Confusion on my first day in the new job with ABC Company
Article by Alan Ward
Hi there, my name is Sally Everyman and I would like to tell you about a great way to make your people more efficient.
When I accepted the offer to join ABC Company as an administration officer they sent through an information pack that contained amongst other things a document titled "So who is confused about Knowledge Management?" and I must admit by the time I had finished the document, I understood how little I knew about Knowledge Management, but I also recognised that I really didn't understand how it related to me and my job.
On day one, after a fairly whirlwind tour of the main office and a bewildering, information laden, three-hour induction session with a bunch of other new-starts I was left with my "buddy" David Harris, who I was told would help me settle into my new role.
As a part of the induction morning we were introduced to the KnowledgeGate web-site on the ABC's intranet and told that this was the company's bible and the place we would get a real understanding of the detail of how we are expected to do our individual jobs. The presenter clicked through a pile of web pages and really just confused the hell out of me. At the beginning of the presentation I sensed that KnowledgeGate was going to be a great resource to help me come to grips with my job, but by the middle the presenter had lost me in the complexity of what he was trying to demonstrate and by the end of the presentation my brain was full. I was totally bewildered, overloaded with information and barely awake.
On the second day I got into work early and was sitting in my work-station browsing the Information Pack and again picked up the paper on Knowledge Management. Just as I was completing the first paragraph my buddy David arrived and suggested we get a coffee and have a chat. As we sat down with our coffees, David said.
"Oh, I see you are going over that paper on our business model, KnowledgeGate. Confusing isn't it!"
"Well you could say that!" I replied, relieved to hear David comment on the complexity of the paper.
"It's not that Alan, the guy who wrote the paper, went out of his way to make it more complex than necessary," explained David "it's just that this knowledge stuff really is difficult to come to terms with and you can't dumb it down too much.
Would you like me to give you the David Harris potted version of the paper?" he offered.
"That would be great" was my response.
"OK, when you boil it all down, what we are trying to do with our KnowledgeGate system is capture all of the "smarts" of those people who really know how to get the job done at ABC and make it available for everyone else that has to do the job."
"That makes sense" I replied.
"Remember all that stuff about creativity and innovation. Before we started the KnowlegeGate programme we were drowning in a sea of paper.
Because we essentially operated as independent units, every office had their own version of every form and of course their own way of doing things. This caused problems every time any of the senior managers wanted to try to get a picture of what we looked like as a total business. There was no easy way to build a composite picture of even the simplest parts of the whole company."
"This all sounds so familiar, my last company was like that too. That's actually one of the reasons that I finally left the place. I just got fed up of spending hours consolidating reports that would have been available from our central systems if we had all been using them in the same way"I said.
David went on to tell me, "KnowledgeGate is all about our work processes, the detailed "how to" that we need if we are to do our jobs most effectively.
You know how sometimes you haven't done something for a while, say, put in a purchase requisition, and you can't quite remember what the process is that you have to use, which form is the correct one for what you want to do and you don't know who it has to go to once you have done your bit in the process.
Well KnowledgeGate is the place that you go to get all of the information."
"Well I have raised plenty of purchase requisitions in my time, it was one of my primary roles at my last company." I blustered.
"That may to be true, Sally, but you haven' tried to buy something at ABC Company yet. Let me tell you, these guys have got short arms and deep pockets when it comes to spending money! If you don't get the process right you can go around in circles, but if you follow the system and dot the Is and cross the Ts it seems to go through a whole lot easier." David patiently explained.
"One of the major benefits of KnowledgeGate is that you can access the relevant policy about what can be done, look at the process to ensure you understand all of the steps in the job, not just yours and then pull up any of the forms that you need to complete the work."
He continued to tell me "In the paper Alan refers to Authoritative Systems, in simple language all he is trying to get across is that the processes in the KnowledgeGate System have been approved by a senior manager who is responsible and accountable for ensuring that the process works in accordance with ABC's policies. If you follow the process and use the correct forms and documents to complete your task you can be confident that the work that you do will be effective."
It was slowly dawning on me "I see, so if I follow the process and use the documents that are attached to the model, I will get my job done and keep my nose clean." I responded.
"That's true" David replied 'but it's much more than that. Because I can simply follow an approved process and don't have to waste a bunch of my time working out how something has to be done I can get on with other more important and interesting things. But what I really like is that since we put KnowledgeGate in the place we have virtually eliminated re-work because people are doing it right the first time. Plus, we get more time to use our nous in doing our work rather than constantly reinventing the wheel and trying to make a non-existent system work!"
"Sounds like the answer to a manager's prayer" I quipped.
"Oh don't get me wrong. It took some time to get everyone on-board, but the boss just stuck to her guns and kept on saying this is the way we are going to work around here. Get used to it."
"That sounds a bit draconian!" I responded.
"No." David replied. "She was happy for us to continually improve the processes, documents and forms that were in the KnowledgeGate System and ensured that we all knew how to go about recommending improvements. She just made us all aware that the KnowledgeGate System was going to be used as our information tool and she wasn't going to allow us to go back to individual, local processes. The old days of information that couldn't be rolled up to give a company picture were over as far as she was concerned."
"OK, when you put it that way I can see that it makes sense."I agreed.
David went on to tell me "When we first launched KnowledgeGate it took some time to get used to going into the system to get the right form, but really it took no longer than the old way of keeping a personal directory of Word documents and pulling them up from there. But once I got to grips with the fact that my personal Reading List gave me access to the information that I needed to do my day-to-day job I found that some fairly simple changes to the way I work made me so much more productive.
KnowledgeGate also has this really effective search system that lets me find information that isn't central to my job, but which I need to access occasionally. So when you read all of that stuff about smart push and smart pull that's all that Alan is talking about. The information you absolutely need to do your job will be automatically updated in your reading list and you can get your hands on any other information you need by using a simple search system."
"OK Dave, can we get a refill of coffee and get back to my desk so I can start working my way through my Reading List."
"Sure Sally."
"Maybe you can tell me some more about these ontologies and taxonomies thingies!"
"Oh those things, just big words for categories Sally, you know how experts like to make things complicated so the workers don't get to know everything. Hell, if we knew as much as they do they wouldn't be subject matter experts would they!"
"Oh I don't know" I replied "I reckon we could all be subject matter experts if we really got this KnowledgeGate thing humming! I must have another look at that paper of Alan Ward's. I reckon I have a much better handle on what it is all about now. Thanks David."
If you want to have another look, or maybe even a first look, at Alan's paper, click on the hyperlink. "So who is confused about Knowledge Management?".