Knowledge construction - Inside Knowledge

Feature

posted 1 Nov 1999 in Volume 3 Issue 3

Knowledge construction

In this interview-based article, Dr. Jaz Saggu describes the concepts and journey which led to a new knowledge infrastructure in Bovis Ltd. The in-house constructed 'Wingspan' intranet has created a new sharing culture and transformed the way business is won. As Development Director, Dr. Saggu has been closely involved with the building of the new KM environment from its initial origin in board-room discussion to its every-day use amongst Bovis employees around the globe.

Why did you feel the need to implement Knowledge Management?

For a number of year's business process reengineering has swept companies with great energy and resolve. In organisations where it has been successful, reengineering has created leaner, more agile, and more competitive businesses. Companies have processed the "fat" out of their organisations, yielding both significant cost reductions and renewed emphasis on profitable growth and improving shareholder return. But now that companies have streamlined core operations and reduced cost structures, what are the basis for competition and the lever for growth? The answer, increasingly is corporate knowledge. Superior knowledge - of clients, products, markets, and business processes and capabilities - confers a competitive edge. Bovis Group Board realised this issue and this is why we embarked on a global knowledge management (KM) programme.

Can you give me the background to Bovis as a company?

Founded in 1885, Bovis is now active in 38 countries and is currently managing £13.6 billion of construction projects in six continents. It has regional operating headquarters in London, New York and Sydney and has 6,000 staff worldwide.

Bovis' services are matched to the needs of the market in the different countries in which it operates. In particular they include project and construction management, consultancy assignments and specialist contracting. Its clients come from all areas of commerce, industry and the public sectors, and retail, offices, leisure, healthcare, education and airports are among its most active markets.

Founded on its 70-year working relationship with Marks & Spencer, Bovis has pioneered alliances with other major private sector clients. The biggest is with BP, and it embraces new construction, refurbishment and facilities management of all the petrol retailer' s outlets in 14 European countries, and also in Japan and Venezuela.

Bovis also participates in a Private Finance Initiative and Build, Operate & Transfer projects in infrastructure and public utilities. These include new National Health Trust hospitals in Halifax and Worcester and its partnership with Thames Water to supply treated water to the city of Shanghai for the next 20 years.

When did Knowledge Management begin in Bovis?

It began in earnest in 1998. Sir Frank Lampl, Bovis Group's Chairman and the Group Board believed that the most important asset of its organisation were its employees. Initially, he wanted to capture the know-how of key people and make it available to the entire organisation. Next, his vision was to have the whole company participate in knowledge sharing and learning culture.

As Development Director reporting to the Chairman and Group Board, I was placed in charge of putting in place a KM programme. I realised that it had to embrace training, creation of centres for expertise, and the development of sharing best practices across the organisation.

I also realised that the most important dimension for successfully implementing KM was addressing the organisation's group behaviour and culture. This was the most challenging area to touch and change. It's hard to imagine a business that would not benefit from better KM. Learning fast; knowing more and then acting decisively are the key to success. For Bovis, it was also vital to leverage local best practices and share them across the company. This is because Bovis' projects are both globally and locally based. Moreover, clients demanding consistency and globalisation also required performance levels that can only be achieved by making the most of expertise across the whole organisation. Identifying new higher quality services and improving competitive business processes was another motivation to embark on KM.

How did you feel about the phrase 'Knowledge Management, when you started the initiative?

In the beginning I often found myself in debates on the definition of 'knowledge'. I quickly moved from calling the initiative 'Knowledge Management' to 'directing business and technical information to the right people at the right time'.

What is your particular definition?

I believe it is a systematic and concerted effort to improve the system by which valuable information is assessed, gathered, distributed and employed within an organisation. It is a process and it's about getting the right information that would help add real business value to the right people at the right time. And Bovis' approach to KM was a multi-dimensional one.

Can you explain this multi-dimensional approach?

Knowledge activities must be rooted and driven by business outcomes. They must have clear business purpose, focus on knowledge domains of significance, and ultimately serve to improve the performance of key business processes, from strategy development to Bovis' client service.

KM needs the capability and the resources for high performance if it is to be a serious business process. This capability includes people and organisational structures responsible for KM, defined KM processes and their performance measures, organisational practices in support of KM, and the technology infrastructure (e.g. databases, telecommunications, software for collaboration) to facilitate KM.

KM relies upon human communication. In order to reap the benefits of KM, Bovis needed to establish and nurture organisational networks, so that its employees could discover who knows what and then establish the "interpersonal channels" for effective knowledge transfer.

Because KM depends on the behaviour of people, knowledge sharing is inherently voluntary. Bovis employees can't be forced to share what's in their heads. They must be encouraged to contribute knowledge (information) and to use knowledge (information) contributed by others. This can be enhanced with tools, training, performance measures and incentives (which are discussed later).

What is your KM strategy at Bovis?

An effective and useful KM capability must include more than just the technology of a knowledge repository. The most important components to build were:

KM structures: the organisational roles and responsibilities for managing knowledge

KM technologies: the technology architectures and applications for managing knowledge.

KM process: the process through which knowledge and knowledge work are performed, and the linkages between them.

KM guidelines: for content management (i.e. how Bovis organises the knowledge itself).

What is your Organisational Structure for knowledge sharing?

It was unrealistic to assume that we would simply throw a range of KM activities on top of existing sets of jobs within its company. On the other hand, it was realised that KM would not succeed if it was solely the responsibility of a small - or even a large - staff group. Ultimately, Bovis employees who perform operational roles (e.g. risk management, project management and construction management services to the client) have to do the bulk of the day-to-day activities of managing knowledge. Hence, at Bovis we developed the following structures:

The Bovis employees
Building the Knowledge Network among Bovis Business Units
The networks most crucial to knowledge sharing are human, not technological. These are the networks of individual and organisational contacts and relationships along which information flows and cooperation happens. They range from formal inter-business unit committees to the very informal organisational structure of people who know who to call for answers to specific questions. Knowledge that flows along these networks ranges from the simple and easily communicated to the very complex, requiring face-to-face contact and intensive discussion for adequate transfer. It takes continuous individual and organisational effort to build and maintain these networks, to help them evolve and keep them active.

Some of the successful knowledge networks we have developed at Bovis are:

Who's who database

Expertise database (a skills bank)

Client and suppliers' links

Market intelligence networks for gathering sector information and forecasts

Centres of Expertise

Centres of Expertise (CoE)

The Bovis CoE's contribute to the Bovis' KM programme through knowledge sharing in two ways. First, it is a vehicle for connecting people who can benefit from each other's expertise. It represents a network of contacts, much like the network of contacts between business units. Second, and more importantly, a CoE is a mechanism that instills norms of knowledge sharing in a company. Through CoEs, people are tuned into the practice of searching for, transferring, using and contributing existing knowledge. Since setting-up the CoE at Bovis we have gained strong evidence that people who are happy working in CoE's setup, where they both contribute and use knowledge, are more likely to engage in knowledge sharing activities outside the CoEs (i.e. the whole of Bovis' KM programme). CoEs therefore, represent a powerful mechanism that knowledge managers can use to create norms of leveraging and using knowledge.

Figures 1 and 2 depicts the front web page of the Centres of Experitise (part of Bovis' Intranet system which has been named ('WingSPAN'). The web page gives the user instant access to the latest news and lessons learned for the particular commercial sector. This information is gathered from the whole group. Moreover, comprehensive information on the sectors is available from the toolbars on the top right of the web page, as well as principal contacts across the group to seek advice and information for winning business and carrying out construction projects.

Figure 1

Figure 2

In summary, what we did at Bovis in order to set-up the global CoEs:

Locate appropriate experts and expertise

Foster networks to share insight and learning

Produce best practices

Nurture relationships with co-workers (people to people, people to groups and group to group)

From 'sharing' to using knowledge to make business impact

From efficiency to innovation

From 'experiment' initiatives to 'part of how we do business'

Make KM part of employees' work

Focus on projects, which would succeed in a lower risk approach?

From the 'knowledge content' point of view, a key component of innovation has to be simply becoming aware of the activities of others. We have aided this through leveraging communication channels and launching an intensive marketing and training programme.

Learning Communities

As part of the Bovis' Self Development Programme (SDP) we have set up learning communities to share best practices and help in nurturing professional and academic qualifications.

The Bovis SDP is a distance learning programme, created to transfer best practice, knowledge and management skills across the group with the additional advantage of offering employees the opportunity to gain a postgraduate qualification. The distance learning element of the Bovis SDP was important since a majority of our employees work on construction project sites, currently 500 in total spread across six continents.

The Bovis SDP, the first for the construction industry, contains a range of modules (presently 20 modules). We have a Global Induction geared to provide all employees with a detailed introduction to the company, the history, services offered, organisational structure and country and project information. There is also more specialised subject matter on Project Management, Financial Awareness and Value Management.

The Processes

It was important to think about how the generic KM process interfaces with key knowledge work processes. How for example, did knowledge get imported into, and exported from the Bovis services? Hence the KM team facilitated the following and passed down through the chain of command:

People in certain roles were specifically charged with importing and exporting knowledge into the Bovis knowledge work process

Trained our employees to match our KM aspirations

Provided lessons learned (templates, guides and processes)

Ensured that end of project close-out reports and lessons learned would be entered onto our system

What is your technology infrastructure?

We had a choice of Lotus Notes and Web-based intranets to aid in our KM programme. We found the Web an intuitive technology, and powerful in that it could incorporate audio, graphic, and video representations of knowledge. Although at present we don' t extensively use video representation.

We also used HTML for publishing a relational database system; for storing information, text search and retrieval engines, tools for managing the "meta-knowledge and Web browser and server.

Were there any IT/IS issues that you had to address?

Yes. There are some basic principles to create an effective IT infrastructure for KM, and for Bovis we had to:

Make sure the infrastructure was sound and maintainable (It was cost effective to outsource our server and maintenance contract)

Establish a help desk for intranet use and KM

Use established technologies wherever possible for KM applications. We use Microsoft as our standard and have a suite of Microsoft products and an Access database for the intranet

Have distributed servers (replicate and cache) to facilitate a reach across the 38 countries

Ensure that the IT teams understand the reliability issues of infrastructure to operate a global intranet

Develop appropriate links to existing dB and systems (including our legacy systems)

Security at all levels. Make sure it works - established a group policy

How do you select the best internal knowledge management applications?

We have a knowledge management Steering Board which consists of the Group Board Operational Directors, Regional Board Directors and myself. We meet quarterly and analyse business-winning applications. Suggestions are made either by the Steering Board and/or by any Bovis employee. We have selection criteria, which is employed to sieve out the most beneficial application.

Here are some tips for selecting KM applications:

Applications should be related to business needs and if possible have Key Performance Indicators

Link corporate strategy, but be flexible

Pilot applications before full release

Some KM applications can be achieved without technology

Do you have measures in place?

At Bovis we operate an extensive continuous Improvement programme and we have a number of balanced scorecards in place. We believe in 'what gets measured gets done' . We also use the following to measure the effectiveness of our KM programme:

Use surveys, trends and benchmarks

Use questionnaires regularly

Moreover, we believe that measures should feed back to the web strategy. The ultimate measure of success is in what is delivered to the client and how quickly this is achieved. We have made intranet usage statistics available to all our employees on 'WingSPAN', (the Bovis intranet), and they are automatically updated.

At Bovis we also have regular user group meetings and focus groups to enable us to constantly gain improvement feedback and carry out prototyping of new applications before full release.

How did you manage to get Bovis employees on board?

Supporting a cultural transformation through incentives, training and a top down mandate is a challenging task. It is a difficult task to fully understand the concepts or terminology of KM since it means different things to different people.

Here is what we did:

Identified clear business needs and linked them to the corporate strategy

Identified practical examples of how KM has improved performance 'stories' from other parts of the Bovis business (from head-office to its global operations), other companies, or our competitors

Illustrated how sharing, creating and utilising knowledge can add real value and competitive advantage

Explained to employees that KM is not about infrastructure, but that it is about culture, behaviour and values

Made our employees feel responsible for running the KM programme

Provided appropriate support and resources

Made use of champions and gave the champions recognition and authority

Communicated in simple terms

Used existing communication media which then evolved on to the Web (produce newsletters, flyers and pocket guides)

Tried to manage everyone's expectations by delivering appropriate messages

Conclusions

There is no single right path to a fully institutionalised KM programme. What works at an early stage for one organisation may be more appropriate at a later stage for another company. There are some obvious relationships and dependencies as we found in Bovis, for example:

Getting executive sponsorship, forming a network, and implementing a variety of other KM tactics will be easier with a knowledge culture

Getting sponsorship will be easier if you have a project with positive business outcomes

A technology infrastructure will be much more useful if the KM organisation and culture are in place

It's easier to get executive buy-in and form the organisation if you have a strategy (a web strategy).

The most important single factor in the success of KM is probably having a culture that is conducive to knowledge creation, sharing and use. Of course, many organisations simply don't have a broad knowledge-oriented culture today. What does an aspiring knowledge manager do when that factor isn't in place? First, it shouldn't be assumed that the culture is monolithic with respect to knowledge. You can try to find a receptive part of the company that already has a knowledge-oriented culture, at least to a higher degree.

In addition to the knowledge culture issue, there are other common pitfalls to avoid in implementing KM. Knowledge managers should avoid for example, any steps that will raise expectations beyond what can be delivered upon. Issuing a great deal of publicity, creating a large KM staff, or asking for a lot of executive support can raise expectations substantially.

Knowledge managers should also gather evidence of the business benefits from their efforts and from KM initiatives in general. Even if the organisation and its senior executives have faith in KM, they will eventually want some demonstration of value.

The best long-term strategy is to start with a set of low-visibility initiatives, join with committed allies, get some relatively quick business results, adjust your organisational mechanisms to encourage knowledge sharing, strengthen the company s human networks, and build interest.

Figure 3: Document Library This application caters for individual to load relevant documents, i.e., anything that helps Bovis to win business, do the job well and so on. The respective heads of the departments approves all documents that are loaded on WingSPAN. This prevents non-value-added information being loaded on the system.

Figure 4: WingSPAN s home page

Jaz Saggu is Development Director within Bovis Ltd.

He can be contacted at: jaz.saggu@europe.bovis.com