The words come from Stephen Kizza, a librarian with the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources in Kampala, Uganda. In his correspondence and writings, Kizza signs off with a phrase that is both poignant and meaningful to strategic knowledge professionals, particularly those dealing with Africa and KM/knowledge services in the research and business communities of the nations of Africa: ”Look backwards with gratitude, upward with confidence, forward with hope.”

Could there be any stronger motivation for us? Could there be any better way to describe our aspirations for our work in Africa?

At the recent Special Libraries Association (SLA) Conference in New Orleans, through the generous sponsorship of Copyright Clearance Center and CCC’s “Beyond the Book” program, a “Hot Topics” session focused on strategic knowledge management and the KM/knowledge services needs of developing countries. Entitled “Global Information Sharing – A Dream Come True: Sharing Information Brings People Together,” the program was moderated by Christopher Kenneally, Director, Business Development, at the Copyright Clearance Center.

In the program, Dennie Heye of Shell in the Netherlands and Kenneally described how Kizza and Heye had become acquainted and how their conversations about strategic knowledge and specialized librarianship in Africa had influenced Kizza’s work. An important part of the story, not surprisingly, is how it demonstrates how strategic knowledge professionals can work with colleagues in other countries. It is a model that seems, from almost any perspective, eminently workable.

Kizza’s presentation, Special Libraries in Developing Countries: Information Management State of Affairs and Development Opportunities, was shown with recorded voiceover, as Kizza was unable to attend the conference due to U.S. visa restrictions. Having been invited by SLA’s Petroleum and Energy Resources Division to present at the conference, this program and the next day’s division meeting and discussion provided an opportunity for conference attendees to hear and discuss Kizza’s important description of information and knowledge management in Uganda.

Following the presentation, Heye described how he and Kizza had become acquainted, and how they and other knowledge professionals work together to support Kizza’s KM/knowledge services work in meeting user needs. At this point Kenneally invited Guy St. Clair, SMR International President and Consulting Specialist for Knowledge Services, to share his own experiences in this area.

St. Clair described his work, a knowledge strategy development assignment in Nairobi for the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT). During his recent six-month assignment (and expected to continue in up-coming work with UN-HABITAT), St. Clair has been able to participate in volunteer work with the Information Africa Organization (IAO) an NGO that seeks to strengthen ICT and KM training  for Kenya’s youth. St. Clair has also been able to meet with academic leaders, working with interested colleagues in Nairobi and Nakuru to advise about incorporating KM/knowledge services into the curriculum of the country’s many specialized graduate programs. In his comments, St. Clair connected his experiences and observations with the work Heye and Kizza are doing for Africa’s research and business communities.

Listen to the podcast BTB # 173: An Information Dream or read the transcript at Beyond the Book – 15 June 2010 – Transcript.

Note: IAO has been described previously at the SMR International site:

January 2010 The Information Africa Organization (IAO): The Birth of A Movement – Kenya’s Focus on Youth Opens the Door to Amazing Potential for the Country, by Guy St. Clair

May 2010 SMR International Special Report: Closing the Digital Divide: Dealing with Drucker’s ‘Responsibility Gap’ in Africa – Kenya Anticipates the ICT/KM Future with Enthusiasm, by Guy St. Clair

A Second Chance: The Information Africa Organization (IAO)’s Splendid Mission – Taking Social Responsibility Seriously [Presentation]

As with similar assignments relating to  knowledge strategy, one is left with both a sense of accomplishment that the big job is finished and a certain sense of sadness that the job is no longer the focus of one’s professional life. Implementation will move forward, and change – both cultural change and structural change – will be managed with the expectation that organizational effectiveness will be enhanced. It is a good time for reflection, to think about lessons learned. And what might be shared with other KM/knowledge services professionals.

Below is a list of 12 “tips” – you might call them – for developing enterprise-wide knowledge strategy. Further comment about each of these can be found in the June 2010 SMR International Briefing, “June 2010 SMR International Briefing: Knowledge Strategy Development Project Completed – Lessons Learned.”

1. Establish clear terms of reference
2. Secure senior management sponsorship
3. Understand the framework
4. Focus on the big picture
5. Recognize that succinctness is a virtue
6. Prepare to be flexible
7. Expect total (or as total as possible) involvement
8. Understand working styles
9. Encourage communities of practice
10. Move outside the client organization
11. Lead by example
12. Develop enthusiasm

Finally: be proud of yourself. You’re changing people’s lives, especially their lives in the workplace. Once the knowledge strategy is in place and implementation begins – and continues – your client’s employees are going to work smarter (and work SMART). While the many elements of knowledge strategy development must be your focus (things like identifying the scope of the project, conducting the knowledge audit, identifying knowledge assets – and recommending new knowledge assets – describing the gaps and constraints that must be addressed, developing managerial and structural recommendations), never lose sight of the fact that your team’s work will make things better for everybody in the organization. Like what you’re doing and be pleased when you’ve done it.

- Guy St. Clair

The course: KMKS 08 Critical Success Factors: Measuring Knowledge Services

Learn techniques and tools for measuring success in knowledge services in this popular Click U course. You’ll learn about the value of metrics in the KM/knowledge services process and have the opportunity to focus on organizational service comparisons for continuous improvement. Once you’ve had this course, you’ll understand how you can use benchmarking, user evaluations, discussion tracking, and how to deal with intangible assets. This is your opportunity to show management just how good your work is (and how important KM/knowledge services is to your company).

KM/Knowledge Services experts Guy St. Clair and Dale Stanley facilitate the course, which is open to all knowledge workers (you do not have to be a participant in Click U’s Certificate Program to attend).

All course participants who complete the course (whether for C.E. credit or not) receive a free copy of Critical Success Factors: Management Metrics, Return-on-Investment, and Effectiveness Measures for Knowledge Services, St. Clair and Stanley’s report on how to measure KM/knowledge services. Prepared for SMR International clients, this SMR International Management Action Plan (SMR MAP) is sold through The SMR Knowledge Store. A $385.00 value, Critical Success Factors will be given free to participants in KMKS 08 Critical Success Factors: Measuring Knowledge Services.

Learn more and register here.

Shared both implicitly and directly with clients, colleagues, and affiliates, Building the Knowledge Culture declares SMR International’s intention to use its influence to ensure that knowledge is used both to enable employees to do their best work and to empower the organization to act responsibly in the larger global social environment.

At SMR International, it is our belief that all institutions, including those in the private sector, have a responsibility to all of society. We believe, as Peter F. Drucker wrote in the Preface to Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973) that “if the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.”

As a management consulting practice specializing in knowledge strategy development, it is our goal to enable and empower organizational leaders for addressing the responsibility gap in management and in society.

The course: KMKS12. The Knowledge Director: Competencies and Skills

Learn what’s expected of you in your role as KM/Knowledge Services Director for the organization. This course defines the responsibilities of the organization’s knowledge thought leader/corporate spokesperson and provides a description of organizational duties and expectations for knowledge services leadership. You’ll learn what your role is with respect to the value of KM/Knowledge Services, the role of KM/Knowledge Services in organizational success, organizational strategic learning, and service delivery. When you have completed the course, you will have a clear understanding of your leadership role in moving the organization to and helping it grow as a knowledge culture.

KM/Knowledge Services experts Guy St. Clair and Dale Stanley facilitate the course, which is open to all knowledge workers (you do not have to be a participant in Click U’s Certificate Program to attend).

All course participants who complete the course (whether for C.E. credit or not) will receive a free copy of Building the Knowledge Culture: The Knowledge Services Effect, St. Clair and Stanley’s report on what you can achieve as the company’s KM/Knowledge Services Director. Prepared for SMR International clients, this SMR International Management Action Plan (SMR MAP) is sold through The SMR Knowledge Store. A $385.00 value, Building the Knowledge Culture will be given free to participants in KMKS 08 Critical Success Factors: Measuring Knowledge Services.

Learn more and register here.

And with accelerated innovation one of the four identified deliverables, you might say (along with strengthened research, contextual decision making, and high-level knowledge asset management) of knowledge services, it seems reasonable to latch on to the idea that the non-profits and the not-for-profit institutions have lagged behind.

Not so. Every day we hear about new venues for the study and implementation of KM/knowledge services, and a fascinating stream in this direction is higher education. Strategy development (ex-”strategic planning”) has long been a mainstay of academic administrative focus, and many companies and organizations specializing in knowledge strategy development have happily found a welcome on the campuses of some of the more forward-thinking universities.

For academics – whether part of the faculty, administrative staff, or having some other connection with the academy (university librarians, for example) – how might to KM/knowledge services be approached? Is it simply a matter of changing the words and phrases? When we define knowledge management with Prusak’s and Davenport’s working with knowledge for the organization do we make it work in the academy simply by defining knowledge management as working with knowledge for the institution?

And for that matter, is the management approach for an academic institution (OK – the administrative approach) the same as it is for a corporation? A research institute? A manufacturing plant? What are the differences? Are they subtle or are they major? Can an academic institution embrace Peter Drucker’s philosophy as willingly and as successfully as a for-profit operation (and, yes it can, for we all know of Drucker’s solid connection with the academy and his great success with charitable institutions and other non-profits)?

The question then becomes simply one of direction, doesn’t it? How can the principles and philosophies behind successful change management, say, in the KM/knowledge services environment be stated for an academic institution? What language do we use? And is that language going to work in other operational structures?

Let’s find out.

In the presentation, an introductory thought asked about the connection between knowledge services and SLA’s founder, John Cotton Dana.

If there is some skepticism about such a connection over the (now) 101-year span, that’s an understandable reaction. In fact, though, when we think about what John Cotton Dana was trying to do, the similarities between his “new library creed” and knowledge services becomes pretty clear:

Knowledge services – as defined in today’s workplace – looks at the management of strategic knowledge from the perspective of the knowledge user, at what that user’s needs might be and how the strategic knowledge being sought is going to be used. In the classic definition, we describe knowledge services as the management and service-delivery methodology that converges information management, knowledge management, and strategic learning into a single, overarching operational function. Putting a knowledge services “spin” on SLA’s famous motto, used since 1916, the goal of knowledge services is to “put knowledge management to work.” In the 21st-century workplace, knowledge services is – in Dale Stanley’s version –  ”the practical side of knowledge management.”

While he did not use our terminology, couldn’t this have been John Cotton Dana’s goal when he called together a group of specialist librarians (that’s what he called them) to think about how they worked? He and his colleagues wanted to determine how their services could be of better use to the businessman (and, yes, that was the term used in 1909, just as the term “man of affairs” was often used – and often by Dana – to describe people who worked in business, probably a link to the French phrase for businessman, l’homme d’affaires).

In his professional work, Dana had concluded that businessmen were too busy to read, and that was just the point: “I am not asking the businessman to read books,” he said. “I am suggesting that we persuade him to use some of them.”

It was a vital distinction, and it would become an important driver as specialized librarianship began its development. So much so that as they talked, Dana and his colleagues realized that they needed a new organization, an association of people like themselves, librarians who would lead a “movement” (yes, they used that term, without apology), a new movement that would replace the old library method, which they described as “Select the best books, list them elaborately, save them forever—that was the sum of the librarians’ creed of yesterday….”

But they went on, and Dana articulated the new “creed” which is particularly familiar to today’s knowledge services specialist:

• Select a few of the best books and keep them, as before, but also…
• Select from the vast flood of print the things your constituency will find useful…
• Make them available with a minimum of expense, and…
• Discard them as soon as their usefulness is past.

By the end of their first year, the nascent SLA had held its first meeting in New York City. It was a meeting at which Dana—SLA’s first president—spoke eloquently about the role of specialized libraries in society:

• “Here in the opening years of the Twentieth Century,” Dana said, “Men of affairs are for the first time beginning to see clearly that collections and printed materials are not, as they were long held to be by most, for the use simply of the scholar, the student, the reader, and the devotee of belles lettres. … [They] are useful tools, needing only the care and skill of a curator, of a kind of living index thereto … to be of the greatest possible help in promoting business efficiency.”

“The care and skill of the curator….” Surely that is the role of the knowledge services specialist in today’s workplace, to take ownership of the strategic knowledge that ensures organizational effectiveness be the organization’s “living index thereto.” Could there be a higher professional calling?

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.

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.