Knowledge Street :: JCR KM Position

Thoughts on KM

From Chris Riemer
23 Feb 1998 02:37:45 PM

To: Jacques Pigeon, Jean-Marc Nantais
Subject: Knowledge Management at DMR

This memo is a follow up to our meeting of 5 February. As promised, it's an attempt to capture my thoughts on the subject of Knowledge Management at DMR Consulting Group. It's fairly brief and fairly personal, based on my own observations of the company over the last dozen years.

And while my perspective is unavoidably from the TRECOM side of the family, I've spent the last few years in APM/2000, an area in which there's been a great deal of cross-pollination. I've also been working with the techniques of Knowledge Management for most of my career, although the work has only recently carried this title.

That being said, let's get on with it!

KM and the Business

Gartner Group is confident that Knowledge Management (KM) is the way of the future. In their analysis, it's not a question of whether a company will adopt KM principles; the only question is when. To answer that, Gartner sorts enterprises into three categories.

Type A companies have already been to the mountaintop. They've seen the vision of improved idea generation and organizational learning, and have invested heavily in KM methods, practices and infrastructure. The early adapters can accept KM's value based on somewhat intangible benefits, and will continue to see it as a strategic investment.
Type B companies will follow the curve, investing in KM out of a perceived competitive necessity. These companies can accept the value of knowledge reuse, but will be driven at least partly by a desire to improve productivity or cut costs. And while these are potential benefits of KM, Type B companies are likely to be disappointed. KM will have some financial impact, but one that's difficult or impossible to measure with traditional metrics.
Type C companies will climb aboard when they can no longer avoid it. Corporate IS backbones are clearly moving toward Intranet protocols, hyperlinks and "groupware," The technologies that promote information sharing and knowledge re-use are becoming part of the interface, both at home and at the office. Deloitte & Touche believes that after 2000, knowledge-based networks will dominate the technology environments of most companies. By 2002, the late adapters will be using KM concepts whether they like it or not.

Arthur Andersen, EDS, KPMG and all of our other large competitors are Type A companies. They've appointed Chief Knowledge Officers, built internal Knowledge Support Systems and otherwise gotten with the program.

DMR is a Type B, and that leads to the next section.

Where We Stand

A recurring theme in the halls of Jersey City is a certain philosophical musing about the corporate cultures of TRECOM and DMR. People tend to emphasize the obvious differences, and often overlook some less obvious similarities. Chief among the similarities is the high value both companies place on local autonomy. Whether they're called Business Units or Branch Offices, the operational entities of DMR Consulting favor an almost perverse level of independence. In TRECOM, we used to joke about the relationship between Atlanta and Edison, and I've heard the same jokes about Montreal and Ottawa.

This shared love for freedom means DMR is not fertile ground for Knowledge Management. If I didn't think we could make things grow despite the culture, I wouldn't be writing this memo. Things are changing, but the old TRECOM components still tend more toward information hoarding than to cooperation based on enlightened self-interest. I'm not sure about the DMR side, but from I what I can see, the problem is much the same.

In my view, Knowledge Management is more about changing/creating a corporate culture than it is about deploying technology or defining standards. Real KM is inherently collaborative, and its success will depend on how effectively DMR can promote a culture that really values information sharing.

I know that within the company, there are people who'd love Knowledge Management. I've met them. They're people who see the benefits of an empowered work force built of capable, responsible and autonomous individuals. But I've also met others who will fight to limit or inhibit KM, trying to maintain a top-down, military style command structure. I can't really say which type of individual predominates.

Another concern is cost, especially at this point in our fiscal evolution. Gartner speaks of a “threshold effect,” warning that when the overall investment in knowledge capital is below the necessary threshold, the enterprise's culture will not be noticeably affected. They estimate the threshold for real results in Knowledge Management at somewhere above 1% of human resources. At this point in time, I simply can't imagine DMR giving that level of support to KM.

Where Do We Go?

To continue this discussion, I'll assume that you've accepted the premise that KM is the way of the future. I'll also assume you agree DMR is not yet ready to fund a 75-person department to promote and manage KM around the world. I don't think that means we should walk away from the possibilities.

In the game of Go, a good player can select strategically significant positions far in advance of their use. I believe DMR should approach KM in the same way. We should define a minimalist, low-cost set of programs that will let us experiment and learn the ropes.

I believe that a direct, large-scale KM program will fail because of cultural opposition, a lack of funding and an inability to demonstrate an immediate effect on the bottom line. However, I think an indirect, small-scale KM program might succeed. I think that with a few well-chosen initiatives, we can plant the concepts of KM in various places around the company. Whether technological or organizational, these elements will initially be somewhat isolated – islands in the cultural sea. But if Gartner is correct, they'll be there when we need them. Like the seeds of a crystal, they'll establish the patterns that will support a wholesale cultural shift once other conditions are right.

I think KM can best promote a positive cultural change in the company by exploiting the element of surprise. Let's sneak up on 'em.

The Seeds of the Crystal

One of the tenets of KM is that knowledge emerges from groups, not from individuals. Considering that, the ten “seeds” suggested here should all be vetted and refined through general discussion. I'm putting them on the table with that intention, as a general outline for a 1998 Corporate KM program:

Appoint a Knowledge Architect

Everything that happens in the KM area should be unified by a single vision. This is the most important step toward establishing the commonality that will support the interconnection of these seeds in the future. The Knowledge Architect may have little real power, but he or she should be granted the level of executive sponsorship needed to exert influence in many areas, across organizational structures. The Architect should be an enthusiastic champion for KM, and be ready to serve as prophet in the wilderness.
Establish a KM Community of Practice

There's currently no effective mechanism to maintain the actual knowledge in the company’s Notes databases, and without such care and feeding, initiatives like the Knowledge Access System (KAS) will only push the frustration down a level. (Taking KAS's APM/2000 section as an example, it originally included two largely redundant regional repositories, as well as two other forums that had been abandoned by their original developers. KAS is a good pointer to existing structures, but the structures themselves often leave something to be desired.) I don't think we're ready for full-time Knowledge Librarians. I do believe, though, that there are people around the company who'd accept the job part time, as long as they had a billing code. I think we should locate such individuals, bring them together for a face-to-face once or twice a year and position them as the distributed stewards of the company's intellectual capital.
Revisit Our Assumptions

I appreciate that DMR Macroscope is considered to be the primary storehouse for our corporate knowledge, at least as far as the business of IT is concerned. But I don't believe it will ever be effective as The Global Knowledge Repository. If Macroscope would be useful any place, it would be in the outsourced development environment of Jersey City, yet almost two years after the merger, there's only minimal awareness and no actual utilization. Macroscope is clearly part of the solution, but we also need knowledge containment structures that are smaller, more agile and less expensive to deploy and maintain. Pretending otherwise only undermines our credibility.
Extend the Infrastructure

There are bandwidth problems in some parts of the world that discourage the use of Lotus Notes. We also need to face the fact that most of the people in the old TRECOM territories have no Notes access at all, lacking even the rudimentary starting point of a corporate e-mail address. (One option here would be connectivity via a Domino front-end web page with security provided by CompuServe. It would let practitioners connect from home, or from client sites, without the need for universal deployment of the Notes client.) Until we deal with this issue, we're not being serious about KM.
Improve the Interface

KAS is an excellent first step toward a Knowledge Support System, but it's still only a step. The more pervasive Web technology becomes, the less our practitioners will be satisfied to see knowledge represented as a fixed collection of downloadable Word documents. The Web is changing the way we think about information, and altering our expectations about relevance, currency and accessibility. We need to provide for greater access to unstructured information, and should accelerate the deployment of Domino technology to allow the integration of Intranet sites with DMR's traditional Notes databases.
Build KM into the Appraisal Process

An employee's contributions to knowledge sharing, creation and/or discovery should be an explicit component of the DMR performance appraisal. We should also look for ways to encourage knowledge contributions with employee recognition and reward programs.
Teach the Young / Convince the Old

KM should be featured prominently in corporate orientation and training programs. There must be a consistent message that's in synch with the strategic vision, even if it's somewhat ahead of the workaday reality. KM should also be supported aggressively with executive messages, coverage in internal media, road show presentations and whatever else we can conjure.
Consolidate KM for Outsourcing and the Year 2000

I know from my years in the COO organization that our APM/2000 services are seen as a good way to capture a larger share of the outsourcing market after the Year 2000. There's an obvious synergy between APM/2000 and APM/AMS, and there are already Competency Centers supporting both lines of business. Bringing the KM elements together would be a natural step, and provide a good platform for the evolution of a future KM organization with a true, enterprise-wide mandate.
Establish a Corporate Yellow Pages

DMR relies more on information grapevines than it should, especially given its significant investment in technical infrastructure. It would be a tremendous advance if we could deploy an effective classified directory, able to connect DMR practitioners with DMR experts. This is not a trivial enterprise, though, and would require significant organizational reforms as well as a major data gathering effort.
Institute Metrics for Knowledge Management

Because KM is so hard to justify with traditional metrics, we should immediately begin finding ways to measure its impact. We should define creative measurements to quantify the contribution of KM, while also collecting KM success stories. I have no doubt that if managed properly, it will save time, improve quality and otherwise serve the company's interest. Cambridge Technology Partners estimates that a System Delivery organization which can manage 50% reuse on a project can expect a 40% reduction in project time to market. We have to prove that KM-driven reuse can do the same for DMR.

I appreciate the opportunity to contribute these ideas and look forward to further discussions. Whatever direction the company takes, I'll enjoy being part of it.

Chris Riemer
Director of Knowledge Management for APM/2000

This was the first interesting thing I wrote about KM when I was at DMR Consulting, which had earlier acquired my company, a firm called TRECOM Business Systems. I had been running the KM activity within the company’s Year 2000 group, and in the process developed a reputation as a KM Evangelist. In that context, I was approached by upper management, and asked to put some of my ideas in writing.

These are those…

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