Effective Knowledge Management should aim to lower costs and shorten time to execute and solve business challenges. A narrative approach can bring relevant and organized highly contextual information to business stakeholders very quickly. A narrative should be easy to find, well tagged and easy to understand. It should tell a short story quickly that can lead to a project charter or create an opportunity for project or work deflection and cost avoidance. It can also lead to a pipeline for Enterprise and Solution Architectures which will result in a great deal of cost savings.
Knowledge Management should be tied to business. Business is tied to people, people are tied to stories..
People->Process->Product->Profit
The KM team helps determine who, what, when, where, and identifies person/group for solutions.
All of the narratives:
have a potential saving outcome criteria, defined by the user story, as an initial estimate.
are self contained and have associated estimated or actual cost savings and are validated through a process with the KM team.
use a content management or social system to document, share and map information to relevant people and content.
Process Identify / Collect:
Capture, document and submit stories that convey an activity or activities that create an opportunity for cost savings and/or the business process efficiency or effectiveness. These stories can also be used to show value in reuse of tools through portfolio management or portfolio rationalization.
Subject (context) of Who and What
Body
Problem Statement (Where)
User Suggestion (Person or group initiating a request)
Team Suggestion (KM)
As we are thinking about the narrative, we want to frame it similar to the process of asking 5-why. Want to learn more about 5-why?
Leads to /or = HOW
Validation/Ranking:
Problem Validation – KM team validates narrative
Criteria for solution – KM team coordinates and proactively define option sets.
Cost Savings Potential –KM team seeks estimated cost benefits
Ranking –KM manager ranks narrative to optimize cost and savings benefit potential.
Leads to /or = Value
Document Outcome / Value Statement:
Effort to Risk Reduction by taking these actions.
Effort to Cost Savings / Supports “Flat to Down” efficiency models by taking these actions.
Opportunity for revenue by way of core, adjacent, trans-formative innovations.
If any mechanism exists to map or tie the story to a revenue generation opportunity, the narrative should seek to show these connections.
If you want to learn more about how narratives work.. just ask!
If you go to a fitness center and sign up for spin class would you trust your instructor if they looked like this?
All too often Knowledge Management “experts” and “consultants” have a great deal of academic experience, theories, data and knowledge but they may lack practical experience and wisdom to understand beyond words the challenges of starting, implementing, maintaining and managing a KM practice.
The broad scope of KM is covered well by Stan Garfield in his posts on LinkedIn. The simple thought that KM covers so many areas of thought and practice is fairly astounding.
Best Practice Replication
Best Practice Transfer
Business Improvement Services
Collaboration
Collaboration Systems
Collective Learning
Communities
Digital Enterprise
Digital Transformation
Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise Collaboration
Enterprise Content Sourcing
Enterprise Learning and Collaboration
Enterprise Social
Enterprise Social Network
Insights
Intangible Asset Plan
Intellectual Capital
Intellectual Property
Knowledge and Information Management
Knowledge and Information Sharing
Knowledge and Learning Processes
Knowledge Development
Knowledge Enablement
Knowledge, Engagement and Collaboration
Knowledge Exchange
Knowledge Flow Management
Knowledge Management
Knowledge Processing
Knowledge Publishing and Curation
Knowledge Retention
Knowledge Science
Knowledge Services
Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge Sharing and Collaboration
Knowledge Transfer
Learning and Knowledge Exchange
Learning Communities
Learning from Experience
Management
Organizational Effectiveness
Post-Industrial Knowledge Age Transformation
Performance Management
Radical Connectivity
Social Business
Social Collaboration
Social Learning
Social Media
Social Networking
Tackling Wicked Problems
The number of thought and practice areas are further complicated by the context of “where used.” In other words, if you are an “expert” in KM are you a generalist or do you specialize in something like CX (knowledge centered support), knowledge transfer, community etc.
Are you a “polymath’ of KM?
Practical Practice for Practitioner Preachers
The US Navy has a training device called the USS Buttercup by the time these sailors found themselves in this very cold and challenging training exercise, they spent a considerable amount of time learning about “Damage Control.” The navy starts teaching sailors about damage control right from the start at boot camp. The instructors are generally from engineering fields and are highly trained and experienced with shipboard firefighting, flooding, pipe patching, emergency operations.
Knowing what to do.. is different than doing … and for knowledge management this matters just as much and even more than other fields.
How does this apply to KM?
If you work for a company that sells knowledge management, the expectation is that you practice what you preach. If you are writing books about knowledge management, the expectation is that you have experience beyond the case study. If you have a desire to become an knowledge management expert, start “working out” or better yet “working out loud” and seek out ways to actually practice the trade.
Lead by Example
I personally started on the road to KM through learning about collaboration and collaboration patterns in project management with large geo-dispersed teams. It wasn’t easy and I think there were a few days that I would have traded for some time in the USS Buttercup. The reality of asking people to work together, reduce conflict and find ways to communicate, collaborate and cooperate under high pressure, high stress, and and high demand was no easy task. My team was learning along the way and more often than not we felt there wasn’t enough time to be academically astute. What we came up with was an agreement and understanding that we needed to work past the 42nd hour . We had to do the work but also learn the concepts behind it in order to master it.
For every area in the broad umbrella of knowledge management I would find something practical. I found through some pain and frustration that persistence and clarity of thought and vision (and faith) the most difficult challenges could be overcome. Here are a few examples of actions you can take to move towards mastery.
As part of my practice, I realize that what I currently believe as “fact” is fungible and may no longer be a fact.
Building trust is the key to success but without having context or purpose around your work, you can’t build trust.
KM should always be tied to business and business should always be tied to people including employee engagement.
If you want to learn about “how to” perform knowledge transfer build something from scratch that you may have some knowledge about but not be an expert in. I built an arcade system with a mix of old parts, new components, hand made pieces and customized software and operating system. I had to learn how to do some of the work and I had to find experts for software and hardware that is over 30 years old. In some cases I had to “make stuff up” because what I needed, I couldn’t find or it didn’t exist as I needed it. (Helps in Knowledge Transfer/ Crew Change / Community)
Always study and learn, I read often and I work hard to take both old and new methods into practice. John Stepper talks about Dale Carnegie as part of his working out loud concepts.
Practice in house at every level. When I was an Associate at Booz Allen, my peers would always tell me that I (can’t do) certain things and that what I was working on was not accepted by leadership. They were thinking about how they felt about their own boundaries not mine. Knowledge Management as a practice should come from multiple directions, it is an “omni channel” area of thought and business. Parts of it are viral and parts of it need leadership buy-in and ownership. It is up to you to make it work and become a leader from where you are.
Summary
Knowledge Management is a lot of things to a lot of people but with clarity of thought and context it can be the right information, to the right people at the right time. It is more than an academic exercise and you don’t need anyones permission to become a master of one or more areas in this field. At the same time, if you don’t practice what you preach, you may find yourself in the same boat as the 350 pound fitness trainer.
by the time these sailors found themselves in this very cold and challenging training exercise, they spent a considerable amount of time learning about “Damage Control.” The navy starts teaching sailors about damage control right from the start at boot camp. The instructors are generally from engineering fields and are highly trained and experienced with shipboard firefighting, flooding, pipe patching, emergency operations.
I built an arcade system with a mix of old parts, new components, hand made pieces and customized software and operating system. I had to learn how to do some of the work and I had to find experts for software and hardware that is over 30 years old. In some cases I had to “make stuff up” because what I needed, I couldn’t find or it didn’t exist as I needed it. (Helps in Knowledge Transfer/ Crew Change / Community)