Top 5 Insights - Chaitrav.com
Over the last year, I have been leading change to transform knowledge management for the entire Sales Force at Microsoft. As a result of this experience, I’ve learned that the journey to accomplish any desired business outcome requires a lot of patience, effort and time. The following are my top five insights that have helped me to get through the challenges that I’ve faced during this journey:
- Knowledge management means transforming your business productivity – I have realized that transforming knowledge management requires a solid business case to justify business productivity. All of our effort was geared towards improving the discoverability of people and content which enhances productivity. In this, Search, Navigation and Content Management became an essential focus for transforming the overall knowledge management.
- Effective management of knowledge requires hybrid solutions involving both people and technology. This was a very tough one. I spent so much time on trying to figure out what we needed to deliver and what an experience to manage and share knowledge would be but in the end, the most progress came from working closely with IT partners and business stakeholders to define and agree upon business requirements and business processes. Only through this joint collaboration were we able to build an experience that would deliver the effective management of knowledge.
- Knowledge management is highly political: Everyone in the company owns knowledge and their perspective is the right one. If you don’t manage expectations correctly, you will be dealing with strong pushback every step of the way. My recommendation is to build a strong coalition. It is especially important to include those that are providing the strongest pushback, once those individuals are involved and share the weight of the change; they will understand the importance of collaboration and moving forward with solutions that meet all expectations. Pushback is always a strong indicator that something needs to be heard, if you start listening, you’ll find that everything will start to fall into place and your stakeholders will respect the process that much more. A knowledge management council is the perfect chance for this cross collaboration and it will inevitably guide the evolution of the experience.
- Sharing and using knowledge are often unnatural acts. The different needs for knowledge vary by different roles in the company. By enabling technology that allows for precisions, you add value to everyone’s daily productivity. In order to accomplish this, you have to define a process where users can easily get engaged, download the information they need, when they need it and also share their perspective on the content and their experience
- Knowledge management means improving knowledge work processes. Knowledge worker processes are rarely addressed in process improvement initiatives. We hear challenges as “Unable to find information or people”, “Search is not working” and “Navigation is very difficult”. All these challenges are addressed by implementing better technology and stronger taxonomy. The root cause of these challenges can often be the poor segmentation of employees and their workload. Once you segment the employees into their appropriate workloads, you will be able to define a solution that will deliver knowledge in a way that can help them quickly accomplish their task.
To improve the business productivity through Knowledge Management, the mantra I follow is: Build a KM council and work together to build a case for change. If you or your team are doing it alone for your company, stop and rethink your KM strategy. If you have the chance, let me know your insights on implementing knowledge management and sharing experiences for your company. What works and what does not work?
