Curious about the role of knowledge services in today’s workplace?

Take a look at this: Knowledge Services and Change Management: Building the Company’s Knowledge Culture [Presentation]

For more information about how your company can strengthen knowledge sharing in the workplace and reduce management and transaction costs, contact SMR International at: info@smr-knowledge.com

Or get in touch with Guy St. Clair, SMR’s President and Consulting Specialist for Knowledge Services.

Guy’s in New York at 917.797.1500 or 212.683.6285, or you can contact him at guystclair@smr-knowledge.com.

Continuing an earlier frame of thought, it is good to think about where we are in KM/knowledge services. Given the movement of organizational management toward understanding and recognizing the value of knowledge to organizational effectiveness and the critical role of managing strategic knowledge as the high levels of excellence that essential for corporate success, it is gratifying to see our influence. We are now seeing the results of that renaissance Judith Field spoke about more than a decade ago when she urged information professionals to join the “knowledge age.” For those who did, who were smart enough to recognize that their roles in their employing organizations would only be strengthened if they took on KM/knowledge services leadership, the effort paid off. The knowledge age is here  and we are all obliged to meet corporate management where it expects to be met: at that juncture where the precepts of information management meet the principles of KM/knowledge services. It’s where we connect. Management now understands that managing the organization’s strategic knowledge ensures organizational success, and management is not be at all subtle about its expectations from those who work in KM/knowledge services. We provide the connection.

We aren’t surprised. When we think about how society is changing, about how society at large (and not just the management and academic communities) focuses on the value of knowledge, we understand what Peter Drucker was referring to when he urged us to look at the “underlying systems.” When things weren’t going right, as Rosabeth Moss Kanter has wisely pointed out, Drucker wasn’t in the business of blaming individuals. He found the root causes in the design of the organization, as Kanter put it in her homage to Drucker in The Harvard Business Review last November, “in the stuctures, processes, norms, and routines” of the larger organization.

Of course. KM/knowledge services managers long ago picked up on the idea that the capture, organization, storage, and dissemination of strategic knowledge was going to be required – in any organization – if the organization is going to be successful (however success is defined in the particular situation).  And strategic knowledge managers realized that connecting would not be limited to research or activities traditionally thought of as “knowledge” related.

Now that organizational management – even down to the level of those over-worked middle management staff caught in their famous “black hole of middle management” – is recognizing that “we’ve got to figure out what to do with all this information and knowledge we collect and use,” everybody is looking at strategic knowledge and wondering what to do. Why? Because strategic knowledge is everywhere, in every department and functional unit, and it must be managed if the organization is to succeed. And as part of the deal, companies are turning to the people who know how to do this work, to the organization’s “knowledge thought leaders,” the company’s KM/knowledge services managers who are taking on the leadership role of seeing that strategic knowledge is managed for the good of the larger organization.

Let’s have a case in point: A financial services company located in the American heartland has made quite an impact in the industry. It started with a bang, it hired the best whiz kids it could find, and in all the excitement of making all that money and – yes – providing a very reasonable ROI for investors, the routines of day-to-day management sort of got lost in the shuffle, as they say. Naturally all the compliance documentation was taken seriously and submitted appropriately (there are laws for that) but much of the organization’s captured content – it’s corporate history – was pretty casually pushed aside. Once in a while this or that observant manager would ask about this or that document describing a historical event, or wonder aloud about what was “happening” in the area of legacy documentation with respect to the company’s background. Not the legal content, of course, as noted, not the compliance or regulatory material. All that was duly handled, and handled well. But much of what was left over, well, it didn’t seem to be all that important.

Now it is. Now there is interest in moving the company into another product line, one very different from what it has offered in the past, and no one can find what they need. They will, of course, and the company will succeed in moving into the new product line, but the costs of dealing with identifying, codifying, and sharing the knowledge have been very expensive. The knowledge was there all the time. The challenge was to find it and format it so that it could be used for background and shared in whatever knowledge-sharing the deal required.

Lesson learned (and in this case management learned it well): Be prepared with the knowledge the organization uses and will need to re-use. Take a page from the Drucker handbook and ensure that structures, processes, norms, and routines are captured, that the management of strategic knowledge in each is part of the organizational framework.

And turn the job over to the KM/knowledge services management team. These people know how to handle strategic knowledge, and managers – not just in examples such as this but throughout the management field – are heeding the call. They get it. They understand that accessing and using strategic knowledge is critical to corporate success, and they’re willing to pay to ensure that it’s done right.

Fine. Well and good. You and I and they all know what we mean. We want to set up an environment in which knowledge management and knowledge services are recognized as the critical drivers for organizational effectiveness. We use the term a lot. I find “knowledge thought leader” sneaking into conversations probably more often than is really necessary, because it’s become part of the jargon for me and my clients (the people who’ve hired me, not to put too fine a point on it, so it’s essential that we agree on the basics). But isn’t that preaching to the choir?

What about the other side of leadership? What about the followers, the people who work in the organization who will – when you get right down to it – be doing the heavy lifting when it comes to connecting KM/knowledge services to organizational effectiveness? Should we – as leaders – not give some attention to how these people perceive us, and what they think about what we are doing, and how they react to what we are saying to them about knowledge and the organization – about their organization, the place where they come to do their work? Doesn’t it make sense to think about the organization as a knowledge culture from their point of view?

I think so. And what we need to provide them with is something we assume they already have. We need to give them the confidence that they are going to be participating in something that will benefit them. In the long run, yes, the organization will be a better organization, a more effective organization, but let’s not forget about WIIFM – the old joke line about getting people to take action: “What’s-in-it-for-me?” We can be as altruistic and forward-thinking about KM/knowledge services as we like – and we are, by nature, or we wouldn’t be doing what we are doing – but the people on the line, so to speak, need to be given the opportunity to figure out how their workplace activities are going to change for the better, how they – as they work smarter and have better jobs – are going to contribute to organizational effectiveness.

There are a couple of people we can turn to. One is the estimable Peter Drucker. In Bruce Rosenstein’s book about putting Mr. Drucker’s principles to work in our daily lives, he writes about Drucker’s commitment to things like self-development, self-reflection, self-organization, generosity, teaching and learning, and social entrepreneurship. If we can get the people who are turning to us for advice about how to move the organization to a knowledge culture and at the same time help them have a better work experience, we need to tell them about these, to use Mr. Drucker’s buzz-words that convey so much of what we need in our corporations and organizations. And to get them to do that, to listen to us, we have to ask them to trust us, to take us at our word and be involved in what we are doing. We have to bring them to the table – these knowledge workers – and we have to listen to them as we seek to move toward the knowledge culture. All of which, in Mr. Drucker’s parlance – leads to a “total life” experience.

And the other expert we might listen to? None other than Danial Goleman in his comments about emotional intelligence. Paralleling very neatly (at least to my way of thinking) the direction Mr. Drucker was taking us in, Goleman asks us to think about – and convey to those who report to us – the values associated with self-awareness and self-regulation in the workplace, the ability to convey empathy for a knowledge worker colleague’s concerns about “moving-too-fast” (the one we hear so much), the “lack-of-time-for-new-stuff,” and my favorite: “they-(who are they?)-don’t-want-me-to-innovate-because-it’s-too-disruptive.”

What’s called for here is trust, leading to the new confidence that people will feel when they become knowledge thought leaders for their organization or their department, the confidence that comes from trusting their managers and, at the same time, building on the trust their organization has in them.