Knowledge 2.0: BC and KM

With KM migration comes a greater need for communication

Business communication has always been left out as a critical piece of management strategy. Same with KM. As hierarchical lines soften, the need increases exponentially.

During the 15 years I’ve been engaged in knowledge management I have often thought KM evangelists were overlooking a communication strategy that would spread the word beyond the core enthusiasts.
The professional help has always been there – business communicators (BC) – but like the rest of management, business communication has been undervalued and underutilised.
As a result, KM communication has been whirling around in a beehive of believers –gurus, consultants, practitioners. Some of the buzz goes outward to their target audiences – executives and senior management, secondarily to their pockets of knowledge workers.
Generally, people outside this relatively small circle are still unaware or unknowledgeable about knowledge management.

BUs unprepared
Now we are in a period where KM appears to be migrating from the corporate level to the business units. Actually, much of the practice of knowledge work has been in some business units like engineering and R&D.
But now the movement is becoming widespread and as it goes, it often leaves the truly knowledgeable practitioners behind in the somewhat narrow circle they’ve been in. With the fragmentation of KM, more knowledgeable KM leaders (and followers) are needed lower down on the organisational chart.
Business communication has always been left out as a critical piece of management strategy – not just knowledge management strategy but all management strategy.
A few years ago J. David Pincus, Ph.D., MBA director and professor of communication in the College of Business Administration at the University of Arkansas, explained it to me in an article in Communication World.
Business schools do not ordinarily include communication in the core curricula. “What is required (by business schools) tends to be almost exclusively basic writing and verbal skills training,” he wrote. “Rare is the MBA program that insists students be exposed to strategic communications topics/issues, such as persuasion, issues management, customer relations and employee communication. Usually, such issues are incorporated as modules into elective courses, which are easily avoided by those who probably need them most.”
“Teaching communication skills without also teaching communication strategy (i.e., the rationale)” he said “is like telling a joke and forgetting the punch line.”
Well, here’s the terrible punch line for KM: we have built KM communication networks without accessing expertise in communication strategy. And communication is the heart and soul of knowledge work.
Effective communication is especially essential in a decentralised, flattened organisational structure that can no longer depend on command and control from the top down to achieve corporate goals and objectives. Communication must become the business tool that provides continuity and interaction across a horizontal structure.

KM vs. MBA
The architects of knowledge sharing initiatives, however, are often products of management curricula which, for the most part, are products of business schools fitting the Pincus description. As KM advocates, they’ve railed against hierarchy and then built a system of knowledge sharing that is hierarchical.
The fault, however, does not lie in the management track alone. With rare exception, professional business communicators are unaware of general business strategies, let alone the KM movement and the potential and need for communication to move from the fringe to the business core.
If business communicators think much at all about management, it is to voice woeful laments about how they are unappreciated in the executive suite. At most gatherings of business communicators, the topics rarely reflect a focus on management strategies of any kind, let alone an interest in the KM field.
Associate Professor Peter Saunders, PhD, director for the Center for Business Communication at Lehigh University College of Business and Economics, Bethlehem, Pa., is an exception. He addresses the failure of communicators to contribute to business strategies as a lead-in to a demonstration of his multi-media training model which is intended to introduce incoming MBAs to strategic planning.

BC marginalised
He hopes to take the product out of the classroom and into the corporate arena. “Why,” he asked, “does business communication remain a marginalised discipline outside of the core of most business programs? Why have the proponents of information technology within only a few years succeeded in getting their discipline recognised by academics and industry as essential to the success of American business while business communication faces faculty cuts and further exclusion from the core of business education?”
The problem predates KM and is a major factor in the failure of many previous business strategies. Saunders said his research team did a factor analysis of all the major strategic management texts and discovered communication was missing from the core elements.
“Then we surveyed management consultants and found that a large percentage of companies that form strategies fail to implement them,” he says.
In the study, “The consultants all agreed that very few companies came up with a good communications plan to follow through on business strategies,” Saunders said. This is a serious problem for any knowledge-based business preparing to compete in a digital economy which will rely on the convergence of management, technology and strategic communication. There are some points of light in this otherwise bleak picture, however. Lucent Technologies told Saunders, while he was shooting for his multi-media presentation, that the success of their divestiture from AT&T was due to the fact that Lucent “learned to communicate.”

Broken dreams
There have been some encouraging signs that the strategic value was gaining some purchase in management education programs. Ten years ago I came across these stories:

Professor Leslie Hitch, MBA, director, graduate programs in communications management, Simmons College, Boston, planned to add a four-week module in KM to her course on issues management. She also proposed to teach a full course on KM communications in the next year.
And, Mary Schaefer, director of communication, MIT Sloan School of Management, was writing, speaking and conducting research and workshops on the changing communication needs for managing knowledge.

Although Professor Hitch was teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences and Professional Studies at Simmons, her communications courses were influenced by her own MBA background. Unlike most business communicators, she was an astute observer of trends in management and looked for a useful connection between business strategies and business communication. She was aware of the KM movement and in touch with some of the best-known thinkers in the KM field including Debra Amidon, founder and chief consultant for Entovation International.
In addition, her students were responsible for her practical focus since they were usually working professionals who were looking for courses that would help them improve their performance and advance their careers.
Hitch ultimately proposed to team teach KM communications with a colleague, Sue Stafford, a professor of philosophy at Simmons, who is an expert in artificial intelligence.
“At first we considered developing a full graduate program in KM communication,” Hitch said at the time. But Stafford left for a one-year sabbatical and Hitch hoped to begin the project on her own the next semester with a four-week module in an existing course. Then she would team with Stafford in the fall of 1998 to offer a full KM course. “Whether it evolves past that depends on how the field develops and whether there is a need,” she said.
Hitch expected the first enrollees would be communication students, but thought the course would have to eventually reach out to an interdisciplinary audience. Hitch agreed with another colleague, “the way to bring communication to the KM field is not to get the communications person to understand KM, but to get KM people to understand the importance of communication”.
That colleague was Mary Schaefer, who – prior to joining MIT – was a futurist and analyst who helped companies develop more creative, effective ways to communicate and work in the 21st century. Schaefer had published a piece on strategic communication management earlier that year that presented “Eight Things Communicators Should Know and Do About Knowledge Management”.
“My theory, though,” she confided, “is that communicators won’t be the ones to do knowledge management. Too many think of themselves as information disseminators. Instead, we must educate knowledge managers about the need for using communication fundamentals to do effective knowledge management.”
Neither of these academics is still at her institution or engaged in knowledge management anywhere. As is so often the case, KM leaders refocus and move on to other areas of interest. A look at the offerings at both Simmons and MIT reveals the current faculty descriptions don’t include anyone with a featured interest in the relationship of management or KM and communications, and the courses the two professors dreamt of don’t show up.

More pessimism
Others are also pessimistic about the potential for business communicators in KM roles for the same and for different reasons. “Communication is this lost child that’s kind of floating around out there,” Saunders observed. At the college level, it is a field pushed and pulled by political forces that either compete for ‘ownership’ or dodge the responsibility. The subject can be found in a number of schools from the English and journalism departments to business and education. Content and emphasis vary widely, depending on the community of interest and too little of it is focused on business strategies. In the same manner, communication continues to float around when it reaches the business world.
On top of that, ‘communication’ – as an act – has lost its identity. Ask any search engine for the word and you will be sent to the telephone company, the cable operator or a host of technology sites. Even Merriam-Webster reflects the confusion, defining communication as both an act and a means. But communication is not technology and communication technology cannot produce the act of communication by itself. It is an enabler with a power that can be awesome when placed in the right hands.

Meeting the challenges
But where are the right hands? They have to be found; or they have to be created—quickly. Here are a few suggestions:

In the short term:

As a company, or as an incubator of KM within a company, include communication as a primary element in the campaign to change organisational culture;
Since KM is a cross-functional process, bring professional business communicators to the table, not as ancillary support people but as strategic partners;
Begin the relationship with cross-training. If there is a genuine exchange of knowledge, both managers and communicators should experience a fundamental change in their professional approaches. The process should lead to an attitude adjustment as well as broader understanding of the changing roles;
Learn not only from each other, but learn together in the new context of KM communication. Using third parties, the communicator can learn how to apply communication in a new way, as a value-added business tool; and, the manager can learn how to incorporate good communications planning into the strategic workplan;
Expand this process from the leadership team throughout the developing KM network. In the Knowledge Age, communication becomes a major part of everyone’s job. All will need to understand it in the KM context. Many will need retraining. Some will learn quicker than others and become champions and mentors;
Write communication into every job description, and create new jobs for communication specialists that redefine the role of communication to fit the core mission of the business process. Let them know that simply writing and verbalising won’t do in the Knowledge Age;
Make certain that recruiters let colleges and universities know you are looking for a new breed of business and communication graduate. Many educators do try to teach according to perceived business needs and they learn from job descriptions presented during the recruiting process. Mixed messages are sent when recruiters present traditional job descriptions even though they are really looking for people to fill non-traditional roles;
Also, let students know you are looking for a new breed. Just as schools will not invest in business communication offerings, students will not take communication electives if they are not aware it will make them more marketable and successful in their ensuing careers.

In the long term:

Encourage business schools to move business communications into the core curriculum as a strategic issue, not just writing and speaking;
Encourage educators in communication programs in other disciplines to introduce students to the business process – including KM – and connect the purpose of business communication to strategic action. This will be of particular benefit in the PR sequences of journalism schools.

Potential KM communicators can be found everywhere – on both sides of the management/communications divide. It is especially true as KM becomes embedded in the business process.
Even though managers may have missed out on business communication 101 during the MBA chase, that does not mean they have not acquired varying degrees of communications skills and strategies on the job. Conversely, every large organisation likely has business communicators, public relations practitioners, marketing people who have enough interest in the business process to become savvy KM communicators. Many will eagerly adapt in order to finally have the chance to join the business core.
Therefore, whether or not we can find or develop KM communicators is not the issue.
The real question is: When will we elevate communication to that of management and technology as a central element of the business process?