Fast, Simple, Cheap, Effective knowledge management

1. Fast, simple, cheap, effective
Knowledge Management
Barry Thomas, Shirlaws Business Coach
“Knowledge management” is a buzzword only a consultant could love but, whatever
you call it, the underlying concept is an important competency for any business. The
sum total of things that your business knows - how things get built, how services get
delivered, how stakeholders are engaged, how competitors are competed with, how
regulators are appeased, and so on - is by far your most valuable asset. Knowing
what you know, and being able to access all that knowledge when and where you
need it, is a fundamental prerequisite for a successful, long-lived and consistently
growing business.
Knowledge management does, however, have a well deserved reputation for high
costs, high failure rates and commensurately shaky returns on investment. In large
part this is because of the common assumption that knowledge management is a
hard problem best solved by the application of sophisticated technology. In fact the
core issues are almost entirely behavioural rather than technical, and even the
technical challenges can be addressed with inexpensive and relatively
unsophisticated tools.
Keep it simple
The model outlined here is perhaps best suited to smaller businesses (say, 25 to
100 employees) that have found themselves growing into knowledge management
problems but the underlying principles could be applied at any scale. These
principles are:
Principle 1: Use a Wiki
There are plenty of sophisticated knowledge management platforms available and
many of them have very impressive capabilities - but knowledge management is an
area where simple open source software can deliver most of the necessary bang for
very little buck1 .
“Wiki” is a Hawaiian word meaning “fast” but on the Web it has come to mean a
simple online database that may be edited and added to by many people. Wikiʼs are
1 This is particularly true where hosted or “cloud” based software is used.
© Barry Thomas 2010! 1 of 5

2. simple to use and manage, very cheap to run, and well-proven at even the vastest
of scales (Wikipedia is, as the name suggests, a simple wiki at heart). The cost of
establishing and operating a wiki is so low that you can easily afford to experiment
and make mistakes along the way.
A wiki completely changes the dynamics of knowledge capture and dissemination.
Wikiʼs inherently encourage collaborative and piecemeal writing - that is, they make
it easy to quickly create a new topic for others to complete or to add a paragraph or
two to a topic created by someone else. If you get something wrong itʼs easy to go
back and fix it because the wiki, as a single “source of truth”, need only be corrected
once - thereʼs never any need to recall and replace copies of outdated
documentation. Conversely if your fix is itself wrong itʼs easy to roll back to an
earlier, correct version because wikiʼs have comprehensive versioning and audit
trails built in.
In traditional knowledge management the role of the wiki is usually taken by an
Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) of some kind. These systems
typically enforce some form of categorisation of documents via a formal taxonomy
with the aim of ensuring that every document can quickly be found again. This was a
very sensible idea in times past but these days powerful search engines can reliably
find a needle in any sized haystack. Thus it now makes sense to do away with all
the arcane rules and allow users to label documents with whatever tags (the
impressive-sounding term for these tags is “metadata”) that they think make sense2 .
Again wikiʼs are well adapted to this approach.
Principle 2: Rough and ready beats slick and unfinished
One reason why capturing knowledge (or, to use knowledge management
terminology, “making implicit knowledge explicit”) can be so difficult is that the
people who know the most valuable things rarely have the time, inclination or the
writing skills to produce well-crafted documentation. Insecurity about grammar and
expression is an under-appreciated barrier to people sharing what they know - so
having a knowledge base that looks a little rough can actually be a big positive. It
gives permission to contributors to just express themselves naturally. Ideally your
staff should see contributing to the knowledge base as being more like dashing off a
2For a more detailed justification of this approach the book “Everything is Miscellaneous” by
David Weinberger is highly recommended.
© Barry Thomas 2010! 2 of 5

3. quick email than composing a formal policy or procedure3. Once the raw material is
in place a professional writer will be able to quickly turn the important content into
professionally structured and edited documentation, should that be considered
necessary.
Principle 3: Make it a habit, make it social
Bulding knowledge management into a business is mostly about changing habits.
Modern neuroscience tells us that the best way to change a habit is to give the
desired new behaviour sustained and focussed attention. In practical terms what this
means is that the knowledge base (be it wiki-based or built on some other
framework) must be made a fixture of daily life for staff. Failure to achieve this is the
root cause of the white elephant status of many knowledge management programs
and systems.
So how do you get people to use the knowledge base often enough to make it a
habit? Make it social - that is, borrow some ideas from hugely popular social media
sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For instance:
• Make detailed profiles of each staff member (perhaps including responsibilities,
KPIʼs and key skills) a part of the knowledge base and allow staff to add whatever
additional material they like
• Enable staff to post status messages (e.g. to announce what they are working on
or to pose questions) on their personal profile page, and to “follow” status
message streams from co-workers as a way of keeping in touch
• Integrate Instant Messaging (IM) into the knowledge base so being logged in
allows staff to communicate easily with each other, regardless of physical location
• Use the knowledge base as the repository and access point for transient
information (company announcements, requests for information, even football
tipping competitions) as well as for formal documents
• Enable collaborative editing of the knowledge base - i.e. make the knowledge
base the place where explicit knowledge is created, not just the place where it is
stored
• Allow staff to establish their own workspaces within the knowledge base - say, for
short-term team collaboration on a particular project - whenever they see the need
3Thatʼs not to say that you donʼt need “proper” documentation as well - thereʼs a need for
both - but generally speaking a clumsily worded and poorly spelled document made easily
available on a wiki is worth vastly more than a carefully written document languishing half-
finished on a local drive somewhere.
© Barry Thomas 2010! 3 of 5

4. to do so. Content that has longer-term value can always be ported to the “formal”
knowledge base later if desired, but in any case the ability to search across the
whole knowledge base means nothing will ever get lost in a metaphorical dark
corner.
None of the above ideas need be difficult to implement - in fact they are standard
features of some popular hosted wiki platforms.
Principle 4: Be permissive with access rights
In the open source software community it is well recognised that, “given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”4. The same principle holds true for documentation -
the more people who can see a document the greater the chance that errors, and
opportunities for improvements, will be identified. This means that the common
business tendency to treat all documents as confidential unless proven otherwise
must be turned on its head.
This principle can even be extended beyond the boundaries of the company itself.
Knowledge sharing, and collaborative knowledge development, can be a powerful
tactic with partners, suppliers and even with customers. Flexible access rights
management (to allow different groups to have different levels of access) is a
standard feature of most wiki platforms.
This is not to deny that there are some classes of document that need to be kept
secret - but being clear about what is truly secret and what is not will free up
resources for ensuring that genuinely proprietary knowledge is properly protected.
Principle 5: Recognise and reward your gurus
The single most important reason why knowledge management projects fail or
underperform is that people generally donʼt like documenting what they do. Even
when documentation is formally added to their job descriptions or financial bonuses
are offered people generally wonʼt shift to a knowledge sharing mentality. Luckily
little things can mean a lot when it comes to motivation.
One simple approach would be to ask all staff to vote for the individuals they believe
do most to share useful knowledge within the business - i.e. for who they think are
the true knowledge gurus. Votes accrued by each individual (perhaps transformed
into an allocation of one to five stars or titles ranging from, say, “worker bee” to
“grand master”) would be displayed on the individualʼs profile or even on each post
4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus'_Law
© Barry Thomas 2010! 4 of 5

5. they make to the wiki. Everyone will thus have an awareness of precisely who is
(and isnʼt!) perceived as a guru within the business by the people doing the actual
day-to-day work.
The motivational power of this idea should not be underestimated but can be taken
up several notches more by then inviting the top gurus to the companyʼs annual
management retreat (or similar event). Doing this gives the most valuable and
engaged staff a chance to contribute to the business at a strategic level while also
ensuring that strategy development is done with the assistance of precisely those
people who know the most about the business. A true win-win.
This concept will have impacts within the business well beyond mere documentation
to knowledge sharing behaviour of all kinds. To gain guru votes employees may well
resort to volunteering to run training sessions, prepare webinars or mentor new staff.
A business that takes active steps to uncover, encourage and make use of its
internal experts can be energetically a very different workplace from the norm.
Conclusion
A knowledge sharing business is culturally different from a knowledge hiding one.
Technology is secondary and on no account should be allowed to drive the process.
Cultural change can sometimes seem hard to achieve but all it really requires is an
informed and deliberate choice - in this case a choice to properly value your
corporate memory, backed up by some simple technology allied with an enlightened
attitude to openness.
If youʼre interested in exploring practical knowledge management in more detail
Shirlaws can help. From training at a conceptual level on Functionality, Capability
and Communication down to the fine details of planning and implementing a
knowledge management program Shirlaws has the expertise to deliver success.
Contact Shirlaws for more information.
© Barry Thomas 2010! 5 of 5