Eight Keys to Successful KM Practice by Madanmohan Rao Sunday, August 18, 2002 Editors Note: In this second of two feature-length reports from KM Asia 2002, Madan Rao discusses key learnings from KM practitioners in the context of his own "8 Cs" framework for successful practice: connectivity, content, community, culture, cooperation, capacity, commerce and capital. Knowledge management--as a systematic approach to create, capture, organize, access and use organizational knowledge and learnings--has clearly begun to mature and gain traction over the past decade. According to research conducted by KPMG, companies expect a wide range of benefits from their KM initiatives: better decisions, more flexibility, increased profits, reduced workloads, improved productivity, new business opportunities, reduced costs, best practice exchange, higher market shares, higher stock prices, lower corporate memory loss, improved motivation and retention of employees. How KM is applied to a wide range of tasks should depend on which differing kinds of knowledge and user participation are relevant--routine, logical, complex, unexpected, and unusual--according to Karl Wiig, CEO of the Knowledge Research Institute in the US, who spoke at the recent KM Asia 2002 conference held in July in Singapore. Numerous steps are involved in unveiling successful KM practices. "The corporate KM roadmap at Siemens involves four successive stages: initiate, mobilize, institutionalize, and innovate," according to Manuela Mueller, director of knowledge sharing at Siemens Medical Solutions in Germany. This article delineates and analyzes the success factors for KM practices based on the "8 Cs" framework devised by this author: connectivity, content, community, culture, cooperation, capacity, commerce and capital. In other words, successful KM practices can be facilitated by adequate employee access to KM tools, user-friendly work-oriented content, communities of practice, a culture of openness, a sprit of cooperation, learning capacity, commercial and other incentives, and carefully measured capital investments. 1. Connectivity "Technology enables new knowledge behaviors," said Paul McDowall, KM advisor at the Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat, citing researched KM findings. Technology is not the panacea for a KM practice--but an easy to use knowledge sharing infrastructure is an important enabler. Organization-wide access to KM architecture, Web-based applications, mobile devices, world wide access, high performance, user friendliness, common structure, groupware, data mining tools, and an easily administered controlling systems are key requisites of the supporting KM infrastructure. Page 1 of 5Siemens Medical Solutions uses Livelink to power a portal that supports collaboration, knowledge sharing and document management. The single-platform approach helps reduce the number of applications for similar purposes. Connection is extended to hundreds of mobile workers at Siemens Medical Solutions have access to crucial know-how via its Med2Go wireless solution on Compaq iPaqs. 2. Content To begin with, an organization must conduct an enterprise knowledge audit to determine internal and external knowledge leverage points. Internal and external forces come into play here, ranging from customer knowledge to news media, according to Clare Hart, CEO of Factiva, which helps organizational KM initiatives via workflow design and news feeds. "A context-sensitive content taxonomy is needed to ensure workflow-oriented content structure for easy retrieval of knowledge," according to Siemens' Mueller. The KM system at Siemens is supported by a Global Editing Team which checks the quality of each document and provides support in writing powerful abstracts. Its knowledge objects include successful practices, innovations, lessons learned, and methodologies. "It is important to launch with sufficient, valuable content and easy navigation. Disappointed users won't return a second time," Mueller warned. "Referable and usable contributions from users must be culled, and irrelevant and unsolicited contributions must be filtered out," advised Ravi Arora, KM Head at Tata Steel in India. However, said David Snowden, director of the Cynefin Centre for Organisational Complexity at IBM UK, "It is important to remember that knowledge is not just a thing that can be managed but a flow that has to be nurtured, and this requires an understanding of the complex ecology of knowledge." 3. Community Successful KM relies heavily on communities of practice, or groups of people who work on business-relevant topics across organisational boundaries. Such communities typically evolve through stages like preparation, warm-up, operation and eventual consolidation. The Bank of Montreal has used a technique called Social Network Analysis to determine who shares information and point out likely interventions. "The groups initiate a knowledge fair to share information between teams. Cross functional teams are formed to address new project demands, and leadership forums encourage greater sharing among team leaders," said Richard Livesley, head of KM at the Bank of Montreal. The corporate university and the KM department at the bank jointly funded the "kCafe," which acts as a bridge between classroom training and on-the-job tools, as well as an enterprise program called ideaNet to have employees identify and brainstorm on banking solutions. Siemens has 500 communities worldwide across its various business units; for instance, Siemens Medical Solutions has a global knowledge community called KnowledeSharing@Med. It provides community support like an integrated portal, expert map, coaching, training and a hotline. Innovative channels for "face time" such as breakfast meetings, learning centers, and coffee corners also help, said Teo Tze Fang, assistant director at Singapore Prison Service, which also conducts regular teleconferences with counterparts in the Hong Kong Correctional Services. Page 2 of 5Tata Steel has over 21 communities of practice aligned with the company's business processes and strategy, focusing on areas like iron making, automation, waste management, and energy management. "The most important challenge in this economy is creating conversations," Arora said. 4. Culture Support and vision from top management, shared sense of direction, trust, openness, excitement, and a willingness to continually learn from peers are key