The next wave of knowledge management
Published: April 27, 2006
By Meg Mitchell Moore
Knowledge management hasn't gone away, but it is changing all the time. Are your people ready?
In Summary:
| • | A knowledge management initiative can do a lot for a midsize business, but only if management embraces and supports it. |
| • | Popular collaboration tools like blogs and portals can help midsize businesses begin knowledge management initiatives without hefty technology investments. |
It has been more than a decade since the term knowledge management entered the general business lexicon. Though the people at the forefront of the movement might have said the concept was a long time coming, it seemed to arrive with a bang for everyone else—a collective "yes!" moment when leaders of organizations of all shapes and sizes realized that their greatest assets were going home to dinner every night. Suddenly, one of the most pressing corporate concerns became how to capture, store and disseminate all the cool ideas in employees' heads.
Knowledge management isn't one of those business trends that is, well, trendy—the practice remains vital. But knowledge management has changed, and midsize businesses ready to jump into a knowledge management project will reap the benefits of its latest flavor: a more fluid exchange of information made possible by technologies like blogs, wikis and portals.
Moving from knowledge management creation to real-time knowledge management sharing and collaboration
"In the beginning, knowledge management was a mix of collaboration and document management," says Bill Ives, an independent consultant focusing on the business uses of emerging technologies and the author of the Portals and KM blog. "But it drifted more into the document management and library management genre, and it went downhill a little bit."
When knowledge management initiatives failed—which they frequently did—it was typically because information technology (IT) managers relied too much on the technology and did not align the project with business objectives. Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives often had no champion in senior management and, therefore, no real reason for existing. In addition, says Robbie Baxter, a strategy consultant with Peninsula Strategies in Menlo Park, California, early technologies like document management tools, contact databases and team workspaces were static; the inability to contribute and respond directly to other people's knowledge limited KM's ability to change the way people worked.
Today, knowledge management is experiencing a resurgence of sorts, with the explosion of collaboration technologies enabling individuals to create, share, contribute and comment on information, according to Michael Kogon, CEO of Atlanta, Georgia-based Definition 6, which builds KM solutions using Microsoft technologies like SharePoint and Commerce Server. "Phase one was information creation, but phase two is shared knowledge development," he says.
Today, knowledge management is experiencing a resurgence of sorts, with the explosion of collaboration technologies enabling individuals to create, share, contribute and comment on information, according to Michael Kogon, CEO of Atlanta, Georgia-based Definition 6, which builds KM solutions using Microsoft technologies like SharePoint and Commerce Server. "Phase one was information creation, but phase two is shared knowledge development," he says.
The next generation of knowledge management tools
For those businesses ready to commit to knowledge development, there are scads of tools to facilitate speedy information sharing and creation. Depending on your needs, your organization might choose to use one or all of these technologies.
| • | Portals. When the British food retailer Sainsbury's launched a portal-based KM initiative, it did so as part of a larger business strategy to encourage innovation in light of tough competition from high-end boutique groceries and discount retailers. Among the portal's features: an idea bank where product developers must register new ideas, thus ensuring that the ideas are not already in development. The portal also links product developers with customer feedback Sainsbury's receives over the phone or in stores. Smaller companies that may not be able to fund a major KM project can easily (and relatively cheaply) create document sharing and collaboration sites using such technologies as Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services (a free download which requires the installation of Microsoft Windows Server 2003). Portal technologies like SharePoint virtual team sites are ideal for structured, process-oriented tasks requiring document creation and versioning. |
| • | Blogs. Found on either internal or external company and personal Web sites, blogs give employees the opportunity to espouse ideas in an informal environment. Kogan cites a consumer product company that was undergoing a package design project. The brand team installed a blog capability inside the organization's portal, thus beginning a "rolling conversation." Without orchestrating a string of conference calls or a time-consuming retreat, they were able to accomplish the whole dialogue through blogs. "Some of the ideas came from junior staff members who would never have been called on in a meeting," Kogon says. |
| • | Wikis. One of the newest arrivals on the KM scene is the wiki, a Web site to which anyone can add, modify or edit material simply by clicking on an "edit" button. Most people are familiar with the concept of wikis because of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, but wikis can also help manage open, unstructured business collaboration, such as in an engineering or RAD (rapid application development) environment. Several vendors now offer wikis as either hosted services or installed on a dedicated server. Wikis are different than blogs and portals in that information presented in those tools remains static, with posts and responses in chronological order. By contrast, each time someone saves changes to a wiki he or she is creating a new iteration to a document or the site itself. A sales team, for instance, might use a wiki to collaborate on the best approach for going after a certain client, Kogon says. Wikis integrate well into a SharePoint site too. |
| • | Mash-up: The term originated in the hip-hop world to refer to remixing songs, but now "mash-up" can also describe the practice of combining applications or tools from different sources. For example, a company could marry a mapping application with the location of the sales force and customers to allow salespeople to share contacts and prospects more easily. Mash-ups have yet to extend much beyond mapping, Ives notes, yet the potential is unlimited: "Any Web-based applications can be put together. For example, the social book-marking tool [which allows users to classify, store and share Internet resources] could be combined with an enterprise search engine to offer both ways of doing search." |
Tips for getting your people to use KM tools
Know your devils. To encourage involvement, develop KM initiatives around critical business issues, Ives suggests. Many of the early failures of KM initiatives stemmed from the fact that managers did not link them closely enough to real business problems or solutions.
Get support from the top. Experts agree on one thing about knowledge management: It won't work unless senior leaders understand it and get involved. "Make publishing content to the company public space a management initiative, and make sure managers are regular contributors," says Kogon.
Award effective KM efforts. Set up a bonus pool for the best contributors of intellectual capital, Peninsula Strategies' Baxter says. Or reward contributors to KM initiatives that led to fast product launches.
After all, the biggest challenge in the new knowledge management arena will not be a lack of technologies or tools, but finding the best way to encourage people to use them.
Meg Mitchell Moore is a freelance writer based in Burlington, Vermont. She writes for a variety of business and general-interest publications, and has held staff positions at CIO and Darwin.
