Speaking to the New Jersey Chapter at the Rutgers Club in New Brunswick on Wednesday, March 3, 2010, St. Clair discussed his recent work researching and writing SLA’s 100-year history and used the lecture to bridge SLA’s past with the future for specialized librarianship and the discipline’s contribution to organizational effectiveness.

Asked to submit 10 reasons why “chapter members should hear him speak,” St. Clair prepared his audience with the following, and during the presentation used these topics to stimulate discussion with chapter members and guests:

We know what we want to do with KM/knowledge services. Our objective is clear: We expect to establish a knowledge culture, a workplace in which KM/knowledge services is exploited (in the positive sense of that good word) to support and advance a workplace environment in which we all work smarter. And, once the knowledge culture is established, KM/knowledge services will be the management methodology we will use to sustain it, to ensure the highest levels of research, contextual decision making, and innovation in the futre.

But to achieve that knowledge culture (or to achieve any objective as we seek to strengthen organizational performance) requires developing a strategy, a framework for how we’ll get there. In dealing with a KM/knowledge services strategy, one of our first findings is that we must first focus on another culture, the larger organizational culture that defines and distinguishes the overall enterprise.

And here is when we start to get a little nervous, because as we look about we find any number of possible impediments to moving forward to our goal, and practically all of these will have something to do with that larger corporate culture. And this is when we begin to speak about “culture change,” with the message that to move to the implementation of the new strategy, to set things up so the new strategy will be implemented with success, some elements of the corporate culture will need to change.

These considerations are especially relevant with KM/knowledge services (even under the new management circumstances in which ICT and KM are recognized as the critical enablers they are). For some reason, a lot of people aren’t very interested in the methods, principles, or even the results of a successfully integrated knowledge strategy. Despite the fact that there are obvious and easily documented costs (often very high costs) to sticking with the status quo, many people just can’t handle moving to a new way of dealing with the information and knowledge they must have for their work. They do not have the time, their managers are not interested and discourage their participation (so they think), or they are just not the type of people who are ready to take on something new and different while they try to deal with what they think of as their day-to-day work.

So culture change is hard to come by, and we all know why. As organizations develop, the people involved in developing the organizational structure bring their own ideas and – not to put too fine a point on it – their own agendas to the workplace. As a result, a great many points of view, organizational arrangements, and personal interests become associated with the larger enterprise, to the extent that some of these – over time – become literally embedded in the organizational structure. “It’s what we do,” people say. “It’s what our company is all about.”

That’s what we mean when we speak about the corporate culture, the one that is in place. It has to do with shared beliefs and values, an accumulation of shared beliefs and values about how the organization functions and about how its people succeed. And the organizational culture is – especially – about how those shared beliefs and values converge for the benefit of the larger enterprise, for groups of people working within it, even for individuals as they devise strategies to succeed at what they are trying to do in the workplace. It’s our challenge to work with that, to change that culture, if you will, and to re-frame it so that it will include the elements that support the  knowledge culture.

So what do we do? How do we “fix things” and come up with some techniques and methodologies we can take up – or put before the organization to take up – to ensure that change happens?

A cool first step is to initiate the discussion among people you’ve already identified, folks who have a stake in working smarter, who understand the value of information, knowledge, and strategic learning in the workplace and who would welcome bringing a good strategy for KM/knowledge services into the picture. In my work, what I’m seeing (very often) is that among the people who are going to be implementing KM/knowledge services strategy on the floor, so to speak (not necessarily the company’s leadership), there is great enthusiasm for undertaking whatever steps are necessary to bring about culture change. They are ready to move forward with KM/knowledge services, but no one has ever invited them to think about the subject before.

I know this because when I meet with them individually, these company employees are amazingly willing to go forward. The problem is that in the past the subject just hasn’t come up. And then when they come into a meeting to discuss the subject with other people (also people I’ve identified as being enthusiastic), you can almost feel the eagerness to get moving, to come up with some speedy and high-profile solutions and get started. Since these people have not come together before to talk about how they might use KM/knowledge services to help them work smarter, just the opportunity to brainstorm and explore a few KM/knowledge services recommendations is welcomed. They get to jumping all over the place, and the suggestions fly back and forth like crazy.

So it’s pretty exciting, this experience. It is very gratifying, too, especially for those of us who focus our professional energies on looking at KM/knowledge services applications as the way to go. I can’t help but wonder if our success with KM/knowledge services enthusiasts relates to what Peter Bregman talks about in an interesting little thought piece from last June, the idea of finding the right stories to tell. These meetings I’m describing are full of story-telling (even if it’s not called that) and the discussion often begins with everybody talking about how this doesn’t work or how that needs to be fixed. But once the attention is re-focused, with some prodding to get people in the group to share their own ideas of what they think could be done to solve whatever problem is being described, things move forward at a very fast pace.

It’s amazing what these people come up with, and I think the main thing that makes it work is just bringing people together – often people who don’t even know each other, or if they do know each other, not in a KM/knowledge services connection. Guiding the conversation so they talk about what works, what could work, what might work is a very gentle way to get things moving. And soon the discussion isn’t about what’s wrong, it’s about what we can do to make it right for the future.

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.

We’re seeing something new in organizations these days, both in the corporate world and in the not-for-profits and the non-profits. Within the past two years (the exact timeframe might be a little vague but it’s been somewhere during the past two, three years or so), there has been a critical turnaround in the management community. KM/knowledge services is now part of the management agenda. The people who do the managing in our companies now understand the good management means good KM/knowledge services.

Well of course. We’ve been trying to tell them that for years. Whereas just a few short years ago those of us working with knowledge workers found ourselves leading, cajoling, persuading, doing everything we could to get senior management to pay attention to knowledge value, the opposite seems to be the case today. We worked so hard to get them to listen to what we had to say about how knowledge development and knowledge management – our good ol’ KD/KS – and sometimes we were successful but most of the time (if we are truly honest with ourselves), it didn’t work. They weren’t very interested.

You remember the scenario: Not so long ago, to be called in to meet with management about some KM/knowledge services project (or even just a concept – forget about something as mature as a concept - meant days of preparation, with most of the preparation having to do with coming up with definitions, case studies, examples, and just plain old story-telling to make sure the people you were meeting were on the same wave length as you. Of course you had to do a lot of what the kids call “dumbing down” because you learned – early on – that anything that smacked of “knowledge” or “learning” was ‘way to academic for these folks. So you went in assuming they would not have any idea of what “knowledge management” meant (you had been through this often enough that you could hear it coming – and usually not far into the conversation – “what’s this about managing knowledge? knowledge can’t be managed? you can’t buy and sell knowledge?”). And you replied dutifully, “Well yes, sir. That’s true, but let me explain….”

And off you went, you and the team in the organization that wanted to move forward – in tiny steps, remember, we don’t want to get things too confused. And step by step, all the way along you worked very hard to make sure that you were getting through, that company leadership – the people who were going to authorize the funding – understood that there would be value in managing knowledge (but value of course being defined in terms that were explicitly understood by management, usually with a big ROI sign on it).

Not any more. We can’t (yet) understand how the change came about, but nowadays we are living a totally different story. Now when you’re introduced to someone in senior management, it’s a very short trip from “we’re not taking advantage of what our people know” to Peter Drucker to Larry Prusak to Tom Davenport to David Gurteen and even – surprising me! – on to David Snowden. And then the conversation turns to the others who pop up in the business magazines.

I’m loving it. Aren’t you?

And get this: These managers are not interested in taking cautious, “tiny steps.” They’ve figured out that it’s not all about managing ICT (which used to be the case with the MBA folks), it’s not even about having the ICT people turn themselves into “knowledge managers.” It’s about – these managers tell us – how people use information and communications technology to work better, more efficiently, and – not to put too fine a point on it – to work together, to work more collaboratively.

Senior management knows this now, and knows that good KM/knowledge services means the whole organization is more effective, leading to success with that over-arching goal so clearly sought in modern management terms: the company must be effective. Organizational effectiveness – however defined in the particular organization – is today’s management mantra and organizational effectiveness comes from one source and one source only: the competencies and the energies of company staff in developing and sharing knowledge. Management knows it, we strategic knowledge professionals know it, and the organization’s employees know it. This is the time.

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.

“Getting Ready: Future Trends in KM/Knowledge Services” was the theme for the January 15 SMR International Spot-On Seminar.

Billed as “A Conversation with Cindy Hill, Dale Stanley, and Guy St. Clair,” colleagues joined these KM/knowledge services leaders to talk about trends and exciting new concepts in KM/knowledge services.

A full report on the seminar and the slides displayed in the program are published at SMRShare, SMR International’s knowledge capture site.

Designed to bring colleagues together at the end of a busy week, SMR’s monthly Spot-On Seminars provide an opportunity to talk about work and share ideas. To be added to the mailing list for future Spot-On Seminars – which are free – go to info@smr-knowledge.com.

For more on subjects dealing with KM/Knowledge Services, check out the courses offered in the Click U Certificate Program in KM/Knowledge Services, which begin again on February 8 with KMKS 11 Knowledge Management Project Management . Guy, Dale and Cindy are team-teaching the courses, with Cindy as the Lead. Come study at Click U and keep the conversation going.

Sara Douglas has been given a daunting challenge. She is in charge of research management at a company providing outsourced editorial services for magazine publishers (primarily working with free-lance editors and writers). The company is successful and continues to grow, but Sara finds herself almost overwhelmed with keeping up with the changes in handling information, knowledge, and strategic learning for the staff.

It’s a classic knowledge services scenario, and it isn’t limited to just dealing with records and information management (RIM) issues or corporate archives or HR compliance documents. It’s the whole strategic knowledge picture, and Sara knows she needs to be dealing with strategic knowledge management at its broadest, most wide-ranging level. She needs to use knowledge services implementation to build a knowledge culture for the entire company.

And she’s stuck. Sara has some language issues. She’s OK with ICT management, and she’s fine with strategic learning, simply because she’s come around to the fact that the knowledge she’s dealing with is absolutely strategic. It’s what the company must have and use if it is going to succeed.

But the KM picture is keeping her up at night, and based on her own observations and conversations with others in the company, she’s not alone.

And not just in Sara Douglas’ office. Apparently there is a continuing struggle in conveying the concept of KM/knowledge services to people who are not particularly focused on knowledge and the value of knowledge in organizational effectiveness. Especially for executives with management responsibility who deal with research (people like Sara Douglas), there is in describing all the strategic knowledge that KM/knowledge services is supposed to fix. Sure, talking about bits and pieces of the strategic knowledge picture is pretty easy, but what terms do you use when you want to be inclusive, when you want to describe all the strategic knowledge that the organization must deal with?

How do we pull it all together?

Electronic Strategic Knowledge. The “naming” problem doesn’t seem to affect what we call repositories for electronic information and knowledge capture. There are all sorts of definitions, most of them coming down to something along the lines of a computerized system that systematically captures, organizes and categorizes an organization’s strategic knowledge, a repository that can be searched to ensure quick retrieval of the data.

Fine and dandy. But printed materials and other objects and artifacts can also “contain” knowledge to be accessed and shared, as do collaborative groups.

So what do we call these?

Here’s what some of us have come up with:

Materials Knowledge Repository (printed materials and other objects/artifacts). We’ve lived with these for a long time, and we have no problem speaking about the hard-copy materials we collect. Some companies might refer to these materials as a “library,” or even have them captured in a functional unit referred to as a “specialized library” or “research library.” On the other hand, when that functional unit expands to include electronic strategic knowledge capture and advisory, synthesis, and interpretive services, it becomes more of an “information center” or “knowledge center” or “knowledge services center,” terms we hear pretty often.

And, yes, this category does include more than hard-copy books, periodicals, and the like. In today’s KM/knowledge services environment, no one is surprised to hear people refer to objects or artifacts like photographs, videos, artworks, historical objects and the like for their “content,” the knowledge that one takes from observing or using them. We could say they are contained in a Materials Knowledge Repository.

And then we come to the strategic knowledge captured and shared within networking or working groups – most often tacit knowledge, of course – and usually brought to the group in a knowledge transaction between or among people. Can we get away with referring to this as a:

Collaborative Knowledge Repository (communities of practice, working groups, social media networks, etc.). We know that is an incredible amount of information, knowledge, and strategic learning content captured by, shared, used by, and sometimes even retained by individuals working in such groups (perhaps we should refer to this knowledge store as a Personal Knowledge Repository). Indeed, whole new industries seem to have popped up in the KM/knowledge services field, just to help us figure out how to deal with, coordinate, manage, and make available for sharing knowledge that is not captured in any formal sort of repository. We know there is a huge quantity of knowledge people use all the time, carrying it around with them and pulling it up when it’s needed. But they don’t think about it in terms of knowledge or knowledge value. And when we are successful in collecting this knowledge, getting it to the point that we can engage in network value analysis and determining how to collected tacit knowledge so it can be shared, what do we call it?

How are you referring to the entire knowledge base of your organization or company? Do you have a single phrase or term? Is it used enterprise-wide?

Most of the time we’re required to deal with standard management functions. Once in a while, though, a real opportunity comes along, and we find ourselves positioned to move the organization forward in terms of knowledge services.

Two recent queries from colleagues got me to thinking about how we might prepare for such an occasion.

One colleague asks what essentials he should have in his basket “as he floats through the KM/knowledge services cloud on a balloon” – as he charmingly puts it. Another colleague notes that he may likely be presented with the opportunity to re-structure his organization’s specialized library into the company’s knowledge center, a knowledge nexus for all knowledge services-related transactions and functions.

Here are the “essentials” I would aim for:

* Extremely high visibility in the organization Make it your business to ensure that everyone understands what strategic knowledge is. Make sure they know that if they have any exercise, task, product development idea, project, or just plain ol’ document management issues to deal with or choose from, your strategic knowledge management skills make you to go-to person (or your team if you have several people in your office).

* Structural “fit” Position your knowledge services functional unit to ensure it supports units and programs where the action is. You and your staff want to be known for taking on the tough tasks, the hard stuff that no one else – even the subject experts – can figure out for themselves (or who get it wrong). Stay away from the kid stuff. And when you and your team are part of a successful strategic knowledge sharing scenario, promote the hell out of it. Let anybody who gets within ten feet of you know how tough the job was and how great it was to pull it off. And be sure to give credit to the people from outside your unit who worked with your team to make it a successful.

* Build your troops Within every department or functional unit in the organization, identify someone to be that unit’s designated person who – while focusing on the specific subject or functionality of the unit – has responsibility as the knowledge services point person for the unit. This person doesn’t have to be an information, knowledge, or strategic learning “professional” per se, but it should be someone who is assigned when hired to “help” the unit in terms of information, knowledge, or strategic learning (and the person doesn’t have to have top-heavy qualifications – just an interest in helping people find what they need to know). Once you’ve identified the point person for the unit, you and your team take responsibility for and work with unit management in mentoring, advising, and coaching the point person so they learn to direct people to your knowledge center – the organizational knowledge nexus – for any query having to do with finding and learning what they need to know

Leading to…

* Knowledge leadership Establish yourself and your team as the strategic learning specialists for the organization. Your goal is to make sure the knowledge development/knowledge sharing (KD/KS) process is “built in” to the organizational culture. Talk about what Dale Stanley refers to as the “catalytic” quality of knowledge services, how KD/KS enables you and the people you come in contact with to create knowledge value through KD/KS. Use the language. Get people to talking about strategic knowledge and what strategic knowledge is for each person’s workplace. Create the KD/KS buzz in your organization.

* Go holistic. Finally (and very appropriate for this week, in which we are observing the 100th anniversary of Peter Drucker’s birth), take whatever steps are necessary to see that you and your team support the entire organization. A recent article in Harvard Business Review offers that Mr. Drucker’s real contribution lies in his “integrative, holistic thinking.” Integrative, holistic thinking works in managing strategic knowledge services, too. Make it enterprise-wide. Don’t allow yourself and your staff to become the intellectual “pets” of this or that research unit or function. If that’s what’s needed, get yourself or a staff member embedded in that unit’s projects, on a case-by-case basis. Your job is to be the KD/KS process managers, the knowledge thought leaders, for the entire organization.