IC and KM – Building from the Bottom Up

Yesterday, I talked about how process can give your organization superpowers. These include processes that support value creation for customers and those that support the internal operations of the company. This list is pretty standard includes infrastructure, human resources, information technology and finance. Each of these functions has its own body of knowledge, competencies and processes. While they are part of the intangible capital of your organization, we won’t spend a lot of time on the details of these classic support systems because these functions are pretty mature.

One support process that is newer and therefore less standardized is knowledge management (KM). This was actually one of the earliest solutions offered by the market in response to the rise of the knowledge economy. The message was simple: If we live in a knowledge economy, we need to manage knowledge. Software and consulting companies sold a lot of people on the concept of KM driven by a faith that if people in an organization could just have access to all the knowledge of their peers, everyone would be smarter and more effective. As often happens with new trends (which always walk the line of fads…) a lot of people thought that this single business function would provide the answer to management in the knowledge era. Check the box and you are a modern company. Of course, this faith was misplaced. This book is a testament to the fact that knowledge and the management of knowledge is about more than a software program.

But that does not mean that KM is irrelevant.It is actually an important tool and/or tactic that has relevance to almost every organization. The field of knowledge management continues to make contributions to the art and science of making vast amount of information available to users. There will be a need for experts that know how to create, organize and access the right data points from pools of knowledge. This aspect of KM will continue to be a discrete competency and should be operationalized into knowledge management processes within every organization.

Having said that, there are a few other points worth making. First, there are those who think that knowledge management will eventually be absorbed into all the other parts of the organization. This is an interesting argument. To us, it says that knowledge management will become a core competency of all knowledge workers. And that is true. All knowledge workers will have to develop a greater understanding of and take greater responsibility for the management of information and knowledge that they need in their work. Nevertheless, their organizations will have responsibility for building the systems and/or providing access to media that will facilitate their personal knowledge management.

Second, there are some that see social media as a replacement for KM. We think that, indeed, social media can and should replace some forms of knowledge management. In this view, social media can be seen as a tool for real-time knowledge access—when you have a question, you just put it out to the right network and chances are, you will get what you need.

This is yet another example of the top versus bottom dynamic in the knowledge era enterprise. The initial approach of knowledge management was a top-down initiative, creating the structure and then requesting (or mandating) participation. A great example of this is the management consulting firm McKinsey. Michael had a young colleague who worked at McKinsey after receiving his MBA in the early parts of the 2000s. He reported that a critical part of his job as a junior consultant was writing up information about projects so that it was available for everyone else in the firm. The motivating factor is for the junior person to get visibility for his or her work by those higher up in the organization. There is no doubt that this kind of system is created for and run from the top down. There continue to be systems run in this way.

However, there are many more examples about knowledge from the bottom-up. Some of the most striking stories come from the military, an organization traditionally associated with top-down command and control. The Army recently put a number of its field manuals on wikis open to anyone with access to the Army Internet system. This means that soldiers and officers from all levels can suggest changes to the manuals. The thought is that the best people to create manuals are those with experience on the ground. 

During the Iraq War, a number of dedicated social media sites have been created for soldiers. An example is companycommand.army.mil, a site for Company Commanders in the Army. This and similar sites provide a place for active soldiers and their leaders to share ideas, practices and tools. Here, the motivation is not to get attention from those higher up on the chain of command but, rather, to contribute to a conversation that helps the individual as well as helping his or her peers. In this case, the “knowledge management” is a bottoms-up, enthusiastic, and voluntary.

A hybrid of top down and bottom up is the Center from Army Lessons Learned (CALL) which is using Microsoft SharePoint to catalog insights and ideas from field personnel. However, most people in the field don’t have the time to record their ideas. So the Army created a team of 200 analysts to spend time in the field and identify ideas that should be shared in the CALL system.

There are pluses and minuses to both approaches (top down and bottom up)—and both will continue to play a part in KM in the future. The important thing in your own company is to ensure that there are platforms and systems that enable and encourage the sharing of knowledge. This knowledge is a rich raw material for performance and innovation.

Adapted from Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization by Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak