denotes premium content | May 24 2013 Feature
posted 1 Nov 1998 in Volume 2 Issue 3
Getting on the I-Way for
Knowledge
By
embedding explicit knowledge connections on an intranet, the doorway to
nurturing implicit knowledge can be opened. Marc Baker shows how this has been
achieved at Royal Mail.
The train now departing platform six
is the intranet express calling at Information Management halt, Knowledge
Management city and terminating at Wisdom Junction - all aboard. Intranets are
the siren call of the 1990's. At almost every conference you attend, regardless
of the professional discipline, you will undoubtedly come across someone
extolling the beneficial impacts of their organisation's intranet and its
ability to manage knowledge, information, ambiguity or any other
resource.
Intranets are the Chris Evans of the information landscape; they are
sexy, brash, empowering and a little bit anarchic. But are they a potential
panacea to the very practical problem of managing an organisation's knowledge?
Intranets clearly help share information between people but should organizations
put all their eggs in the intranet basket, or would they be wiser to consider
other potential approaches to creating a knowledge supporting organisation?
Using RM Consulting as a case study I hope to provide some signposts from our
own learning. Be warned however - no answers will be provided! One of the
distinguishing characteristics of Knowledge Management in its current phase of
evolution is that there are more questions than answers.
Background to RM
consulting
In 1992 Royal Mail set up an organisation to provide an internal
consultancy and project management capability. This was mainly for the British
Post Office, but was increasingly applied to other post offices across the
world, where such capabilities could be used strategically to improve the
quality of the international mail services. RM Consulting - as it became known
in 1995 - has as its core competence the ability to leverage and deploy the
knowledge of its people to the benefit of the Post Office as a whole. It
recognises that its only asset is its intellectual capital and that this is
largely tied up in the knowledge of its people. To quote from the business plan,
RM Consulting ' ...customises knowledge for the postal and related distribution
markets. It acquires knowledge, shapes it, enhances it, deploys it and preserves
it. The successful management and exploitation of knowledge will become ever
more important to the transformation of Royal Mail, the post office and the
global distribution network'.
To maximise the development and
application of that knowledge, a large scale change management program was
developed based around organisational development and the deployment of a
framework of tools. The vision for the program was to deploy the right knowledge
to the right people at the right time and in the right format.
Business
drivers
Like most organizations we are operating in an environment where clients
demand higher quality and more innovative solutions. They want it delivered
faster and quicker, with increased value for money. In parallel, as we expand to
support our global ambitions, there is increasing competition from other
consultancies. This is a typical situation facing most businesses in the 1990's.
As an organisation with flexible resourcing strategies and a turnover of some
13% pa in our non permanent (associate) resource, we needed to ensure that we
understood our peoples' skills and capabilities in order to capture their
knowledge.
Knowledge program
Our knowledge program is based on a
number of fundamental assumptions which have helped shape both its nature and
scope, and help to position the intranet within that program. These are:-
1) Knowledge is
transitory - it has a time limit on its potential application
2) Knowledge is
contextual - without understanding the reasons, assumptions and context that
knowledge is based on, then it can be misleading, inappropriate and potentially
dangerous
3)
Knowledge is personal - you cannot manage knowledge, it is in the brains of
individuals
4)
Knowledge only adds value when we share lessons from its application - learning
lessons as an individual and keeping them to yourself adds no value to the
knowledge base of other individuals and is therefore of limited value to the
organisation
Although we work on the principle that knowledge cannot be managed, we
believe that the enablers that support knowledge share and knowledge creation
can be managed. These enablers consist of information, skills, experience,
personal capability and culture. They can be expressed in the following way
:
knowledge =
(information + (skills + experience) * personal capability) culture
Types of
Knowledge
To understand the positioning of the knowledge program and the intranet
it is necessary to distinguish between the two main types of knowledge -
explicit or tangible knowledge and tacit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is
largely articulated in words, numbers and pictures. Knowledge in this form can
be stored, manipulated and shared fairly easily. Tacit knowledge consists of
insights, intuitions and instincts. These are always personal to an individual
and difficult to articulate.1
If organizations have some form of
memory then it can be identified as the sum of explicit plus tacit knowledge.
The objective of the knowledge program is to embed explicit knowledge into the
processes of the organisation so that it is instinctive. It will then provide
opportunities and an environment which supports tacit knowledge share.
The issue facing
knowledge
program architects is how to enable the sharing or conversion process
around these different types of knowledge. Each type of knowledge conversion
requires a different set of approaches to support it in action. For example, in
converting from tacit to explicit knowledge we are dealing with processes which
support individuals to develop conceptual knowledge. One approach for tackling
this is to provide support for individuals to learn through a coach or mentor.
Organising for Knowledge
The challenge is to design an organisation
where the processes, values, beliefs, structure, people and culture are
all supportive of the overall need to manage our knowledge in the most effective
way. Initiatives that support this change should aim to integrate people,
processes and technology. They should be supported by the company s
organisational design and business strategy (see Figure 2). If we consider the
implications of this for the application of intranet technology, then we need to
consider elements such as personal motivation, training, supporting systems and
above all culture as part of our approach. People will only consider using
intranet technology if they are able and more essentially willing to share their
knowledge.
Figure
2
However, they should also be
assessed on how well they facilitate the acquisition, creation, transfer and
exploitation of knowledge. These areas should be the Critical Success Factors for judging
the effectiveness of the intranet. It is here where the limitations of
traditional intranet technology are exposed. If we refer to the complexity of
knowledge conversion in Figure 1, it is clear that intranets largely support explicit
to explicit (systematic) knowledge conversion only and are not suitable
for supporting other dimensions of the knowledge quadrant. Indeed, Sarah
Cliffe writing in a recent Harvard Business Review article suggests that 'if a company
tries to use an intranet database to exchange complex, tacit knowledge it is to
likely fail.'2
The Intranet challenge
Let us
look at RM Consulting as an example of the complexity of our knowledge
management problem. We have one thousand people working in twenty one diverse
practitioner groups (organised around technical capabilities) working on over
twelve hundred assignments per year, each generating substantial supporting
paperwork and over three hundred individual Lotus Notes databases. Therefore,
even with a supportive culture and a clearly defined process to capture, deploy,
apply and review our knowledge, our information sources are still very hard to
find. The problem we have is creating a system to locate the correct individuals
with the appropriate knowledge.
The challenge is to use technology in
ways which support navigation through the organisation's information sources and
encourage the serendipity and spontaneity associated with tacit to tacit
knowledge conversion. We need a solution that gives people time to apply their
learning to key-value added activities and reduce their workload on non-value
adding activities such as searching for information. This can be achieved
through making content location irrelevant; by encouraging informal networks and
communities of people with similar interests looking to exchange common
knowledge. Finally the technology needs to support our people in learning and
unlearning, allowing them time for reflection.
Speed of access and
information retrieval efficiency are key elements of knowledge share, knowledge leverage
and creation. People need to be able to access relevant information quickly, and
use the intranet to put people in touch with the correct people.
Information overload is the potential downside of this virtual paper pile gathering.
As information comes out of its previously inaccessible silo's and
foxholes, organising for knowledge can become a paradoxical nightmare. Without
careful management, the intranet can leave users feeling overloaded with
valueless unchannelled information, which makes it difficult to identify any
information pertinent to their needs. In addition, intranets can encourage slow
unlearning of historical best practice as there is a tendency to treat
published information as the 'answer' rather than simply one potential approach that
worked in a particular context.
Intelligent profiling
Having defined
the problem, what is our approach to finding some possible solutions? One
approach may lie in combining intranet usage with intelligent profiling
technologies to create better navigation through the information maze.
Intelligent profiling
uses software agents to search across multiple information sources for documents
matching an individual's area of interest. Users create and train agents by
typing a paragraph in normal English, indicating the subject they want to
explore. The profiling software then abstracts the main ideas from the text and
creates an agent trained to search on these key concepts. The agents are sent
off to search a number of information sources, both internal to the organisation
such as Lotus Notes databases, word documents etc. and also external sources
held on the Internet. The results of these searches are e-mailed to the user who
can access the individual documents with highlighted content which matches their
interest.
Following the result of the search which can be conducted while the user
is off-line, the search paragraph contained in the agent can be updated or
retrained by referencing documents found in the search. In this way individual
agents are specifically personalised to a user's interest.
As an individual reads the documents
the agents are updated by recalculating interest levels in the different ideas.
Concepts that once occurred frequently but have lost their importance are
replaced over time. In this way, the system keeps pace with an individual's
changing interests.
To support our requirement of encouraging tacit knowledge share through
identifying communities of interest, the profiling agents compare subject
definition with other agents set up by other individuals in the organisation.
They then highlight the people who appear to be interested in similar subjects.
This allows individuals to be put in touch with colleagues from other
practitioner groups who appear to be interested in similar areas.
Initial
Findings
The initial findings from our pilot projects indicate that profiling
technologies will not entirely fulfil our information location needs across the
Internet/intranet. However, they are a very useful approach to support the
acquisition of information. Profiling is particularly good for proactive
research, acting as a catalyst for new insights and ideas. In addition, we have
also found that profiling influences the way users think about their information
requirements, exposing different levels of effectiveness in personal information
management. Individuals who particularly benefit from using this technology
display certain learning styles. They change their behaviour to give thought to
the type and form of information needed to undertake their assignments.
Conclusion
Intranets are here to stay and have a
clear role to play in managing information within an organisation. However, they
have their limitations as a knowledge management tool, particularly as a focus
on explicit to explicit knowledge share. This is only one of many approaches
that can be used. Intranets can help individuals understand the know
what question, but only personal contact between individuals can help answer
the 'know why'.
Knowledge codification in an intranet has the advantage of making it
more replicable, thereby making explicit knowledge transfer easier. However,
without a clear understanding of the assumptions and context behind the explicit
knowledge the process can be dangerous, as people may use this knowledge
inappropriately.
Profiling technology has a part to play in helping organizations manage
their explicit knowledge by providing a means of organising access to large
volumes of unstructured information across a multitude of information sources.
However, intranets and profiling are not the complete answer. An integrated
program is required that encompasses all aspects of knowledge conversion.
Marc Baker is a
Senior Consultant at Royal Mail and can be contacted at: Marc.Baker@RoyalMail.co.uk or autonomy@autonomy.com.
