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Real-world knowledge management:

Bare-foot knowledge management:
A real-world handbook for business

Contents

Part 1 The state we’re in 4

Introduction 5

Why does anyone need to manage knowledge? 6

Where do organisations get their knowledge? 6

How do organisations keep their knowledge? 6

How do organisations use their knowledge? 6

Real-world knowledge gathering 7

Where do you get your knowledge? 7

What are the sources? 7

Who owns your company’s knowledge? 7

Who holds it? 7

What processes (people and technology) do you use acquire your knowledge? 7

If your processes add value to existing knowledge, are you capturing those processes? 7

Real-world knowledge storage 8

How do you keep your knowledge? 8

How is it stored? 8

Where is it kept? 8

What processes do you have in place to capture the knowledge that is in your people's heads? 8

How do you retain knowledge when people move inside or outside the organisation? 8

Real-world knowledge usage 9

How do you use your knowledge? 9

How do you make knowledge available to those who need it? 9

How do you support the sharing of knowledge? 9

How do you manage the filtering of knowledge (by relevance and by currency)? 9

How do you support the aggregation of knowledge from related areas? 9

Does your knowledge have a market, and if so what is its market value? 9

How do you know when your knowledge is no longer needed, and what do you do about it? 9

Part 2 Letting it work together - the keys to successful knowledge management 10

Find out what you know 11

Building an organisational skills directory 11

Identifying the knowledge brokers in your organisation 11

Making sure you know what (and who) your knowledge assets are. 11

Put knowledge sharing at the centre of the culture of your business 12

Expect it as part of the career development process, 12

Develop and use practices that identify and reward knowledge sharing. 12

Create a knowledge profile for every role and ensure that everyone in the organisation knows how to maintain it. 12

Harmonise your knowledge 13

Introduce the building blocks of knowledge management in such a way as to ensure that they work in harmony 13

When you bring in policies for information sharing, ensure that you also put in place the enabling management and reward systems. 13

When you introduce knowledge profiles, consider moving to a role-based information architecture for storing your documents. 13

Look at the problem holistically and make sure that your components work together. 13

Part 3 Moving on 14

If you build it, will they come? 15

Using the Bare-Foot Knowledge Management Toolkit 16

The Toolkit contents 16

 

  1. The state we’re in

Introduction

This book is about how you can improve your business by improving the way you look after the knowledge in your business.

We havered, it has to be said, over the title. Knowledge management has had a bad press, not least because of the images the term carries. On the one hand knowledge management is seen as an academic subject, about theories of language and models of complex information exchange. On the other it is seen as the graveyard of many a brave business project, having had millions of pounds of good money thrown into it with no discernible business benefits. We have had experience of many views of knowledge management across this spectrum and it is no surprise that many sensible business people steer well clear of it.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way, and the purpose of this book is show you how to improve your knowledge management measurably, quickly and without throwing a fortune in money at the problem.

You will notice that this is a small book. It didn’t need to be any bigger: what we are talking about here is the basic commonsense processes and structures that you can put in place with very little pain or disruption to your real work. There is no need for complexity or vast overwhelming projects. This is the real world, after all.

You will also notice, unusually for a business book, that it comes complete with software. Unlike a computer book this is not on a CD stuck inside the back cover, but on the companion web site. What you will find here are all of the basic tools that you will need to implement real-world knowledge management in your business. Like your business processes, your systems can be simple and easy to understand if you take the bare-foot approach. We have ensured that all of the software, templates and other support tools are public domain or open-source: that is, you can use them freely without incurring any charge. That doesn’t mean that you can do all this stuff for free. It means that you have, for a change, a chance to use and understand the value of tools without investing huge sums of money in them. Where you go from here is up to you: if you want to implement an intelligent knowledge sharing system for 100,000 staff around the world, the chances are that what you find here will start to run out of steam. Let’s be clear about what we are trying to achieve here: it is to demonstrate that for many organisations - including probably many FTSE100 or Fortune500 companies - you can achieve most of what is valuable to you in knowledge management using the practices, cultures and tools that are in this book.

Start here and let’s see what is on offer.

Why does anyone need to manage knowledge?

The world is changing. Knowledge is the new currency of the western world. So-called First-World nations can no longer compete with the emerging superpowers of the Far East as manufacturing powers. One study after another affirms the contention that for countries like the UK and the US to compete in the world of the future, the territory we choose has to be different, further up the supply chain, more valued-added. And the number one contender for the new competitive territory is knowledge. More than anything else, it is the value-added knowledge that we can bring to bear on problems that will enable clever organisations to compete.

A rapidly-increasing area for UK and US business is that of the knowledge-based enterprise. In such an organisation, the product is knowledge. Knowledge is a product in the same way that a car, a can of beans or a pair of socks is a product. And the organisations for whom knowledge is a product need to adopt the same disciplines and mental models as the organisation selling any other product. Our manufacturer of baked beans wouldn’t stay in business for long if she didn’t have a plan for sourcing her product (knowing the right place to get the right raw materials, getting them at the right price, ensuring quality and reliable supply chain), putting in the work to add value to it (cooking the beans, adding the sauce), developing the markets for the product and knowing how to move it to the customer. That’s how organisations have to start thinking about knowledge.

However, to make this happen requires a new approach. The problem is that on the whole, organisations are pretty bad at managing knowledge.

  • Few organisations have processes to make document production or management easy. Few use document templates or house styles, and in many organisations where we have worked it is not uncommon for people to be unaware of style sheets in programs as ubiquitous as Word.

  • Few organisations use document management systems (either implicit or explicit)

  • Where implicit document management (using the file system and collections of folders) is in place, there is rarely any type of access control or version control

  • Very few organisations have role-based ownership of documents. That is, most systems for storing documents do so under the ownership of individuals rather than of organisational roles. As we will see later, although this is the norm it is hugely counterproductive in terms of knowledge management.

  • Few organisations build sharing of knowledge into their culture

  • Few organisations have processes to measure, recognise or reward knowledge sharing.

This chapter looks at how a typical organisation manages its knowledge and points up some of the areas in which there are opportunities for improving its knowledge management.

Where do organisations get their knowledge?

How do organisations keep their knowledge?

How do organisations use their knowledge?

 

Would it be worth having some anonymised case studies?

Real-world knowledge gathering

Where do you get your knowledge?

What are the sources?

Who owns your company’s knowledge?

Who holds it?

What processes (people and technology) do you use acquire your knowledge?

If your processes add value to existing knowledge, are you capturing those processes?

Real-world knowledge storage

How do you keep your knowledge?

How is it stored?

Where is it kept?

What processes do you have in place to capture the knowledge that is in your people's heads?

How do you retain knowledge when people move inside or outside the organisation?

Real-world knowledge usage

How do you use your knowledge?

How do you make knowledge available to those who need it?

How do you support the sharing of knowledge?

How do you manage the filtering of knowledge (by relevance and by currency)?

How do you support the aggregation of knowledge from related areas?

Does your knowledge have a market, and if so what is its market value?

How do you know when your knowledge is no longer needed, and what do you do about it?

  1. Letting it work together - the keys to successful knowledge management

Find out what you know

Building an organisational skills directory

Identifying the knowledge brokers in your organisation

Making sure you know what (and who) your knowledge assets are.

Knowledge management is often described as 80% people and 20% technology, I doubt that this is right but it is worth repeating as 20% technical features and 80% the application of those features. The common office data and document tools contain many of the features for a good KM system but very few of these are used 1

Put knowledge sharing at the centre of the culture of your business

Expect it as part of the career development process,

Develop and use practices that identify and reward knowledge sharing.

Create a knowledge profile for every role and ensure that everyone in the organisation knows how to maintain it.

 

Story – do you want to be a robin or a blue-tit. With the introduction of doorstep milk delivery in the 1930's the health implications of birds taking the milk was raised as a concern. Therefore the introduction of a foil top was introduced as a mechanism to stop the birds taking the milk. In the short term this was effective but after about 5 years it was observed that throughout the country

Harmonise your knowledge

Introduce the building blocks of knowledge management in such a way as to ensure that they work in harmony

When you bring in policies for information sharing, ensure that you also put in place the enabling management and reward systems.

When you introduce knowledge profiles, consider moving to a role-based information architecture for storing your documents.

Look at the problem holistically and make sure that your components work together.

  1. Moving on

If you build it, will they come?

It’s not enough to put a new way of working in place. Even after all of the planning, warming the organisation up to a new way of working, championing and implementation there comes the stark reality of making it work in the real world.

This chapter deals with how you go about keeping it fresh and spotting the areas where the strategy may be coming adrift and applying the right steers to bring it back on track.

 

Using the Bare-Foot Knowledge Management Toolkit

This book is unusual amongst Knowledge Management books in that it comes with real software that you can use to manage real knowledge management problems.

In this chapter we will describe the components of the Bare-Foot Knowledge Management Tookit (as well as some of the alternatives that are available, both open-source and commercial). We will describe how you install and configure the Toolkit components and how to begin to tailor them to your needs.

This is not going to focus on the detail of the tools – there will be step-by-step instructions here for implementing each of the Toolkit’s components, but we will not be describing how the code works.

 

The Toolkit contents

  • An organisational skills directory

  • A set of house styles

  • A document ownership policy

  • A document storage policy, including how to do version control in the file system and how to set up shared areas and files

  • A document management system

  • A FAQ builder

  • A sample Job profile that includes knowledge sharing as a requirement for performance management

  • Blogs – if you don't allow it they will

 

1 I was reminded by the Microsoft launch of IIS and the enthusiastic presentation on metadata search. Buoyed by this enthusiasm I rushed to the web site to find the white paper on metadata searching and the use of document properties – only to find a white paper authored by 'Microsoft Corporation – Marketing' and of course no added metadata