One of management’s biggest challenges, though, is coordinating these key elements. From the SMR International perspective, there’s a critical first step: bring together HR and knowledge strategy leaders in the corporation, creating a special purpose community of practice to follow the progress of knowledge strategy implementation and, when required, to provide directed interventions when they are recognized and required.

Why HR? There are a couple of reasons. One has to do with the “place” of strategic learning and training within the corporation. Despite many well-intentioned (and on-going) efforts to move learning and training activities into a  dedicated functional unit, in most companies these activities fall under the aegis of HR and that’s not going to change. More important, though, is the fact that the HR focus is enterprise wide, and any programs, activities, or informational or regulatory direction is going to emanate throughout the company, adding authority to the process since HR – like legal, accounting or, of course, payroll activities – are given universal attention within the organization.

But HR is not necessarily an educational or knowledge-sharing function, you say. Of course, and that’s why the idea of a knowledge strategy-focused CoP connected with HR can be such a powerful foundation for excellence in knowledge strategy implementation. In working with the senior management person responsible for directing corporate knowledge strategy (whether acknowledged formally with a title along the lines of something like knowledge strategy director or not), HR management ensures that KM/knowledge services concepts, ideas, structures, and content match what the company needs.

And to add icing to the cake: The ideal CoP (or team or focus group or planning group – what you call it doesn’t matter) doesn’t just include HR management and knowledge strategy leadership. An ideal CoP with this focus will include senior management – or at least a representative of senior management – for each of the major divisions or operational functions of the organization. When top organizational leaders and management  thinkers come together with HR leadership and knowledge leadership, the company is on the road to established excellence in KM/knowledge services and by definition constitutes itself as a knowledge culture.

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.

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

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.

One of these especially still hits the mark: the whole idea behind the development of a knowledge strategy is “the futurity of current decisions,” thinking about how current (or recent past) decision making affects what will happen as the KM/knowledge services function proceeds into the future.

Our good friend Peter F. Drucker also brings knowledge workers closer to understanding the true impetus behind planning  knowledge strategy: planning for the future. In his classic Managing in a Time of Great Change, Drucker could be writing for knowledge strategists in 2010 (for could there be a time of greater change than the times we’re living in today?): “Traditional planning asks,” Drucker wrote, “‘what is most likely to happen? Planning for uncertainty asks, instead, ‘what has already happened that will create the future?’”

For Drucker, “strategic planning is not a box of tricks, a bundle of techniques” (Drucker’s emphasis). For our great management hero, strategy development was summed up in four important activities which can be applied directly to the development of knowledge strategy:

• Analytical thinking and the commitment to resources in action
• A continual process of making present entrepreneurial decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity
• Organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decision
• Measuring the results of these decision against expectations through organized, systematic feedback

So there’s the answer to our challenge. Developing knowledge strategy is both prescriptive and descriptive, and the knowledge strategist simply has to position himself/herself to drill down as deep as it’s necessary to go. The task is to find the nuances, the private (or public) agendas, and the organizational goals that will bring forward the information the organization requires for managing its knowledge. Only when the knowledge strategy is developed in an atmosphere that includes both “how-things-are” and “how-things-ought-to-be” can the strategy lead to the results the organization is seeking.

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.

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.