Tell me again - How do we really do things around here?

Sections of this Article:

Developing Knowledge Management Systems that Capture Intellectual Property
Building a Knowledge Management System
The Benefits of Taking the Journey
Critical Success Factors
Start with an 'end' in Mind
Overcoming Resistance

Developing Knowledge Management Systems that Capture Intellectual Property

Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom

The world of organisations is a complex place. We talk glibly of living in the "Age of Knowledge" and discuss the Information Age as though it were an organisational reality. Yet the experience for most organisation dwellers is that we live in the "Data Age'. Most of us struggle to cope with a deluge of fragmented, non-integrated data that swamps us on a daily basis.

We read of "knowledge workers" and sagely nod as we consider the way in which intellectual capability is replacing physical capacity in the majority of jobs undertaken within our businesses. But in most cases, the way that front line staff actually does their job is a mystery to the vast majority of managers.

At changedrivers we believe that the way an organisation goes about its work constitutes its fundamental intellectual property. The way in which it performs this work in comparison to its competitors will determine its position in the industry and significantly influence its comparative success. As soon as a business grows beyond a handful of people, the difficulty of disseminating the organisation's best practices across the group becomes problematic. As the organisation matures and inevitably experiences staff turnover the problems simply worsen. We have developed a structured process for capturing this intellectual property and building Knowledge Management Systems that effectively combat the negative effects of these natural conditions.

The way that organisations manage and disseminate the information that constitutes their corporate knowledge will be one of the critical competences in the decades to come. We have developed a structured approach to converting this information into a source of Intellectual Property, testing its validity and then through the application of web enabled tools, disseminating the information across the organisation. Our processes are the result of a convergence of capabilities developed over many years as business analysts, consultants and accountable, business-unit managers.

All organisations, whether they are large or small create the products and services that are consumed by their customers through their "day to day" work activities. It is the work, the business' "policies, processes and procedures" that adds value to their products and services from a customer's perspective. Managers of successful organisations are constantly engaged in directing, controlling and deploying the available human and capital resources within their operational context to most effectively deliver the organisation's outputs.

A major challenge, particularly for large, complex organisations is to disseminate and embed common organisational "processes and procedures" within their business framework. Take this simple test before you read much further and determine whether or not our processes for building organisational competence on the basis of the intellectual property of how work is done makes sense in your context.

How well are you managing your organisation's fundamental, intellectual property?

Would you rate your current business processes as comparable to "world's best practice" in your industry?	YES / NO
If you operate your businesses in more than one geographic location are you confident that your operating procedures are standardised location to location?	YES / NO
Are they documented in a way that would allow you to seek Quality Accreditation?	YES / NO
Can the people who need the documents get access to them easily?	YES / NO
Continual improvement is a way of life today - do you have an effective mechanism for sharing productivity improvements across your organisation in a timely manner?	YES / NO
Do you know which processes in your business represent the "low hanging" fruit of process improvement and can you rank them in a "bang for buck" order of merit?	YES / NO

If you answered No to any of the questions above there could be value in talking to us about how we have helped a number of major Australian organisations address these issues.

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Building a Knowledge Management System

We have developed a systematic approach to the creation of a Knowledge Management System that we can graphically represent in following diagram:

The first step in the process is to determine the organisational imperative for undertaking this work and thereby defining an initial scope for the activity. (see "Start with the end in mind")
We work with the executive management team to develop a model that represents the high level business cycle of the organisation that essentially describes of how the business works from a strategic perspective.
We work with appropriate staff in the organisation to identify the families of products and services that are "taken to market". We apply the same techniques to both public and private sector organisations because at the end of the day organisations only exist to produce outputs for their customers. From this work we are able to develop a series of Output Process Maps that provide a framework for the policies, processes and procedures that produce the products and services of the organisation. This work ensures that we identify the organisation's deliverables and focus on those processes that are value-adding.
We create maps of the processes, procedures and activities of the organisation and generate an appreciation of the opportunities for improvement that can be achieved through process reengineering. In our experience, the combined knowledge of our expert business analysts and the client's experienced personnel is a powerful way of uncovering poor process that will respond to reengineering efforts. Our analysts ability to ask "but why do you do it that way", at times leads to process improvement being directly built into the analysis. As an integral part of our process analysis we can if required, develop a "full cost" picture of each of the processes and in doing so develop an understanding of the cost impact of poor process and thereby identify the low-hanging fruit for process improvement.
We uncover the different media that is used to transfer information throughout the structure of the organisation. We generate an understanding of the reports, templates, documents, policy statements, etc., and determine how this information then "triggers Activity". We then create road-maps that identify the paths of "information flow" and link these to the Activity triggers.
The vast majority of staff in large organisations is multi-hated and job titles don't explain their work. We identify the "functional roles" that are played throughout the organisation and create clusters and profiles of these roles to describe job functions. We then use these "functional roles" to determine who is engaged at each Activity step.
One of the primary deliverables from our work is the Process Maps that we publish to a "browser environment", such as the client's intranet. In this way we enable cost-effective access to the information staff require to do their job, whilst at the same time securing control over the content of the information because of the "read-only" nature of the "browser environment". Our ability to share information across the organisation also ensures that we can engage staff within the business units in the process of identifying opportunities for process reengineering. When we employ cost and process analysis to the job, we are in a position to identify those process improvement opportunities that will deliver the "biggest bang for the buck".
The change management support required to embed the processes in the business should not be underestimated. In large projects there needs to be a recognition that this work will be the starting point for an ongoing process and the business will need to take ownership of the business model that has been developed and will need to resource the task of maintaining the accuracy and currency of the model if there is to be a continuing benefit from the work.

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The Benefits of Taking the Journey

So why would you undertake the arduous task of building a Knowledge Centre in your business? What are the Waifs (what's in it for me?) that will get the management and staff of your organisation to contribute to the process.

If all of your staff has access to information that allows them to ensure they are performing their tasks in a standard fashion, then internal and external customers can expect reliable, measurable, repeatable levels of service.
Managers will be in a position to more effectively and efficiently deploy all of the resources at their disposal, but particularly personnel. This in turn will lead to increased productivity through standardised process
In the private sector improved efficiency and effectiveness leads to improvement in the bottom line. Management can determine whether or not the bottom line improvement will be as a result of growing the top line by utilizing "idle capacity" (the same people doing more because they are working more efficiently) or by taking redundant cost out of the COGS lines (less people doing the same work because they are working more efficiently).
In the public sector improved efficiency and effectiveness leads to improvement in the "cost to deliver" charter products & services for which a Department is responsible. Again management has the opportunity to determine whether or not they will deliver more Outputs for the same cost by creating "idle capacity", or take redundant cost out of the COGS lines
An old, but true saying in management is If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. Our process allows managers to focus on the outputs of the organisation and the activities that produce those outputs. This in turn means that the performance of critical activities can be measured in terms of resource consumed to produce units of output. Techniques such as Activity Based Management and Cost Performance Measurement can be employed.
Standardised business processes allow increased flexibility and mobility for managers & staff. When they are deployed to other locations within the organisation they hit the ground running.
A common business platform leads to better returns on the training budget particularly through scale economy benefits
We have found that when the business starts to take the development of common business practice seriously, IT development starts to become business-needs focused, that is the business starts to drive IT, not vice-versa
When it starts to "go wrong", you have a starting point for investigation. When the business performance does not live up to expectation or budget, the process is the first place to look. If staff are not following the prescribed process they can be "put back on the rails" and if they are following the process then you know you have an unusual cause at work that will require further investigation
Building an understanding of how work is done inside the organisation will inevitably lead the members of the organisation to become activity and outputs, not simply cost and inputs focused.

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Critical Success Factors

Success in the venture will depend on a number of inter-related elements. Factors affecting success will derive from the maturity of the organisation, the complexity and volatility of the market, the stability and experience of the staff and the relative pace of technology change in the industry. Some of the specific points that will need to be considered include leadership, communication and a clarity of definition around the activities, outputs and functional roles of the business:

At the outset of the initiative, the senior executive team must be engaged in scoping the project to ensure "buy in" from the top. Only in this way will you be able to maintain focus and support in the medium-long term. This is particular important as in our experience "everything looks like a failure in the middle". Building a Knowledge System requires consultation, discovery, dialogue and time. The senior management team need to understand the timeframes involved in assembling foundation material and the resources that will be required before there are significant tangible elements to show for the work that has been undertaken.
All words are loaded with meaning and it appears to us that a great deal of the conflict we observe in change programmers can be linked back to misinterpretation of meaning. So often we see people in "heated agreement" about issues and until such time as we adopt a position whereby we "seek to understand before we seek to be understood", this dysfunction will continue. Words may simply be described as labels, but effective communication occurs through shared understanding of meaning. For example, some people would consider the words; process, activity, procedure and task; to mean the same thing, but we know from experience that in some contexts they convey quite distinct meaning to some audiences.
In our work we focus on the "Activities & Outputs" of the organisation and seek to understand the way that organisational resource is deployed to deliver output. We have developed fundamental rules for determining what constitutes an Activity within an organisation. These fundamental protocols include, if it doesn't have an Output, it isn't an Activity. If you cannot count it, it isn't and Output. If you cannot attach resources to the Activity that produces the Output it isn't an Activity.
The complexity of business today means that most staff members play multi-functional roles. We have found that Job Titles don't actually help you to comprehensively understand what an individual does. The combination of a Job Title with a "Functional Role Profile" provides much greater clarity of the work that is undertaken within the business unit. Our process links Activity to Functional Role which in turn ensures that staff members are able to self manage their development within their roles.

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Start with an 'end' in Mind

A critical first step in the process is to develop a shared understanding amongst the senior executive team of the primary business driver for this initiative and secondly to have some agreement as to the boundaries of the project. This ensures that in the early stages of the project a touchstone exists for the project team and they will be able to navigate by constantly asking the two questions, "will this contribute to delivering the strategic objective?" and "is this inside the scope of our project?".

We have found that organisations embark upon this journey because of some imperative, typically driven from the top of the organisation. Nevertheless, the complexity of the terrain demands that you begin the journey with a shared understanding among the senior executive team about what it is that you are trying to bring about. The multi-facetted nature of building a Knowledge Management System in turn implies that there will be a number of inter-related and inter-dependent organisational objectives that can be realized within the one project, these include:

To reengineer ineffective processes which have been identified as opportunities for improvement within the organisation.
To educate and induct Users - and to deliver productivity gains through standardised, shared processes.
Merging Enterprises - identifying the set of common processes that are shared by merging organisation and those processes that are enterprise specific and which need to be recognized and captured.
Transition management - determining activity and competence shift over time during Transition Stages.
As a basis for automation of repetitive process - when the introduction of new techniques and technologies calls for a change in the way people do their work.
As a foundation for IT enablement - creating the Detailed Operating Requirement that will guide IT systems engineers in the development of applications that meet the business' needs and allow the business to manage "scope creep" from a well understood configuration baseline.
Organisational focus on Cost Reduction through the identification of Core, Non-Core and non-value adding activity that informs decisions to reduce the organisational headcount.
To identify opportunities to create "organisational slack" that will allow the business to redirect those resources to other areas of value adding activity.
You must understand the boundaries of your Project, is this to be an enterprise wide review and if so how deeply do you want to drill into the business, or is the project to focus on one functional area of the business and if so, again how deeply do you want to drive into the detail.

Failure to address these issues at the outset presents the danger of the project team developing a system that makes people say "So What?" and there is an inevitably you will start at the wrong place!

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Overcoming Resistance

"If you would win a man to your cause, you must first convince him that you are truly his friend."

In his book "Future Shock", Alvin Toffler provides a succinct insight into the stresses that are caused by the pace of change that we are required to accommodate. In his book, he notes that if you were to take the time that human beings have been in existence (about 50,000 years) and divide this time into 62-year average lifetimes, you would get 800 lifetimes. Of those 800 lifetimes:

650 of them have been in caves.
It is only in the last 70 lifetimes that humans have been able to communicate across generations.
It is only in the last 6 that there has been the printed word.
It is only in the last 4 that we have been able to measure time with any accuracy.
It is only in the last 2 that there has been the electric motor.
Most of the technology that we are so familiar with has been brought into existence in our lifetime.

No wonder our people are feeling "change weary". It is our observation that despite this rate of change, with respect to organisational shifts, people are more "change wary" than "change weary" and this is because in the majority of cases they are not allowed or encouraged to play an active role in determining how the work that they do will need to change to accommodate shifts in organisational objectives. Too often we see poorly thought through change management initiatives that have been inadequately prepared and resourced inflicted on the workforce rather than engaging them early in the process to determine what needs to change to most effectively deliver the shifting organisational goals.

Our process ensures that the "broad church" of the organisation is engaged in defining what needs to be done to deliver the measurable outputs of the organisation, and then how these outputs are to be produced. That is, what are the policies, processes and procedures that will most effectively deliver the organisational objectives.

We engage staff within the business through a structured schedule of small work groups and one-on-one interviews with the people who know and understand how work gets done within the business. We map the processes of the organisation and at each activity step we identify the contributing outputs and resource requirements within the process. We then convert this information into a format that allows us to validate our findings with those who were interviewed and in many cases test the validated understanding in a separate location to ensure that we have accommodated local variation.

It's all about change management. Defining the technical solution is always the easiest part of the journey. The hard part is helping those affected by the change to abandon the current ineffective processes and adopt the newly engineered solution.

For further information contact Alan Ward at alan-ward@changedrivers.com.au

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