‘Couture for data’: capturing organisational know-how for good

Search for a descrip­tion of knowl­edge man­age­ment (KM) and you’re like­ly to have a bet­ter chance of find­ing an agreed ver­sion of the best Avenger hero. Atlass­ian describes KM as “the process of cre­at­ing, curat­ing, shar­ing, using and man­ag­ing knowl­edge across an orga­ni­za­tion, even across indus­tries”. Gart­ner takes a sim­i­lar view, posit­ing that “KM pro­motes a col­lab­o­ra­tive and inte­gra­tive approach to the cre­ation, cap­ture, orga­ni­za­tion, access and use of infor­ma­tion assets, includ­ing the tac­it, uncap­tured knowl­edge of peo­ple” – but there still remains no sin­gle, accept­ed def­i­n­i­tion.

This posi­tions KM as an eso­teric dis­ci­pline, but con­sen­sus sug­gests that when it is imple­ment­ed effec­tive­ly, KM is a col­lec­tive endeav­our; an organ­i­sa­tion­al move­ment where tech­nol­o­gy inter­sects with the levers of peo­ple, process, tools and con­tent.

Of these parts, peo­ple are arguably the key to suc­cess­ful­ly embed­ding KM into an organ­i­sa­tion. They are asked to per­form out­side the per­ceived con­structs of their role, for which they’re unlike­ly to receive plau­dits. Such out­puts might include pro­fil­ing con­tent with meta­da­ta using clear, unam­bigu­ous lan­guage so it can be eas­i­ly found or join­ing a com­mu­ni­ty of prac­tice and par­tic­i­pat­ing in knowl­edge-shar­ing ses­sions (in addi­tion to exist­ing roles and respon­si­bil­i­ties).

What is knowledge management?

In what­ev­er form KM activ­i­ties man­i­fest for the indi­vid­ual, it will involve apply­ing intent to their activ­i­ties and an under­stand­ing of how those activ­i­ties inter­sect with oth­er areas of the organ­i­sa­tion. So these activ­i­ties must have tan­gi­ble ben­e­fits for the employ­ee and the organ­i­sa­tion.

Mon­i­ca Danese-Per­rin is head of knowl­edge man­age­ment at dig­i­tal busi­ness ser­vices firm Emergn and was tasked with cre­at­ing com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice at Lloyds Bank­ing Group as part of a move to an agile work­ing mod­el. Employ­ees were required to upskill as part of the trans­for­ma­tion project and, as part of the process, agile coach­es were brought in to iden­ti­fy capa­bil­i­ty gaps.

Danese-Per­rin used the hub-and-spoke mod­el to scale and con­nect capa­bil­i­ty across the organ­i­sa­tion. Parts of this process were to dri­ve new cap­ture process­es to improve knowl­edge find­abil­i­ty, and these tools were effec­tive­ly used for knowl­edge cre­ation, shar­ing and stor­age. At least 70,000 employ­ees use the tools Danese-Per­rin intro­duced and this ini­tia­tive was short­list­ed for the Hen­ley Forum Advanc­ing Organ­i­sa­tion­al Change and Devel­op­ment Prac­tice award.

Under­stand­ing the objec­tives of a project from a KM purview can save an organ­i­sa­tion sig­nif­i­cant rec­ti­fi­ca­tion costs. “Any KM ini­tia­tive has a com­mer­cial con­sid­er­a­tion, in terms of what it can save or make the organ­i­sa­tion, so approach­ing it with a clear pur­pose and inten­tion is crit­i­cal.”

Organ­i­sa­tion­al silos can result in mon­ey sink­holes with dis­con­nect­ed busi­ness func­tions solic­it­ing ‘sil­ver-bul­let soft­ware’ in a vac­u­um.

Microsoft Viva is mar­ket­ed as an employ­ee expe­ri­ence plat­form – its holis­tic offer­ings are a beguil­ing propo­si­tion. Viva Top­ics teas­es the holy grail of infor­ma­tion find­abil­i­ty, using AI tech­nol­o­gy and oth­er depen­den­cies in the Microsoft suite. Lay­er­ing AI onto a con­tent data­base that hasn’t been organ­ised, clas­si­fied or gov­erned with life-span man­age­ment prac­tices won’t of itself bring about the desired out­come. With­out embed­ded KM process­es, the under­ly­ing inter­de­pen­den­cies might all too eas­i­ly be over­looked.

How knowledge management systems help organisations

By con­trast, soft­ware provider ClearPeo­ple has a dig­i­tal work­place prod­uct, Atlas, which lever­ages the capa­bil­i­ties of Share­Point Syn­tex (a less­er-known AI-based Microsoft prod­uct). The syn­the­sis of these prod­ucts pre­sup­pos­es an exist­ing tax­on­o­my, meta­da­ta, infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and gov­er­nance.

Silos aren’t an issue at glob­al law firm Shear­man & Ster­ling. Jon Beau­mont, senior knowl­edge man­ag­er, describes the col­lab­o­ra­tive rela­tion­ship between CTO and chief knowl­edge offi­cer which was piv­otal to the suc­cess of a project to move from a dis­parate on-premise file-share sys­tem to a cloud-based doc­u­ment man­age­ment sys­tem, iMan­age 10, at the height of lock­down. The sys­tem has deliv­ered increased secu­ri­ty and cen­tral­i­sa­tion of doc­u­ments, and has future-proofed search capa­bil­i­ty ini­tia­tives. But it hasn’t been imple­ment­ed entire­ly with­out issue, with the occa­sion­al incon­sis­tent doc­u­ment pro­file and meta­da­ta-tag­ging by con­tent own­ers.

In 2020, tech­nol­o­gy piv­ot­ed to facil­i­tate a raft of busi­ness-crit­i­cal require­ments, one of which was remote con­tract exchange and esig­na­tures. Jen­ni Tel­lyn is a KM con­sul­tant at 3Kites Con­sult­ing, who worked on a project to imple­ment DocuSign. The con­tract exchange and esig­na­ture plat­form was a key busi­ness enabler for the organ­i­sa­tion dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, pro­vid­ing a sus­tain­able and risk-averse approach to con­tract com­ple­tion.

While she believes that “KM bridges the gap between tech­nol­o­gists and the wider busi­ness”, Tel­lyn iden­ti­fies the crit­i­cal role which peo­ple play in the process of KM deliv­ery. “Peo­ple often wish to sub­scribe to the ben­e­fits offered by KM but with­out hav­ing active­ly con­tributed to them,” she observes – a sen­ti­ment that is echoed by Beau­mont.

There is anoth­er red flag that can be tied back to the lever of peo­ple and the imper­a­tive of pro­vid­ing a clear nar­ra­tive around the ‘why’ of KM appli­ca­tion, along­side the ‘how’ of tech­nol­o­gy. When the case for KM no longer needs to be argued, it will become the con­nec­tive tis­sue of the organ­i­sa­tion and crit­i­cal to dig­i­tal sus­tain­abil­i­ty endeav­ours through the robust man­age­ment of soft­ware, con­tent and media assets.

The spir­it of this out­look is summed up in Danese-Perrin’s def­i­n­i­tion of KM, which tran­scends its oth­er­wise util­i­tar­i­an essence: “KM is cou­ture for data. It’s made to mea­sure – and good KM should be both inten­tion­al and invis­i­ble.”