Bryant – then Accenture’s CEO – commented last year that three things matter for managers:

Competence, Confidence, and Caring.

As knowledge thought leaders in our organizations, strategic knowledge professionals are already there, and the challenge (another “C”!) becomes how to apply those criteria for strategic knowledge management for the organizations where we are employed.

Here’s a story:

Jerry Thomas is at the mid-point of a very successful career in strategic knowledge management. His KM/knowledge services competence is evidenced by his experience as a specialist librarian for a large manufacturing company. In that role, Jerry learned not only how to use his formal education for providing his KM/knowledge services customers with the strategic knowledge they require for their work. He also was able to build on each of his customer interactions to share his own knowledge gathering and knowledge transfer expertise. He had the competence to do what needed to be done.

Jerry’s confidence grew with his growing competence. With all his interactions with his customers, Jerry’s role seemed to expand, to the point that he was soon – early in his career – being asked to advise or serve as a sort of internal consultant in KM/knowledge services matters. Indeed, his confidence in his ability to provide excellence in KM/knowledge services grew so much that not only was his expertise being recognized in his own organization, he was pursued for jobs in other companies. Jerry’s confidence was attached to and resulted from his competence in what he was able to do for his customers (and others in his organization).

Jerry’s caring expanded along with is confidence, for he learned early on that just “providing the information” was not really what his customers wanted. Regardless of the customer’s professional level, Jerry made it his business to make sure he understood – and positioned himself to respond to – his clients’ expectations. Of course different people had different expectations but that didn’t stop Jerry. He became particularly skilled at identifying what each client is looking for. His approach to strategic knowledge management and delivery was simple: he made sure the customer knew he cared about what that person was seeking. Then he arranged for his customers to know, first off, that caring is the key characteristic in dealing with Jerry and his team, as the customers work with them in pursuing strategic knowledge.

Management competence – Management confidence – Management caring: Thanks, Alan Bryant.

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.

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?

In the not-too-distant past – back when we had to argue and cajole and use all our manipulative tools to get management to have some interest in KM/knowledge services – one trick we used was the old “low-hanging fruit” idea. We would find some high-visibility, catchy KM/knowledge services technique, go to management with some discussions about how the organization needed to be thinking about how we were dealing with strategic knowledge, and make a case for putting it in place. Usually on a sort of experimental basis, focusing on one department or functional unit – probably a fairly small operation – and we would work on it as a “pilot” project, just to be safe and just to be sure too many fingers weren’t burned if we failed.

That’s not so much the case anymore. What we’re seeing now is management coming to us, the KM/knowledge services professionals, and asking us to prepare a business case for figuring out how the organization can deal with strategic knowledge. And as often as not, management (at least up-to-date and well-educated senior managers who recognize the viability of KM/knowledge services in the organization) is not asking for pilot projects or some easy-to-fix situation that has little risk. Now management is looking for an enterprise-wide KM/knowledge services strategy, and the gauntlet has been thrown down. It’s up to us to rise to the challenge.

So how do we do it? How do we tackle this “big picture” opportunity?

One scenario I’m seeing in my work has to do with taking advantages of the enterprise-wide approach: since you’re working with such a large group, you get to identify the different layers and operational functions in place throughout the company and you work with different people to understand what information, knowledge, and strategic learning is required for them, at their particular level. Meaning of course that the people working in production on the shop floor are experiencing one KM/knowledge services need, the people in middle management with another, the employees in the executive suite with even another (or several if you separate out what the executives themselves require as opposed to the office management staff, personal assistants, and others).

You get the picture. We’re now at the point where it’s OK – even good – to identify that managing strategic knowledge is not going to be the same for everyone in the organization. Indeed, it will be this over-arching collaboration and knowledge-sharing experience that will enable the organization to break down those “silos” and “smokestacks” we hear so many managers lamenting about. If we – as the KM/knowledge services authorities – are able to get our arms around the enterprise-wide strategic knowledge challenge, our colleagues and co-workers will be able to do the same.

Is this a new direction? I think so, and it might be one of the future trends in KM/knowledge services people talk about from time to time.

And certainly the beginning of a new year (and of a new decade as my pal Cindy Hill has pointed out) is the ideal time to identify some of the new trends in KM/knowledge services that are coming down the pike. And talk about how we can adapt them in our own workplace.

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 issues (RIM) 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 highest level. She needs to combine KM, knowledge sharing, and knowledge services implementation into building a knowledge culture for the entire company.

And she’s stuck. Sara has some language issues. She’s OK with information management/ICT management, and she’s fine with strategic learning, simply because she’s identified strategic knowledge as what she’s dealing with. It’s the KM that’s keeping her up at night, and based on her own research and observations, she’s not alone.

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 a problem with how to describe all the strategic knowledge that KM/knowledge services is supposed to deal with.

Describing bits and pieces of the strategic knowledge realm 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? Here are some steps to get us thinking, but 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/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.

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

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 that you use? Is it used enterprise-wide?