KM University

This month’s tutor: Stan Garfield – Worldwide Consulting and Integration Knowledge Management Program for Hewlett-Packard Services.

In 1996 I was asked by the senior vice president of my business unit to start a KM programme following a visit to Ernst & Young’s Center for Business Knowledge in Cleveland, Ohio. When he heard that Ernst & Young had a chief knowledge officer (CKO), he turned to me and said, “I want you to be our CKO”. This made it sound simple, but it turned out that a lot of time and effort were needed to get our KM program off the ground.

Along the way, I had to endure many ups and downs, enlist allies in the cause, get executive sponsorship from a succession of leaders, deal with constant organisational change, adjust to changing technology, migrate from and integrate with legacy software, exercise diplomacy with many other groups and cope with two large-scale corporate mergers.

In my opinion, the basics of KM have broadly stayed the same for the past ten years. The fundamental goals are unchanged, the challenges are much the same and the basic categories of people, process and technology still apply. What has changed is the technology, the acceptance of KM as a strategic initiative and the willingness of organisations to assign people to the roles of knowledge manager and knowledge assistant.

We still struggle to persuade people to spend time sharing and re-using knowledge, it can still be hard to find information and expense budgets are still tight.

But more people are practicing KM today, there are more ways for practitioners to share their thinking (with weblogs, for example) and building blocks, such as communities, team spaces and taxonomies, are now in widespread use. Emerging tools and techniques are being tried and tested in KM programs to better address existing requirements and to enable new capabilities.

The challenges for KM include creating new knowledge to stimulate innovation, expanding and better exploiting people networks, incorporating narrative in all knowledge initiatives and making it easier to find information when it is needed for better decision making. KM is here to stay and by applying its fundamental concepts of learning from the past, re-using good ideas and avoiding past mistakes, KM practitioners can ensure that their initiatives will succeed.

The books which have had the most influence on me are those with the following attributes:

1. Well written. They must be clear, concise and articulate, and contain a minimum of jargon;

2. Logical. The arguments should be well-formulated and appeal to logical thinking;

3. Iconoclastic. The authors must be willing to stake out new or unpopular positions and not conform to existing thinking, trends and fads.

For KM University, I selected a baker’s dozen of books which stood out from the many others that I have read. Not all of them are strictly KM, but they have all influenced my thinking and the way that I approach KM.

Knowledge management

‘The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization’ by Thomas Stewart. Published Currency/Random House (2003);
‘Working Knowledge’ by Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak. Published by Harvard Business School Press (2000);
‘Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Results from Knowledge Workers’ by Thomas Davenport. Published by Harvard Business School Press (2005).

Narrative and leadership

‘Squirrel Inc. A Fable of Leadership through Storytelling’ by Stephen Denning. Published by Jossey-Bass (2004);
‘The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative’ by Stephen Denning. Published by Jossey-Bass (2005).

Management and project management

‘Why Employees Don’t Do What They’re Supposed to Do – And What to Do About It’ by Ferdinand Fournies. Published by McGraw-Hill (1999);
‘The Mythical Man-Month’ by Fred Brooks. Published by Addison-Wesley Professional (1995);
‘Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams’ – by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Published by Dorset House (1999).

Marketing

‘Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Published by McGraw-Hill (2000);
‘Marketing Warfare’ by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Published by McGraw-Hill (2005);
‘Focus: The Future Of Your Company Depends On It’ by Al Ries. Published by Collins (2005).

Sales

‘Why Customers Don’t Do What You Want Them To Do’ by Ferdinand Fournies. Published by McGraw-Hill (1994);
‘SPIN Selling’ by Neil Rackham. Gower Publishing (1995).

Wealth of knowledge

I’d like to focus on what I learned from Tom Stewart’s ‘The Wealth of Knowledge’. I gave this to all 50 attendees at HP’s last worldwide KM meeting and led a discussion in our KM forum about some of the insights gained from reading the book.

Stewart’s book defines the following key elements of a KM programme, based on Denning’s experience at the World Bank:

Communities of practice;
Place (online presence for communities);
Help desk;
Yellow Pages (who-knows-what directory);
Primer (frequently asked questions);
Knowledge artifacts (records of prior projects, emphasising best practice and lessons learned);
Bulletin board;
Doorway (provision for outside access).

I have found this to provide a useful framework for benchmarking the KM programme that I lead. I was pleased to find that at HP we had implementations for each of these. It also prompted me to add links to HP’s expertise locator tools to the Knowledge Network, our KM home page.

Chapter six, “The Case Against Knowledge Management”, describes ‘the Kraken’, a project based on a Lotus Notes e-mail list for general Q&As at one organisation. “The founders imagined people would spark discussion by uploading white papers and the like. That is, they expected users to pile logs of content on the fireplace, generating fire in the form of questions, critiques and so on. Instead, the spark comes first. 80 per cent of Kraken traffic starts with questions: Does anybody know? Has anybody ever done something like…?”

“The Kraken differs from KnowledgeCurve [another initiative]. The latter is supply-side; it’s full of documents and other explicit knowledge…The Kraken’s a conversation; KnowledgeCurve and its cousins are compendiums. KnowledgeCurve is about teaching; the Kraken is about learning.”

This became the topic of a lively thread in HP’s KM discussion forum.

Knowledge networks

The importance of getting knowledge moving around an organisation is dealt with succinctly elsewhere: “Connection, not collection: That’s the essence of KM. The purpose of projects, therefore, is to get knowledge moving, not to freeze it; to distribute it, not to shelve it.”

Too many KM initiatives over-emphasise capture – collecting lots of documents, but not enabling people to effectively re-use them. At HP, we have made the phrase ‘connection, not collection’ one of the key themes of our KM programme.

Stewart has influenced KM at HP in other ways, too. On page 313, he makes the following important point: “Don’t use too many measurements: He who tracks everything knows nothing.” After reading this, we cut the number of KM metrics from five to three.

In the chapter, ‘Measuring the Efficiency of Knowledge Work and Knowledge Workers’, he provides two lists. One, culled from various sources, lists possible ways to measure how efficiently human, structural and customer capital are deployed (see www.go2cio.com/articles/index.php?id=1474 for the full list).

The second comes from Wouter de Vries, who lists a dozen factors critical to the success of a KM project or initiative:

Knowledge vision: Do we know what knowledge we need for this project or in this line of business?
A clear connection to performance: Will this save money? Grow sales?
A knowledge-friendly structure. For example, teams versus functional silos;
A knowledge-friendly culture: Do people share or hoard?
Adequacy of resources;
Technical infrastructure: How good are our KM tools?
Knowledge structure: Have we established a vocabulary and taxonomy for the knowledge we are using?
Motivation: Are the right incentives in place?
Clarity of purpose and goals;
Is there a common terminology about KM itself?
Senior management support;
Power: How great is our ability to break through the organisational barriers we encounter?

Details such as these are valuable for KM project managers. I recommend this book to all KM professionals.

Garfield joined HP's predecessor organisation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1983 and launched its first knowledge management (KM) programme in 1996 – a programme that was widely regarded as trail-blazing.

DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998 and Garfield therefore developed the corporate KM strategy there, before it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2001. Garfield holds a degree in computer science from Washington University in St. Louis.

For articles on KM by or about Stan Garfield, along with KM-related links, please visit http://groups.msn.com/KnowledgeManagement

He can be contacted at stanley.garfield@hp.com