The 5 key skill areas for a KM implementation team

Here are 5 key skill areas you must not ignore when putting together your Knowledge Management implementation team. You need to have all of them on the team.

Image from wikimedia commons

You know the four enablers of People, Process, Technology and Governance? What we call the four legs on the KM table?

These four areas should be reflected in the people and skills you choose to drive Knowledge Management implementation.

KM covers the area of overlap between IT, HR (or Learning and Development), Organizational Process and Management, and so the KM implementation team needs a blend of people who can cover these areas. So we need the following skills on the KM implementation team, plus one more skill as described below.

People Skills
If the aim of the KM team is to introduce new behaviours and practices to the organisation, they will need people skilled in training, coaching, mentoring and facilitation. It may be useful to have someone on the team with an HR, training or business coaching background. Get some facilitation training for whole team as well.

Process skills
The team need experience and skills in the operational processes of the business.  The KM team should contain people with good and credible backgrounds and skills in each major organisational subdivision. This is really to establish as much credibility as possible. When members of the task force are working with business projects, they want to be seen as "part of the business", not "specialists from head office who know nothing about this sector of the business". They have to be able to "talk the language" of the business - they need to be able to communicate in technical language and business language. They act as Best Practice champions within their area of business, and when the working task force is over, may take a leading Knowledge Management role in their subsidiary.

Technology skills.
The KM team needs at least one person who has strengths in the details of the current in-house technology, understands the potential of new technology as an enabler for knowledge management, and can help define the most appropriate technologies to introduce to the organisation.

Governance skills.
Finally the Km team needs a person who can look at KM from a high level - who can understand how it fits into the governance systems of the organisation, and who can work at a high level to introduce the policy changes and the governance systems that are vital to the long term survival of KM. This person can be the KM team leader, or even the executive sponsor.

Change Management skills

Even if you have the 4 skills areas that map to the legs on the table, there is still one more skill area you need - Change Management. The knowledge management implementation task force has a hard job ahead of them, changing the culture of the organisation. They will be working very closely with people, often sceptical people, and they will need very good influencing skills. Look for people with skills as change agents and influencers. Also the early stages of implementing knowledge management are all about raising awareness, and "selling" the idea. The KM team needs at least one person who is skilled at presenting, communicating and marketing/selling KM. This person will also be kept busy raising the profile of the company's KM activities at external conferences. 

If the KM Table has 4 legs, then make sure there are people on the team with enough skills to look after each leg, to  make sure your final framework is sturdy and sound, and then add one or more people who are skilled in fostering Culture Change. 

4 roles for the KM team

I presented this Boston Square last week to talk about 4 styles of knowledge transfer. Here's how the KM team can help with each. 

The Boston Square looks at four modes of knowledge transfer within KM, differentiated by Push and Pull, and Documented/Undocumented knowledge.  Any balanced KM program will address all four, more or less equally. Any KM program that focuses only on one or two quadrants in unbalanced.

Here is how the KM team can ensure balance.

The Explicit Push quadrant, labelled Share, is where an organisation focuses on collecting and publishing codified or documented knowledge, thus creating knowledge collections. It is the "Collect" route described here. The KM team can help ensure collection of documented knowledge by:

• Training people in how to collect and document knowledge:
• Ensuring each project understands what knowledge products it should document:
• Embedding into the workstream knowledge-collection processes such as lesson learning;
• Providing facilitation for these processes, or training facilitators;
• Providing technology where knowledge can be collected, which is outside "project space" and visible to other projects or to the organisation as a whole (ie technology for the "knowledge workstream");
• Measuring whether the required knowledge products are being created, to the right standard;
• Promoting a culture of openness and honesty, and discouraging secrecy and knowledge hoarding.

The Explicit Pull quadrant, labelled Search, is where an organisation focuses on facilitating searching for documented knowledge. The KM team can help by;

• Ensuring the organisation has an enterprise search engine;
• Ensure there is someone in the organisation responsible for maintaining and tuning the search engine;
• Ensuring that there are roles in place for maintaining, curating and synthesising the stores of collected knowledge;
• Ensuring the knowledge stores are browsable as well as searchable;
• Ensuring there is a taxonomy and metadata system in use;
• Embedding into the workstream  processes that encourage and promote searching, such as knowledge gap analysis;
• Providing facilitation for these processes, or training facilitators;
• Measuring search, eg search queries, and the number of document downloads;
• Measuring whether the use of sought knowledge is aiding the business, and by how much;
• Promoting a culture of curiosity and Learner behaviours, and discouraging not-invented-here, "too busy to learn" and other Knower behaviours.

The Tacit Push quadrant, labelled Tell, is where an organisation focuses on storytelling and knowledge exchange.  The KM team can help by;

• Ensuring people and projects understand what knowledge they should talk about:
• Embedding into the workstream knowledge-presentation processes such as knowledge handover, knowledge exchange, knowledge café etc;
• Providing facilitation for these processes, or training facilitators;
• Providing blogging platforms for individuals and/or projects and communities of practice;
• Measuring whether the required knowledge presentations and discussions are happening;
• Measuring whether they are aiding the business, and by how much;
• Promoting a culture of openness and honesty, and discouraging secrecy and knowledge hoarding.

The Tacit Pull quadrant, labelled Ask, is where an organisation focuses on creating and satisfying a demand for knowledge. This is the "Connect" route described here. The KM team can help by;

• Ensuring people and projects have channels and mechanisms to ask questions;
• Ensuring, where appropriate, that communities of practice are set up for the main knowledge topics;
• Providing Q&A forums for communities of practice;
• Providing a "knowledge index"/"yellow pages"/"Expertise locator" system if appropriate;
• Embedding processes like Peer Assist into the workstream;
• Introducing knowledge discussion processes such as knowledge handover, knowledge exchange, knowledge café etc;
• Providing facilitation for these processes, or training facilitators;
• Measuring whether the required  discussions are happening;
• Measuring whether they are aiding the business, and by how much;
• Promoting a culture of curiosity and Learner behaviours, and discouraging not-invented-here, "too busy to learn" and other Knower behaviours.

Everyone will have their preferred quadrant in which they feel most comfortable, but the key for any KM program is that you need to address all four elements, as different knowledge needs to be transferred in different ways, and to focus on only one quadrant of the diagram is to miss 75% of the possibilities KM can deliver.

Use this lists here to check how balanced your KM program is.

What KM can learn from business start-ups 3 - appoint the right team

Last week I started a set of blog posts likening KM implementation to a business start-up. Here is number 3 in the series. 

Picture from Needpix, author geralt (pixabay.com)

This blog series uses this analogy of a start-up to inform KM implementation. It reviews 5 common reasons for start-up failure and suggests ways in which KM programs can avoid these failure modes. These common reasons are taken from  a great article by David Skok , and are as follows:

1. Little or no market for the product; 
2. The business model fails; 
3. Poor start-up management team; 
4. Running out of cash; 
5. Product problems.

Poor start-up management team

According to Skok's article,

"An incredibly common problem that causes startups to fail is a weak management team. A good management team will be smart enough to avoid Reasons 2, 4, and 5. Weak management teams make mistakes in multiple areas: They are often weak on strategy, building a product that no-one wants to buy as they failed to do enough work to validate the ideas before and during development. They are usually poor at execution, which leads to issues with the product not getting built correctly or on time, and the go-to market execution will be poorly implemented. They will build weak teams below them. There is the well proven saying: A players hire A players, and B players only get to hire C players (because B players don’t want to work for other B players)"

The choice of the KM Implementation leader, and the KM team, is crucial. We have also seen that a poor KM team is a common cause of KM implementation failure. The team leader should be:

• A Change Agent, with  a history of delivering organizational change
• Familiar with the risks involved in change programs (and business start-ups)
• A respected senior member of the organization
• Charismatic, engaging and influential
• A confident and effective communicator, with excellent leadership skills 
• Not afraid to take risks 
• Diplomatic
• Familiar with the technology and the human/cultural issues involved in KM
• Very familiar with the organizational structure, vision and strategy
• Well networked within the company

If we look at the work of the KM team during KM implementation, we can see the following stages:

• An analysis or "market research" phase, some of the activities of which are described in the first post in this sequence. During this stage the KM team will create the KM strategy, survey the internal “market”, determine the stakeholders and their value propositions, create the business case for KM, and plan the next stages of the implementation program. The team in this phase needs to be strong in strategic thinking and understanding stakeholder needs. 
• A piloting phase, during which a simplified prototype KM Framework is progressively tested with the business, improved and elaborated, as we will discuss later this week. The team in this phase needs to be strong in the mechanics of KM (e.g. the facilitation of KM processes, KM technology and Information Management), as well as working with business customers and leaders, and communication and marketing. 
• A roll-out phase, during which the final KM Framework is deployed across the organisation through engagement, training and coaching. The team in this phase needs to be strong in influencing, selling and marketing. 
• A operation phase, during which the use of the KM Framework is supported monitored and measured across the organisation. The team needs to be strong in the mechanics of KM, and in analysis of the value delivered and the opportunities for further improvement of the Framework.

A strong leader such as described above can build a strong and balanced team, which needs the following skills mix:

• Facilitation skills. 
• Coaching and training skills. 
• Marketing/influencing/selling skills 
• Writing skills. 
• Technology skills. 
• Information management skills

There seems a tendency, which we have seen many times, to appoint teams made up entirely of information managers and librarians. The thought process seems to be

• "Knowledge is a little bit like Information" (wrong assumption number 1 - knowledge is not at all like information, although there is a small area of overlap)
• "If the KM team is managing knowledge, then they need information management skills" (wrong assumption number s 2 and 3 - the team is not managing knowledge, they are influencing the organisation to management knowledge, and  the primary skills they need are influencing skills, not IM skills, although you need some IM skills to cover the area of overlap).

Think like a start-up. Your KM Implementation leader should be a Jobs rather than a Wozniak, and the team should be selected as if they were trying to introduce a new product into a market (which is actually what they are doing).

The 2 factors that determine the size of KM teams

The size of KM teams depends on the size of the organisation, and the maturity of the KM program.

Yesterday I talked about the need to put your A-team onto the KM implementation program, and discussed some of the skills you need on the team. What I did not discuss was how large that team should be.

I published some statistics on this in 2015 based on our global KM survey in 2014. We conducted a second run of the same survey in 2017 and so have some additional data, with now 596 responses from knowledge managers around the world. The updated plot below shows that the size of the central KM team is controlled by two factors, described below. (There will be other KM roles in the organisation, and this plot does not reflect all KM professionals; just the central implementation and coordination team).

The first factor is the size of the organisation. Larger organisations have bigger teams, but not proportionally to their size, and an increase in organisational size of a factor of 10 is not associated with a similar increase in KM team size. There is an economy of scale here, and the size of the central team remains similar across all organisational sizes. What seems to change instead is the time taken for KM implementation, and a team in a small organisation can implement KM much faster than a team in a large organisation.

The second factor is the maturity of KM in the organisation. Whatever the organisational size, the KM teams in organisations where KM is fully embedded are larger than the teams where KM is still in progress. This is either

1. Because mature KM requires a larger central team than "in progress" KM, or
2. Organisations where the KM team is too small do not get to the "fully embedded" stage.

Whatever the reason, this remains a useful plot for organisations to benchmark the size of their central KM team. 

The importance of choosing the A team to run knowledge management

Introducing Knowledge Management to an organisation is a process of massive disruption and change (or at least it should be!). You need your very best team on the job.

Image by Joe Haupt on Flickr

One of the most frustrating situations you can face as a consultant is working with an internal KM team that does not have the capacity to deliver. You want to help them, you want them to succeed, they are focused on the right things, but they are just the wrong people.

I am talking here primarily about the team that implements Knowledge Management - that introduces the framework of roles, technologies, processes and governance, and that leads the change to a new way of working. This is a big change process, you as asking people to change their working habits, and to change the way they see the world of work. You are introducing a new order of things and you need the right team to deliver this. You need the A team.

But who are the A team?

The team leader, first and foremost, needs to be a change agent. They need to be a visionary leader, capable of working at the highest levels in the organisation as well as the lowest. They need to be a respected organisational insider; this is a role that cannot be outsourced, as they need to "speak the language", know the politics, and have the credibility. They need to know enough about KM to translate it into business and customer terminology, but able to back it up with sound KM theory.

The skills of the KM team need to be varied. KM covers the area of overlap between IT, HR (or Learning and Development) and Organizational Practice, and so the team needs a blend of people who can cover these areas. The key skills here are the softer skills. This is what John Keeble, the CKO of Enterprise Oil, said about the make-up of a KM team

"If you look at the team more widely, rather than just the person leading it, far and away the most important things are the interpersonal skills, and we have said whoever we are recruiting anyone for the team, that's the most important thing. We can teach them the knowledge management skills, they bring their own network with them, but they have got to have the interpersonal skills, because so much of this is about persuasion. You cannot coerce people into sharing their knowledge, you have to be able to entice and cajole and persuade them to do it"

Some of the following skills should be on the team.

Facilitation skills. Most of the KM processes require people working together, and sharing knowledge, on groups, communities or meetings. The quality of dialogue in these meetings is vital, facilitation is key, and the KM team members play important facilitation roles. Secure facilitation training for the team members as soon as you can.

Influencing skills. The knowledge management implementation team has a hard job ahead of them, changing the culture of the organisation, and the soft skills are absolutely core. They will be working very closely with people, often sceptical people, and they need very good influencing, marketing and selling skills. Give them training in this aspect as well.

Coaching and training skills. If the aim of the team is to introduce new behaviours and practices to the organisation, they will need people skilled in training, coaching and mentoring. Look for people with skills as change agents and business coaches. One or more people with a training background should be on the team.

Writing skills. The processes of knowledge capture and packaging are in some ways very akin to journalism. Interviewing, group interviewing (e.g. Retrospects), analysis, summary, write-up, presentation, are all part of the stock-in-trade of journalists. Make sure there is at least one person on the team with journalistic or writing skills, and preferably more than one.

Communication skills. The early stages of implementing knowledge management are all about raising awareness, and "selling" the idea. The team needs at least one person who is skilled at presenting and marketing. This person will also be kept busy raising the profile of the company's KM and Best Practice activities at external conferences.

Technology skills. The team needs at least one person who is aware of the details of the current in-house technology, the potential of technology as an enabler for knowledge management, and who can help define the most appropriate technologies to introduce to the organisation. However do not staff the whole team with techies (this is one of the two common unbalanced teams - the team of techies).

Library and information science skills. Your team needs at least one person who can look after the issues of information management as it applies to documented knowledge, and who can take care of the organisational aspects of taxonomies, databases etc. However do not staff the whole team with librarians (this is the other common scenario of the unbalanced KM teams - the team comprised entirely of librarians).

The organizational backgrounds of the core team need to be varied. The team will be attempting to change behaviour and embed knowledge management into the business process across a large part of the organisation (or indeed the whole organisation). Ideally the team should contain people with good and credible backgrounds in each major organisational subdivision. This is really to establish as much credibility as possible. When members of the team are working with business projects, they want to be seen as "part of the business", not "specialists from head office who know nothing about this sector of the business". They have to be able to "talk the language" of the business - they need to be able to communicate in technical language and business language. They act as Best Practice champions within their area of business, and when the working team is over, may take a leading Knowledge Management role in their subsidiary.

The members of the team will also need to be passionate about the topic. The team members must be seen to be personally committed to best practice and knowledge management if they are to retain credibility. They need training in the skills and theories of Knowledge Management and Best Practice transfer, and need access to books, conferences and forums on the topic They must be enthusiastic about applying knowledge management tools and techniques in their own business, and to their own work, in service of improving their own performance.

Finding such people is not easy, but changing the culture of an organisation is not easy either. With the wrong people on the team, you don't get the right result, even with the best consultants in the world to support you. However ...

With the right team, the right leader, and the right approach, absolutely anything can be done, and Knowledge Management implementation will be assured.

Which 5 skills do you need on your KM team?

There are five key skills you need on a KM team, no matter what sort of organisation you are.

Image from ROverhate (pixabay.com) via needpix

Implementing Knowledge Management needs attention to many things - to People, Process and Technology, to Governance, Change Management, to Collecting knowledge and Connecting people, and to integrating KM activity into the work practices and working styles of the organisation. To this end, 5 skillsets are key to have on your team.

These are as follows:

• You need Information technology skills. Technology is one of the 4 legs on the KM table, and you need someone on your team to help define the technology needs, act as informed buyer for any new technology, and help staff understand and work with the KM tools; whether these are as simple as a community of practice forum, or as complex as AI and big data;
• You need information management and library skills. Part of the knowledge of the organisation will be documented, and needs to be managed in the forum of documents, You need someone on the team who can work with the IM team and ensure that the interests of KM are represented as part of the organisations IM efforts, and who can bring an IM mind to bear on the documented knowledge bases; 
• You need facilitation skills. Many of the KM processes involve conversation and dialogue, and this needs careful facilitation. Undocumented knowledge is handled through conversation, and facilitation skills are needed to ensure these conversations are productive and focused;
• You need change management skills. Implementing KM is a change management exercise, and these skills are vital to run your communication strategy and program (among other tasks),
• Finally you need the basic skills of the organisation itself (legal skills for legal firms, military skills for military organisations, and so on).  You have to be able to translate KM into "organisational language" and organisational practice. This is vital. You need people on the team who represent the core skills of the organisation. 

According to our KM survey, these skillsets are common across all sectors, although prioritisation varies.

• Legal KM teams prioritise Organisational (Legal) skills and IM skills, often to the exclusion of all other skills;
• Oil and Gas KM team prioritise Facilitation skills;
• Professional services firms prioritise IM skills;
• Information Media and Telecoms firms prioritise IT skills

However even though prioritisation changes, we can probably treat these five skills as the core skillset of a KM team.

Check your own KM team. Are any of these skills missing?

10 tasks for the KM team when KM implementation is complete

When KM implementation is over, the KM team still has a job of work to do

Implementing Knowledge Management is a long project of culture change, and the introduction of a new management framework (roles, processes, technologies, governance).  The Knowledge Management team's initial role is to design and introduce the framework, delivering the required changes in behaviour and culture.

Once that job is done, what role does the KM team have?

Some people say that once this job is done and Knowledge Management is fully embedded into the business, you can disband the team, but that isn't the case.

Once Safety Management is embedded do you disband the Safety team? Once Quality Management is embedded, do you disband the Quality team? No; you retain them, because they still have a key role to play and without them playing that role, Quality performance or Safety performance would revert to pre-change levels. The same would happen to KM.

Here are 10 key elements of that continuing role for the KM team.

1. They need to support usage of the framework. This includes training people in its use, coaching the KM professionals, running the KM CoP, launching other CoPs, building the knowledge asset about Knowledge Management.
2. They need to monitor and report on the application of the framework. This includes checking compliance with the KM policy and expectations, measuring the application of lesson learning, tracking value added through communities , auditing the management level of key knowledge assets, measuring the maturity of key CoPs, collecting results of any KM Dashboards or scorecards. Then reporting a summary of these metrics to senior management.
3. They need to coordinate any KM recognition activity. This includes running annual awards schemes, for example, or finding other ways to recognise the star performers, as well as finding ways to deal with the people who refuse to engage with KM.
4. They need to continue to keep the profile of Km high, through communications campaigns or KM focus weeks.
5. They need to continuously improve the KM framework. This may include improving the company KM policy, bringing in or improving the existing, technology, or adapting the processes and roles;
6. They will be in charge of testing the KM Framework against international standards such as ISO 30401:2018;
7. If new KM technology is needed, the KM team will manage the process of technology requirements definition, and managing a vendor tendering process
8. They may take on specialist roles themselves, such as lessons management, or major lessons capture, development of KM plans for major projects, and big Retention exercises.
9. Indeed, if your Knowledge Management strategy is a Retention strategy, the KM team may run the Retention process (planning, prioritising, interviewing etc)
10. The KM team will act as client for any outsourced KM services.

The KM team has a job of work still to do - to manage, maintain and continuously improve the KM Framework - and these 10 tasks form the core of their work.

10 things a KM champion needs to understand

Here are ten things a KM Champion needs to understand in order to do their job well.

Image from wikimedia commons

Understand your role
Discuss this with the KM team until you have a clear idea what your role as Champion entails. It may contain elements such as the following:

• Development of KM strategy for your part of the business 
• Deployment of a KM Framework (Roles, processes, technology and governance)
• Promotion of KM behaviours and culture (Communication, Support, Coaching and Facilitation) 
• Measurement and reporting of KM Activity and benefits

Understand your stakeholders
Find out what management need from KM, what you need from them, and the value proposition for management. Also find out what the knowledge workers need from KM, what you need from them, and what their value proposition is.

Understand your scope of work
What is in scope, and what is out of scope?

Understand the critical knowledge
Find out the critical knowledge for your part of the business, so you can focus only on the most valuable knowledge - the 20% of knowledge that will make 80% of the difference.

• Is it new knowledge, where the focus is on rapid learning? 
• Is it knowledge spread among many people, where the focus is on sharing good practice? 
• Is it old knowledge which should be standardised? 
• Is it knowledge of an expert, which should be captured?

Understand the KM Framework 
This is the framework of roles, processes, technology and governance that defines how knowledge will be managed in your organisation. You need to make sure you understand this completely, as this is what you will be trying to implement in your own project, department or division.

Understand the core KM tools and processes
You need to understand these, as you will be coaching people in their use, and facilitating some of the processes. These will include:

• Tools and technologies for knowledge discussion, such as Peer Assist, Knowledge Exchange, and community forums 
• Knowledge capture tools and processes such as After Action review, Retrospect,  lesson management systems and blogs   
• Knowledge synthesis tools and processes, such as Knowledge asset creation and update, knowledge article creation and update, wikis and knowledge bases,.
• Knowledge access and re-use tools and processes such as KM planning, and the use of search tools and people-finders.
• Knowledge creation tools and processes, such as Deep Dive. 

Understand communities of practice
If communities of practice are included in your KM Framework then you need to understand how these work, and the roles, processes and technologies involved.

Understand the issues of implementing KM in your part of the organisation
Understand the barriers to KM and how to overcome them, and the enablers you can use. Understand the use of pilot projects and "proof of concept" activity.

Understand how to sell KM, and react to objections
Understand the influencing techniques you can use, and the use of social proof, in selling the concept of KM internally.

Understand KM Governance
This includes the elements of KM expectation, metrics and rewards, and support. Governance is the issue that will be most powerful in reinforcing KM behaviours, and you need to be able to explain your stakeholders how it works.

Contact Knoco for help in developing your understanding further. 

To which department should KM report?

Where is the best place for Knowledge Management in an organisation?

This is a common question in the early stages of a Knowledge Management implementation program.

It also sometimes arises later on; if you start KM with a temporary task force reporting at a high level, then when KM becomes operational you need to find an organisational home for the ongoing support team.

KM can report anywhere

First let's look at where KM actually does report. The figures below are from 540 responses to our 2014 and 2017 surveys (with duplicates removed)

reporting line	number	percent
Separate reporting line to senior management	115	21%
Operations	66	12%
Information Technology	50	9%
Strategy	44	8%
Learning and development	35	6%
Human Resources	22	4%
Projects	20	4%
R&D	18	3%
Business improvement	18	3%
Innovation	16	3%
Quality	13	2%
Sales and Marketing	10	2%
Engineering	9	2%
Legal	8	1%
Internal communications	8	1%
Other (please specify)	88	16%

The most common reporting line is a separate line to senior management, which is typical in the early stages of KM. The second biggest category is the "Other" category, which includes categories such as 

Science Group; volunteers and strategy; Fire & Incident Management ; Finance; Planning and evaluation ; Innovation and academic development; Standards and studies; Dirección de Estudios; Knowledge and Information Services; Education Research; Business Systems; Strategy, innovation and risk management; Policy analysis & Research; Corporate Services; Naac; Management Development Department; Quality and Operation department; HR and Engineering dept/division; Client Experience; Supply Chain; Customer Support;Corporate; Health and Wellbeing Division; Central Services - Information Management; Customer operations director;  Corporate Services; I answer to the Service Line Leader; Future Business; Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning; Corporate University; Distributed model - embedded within organizations; Sport Science and Medicine Director; Education and quality; HSE....; Consumer Market Insights and Business Intelligence teams ;  Directly to the Portfolio Management, KM and strategic projects team; Services; Information Technology + Business transformation program.

So based on common practice, KM can report anywhere, and it probably should report in the place where it makes most sense - where the knowledge issues will deliver the largest value, where the business demand is greatest, and where you have the most powerful advocacy.  

However here are some things to look out for in the various scenarios shown below.

Issues and risks

Reporting separately to senior management is ideal in the early stages, but KM support will eventually need to be embedded somewhere, in a part of the organisation you know is going to survive in the long term. Being a separate item makes you vulnerable, even though it may give you high level access.

Reporting to strategy is an excellent option, as it keeps KM strategic. Maybe some of the tactical issues of KM might suffer, but I would rather lose the tactical aspects than the strategic aspects.

Reporting to operations is a good option (or to Projects, in the case of a project-based organisation), as it avoids KM being seen as a support function, and keeps KM grounded in the operational needs of the firm. However remember the four legs on the KM table - People, Process, Technology and Governance? An operational focus may emphasise process over People and technology. You will need to interface closely with HR and IT.

Reporting to IT is possible, but you have to take EXTREME care that KM does not become seen as a technology exercise, and that people, process and governance are equally well developed. You will need to interface closely with HR and Operations.

Reporting to HR or L&D is possible, but you have to take EXTREME care that KM does not become seen as a people issue, or another branch of training. Make sure that the technology, process and governance sides receive equal attention. You will need to interface closely with IT and Operations.

KM can report almost anywhere, depending on operational need. However make sure that no matter where it reports, equal attention is paid to the four main enablers of KM, to ensure a complete and balanced approach.

The most important skill on your KM team

There are many skills needed on your KM team, but one is more important than any of the others.

I have been involved in a few overview visits to Knowledge Management programs recently, and a common factor in all of them has been a missing skill within the Knowledge Management teams themselves.

One team, reporting to the HR function, was staffed with people with HR backgrounds, and as a result was focusing on KM as it relates to succession planning and staff development. Another, reporting to the research department, was staffed by researchers and analysts. All were understaffed, and all lacked members with an operational background.

It is those operational skills that are most important in a KM team.

There is point in having all the HR skills, all the IT skills or all the IM or facilitation or change management skills, if you cannot translate your Knowledge Management message into the operational context of the organisation, and if you have no credibility with the operational staff.  Our 2014 survey of Knowledge Management showed "Operational Skills" as the highest ranked KM team skill (see the graph above).

Therefore

• a KM team in a legal firm needs to contain lawyers
• a KM team in an automotive manufacturer needs to contain engineers
• a KM team in a financial institution needs to contain financiers and economists
• a KM team in an Oil Company needs to contain drillers and geologists
• and so on

The role of these staff on the team is to ensure that the realities of day to day work are brought into the Knowledge Management program, that the language of KM is translated into the language of operations, and that the Knowledge Management Framework will ultimately add value to the knowledge workers.

That's why Operational skills and experience is the most important skillset for your Knowledge Management team

Who do you need on the KM team?

Here are 4 key skill areas you must not ignore when putting together your Knowledge Management implementation team.

Image from wikimedia commons

You know the four enablers of People, Process, Technology and Governance? What we call the four legs on the KM table?

These four areas should be reflected in the people and skills you choose to drive Knowledge Management implementation.

KM covers the area of overlap between IT, HR (or Learning and Development), Organizational Process and Management, and so the KM implementation team needs a blend of people who can cover these areas. So we need the following skills on the KM implementation team

People Skills
If the aim of the KM team is to introduce new behaviours and practices to the organisation, they will need people skilled in training, coaching and mentoring. Look for people with skills as change agents and business coaches. One or more people with a training background should be on the task force.

The knowledge management implementation task force has a hard job ahead of them, changing the culture of the organisation. They will be working very closely with people, often sceptical people, and they need very good influencing and facilitation skills. Secure facilitation training for the task force members.

The early stages of implementing knowledge management are all about raising awareness, and "selling" the idea. The KM team needs at least one person who is skilled at presenting, communicating and marketing. This person will also be kept busy raising the profile of the company's KM and Best Practice activities at external conferences.

Process skills
The team need experience and skills in the operational processes of the business.  The KM team should contain people with good and credible backgrounds and skills in each major organisational subdivision. This is really to establish as much credibility as possible. When members of the task force are working with business projects, they want to be seen as "part of the business", not "specialists from head office who know nothing about this sector of the business". They have to be able to "talk the language" of the business - they need to be able to communicate in technical language and business language. They act as Best Practice champions within their area of business, and when the working task force is over, may take a leading Knowledge Management role in their subsidiary.

Technology skills.
The KM team needs at least one person who has strengths in the details of the current in-house technology, understands the potential of new technology as an enabler for knowledge management, and can help define the most appropriate technologies to introduce to the organisation.

Governance skills.
Finally the Km team needs a person who can look at KM from a high level - who can understand how it fits into the governance systems of the organisation, and twho can work at a high level to introduce the policy changes and the governance systems that are vital to the long term survival of KM. This person can be the KM team leder, or even the executive sponsor.

If the KM Table has 4 legs, then make sure there are people on the team with enough skills to look after each leg, to  make sure your final framework is sturdy and sound.

The two factors that control KM team size

Here is another interesting result from our Knowledge Management survey, on the two factors that seem to control the size of KM teams. 

I say "seem to" as correlation does not imply causation.

The graph here combines results from three questions:

• How big is your KM team
• How big is you organization
• How mature is your KM initiative

It seeks to test whether KM team size grows or shrinks as implementation progresses.

The graph shows, with a remarkable level of consistency, that KM team size is linked both with organization size and with KM maturity. 

I expected to see the first correlation, as it is intuitively obvious that the larger the organization, the larger the size of the KM team.  I did not expect to see the second correlation. 

Intuitively I expected that a KM team would be biggest during the implementation phase, but would slim down once KM was embedded.  This is not what the data show.  Instead the KM team s are largest where KM is fully embedded. 

There are two ways to interpret these results

1) KM team size should be expected to grow as KM implementation progresses, or
2) it is only those organizations with well-resourced KM teams that reach the point of fully embedded KM.

Contact Knoco for advice on selecting and building your KM team

Suitable KPIs for your KM team

How do you measure the performance of a Knowledge Management team? What sort of KPIs would you assign to them?

Faster Than, by Tsahi Levent-Levi on Flickr

The answer to this question depends on the stage that KM implementation has reached. I suggest some KPIs below, depending on the different stages your implementation has reached.

During the strategy phase

KPIs are difficult during the strategy phase, as the KM team have not yet delivered anything - they are still planning. At this stage there is probably only one objective; "Deliver a well-researched Knowledge Management strategy and implementation plan that has the support of the key business stakeholders". This will be easier to accomplish if your key business stakeholders are acting as a steering team for the KM program. The KPI will be the level of support for the strategy.

During the piloting phase

 Part of the purpose of the Knowledge Management pilots is to deliver tangible business value through operation of KM within the pilot areas, with a secondary purpose of refining the Knowledge Management Framework prior to roll-out. The primary objective during the piloting stage is therefore the amount of value delivered.

This was the primary KPI for the BP KM team during piloting in 1998, when we were charged with delivering $100m of value to the organisation through KM pilots.  The secondary KPI for the KM team at this stage should be the number of elements of the Knowledge Management Framework which have been tested in action within the business, with improvements made as required. The target should be 100%.

During KM roll-out and transformation

During the roll-out phase, purpose of the KM team is to spread the KM transformation across the entire organisation, while continuing to add business value. The team therefore has three primary KPIs,

• The percentage of the organisation which has reached a defined KM level, 
• Activity metrics such as number and value of lessons, maturity of CoPs, and
• The value added by KM to the business.

You can also add activity metrics such as the number of training courses run, the number of communities launched and so on.

During KM operation

After the roll-out and transformation phase, Knowledge Management becomes part of normal business, defined by a set of expectations within a Knowledge Management policy. At this stage, the role of the KM team is to support the business in compliance with the policy, and hence deliver value to the business.  Suitable KPIs for the KM team would be the following;

• The level of business compliance with the expectations in the KM policy
• Support activity metrics (such as training courses run, KM roles 
• Addition activity metrics such as number and value of lessons, percentage of embedded lessons, completeness currency of knowledge bases,  maturity of CoPs, etc
• The value added by KM to the business

The 5 core skillsets for a KM team

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Our Knowledge Management Survey continues to throw up fascinating data. It seems that, if we look at Knowledge Management programs world-wide, there are 5 core skillsets people look for in a KM team, although the emphasis varies from one sector to another. 

We provided respondents with seven options for skillsets, and asked them to prioritise them in terms of importance to their Knowledge Management team. The average priority for each skill is shown in the table below, with large numbers being High Priority (marks out of 7), and the frequency in which each was chosen as Highest Priority is shown in the picture above.

From the table, we see that 5 of the 7 skills have almost exactly the average weighting, and statistically we can see these as "equally important". The other two are much lower.

The same 5 are all popular "first choice" skills, with  "Organisation and Industry skills" and "IM and library skills" being the most popular.

These are the average figures. When we look at individual industries, we see some systematic differences, although all 5 skills are well represented in each indutry.

• Industry skills are strongly favoured by Legal firms (where most KM teams are made up of lawyers and paralegals) with IM/Library skills being a close second, also by the Military
• IM/library skills are favoured by Professional services firms, with Change Management skills a very close second
• Facilitation skills are slightly favoured by Oil and Gas, and by Manufacturing
• Change Management skills are favoured by Construction and Engineering, and by the government sector. 
• IT skills are favoured by Telecoms companies

Based on the data from the survey, I think we can look at these 5 skills as being the core skillsets needed within any KM team (tweet this)
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Great KM strategy, shame about the KM team

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One of the most frustrating situations you can face as a consultant, is working with an internal KM team that does not have the capacity to deliver. You want to help them, you want them to succeed, they are focused on the right things, but they are just the wrong people.

Gumbies by Andy Wright on Flickr

So who are the right people? I am talking here primarily about the team that implements Knowledge Management - that introduces the framework of roles, technologies, processes and governance, and that leads the change to a new way of working.

The team leader, first and foremost, needs to be a change agent. They need to be a visionary leader, capable of working at the highest levels in the organisation as well as the lowest. They need to be an organisational insider; this is a role that cannot be outsourced, as they need to "speak the language", know the politics, and have the credibility. They need to know enough about KM to translate it into business and customer terminology, but able to back it up with sound KM theory.

The skills of the KM team need to be varied. KM covers the area of overlap between IT, HR (or Learning and Development) and Organizational Practice, and so the team needs a blend of people who can cover these areas. Some of the following skills should be on the team.

Facilitation/influencing skills. The knowledge management implementation team has a hard job ahead of them, changing the culture of the organisation, and the soft skills are absolutely core. They will be working very closely with people, often sceptical people, and they need very good influencing and facilitation skills. Secure facilitation training for the team members as soon as you can.

Coaching and training skills. If the aim of the team is to introduce new behaviours and practices to the organisation, they will need people skilled in training, coaching and mentoring. Look for people with skills as change agents and business coaches. One or more people with a training background should be on the team.

Writing skills. The processes of knowledge capture and packaging are in some ways very akin to journalism. Interviewing, group interviewing (e.g. Retrospects), analysis, summary, write-up, presentation, are all part of the stock-in-trade of journalists. Make sure there is at least one person on the team with journalistic or writing skills, and preferably more than one.

Marketing and communication skills. The early stages of implementing knowledge management are all about raising awareness, and "selling" the idea. The team needs at least one person who is skilled at presenting and marketing. This person will also be kept busy raising the profile of the company's KM and Best Practice activities at external conferences.

Technology skills. The team needs at least one person who is aware of the details of the current in-house technology, the potential of technology as an enabler for knowledge management, and who can help define the most appropriate technologies to introduce to the organisation.

This is what John Keeble, the CKO of Enterprise Oil, said about the make-up of a KM team

"If you look at the team more widely, rather than just the person leading it, far and away the most important things are the interpersonal skills, and we have said whoever we are recruiting anyone for the team, that's the most important thing. We can teach them the knowledge management skills, they bring their own network with them, but they have got to have the interpersonal skills, because so much of this is about persuasion. You cannot coerce people into sharing their knowledge, you have to be able to entice and cajole and persuade them to do it"

The organizational backgrounds of the core team need to be varied. The team will be attempting to change behaviour, and embed knowledge management into the business process, across a large part of the organisation (or indeed the whole organisation). Ideally the team should contain people with good and credible backgrounds in each major organisational subdivision. This is really to establish as much credibility as possible. When members of the team are working with business projects, they want to be seen as "part of the business", not "specialists from head office who know nothing about this sector of the business". They have to be able to "talk the language" of the business - they need to be able to communicate in technical language and business language. They act as Best Practice champions within their area of business, and when the working team is over, may take a leading Knowledge Management role in their subsidiary.

The members of the team will also need to be passionate about the topic. The team members must be seen to be personally committed to best practice and knowledge management if they are to retain credibility. They need training in the skills and theories of Knowledge Management and Best Practice transfer, and need access to books, conferences and forums on the topic They must be enthusiastic about applying knowledge management tools and techniques in their own business, and to their own work, in service of improving their own performance.

Finding such people is not easy, but changing the culture of an organisation is not easy either. With the wrong people on the team, you don't get the right result, even with the best consultants in the world to support you.

However with the right team, the right leader, and the right approach, absolutely anything can be done, and Knowledge Management implementation will be assured.

7 key components of the KM team role once implementation is complete

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Implementing Knowledge Management is a long project of culture change, and the introduction of a new management framework (roles, processes, technologies, governance).  The Knowledge Management team's initial role is to design and introduce the framework, delivering the required changes in behaviour and culture.

Once that job is done, what role does the KM team have?

Some people say that once this job is done and Knowledge Management is fully embedded into the business, you can disband the team, but that isn't the case.

Once Safety Management is embedded do you disband the Safety team? Once Quality Management is embedded, do you disband the Quality team? No; you retain them, because they still have a key role to play and without them playing that role, Quality performance or Safety performance would revert to pre-change levels. The same would happen to KM.

Here are the 7 key elements of that continuing role.

1) They need to support usage of the framework. This includes training people in its use, coaching the KM professionals, running the KM CoP, launching other CoPs, building the knowledge asset about Knowledge Management.

2) They need to monitor and report on the application of the framework. This includes checking compliance with the KM policy and expectations, measuring the application of lesson learning, tracking value added through communities , auditing the management level of key knowledge assets, measuring the maturity of key CoPs, collecting results of any KM Dashboards or scorecards. Then reporting all this to senior management.

3) They need to coordinate any KM performance management. This includes running annual awards schemes, for example, or finding other ways to recognise the star performers.

4) They need to continuously improve the KM framework. This may include improving the company KM policy, it may include bringing in, or improving the existing, technology, and it may include adapting the processes and roles.

5) They may take on specialist roles themselves, such as lessons management, or major lessons capture, development of KM plans for major projects, and big Retention exercises.

6) Indeed, if your Knowledge Management strategy is a Retention strategy, the KM team may run the Retention process (planning, prioritising, interviewing etc).

7) The KM team will act as client for any outsourced KM services.

Rare stats on KM team size, budget, reporting

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Here are some very interesting graphs, from a 2000 study by the Conference Board . The survey says that it

"describes the current (year 2000) state of knowledge management and organizational learning from the perspective of senior line and staff executives. Two hundred senior executives at 158 global companies responded; their companies have an average of 40,000 employees, with 90 percent reporting revenues over $1 billion and 68 percent with revenues over $5 billion. Their headquarters are based in North America (85 percent), Europe (13 percent), and Asia Pacific (2 percent)".

So the study is old, and primarily from American-based large multi-national companies. However there are some statistic here which are quite interesting, given than hard data on KM programs is very rare.

Firstly, there are KM budget figures. Half of the surveyed companies had no KM programs and no KM budgets. For the others, the modal annual budget is in the $100,000s, the median in the $0.5 million range, and the mean at about $1.9 million. If we assume a mean company size of 40,000 staff, that's an average investment dedicated to KM in the order of $40 to $50 per employee per year (this is a very rough figure).

It would also be very interesting to revisit this set of companies and see if there was any correlation between budget and long term KM success!

The second interesting graph concerns the size of the full time KM resource within the organisation.
My blog post on KM team size suggests one full time KM team member for each 5000 staff, so if the surveyed companies have an average size of 40000 staff, this should equate to an average team size of 8, assuming that the KM team is a culture chance and implementation team (an order of magnitude greater if the KM team does the KM work instead of the business). The graph to the right however must be counting staff throughout the organisation with a KM accountability, including full time CoP leaders, librarians, IT support, lessons learned teams, and so on. To be honest, this graph is far from helpful ("KM needs full time support between 1 and more than 200 people" - thanks a bunch!)


The final plot shows where the Chief Knowledge Officer reports to. It should be compared and contrasted with the graph in my blog post on KM reporting.

In this survey, 32% of CKOs were members of senior management (compared to 6% in my survey), with the next biggest tranches reporting to IT and then HR (in my survey, the most common reporting lines were to the operational units, then IT and then HR).

We have to be careful not to compare apples with oranges - the Conference Board was primarily surveying large American multinationals, while my survey was based on Linked-In volunteers, many of whom were KM enthusiasts from small organisations. That may be enough to explain the difference between high-level CKOs commanding large teams and big budgets, and lower level CKOs commanding smaller teams and (I suspect) smaller budgets.

However - some rare statistics for you!

The role of the Chief

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A recent discussion in Linked-In suggested that the role of the Chief Knowledge Officer is poorly defined, and very difficult.

That made me think.   Certainly the role is very difficult, but I would not say it is poorly defined.

We see the role as evolving over time. To begin with, the CKO is in charge of Knowledge Management implementation. Then, once implementation is over, the CKO is in charge of the effective operation of the Knowledge Management Framework. Roles and accountabilities in these two phases are as follows;

The role of the CKO during implementation of the KM Framework is as follows;

• To design and deliver a working KM framework within the business, that delivers business value and is seen by customers as effective business practice.
• To act as project manager for the framework implementation project. 
• To represent Knowledge Management at the senior level of management

The Accountabilities of the CKO during implementation of the KM Framework are as follows;

·         Develop, together with the leadership of the organization, the objectives and deliverables of the Knowledge Management implementation program.

·         Deliver the implementation project objectives, within the agreed time frame and to the agreed cost and standard.

·         Ensure that the KM framework operates effectively and efficiently

·         Ensure that the KM framework delivers business value

·         Act as champion for the corporate vision for KM

The Role of the CKO during operation of the KM Framework is as follows

·         Sustain the corporate vision for Knowledge Management.

·         Act as champion for the Knowledge Management framework within the organisation

·         To provide assurance to senior management that Knowledge Management continues to be applied effectively and for business gain.

·         To project management any enhancements to the KM Framework

The Accountabilities of the CKO during operation of the KM Framework are as follows

·         Develop, together with the leadership of the organization, the performance indicators for Knowledge Management within the organization.

·         Report performance against these indicators and ensure target performance is achieved.

·         Agree any required improvements to the framework, and act as project manager for the improvement projects.

·         Represent the company externally in the field of Knowledge Management.

The required competencies for the CKO are as follows

·         A respected senior member of the organization

·         A history of delivering organizational change

·         Charismatic and engaging

·         Confident and effective communicator

·         Excellent leadership skills

·         Not afraid to take risks

·         Diplomacy

·         An appreciation of the technology and the human/cultural issues involved in KM

·         An excellent grasp of the organizational structure, vision and strategy and understanding of the business deliverables

·         An extensive network within the company