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December 7, 2005

Just what's so manageable about Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management (KM) is an idea that has been stretched into a gigantic umbrella term, under which a vast range of items are crowded together by a common theme: getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right time.

The attention to personal use of knowledge (instead of data) is a great development in the way managers attend to work being done within the organization -- especially when the work is either required (where the pressure is to drive high performance) or exploratory (where the pressure is to create new value). Recognizing the distinctive role of knowledge is easier now, because we have enough experiences of competitive advantage being attributed to a superior organization's "knowing something that the competitor did not".

The motivation to reach "knowledge parity" is more than sufficient to drive adoption of a KM goal and capability, but it often confuses the issue of what to know and how to know. Worse, the issue of "how to know" is even further confused with how to get what is 'known'...

Consequently, the idea of managing knowledge is often implemented in incomplete, misdirected, or over-complicated ways.

Despite usually seeking integration of knowledge resources, KM implementations make changes in the organization that risk dis-organizing established objectives and tasks relating to:
- developing concepts,
- processing information, and
- delivering content.

Linking incompatible systems, or using a system on the wrong thing, can quickly misplace, bottleneck or misroute the supply of concepts, information or content versus requests. Production, maintenance and delivery of these things may all be subject to different cycles, attendants, costs and maturity levels -- so blending them presents a lot of reconciliation to be discovered and executed beforehand.

The first step in preventing or repairing the confusion is to identify how the differences between concepts, information and content are important, which is what generates demand for them.

- Concepts represent developed knowledge. However, because concepts can be hypothetical, it's important to realize that they are not necessarily "facts" -- but instead are ideas.

- Information represents facts that are available. Because facts are the result of agreements about observations, it's important to realize that context and perspective have a lot to do with whether facts are useful beyond the time and place of their initial creation.

- Content represents the result of packaging ideas. Because packaging is driven by utilization requirements, content makes ideas suitable for specified types of occasions, leaving the same ideas less suitable for other occasions except in different packaging.

Because of those three conditions, it is unsatisfactory and unwise to simply respond to the blanket demand for "knowledge" by distributing all information through every potential delivery channel. Each of the three issues above is a different facet of providing for the quality and availability of knowledge.

I.

Instead, the first move is to start organizing the recognition of how knowledge is created, so that its sources and arrivals in the organization can be logically anticipated from different activities, systems and contributors.

To begin with, there are always events occurring around us, whether intentional or not. Knowledge development begins with observation of an event; then the observation is progressively transformed for relevance to our known purposes. The progression begins with confirming and classifying the observation, to create "data".

This immediately points out that, contrary to popular belief, data is not actually "neutral" -- instead it is simply vulnerable to being handled indifferently. However, when the data is deliberately served to a given occasion (such as a task), it is next used to describe and diagnose the occasion's subject, which creates information. (For example, the "subject" could be an expense authorization, or it could be a sales transaction, even though they could be two different views of the same thing.)

This points out that different occasions can produce different kinds of information from the same data. (In most organizations, an "occasion" is most often identifiable as a particular moment blending people, process and technology.) So, occasions are not neutral either. In most organizations, management directsoccasions more than anything else -- creating and manipulating them in order to focus the activity within them on any number of requirements. This level of supervision later typically treats the activity as "behavior" and diligently reports on the behavior. Similarly, the activity seen elsewhere, in other external settings, is also thought of as behavior -- whether it is systematic or not, and whether programmed or ad hoc. In that sense, reports on behaviors make up a huge proportion of the "information" recognized in an organization.

But management needs to take a further step-- of determining the significance of the report (i.e., the characterization of the behavior). Ordinarily, formally established operational requirements provide the perspective or context within which the significance of the information is evaluated. That context drives selection and prioritization of the available information, looking for relevance. When the relationship of the information to the requirements is understood (or agreed), "knowledge" has been produced.

II.

It's exactly at the stage where information must be processed that organizations are pulled into different directions -- by lack of planning (including opportunism), or by apparent competition between different ways to proceed. However, most organizations have chosen to tackle the urgencies of competing accountably, by emphasizing better awareness of cause-and-effect. This effort has evolved into "business intelligence", which greatly improves the feasibility of competition. But the other problem of equal strategic importance is the need for effective responses to sudden and ongoing change. Changing effectively is the capability that offers the organization continued viability as a competitor. This is what drives the evolution of information management into knowledge management.

But what drives the goal of doing knowledge management into practice? Individual members of the organization must also shift from "accountable competing" to "effective change" -- and they must identify the opportunity and appropriateness of being agents of change when it can matter the most.

To have that happen, the minimum implementation requirement is that the members have great visibility on the organization's resources for developing and leveraging knowledge -- and the organization's managers must configure those resources for efficient access and maximum relevance to the members' functional requirements.

III.

Getting an implementation to that point will mean transforming a challenging amount of legacy resources and dependencies -- not just installing new things in a "greenfield" environment. In the organization, persons already significantly "self-service" their knowledge needs through a combination of automation technology and intuition. Configuring the technology is a major issue, but even bigger is the challenge of changing personal behaviors.

The picture below illustrates how knowledge-availability is organized behaviorally within the organization's operations...

The key observation is that from the individual's personal perspective, relevant functional "knowledge" tends to fall within three general categories: expectations, experience, and expertise. Most individuals, in most instances, will call on some blend of those things, from whatever reserves or sources they are conscious of being able to access. What is less apparent is that the different types of knowledge have a distinctive bearing on different types of organizational requirements. The availability of various "information systems" tends to make people think in terms of the kinds of information delivered by dedicated tools, instead of thinking about the kinds of knowledge most appropriate to requirements. Putting the cart in front of the horse that way leads to disorganization and waste.

The other typical point of reference for individuals is the collection of explicit instructions that make up what is often considered to be the "official" knowledge of the company -- namely, its practices, rules and skills.

But over time, a major counterpoint to the reliance on instructions becomes apparent -- already indicated in the above picture.

The organization's formal codifications of practices, rules and skills do not simply "overlay" the three types of knowledge, but instead are products of the way knowledge is combined. For example, experience and expertise together generate rules.

In fact, the three types of knowledge (expectations, experience, expertise) align more to the contexts (operational, cultural, environmental) of the company's requirements than they do to the practices, rules and skills.

In effect, this leaves the practices, rules and skills -- as "products" -- more variable than the underlying knowledge factory. This variability is a reality that we already recognize, based on such normal "managed" situations like: personnel changes; practice additions or alterations to accomodate customer or partner segments; and of course, new rules from new bosses or processes. In turn, it shows that overreliance on those shifting sands is risky. Instructions are really just a form of content.

IV.

Because of that difference between the knowledge and the instructions, it is more obvious that "knowledge management" per se has to do with the way knowledge users leverage their knowledge reserves and resources -- not about how familiar they become with the definition and implementation of practices, rules and skills.

We can map out how this leverage already naturally occurs. Knowledge users satisfy their needs for knowledge by reaching out to preferred suppliers. In this dynamic, each of the key contexts -- operational, cultural and environmental -- features a knowledge "persona" that the knowledge user consults and/or becomes. The dynamic is about why the user prefers one persona or the other.
- Operational persona: the "Master"
- Cultural persona: the "Hero"
- Environmental persona: the "Wizard"

The personae have practical roles that show off their respective strengths.

Operational Masters combine skills and practices. Highly sensitive to the perspective of the corporate owners, they exert tremendous influence on quality issues, in alignment with setting and meeting expectations. Masters can address the question, "Is this really going to work?"

Cultural Heros combine practices and rules. Highly sensitive to the perspective of corporate customers, they have outstanding impact on how advantage is derived by negotiating demand, drawing insight from their broad experience. Heros can tackle the question, "What do they really want?"

Environmental Wizards combine rules and skills. Highly sensitive to the perspective of competitors and/or the nature of adverse conditions, they have the driver's seat when it comes to managing change, reflecting capability drawn mainly from expertise about how things can work. Wizards prove their mettle answering the question, "how can we beat those guys?"

Those are practical assignments, which historically have been opportunties for the personae to generate success stories. But those circumstantial distinctions are less important than is the general availability of these personae as resources for multiple modes of knowledge. The three personae are not mutually exclusive but rather represent three fundamental points of view on any given situation.

This stages a wide variety in knowledge availability within the organization, which challenges manageability.
- In practice, a given individual may consult, and/or perform as, one or more of the personae.
- Performers in one persona may consult a different persona.
- Meanwhile, at the given time, the availability of support offered, and/or the level of accomplishment achieved, may be different from one persona to other.

Because of all these possible variations in knowledge types and knowledge levels, it is not always evident that the knowledge source chosen and used by an individual (to give or get knowledge) is the best one for the occasion at hand -- and this particularly includes occasions where the person's knowledge source is himself.

But while each persona is significant independently, what is finally most interesting about them is their collaboration.

In the above diagram, the strategic importance of their cooperation shows up as the company's issues regarding position, innovation, and agility. For example, when a Master and a Wizard combine their respective strengths in "quality" and "change", they can develop solutions that produce safe, effective agility. The corporate owners particularly enjoy this agility as a competitive capability. In like manner, Masters and Heroes combine strengths to fortify the company's (market) position through advantages derived from quality. And, Wizards and Heroes together support or even drive effective innovation.

V.

KM implementation can proceed based on objectives and priorities supported by the considerations above. The key is to identify organizational roles that can or should take advantage of knowledge-provisionroles to exert influence on corporate goals. For example:

Then, those organizational roles should be enabled with an infrastructure of tools, policy and incentives to mature and exploit the knowledge roles.

Another critical part of that infrastructure is content. Here, the function of content is to make knowledge more accessible, portable, and certifiable. Knowledge-users should be able to rely on content to help them see, develop and utilize the balanced, integrated range of key knowledge providers. Content also has the responsibility to indicate the strategic options available from the influence of various roles. As shown in the following table, content typically offers documentation of the model we have examined above. We can usually find three major categories of documentation, that add up to effective support of the worker and organization:

All together, this content offers a corporate knowledgebase -- strictly meaning a repository of current explicit guidance based on knowledge.

Using the knowledgebase is not simply a matter of exploring the table of contents and making "deposits or withdrawals"... To get value from the knowledgebase, the company must invest what is in it against some purpose.

The most important general use of knowledge is to create or fortify an opportunity.
Above, we looked at three flavors of opportunity -- position, innovation and agility -- as generated by attention to quality, advantage, and change. In adapting the organization to pursue the opportunities, what we find is a need to attend to a set of related performance success factors or constraints.

This points to a crucial revision of what we think makes "knowledgeable" organizations competitively superior: it's not that they "know something that the other company doesn't", but more fundamentally, that they are more capable of effectively using the knowledge that they have. Their success factors for utilization are seen in:

- Communications (providing ideas);
- Collaboration (providing structure); and
- Compliance (providing permission); adding up in support of...
- Competency (providing ability).

KM keeps an eye on those success factors by mobilizing tools, policy and incentives to "configure" the use of knowledge in terms of those factors. A planning chart like the following helps to identify existing and potential requirements and components for this configuration.

This should amount to support of a highly visible and available virtual knowledgebase. (The "knowledgebase" exists because of strategically managed uninterrupted on-demand access to relevant knowledge.)

Then we want to assure that the knowledgebase content, in the way that it was developed, also incorporates the success factors of knowledge use. As we'd said in the beginning, content makes ideas suitable for specified types of occasions, leaving the same ideas less suitable for other occasions except in different packaging. What we finally want from content (whether the content is solutions, standards, or priorities) is to have those success factors incorporated in the knowledge-user's work -- through the handling and purpose of the content.

[To be continued.]

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at December 7, 2005 8:35 AM

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» What is so manageable about knowledge? from Knowledge Jolt with Jack
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» What is so manageable about knowledge? from Knowledge Jolt with Jack
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» What is so manageable about knowledge? from Corante Web Hub Network
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