posted 9 Apr 2010 in Volume 13 Issue 6

Building communities

Continuing her 'Challenging preconceptions' series, Cora Newell and Richard Hare discuss the evolution of KM and collaboration tools at British American Tobacco.

This article reveals how a move from British American Tobacco’s information technology (IT) function into human resources (HR) prompted the knowledge management (KM) team to experiment with innovative approaches of design thinking, usability and social media to understand the needs of its internal customers.

The potential of KM was first explored at British American Tobacco back in 2000, by an internal division aptly named ‘Imagine Evolution’. Its brief was to investigate new working practices as the internet at that time was starting to have an effect on business, but the possibilities for collaboration had yet to be fully understood.

Aware of KM’s promise to help smart organisations to learn collectively from their successes and failures through online collaboration tools and cognisant of British Petroleum’s approach to such tools – as outlined by Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell in their book Learning to Fly – Imagine Evolution was soon preaching the gospel of ‘learning before, during and after’, running retrospects and after-action reviews and publishing knowledge assets in specially designed intranet applications.

Genesis
A KM team was formally created within IT in 2002 to assume responsibility for the tools Imagine Evolution had developed. Under the leadership of a team leader from this division, four volunteers and two full-time consultants began engaging with the business by working on an intranet site to advertise KM tools and methods. The team built knowledge assets from ‘lessons learned’ engagements and devised a three-tier KM service strategy. This included a self-service level, which enabled users to request access to tools and training so they could run their own after-action reviews, as well as a managed service provision, which provided for the whole process to be run by the KM team.

Three IT business engagement managers were recruited as KM champions, to look for KM opportunities as part of their own work and recommend appropriate tools to the business.

Learning to fail
After several months of design and development work, the KM team launched its new intranet site early in 2003. It looked like nothing else on the intranet and its strong branding made a big initial impact; generating significant awareness throughout the business and provoking many positive comments. But three months after the launch, negative feedback started to come through. People didn’t understand the site or what they were meant to do with it. It was hard to find things. Although the site eventually led to several managed service engagements, there was little in the way of self-service KM generated. This feedback helped the team to realise the importance of prioritising usability during the design process for subsequent tools.

Later on that same year, KM merged with intranet development to form a new team of six and continued its focus on developing technology and processes for KM yet sadly the needs of the end user were still neglected at this time. Interestingly, there were tools available that had been created by other teams, which tried to address the needs of the end users – for example, online communities and an expertise location tool, ‘BAT Connect’. New social and business networking tools like Friendster and LinkedIn were starting to appear on the internet, but the benefits of linking people together were still not properly understood. People, it seemed, were not a priority. This was about to change.

A new coalition of learning and knowledge
In 2004, HR decided to improve capabilities in both learning (viewed within the organisation as a personal activity) and knowledge development (considered an organisational activity). This led to the KM team moving to HR after its 18-month debut within IT, under a newly appointed head of learning and knowledge. His brief was to look at KM more strategically but this proved something of a challenge as much of the KM team’s time was taken up compensating for a skills shortage within the company, in connection with outsourced technical work.

The change of leadership saw the introduction of a set of guiding principles selected by the team to become more customer focused. These guidelines were based on Tom Peters’ book The Professional Service Firm 50, in which 50 practices common to professional service firms are examined to see how managers can use them to refocus and reinvigorate their teams. A documentary by the name of ‘The Deep Dive’1 about Ideo – a design company whose methodology was rooted in design thinking2 and involves ethnographic research to gather information – was screened. The KM team added Deep Dive to its toolset, running workshops to encourage innovative thinking in the business. But more benefit was actually gained from adopting the Ideo method of placing the consumer at the centre of the design process. The first tool to benefit from this approach was the KM site, which developed into a prototype content management and knowledge repository tool, called SiteBuilder.

Building sites
SiteBuilder simplified content management so that anyone familiar with word processing could use it. Its success was assured when, quite independently, the internal communications team announced a new set of branding guidelines for corporate communication but omitted to include the intranet, Interact. Without any branding guidelines, Interact’s pages all looked different and its content suffered as a result. The KM team saw its opportunity. Moving quickly, it worked with the design agency responsible for the rebrand and developed a set of five corporate templates for websites, including SiteBuilder. Its release demonstrated to content managers that attractive new sites could be built quickly and easily without spending money on external design agencies. Within a year, Interact had a more coherent look and the problem of out-of-date content was significantly reduced.

Further developments followed that year. In the summer, an internal communications consultant and ex-journalist working in operations, contacted the KM team asking for a blog and one team member was assigned to see if there was any software available on the internet. Although not appreciated at the time, this request would have a significant impact on the KM team’s future direction.

Internal blogging
The blogging tools investigated were mostly disappointing and two shareware based attempts failed to deliver a satisfactory user experience. The team added blogging to a new version of SiteBuilder and one early adopter of the tool was the business services management team. This group of ten managers was responsible for the IT services provided by an off-shore internal organisation known as ‘group service delivery’. The team quickly built up an audience, both within group service delivery and the rest of the organisation, as each manager committed to write one post every two weeks. Though most of the team had little previous writing experience, the personal viewpoints expressed helped to build links between the managers based in the UK, and their teams based in Malaysia.

Svetlana in marketing was one individual who couldn’t understand why people were wasting their time blogging, but has since become social media’s most passionate advocate. Her blog on the company’s withdrawal of free biscuits from meeting rooms became the hottest topic on BlogCentral and ensured that the debate was seen and heard by the facilities team, which tacitly acknowledged its failure to communicate the change properly. This is one example of how something that could have been a potential embarrassment for the company on a public site was dealt with by open debate inside the firewall.

British American Tobacco’s BlogCentral now attracts 3,000 internal visitors a month and continues to grow. Two directors – from finance and human resources – write blogs for their functional leadership teams, which attract significant traffic and comments. Subjects discussed range from business matters like the introduction of new travel policies and the restructuring of the finance function, to the state of the lifts in the group’s London head office.

More restructuring and a new strategic direction
Budget pressure and changing business needs led to the team being cut again at the beginning of 2005 to three core members – people either moved on or were assigned to other parts of the organisation to continue the less strategic intranet delivery work.

To reflect its mission to facilitate collaboration and innovation, the newly slimmed down team adopted a strategic direction based on ‘connect, collaborate, innovate’. Any new tools the team considered would be measured against this to assess their strategic fit.

The team’s confidence in its abilities grew, as did its ambitions. A new project was run in partnership with IT and explored the potential future of Interact in an attempt to reposition it as a collaboration tool rather than a tool for communication. IT’s support would help to communicate the vision as well as provide benchmarks and potential direction.

Building communities
HR managers responsible for change management approached the KM team wanting to build ‘a proper community’ for their area and so the CommunityBuilder – a workshop aimed at breaking down interpersonal barriers to collaboration – was created.

The team explored a range of options to avoid sitting people in a room and telling them what to do. The workshop would be designed around the participants as opposed to the subject of change management. The focus would be on building relationships between the community members – most of whom had never met before – and helping them learn more about each other. In this way change management objectives would be met. The importance of the workshop being fun was agreed. Participation needed to be enjoyable and carry across into the community’s future work.

The knowledge café format popularised by David Gurteen was a strong candidate for consideration, but the team eventually decided on more directed activities as CommunityBuilder needed to actively involve everyone present.

The result was a one-day workshop mixing different narrative-based activities. The centrepiece was a storytelling circle where members talked about their experience of participation in a community. The facilitators recorded the behaviours and attributes discussed and played them back to the community members during the stage where they discussed how their community might function.

Other activities required participants to bring along important personal items as a springboard for their stories and the day’s activities were completed with a high-speed quiz where members asked each other off-the-wall questions to provoke conversation. The workshops finished with a visit to a local restaurant for some less-structured interaction.

The results surprised many of the participants. New ties formed and people who shared an office related how they had learned new things about each other. The change management community would face more challenges as it developed, but CommunityBuilder helped to create a sound foundation for its work as a group.

CommunityBuilder was used globally to help break down barriers to the building of smooth relationships between people located in different countries.

Promoting communities
In 2006, the team’s leader suggested British American Tobacco further promote its online community tool, CommunitySpace, and follow the example of British Airways by introducing a forum for employees to discuss the football World Cup within the space. ‘What’s new’ links on the homepage directed people to the new community, which quickly became the most popular page on Interact. The use of CommunitySpace increased over subsequent months but it was still hard to find and experimentation wasn’t easy. A redesign helped to promote CommunitySpace, with the allocation of a dedicated tab on the homepage. The link that invited potential community leaders to ‘request a community’ was replaced with ‘create a community’, enabling more experimentation and helping to increase use.

The KM team learned that not all groups required facilitation to form relationships. The management trainees group had a strong desire to learn about the organisation and to build personal networks. The trainees have had their own discussion groups for nearly ten years now, but the bespoke system on Interact suffered from burdensome administration due to the closed system’s requirement for passwords and restricted access. This was a bore for both the KM team and trainees alike.

The decision to set up a new open community within CommunitySpace removed that issue, while also ensuring the conversation focused more on business. Within two months the new community had over two hundred members and there was a constant flow of questions and knowledge. The management trainee community remains one of the most lively knowledge sharing groups in the organisation to date.

A new HR dawns
With 2006 came the start of a new self-service project to create an online ‘one-stop shop’ within Interact for the customers of the talent division of HR. When the KM team investigated the processes involved, it became clear that there were many interdependencies between the talent division and other HR pillars, such as reward and remuneration, learning and knowledge, and culture. Therefore, the project required a new integrated approach. This resulted in the reorganisation of the HR site as a whole.

The KM team used this as opportunity to redesign the Interact homepage and restructure its content based on user expectations rather than organisational hierarchy or ownership. A new design methodology played a big part in the project’s success. A ‘card sorting’3 workshop (a mass-consultation technique used in design and intranet circles to understand how a particular group organises its information – in this case a structure of links on a website) helped the team understand how employees, managers and HR staff wanted the information on the site to be organised. Users were videotaped using prototypes to get their feedback and to benchmark their increased efficiency at performing specified tasks.

The new design went live in 2007 to great acclaim, setting the standard for organising information within a business function’s site. HR was happy to be seen to lead from the front with such a tool hoping to spur the rest of the company to catch up. Much of the next three years was spent helping end users migrate their own homepages, stored in the same Lotus Domino database, to the new Amazon.com-style tabbed design.

The KM team had now started to build relationships with people in the business who would support social media tools. And social networking, four years on, was at last firmly on the agenda with the development of Facebook in the mainstream internet.

Getting social
The informal social media community quickly set its priorities. If an updated version of BAT Connect could replace several existing people directories and Twitter-like microblogging and the ability to connect with other Interact users like Facebook, could also be added, the mixed group of people from the various business functions which wished to experiment with these new tools would agree to fund the work.

Launched quietly in 2008, Connect quickly spread over the first three weeks before an official announcement helped it become the most widely used tool on Interact. A measure of its success is that of the 26,000 registered Interact users, over 19,000 have been found to use Connect in a six-month period. Connect also enables people to contact their peers in the handful of markets which have their own additional non-Interact intranets.

All Connect users see a newsfeed on their homepage, which shows what their connections have done, whether they’ve connected to other employees, posted to a blog or joined a community. This increases the user’s ambient awareness of the activity around them.

An unexpected side effect of Connect is that more people now update their profiles. When Connect was seen as merely a directory, there was an expectation that this was someone else’s job. Since it has become a networking tool, people have started to see updating their own profiles as their own responsibility.

Connect has now become the de facto source of people-based information at British American Tobacco. Management information on employees is imported from the SAP (an enterprise resource planning system commonly found in most large organisations) to populate the organisational structure charts, which Connect generates on-the-fly whenever someone opens a Connect record. Work is now continuing to make Connect the visible front end to British American Tobacco’s implementation of Active Directory.

A more integrated future
Although the KM team was cut to two people at the turn of the year, the team’s vision of a joined-up organisation is becoming a reality.

As the tools British American Tobacco uses to communicate and collaborate have become more integrated, the organisation itself moves in the same direction. The pressure to reduce cost and stretch existing resources increases with the consolidation of factories leading to more above-market4 working and regional collaboration.

The need to support this integrated future with simple, effective tools to connect people is now greater than ever.

References

‘ABC Nightline: The Deep Dive’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_thinking
Participants group together information on a set of cards into categories that make most sense to them. Averaging the results tells you the most efficient arrangement of the information
The production of products for different markets, which means that factories can no longer consider their needs a priority over those of other markets which they now serve

Richard Hare is an independent consultant who has worked with British American Tobacco for over ten years. He can be contacted at richard@flareconsulting.com or http://www.twitter/richardhare

Cora Newell is a senior KM adviser and solicitor with wide experience of city firm practice. She is a member of the Inside Knowledge editorial board and founder of KM Insight Consulting, a consultancy which offers advisory and change management services to firms wishing to develop their knowledge capabilities, information management and business efficiency. A regular speaker at major KM and legal conferences, she can be contacted at newell@kminsightconsulting.com