11 things that 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

The role of KM Champion within a business unit or department can be an important one. The KM Champion acts to promote and support the application of KM in their part of the business, and works at the intersection of normal business and KM. To do this role well, there are 11 things you need to understand.

1. Understand the value proposition for KM. 

You need to understand how KM will support your part of the organisation, and have a good idea of the outcomes needed from KM, if this support is to be recognised. 

2. 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

3. 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.

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

5. 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?

6. 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.

7. 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. 

8. 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.

9. 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.

10 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.

11. 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.

If you understand all of these, it will help your role considerably. 

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. 

What should the KM executive sponsor do?

Someone senior has asked you to introduce Knowledge Management and is providing you with some time and budget for this. What should you ask them to do for you in return?

Most or all KM initiatives have an executive sponsor (there are some that do not have one, the so-called Guerrilla KM or stealth KM, but these generally have the aim of gaining a sponsor). What do you need that sponsor to do for you?

The role of the Executive Sponsor is as follows;

• To act as customer for the KM implementation program, defining the needs and success criteria for implementation, 
• To act as customer for effective operation of the KM Framework, defining the required outcome and KPIs,
• To convene and chair the KM steering group,
• To aid in removing corporate barriers to effective KM, 
• To endorse and communicate the vision for KM within the organisation,
• To agree and endorse the KM policy,
• To set corporate expectations for adherence to the policy, 
• To ensure appropriate resources for KM within the organisation,
• To agree the reporting structure for KM metrics and to receive an appropriate level of reporting, and 
• To appoint, resource and manage a Chief Knowledge Officer or Head of KM plus their implementation team.

Why roles are important in Knowledge Management

 Knowledge Management roles and accountabilities are one of the four legs on the KM table, but receive comparatively little attention. They seem to be a bit of a "blind spot". 

In our consulting work, we find that Knowledge Management roles often do not get the same level of attention as other KM components. Both our assessment and benchmarking services and our free online surveys show KM roles to be one of the weakest elements.  Google finds five times as many hits for "knowledge management processes" than it does for "knowledge management roles". And I have had many conversations recently which made me think that roles are just not perceived as important.

For example, the KM consultant who said "I just include roles as part of processes. They are just about the people who are needed to do a process". Another example was the consultant who explained that the "people" aspect of his people/tools/content triumvirate referred to behaviours and culture, with nothing related to roles at all.

However accountable roles are required in any management system.

No financial management system would survive without accountable roles such as budget holders, financial clerks and chief financial officers. No safety management system would survive without HSE staff. No HR system would survive without accountable roles for hiring and for staff management. 

Knowledge management is the same; roles and accountabilities are needed. Most organisations will need to assign some of the roles and accountabilities below.

• Chief Knowledge Officer/Head of KM
• KM team members
• Community of practice leaders 
• Community of practice facilitators
• Knowledge Management Champions 
• KM officer
• Knowledge engineers
• Knowledge analysts
• Knowledge Management lawyers
• Knowledge Managers for departments or divisions 
• Knowledge managers for specific projects
• Lessons learned integrator 
• "Owners" for a specific knowledge topics 
• Content management support 
• KM Technology support
• Knowledge Base administrators
• Content authors

Obviously not all of these roles are needed - each organisation will have a selection, based on their business and on the details of their KM framework. The graph below, taken from our KM surveys, shows the relative usage of some of the main roles, and how this changes with KM maturity (the green bars being the answers from the organisations where KM is fully embedded. 

As I explain in this blog post, some of these are full-time roles in the KM team, some are roles are accountabilities for people within the business (for example the accountability given to an SME for maintaining the body of knowledge related to their subject matter), and some are specific knowledge roles (such as a KM champion in a business unit, or a knowledge manager on a project).

Without such roles and accountabilities, KM becomes "everyones job" which is the same as becoming "nobody's job".  I shared a taxi in Kuwait once with Jeff Stemke, who used to be head of KM at Chevron, and he told me "the most important thing we did (at Chevron) was to make people accountable for knowledge".

So as you plan your KM implementation, think not just about the technology suite, the process suite and the elements of governance; think also about the structure of roles and accountabilities you will need to introduce, and plan your Knowledge Management organisational structure.

KM accountabilities for the knowledge domain owners and SMEs

 I blogged earlier this week about the KM accountabilities for project managers. Here is the counterpart - the KM accountability for the knowledge domain owners.

There are two dimensions to KM within a project based organisation. These are

• KM within individual projects, and
• KM across and between the projects.

Any project based organisation needs to consider both dimensions, and to make sure the correct roles and accountabilities are in place in both.  The KM accountabilities for the project and programme managers has already been covered, and the other accountability - the one that applies across projects - is usually held by the functional organisation and the subject matter experts.

The functional chiefs (chief engineer, head of sales, marketing director etc) already are accountable for developing a competent organisation. The chief engineer makes sure there are enough engineers, with the correct training and skills. And of course competence implies access to knowledge, therefore the functional chiefs have an accountability to ensure that the knowledge relating to their function is well managed. Functional chiefs on some organisations are supported by centres of excellence, and the chiefs may delegate some of the KM activity to these centres.

The functional chiefs will usually delegate KM accountability on specific topics to subject matter experts or knowledge domain owners, while retaining overall accountability for KM in the knowledge domain. The KM accountabilities for these domain experts/SMEs is as follows:

• To ensure there is a sufficient body of documented knowledge in their domain or area of expertise to support the practitioners in their work. They may delegate specific areas of content to others, but retain overall accountability for completeness, accuracy, currency, findability and usability of the knowledge.
• Receive and validate new lessons and new best practices within the practice area, and ensure the body of knowledge is updated as a result (knowledge synthesis) 
• Publicizing and broadcasting updated practice documentation. 
• Publicizing and broadcasting any other new developments within the practice domain (for example on a CoP blog) 
• Develop, and agree with management, any company corporate standards for their specific practice area.
• Monitoring use of the body of documented knowledge, and continually improving its application and effectiveness.

Where the organisation is large enough to support communities of practice, the SMEs or knowledge domain owners may be given additional accountabilities, as follows:

• Ensure a CoP relevant to their knowledge domain is launched, built and sustained. This includes 
  • defining the goals and objectives of the CoP, 
  • negotiating and acquiring any required CoP resources, 
  • ensuring effective discussion among the CoP members, 
  • ensuring results from discussions are included in the body of documented knowledge
• Define and measure the CoP’s benefits and progress, and report this on an agreed timeframe
• Seek out, format, report and promote success examples within their domain
  

CKOs (or KM team leaders) are generally appointed from within the organisation. here's why

It is becoming increasingly common to appoint your CKO internally, from within the organisation.

A common question when implementing Knowledge Management  - should your KM team leader, or CKO, be an internal appointment, or should you look externally to fill the role? I posted on this topic in 2019, but include some additional survey detail here. 

There are advantages and disadvantages to both options, as I explain below, but the majority of organisations appoint their CKO internally. As the pie chart shows, 83% of organisations in our three KM surveys (2014, 2017, 2020) appoint the leader of their KM program internally, as opposed to 12% who appoint externally. The remaining 5% have no such role.

Not only this, but the trend of appointing internally seems to be increasing. In the 2014 survey the percentage of internal appointments (the red sector in the bar chart) was 79%. In the 2020 survey this was 86%.

The advantages and disadvantages of the options are listed below (this text is copied from my 2019 post)

Internal appointment

As we have often said, Knowledge Management is a simple idea, but very difficult to do in practice.
The idea - that people should share knowledge with each other and learn from each other - is not a complicated idea. The complicated thing is getting it to actually happen. Implementing KM is primarily about culture change, and culture change is both difficult and highly politically charged.

The primary value in having an internal appointment (and not just an internal appointment, but an internal change agent), is that they know the politics. They know how to get things done in the organisation; they know how to drive change. And that, as we know, is the difficult part of KM implementation.

The internal appointment has existing networks they can use, they know the business priorities, and the way the organisation works.  They should have credibility within the organisation. They may also know the real reasons why previous KM attempts failed.

The disadvantage is that they might not know much about KM, and will need external mentoring and coaching in the details of KM and its implementation.  There also might be a relatively small pool of change agents available within the organisation. And in addition, if the organisation has already tried KM with little success, an internal appointment may be too linked to, and influenced by, the approaches of the past.

There may feel like a lack of urgency if the appointment is internal, and the internal appointee may already have rivals at the firm, and if priorities shift, they can also find themselves transferred out of the role as quickly as they were transferred in.

External appointment

It will be easier to find an external person with a history of KM success in other organisations, and very often a new appointee, with a clear view on KM and a wealth of experience of what "good KM looks like," can be a breath of fresh air. It may be difficult to find such strong and passionate change agents within the organisation.

They will have experience in KM, a repertoire of interventions, and some good success stories to share.  An external appointment might be on a fixed term contract of a few years, which gives KM an urgency, a project-like structure and a clear cost-benefit equation.

The disadvantage is that the zeal with which an external appointee will bring to KM may be met in equal measure by internal resistance. Organisation often reject "foreign bodies", and the best change always comes from within. The external appointee will not know the "language" of the firm, or the key players, or the unwritten rules and assumptions. They will need strong support from the CEO, and to surround themselves with mentors and coaches with decades of tenure at the organisation, to help steer the CKO through the political maze.

There may be a higher threshold to get started for an external appointee, and if they are on a fixed contract, they will still need to find an internal person to whom to transfer the accountability for KM when the contract ends, otherwise KM may wither and die at that point.

Our recommendation is as follows:

If you can find a good, experienced change agent within the firm who "gets" the vision and the opportunity KM can bring, then give them the CKO role, supported by coaching and mentoring from external experts. Their knowledge of how to change the organisation is more important that their lack of knowledge of KM.

If you cannot find such a person, or if KM exists but needs a shake-up, then look to hire someone external, and give them a wise "chief of staff" who knows the organisation inside out and can help navigate the politics associated with change. And if you are hiring your CKO externally, follow this piece of advice from a Knowledge Manager I interviewed:

If I was recruiting somebody external and I had an interview and I asked "do you think you were successful (in your last KM implementation)" and they said "yes we were absolutely successful" I would instantly be suspicious, because knowledge management is not straightforward. I want practical evidence that it was painful. I want to see the blood and the guts".

Internal appointment is far more common, and has big advantages, but ensure you get strong external mentorship from KM consultants with proven KM implementation experience.

 

KM accountabilities within projects and programmes.

 In a project based organisation, project managers bear much of the accountability for KM within the projects. 

There are two dimensions to KM within a project based organisation. These are

• KM within individual projects, and
• KM across and between the projects.

Any project based organisation needs to consider both dimensions, and to make sure the correct roles and accountabilities are in place in both. Below is something I recently found in my files which I think is a nice description of the KM accountabilities in the domain of projects and programmes.

The project/programme manager carries single point accountability for KM activity at project/programme level. This includes accountability for:

• Identifying knowledge deliverables for the project/programme consistent with those required by the organisation;
• Ensuring that required knowledge deliverables are created and shared appropriately;
• Ensuring the team(s) seek and re-use existing organisational knowledge wherever appropriate, and 
• Ensuring that appropriate KM processes and systems are in place for the project to manages its own tacit and explicit knowledge though the life of the project; 
• Ensuring that required KM activities are included in the project/programme plan and resources assigned accordingly; and 
• Monitoring to ensure the required KM activity is taking place.  

A programme manager can, if required, delegate accountability for KM within component projects to the relevant project managers, while still retaining accountability at programme level. 

A project manager can, if required, delegate accountability for KM within component sub-projects or workstreams to the relevant sub-project or workstream managers, while still retaining accountability at project level. 

Responsibility for specific KM activities can be delegated within the project team as needed.

In larger projects the project manager can consider assigning KM coordination duties to a named individual e.g the project controller, project risk manager, project quality manager or project services manager.

Project/programme performance against KM requirements will be assessed at stage gates as part of the project/programme review process.

Use of a project/programme knowledge management plan may be considered, to aid monitoring and clarify KM responsibilities and activities at project/programme level. 

 

 

 

The organisation after the KM makeover

What does an organisation look like, when it is fully engaged with Knowledge Management? What will the After shot of the KM make-over look like?

House Makeover, from wikimedia commons

Introducing KM is an organisational makeover. The "After" shot will not resemble the "Before" shot.

If KM is to be embedded into an organisation, it needs to be embedded into the organisational structure.  The KM organisation is not just a case of

1. The KM team
2. Everyone else

If KM is to be embedded in the business, then it needs to be part of the organigram. KM roles and accountabilities will be needed. These are probably not new hires or additional staff, they are people taking roles related to knowledge. In some cases they may even have played these roles before, but in their spare time, or without support, or without knowledge of what the role entailed.

Let's look at some examples of the "After" picture of the organigram.

For example, at Tata Steel (widely recognised as one of the leading KM companies in the world), the KM team supports a KM organisation of

• 500 SMEs identified by the communities who validate the accuracy and reliability of all the good practices being submitted;
• 25 champions for the various communities;
• 250 practice leaders, who lead the sub-communities;
• 250 conveners who help manage the communities and sub-communities;
• 200 experts who help others over the discussion databases to resolve problems;
• 50 KM coordinators; and,
• 1000+ part-time evangelists. (Figures from 2009)

Or think about the US Army, with

• A full-time Centre for Army Lessons Learned
• An owner for every Doctrine
• Lessons Learned Integrators in every battalion, as well as the training centres
• Combined Arms centre staff who run the Battle Command Knowledge Centre
• Facilitators and core teams for the Communities such as companycommand.mil, platoonleader.mil etc
• Hundreds of trained AAR leaders
• etc

Or Wipro, with

• Full time functional team of 32 in Wipro Technologies (45 in consolidated Global IT Business).
• More than 400 part time KM Primes/Champions across various groups - typically committing 10-15% of their time to KM activities for the group.
• Full time team of 15-20 to support and enhance the IS platform for KM.

For an extreme example, see McKinsey Knowledge Professionals and Knowledge Centres. McKinsey has a very large number of knowledge professionals, because they realise their entire business is about knowledge. Other organisations will have a smaller percentage of its organisation with an accountability for knowledge, but that percentage cannot be zero. 

So one question every organisation needs to think about, when implementing KM, is "What will our organisation look like afterwards".  You will almost certainly need

• KM roles in the operational units and projects, to facilitate the processes and act as champions
• KM roles within the communities of practice, including community sponsors, leaders, core teams, facilitators
• Subject matter experts to look after the codified knowledge base
• People to support the KM technology infrastructure
• People to manage the lessons learned system(s)

You will need a Knowledge Management organisation.  Increasingly, organisational design such as this is becoming a part of our consulting offering, as companies take the KM Make-over.

Why, in KM, the best generals should not be on the battle field.

Your best performers are far too important to be working on projects - they should be teaching others to work on projects.

Image from Creazilla
under creative commons licence

Several times in my career I have been met with the objection that Knowledge Management will not work because the top experts - the people who hold most of the knowledge - are too busy to take part in KM. They are working full-time on the toughest projects or working with the most demanding clients. The theory is that the highest priority project should have the best people working on it. 

If the organisation has aspirations for growth or improvement, then that is a waste of knowledge. The expert can only be in one place, on one project or with one client, but their knowledge is needed in every place, on every project and by every client. 

 KM needs to offer them a new role (which should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat) - to be the stewards and sharers of knowledge, rather than the sole holders. Their role is to make the organisation knowledgeable, not jut to be knowledgeable themselves. 

The best generals should be in the war college, not on the battlefield. Your best expert on disarming bombs should not be disarming bombs, but teaching others to do so safely. Knowledge needs to be spread as much as (or even more than) it needs to be concentrated.

We can see this approach in Shell, where the best experts become internal technical consultants, or in Rolls Royce, where the best experts are given a "Fellow" role. You can also see this approach in the Customer Service world, as illustrated in this article. 

In KM, the best generals should not be on the battlefield.

The role of the expert should not be to dedicate their knowledge to the toughest project, but to make sure that every project can apply their hard-won knowledge and experience.

What is the role of the knowledge engineer?

The Knowledge Engineer is a key role in any KM system where knowledge needs to be computer-readable

Engineer by on Roddy Keetch on Flickr

The Knowledge Engineer is the key role in any Knowledge Management program that focuses on analysing complex decision making applied by experts, and turning this into rules; particularly rules that can be read by computers.

The Knowledge Engineer role was first introduced in the era of Expert Systems, when the vision was to take expertise out of the human domain and incorporate it into machine logic. It has now returned, with the interest in AI.

Even without developing an expert system, the Knowledge Engineer role can be an important one in creating human-readable Knowledge Assets, Manuals and Knowledge Bases from the knowledge of experts.

This is not an easy role, and needs a set of unique skills. It requires skills in:

• Elicitation of knowledge from experts;
• Creating systems of rules which replicate expert decision-making;
• Preparing these rules so they can be used as algorithms.

The focus of the Knowledge Engineer was historically on the creation of the knowledge system, but in reality the major challenge for the knowledge engineer is in eliciting the knowledge in the first place, and turning into rules. It is in the elicitation and analysis that the skill lies, rather than in creating the expert system.

The task of the Knowledge Engineer 

Assess the problem. The step that initiates the process of knowledge engineering is the assessment of the problem for which the knowledge needs to be acquired and packaged.

Elicit the knowledge. This is the most difficult step, and where the skills of the knowledge engineer are most important. There is a range of techniques for Knowledge Elicitation, from the structured and unstructured interview, through analysed problem solving, to card sorting and the creation of concept maps.

Structure the knowledge. Once the knowledge has been elicited it needs to be structured into an expert system, a database, a knowledge base or a knowledge asset. The knowledge engineer creates the structure and format for the knowledge, and populates it with the knowledge which has been elicited.

Validate the knowledge
The knowledge engineer needs to verify the final system, database or asset, by asking the experts to review it, and by validating the knowledge against known outcomes. The objective is to produce knowledge of high integrity.

Encode the knowledge
The knowledge engineer then works with the software engineer(s) to ensure the validated knowledge of the expert is faithfully encoded into the AI or Expert System software.

What it's like being a knowledge engineer.

In an article no longer on the Internet, Maurice King - an editor creating medical manuals - describes the perceptions of the KM role as a somewhere between "all you do is listen and write things down" and "you become an expert in everything".  Here is how he described some of the challenges of the Knowledge Engineer role;

Like other knowledge engineers, I have had great problems in getting knowledge out of experts. Real ones are hard to find, and when you have found them, they may only be master of a small field, and be so busy that they can spare you little time....

An expert often forgets what he does, and may not know what he does. Even when an expert can describe what he does, he can be wrong. He is more likely to be able to remember actions given conditions, than conditions given actions... expert surgeons know when to operate, but have difficulty listing the indications for doing so. They need cues which a knowledge engineer has to supply. 

An expert is often better at criticizing someone else's ideas than explaining his own, and may only express his knowledge in response to something he disagrees with. Knowledge engineers have to learn the expert's language: in doing so I became a particular kind of ''theoretical' surgeon, anaesthetist, and obstetrician. 

I worked mostly by asking experts to comment on innumerable drafts assembled from tiny fragments of knowledge. As one expert said when I began, ''You will have to build it up comma by comma''. Looking back, it is remarkable that the task was accomplished at all. Only by combing the earth was it possible to find just enough appropriate experts. 

Paradoxically, any merit in these manuals lies with the experts, and any faults with the knowledge engineer ... it is his job to spot the fault and patch it with another expert's knowledge. The sixth sense that he needs to develop is to know what knowledge is useful, and when it is likely to be faulty.

The knowledge engineer in the legal context

This article describes the role of a Legal knowledge engineer, as follows:

As the interface between lawyers and developers, we have to have a firm grounding in legal principles, and a concept of practice helps – we are, after all, designing tools for use in practice, so we need to understand our user’s needs. We tend to work across practice areas, collaborating closely with lawyers to understand their issues to make sure we are actually solving a problem.  

But working with the lawyers in only part of the job. Once we’ve understood the legal principles at play, we have to translate that into a format that the developers can work with. LKEs are not necessarily coders, but we do need to understand the technical aspect – to understand the needs, capacities and language of developers, which is as specialised a version of the English language as that needed to talk to the lawyers. 

As the legal industry begins to engage proactively with technology, the need for translators to bridge the gap between the two industries is likely to remain strong. As we get more ambitious with the technology that we can bring to bear on these problems, the role of the LKE to facilitate collaboration between the legal and the technical experts, not just linguistically but also in terms of working practices and ways of thinking, will become more and more necessary.

The Knowledge Engineer is therefore a key intermediary role in the transfer of knowledge from human to machine.

The 3 main types of KM roles

There are three main types of KM roles in an organition; the business roles with a KM focus, the KM roles with a business focus, and the central roles 

. 

The business roles are focused on the business outcome which KM supports, while the KM roles focus on the effective operation of the KM processes within the business. The central roles design, implement, monitor and continuously improve the KM framework itself.

Business roles with a KM focus 

There is a role we could call the Business Knowledge manager or Business Knowledge Champion for an area of the business such as a department, a division or a project.  This person owns and implements the KM plan or strategy for that area of the business.   They

• ensure the KM expectations are met, 
• that the processes happen, 
• and that KM works for the benefit of the business. 

They don't conduct KM processes themselves, but they ensure KM processes are conducted. In my experience, this is a role owned by a business person, and they may also own risk management, quality management or another parallel discipline.

In the Communities of Practice there is a CoP leader role, who

• provides overall leadership and direction to the CoP, 
• works together with the community sponsor to develop community objectives,
• works with the core community team to develop plans to deliver the objectives,
• coordinates & follows up the activities of the community, 
• ensures that the community successfully delivers its goals, and 
• sets the leadership style of the community

In terms of the ownership and the maintenance of the organisational knowledge, the business role is the Knowledge Owner or Subject Matter expert. This role

• “owns and manages” an area of critical knowledge for the company
• monitors the state of knowledge 
• keeps the knowledge base up to date 
• validates new knowledge 
• broadcasts new knowledge 
•  plays a strong role in the community or network

KM roles with a business focus. 

The business roles mentioned above will have specialist KM support. 

There is a role which supports the business KM champion, which we could call the business knowledge facilitator.

• They facilitate the KM processes, 
• capture new knowledge,
•  interview experts, 
• document lessons and knowledge, and 
• facilitate Peer Assists, Knowledge Cafés and After Action reviews. 

This role is sometimes known as a learning engineer, or a learning historian, and is a role for a practitioner with KM skills.

The CoP leader is often supported by a community facilitator, who

• ensures effective transfer of knowledge among the community members through facilitation of online discussion and face to face meetings 
• ensures new knowledge is captured and shared 
• maintains energy and commitment in the community 
• ensures the knowledge assets are built and maintained, and
• maintains the community site

The CoP leader is usually a business role, while the CoP facilitator (who has a much greater emphasis on the mechanics of knowledge transfer within the CoP) could be considered a KM role.

The role of the knowledge base facilitator, or cyberarian, is to

• determine the customer base of the online library or knowledge base, 
• carry out market research into customer needs,
• work with the SMEs to develop and maintain a structure for the online library 
• work with the SMEs to develop processes for refreshing and renewing content and for removing old material 
• monitor these processes, prompting for compliance as required 
• provide a help-desk service to users of the online library, and 
• provide coaching in the use of online tools and the search engine

The role of the Lessons Learned manager (who might be based in the project management office, if you have one) is to

• support the lesson learned process 
• analyse, action and communicate lessons
• support LL Information Sharing via databases, websites, reports, newsletters, etc. 
• look for recurring lessons and common threads
• support the LL Community
• set up or improve the organization’s LL capability.

So as the diagram above shows, at each level we can see a business role with KM as a focus, supported by a facilitative KM role with a business focus.  The KM facilitation roles bring the KM skills and knowledge of KM theory and process, while the business KM roles bring the business objectives and the business context.

Then we have the central roles

This blog contains many posts about the KM team and its role. In a fully mature KM organisation the role of the central KM team is to monitor and support the application of the KM framework, rather than to do KM work. The team will have a leader (a CKO) who is accountable for the KM Framework and its application in support of business strategy. Then there may be trainers and coaches who work with the KM roles mentioned above, to give them the skills and support they need to do their jobs.

Those are the three types of role. Not every organisation will have every role mentioned here (you can see the usage of the more common roles here), but every organisation will have roles that fall within these three types.

CKO skills, revisited

In 2015 I published a post showing that a significant proportion of CKOs know very little about Knowledge Management, at least according to their Linked-in profiles. This year I revisited these stats.

It seems things have improved a little, but there are still a lot of CKOs out there with few or no KM skills.

I looked at the profiles of 50 CKOs in Linked in - people with "Chief Knowledge Officer" in their current job title - and I counted how far down the list of skills you had to go before you found "Knowledge Management".  The results are shown in the pie chart here. (Note however that this job title seems disproportionately popular at the moment in the military and legal fields, so these fields are over-represented in the sample).

Note how 34% of CKOs have KM as their top skill - as you might expect.

But note also how 14% of CKOs have KM way down their list of skills - lower than 10th place - and how 26% of the CKO profiles I reviewed DO NOT HAVE KM ON THE LIST OF SKILLS AT ALL!

I said in my 2015 post that there seems to be two types of CKOs out there, with a fairly even split between the two.

• One type, who are reasonably well versed in Knowledge Management, and see this as the CKO's domain. KM is top of their list of skills, or high in the list (and half of the the profiles I reviewed had KM in the top 3 skills).
• Another type, for whom the CKO role is held by a person with few or no KM skills at all.

It's the second type that puzzles me. Perhaps the job was titled "CKO" because it sounded good and important rather than because it had anything to do with the management of knowledge, or perhaps they appointed someone with information skills in a knowledge role, or perhaps the CKO plays purely an oversight and coordination role, and leaves the KM aspects to Knowledge Managers (managing the initiative rather than the knowledge)?

Whatever the reason, the results are surprising. 40% of CKOs have few if any KM skills.

Would you see this in any other discipline? Imagine

• a CFO with no financial skills
• a Chief Lawyer with no legal skills
• a Chief Engineer with no engineering skills

So why do 40% of CKOs have few if any KM skills?

What is heartening though is that things seem to be getting better. Bearing in mind the caveats that

• these are two different samples, and that 
• 50 many not be a representative number, and that 
• the profiles I can see on LinkedIn are related to my own personal network;

the plot below seems to show that the situation is improving. 

In the 2015 sample, only 24% had KM at the top of the skills list - now it is 34%.
In the 2015 sample, 32% had no KM skills on their skills list - now it is 26%.

Perhaps this is evidence that KM is becoming more respected and more established as a discipline, and that CKO is less likely to be used as a random job title.

The trend is heartening, but we still have a long way to go.

The Knowledge Manager as Gardener - an organic metaphor

People often think of Knowledge as being Organic, or being an Ecosystem. But what does this imply for Knowledge Management and for the Knowledge Manager? 

gardener, Filoli, by David McSpadden on Flickr

The ecosystem or the garden is a pretty good metaphor for the world of Knowledge in an organisation. Knowledge is something that grows and develops; that can be replicated and seeded. It is not something immutable like a car or a factory or a pound coin that can be physically managed. Instead it needs to be nurtured and tended.

The Knowledge Manager, in this metaphor, is the gardener.  And anyone with a garden will know that if you want to produce flowers or vegetables, the life of a gardener is hard work, and gardens require a lot of management.

Let's assume you are tending the Knowledge Garden for your organisation. Let's assume that you are doing this to create value for the key stakeholders - the knowledge workers, the management, and your external customers.  If you want to create value from a garden, you don't just "create the conditions so anything can grow", because all you get is nettles, brambles and other weeds.

Instead you have several tasks.

• Tilling and fertilising the ground. For gardening and for Knowledge Management, you need to get the conditions right for growth. This is the culture change element of your role - the communication strategy, the hearts and minds campaign. Also you need to provide the supporting infrastructure. Just as a gardener needs to put in place the canes, cloches and trellises to support the new seedlings, so you need to ensure there is sufficient technology to support emergent KM activities (recognising, of course, that technology alone will not create KM, any more than trellises alone will not create a garden).
• Planting the seeds. These are the proof of concept events, the KM pilot projects, the early Knowledge Assets and the trial Communities of Practice which you might set up in the places of greatest demand and greatest knowledge value. 
• Watering and fertilising the growing seeds. As a Knowledge Manager, the early seeds in your KM garden will need your oversight and your support. You will need to work with the CoP leaders, the knowledge owners and the project staff to ensure the early KM work does not wither and die through lack of care.
• Propagating the growth. Some of the plants in your KM garden will thrive. Learn from these, find out the secrets of their success, and seek to reproduce these elsewhere. Just as a gardener will  take cuttings, runners and seeds from their prize-winning plants, you too can propagate success from the best performers. 
• Removing the weeds and pests.  If there are any things that hamper the growth in your Knowledge Management garden - be these incentives that backfire, loud sceptics, or misbehaviour in Community of Practice discussions - then you need to address them, and see if you can remove them before they start to spread. Internal competition incentives, for example, need removal before they stunt the growth of KM or kill your tender plants. 

This is all very hard work, but the rewards for successful Knowledge Management are the same as those for a successful gardener - a thriving ecosystem and a mountain of produce.

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).

How many knowledge managers are there in the world, and where are they?

5 years ago, in late 2014, I made an estimate of  the number of knowledge managers in the world. Here is an update - the number has increased to over 47,500, of which 28% are in the USA.

Number of knowledge managers per country,
normalised for population

 Of course there is no list of global knowledge managers, and as a proxy I made a count of the number of people on LinkedIn with the word "Knowledge" (or Conocimiento, or Connaissance, or Kennis, etc etc) in their current job title, in a selection of the larger countries. They could be knowledge managers, chief knowledge officers, knowledge leaders, knowledge experts, knowledge engineers and so on.

Of course

1. there may be some people in that list who have Knowledge in the title in another context (for example "Student with knowledge of French"),
2. there may be knowledge managers not on linked-in, 
3. some of the people may have been counted twice (with both Knowledge and Conocimento in their job title, perhaps)
4. I did not search through every country (only the bigger ones where I know there is a history of KM), 
5. nor did I search for every language equivalent of "Knowledge". 

 Therefore the number of knowledge managers estimated by this method is approximate. However I counted 47577 people by this method. If your country, or language, is not on the lists below, then please feel free to do a count yourself, and let me know the answer.

This blog post goes on to discuss, in maps and lists, 

a) where these people are

b) the number as a percent of the national population

c) the number as a percent of the LinkedIn population
d) how the number has changed in the past 5 years

Where the knowledge managers are

Total number of knowledge managers per country. Jan 2020

This map shows the total number of people with Knowledge (or its equivalent) in their job title, on LinkedIn, in Jan 2020. The countries are listed below in order of "Knowledge Manager" population, with all the caveats mentioned above. 

Country	total number of knowledge managers, 2020
USA	13430
India	5050
UK	4577
canada	2333
netherlands	2135
germany	1841
france	1807
spain	1615
Australia	1576
brazil	1218
south africa	895
colombia	877
belgium	864
italy	849
indonesia	843
china	699
phillipines	611
switzerland	596
mexico	548
israel	527
Argentina	477
poland	433
iran	375
malaysia	350
new Zealand	307
singapore	300
UAE	298
ireland	292
sweden	285
chile	277
saudi arabia	234
thailand	222
denmark	192
hong kong	191
austria	166
norway	164
russia	123

Number as a share of national population

Of course many of the countries at the top of this list are large countries. We need to look at the number of knowledge people as a proportion of the national population. This is shown in the picture and list below (the list shows the number of people on LinkedIn with Knowledge in their title, divided by the national population in millions).

Total number of knowledge managers per country as a proportion of national population. Jan 2020

The USA  is no longer top of the list - that honour goes to the Netherlands, just as it did in 2014, where 133 out of each million (one in 7500) has knowledge in their job title (subject to all the caveats above). The USA is now in 11th place.

Country	K Managers per millions population
netherlands	133
belgium	86
switzerland	75
UK	74
new Zealand	71
israel	69
canada	69
Australia	69
ireland	66
singapore	60
USA	43
spain	35
denmark	35
norway	33
sweden	32
france	28
hong kong	27
germany	23
austria	21
colombia	19
south africa	18
chile	16
italy	14
malaysia	13
Argentina	12
poland	11
saudi arabia	9
UAE	7
phillipines	7
brazil	6
mexico	5
iran	5
India	4
indonesia	4
thailand	4
russia	1
china	1

Number as a proportion of the LinkedIn population

Of course the number of people counted from LinkedIn is unreliable, as the global use of LinkedIn is highly variable. Perhaps the lack of knowledge managers in China is because there is less use of LinkedIn in China, for example?

The map and list below account for this, and shows, for each country,  the number of people on Linked with Knowledge etc in their job title, per million people on LinkedIn. This may be a truer representation of the distribution of KM interest.

Total number of knowledge managers per country as a proportion of LinkedIn population. Jan 2020

Now we see Israel as top of the list, followed by the Netherlands again. China is still at the bottom. USA has fallen to 23rd place.

Country	KM per million linked in population
israel	261
netherlands	249
belgium	195
switzerland	191
new Zealand	157
UK	148
Australia	133
canada	128
singapore	124
ireland	123
south africa	110
iran	109
austria	109
spain	107
hong kong	107
norway	105
poland	102
thailand	97
colombia	92
france	78
germany	74
malaysia	74
USA	72
sweden	72
phillipines	69
India	68
UAE	67
denmark	66
italy	51
Argentina	50
indonesia	44
chile	39
saudi arabia	38
mexico	36
brazil	25
russia	17
china	12

How the number has changed in 5 years

Percentage increase in the number of knowledge managers per country between Dec 2014 and Jan 2020

In every country other than Switzerland and Norway, the number of "Knowledge Managers" with all the caveats above, has increased. The countries are listed below in order of increase in "Knowledge Manager" population over the past 5 years. This gives us a proxy measure for areas where KM seems to be on the increase, vs countries where the topic is relatively mature.

Country	increase in knowledge managers 2014 to 2020
indonesia	168%
germany	159%
poland	150%
phillipines	143%
iran	142%
chile	135%
saudi arabia	129%
france	125%
colombia	98%
spain	97%
thailand	95%
china	91%
UAE	86%
mexico	84%
belgium	71%
ireland	70%
italy	66%
brazil	66%
hong kong	66%
sweden	59%
India	56%
israel	51%
malaysia	50%
Australia	43%
singapore	39%
south africa	37%
canada	34%
UK	33%
austria	33%
netherlands	29%
new Zealand	28%
russia	28%
USA	28%
Argentina	27%
denmark	15%
norway	-1%
switzerland	-11%

Note that these increases are only partly due to an increase in the number of people using LinkedIn. LinkedIn usage is increasing rapidly (on average 120% in the last 5 years for the countries in this study), while the increase in KM numbers is at a lower rate (on average 70%). Possibly the Knowledge Managers were early adopters of LinkedIn, and are now becoming diluted as others join.

Conclusions

Bearing in mind the caveats above - 

• There are in the order of 47500 knowledge management people in the world
• The largest numbers are in the USA, then India, then the UK
• In terms of percentage of Knowledge Managers in the national population, the Netherlands is the highest, then Belgium, then Switzerland. Russia and China are at the bottom.
• In terms of the percentage of  Knowledge Managers in the linkedIn population, Israel is at the top of the list, then the Netherlands, then Belgium. Russia and China are still at the bottom.
• The greatest percentage growth in numbers is in Indonesia, Germany, Poland and the Phillipines. Numbers have decreased in Switzerland and Norway.