Chapter 6
Implementing Knowledge
Management

Now that we have explored the knowledge landscape and looked at knowledge management initiatives in the areas of responsiveness, innovation, competency, and efficiency, you are probably honing in on how to institute knowledge management practices in your organization. In this chapter, we will look at how to do that by walking you through best-practice processes and then exploring a knowledge management implementation scenario at a hypothetical company.

Best Practice Processes

1.   Define the Business Need. The practices that you are considering should address a real business need—a “need to have,” not a “nice to have.” Your responses to the questions at the end of Chapter 5 can help you assess priorities and think about the feasibility of initiating a knowledge management project within your company’s environment—given its strengths, weaknesses, and available financial and human resources. For example, if your strategy demands that a significant percentage of revenue come from products under two years old, then you need to invest not only in R&D but in a coherent knowledge management system that accelerates innovation.

Don’t be seduced by amazing technology. Allow your visionary faculties to be tickled by remarkable technology; but ground your excitement in the business actualities of your organization—your current needs and needs that lie around the curve.

Many companies and CIOs have come to regret purchasing fancy IT systems that have theoretical promise but don’t deliver in their particular environment. Technology can enable you to set up virtual meetings with chat, video contact, shared white boards, and shared documents which multiple parties can see and edit. People can participate from their desktops anywhere in the world. However, if, in your culture, people put a high value on face-to-face interaction or do not share works in progress, only finished products, then they may not be ready for virtual collaboration technology. Technology can help you create wild multimedia presentations with spinning, flashing objects and high-quality sound and music with dramatic sound bites thrown in. But if these capabilities do not suit your marketing strategy or your corporate image, then they are irrelevant.

2.   Ensure Sufficient Support. For an initiative to get off the ground and really fly, it needs support from four sources:

The executive sponsor blesses the project, funds it, and keeps it visible at high levels. The operations leader defines its scope, fires up the troops, oversees project management, and runs interference. These people need to be believers and communicate the real business value of the initiative up and down the corporate ladder. As for employees—the people who will be affected by the initiative—involving them early is essential for assessing their real, urgent work needs and setting their expectations about impending changes. Early and ongoing inclusion of employees in defining their own work processes can go a long way toward preventing later mutiny.

The resources you need are adequate funding and sufficient time from those who will be involved in the project. We have seen too many knowledge management initiatives get launched and then dwindle because no one is designated to remain at the helm and no one is assigned to continue to work at the day-to-day level. An initiative doesn’t necessarily require people’s full-time attention. But it does require some percentage of people’s work time. You can’t expect an enthusiastic employee to do a “real” full-time job and keep up a knowledge management role on top of that. Knowledge management roles have to be integrated into “real” work.

In addition, the funding has to support any additional technical infrastructure needed to host the initiative, as well as new technology, applications, or consulting. Training will likely be needed and must also be factored into the funding equation.

3.   Begin with Piloting—Learn as You Go. A knowledge management initiative represents a tremendous learning opportunity—from a technical, a process, and a cultural perspective. Typically, you should begin with a pilot project, and call it that. Calling it “pilot” gives you attention and permission to learn—two useful ingredients. It is important to design the pilot project with a “learn as you go” protocol or intentional experimentation in mind.

Experimentation does not mean shooting knowledge darts blindly at a blank screen and hoping that they spell out some business success formula. Experimentation means that you begin, as you would any serious project, with careful scoping, thoughtful process design, and inclusion of all the key players. Experimentation means keeping a constant observing eye across all aspects of the project, noting and documenting what’s working and what’s not. And what’s not working needs to be adjusted during the course of the project, not just at the end. We call this an iterative learning process—try, learn, adjust, try—and it is essential for knowledge management projects.

For the first few pilots, target the low hanging fruit.

A successful knowledge management project that truly helps people work smarter provides momentum for future initiatives. The best PR comes from employees and customers who say, “This made a real difference in helping me get what I need.”

4.   Building on the Initial Pilots. The piloting and iterative learning process are essential. As you consider pilot opportunities, you will also need to think about the “big picture,” and consider the overall knowledge management landscape. You will need to engage other champions, visionaries, and leaders in mapping out the larger strategy. Think of the pilots as catalysts for a more comprehensive, organization-wide strategy. And each part of the wider strategy should likewise begin with a pilot learning phase. The learning needs to continue and be incorporated into the ongoing planning and deployment—as we illustrate in a sidebar on an actual knowledge management pilot project and an indepth scenario about knowledge management at a hypothetical pharmaceutical products company.

A Scenario for Launching Knowledge Management

Our hypothetical company, Bio-Brand, is a mid-sized pharmaceutical products company with a reputation for being highly innovative. It has had major success with a small portfolio of drugs and has been riding that success for many years. However, the end of its patent protection period is approaching.

Bio-Brand’s continued success in this business environment depends on its ability to leverage its scientific and research capability to create new products and receive patents on new formulas—and reduce the amount of time it takes to do so. While the long-term profit margins on a successful, patented drug are high, the time to patent for Bio-Brand products has been nine to twelve years. The company needs to reduce this barrier to entry to seven to eight years.

Another key to success is getting expertise either from new hires or by acquiring small start-up companies who have specialty products or components and the experts who can develop them further. The people who are hired into Bio-Brand are highly educated M.D.s and Ph.D.s, and other professionals, with established networks among scientists and researchers around the world. The market for these people is very competitive and a high-quality R&D environment is crucial to attracting and retaining them. Bio-Brand finds recruiting and retaining high-level talent to be a challenge. In addition, it takes six to nine months to fully orient and train a new hire. And staff tenure ranges from a high of twelve years to an increasing low of two years. Bio-Brand needs to better understand its increasing attrition rate and do more to retain staff.

As Bio-Brand grows by entering new markets and through hiring and acquisition, it is becoming increasingly global. Clinical teams now have members from several geographies and from several different, now merged, companies. The firm’s customer base is also increasingly global and its sales strategy is no longer purely regional. Bio-Brand now sells products to a managed care consortium with facilities throughout the United States and Canada. A team composed of sales reps from many different areas will work together to sell to their global customers. These teams need to learn how to work collaboratively while remaining geographically separated. And, as new clinical and sales teams form, they need to leverage existing protocols and methodologies and materials, rather than reinventing wheels.

Bio-Brand’s products currently compete on uniqueness and quality, but a number of firms are revving up to copy Bio-Brand’s products once their patents lapse. Because of this competition, in addition to keeping new drugs in its development pipeline, Bio-Brand wants to develop value-added service offerings that can be packaged with its products. For example, Bio-Brand is sending its senior researchers into the field as on-site advisors to doctors as they test new drugs and medical products in trials. In this way, doctors, who are the firm’s key customers, get immediate access to expertise and Bio-Brand researchers get immediate feedback on their products. This serves to increase customer loyalty and keep senior scientists fresh and full of new real world ideas that might turn into new product ideas. However, this strategy, while having demonstrated value, relies on face-to-face contact and takes up the valuable research time of Bio Brands senior staff. Additional, more innovative means of reaching the customer need to be developed.

The executive leadership group has been meeting to review these challenges. They see them as challenges to the ways Bio-Brand addresses its knowledge management capabilities: their “Know-What,” “Know-Who,” and “Know-How.” The leadership group has identified the following six key areas for knowledge management initiatives:

•   Reducing time to patent through better management of information

•   Attracting and retaining high-caliber scientific and sales talent

•   Reducing new employee time to productivity

•   Enabling distributed teams to work collaboratively on complex projects

•   Enabling broad communities of knowledge workers, within and outside the company, to interact

•   Creating innovative value-added service components as part of the customer relationship management process

A Structured Strategy. Using the RICE model, the leadership team organizes the issues, laying the groundwork for a focused, manageable, accountable process:

Responsiveness

•   Creating innovative value-added service components as part of their customer relationship management process

Innovation

•   Reducing time to patent through better management of information

Competency

•   Attracting and retaining high-caliber scientific and sales talent

•   Reducing new employee time to productivity

Efficiency

•   Enabling distributed teams to work collaboratively on complex projects

•   Enabling broad communities of knowledge workers, within and outside the company, to interact

Each area is to be actively managed by one “champion” from the leadership group. The champion will work with the lead operations manager to address the strategy, knowledge, culture, and technology questions listed in Chapter 5. This gives the leadership group a stable foundation for proceeding and prevents them from jumping prematurely to a pure technology response before the environment is ready to effectively use it. The answers to these questions will help them determine what steps may need to be undertaken—before or during a knowledge management pilot—to ready the organization to use knowledge management as part of its way of doing business.

Each area begins with a pilot program that will provide visible and valuable results and will be overseen by the champion and staffed by the operations manager and a dedicated team. They will be responsible for shaping and rolling out a knowledge management pilot. They can use the knowledge management landscape (also described in Chapter 5) to help them think about possible initiatives. Each initiative on the landscape will need to be fully scoped out from a business value, a cultural, a process, and a technology perspective.

For example, if the team is working on enabling broad communities of knowledge workers, within and outside the company, to interact, they begin by doing an assessment that includes issues such as these:

1.   Does our company believe in the business value of communities, and is our company a nourishing place for communities to grow?

2.   What communities would ideally serve the best strategic interests of the company? Do they already exist?

3.   What communities currently exist naturally inside of the company?

4.   What communities currently exist that span the boundaries of the company?

5.   Are existing communities of strategic value? If so, do they have the resources they need to be effective; and are there processes in place to funnel some of their knowledge products back to the company?

6.   If appropriate communities don’t exist, could the company foster their emergence?

The team plans to consider and manage issues such as cultural compatibility between the company and the community; respect for the integrity of the community; and agreements with the community to harvest and use some of its tacit and explicit knowledge products. Is there sufficient motivation for people to participate? Do specific community roles need to be supported, such as facilitator, knowledge harvester, and administrator?

The team will also consider what form of technology would best support the many needs of the community from functional and infrastructure perspectives. Functional considerations include:

•   Storing knowledge

•   Engaging in multiple dialogue types

•   Profiling members

•   Filtering information

•   General administration

•   Engaging in knowledge work processes (such as decision making, brainstorming, and identifying action steps)

Infrastructure considerations include the platform, firewall issues, and scalability.

The project team, after reviewing its assessment of these and other issues, decides on the processes and technology needed for piloting a community space knowledge management initiative. They will need to set up success criteria for the pilot and monitor the initiative throughout its duration. They will need to use the iterative learning process described earlier in this chapter (try, learn, adjust, try) and be sure to stay in contact with users and make modifications as needed along the way. They will also need to communicate their learnings, successes, and obstacles to their champion, who can begin to spread news of the value of the initiative to other arenas.

Bio-Brand’s Experience with Piloting a Community Space

Bio-Brand is fortunate in that there are already a number of active, successful, and strategic communities. Most of them are communities of researchers who exchange findings and use each other as ad hoc advisors. Many of the queries begin with “Have you ever seen this before… or had this result?” Or, “Do you know where I can find this piece of equipment?” Individual managers see the value in these exchanges and support employees spending time in communities. These communities tend to be small, with membership spreading by word or mouth, and they use list servs as their communications vehicle. Community members speak highly of their activity in their communities and consider it important to their ongoing development. New employees who stumble into a community are excited to have the opportunity to learn so much so quickly and to interact with the experts.

For Bio-Brand, the challenge is to take these communities out of the closet and expand their potential without damaging their momentum. Working with community members, the team decides that providing communities with a more robust, collaborative form of technology that could meet more of their needs (for sharing documents, collaborating on papers and projects, etc.) would be of significant value. Bio-Brand also offers to host all these communities and put a directory of communities on its company intranet so more people could learn of their existence and join. The project team works with each community to design processes for ensuring that new members have the appropriate skills and job requirements to participate and that they are trained to use the community space technology. Bio Brand also offers a cadre of trained virtual facilitators to each community who can help facilitate conversations and may also serve as links to others.

They can flag information as having knowledge value to the company or to other communities and bring in useful information from other communities.

The success of communities in the research area sparks interest in other parts of the company. Sales and marketing teams, already comfortable working as distributed teams in virtual spaces, want to form communities of interest to share leads and best practices more broadly. Bio-Brand is able to leverage its learnings from its early pilot experiences and use them to bootstrap the formation of new communities.

Bio-Brand is also in the process of setting up communities with customers, as one part of its initiative to offer customers value-added services. This will be a space in which customers can get immediate responses to their questions and concerns and know that they are being heard. Bio-Brand will benefit from early warnings about what really matters to its customers.

So far, the biggest hurdle Bio-Brand has faced in creating communities is in linking up with researchers in other companies. The legal issues concerning protected information and technical firewall issues have made this a difficult challenge, and, for the time being, the company is focusing on other knowledge management areas where more immediate results can be won.

Recap

Stephen Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, advises beginning with the end in mind. With knowledge management, begin with strategy in mind. Start by assessing the business value of the potential initiative. Thinking about your core competencies helps map how knowledge management can add value to your business. As we discussed in Chapter 5, core competencies fall into four main target areas:

•   Responsiveness to the market

•   Innovation of new products and services

•   Competency of your skill base

•   Efficiency of work processes

One or more of these dimensions will be likely candidate areas for your knowledge management initiatives. Within each dimension, decide which practical application of knowledge management will create visible and valuable results. We offered you many options in Chapter 5.

Pick a real business need that will, when addressed, get people’s notice. It needs to be one that can be addressed and measured in a visible way and within a realistic time frame. This is also the time to consider the cultural and process issues you will face in your organization. Line up leaders and resources. Then consider technology. Addressing technology at this point ensures that it will serve your project, not drive it.

Once you’ve chosen your target area (e.g., Efficiency) and application focus (e.g., Community Space), begin with a pilot that will permit you to both accomplish some real objective and learn as you proceed.

At the same time, you will need to consider the “big picture” and the other critical areas for embedding knowledge management into your business. A successful initial pilot can serve as fuel for expanding your knowledge management efforts and for engaging the support of other key players. Each additional knowledge management effort should begin with a pilot phase that permits you to learn as you go and incorporate those learnings into your ongoing and future efforts.

The following outline can serve as a road map: