For knowledge workers who represent a positive value multiplier, providing consistent supportive feedback through the corporation’s touch points, investing in knowledge worker education when economically feasible, and maintaining the processes associated with knowledge worker loyalty all maximize the value that the knowledge worker can bring to the corporation.
Men are disturbed not by things that happen, but by their opinions of the things that happen.
—Epictetus
82
C H A P T E R 4
Process
After reading this chapter you will be able to
• Understand the knowledge management life cycle—its phases and their related issues
• Appreciate the role of standards in the Knowledge Management process
• Appreciate the significance of establishing a Knowledge Management infrastructure
Sharing,archiving and reusing information occurs in most organizations, but leaving these activities to chance decreases the likelihood they will happen. In contrast, implementing a formal Knowledge Management (KM) program, with finite, measurable parameters that can be scrutinized relative to best practices, maximizes the likelihood of success.
In addition, the KM program will have a better chance of adding to the company’s bottom line if it is aligned with other key business processes. For example, if customer service representatives are instructed on the importance of documenting each significant interaction as part of a KM initiative yet they are rewarded strictly on the number of problems resolved per shift and not for documenting problems and solutions, the initiative will fail. What’s more, they will likely be less effective because of confused communications from management. In contrast, if 83
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t the KM initiative is orchestrated with a customer relations management (CRM) effort, the synergies between the two efforts can contribute to the success of each other as well as to the company’s bottom line.
Part of the task of managing information is understanding the process in which it is created, used, stored, and eventually disposed of and how to accomplish that when the cost of maintaining it is greater than its likely future value. As introduced in Chapter 1, managing information—
whether in the form of multimedia for marketing purposes or heuristics for decision making—typically involves eight discrete stages as well as a tracking function. These stages constitute the KM life cycle: 1.
Knowledge creation or acquisition
2. Knowledge modification
3. Immediate use
4. Archiving
5. Transfer
TEAMFLY
6. Translation/repurposing
7. User access
8. Disposal
To begin the journey, consider the unfolding events at Medical Multimedia.
For the Love of Money
Because of a continued downturn in the economy and impending federal legislation placing spending limits on pharmaceutical advertising, owners of the privately held Medical Multimedia conclude that it’s in their best interest to sell now, while the company is profitable. Of the prospective buyers, the most promising is the Custom Gene Factory (CGF), a local biotech company. To maximize its position at the negotiation table, the management of Medical Multimedia commissions an independent 84
Team-Fly®
P r o c e s s
knowledge audit to establish the value of intangibles in the company—
including knowledge worker loyalty and various forms of intellectual property. On the books, Medical Multimedia has a value approaching $15 million, based primarily on tangible assets. However, after the knowledge audit, it’s valued at about $30 million—over double the original book value of the company.
With a sale price of $25 million in stock and cash, CGF acquires and absorbs Medical Multimedia into its corporate structure. A $500 million company with about 1,200 employees, including the 75 employees recently acquired in the merger, CGF relies heavily on multimedia to map out genetic structures. It uses these graphics to help sell its services to pharmaceutical firms developing custom drugs for specific diseases and populations.
When the chief executive officer (CEO) of CGF examined the knowledge audit of Medical Multimedia, he was impressed at the value that the KM process added and believed that a company-wide KM program should be instituted. Working with Mary, the chief information officer (CIO), and an outside consultant, the CEO identifies a chief knowledge officer (CKO) who reports directly to the CIO. Mary is repositioned as a knowledge manager for the customer support division of the company, and upper management decides that she will work under the direction of the customer service manager to establish the KM processes, the most appropriate controlled vocabulary, the benchmarks, and the metrics used in the customer support area.
However, after working in that job for one year, Mary realizes that it has become tedious and limited. She’s too far removed from the CKO
and upper management to effect any real change in the organization, and her day-to-day tasks have become mundane. She gives one month’s notice to the manager of her division and announces plans to return to working as a consultant. As was agreed in her non-compete arrangements with 85
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t I N T H E R E A L W O R L D
Recycled Employees
During lean periods, middle managers are usually among the first employees to go. While this is a quick method of reducing payroll expenses, it also results in the loss of significant knowledge about how to get things done in the company. To reduce the loss of knowledge resources during a downsizing operation, Caterpillar recycles some of its middle managers into trainers at its Caterpillar Training Institute in western Australia, which offers courses on topics from forklift safety operation to off-highway truck systems.
Medical Multimedia and CGF, she is free to consult for any companies as long as she doesn’t disclose proprietary information.
Senior management’s first concern is that Mary will leave the company with a great deal of knowledge that can’t be replaced. Furthermore, her knowledge about the company’s KM processes would be invaluable in the hands of a competitor—even if it were not explicitly re-created.
As a consultant to a competitor, Mary could reapply her KM skills, much of which she developed while she worked with Medical Multimedia.
Short of resorting to legal action and creating an adversary, the best that CGF can do is offer Mary a bonus to work with a knowledge manager from another division to capture some of the heuristics that she developed while working with Medical Multimedia. Mary declines the offer of a bonus and takes the vacation time that is due her. She reap-pears two weeks later, offering her services directly to the CKO, one day per week, and at a considerably higher rate that she had been paid as an employee. The CKO readily accepts, and Mary begins work on the much more interesting and company-wide aspects of Knowledge Management in the biotech company.
86
P r o c e s s
Issues
Custom Gene Factory’s acquisition of Medical Multimedia and the associated activities illustrate several key issues associated with a KM initiative:
• Knowledge workers involved directly in the KM process may be the company’s most valuable assets.
• If it is to be successful, Knowledge Management is a business process that has to be managed like every other major business initiative.
• It is virtually impossible to prevent the repurposing of tacit knowledge by workers who leave the company. For example, in the story, management can’t stop Mary from leaving the company and using her tacit knowledge in the service of the competition.
• Knowledge audits are commonly used to quantify the value of a company’s intellectual assets. A series of knowledge audits can demonstrate the effectiveness of a KM initiative.
Life-Cycle Overview
The duration of the Knowledge Management life cycle is a function of the availability of the technologies that enable each phase and of the nature of the information, the difficulty of archiving the information, and other external factors. For example, some business information, such as tax information, must be retained or archived indefinitely to comply with federal, state, or local law. Other information may be critical to maintaining the value of the corporation, such as knowledge of core processes in the company.
As illustrated in Exhibit 4.1, each phase of the KM life cycle is associated with issues, input data, support mechanisms, and output data. The difference between the input and output data depends on the processes 87
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t E X H I B I T 4 . 1
Issues
Input
Output
PHASE
Data
Data
Suppor t Mechanisms
involved in the particular phase of the KM life cycle. For example, in the archiving process, the output data are indexed according to a standard or controlled vocabulary, whereas in the translation phase, the format of the information is converted to a more useful form.
Issues
The issues relevant to each phase in the Knowledge Management life cycle depend on the phase as well as the type of knowledge involved.
For example, for highly sensitive medical, legal, or financial information, security is a key issue. In contrast, for information that will be published on the web for general consumption, verifying ownership and copyright may be primary concerns. The primary issues in the KM life cycle, each of which is relevant to different degrees at each phase of the life cycle, include:
• Economics
• Accessibility
• Intellectual property
• Information
88
P r o c e s s
• Infrastructure
• Management
Economics
Every phase of the KM life cycle has an associated resource requirement in terms of money, time, technology, overhead, and physical space. Costs typically are expressed in cost per quantity of information accessed, manipulated, or stored. In this regard, the value of the data or information handled by the KM system reflects both the cost of replacement and resources already invested in acquiring the information. The economics of the KM life cycle also should provide for unplanned events.
For example, a KM initiative must have enough economic reserve to survive data loss due to unavoidable accidents, ranging from human error to hardware failures and software incompatibilities.
Accessibility
The accessibility of information in a KM system is a primary concern of knowledge employees and managers. Accessibility issues include access privileges—who within the organization has access to specific information and the type of access allowed. Access privileges typically are stratified on a need-to-know basis and by level in the organization.
For example, whereas the CEO may have access to information throughout the organization, a knowledge worker in, say, customer support may not have access to information in the human resources department. The type of access to information commonly varies as a function of the knowledge worker’s role in the organization. The librarian may be able to read, modify, and even delete information from the KM system. However, a front-line knowledge worker, such as a customer support representative, may be able to read and write information but not modify or delete information already in the system.
89
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t User authentication and security are directly related to access privileges. Authentication includes the methods used to verify that the users are who they say they are. In automated KM systems, authentication based on username and passwords is increasingly supplemented with biometric systems that rely on images of the user’s fingerprints or retina.
Security involves keeping unauthorized users from accessing, modifying, or destroying valuable information. A related issue is privacy, which is accomplished by maintaining certain information out of the reach of those without access privileges and need to know. In most KM programs, the ability of someone in the organization to modify information once it has been created or added to the system is especially guarded and tracked.
Access time is also a function of the ability to locate specific information in any phase of the KM life cycle, which is directly related to the methodology and vocabulary used to archive, locate, and retrieve information. As detailed in Chapter 5, the methodology and technology used to track the location and version of information in the KM life cycle also affect accessibility.
Intellectual Property
The intellectual property issues associated with each phase of the KM
life cycle have legal and practical implications. For example, there is the issue of specific intellectual property rights, such as moral rights, that may allow a knowledge worker to claim authorship of information even if other intellectual property rights have been assigned to the company. There is also the issue of the amount of author involvement in the KM life cycle once the information has been created.With information acquired outside of the corporation, such as stock artwork or work for hire, the issue of ownership verification, the process of verifying intellectual property ownership, arises.
90
P r o c e s s
Information
In automated KM systems, information is commonly in the form of electronic files. In manual KM systems, information may be in the form of a book, card file, or file folder. These formats afford different kinds of intellectual and social activity.
Then there is the issue of finding a standard nomenclature familiar to all knowledge workers who need the information, despite their different backgrounds. The language can range from graphical representations of decisions, numerical relationships, and textual descriptions in English or other language, to IF-THEN clauses that can be read by machine. A related issue is file naming, the labeling of information prior to or instead of indexing it with a controlled vocabulary; naming may be ad hoc or systematized, as determined by the author or management.
Reversibility, the ability to reverse or negate changes to the information that occur during the KM life cycle, is a chief concern of those wishing to repurpose information. Some changes, such as disposal, are irreversible, because information may be lost in the original translation process, whereas other changes are fully or partially reversible. For example, original data normally can’t be reconstructed from summary statistics.Versioning, the ability to track incremental changes to information, such as modifications, is key to allowing reversibility. Translating information from one form to another is usually fully reversible.
Infrastructure
A functional, supportive infrastructure enables the application of information technology to one or more phases of the KM life cycle. Core infrastructure issues include the nature of the supporting computer and communications hardware; the frequency, cost, and regularity of hardware updates; and the information storage capacity of a manual filing facility or computer system. In both physical and computer-based KM
91
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t systems, local storage capacity affects speed of access and has security implications. For example, storing all information in a local database makes the entire KM system more vulnerable to accidental loss due to hardware failure, fire, or flood.
There are also software issues, such as the performance and version of the computer’s operating system and network; the functionality, ease of use, performance, and cost of other software tools used in an automated KM system; and the availability of software updates, an area especially relevant in long-term archiving and maintenance of information.
Management
Management has a role throughout the KM life cycle. The key mana-gerial issues are quality control, including the degree to which quality control standards are established and followed, and process stability, which includes the stability of each phase of the KM life cycle as well as that of the overall life cycle. Management exerts control first by naming a librarian, who is in charge of the overall KM process and of the day-to-day upkeep of information in the system. Management also exerts control through sign-off or formal acceptance of the work involved in each phase of the KM life cycle.
Support Mechanisms
Just as the key issues apply variably to each phase of the KM life cycle, the support mechanisms are more relevant to some phases than others.
The primary support mechanisms or methods in the life cycle include technology, standards, knowledge workers, and management.
Technology
The technologies involved in the KM life cycle, described in depth in Chapter 5, include communications and collaborative systems, such as the 92
P r o c e s s
Internet and other networks; a variety of tools to manipulate, transform, and create information; and database technologies that can enable the rapid storage and retrieval of information.
In addition to general technologies, specific tools enhance and secure the flow of information in the KM life cycle. For example, security systems provide data encryption and user authentication; software systems and processes insure the version of information used is appropriate to the intended use; and program instrumentation is an automated means of tracking use of information throughout the KM life cycle. Other niche technologies range from erasure programs, the equivalent of paper shred-ders in an office environment, to decision support tools to help a librarian or management decide, for example, what information to archive and what information to destroy. Expert system technologies can help guide knowledge workers and other employees by providing them with access to instant expertise. Even the media used to store information has implications regarding ease of use, transport, and long-term storage.
Standards
Standards provide the basis for control and consistency of information.
In the context of supporting a KM initiative, standards are extensions of the KM process because they encapsulate rules and heuristics and thereby represent knowledge. Standards also represent best practices, the best way of accomplishing Knowledge Management. Furthermore, standards provide benchmarks for comparing performance. As such, they provide a basis for optimizing KM phases.
Knowledge Workers
As Mary’s career illustrates in the story of Custom Gene Factory, knowledge workers are some of the most important assets in a knowledge organization. In supporting the KM process, knowledge workers contribute 93
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t through activities ranging from self-reporting and documenting company processes, to knowledge engineering, which involves a formal means of extracting knowledge from an expert and converting this information into heuristics and flow diagrams.
Management
In most knowledge organizations, management’s role is to provide support and direction for knowledge workers. In this role, management directly influences the KM life cycle by aligning and integrating its phases with the overall business strategy and other business initiatives.
Management is also responsible for providing an environment supportive of KM activities, from an efficient work environment to safe storage areas for magnetic media and printed documents. By helping define corporate policy, management can help support each phase of the KM
life cycle.
TEAMFLY
Management also defines and then assigns access and use privileges to the information in the KM system, through the authority and responsibilities of a librarian. The librarian, as a manager or upper-level knowledge worker, is typically at least partially responsible for every phase of the KM life cycle. For example, the librarian normally is charged with creating and managing a formalized means of capturing user feedback to determine what information is used, what isn’t, and who in the organization is using it. Armed with this information, the librarian works with the CKO, knowledge managers, and knowledge workers to determine what information to archive, what to dispose of, and what to allow to become unusable though benign neglect.
Each of these issues and support mechanisms is discussed more fully below.
94
Team-Fly®
P r o c e s s
Creation and Aquisition
In the creation an acquisition phase of the Knowledge Management life cycle, information is authored internally by knowledge workers, acquired through outsourcing, or purchased from an outside source. As illustrated in Exhibit 4.2, this phase starts with a requirements specification that provides the author or acquiring agent with a description of the information needed. The information can take the form of questions presented to customer service representatives; decision-making heuristics used by expert knowledge workers; and designs, illustrations, and schematics of devices and services sold by the company. It also can be process descriptions and personal best practices. External sources of information are increasingly significant in most knowledge organizations, especially given E X H I B I T 4 . 2
Issues
Use
Modification
Input
Output
PHASE
Creation/
Data
Data
Access
Disposal
Acquisition
Translation/
Archiving
Repurposing
Suppor t Mechanisms
Transfer
Cost,
Software, Hardware, Format,
Naming, Quality Control, Security, Tracking,
Editability, Ownership, Language
Requirements
Creation/
Data
Specifications
Acquisition
Self-Repor ting, Documentation, Program Instrumentation, Networks, Knowledge Engineering
95
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t the affordability and ready availability of commercial databases on every topic from current publications to industry-specific processes in fields like engineering, law, and medicine, and genomics.
In Exhibit 4.2, the primary issues associated with the creation and acquisition of information in the KM life cycle include cost, the enabling hardware and software technologies, the format and naming of information, quality control, security, and the means of tracking of information. In addition, the editability of the information, ownership, and even the language used to represent the information are significant.
Information is never free, even if the direct costs of creating and acquiring information can be avoided. Over time, the indirect costs, including tracking and archiving, can easily exceed direct costs. Indirect costs commonly include the hardware and software infrastructure. For example, in automated KM systems, computer hardware and software are enabling technologies. However, issues frequently arise over the make and compatibility of hardware used to create and capture information. In many companies, the artists and architects favor Macintosh-compatible hardware, whereas engineers and accountants favor PC-compatible hardware. Similarly, when mobility and portability are required, hand-held and laptop computers frequently are employed. As with desktop systems, often there are differences of opinion over which technologies are best suited for a particular KM application.
Software issues range from the best applications to use for creating and acquiring information to the underlying operating system. Similarly, when network systems are involved, the network operating system and its versions also can be an issue. The format of information in automated KM systems is often related to the hardware and software involved in its creation or acquisition. Issues arise when the information format is incompatible with the computer hardware or software.
96
P r o c e s s
In addition to infrastructure issues, there are process-oriented issues, such as the naming system used by the information author or acquirer.
If the information will be used immediately and not archived, the naming system used by the author has little relevance. However, if the information is likely to be repurposed, a controlled vocabulary or at least an agreed-on system should be used to label the information. For example, white T I P S & T E C H N I Q U E S
Validating Best Practices
Collecting and disseminating best practices may be difficult, but validating their contribution to the bottom line is even more challenging.
Even with a database, an intuitive, easy-to-learn front end, multiple points of access, and a streamlined process for capturing best practices, the system may lay dormant unless the quality of data stored in it can be validated. That is, simply because a knowledge worker submits what he or she thinks is a best practice doesn’t mean it should be disseminated throughout the organization. This situation exists on the Internet, where anyone can start a web site and self-publish information on any subject, even though he or she may have no expertise in what is being presented. What one knowledge worker considers a pearl of wisdom may be viewed as ludicrous or simply wrong by another.
The solution used most often in industry parallels that used in academia, where articles submitted for publication in a print or online journal are first peer-reviewed by experts in the area. In many cases, the original article is either rejected outright or accepted provisionally with editorial and content changes. Similarly, ideas submitted from employees go through a screening process. However, instead of outright rejections which might simply state that the topic has been covered or that it’s being covered by some other method, to encourage future submissions, employees can be sent a gracious letter or e-mail thanking them for their submission.
97
E S S E N T I A L S o f K n o w l e d g e M a n a g e m e n t papers produced by a company’s engineering department may use a sequential name, such as “ENG ###”, where “ENG” stands for engineering and “###” is a placeholder for the next number in the sequence of white papers from the department.
The tools used to create information affect its editability, which can be an issue if translation and repurposing are likely in the future. For example, a text document can be authored in Microsoft Word, allowing the document to be easily edited by someone with access to it.
However, although other knowledge workers may easily access a document created in Adobe PDF, the document can’t be modified because editors are generally not available for the proprietary PDF format.
Finally, information owne