KM Artifacts Integrated Around Processes

Knowledge-Base Implementation: Big Bang vs. Swiss-Cheese Approach

Implementing a new Knowledge Repository requires converting and migrating existing knowledge artifacts from numerous repositories and organizing those artifacts around taxonomy domains.  The industry rule of thought is to complete the migration prior to release (Big Bang) rather than releasing partial completed knowledge domains (Swiss-Cheese).  The positives for the Big Bang approach is largely focused upon fostering user buy-in with the new knowledge repository.  It allows old repositories to be shut down and moves all usage to the pristine new repository.  When users have the options to choose between a new repository and existing repositories, historically users will stay with the tools they are most comfortable with. 

With large migrations, taking six to twelve months, the Big Bang approach provides zero value until production launch.  Releasing the new Knowledge Repository prior to 100% of the migration completion may make sense.  We had the opportunity to try both approaches for comparisons within identical cable customer care call centers.  Location ABC went with the Big Bang and Location XYZ the Swiss-Cheese.  Both locations have approximately a million customers and 900 support Agents.  Both locations offer the same services to their customers but have different processes managing their service offerings and different equipment used by their customer.  The domains are segmented by High Speed Data (HSD) housing troubleshooting artifacts for Digital Phone and Broadband services, Video Troubleshooting, and Video/HSD Sales & Billing.

Location ABC migrated each of the three Taxonomy segments as a whole and shut down correlating legacy repositories with the launch of each.  They started with the HSD content, then Video/HSD Sales & Billing, then launched the Video Troubleshooting content.  The migration took approximately ten-months; HSD five-months, then Video/HSD Sales & Billing three-months, and finally Video Troubleshooting two-months.  Location XYZ, migrated content from all three areas simultaneously; focusing on prioritizing the value of the content.  After four-months, Location XYZ’s knowledge repository consisted of 65% of its estimated content needs.  Instead of waiting another three to four months until conversion completion, we decided to launch the repository in the current 65% state.  The legacy repositories were not shut down but a feedback mechanism was in place, and the migration team continued adding content daily.

The results of both approaches were overwhelming successful.  Location ABC realized user buy-in quickly since the content was complete and legacy repositories were shut down.  Location XYZ took longer to obtain the same success since users were forced to navigate between the new and the old repositories.  One unexpected benefit for Location XYZ was the user feedback mechanism.  Users overwhelmingly provided an average of 100 weekly feedback items allowing the KM team to focus upon those request over the predetermined 35% of estimated content planned for migration.  This new variable eventually discontinued the remaining 35% of content planned for migration.   The team solely focused on feedback and new content initiatives (new products & services, promotions, etc.).   Implementing bi-monthly surveys for each Location and usage/feedback metric tracking, no notable metrics distinguished one method over the other.  The only two notable variables extracted from the two approaches are: 1) the Swiss-Cheese approach for Location XYZ offered a shorter time to production and its quick adoption moved 75% of users voluntarily off legacy content portals, and 2) the Swiss-Cheese approach doesn’t allow the immediate shut down of legacy content portals and we soon found those portals no longer being maintained, and stakeholders soon referenced outdated and unmaintained artifacts.

What is Knowledge Management (IT Spin)

This is a blurb from one section of my coming book around practical implementations of KM.

Perform an Internet search on Knowledge Management (KM) and you'll find thousands of hits promoting different Knowledge Management Systems.  Ninety Nine percent of those application results are going off the hype of KM and only offer basic Information Management.  So what is KM?  Knowledge Management is a corporate thought process and not an application.  It's creating a Knowledge-aware organization where corporate intellects are extracted from its members, organized in a comprehensible structure, effectively presented to all roles that require that piece of knowledge, and finally expiring outdated knowledge pieces.  The process is integral!  Changing the behavior of the organization to capture and retain know-how is Knowledge Management and Knowledge Management is not the electronic system selected to improve information management.

All too often, organizations know they are failing at managing their intellectual assets and opt to bring in a Knowledge Manager to institute knowledge practices throughout the enterprise.  Every Knowledge Manager has experienced walking into an organization and quickly learning that their organization doesn’t comprehend the fundamentals of KM, and KM practices are challenging to implement at an enterprise level.  Knowledge Managers make the mistake assuming the organization understands key concepts of KM and create roadmaps where little or no buy-in from executive management is the norm.  Knowledge Management is an organizational behavior change and the magnitude of impacts must come from the President Level and/or majority of line-of-business VP’s.  If only one line-of-business pushes KM strategies, the probability of success is diminished.  Have hope, each chapter provides small roadmaps to achieve small wins; eventually guiding your organization down the path of becoming a knowledge-aware organization.

Knowledge Managers are notorious for promoting the social aspect of KM, which other organizational leaders rarely comprehend.  Most KM cohorts argue the social structure is KM and should be pushed.  The more you push the more resistance you’ll receive and your built-up animosity is the beginning of the end, ultimately resulting in you leaving the organization.  The company then disregards KM as a strategy since it offered zero value and the KM team looked upon as non-strategic.  In the United States, we lag European & Asian corporations with understanding the impact/value of KM.  So how do you promote KM within your organization that gains buy-in from the decision makers?  To answer that question, let’s define traditional approaches of academic KM.

Knowledge Management is best described with an Information Technology (IT) skew.  Yes IT, even though IT is rarely taught in the academic KM curriculum.  Understand that Knowledge Management combines many strategies into one business strategy.

• Library Science teaches classification of artifacts.  Artifacts are everything in the organization that is viewable as an asset.  This includes documented corporate intellect, policies & procedures, training documents, how-to’s, financial statements, troubleshooting guides, expert locators, data records, Intranet content, etc.  The term “Artifacts” is used to generalize all corporate items with the ability for classification and ultimate presentation targeted towards end-users.  The classification of how all artifacts will be organized is an essential KM component.  This is termed the Taxonomy.
• Content Management is the how artifacts are captured from users’ tacit know-how and managed through a lifecycle for presentation and ultimately expiration.  Artifact capture, review, and approval are key components for managing content.
• Business Intelligence is a reporting corporate strategy to measure Key Performance Indicators and corporate data to assist with quickly adapting to required change.  Web-based dashboards show snapshots of current states for how the corporation is performing and display red-flag indicators when processes are out of compliance and/or predetermined thresholds are met.
• Social Networking is rarely performed electronically within organizations.  Social Networking relies upon an Expert repository allowing key skill sets and interest specific to each corporate employee.  This allows users to submit questions around skills needed and past project experiences to locate experts who can guide the submitters to resolving their needs.
• Communities of Practices (CoP’s) are portals organized around macro concepts where all information regarding the concepts is located.  It is a one-stop-shop for contextual information.  Human Resource employees could open their CoP and have access to everything to perform their duties; web application, knowledge-base, employee forms, assigned tasks, active projects, Instant Messaging, HR Experts, HR social network, list of policies & procedures, etc.  CoP’s should host items needed for employees to perform their job and eliminate their need to search outside of their community.
• Enterprise Search strategies provides intelligent search engines that allows users to search across many document repositories, web portal, application data, etc  while presenting the results that are role based and weighted.  Most corporate search engines perform a mass search of all Intranet portals and file servers, presenting massive result sets.  An effective search strategy interrogates numerous repositories, weights the return results based upon the users role in the company, and organizes the results based upon the corporate Taxonomy.  The features don’t stop there.  The search engine should display the number of results for each Taxonomy category and allow one-click filtering for each category.  A bread-crumb trail tracks the path the user followed through the filtering process and allows quick changes in the result set filters.
• Business Process Management (BPM) is a widely confused concept.  It is the electronic management of corporate processes.  It is conceptually bigger than workflow automation since workflows are by definition a model with the set of relationships between all the activities in a goal, from start to finish.  Business Process Management entails modeling workflows, establishing processes to dynamically assign activities, initiate electronic activities, track manual and electronic tasks, and report on the series of actions directed to some end.  Business Process Management may be as simple as automating and managing the new customer process or collaborating and approving documents.  Or it can be complex automation of manufacturing supply chain management processes or manage the complete employee on-boarding process from position requisition to automating the background check, drug screen request, and imaging of the employees’ computer equipment.

You may not fully grasp the overviews bulleted above, but each is covered in detail in future chapters.  Each of those bullet subjects have been incorporated within organizations without the use of Information Technologies.  Library Science has classified books and content for centuries; scientists have used taxonomy methods to group species, chemicals, plants, etc.  Content Management was accomplished with paper documents, manual collaboration, approval signatures, and finally housed in massive file cabinets organized by some form of classification.  Business Intelligence has improved the manufacturing industry for over a century prior to computer systems becoming prevalent.  The Japanese tracked metrics to learn achievable efficiencies to dominate the world manufacturing industry after WWII.    Social Networks were round table face-to-face discussions for all relevant users to share expertise with each other.  These networks were as small as water cooler conversations or formal auditorium symposiums with hundreds of attendees.  Communities of Practices were similar to Social Networks but differed by its goal.  Hard copy manuals housed artifacts gleaned during Social Networks and distributed between community members.  Prior to Search Engines, the military filed After Action Reviews and published best practices and lessons learned in articles distributed to individuals who may need the information in the future.  Publishing’s were highly dependent upon taxonomies derived from Library Science.  Business Process Management has always been around, examples are the building of structures built during the Mayan, Egyptian, Roman, and Asian empires.  Processes were derived and mapped out with several branching paths and based upon new information (Business Intelligence) the proper pre-defined path was taken.  Corporations followed the same Business Process Management strategies through the industrial revolution as we strive for today.  The primary difference is our current ability to automate manual processes where decision paths are automatically decided and the systems navigate workflows down the proper paths.

The rest of this book will provide examples using current applications and processes that will help you understand how to implement the bulleted components of KM, documented within this chapter.  Any line-of-business expert or business analyst should quickly understand the concepts and quickly start impacting KM change within their organization.  A few of the chapters will be better understood with some technical expertise.

Should the Enterprise Integrate Learning Management Systems with Knowledge Management Systems?

I have recently researched how firms are implementing Learning Management Systems and how those solutions integrate with their Knowledge Management Systems.  Each firm invested heavily in their portal LMS & KMS solutions and notably extended those solutions beyond their feature sets.  Instead of integrating the solutions or purchasing an integrated solution, content is duplicated throughout both of their firms’ specific solutions.  Not only are there duplications within the LMS & KMS, but significant Intranet content and tools are incorporated within the solutions.  Notice, I use the word incorporated not integrated.  Documents belonging on the Intranet are in the LMS, full training PDF’s are in the KMS, and no links from the KMS solution page for an inquiry links back to formal training in the LMS.

One would think my research aspirations to incorporate corporate knowledge within the users’ business workspace would endorse such solutions.  However, the Intranet, KMS, nor LMS are the users’ business workspace.  An example of a business workspace is a billing system for customers who call in for questions about their accounts.  Incorporating corporate knowledge to provide consistent and accurate responses to customer inquiries is an example of integrating corporate knowledge repositories within the business process or business workspace.

Simple description of what is a Leaning Management System?
A Learning Management System enables the management and delivery of corporate knowledge skills development.  It allows gap skills curriculum building, learner registration, delivery of learning modules, testing & assessment, certification compliance, etc. 

Simple description of what is a Knowledge Management System?
A Knowledge Management System is a system for supporting the creation, capturing, storage, and dissemination of expertise throughout the enterprise.

Simple description of what is an Intranet?
An Intranet is a communication medium for internal employees to share organization’s information or operations content.  Intranets increase collaboration and are a platform for deploying web applications to support business operations and decisions across the internal enterprise.

Accenture recommends, a tightly integrated Learning and Knowledge solution (see figure-1).  I am having trouble wrapping my IT and business brain around such a concept.  We use the KMS for short answers to thousands of customer questions.  Without tagging every paragraph within our hundreds of training documents that change everyday, a search engine could not display the correct answers for Customer Service Representatives (CSR’s).  Our CSR’s need answers in seconds and cannot traverse through pages of content, which is how traditional LMS’s store training material.

For me, the only logical solution is to provide separate KMS and LMS.  Provide simple answers in the KMS with contextual links to the LMS artifacts, complex training materials in the LMS, and everything else on the Intranet.  Feel free to shoot me an email regarding the subject or the architecture your firm utilized to integrate the KMS and LMS.

Did Knowledge Management Originate from King Solomon? Part-I

During my mother in-laws last three-week visit, the visit where I started smoking again, went from three beers a week to thirty, and the visit where I packed my suitcase planning to spend her final three days at my co-workers (Dan Attis – The SharePoint Guru) house, she bought me a book.  She heard about the book while watching her religious channel louder than I thought my Boss speakers could possibly produce.  She needed to hear the program while taking a shower on a separate floor than my entertainment system.

I did not put much thought into the gift since I was sure it was some radical Christian book, which reinforces my worldly behaviors.  One insomniac weekend, due to my body’s inability to handle drinking beer again, I decided to crack the introduction section since I knew Hosapple was out of my comprehension range.  Interestingly enough the author (Steven Scott) is a millionaire responsible for billion-plus in marketing advertisements.  Scott details how his failures and successes in life easily map back to the teachings of King Solomon.  The book was not religious in nature but a management guide to worker diligence, succeeding with mentors, workforce partnering, conflict resolution, etc.  I read the complete book that weekend.  I then went through the book again with a highlighter and a pen.  I am now reading it for a third time and actually duplicating the end of chapter activities.

Within the book, “The Richest Man Who Ever Lived, King Solomon’s Secret to Success, Wealth, and Happiness” I learned a plethora of business applicable advice based upon lessons of King Solomon.  Scott’s #1 advice recommended reading a Proverb each morning before work and taking notes on the wisdom documented.  I took the advice and the first action item I perform on arrival to work, is taking 5 minutes and reading the Proverb of the day.  I could not believe the number of times within the thirty-one Proverbs that Salomon uses the word “Knowledge”.

While I will never create a religious post, I cannot help but reiterate the wisdom presented within King Solomon’s teachings.  I believe it is safe since three of the four major religions believe in Solomon’s teachings and every historian believes in Solomon’s legacy.  While reading those teachings, the wisdom of managing knowledge inundated me with its present applicability.  The second half of this post will detail some of the Knowledge Management wisdom presented within the Proverbs.

Did Knowledge Management Originate from King Solomon? Part-II

The Proverbs is a compilation of didactic poetry to teach wisdom directed to the young and inexperienced and to those who desire advanced training in wisdom.  The first two-thirds of the book offer numerous purely secular advices around counsel, training, knowledge and wisdom.  I believe different authors wrote the later chapters.  My non-scientific research entailed keyword searches on “Wisdom” and “Knowledge”, which had 48 “Wisdom” hits and 36 “Knowledge” hits.  Dozen more hits were plausible with terms like “Wise”, “Intelligence”, and “Counsel”.  The following are a key versus that stood out as applicable within knowledge intense organizations.  The versus are copied so grammatically they are not accurate to today’s writing standards.  As you read through them, ponder on their applicability to knowledge repositories, tacit experiences from your corporations’ knowledge experts, and general collaboration & forums with corporate expertise.

1:5
A wise man by hearing them will advance in learning, an intelligent man will gain sound guidance

1:30
They ignored my counsel, they spurned all my reproof; And in their arrogance they preferred arrogance, and like fools they hated knowledge

2:10-11
For wisdom will enter your heart, knowledge will please your soul, discretion will watch over you, understanding will guard you

3:13-17
Happy the man who finds wisdom, the man who gains understanding! For her profit is better than profit in silver, and better than gold is her revenue; She is more precious than corals, and none of your choice possessions can compare with her. Long life is in her right hand, in her left are riches and honor; Her ways are pleasant ways, and all her paths are peace.

4:5-13
Get wisdom, get understanding! Do not forget or turn aside from the words I utter. Forsake her not, and she will preserve you; love her, and she will safeguard you; The beginning of wisdom is: get wisdom; at the cost of all you have, get understanding. Extol her, and she will exalt you; she will bring you honors if you embrace her; She will put on your head a graceful diadem; a glorious crown will she bestow on you." Receive my words, and the years of your life shall be many. On the way of wisdom I direct you, I lead you on straightforward paths. When you walk, your step will not be impeded, and should you run, you will not stumble. Hold fast to instruction, never let her go; keep her, for she is your life

5:1-2
My son, to my wisdom be attentive, to my knowledge incline your ear, that discretion may watch over you, and understanding may guard you

8:9-12
All of them are plain to the man of intelligence, and right to those who attain knowledge. Receive my instruction in preference to silver, and knowledge rather than choice gold. (For Wisdom is better than corals, and no choice possessions can compare with her.) "I, Wisdom, dwell with experience, and judicious knowledge I attain

8:32-33
listen to me; instruction and wisdom do not reject!

9:12
If you are wise, it is to your own advantage; and if you are arrogant, you alone shall bear it.

10:14
Wise men store up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool is imminent ruin

12:1
He who loves correction loves knowledge, but he who hates reproof is stupid

13:10,20
But with those who take counsel is wisdom. Walk with wise men and you will become wise, but the companion of fools will fare badly

14:6,8
The senseless man seeks in vain for wisdom, but knowledge is easy to the man of intelligence. The shrewd man's wisdom gives him knowledge of his way, but the folly of fools is their deception

15:2,7,14
The tongue of the wise pours out knowledge. The lips of the wise disseminate knowledge. The mind of the intelligent man seeks knowledge

15:22
Plans fail when there is no counsel, but they succeed when counselors are many

15:31-32
He who listens to salutary reproof will abide among the wise. He who rejects admonition despises his own soul, but he who heeds reproof gains understanding

16:21-23
The wise man is esteemed for his discernment, yet pleasing speech increases his persuasiveness. Good sense is a fountain of life to its possessor, but folly brings chastisement on fools. The mind of the wise man makes him eloquent, and augments the persuasiveness of his lips

17:24
The man of intelligence fixes his gaze on wisdom

18:15
The mind of the intelligent gains knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge

19:2,20
Without knowledge even zeal is not good; and he who acts hastily, blunders. Listen to counsel and receive instruction, that you may eventually become wise

20:18
Plans made after advice succeed; so with wise guidance wage your war

21:11
When the wise man is instructed, he gains knowledge

22:20-21
With counsels and knowledge, to teach you truly how to give a dependable report to one who sends you

23:12,23
Apply your heart to instruction, and your ears to words of knowledge. Get the truth, and sell it not-- wisdom, instruction and understanding

24:5-6
A wise man is more powerful than a strong man, and a man of knowledge than a man of might; For it is by wise guidance that you wage your war, and the victory is due to a wealth of counselors

26:12
You see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.

28:26
He who trusts in himself is a fool, but he who walks in wisdom is safe