Weaving KM into the lifeblood of corporations

Knowledge is increasingly getting into the mainstream of organisational activities as a firm’s capability to remain competitive is continuously challenged in today’s dynamic business environment. Knowledge Management (KM) has to, and is increasingly becoming pervasive in nature—moving away from an ‘application only’ paradigm to a more holistic framework involving strategy, people, processes and technology. R R Dasgupta elaborates on the ingredients essential for success in KM

There is a need to understand and apply KM from its first principles, one of which is captured by eminent management guru, Tom Davenport, who says, “Instead of being a separate activity from normal work that requires knowledge workers’ motivation and spare time, it must become ‘baked in’ to their daily work processes.” Although this may sound pretty obvious, it is perhaps the quintessence of what successful KM initiatives are all about and is an essential pre-requisite of pervasive KM.

Aligning KM to your business

Pervasive KM allows organisations to align their KM initiatives based on their competitive positioning and capabilities that are required to support their competitive positions.

Treacy and Wiersema, in their path-breaking book, The Discipline of Market Leaders, talked about three types of competitive stances taken by companies viz. customer intimacy, where the value proposition is that of providing the best total solution; product (and/or service) leadership, providing the best product (or service) to the customer; and, operational excellence, providing the best total cost for the products/services offered to the customer. This model can be used to understand the critical links between the elements of competitive positioning, core capabilities and pre-dominant knowledge styles (See Figure 1 on Page 22). In reality, most of these stances co-exist in some form or another. Let’s take the example of a global major in high-tech manufacturing. Product development in such an organisation typically represents the product leadership stance, Manufacturing and distribution significantly demonstrate the operational excellence flavour whereas customer-facing processes are more in line with the customer intimacy paradigm. Given the fact that they do co-exist alongside, it is important to map them early and ensure that they complement each other and can morph into other forms as and when necessary.

It follows that each of these categories brings a different set of challenges. The firm’s ability to leverage each one of these knowledge dimensions is to be looked at as a continuum of knowledge transformations.

Going from tacit / expert-oriented to codified / articulated knowledge:

• Use a combination of process automation, collaboration tools, and informal networks to convert tacit knowledge into codified knowledge.
• Incentivise knowledge sharing.
• Promote knowledge champions.

Going from codified/ articulated knowledge to adaptable /modular knowledge:

• Create teams with broader skill sets.
• Focus controls on outcomes and not on processes.
• Foster communities of practice.
• Make KM an integral part of line functions and link to performance management systems.

Looping it back to innovation—renewing knowledge:

• Map moments of truth across the value chain—suppliers, customers, and employees.
• Use every point of contact as an opportunity to learn.
• Measure learning to innovation life cycles.

The role of technology

Large companies are imposing an increasingly interconnected IT infrastructure throughout their value chains and even within the corporation, As the majority of companies embrace new technology, there is going to be qualitative change in knowledge flow, rather than a simply quantitative one. Companies will have to learn to work with several technologies (See Figure 2), keeping in mind that while all these technologies are ‘revolutionary’, their adaptation is essentially going to be “evolutionary”.

The final measure of IT as an enabler is not its features, but what emerges through its application. The manufacturing industry (especially automotives)as pioneered the principles of lean and ‘just-in-time’. For pervasive KM to really happen, we need to learn another important principle:

• Too fast, and your knowledge is inventory;
• Too slow, and your knowledge is not any longer relevant, leading to missed opportunities.

Success stories and lessons learned

A UK-based utilities firm provides for a stellar example of adopting KM as a way of life. The company is the largest operator of water and wastewater infrastructure networks in the UK. It has an annual turnover of over £1.9 billion, and employs almost 14,000 people.

The words of their CEO encapsulate the importance the company assigns to KM: “If I had to express our strategy in a single sentence, it would be this: to create value for our shareholders by taking the skills of our people out into the world at large.”

KM work started with the Contract Solutions Group and has since traversed multiple business units within the enterprise. The ‘start small’ approach has enabled several KM initiatives within a short period of time. These include:

• Shortening the bid generation effort.
• Risk management during IT projects.
• Managing unanticipated events.
• Seller-side collaboration.
• Managing legal and contractual obligations.
• Post-merger culture change.
• In such an initiative, it is important to:
• Link KM activities to business strategy to gain support.
• Be responsive to users.
• Continually develop–be prepared to change.
• Communicate tangible and intangible benefits.
• Put in place a governance structure.
• Focus on business readiness activities.
• Use innovative communications methods, including competitions, desk drops, lunch-and-learn.
• Reward, recognise and incentivise.
• Let people take precedence over technology in KM.
• Use the ‘start small’ approach to deliver benefits and gain credibility.

Another company, an infotainment company based in the UK addressed the need to get their experts connected together through an ‘expert directory’, which brought to the fore four pieces of critical information:

• Personal profile
• Experience profile
• Community profile
• Job profile

In a geographically dispersed enterprise, the need to locate experts is often a daunting task, especially when one needs to leverage expertise across the world. Some of the significant benefits can be categorised as under:

Direct benefits

• Reduction in time required to find people / expertise.
• Reduced duplication of effort.
• Fulfill a long-term need in all businesses.
• Better reuse of skills /experience, Indirect benefits
• Reduced reliance on key individuals.
• Basis for forming communities.
• Strong relation to other initiatives like team learning.
• Create a more agile, learning organisation.

The do-how of pervasive KM

For knowledge to become woven into the fabric of any organisation, the 4 C’s of pervasive KM are required:

• Clarity: Knowing knowledge needs in advance, with the ability to link it to business strategy of the organisation.
• Context: Defining in advance the needs of value chain stakeholders and ensuring the right kind of knowledge exchange happens.
• Collaboration: Connecting the right people at the right time through online and offline modes.
• Culture: Does your organisation support a ‘knowledge’ culture? Do you have an empowering environment that supports knowledge? Is KM an integral part of your strategy, and performance management systems?

It would be appropriate to end with a quote from Susanne Hauschild, Thomas Licht and Wolfram Stein of McKinsey and Co., “Knowledge—not land, labour and capital—is now the lifeblood of a corporation.”

R R Dasgupta is General Manager–Consulting with Zensar Technologies. He can be contacted at rrdasgupta@zensar.com