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Creating a Successful Knowledge Management System - Journal of Business Strategy
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1999 Faulkner & Gray, Inc. Laurence P. Chait When knowledge is your product, you'd best be able to manage it. Here's what
one consulting firm has done. Effective knowledge management is an area that we at Arthur D. Little see as
critical to the ongoing success of our firm. After all, our knowledge and
experience is our "product." Today, our more than 3,000 staff members are spread across offices and
laboratories in more than 50 cities around the globe. We want every one of
those staff members, wherever he or she may be in the world, to have instant
access to the knowledge, skills, and experience of 2,999 others. Such access
means that the best of our corporate knowledge must be available and applied
to the needs of our clients and our company. It ensures that the right
information is available to the right people, in the right places, at the
right times, and that our individual knowledge elements-which are some of our
most important assets- are being leveraged and multiplied in value. Since we cannot physically link 3,000 staff members, we have built virtual
links using a state-of-the-art, Web-enabled system. Our information system
environment, known as the "ADL Link," is designed to connect people worldwide
for learning, information, and knowledge sharing. (For the technically
inclined, the ADL Link is a Lotus Notes application hosted on a series of
Domino servers and available to staff members via Netscape browsers through
our global wide- area network.) The content of our knowledge management system includes the key elements of
our knowledge capital. We have information about our staff, which improves our
ability to identify people with needed skills and knowledge. We have
information about our clients, which helps us to support and serve them. We
have information about our methodologies and tools, which allows us to deliver
consistent service in an efficient and effective manner. And we have
information about our practices and groups, which keeps everyone up-to-date,
even when they get to see one another only infrequently. We learned several years ago, however, that the computer system was just one
element in a broad initiative to maximize the potential of our knowledge
resources. In addition to the hardware and software, we had to concern
ourselves with issues of content, culture, and process. In fact, technology
provided only about 20% of our overall solution. >From our experience assessing, planning, pilot testing, and implementing our
knowledge management system, we have identified three factors that have
contributed most to our achievements in knowledge management: ensuring vision
and alignment, managing four domains, and creating an effective plan. While
every organization must find the keys to its own success, these three factors
will be present in virtually every list. Ensuring Vision and Alignment In many ways, managing knowledge is no different from managing other aspects
of an organization. First, there must be a vision that links with the
organization's objectives and strategies. Second, people must be aligned with
that vision. And, third, the alignment must be from the top down and all
across the organization. At ADL, two cross-organizational task forces were responsible for creating a
vision and ensuring strategic linkage. These teams were composed of senior
leaders in our practices and our information services areas-people who
understood our culture and corporate direction-to consider the issue of
knowledge management and determine the appropriate direction for the firm. The
task forces worked to understand what knowledge management was and how it was
evolving. During this process, they derived a vision for knowledge management
that is still in place across the firm. The next critical step was to ensure that the firm's senior leaders actively
shared that vision and would provide ongoing support for the knowledge
management program. The task force accomplished this by holding individual and
group meetings with the senior leaders to communicate the vision and ensured
that they were aligned with it. Furthermore, we continually make sure that the
leaders remain truly on board. Aligning staff with the vision was relatively simple. The vision and messages
around it are simple, clear, and obvious to our staff members. A communication
program that included oral presentations and articles in our corporate
newsletter served this purpose well. Managing Four Domains Managing knowledge is a multidimensional process. It requires the effective
concurrent management of four domains: content, culture, process, and
infrastructure. Content. At the outset, the task forces had to identify all our knowledge
elements and understand the relative importance of each element to
individuals, groups, and our corporate objectives. This understanding was
critical if we were to plan and set priorities effectively. We also needed to
understand the context for the different knowledge elements; that is, where
and how they were used or could be used. Finally, once the system was up and running, it became critical to monitor
content-to know what content is used, by whom, how, and to what advantage. To
leverage knowledge to the fullest, we obviously must refresh old content and
add new content over time. In this area, we decided to treat our knowledge
management system as if it were a public Web site, like amazon.com or
llbean.com. We established a system to track individuals' use and experience
with the ADL Link at a very detailed level and then to marry those data with
the demographic information we have on each user. As a result, we are able to see patterns of usage and analyze them in light of
the characteristics of the people using the system. The combined data helps us
answer several key questions: * What content is being used and by whom? * Would it be valuable to provide additional, similar content to these people? * Are there other people who should be using such content but are not? * How can we "advertise" and leverage this content to those additional
potential users? * Is there content that we believe to be valuable that is not being used at
all? * Can we determine why and correct the problem? * What content, after all attempts to leverage it, remains unused and hence is
subject to deletion? Culture. Because cultural realities can act as barriers or enablers for
knowledge management, we had to understand our own cultural realities and to
take them into account. For example, we are driven by what we call "business
impact" toward selling our services and keeping our people billable-a focus
that might not leave a lot of time for knowledge management. Once we had identified our cultural realities, we set forth a compelling
vision of our need to succeed despite those realities, and of our certainty
that, by managing knowledge well, we will actively support them. This linkage
of knowledge management directly to our culture and values is critical. Process. The process domain exists at several levels. First is the process by
which we manage knowledge-how we capture, evaluate, cleanse, store, provide,
and use it. We assessed and diagrammed this process to ensure that we
understood how it functioned, and then we worked to modify and enhance it to
bring it into alignment with our future vision. Process also includes roles. In our case, we designed new roles that we
believe focus people's attention on performing the processes of knowledge
management. Note that these are roles, not jobs; some staff who perform
client-facing roles were expected to restructure their workloads and perform
the new knowledge management roles, as well. These roles were housed in our
practices, the client- facing groups, within our organization. The two primary roles within the practices are those of Knowledge Advocate and
Knowledge Steward. The Knowledge Advocate is the champion for knowledge
management within a practice, becoming involved at key times to help ensure
success. The Knowledge Steward (there can be more than one) has operational
responsibility for knowledge management within a practice. These individuals execute knowledge management tasks and oversee the virtual
knowledge management process. Since they cannot do all of the work themselves,
they involve other people in their practices, as well. Finally, these
individuals work to establish a community of interest among their peers to
advance the cause of knowledge management across ADL. These roles have formal
expectations associated with them that have become a standard part of the
evaluation process for the people who perform them. Third, there are the processes by which we govern our knowledge management
effort itself. We established guiding principles that cover both
implementation and ongoing operation. These principles allow geographically
dispersed groups to function pseudo-independently, yet ensure that their
actions are aligned with our vision and objectives for knowledge management.
We also put into place a set of corporate roles: * A Global Director of Knowledge Management, who is responsible for the
design, implementation, and overall operation of our knowledge management
efforts. * Knowledge Coordinators, who coach, coax, cajole, and coerce Knowledge
Stewards and practice leadership groups to make continued progress toward our
objectives. * A Link Master and a Web Publishing Specialist, who manage our Domino/Web
publishing activities. Infrastructure. The fourth domain we had to manage is the infrastructure. This
included not only computer systems, but also elements such as teaching,
training, and coaching-and support in general-that ensure that our computer
applications and digital repository are used effectively. The bottom line here
is that while technology is critical for effective knowledge management, it is
only about 20% of the challenge. As for the systems themselves, we adopted a somewhat radical approach to their
development. Over the past decade, with the introduction of techniques such as
"rapid application development," system development cycles have gone from
years down to months. In the case of the ADL Link, we pushed these techniques
to the extreme: We add new functionality to our infrastructure monthly. Perhaps the most important challenge in knowledge management is to manage and
maintain a multidimensional perspective, focusing on all four domains-content,
culture, process, and infrastructure-at the same time. Think about it: If an organization does an exemplary job in managing any three
of these domains, yet fails in the fourth, its entire program will fail. We
have not been "exemplary" in each of these four domains, but maintaining a
persistent and unshakable focus on all four domains has ensured our success.
You might even say that doing all four reasonably well is far more important
and beneficial than trying to do each perfectly and coming up short on one or
two. Creating an Effective Plan While understanding and focusing on the four domains (content, culture,
process, and infrastructure) was important, it was not sufficient. We found
that we needed a really good plan of attack. We had to make many decisions,
including: * Which knowledge elements to start with * What to automate first * What platforms to use * What roles and governance process to establish Here too we have taken a nonstandard approach. We did not try to develop a
top- down, three- to five-year implementation plan. With the pace of
technology change and the rapid and ongoing change in our users' understanding
of their needs and of the potential of knowledge management, a standard
planning approach would not work. Instead, we outlined a long list of significant initiatives (more than could
be completed in a year), set priorities, and took to working on the highest
priorities first. At the top of the list was the need for an extendible architecture for our
systems, one that would provide an underlying framework that would accommodate
the rapid changes occurring around us. After that, we embarked on the
applications and process changes, with the highest-priority initiatives coming
first. Each month, we plan our activities for the next two months into the future.
Twice a year we revisit the initiatives, recasting, reshaping, and setting new
priorities in light of the current reality. In a chaotic environment, short
time cycles and frequent replanning are critical elements of success. Setting priorities for knowledge management follows the pattern of priority
setting for most management initiatives. The answers to several, basic
questions provide the needed input: * What is the need? * Where is the benefit? * What can be leveraged? * What resources are available? We applied these questions and answers across three dimensions: * Breadth vs. depth-should a practice address all knowledge elements at a high
level, or capture one or two in depth? * Looking back versus going forward-should a practice capture its historical
knowledge or start now and capture going forward? * Incremental vs. big bang-should a practice plan to address its knowledge
needs in stages over time, or should it make a major, concerted effort to put
a repository into place in a short time? Practices placed themselves at different points along these dimensions,
determining what they would do, how they would do it, and when. A Never-Ending Effort The ADL Link is not finished-nor will it ever be. We have a facility in place
for capturing, storing, and accessing knowledge of various types. Our plan is
to continually make that facility easier to use. Also, new tools and new
Internet developments (such as active support of collaborative, team-based
work) and new content types (such as sophisticated benchmark databases) will
push the ADL Link to evolve for the foreseeable future. So, what are we doing now? We are working to build an infrastructure to
support today-and, more important, to be ready for tomorrow. We are actively
researching tools that we think we will need in the next year or so. And, one
last time, in everything we do, we are trying to maintain a focus on our four
critical domains-all four, all the time.
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