IknowInsights

Past Knowledge, Fast Forward

To better understand the past, and to create a better future, many of us often turn to collective human wisdom of eons gone by. That provides us the context, continuity, and often the connection that we can relate to, something we are comfortable with. Institutional Memory (IM) performs the same critical function in a business environment.

Why did we do that? This question is frequently posed in organizations that have been in existence for a few years. Not many organizations can answer that question because they did not continually gather the context around their decisions: Why certain decisions were made, why one path was chosen over another, and indeed, why the organization operates the way it does? In other words, such organizations did not develop an Institutional Memory (IM).

IM performs a critical function of providing collected wisdom to the members of the organization: It sets them up for success through an unbroken chain of organizational familiarity and conformity, fostering a long term organizational culture.

In addition to knowledge, IM also helps share organizational values — does an organization put profits above people? Does the organization recognize its social mission? — and provides concrete examples of how it was done. This not only fosters conformity and buy-in of core values that an organization strives for, but also provides a sense of continuity, organizational pride, and team cohesion as members share the same beliefs. It also helps avoid frequent ideological conflict by providing a stable value platform. All of this contributes to a business’s competitiveness.

Indeed, several organizations such as the Hewlett Packard Company and Johnson & Johnson have leveraged IM as their business compass, market telescope, and decision filter to survive and thrive for several decades. They bring to life important events and decisions by sharing case studies, notes, and vignettes. And their top management have likely put in place structured, easy to use process and tools to gather today’s stories for tomorrow.

IM, especially if shared in an anecdotal and traditional manner is easy to follow, understand and digest. For example, a lot of wisdom in cultures around the world has traditionally passed on by storytelling. In our time, there are tools available that can help collect and sharing of institutional memory even more effective and easier. For example use of multimedia tools (audio, video, social media) help organizations preserve the knowledge and context of important events in the organization’s life for posterity. After all, only those who remember the past are not condemned to repeat it.

 

Learn more. Reach out to Pranay Kohli.

Putting a (Knowledge) Pedal to Innovation

The bicycle, a seemingly simple machine, is a culmination of innovation that many rarely appreciate fully. Compare that to the intellectual effort that goes into making airplanes and spaceships. Leveraging knowledge is the key!

The late English cycling historian, John Pinkerton, once remarked, “Think of a new idea in bicycle design and someone will have already invented it, probably in the nineteenth century.” But as we know, we are still not done perfecting the bicycle. Every so often bicycle manufacturers innovate several aspects of the humble bicycle, be it materials, engineering, ergonomics, aesthetics, pneumatics, and so on. What makes it possible? The constantly moving pedals of knowledge. And bicycle manufacturers are not the only people busy innovating: all business activities are constantly being innovated and improved upon.

A case can be made that only cutting edge innovation provides any competitive advantage anymore, rest can be sourced. And a natural basis for constant and structured innovation, in contrast to random “aha” moments of insights and great ideas, is knowledge. The process of innovation may vary, but it leverages intellectual property created in R&D labs, insights gleaned by marketing, new production techniques discovered on the shop floor, as well as the collective experience of everyone in the organization. These vast stores of knowledge are critical to facilitate creation of innovative, products and services.

But how does knowledge move the innovative into a higher gear? Here are some best practices:

  • Collect data, create knowledge. Only when an organization has created well-defined processes to exploit the assets of its knowledge, can it mine the content to its best advantage. This is the hard work of innovation, going through what’s already available and looking for the nuggets of ideas that need to be extracted. One way it can be done is by using tailored text-analysis tools; another is just going back through the institutional memory of the company: learning from the collective wisdom, knowledge, and insights of an organization.
     
  • Everyday ideas, creative insights. The best discovery of insights is done during the course of everyday work, especially within project-based organizations, where team members interact, share, and create while interacting with each other. These insights need to be gathered, embedded into everyday work, and shared using collaboration tools and then pushed out to the whole company.
     
  • Think externally, share locally. Innovation can be found not only within what the organization is doing but in finding out what is happening in the broader field, especially how the customers actually use products and services, comparing how things are done across multiple locations and/or business units, looking for anomalous customer requests, dealing with “difficult” customers. All of this requires for structured data collection, analysis, and knowledge creating and sharing.
     
  • Here today, gone tomorrow. In today’s knowledge-based economy, team members carry knowledge, ideas, expertise in their brains. Companies are most at risk for losing their innovations when their most valued and experienced employees leave. Therefore, structured Knowledge Management (KM) aided by appropriate tools is imperative to avoid an intellectual discontinuity.

As businesses, organizations, and teams become increasingly knowledge-centric, innovation is ever more dependent on knowledge creation and sharing. In fact, a company may increasingly thrive on innovating certain aspects of value chain. Examples include Dell (supply chain), Apple (usability and aesthetics), and Nike (design).

As we pedal our way forward riding the innovation bike, we will be constantly reminded to leverage knowledge, and to share knowledge. Only that way, the next generations of bikes (and everything else) will be better. Pedal on!

 

Learn more. Reach out to Ian Poole and Pranay Kohli.

Social Collaboration: Force Multiplier or Forest Fire?

Social Collaboration is one of the largest recent trends in Knowledge Management, gaining widespread investment and adoption across all types of organizations. Unfortunately, very few have realized the business benefits they expected. Insights from successes and failures reveal key lessons for anyone looking to create value from social collaboration.

The Promise

Organizations have learned that much of the business value from Knowledge is delivered not thru traditional content libraries, but thru collaboration. The goal is to help people to connect and collaborate with others more quickly, beyond formal teams and also with external customers, suppliers and partners. The emphasis on the “flow” of knowledge, not just the “stock,” is the most significant KM trend over the past five years, across all types of organizations.

Technology has accelerated this shift, inspired by the now-ubiquitous presence of social media and communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Linked In. If only we could bring these tools inside our firewall, many business leaders and CIOs say, we could instantly change how our people work together, we could spark more innovation and efficiency across teams and departments, and finally provide our people with the tools they have been asking for. What could be better than this?

Social Collaboration is one of the largest recent trends in Knowledge Management. Unfortunately, very few organizations have realized the business benefits they expected, and they should heed some simple lessons for success.

The Race and Disillusionment

Organizations have rushed to invest heavily in these new social collaboration and community tools in recent years. Cloud hosting and “freemium” products have made it simple for enterprise users to try out and virally adopt many of them, often without involving Information Technology and other formal groups. Business leaders have also jumped onto the bandwagon, in efforts to show their people a newer, more modern electronic workspace.

What is abundantly clear is that social collaboration is able to radically transform how people and teams can tap into the latest insights, solve problems and make decisions. By supplementing email, some organizations report countless success stories about how their social platform has helped them to win new business, innovate and reduce costs in ways their traditional tools never could. These stories are real and tangible. Sounds wonderful, right?

The issue is that these successes are not the norm. For most organizations, their hopes for dramatic business impact remain unrealized. After the initial wave of buzz and excitement, the social collaboration platform often becomes viewed as merely a chatroom for non-business related topics, and perceived as a waste of time for most people in the company. The platform and program then take a back seat in the business, resulting in resourcing and funding drying up. This pattern occurs more often than not – and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Making it Real and Delivering Value

A winning program requires the organization to view social collaboration not as a tool, but as an entire business capability for their people and teams. “Build it and they will come” is not a strategy. There are many factors to consider across the a program and four of the most important are highlighted here.

  • Align Social Collaboration to how your people work. The most overlooked step is to think in detail about these tools should be used, by whom and for what purpose. What problems can it solve, how is this new/different, and how will the organization know if it is succeeding? Document this vision with examples up front, to help grab the attention of any business user or leader.
     
  • Understand that this is a new and radical way of working. The power of social collaboration lies in the fact that posts are, by default, open – any person can instantly ask a question, share an insight or make a comment. Even though this is no different than public tools such as Facebook, this is a radical change for the workplace, where people are hesitant to share openly with others they don’t know, and are slow to expose publicly what they DON’T know. Remember, it took 10+ years for email to become a trusted, everyday tool.
     
  • Address the complexity paradox. Despite the goal of making our lives easier, the introduction of Social Collaboration actually adds complexity. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take any existing tools away, even email, and we don’t know what the future mix of tools will look like. People are increasingly overloaded with new desktop and mobile tools every day, and Social Collaboration has the potential to create further confusion. It is critical to develop a clear set of good practices regarding how and when to use new and existing tools, anchored in the overall strategy. Doing this up front, in training, will help immensely.
     
  • Leadership, leadership, leadership. A social collaboration program will only succeed when large numbers are participating regularly, including the organization’s most visible and respected people. This requires users to feel comfortable and confident in creating and sharing content across the network. Unfortunately, a common issue is that users feel reluctant to post on their platform for fear of what their manager might think. When users don’t feel “permission” from their managers to engage, they won’t! The imperative is for leaders to not only serve as sponsors, but to be active users and contributors.

Social collaboration has the potential to be a game-changing “force multiplier” to just about any organization, but realizing this promise is difficult. Managing the program as a business capability, not just a tool, can help organizations improve chances at success.

 

Learn more. Reach out to Bob Armacost.

Optimized Situational Awareness

Situation awareness in not new, it has been part of the military’s lexicon for over 200 years. Having the appropriate level of situational awareness is critical for senior decision makers. A lack of it can be devastating – just ask General Motors, which took a $1.5 billion charge for recalls associated with a 2014 faulty ignition switch that it had known about for over a decade.

Understanding the environment you operate in is essential to making good, sound business decisions. A decision maker must always know context (what is happening), circumstance (what has happened) and consequence (what could happen) at all times. To be successful, you must understand and interpret all three of these inputs and allocate resources accordingly to take advantage of future opportunities and to mitigate potential threats. Sadly, most organizations have poor situational awareness. They either don’t take all “Three Cs” into account when planning or acting or wrongly identify key inputs.

Understanding the environment you operate in is essential to making good, sound business decisions. Three simple activities can help raise your organization’s situational awareness so that you make better, faster, smarter decisions.

So how does one raise the situational awareness of individuals or organizations so better, faster, smarter decisions are made?

First, it is important to recognize that situational awareness cuts across a time continuum. It isn't just about being aware of 'now' – it's about what the current situation means and what can be extrapolated from past events and the present into the future, and using that to drive a decision or decisions to manage threats and/or exploit opportunities.

Three simple activities can raise your organization’s situational awareness:

  • Open the aperture. We live in an era of data overload. The volume and variety of data, coupled with the velocity it can be accessed and searched, put incredible amounts of data at our fingertips. Yet vast pockets of valuable information go untapped – social media, audio, video and photos. Organizations should develop strategies that move beyond just tapping into traditional structured data (such as easily searchable databases) and harness the power of unstructured data such as multimedia content. Experts estimate that 80 to 90 percent of the data in any organization is unstructured. And the amount of unstructured data in enterprises is growing significantly - often many times faster than structured databases are growing.
     
  • Share, share, share. The old adage ”The sum is greater than the parts” is nowhere more applicable than in the business world. Yet breaking down organizational barriers and sharing information seems to be a recurring problem for most organizations. Lessons learned often times become simply lessons heard because they are presented when individuals cannot leverage the insights to drive smarter decision making. The key is to share information readily so it is available on-demand and develop processes and procedures so that sharing becomes part of the DNA of an organization. In turn, accessing the insights when they are needed, as opposed to when they are presented, becomes a driver for improved decision making.
     
  • Embrace technology. The role that technology can play in improving situational awareness cannot be overstated. As information is collected, converted into intelligence and then disseminated to key consumers, each of these steps can be optimized (in terms of quality and speed) through the efficient use of technology. For example, information can be more effectively downloaded by developing smart connectors between external content sources and your organization’s internal data repositories. Analytic capabilities are improved by text analysis and pattern recognition software. Finally, enterprise business intelligence tools, such as SharePoint, allow organizations to smartly push information to the right people.

Like chess, improving situational awareness is a simple concept to understand, but difficult to master. However, if you follow the simple activities outlined above your organization will be well on its way to making more timely and better decisions.

 

Learn more. Reach out to Scott Leeb.

Pearls of Wisdom in a Sea of Documents

Many organizations have become disillusioned with their knowledge management initiatives, despite success at gathering large volumes of well-structured content. What’s often missing is the “insights layer”.

Many organizations have accumulated significant document archives over time, in the thousands or even hundreds of thousands. Many have also installed search tools that can surf this content and extract results for a particular topic.

Despite this, you often hear complaints about knowledge management (KM) in these organizations: “there’s too much to sift through” or “we can't find what we really need”. The problem is only going to get worse as additional documents, together with increasing volumes of unstructured content from external sources and social media get added to the mix.

One solution is to get more selective about what’s captured, focusing on content that truly extends and advances your organization’s core knowledge base – even if you also need to keep a more comprehensive document repository for records management purposes.

Many organizations have become disillusioned with their knowledge management initiatives, despite success at gathering large volumes of well-structured content. What’s often missing is the “insights layer”.

But regardless of the scope of these collections, what’s often missing is the “insights layer”: a way of quickly surfacing the key ideas that help with real business issues that people are facing. If we could make it easier to find these pearls of wisdom in a sea of documents, knowledge management would be much more useful.

Building the insights layer is tricky, because you don’t want to over-invest in building highly polished and synthesized topic knowledge that few people will ever use. Three approaches in particular can help keep things lightweight and efficient:

  • Structure KM content around use cases. There can be tremendous value in asking a few key questions when uploading documents or project summaries, and then using the answers to label the content; e.g., “what could be useful to other teams”, “what was the impact of this work”, and “what lessons were learned”? This exercise should also help you quickly trim and re-focus the content to make it easier for others to re-use. If you don’t have good answers to the questions, perhaps the content should stay in your archives and not be highlighted for KM purposes.
     
  • Don’t try and capture everything. Think of the content that you upload as advertising for what’s available behind the scenes. After all, a key objective for knowledge management is to encourage direct personal contact between originators and users, so that people can find out about additional resources and how to apply them in specific situations. By doing this, you’re adding a more customized “pull” element to knowledge sharing - and saving effort on unnecessary codification of content that’s better explained in person.
     
  • Create “shop windows” for key knowledge areas. If every item that’s uploaded to repository has a basic set of topic metadata added, together with the key insights and contact people, it makes it relatively quick and easy for topic experts to create and maintain lists of the most useful content for entire areas of knowledge. As an alternative or a supplement, some organizations are successfully using internal crowd-sourcing approaches, combined with usage analysis, to collectively select the content that should be highlighted. However you do it, these lists will become highly valuable starting points for searchers.

None of these tasks should take much extra time if you can build a discipline of doing them as part of the ongoing work for a project or other knowledge-creating activity. If you’ve helped develop the ideas, you’ll already have a good idea of what topics were covered and why they might be useful to others; and you’ll definitely know the right contact people. A small investment of time adding this information pays big dividends later when people are trying to find what they need.

Of course, some of the pearls will fade over time. Insights get outdated or superseded, so there needs to be a mechanism for review and updating. Technology can help by providing usage data and by triggering review workflows after a period of time; and the same approaches you used for highlighting key content will also help with re-ordering and editing it. It’s important to make this extra effort to maintain currency and relevance, or the knowledge platform will gradually lose credibility with users.

Creating a strong insights layer and keeping it fresh are among the most important success factors for KM programs. If you do it right, it will have a big effect on and organizational buy-in and leadership support, and KM will be transformed from a static library to a living resource with real and growing business value.

 

Learn more. Reach out to Simon Trussler.

Teaming Beyond the Team

Organizations, like people, are often at their best when facing an urgent challenge: grasping a new business opportunity before others can, defending against a threat, or reacting to a surprise external event. People work together, build on each other’s special expertise, and find a solution – in fact, they become very effective knowledge managers.

After it’s over, people often ask: “why can’t we collaborate like this all the time?” Why can’t this free flow of knowledge between individuals and groups be a permanent part of the organization’s culture? Unfortunately, given the chance, people often lapse into hoarding behavior, intentionally or unintentionally, and the old siloes re-establish themselves. What can be done to avoid this?

One idea is to look at what effective crisis management project teams do well and then aim to replicate those behaviors and systems at enterprise level. Members of effective teams perform their individual roles at a high level but they also work together to solve problems and generate solutions – by contributing their individual insights and experience and by asking the right questions of each other.

The most effective organizations are able to replicate successful project team practices at the level of the whole enterprise, by encouraging people to ask the right questions of each other, as well as contributing their individual insights and experience.

At an organization-wide scale, leaders can drive the same type of behavior by continually reinforcing three key themes:

  • It’s OK to ask someone. Junior staff members often see it as a sign of weakness if they build on someone else’s approach to a problem - they feel they have to invent it themselves. Managers need to fight against this tendency, encourage people to ask: “hasn’t someone done this before” and give explicit credit to people for finding experts and “borrowing with pride”. This behavior creates the “pull” dynamic across organization siloes, which is a key motor for successful knowledge sharing.
     
  • It’s good to share. If there’s pull, there needs to be response: managers should insist that when new ideas and approaches are developed, they are shared broadly – both for the benefit of others and to stimulate comments and improvement to the ideas themselves. This can be through knowledge management systems, or - even better - through live presentation and discussion. Think about communication channels and events that don’t require extensive preparation and are easy for others to access.
     
  • You can measure how well this works. Performance management systems and rewards, for both individuals and teams, can easily be adapted to encourage these knowledge flows. Imagine a performance review based on questions like “how often did you present your ideas to people outside your team”, “which ideas from other teams did you use on this project”, or “which new KM documents did you write or help write?” Technologies like social networking and expertise-finders can stimulate and facilitate this behavior, while KM contribution and usage metrics provide additional tracking data.

“Asking and sharing” are key success factors for teams – effective collaboration makes everyone productive. They also improve motivation, because people like having their ideas listened to and validated. The same practices, extrapolated across the whole enterprise, are key building blocks for an effective and lasting knowledge sharing culture. The target is for the whole organization to behave like a highly collaborative expert team.

In the end, this is all about leadership. Leaders need to drive the right “asking and sharing” behaviors and continue doing so until it becomes second nature. It shouldn’t need a crisis to break down your organizational silos and create a free flow of ideas that becomes a permanent part of your culture.

 

Learn more. Reach out to Simon Trussler.

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