steve C. • Hi Roan

We have a similar task - to develop a culture where there is organisation wide knowledge sharing in an organisation with little history of this. The approach we have taken is to work at the ground level looking for opportunities to add knowledge sharing to other work that is going on. So far we have about six parts of the organisaiton that we are working with to develop knowledge sharing strategies as part of their other work.

Out approach is to get some knowledge sharing programs in place, demonstrate their value and generate interest from other parts of the organisation. This seems to be working as the people we are working with have told others about what we are doing. We are now getting an increasing level of interest in our knowledge sharing strategies.

Regards

Steve

Nick M. • Roan, if your organisation finds that it delivers all it needs to deliver by getting the subject matter experts to solve the problems, then perhaps they don't need organisation-wide knowledge sharing.

There are organisations where this is in fact the best knowledge model - where knowledge is static and not evolving, where problems are few, and where the turnover of staff is high, so that the expertise resides solely with the experts.

You need to show senior management a good reason why the organisation needs to change this model. You need to show them that there is enough real tangible business value in "organisation-wide knowledge sharing" (increased margin, increased market share, decreased risk) for them to change the status quo. Then you need to demonstrate this through a pilot (as Steve says), then you need to go back to senior management and ask for REAL support (as per my "letter to senior managers" here http://www.nickmilton.com/2011/02/knowledge-managers-request-to-senior.html )

Arshad A. • Hi Roan,

Sorry to hear about your experiences. Although perhaps not lip service, I’ve found from my own recent experiences that there seems to be an expectation that senior people need to have a good understanding of every business discipline, including knowledge management. As a result I’ve found their perception of KM (which includes the notion of knowledge sharing) is usually not the same as mine. As the only dedicated knowledge worker in 8,000 employess I now make it a point to be the authority on the area and what I feel KM is, what are elements of it and what it isn't.

Steve’s approach really struck a chord with me, because that’s exactly what I’ve made one of my methods of operation. I harness tools such as Web 2.0 and focus groups to promote KM at a grass roots level. In fact I posted Nicks “letter to senior managers” on my Yammer profile last Friday and hope that as well as seeing the humorous aspect, they see the key message of how it articulates the benefits of KM from a strategic level.
Through this and generally been more vocal I’ve been lucky enough to gain the support of many members of the senior management team recently. Despite this, one of the heads of a particular functional division although appreciating the benefits of KM, couldn’t see it as a unique selling point for his particular area. Disappointing but it happens.
KM is still a new field within my organisation and I hope that with enough support and more people getting onboard, demonstrable results could make for a very different conversation in a few months time.

For your particular dilemma it would be interesting to know if everyone within the organisation really know where this specific knowledge council of subject matter experts are and who they would go to in order to find the key knowledge they require. If the answer to this is unclear, then the case for organisation-wide knowledge sharing would certainly appear to be :-)

Jim C. • Tow of the main reason noted for the failure of KM in an organization are executive inattention and lack of budget. People what the executive's feet and follow the money. The things that have budget are the things that are deemed important. With that said, one of the things I started out with was forming communities of practice to share knowledge among the employees. I even started one for first line managers. There are a lot of employees that will do this during lunch, before work, and even after work to get it started. What you really want to do is embed the KM principles and practices into the daily work. This can be done through communities and is very low budget. Communities are for learning, sharing, and getting things done. Don't let people dictate what they should do. Challenge them instead. If the pick up the challenge then great. If not, then it has no value to the community. Try another. Starting grass roots efforts is always easier than starting with the executives. Once you have something started, including other things besides communities, then you can start to collect success stories from them and use them with executives to focus these efforts wit their help.

Two other things I would do. Start an internal blog or wiki to incite discussion about KM and start to educate your executives about it. There are other companies that are having a lot of success in areas that may be of use to you and you could invite them ti speak at a monthly meeting. Maybe a KM Community of Practice meeting. Then minutes or notes from the meeting could be posted and a note sent to the executives with one paragraph noting a few "gems" for the company and a link to the rest of the information.

Start small and expand quickly. If you start to large or launch impossible mission you will fail. Try to start on the people and culture side of things at first. Starting with technology seems to be a fast win but it often isn't. Technology facilitates knowledge sharing. But you have to start with a good foundation for that to happen.

Roan Julius I. • Thanks everyone for the comments. I know there is no shortcut to this. My KM team mates and I have to work hard to prove the value of KM to the organisation.

We have tried to work with the grass-root people and identify some areas that we could help. We started out a few communities of practice. But, I'm still struggling to keep cops alive. What I found out was although the grass-root people is very committed to their work and they are very passionate about it, they are also:
(1) IT-phobia
(2) in fields where expert voice is more important than what they think is right. For e.g. medical field (I'm not talking about doctors here - but medical professionals like nurses). There is establish procedures in their work and they get audited for it, so there isn't much room for discussion.

Another issue is, our KM team is not the IT department. So, it's kinda hard to justify investment in the IT tools for KM. After much effort, our KM team is finally able to roll-out Sharepoint 2010.

Our plan is to create a platform to share stories, and to categorise and summarise stories for organisation-wide distribution.

Is Yammer worth the investment?

Nick M. • Knowledge management does not have to be IT-based. If your organisation is IT-phobic, SharePoint and Yammer will not necessarily help. You may probably do better if you focus on getting people to talk to each other, and learn from each other that way. People can share stories better face to face than through any platform.

Also, why not focus on solving peoples problems rather than distributing stories? If you start with Pull, not Push, you will get your early wins far quicker. If I were in your position, I would take some business issues, and look at getting people to share their knowledge in face-to-face discussion to address those issues. Set up some Peer Assists and Knowledge Exchange circles.

Pramod J. • it does not depend totally on IT . But same we can not deny to use of it. Because IT system is used as virtual brain of organization to store the knowledge , search the knowledge , use of knowledge , capturing of knowledge. But at the same time people don't know IT system we can capture their knowledge through KSs, manthan sessions a mix of brain storming and KSs .but we have to keep this knowledge finally in IT system.again we can disseminate it through magazine ,posters , KSS.

Pramod J. • it does not depend totally on IT . But same we can not deny to use of it. Because IT system is used as virtual brain of organization to store the knowledge , search the knowledge , use of knowledge , capturing of knowledge. But at the same time people don't know IT system we can capture their knowledge through KSs, manthan sessions a mix of brain storming and KSs .but we have to keep this knowledge finally in IT system.again we can disseminate it through magazine ,posters , KSS.

Pramod J. • km has an important role in organization . Every one share their knowledge with their colleague , boss ,subordinates at the time work ,lunch in canteen. It improves the organization learning . Km is the system deliberately capturing the Best practices and knowledge their dissemination to improve the learning of organization . we have use it directly in problem solving by arranging group of people giving their expert views. Top management approach ,proper budget ,good knowledge managers are key point to success of KM.

Arshad A. • Hi Roan,

With respect to Yammer there is a good case to invest in it. In terms of the I.T Phobia you describe in your workplace, their isn't really any real learning curve with Web 2.0 technologies such as this. I tell people that if they can use email they can use Yammer and have found more and more I.T phobic people signing up and getting involved in discussions as a result.. Despite being in favour of Yammer as a knowledge sharing tool, it still won't guarantee successful KM within your organisation on its own.

You mention you’re not the IT department and your own team had to roll out SharePoint. In some ways you’re lucky. I don’t currently even have a KM department. However, I approach whoever I feel could benefit from KM and who could benefit me. You could try approaching the I.T department and try to work alongside them like I did. They were understaffed and gave me the role of looking into CMS’s for them. Once I had their backing I suggested that I was happy to do this task, however it was the social aspect that was missing in IT systems and proposed the inclusion of Web 2.0 components. If this CMS project does prove to be a success, I wouldn’t dream of taking all the credit, however I could at least make the claim that KM contributed to this success to a greater or lesser extent by adding another dimension over just the repository aspect.

You also mention SharePoint 2010. Since this has Web 2.0 type functionality it could do a similar role to Yammer and that way you’re not building another island by introducing two separate repositories unnecessarily. Personally I’m looking into Alfresco with a LifeRay front end as an alternative to our current content management offerings, which is also SharePoint.

As others have suggested though, I’d focus on the face-to-face aspect first, and then implement a technology component.
Hopefully you will provide an update when things improve for you!

Pramod J. • at present era a company differentiate by other by its employee asset and culture in the company . certainly top management approach is required for success of it. But they can't deny with their responsibilities . for every problem their may be expert. But the expert can't be created in one day. They come after long experience ,qualification. So It is necessary to capture their tacit knowledge deliberately and create a second line of expert .so when expert leave the company their is no harm to company. Capturing the knowledge of expert from top to bottom level employees and store it to km system . And focus to use of those best practices in problem solving , creating second line of experts.