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Knowledge Management: Care and Feeding of New Initiatives in Tough Economic Times

Like any consultant, I'm a fervent advocate for my discipline, which happens to be Knowledge Management. I'm convinced that KM practices and tools can increase the productivity of any customer service organization and improve customer satisfaction with a company's services in very significant ways. And I'm convinced this is at least as true now - in a soft economy, with a war going on - as it was in the hypergrowth economy of the 1990s.
 
But let's face it: even a modest KM initiative is a significant investment, and as with all projects, it is easy now to put in on ice until "the numbers look better." A lot of you who remain committed to bringing KM to their organizations are treading water now. One of the most frequently asked questions in my travels is: If we can't buy enterprise software tools now, what can we do to keep the momentum going until we do get a budget to work with?
 
Buying enterprise software is something corporate managers know how to do, and there is typically a formal and explicit process in place for doing it. Big dollar figures are involved, and the process is highly political. Thus, the tool decision tends to be the major preoccupation in KM discussions. In fact, when managers perceive that there is "no budget available for KM," they generally mean there is no budget to buy tools.
 
This is unfortunate. There is much more to KM than implementing software, and an initiative can thrive despite the choice of deeply flawed software tools - it also can fail utterly despite the choice of excellent software. There are at least three other components of a KM initiative that are far more important in determining its success: People, process and content issues. There are constructive things you can do to optimize each of these, now, before you face the software decision.
 
First, think strategically about what you want to implement in the long run. Does KM support some larger initiative that still has senior management support, such as Service Level Management or the re-engineering of e-business initiatives? If so, you may be able to borrow support (including funding) from an initiative devoted to this, one that has its own budget. Even if there is no such project you can tie into, you may be able to impress a broader cross-section of senior management with the importance of your KM program by giving it a larger context.
 
Have you developed a strategic plan - a charter - for the KM initiative? If not, there is no way for all of the parties affected by your program (those who run it, those who author or review content, those who will push for it and fund it, and those who will benefit from it) to agree on whether it is meeting its objectives, or even what those objectives are. Get it down on paper, and include detailed success criteria.
 
Now, address the three types of issues listed above:
 
People Issues
 
KM always requires many people who are only indirectly associated with the initiative to contribute significant amounts of effort. These people need to know what they are being asked to do, why they're being asked to do it, and how that will affect the other tasks for which they are more directly responsible. They need to know where they will find the time to do this work, what's in it for them, and what impact this responsibility will have on the productivity metrics by which they are measured now. There are specific KM roles to be defined, mapped out and assigned to individuals. All of this can be done now - it does not have to depend on a specific KM tool.
 
Process Issues
 
To be effective, a knowledge base has to be managed. The content must be both timely (because it ages rapidly) and technically sound (because customer satisfaction can only be improved if customers get the right answers to their questions). Processes for assigning people to author knowledge in specific areas, keeping after them to contribute content in a timely way, review the content for technical accuracy and adherence to corporate style conventions, and revisit knowledge periodically to insure that it stays up to date, all need to be mapped out, so they can be understood. A series of meetings to flowchart these processes, diagramming them for analysis, is a crucial part of the design of a KM initiative. Too often, processes such as these are designed according to the functionality of a specific KM or CRM tool that has been adopted or is under consideration. This is backwards; these are business processes, and the most effective way to design a KM initiative is to decide in advance what these processes should look like, and only then look for tools that support these processes. So there is no reason process design needs to be held up until a tool budget is approved.
 
Content Issues
 
Without content, there is no knowledge base. Some of this content will be generated by the KM team, de novo. But much of the content already may exist, in informal repositories such as intranets, e-mail folders, training manuals, service logs and any number of other forms. Identifying knowledge content is something that can be done well in advance of knowledge base implementation and, as in the foregoing discussion of process, the findings of this effort may affect the choice of tools down the road. Meanwhile, an effective KM initiative will impose style conventions on the content that is included in the knowledge base, and these can be arrived at well in advance of the tool decision.
 
Even addressing non-tool issues such as these requires some investment - of time, yours and that of the people you need to involve to make KM work. The effort might benefit from outside consulting guidance. But if the investment is modest, if participants have the feeling they are learning from the experience, and if the KM initiative respects their time and uses it wisely, the result can be a much more measurably successful implementation - and you may have a far easier time justifying the tool purchase by presenting a business case with all the other pieces in place.
 
Peter Dorfman is the founder and president of KnowledgeFarm (http://www.knowfarm.com), a knowledge management consultancy based in Lebanon, NJ.