Handball

Our department opened in the early 80s and the staff who put in the VAX, network, electrics stayed around. Well they stayed until voluntary redundancies were offered 25 years later. So everybody who put in the systems went. "Corporate knowledge retention" was handballed to the KM team. We focused on a couple of staff with critical information. We interviewed them and took some notes. The exercise never took off because it was never properly resourced.

What Do I Do Next?

Yesterday I was talking to a colleague and they said, "I don't really know what my role is. Part of it is knowledge management. I have fixed the intranet but what do I do next?"

The Value of Outside Perspective

Expertise is often valued more highly outside of a an organization than within it. When I was at a previous firm, I regularly received complaints that our KM tools were bad, and that we were greatly inferior in our KM capabilities to all of our competitors. I invited a colleague from Company X to present to our internal KM community about Company X's use of best practice replication, which was much admired in the KM field. I was asked to reciprocate by presenting our KM program to Company X's KM community. When I did so, I was surprised at their enthusiastic response to my presentation. They said they would love to have the functionality which we had. This led me to submit a presentation to APQC for their national conference, which was accepted. At that event, I hosted a lunch with KM leaders from other systems integration and consulting firms, which led to the creation of the SIKM Leaders Community. And given the good reception of my presentation, I went on to present at other conferences, publish articles in KM journals, and write a book on KM. This same effect was also evident across organizations with the company. Our business unit did not appreciate our KM program nearly as much as other business units, who would have loved to have the people, processes, and technologies we had in place.

Appreciation of Expertise Depends on Where You Sit

At several of my previous jobs, expertise was appreciated very differently depending on the level within the organization. The first-line consultants and managers greatly valued expertise in knowledge management, including knowing where information could be found, whom to contact for specific expertise and help, and how to make the best use of technology. They subscribed in large numbers to knowledge-rich newsletters, asked for help regularly, and greatly relied on a list of key contacts in the organization. But higher level managers did not actively engage in collaboration, using the tools, or observing how expertise was shared. As a result, when profits dropped and budgets were squeezed, these managers scrambled to preserve their jobs and were willing to eliminate the jobs of knowledge managers and even expert consultants. Their mission was short-term survival, and it came at the expense of long-term failure.