Quantified KM success study 15 - US Army

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Thanks to Nancy Dixon for alerting me to this US Army publication reporting quantified results from the online forums on their Battle Command Knowledge System.

I quote

"A BCKS survey of forum participants reported that the professional forums helped save more than 1,400 lives from June 2008 to June 2009. Nearly 2,500 of the more than 100,000 members of 12 forums responded to the survey conducted last year. The respondents also said the forums had conservatively saved them or their unit 6,749 labor hours from June 2008 -June 2009. Likewise, they estimated that the things they had seen, read or downloaded from the Forums saved the Army nearly $1.6 million".

6750 hours, $1.6 million and 1400 lives. Thats pretty good value!

The article goes on to say

The professional forums provide 24x7 access to online discussions, best practices and TTPs (tactics, techniques, procedures) that facilitate knowledge sharing, promote learning and accelerate decision making, all of which helps Soldier and unit readiness in combat situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The professional forums hosted by BCKS promote a culture of learning in the Army and play a vital role in forming agile and adaptive leaders," said Mr. Dale Ormond, deputy to the commanding general, Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth. "The survey clearly shows the value Soldiers place on the knowledge they glean from the online discussions and documents in the Forums."

KM in sales and marketing

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Our new book, KM for sales and marketing, is now published.

It is available from the publisher's site

Three implementation strategies for Knowledge Management

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In generic terms, there are three main implementation strategies for KM, and only one of them is really reliable.

You ultimately want the all the elements of the KM framework deployed across all of the business. You want to get to the yellow square in the figure to the right.

There are three ways to get there.

The red arrow with the Asterisk represents getting there in one go - in other words, rolling out the entire framework across all the business, straight from the word go. This is a risky strategy. You only get one shot at this, and if you get it wrong, it may be permanently wrong.

The red A/B arrow represents rolling out elements of the framework one by one across the business. This is a common approach, and people often start by rolling out the technology element (step A), and only later introducing the other elements of roles and accountabilities, processes and governance. This also is a risky strategy. Few framework elements add much value when working in isolation, and you may devalue the whole KM implementation if you introduce something that adds no value.

The green arrow represents a tailored implementation. At step 1, you test elements of the framework one by one, locally in the business, to make sure they work in the company context, and to tailor them until they do. At step 2, you pilot the whole KM framework in one part of the business, to make sure the complete framework adds value to the business, and you tailor it until it does. Finally (step 3) you roll out this tried, tested and piloted framework across the business as a whole. The green arrow takes longer, but it works.

Learning to change the culture

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There is a linked-in conversation at the moment on "activities that support you in promoting a culture of KS and KM within your organizations"

My suggestion for answering this question would be to look at activities that support promoting any positive existing culture in your organisation.

• How do you promote a culture of Safety?
• How do you promote a culture of Quality?
• How do you promote a culture of Diversity?

One of the key tenets of KM is "learning before doing", and learning about how to effect internal culture change is core knowledge for the KM team.

Find the people involved in previous cultural initiatives in your organisation. Talk to them. Hold a Peer Assist with them. Learn the lessons from their success or failure. Learn what they did, and what they wish they had done. Learn how behaviours associated with the safety culture/quality culture/diversity culture have been changed, set, embedded and sustained.

Then apply that knowledge to your KM initiative.

The core challenge of KM

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The core challenge of KM can be summed up as follows

The people who have the crucial knowledge, are often unaware that they have it, are unaware how valuable it is, are unaware who needs to know it, and would not know how to go about sharing it anyway.

The people who need the knowledge are often unaware that they lack it, unaware that they need it, unaware that it exists already, are unaware of who holds that knowledge, and would not know how to go about acquiring it anyway.

In other words, the knowledge supplier does not know what they know, the knowledge customer does nt know what they need to know, neither of them realise the value of the transfer, and neither of them would not how to go about transferring it. This is particularly true when the knowledge customer's need comes several months or several years after the knowledge supplier gained the knowledge.

Knowledge Management therefore involves

• helping people realise what they have learned, and the value of that learning
• helping people realise what they need to learn, and the value of acquiring that learning
• helping people understand how that learning can be shared and transferred
  

It's wrong to be right

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Being effective in knowledge management requires a degree of humility.

The knowledge management culture change described here, needs everyone to be open to the knowledge of others, and to be open to the possibility (maybe even the probability) that someone else probably knows more about any given topic than you do. Certainly when you look at the totality of knowledge in a community of practice, that's almost certainly bound to be greater than the knowledge of any given individual.

So the expert needs to let go of "always being right".

The expert needs to realise that although they know a lot, they don't know everything. They need always to be open to learning more. If they think they are always be right, then they are wrong!

The role of the expert in KM is not to know everything, ant not to be always right, but to be able to access and assimilate new knowledge as quickly as possible, and to be able to reliably assess the impact of new knowledge. They need to know all the context, and to be able to fit new knowledge into it.

The expert needs to know that they are not always right - that their knowledge is provisional and partial - but they need to have access to the best provisional knowledge, and to make this available to others.

The humble, learning expert is a massive asset in KM.

Temporary break from blogging

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There will be a short respite for all my blog readers as my wife and I take a well-earned break.

Back online towards the end of the month.

Success Story - Alaska Peer Assist

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Here's an excellent success story on Peer Assist, told here by Kent Greenes

"I recently facilitated a peer assist for a health care provider in Alaska whose aim was to develop a capital business plan that would gain approval from budget holders outside Alaska to renew aging facilities and grow capability for long-term health care. A preliminary version of the plan had met resistance from these decision makers; the Alaska team was told to go back to the drawing board and develop a plan that required significantly less investment. The team had been working for months at reducing the cost and had gotten to a point where they exhausted what they knew and the knowledge they were able to get their hands on. They called me in to plan and facilitate a peer assist.

After calls with potential peers from the provider's operations in Washington and Oregon, we held the peer assist in Anchorage with the home team and eight visiting peers. The peers openly shared the lessons they learned from developing capital plans for long-term-care facilities in their regions. It was clear by early afternoon on the first day of the peer assist that their advice to the Alaska team was to reduce their capital plan by remodeling and repairing existing facilities.

The Alaska team insisted that their environment and customer needs were different from those in the northwestern United States and remodeling wouldn't provide the long-term care needed to attract, serve, and retain potential Alaskan customers. Later that afternoon (and planned as part of the session) the peers visited several long-term-care facilities. The experience made all the difference in the world. The visitors now understood the Alaskan context for long-term care and changed their advice. They felt new facilities were warranted in Alaska and spent the second day of the session developing new options and approaches for capital-plan submission with the home peers.

One of their recommendations was to perform a new survey of the aging population in the region. The peer from the Oregon provider operations had recently done something similar and offered a set of questions and a survey approach that were geared to providing design input for the development of long-term-care facilities. On the spot, the peers modified the design of the survey to address the Alaskan environment, native Alaskan culture, and other unique aspects of the aging customer base in that region.

The session led to a breakthrough in the Alaska team's thinking and capital plan. Not only was their plan approved, but the visiting peers benefited from the experience as well. An e-mail received by the Alaska team leader reinforced this: "Thank you again for the wonderful opportunity to work together last week. I really applaud your willingness to hear new ideas and your dedicated commitment to the people you serve. Kent, you taught us a new appreciation for the power of coming together to harness our collective knowledge to fulfill our mission. It was an enlightening two days for me, and I am very grateful for the experience."

Many of the peers who came together for those two days continue to communicate and collaborate on a routine basis".

Good job, Kent!

If knowledge is power .....

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If knowledge is power, then knowledge sharing is empowerment.


Knowledge sharing empowers the community, and thereby empowers every member of the community.

Horses for KM courses

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It is tempting to think that there are reliable knowledge management interventions which will form the cornerstone of any KM implementation.

"All companies need communities of practice" we might think. Or, "knowledge management relies on portals, and creation of a documented knowledge base". Or perhaps we think "Any company implementing knowledge management needs to introduce a culture of innovation".

Such certainties are tempting, but wrong.

Communities of practice may be fine where knowledge is dispersed around the organisation, in multiple silos, and where the disparate views of knowledge need to be brought together. But there are many cases where communities of practice are not the answer; when knowledge is held in one department in one location, or when knowledge is well defined and well documented, or when there is no knowledge in the organisation, and when the knowledge needs to be created or imported.

Portals and documented knowledge bases may be very valuable when knowledge is well-defined, and standard practices and procedures can be documented. However when knowledge is rapidly evolving, or where knowledge is new, then there is no value in writing it down in a centralised knowledge base, as it will be out of date before the ink is dry (see here for a historical example).

A culture of innovation is a great thing to have in any rapidly evolving industry, where new products and new approaches are the key to competitive success. Where success involves the effective and reliable operation of an established operation, innovation is less valuable (who wants a nuclear engineer to be innovative, rather than to follow orders? Who wants the pilot of their aircraft to be innovative in the way they fly the plane?) And there may be many cases where innovation is a less successful strategy than copying, or than standardising.

So don't be tempted to think that there are universal solutions in KM. There are horses for courses.

Define your course - define your business problem - and you can pick your horse.

KM - realising the need

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Your management will not invest in KM if they don't see the need.

Even the smallest investment, for example a workshop, or an assessment)  requires some sort of justification, so to justify even the smallest investment, you need to demonstrate some potential value. There are three ways to sell the need

1. Logic. Here you logically explain knowledge management to senior management, talking through what it is, and where the value lies. Our experience is that people rarely buy something based on logic, but that they need the logic to justify the emotionally-based decision to buy.

2. Problem Stories. This is a powerful way to help your management see the need. You tell stories about the mistakes which have been repeated, the good practice which remains isolated, the silos which do not communicate, the knowledge which has been lost, the knowledge which will shortly be lost ("did you know we will lose 40% of our engineering expertise in the next 2 years?") Once senior management "buy" the existence of a problem, then it is easier to "sell" KM as a solution.

3. External Examples. Here you tell the stories of companies that have implemented KM, and delivered big value. You talk about the $1billion at Mars from knowledge-enabled work, the $200m per year at Shell, and so on. This actually works quite well, especially if the stories are about your competitors.

Read more here in the white paper on "Making the case for Knowledge Management"

Fluor success stories

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A great article here on KM at Flour by Rob Koene mentions the following success stories

Success stories


The value of sharing knowledge is best illustrated with success stories. They range from discovering that our in-house expert on Russian pressure vessel codes lives in Houston, Texas, to receiving a solution in just a day to a complex software problem that the vendor had been unable to solve for more than six weeks, to engineers working globally to save a client €1m on a clean-fuels project.

For example, a Fluor client was trying to stretch its 30-year-old control system for a power station for another 15-year service. The original vendor no longer existed and getting the system repaired was difficult. The Fluor site manager visited the control systems community forum and asked for advice.

The result came back within 24 hours from a contact at another client’s power station that was replacing the same type of control system with a more modern one. The second client was happy to sell the old equipment and also provided the details of the engineer who built and maintained the instruments. Through this capability, Fluor is seen as a strong facilitator of knowledge and expertise across the industry.

Another example: a Fluor office was trying to qualify for a chemical giant’s business. The client questioned the office’s level of experience with Fieldbus (a method for instrument and control wiring). During a break, an engineer searched Fluor’s knowledge communities for ‘Fieldbus’, found 30 ‘knowledge objects’ (including a list of Fluor’s global experience) and reported the results to the client. They were suitably impressed and the office qualified for the project.

Good stuff, Fluor

Routing the lessons

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Imagine an organisation, busy reviewing activity and coming up with lots of learning points - "we learned that we have to address this sort of situation with this sort of contract; we learned that there is a better way to apply paint, we learned that this client loved this sort of presentation".

Imagine each learning point leading to a suggested action - "we must update the contracting guidelines, we must write up a how-to guide for the new painting methodology, we must annotate the client database, and put a copy of the powerpoint in there".

How do the learning points get to the people who need to take the action?

One great way to do this is through an automated system, where posting the lesson in a database or on a wiki leads to an automatic alert to the right person.

A complementary, way to address this is to have a group looking at the lessons. They look at the new lessons, check the actions are assigned to the right people, and make sure these people are notified. They look at "open" lessons and see why the actions haven't been closed out. They look for the recurrent lessons, and the trends that point to something more systemic which needs to be addressed.

Increasingly we are seeing a role for this group. The Army calles them "Lessons Cells". An oil company calls them "lessons review meetings". Another company assigns this role to the central projects group. An engineering company holds a meeting of the functional cheifs, to do the review.

They act as a clearing house for learning, and together with the automated technology, make sure that new lessons learned are as quickly as possible embedded into the process and procedures and checklists and guidance; the documents that define "the way we work".