4 ways to ensure good KM in your outsource partners

Many organisations outsource large chunks of their work to partners, who can deliver that work more efficiently. But how do you make sure those partners are managing their knowledge?

Creative Commons image from nyphotographic.com

Outsourcing work generally means outsourcing the knowledge about that work as well. 

Say you have an outsource partner managing your customer support, for example, or your tax preparation, or your website design. You want them not only to provide a good service, but to manage their knowledge about service provision, so that they continuously improve.  You need them to have good knowledge of customer support, tax preparation and website design, and to keep that knowledge fresh and well managed.

You have outsourced the knowledge as well as the task, and need to ensure the knowledge is managed on your behalf.

Here are 3 ways you can acheive this.

1. Put KM in the contract.

I recently saw a government contract which contained the following clauses:

"the contractor shall employ knowledge management systems and processes to promulgate knowledge and experience resulting from the service to the user community"  

 "The contractor shall provide the following ... A knowledge management system to promulgate lessons learned, good practice and to facilitate improved maintenance and operation"

These are good clauses - they say quite clearly what is expected from the outsource contractor in terms of KM.

If you are outsourcing knowledge as well as work, then use clauses like this to let the partner know in advance that they need to manage that knowledge on your behalf.

2. Align your Knowledge Management frameworks.

Ideally the partners KM framework and yours will be aligned and integrated. Take the example of outsourced customer support - you need to be receiving lessons and insights from the customer support area to improve your products and services, and you need to be passing knowledge to customer support concerning new products and services. Any communities of practice related to specific products or services may need to include staff both from your own organisation and from the outsource partner. Your taxonomy, and the partner taxonomy, should align in critical areas.

Again this is something you need to set up from the start.

3. Require a single point of contact for KM matters

Ask the partner organisation to assign a person to work with you on KM matters, and to be accountable for the KM performance of the outsource partner in relation to the outsource service. You need someone you can talk with, work with, negotiate with, who can fix any KM related problems for you and reassure you that the knowledge is being well managed for you.

4. Ask the partner to comply to a KM standard.

We don't yet have an ISO KM standard, although one is in preparation. Once this is published (possibly in 2017, more likely in 2018) then you will be able to require your outsource partner to comply with this standard. This will ensure they have a sound KM approach which will make sure they manage the knowledge well on your behalf. 

When you outsource knowledge, outsource the management too (cautionary tale).

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A couple of years ago I was running a multi-day lessons capture event with a company that had recently commissioned construction of a large production plant.

 Here's a story that the client project manager told at the event.

"This plant was based on a similar plant built by the same contractor, and on that previous plant they had made a big construction error - in one of the emergency release lines, they had put a non-return valve in backwards. Had there been an emergency, this could have been a disaster. We spotted the error, fixed the valve, and we discussed it, together with other lessons, with the contractor at the end-of-project lessons capture session.  

So this time, when I was walking the lines, I thought 'shall I bother to check that valve? Surely they would not have put it in the wrong way round again? But I thought - better safe than sorry - and blow me down, it was the wrong way round again!"

Disaster averted for a second time, but what's the moral of the story?

The moral is that when we outsource work (to a contractor, or to an outsource provider) we are also outsourcing the knowledge of how to do the work. We  expect the contractor or the provider to bring the knowledge needed to deliver the work properly.

And when we outsource the knowledge, we outsource the management of the knowledge as well. We expect the contractor or provider to learn - to constantly improve their knowledge - to never repeat mistakes.

So what went wrong on this case? Who was to fault?

Obviously the contractor was at fault; they should have had a proper KM system in place, with closed-loop lesson-learning, which eliminated repeat mistakes. And there is nothing worse for a contractor than having a client with a better KM system than you - who knows your repeat mistakes before you do!

However the client was equally at fault. They assumed that "Surely they would not have put it in the wrong way round again? Surely they would have learned?".

But this was an assumption. There was nothing in the contract that stipulated a KM system, and no audit of the contractors learning ability. The client just assumed, and we all know what Assume makes!

The moral of this tale is that if you outsource major work, you also outsource the knowledge needed to do the work, and you need to outsource the management of that knowledge as well. Therefore make sure that your contractor has a top-notch, independently audited and verified, KM and learning system, with the sort of closed-loop learning that eliminates repeat mistakes.

And then make sure this "effective KM" is stipulated in the contract.

And its still worth walking the lines and checking as well - just in case!

How much Knowledge Management can you outsource?

You have a successful Knowledge Management program under way. All is going well, but you are under increasing pressure with requests from the business, and you don't have enough resources to respond to the demand.

You think "I must be able to outsource some of this work". But how much can you safely outsource, and what are the elements you need to keep in-house?

Read on, and find out!

You can’t outsource ownership of the knowledge management strategy. Although it a very good idea to get an  experienced Knowledge Management consulting company to help you to draft a strategy, the strategy needs to be owned and delivered from within your own company.

You can’t outsource delivery of knowledge management implementation. Although it is a very good idea to get a good experienced Knowledge Management consulting company to help you with implementation, the implementation project needs to be led and delivered from within the company.

You can’t outsource leadership of the communities of practice. The CoPs own your critical organisational knowledge, and this needs to be owned internally.

You can’t outsource knowledge ownership. The practice owners, the knowledge stewards, the subject matter experts, all need to come from within the company. If you start outsourcing knowledge ownership, then you have really outsourced that particular capability. And that’s fine; companies outsource things like financial management or catering, but you are outsourcing the entire capability and not just management for knowledge capability.

You can’t outsource the ownership of content. The content owners need to come from within the organization, although you can bring in an experienced KM consultancy to help create some of the content in the first place.

You can’t outsource the application of the knowledge. Applying knowledge is done by your teams, your departments and your individuals.



You can outsource knowledge capture services, such as the capture of lessons learned from projects. This is an intermittent activity, and can sometimes be a high volume activity and sometimes not very much is going on, which makes it hard to resource internally. Knowledge capture requires specific skills, and you may not have a readily available pool of people with those skills in your organisation. This is an ideal service to outsource, and knowledge capture is a service we already provide to many clients.

You can outsource knowledge retention services, such as retention interviewing and the creation of knowledge assets from retiring staff. Like the example above, this is a specialized task requiring specialised skills, but one which is intermittent. Many companies outsource this service - Shell outsourced much of their ROCK interviewing for example. If you have a sudden workload of retention work, then look to outsource the service.

You can outsource the facilitation of knowledge management processes, such as peer assist, knowledge exchange, or community of practice launch.

You can outsource the administration of the online library or the online knowledge base. Shell, for example, outsource much of the administration work related to their Wikis, such as building cross-links between articles.

You can outsource lessons management, and the administration of your lesson management system. You can bring in people to do the day to day work of quality control of lessons, tracking lessons and actions, following up on actions, and gathering and reporting metrics; also the work of lessons analysis.

You can outsource audit of your knowledge management framework and application. You can bring in an external objective company on a regular basis to check the health of your knowledge management program, and to audit the degree of management of your knowledge assets.

You can outsource provision and maintenance of some of your knowledge management technologies. Technologies such as lessons management systems for collaboration tools can be provided from the client, rather than having to be hosted and maintained from within the organization.

So there are many things you need to do yourself, in-house, but there are a number of specialist services where it makes sense to set up a call-off contract, so you can respond to requests by pulling on a pool of external specialist resource.