management.

Next post…Creativity and Knowledge Management, part 3

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Upcoming Ark Group Report: Navigating the Knowledge Management Technology Maze

As those of you who have spoken to me in the last 6 months will know, I have been busy writing a report for Ark Group, it will be published later in the spring, here’s a sneak-peak of what I’ve been working on and why I haven’t posted anything on this blog for so many months.

Navigating the Knowledge Management Technology Maze

Knowledge Management may be a familiar term to many, but how many individuals actually understand the technology side of KM? What do all the platforms do, why one is better suited to particular business needs and objectives than another? The vendors aren’t going to tell you, they want you to buy their platform and customize it.

What are the benefits that choosing the right KM technology platform can bring to a business? Many will think of the selection process as strictly technology focused, but there are a plethora of human, organisational, leadership and process elements that must also be taken into account. Selecting the right technology and implementing it successfully are key to realising the true benefits of KM. In a climate of severe competition, limited resources and pressure on performance and profitability, organisations would do well to examine how choosing the right KM technology can help an organisation to counter these challenges.

This report is intended to help organisations understand KM technology and its benefits and will provide a ‘roadmap’ for organisations to follow to implement and maximise KM technology investments. Crucial aspects such as achieving executive sponsorship, nurturing the necessary conversations between business leaders and IT managers, and ensuring the project remains business-driven, will all be covered.

Target readership

Strategists, IT directors/managers, information architects, business analysts and project managers charged with exploring or implementing a KM strategy for their organisation. The report will also be of interest to chief executives, COOs, finance directors, CIOs and other senior managers wanting to find out more about KM technology and the logistics of its implementation.

Contents

What is Knowledge Management? Discussion of various aspects and facets of KM from tacit to explicit from Information Management to CRM and BI and the technologies that support them.

Recent trends: how the role of KM is evolving to include not just an organisation’s IT department but a broader range of key decision-makers. Shift in focus from either Technology or People and Process to Technology and People and Process.

Benefits for performance measurement/management, competitiveness, identifying new opportunities, improving efficiency, boosting productivity, resource planning, reducing risk, etc.

Risks and costs associated with KM technology and how to mitigate them.

The KM roadmap: from identifying aims to leveraging the output

Technology

  • What systems do you need for KM?
  • Integrating/migrating information sources
  • Interface design – how will the system be used, how do users need to be able to manipulate and interact with it
  • Business process alignment – allows organisations to model patterns in their own operations
  • Building in flexibility for future development

Communication

  • Gaining executive sponsorship and forming a taskforce that represents both business and IT sides, to ensure the project remains business driven
  • Enabling good communication between business leaders and the IT side
  • Communicating internally the purpose, need, value, etc
  • Building an internal KM culture: breaking down reluctance to share information, access and present it in a different way, etc.

Aligning KM initiatives with the business is vital.

Evaluating return on investment. How soon can you expect the investment to start paying off, and how can you maximise ongoing ROI?

Case studies

The report will include practical material in the form of case studies from a range of organisations who have successfully implemented KM technologies and reaped the benefits as well as tales of lessons learned from ineffectual implementations that have not brought the expected outcomes.

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Succeeding at Change in a Knowledge Worker World

The only thing that is certain is death and taxes…and change. Many organizations spend thousands of dollars on knowledge management technology solutions, focusing on the technology, because the technology is easy to focus on, it’s visible: buying the servers, installing the software, testing it, releasing it, those are activities that are very visible. Involving stakeholders in the software selection process, understanding what helps versus what hinders them in their performance, providing training, communicating, these are invisible, “soft” activities. Soft-skills/activities are often ignored, or down-played in organizations, sometimes it’s because of cost, sometimes it’s a lack of understanding of their importance, sometimes because there’s “no time.”

Projects fail because of this lack of attention to soft-skills, especially Knowledge Management projects. With Knowledge Management projects knowledge workers have already found a way to get their jobs done, it may not be the most efficient and effective way to get it done, but they get it done, that’s who they are. They may miss opportunities to share and leverage other people’s experience or create something new because they didn’t know there was a possibility to share/leverage/create, but they get their job done. In implementing a Knowledge Management project knowledge workers are being asked to do things differently, whether that’s share information in a repository or micro-blogging site, or participate in a Community of Practice; chances are it’s different than what they are doing now, and they will keep doing their “old way of doing things” unless they are given a reason to change.

Why/how do people change their behaviours? Because they have a reason to change, they understand the “what’s in it for me.” A good program manager will have included key stakeholders in the whole process from the strategy and requirements gathering stages to roll-out to the organization. Stakeholders, who include front-line employees who will be using the system, have contributed their needs and requirements to the selection of the technology, so the technology is actually supporting them, not causing more work. Connecting with stakeholders is critical, this helps them understand the change that is coming and to have influenced it so that they can feel proud of what’s being build and act as change agents with their peers, when the time comes to start using the technology.

Once the connection is made, communication has to maintain and inform the relationship. Tell the stakeholders the truth, own up to any changes in the plan or scope or functionality, the situation will only get worse if the organization tries to hide or sugar-coat changes that were not agreed to by the team.

Communication and training will drive the adoption and acceptance of the technology and process changes. The IT team can get the technology 100% right, and if they ignore the people and process side of the equation, they will fail. These people and process side often gets cut or short circuited when budgets tighten, this is short sighted. Better to reduce the scale of the project or extend a timeline than to skimp on training, communication, and involvement of stakeholders. If the organization has time to do it wrong and fail and fix it, then they have time to get it right the first time at a much lower cost than doing it wrong and then fixing it.

Involving stakeholders in all stages of the process, ensuring that the technology enables them and that they have the communication and training that they need to be successful, will ensure that the organization’s Knowledge Management investment will have an ROI to be proud of.