Yearbook 1999-2000
What's Up with Knowledge
Management: A Personal View
Laurence Prusak
Copyright © 1999 by Butterworth-Heinemann. All rights reserved.
Knowledge Management, as an overt activity performed within firms, is about four or five years old now, so it might be valuable to take a look at the state of the practice.
The story is one of much activity, some diffusion of focus, and a few major documented success stories. Activities are easy to measure broadly. It is estimated that as many as 80% of the Global 1000 have knowledge projects. One report indicates that approximately 68% of the Fortune 1000 have defined knowledge projects under way. Attendance at knowledge conferences, another good indicator of interest and activity, has reached over 10,000 in the U.S. alone. There are at least six knowledge management newsletters, one fully developed knowledge management magazine, and (modesty aside) Working Knowledge has been declared a "best-seller" by its publisher, Harvard Business School Press.
However, these activities are of a very diffuse nature, with knowledge management being somewhat of a "black box." Practitioners read into it whatever they determine "knowledge" to be. Quite a few of these projects include work focused on data warehousing, data mining, installation of Lotus Notes, building intranets, and developing document and intellectual capital applications-all of which bear a definite but somewhat distant relation to knowledge.
Needless to say, these projects are much more focused on explicit, articulated knowledge (or data), which is really another way to say information. Now, there is nothing wrong with managing information. In fact, there is much that is right with it. There has been considerable research and practice devoted to this subject for at least twenty years-much of it supported by IBM, incidentally.
However, knowledge is a human trait or attribute. Only a very small percentage of what an individual knows can ever be codified or turned into information. This fact presents organizations with a huge opportunity to somehow "manage" the knowledge they have that is more tacit, more embedded in practice, and therefore less explicit. And in fact many organizations are seeking to meet this challenge in a variety of ways.
After reviewing approximately 120 knowledge projects over the past five years, I can place them into three categories:
- knowledge visibility
- knowledge infrastructure
- knowledge culture
Knowledge Visibility
First and foremost, these activities focus on how individuals can know who knows what in their own organizations. As firms grow more global and more virtual, there is developing a strong need for what are the most effective ways in which individuals can find one another using technologies that are realistic and valuable. What differentiates these activities from earlier efforts, such as skills databases and electronic yellow pages, is a desire to find a new unit of analysis with which to work that is based on the organization and its knowledge, not the individual.
In general, there is a strong, growing recognition among academics and practitioners that knowledge coheres in networks and communities. Therefore, a common knowledge-based project is finding these groups and letting others know of their existence. In fact, perhaps the most interesting and productive knowledge work now under way is working with communities (howsoever called) to make them more effective, innovative, and vibrant.
Another common project in this category is making knowledge visible to those who run the firm. This usually entails workshops and programs for executive education that focus on three things: what knowledge is (in contrast to data and information); how knowledge is, in reality, the irreducible element in building and maintaining core capabilities; and how knowledge can best be used within firms in the wired, networked, or knowledge economy (you can choose your own controlling metaphor!) Much of this work is supported, not surprisingly, by the strategy function within firms.
This is not to say that middle- and upper-middle-level operations managers have no interest in the subject. In the past several years, quite a few organizations in the U.S. and Europe have undertaken internal knowledge "discovery" or educational programs, focused on how knowledge can be a key factor in a specific undertaking, e.g., re-engineering, quality, information management, marketing and sales, etc.
Knowledge Infrastructure
Much attention in the popular press and at conferences has focused on the more technical aspects of knowledge projects. This focus usually includes intranets, Web access and applications, groupware, and various repository-based intellectual capital systems. Some other, less well-known but promising technological developments such as text mining and analysis, real-time multimedia, and network analysis tools are also included in the "knowledge" bucket.
The one great problem that we see with the development and internal deployment of these varied systems is that quite a few firms view their knowledge work as finished when the application becomes technologically operational. Why this is so isn't too difficult to discern. New systems take time and money to implement, so little of either resource is left for working on the more elusive and less tangible knowledge concerns. Our own project experiences indicate that when a knowledge project spends more than one-third of its budget and time on purely technical matters, it tends to turn into an I.T. project. This is because of the time required for a successful technology implementation and because it is easier for managers to deal with tangible entities than elusive concepts.
However, there are many technological applications that are central to knowledge work and these can be conveniently understood under the headings of capture or connection.
In general, firms develop capture models when the information usually required for process or project work is somewhat reusable and has a longer-term life cycle. It is important to note that what is being managed here is, strictly speaking, information (codified knowledge) that has been identified as having strategic value.
However, several well-publicized consulting firms have successfully strengthened the ties between these repository models and the firms' internal knowledge networks and communities. These "knowledge centers" or "intellectual capital systems" provide interesting examples of using knowledge artifacts, such as documents, as the foci of knowledge projects. Time will tell as to how effective they will be in changing knowledge behaviors and enhancing innovation.
The other wide category for knowledge infrastructure involves connectivity. When made the basis of a knowledge project, this is a catchall term that usually involves choosing a messaging/groupware platform and providing processes for finding ways for people within large firms to locate one another.
In general, these sorts of projects have proven quite successful, but their value is similar to that of any open technology project-by itself it provides only the means for collaborative work, not the social norms or incentives that have such a strong impact on individual performance.
Knowledge Culture
The single point most commonly raised in knowledge conferences and discussions (whether involving practitioners or academics) is how to change behaviors and organizational culture so that they are more likely to generate, codify, transfer, share, or do some positive action vis-à-vis knowledge. Many books and articles have been written, especially in the last decade or so, on change management and its many guises. However, while much of the theory behind these efforts has some validity, little of it is focused specifically on the issues around knowledge.
Within many firms, sad to say, the most common approach to changing the knowledge culture (which can be understood as the aggregation of collective behaviors that create social norms) is to build an infrastructure and combine it with an exhortation to share. This last approach is probably taken the furthest by a large Japanese conglomerate that has a policy of not reimbursing an employee for a conference trip until that employee has given a talk recounting what he or she learned to at least 50 other employees!
However, what several organizations are doing-which is more effective in the long run-is what anthropologists do when studying a new culture. They are observing how the work is actually performed and developing a "thick" or "rich" picture of it. From this vantage point, managers can begin to see what is the actual (as opposed to the idealized or schematic) role and value of knowledge and how the work is structured and organized. After this work is completed, concrete proposals and steps are taken to see how and which behaviors could realistically be changed.
Among the most common management interventions to change behavior is the use of money, time, space, technology, and management focus to achieve some changes. I emphasized the word realistically in the last line of the previous paragraph because so many knowledge projects run aground on this point. Decisions are made away from the actual work site, decisions that are not coordinated with how the actual employee views his or her work. This often results in yet another application, or Web site, offered on the desktop that will be sub-optimized or ignored all together.
Where Do We Go From Here?
How can organizations take greater advantage of the opportunity to "manage" knowledge that is more tacit, more embedded in practice, less explicit? What might improve knowledge management practices in our three areas of activity-visibility, infrastructure, and culture?
As I noted above, there is a growing recognition that knowledge coheres in networks and communities. In addition to finding these groups and identifying them to others in the organization, it's important to work with those networks and communities to make them more innovative and vital-in a word, more effective. In other words, if it makes sense to publicize your intellectual assets, it makes even greater sense to work to develop those assets. The challenge for capture models of infrastructure technology and document-based projects is to prove that enough relevant, timely, and valuable knowledge is codified in the documents to provide value for the users and justify the often substantial price tags of such systems.
The connectivity projects need to provide enough social capital so employees have the incentives and will to cooperate and share knowledge, especially in firms where incentives tend to accrue to individuals, not teams, or communities.
Finally, to change knowledge behaviors, organizations need to develop a rich, three-dimensional picture of what current knowledge behaviors are, what the actual work situation is of the employees whose culture one wants to change, and what would be the most effective intervention to change these behaviors.
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