Knowledge Management Briefs for Your Business
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LWM Technology Services of Harvard, Mass. publishes and distributes this bimonthly newsletter by e-mail to individuals and organizations having an interest in any aspect of Knowledge Management processes. Each issue presents a mini-report on a KM topic and links to interesting reading on the featured topic.
See News for KMPro, Knowledge and Innovation Management Professional Society Meeting Announcement
How to Learn Your Industry - Step One for a CKO
Are you a technology expert or a key innovator in your company? Do you aspire to be a Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) or have you just landed that assignment? Chances are pretty good in any case that neither your technology nor scientific competence includes in depth expertise about key knowledge resources in your organization. Acquiring that expertise will enable you to effectively manage them. While you may be skilled at finding information needed to perform in your own specific area, it is less likely that you are familiar with the resources people in other disciplines need and use for their work.
As
CKO, one of your roles will be to insure that knowledge transfer happens and
knowledge resources are available for every process in the organization. Learning
the types of employee knowledge needed in your industry is vital to planning
a knowledge architecture for your audience. [See
November 2002 article.] Here I first describe ways to learn about your industry
and organization, then some suggestions for tools you can use to learn quickly.
A brief table at the end shows a variety of knowledge resources and how they
vary from industry to industry.
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THERE
IS NO SHAME IN NOT KNOWING, ONLY IN NOT LEARNING
At a point early
in my experience as a technical librarian, I became frustrated about my lack
of understanding of the workings of graphite electrodes in electric arc furnaces
for steel making, one area in which I had to do searching and document indexing.
My boss was quick to inform me I wasn't hired for my expertise in arc furnaces;
it was because they believed I had the ability to learn. A few years of experience
taught me that learning is what professionals must face first in any new job.
We
rarely come equipped with all the expertise we need to do a job even as we are
admonished that we will need to hit the ground running or to be a quick study.
Many of us assume that means producing results immediately but we also get advice
to slow down and take a deep breath. I believe that the latter is the only way
to let learning happen so the product of our work is really fruitful. We all
know that learning is a lifelong activity for personal and work success. After
taking a deep breath, what you first must do is find your most efficient and
effective learning path.
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ASKING
QUESTIONS IS A GREAT WAY TO LEARN, BUT MAKE IT WORK FOR YOU
I heard
an interesting talk recently that got me thinking. It was by a professional
sales coach who made the point that the more questions you ask, the more you
can lead a prospect to your point of view through the questions you ask. Although
I am not a sales person, I do know how important it is to ask lots of questions.
When I am in a situation as a consultant where part of my job is to gather information,
I do fine because I have the questions written down that I want to ask and it
is understood that this is my role. In other situations, particularly if there
is some give-and-take, I usually get off track once the other person starts
asking me questions. I think many of us have that problem; it is hard to stay
focused on what we want to learn.
This is also a problem if you aren't good at formulating questions like one employee in our company; he came with a marketing agenda but he never asked one question, in the first day, second day or third day. I listened to lots of his ideas, fully aware that he knew nothing about our industry, not to mention about the company. Things came to a head on day three when, in spite of having a full client list on his desk, he jumped on the phone and started to pitch one of our clients the product they already had. He later defended this as "trying to establish a need for our product in that industry," an industry we had operated in for over 15 years. As a result of that embarrassment, I gave him an assignment to come in the next day with ten questions he needed answered about the industry, the company, or the products we offered. He couldn't come up with a single question. Needless to say, his job with us ended swiftly.
The message in this
story is clear, if you can't think of what to ask, you better have another way
to learn, because you need to.
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APPROACHES
TO TEACHING AND LEARNING THAT WORK
As a small
business founder and owner, I was challenged to effectively motivate and train
employees. I alternatively tried to do this by setting an example and personally
giving instruction. Neither method was an overwhelming success with all employees;
there were some who easily followed my lead and some who liked having me coach
them. Employees with previous expertise in the industry did well by following
the lead, while those new to the industry did need someone to give context to
their expected role in the company. You may fit into either category but entering
at a high level will require that you seek the example or coach.
Another technique
for getting good industry and organizational information out to employees was
developed after several years of building staff experience. It was an adaptation
of a program from a large corporation where I had worked. We were small, however,
and couldn't indulge in long meetings with the entire staff. Instead, we initiated
a monthly, 90-minute Tech Seminar in which each employee was expected to participate
as a presenter. Every employee selected some aspect of his job to explain to
the rest of the company. The agenda was organized so that more experienced employees
presented early in the program with emphasis on topics that would benefit everyone.
It was a tremendous success and I would repeat it for any team I would lead
in the future. But why?
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The net result was a program that got terrific acceptance because it was never perceived as a waste of time. After the first couple of meetings there was an eagerness to present and excel, and we all looked forward to what was coming in the next. Once this program began, we had a real knowledge-centric organization with obvious benefits:
I had always felt
that my former career as a technical librarian was ideal because I was in a
position to be exposed to what everyone in the R&D operation was working
on. In some ways, the monthly seminars gave my entire staff the same kind of
view into what we did and how we did it. It is a long-term processes and won't
ramp you quickly in a new job, but you can develop your own program for identifying
people who will give you the information you need to understand how they work
and what knowledge they need to do their jobs.
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TOOLS
TO USE FOR BECOMING A QUICK STUDY ON YOUR INDUSTRY
Learning
in a short time what you need to know to become an effective CKO with demonstrable
results is dependent on how quickly you can grasp the essence of your industry
and how organizations in your industry work. To start, try some of these resources:
The Organization Chart - Study the organization chart and know what all the groups on it do for the business. This means that you will need to visit with managers or key people (people with long experience, preferably) in each group. You'll need that list of questions already prepared in advance because you are, basically, taking a survey. When you have finished, you should have a clear idea of how different parts of the business work together.
As
you move through the organization, you will undoubtedly ask better questions
as the big picture becomes clearer. Make observations about relationships among
groups. For example, in a pharmaceutical company, you would learn that good
scientists read everything they can find that is published in their area of
focus. Articles and documents that are read and referenced in their work must
be supplied as supporting documentation to the FDA with drug filings, or must
be cited if there is a relationship to claims in a patent application. Mature
and successful companies in this industry have sophisticated processes to insure
that cited publications or material used in the discovery process are organized
for recall and reuse. Regulatory and patent groups will both need this material
later as invention becomes product. Reconstructing this research knowledge base
would be time consuming and costly, and needs to be avoided. A CKO in the industry
must understand this and plan the knowledge architecture for rapid retrieval
of key materials.
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Industry Associations and The Web - A terrific source of information about any new discipline is professional or trade associations in the industry. The most comprehensive source for finding associations by topic is Gale's Encyclopedia of Associations. Searchable through Dialog on a fee basis, your library might have access or a print copy. Once you have the names of associations in your organization's field(s), you have a key to people in the industry, trade publications, meetings, and specialized databases of articles, books and other worthy content. Some associations maintain links to sponsoring members or vendors in the industry on their Web pages. You, or someone in your group, should join to gain access to the best information, an excellent value for the modest expense of most memberships.
Industry Publications
- You must read about your industry. If you have been involved in IT you will
surely have kept up with technology news and advances through one of numerous
IT publications like Information Week, or eWeek
or their on-line daily eZines. I strongly suggest you add CIO Magazine
(www.cio.com) to your reading
for generalist information about the knowledge management field and perhaps
the Project Management Journal from the Project Management Institute
(www.pmi.org/info/PIR_PMJournal.asp).
It contains excellent best practice articles on managing large projects in every
field from transportation infrastructure to building shopping malls to automating
an entire university. As a CKO involved in large projects, you are likely to
find in these publications articles on similar projects in your industry.
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Finally, identify a couple of publications that are specifically about commerce, research, and company news in your specific industry. You want know what your competitors are doing financially, in knowledge management, and in running their Web sites. Familiarity with how they do their business gives you insight into what they get right and where they go wrong. You can learn a lot about their organization structure, the types of technical information they share with their customers, and where they place the emphasis in their marketing statements. By reading a news publication such as Aviation Week or Plastics News, if you are in those industries, it will be easier to converse with all types of employees in the company. Learning about your industry will help you build interest in the business your organization pursues. If you can learn how your competitors manage knowledge, you may get some good ideas.
Industry specific awareness is important. If you work for a defense contractor, there might be government resources available on a need to know basis. Internal subscribers to defense databases or document distribution lists are a good source of information about them and how to make them available to others with clearance for access.
In a consulting
firm, proposals and client reports can be used to build a foundation of company
expertise. The people who consult are also knowledge assets that should be identified
for others to benefit from their expertise. Building a cohesive knowledge base
in this highly competitive environment is a challenge but you must make a case
for why the work of all benefits the organization as a whole, if this is where
you work.
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Industry Meetings - Already mentioned are trade associations that will lead you to meetings in your industry. These are great places to get up to speed quickly, particularly the large annual conferences. Through papers that are presented, people you will meet and the exhibits, you will learn the types of knowledge that are shared, used and sold in your business environment. Publishers of books, journals and electronic resources exhibit; technology producers show off their specialized tools for managing and storing unique proprietary data types, from text to engineering drawings to chemical models. Industry exhibits are more productive than a COMDEX or massive publishers' exhibit because they are targeted at a unique audience.
Knowledge Management Societies - Finally, you need to insure that you can benefit where others have already demonstrated a best practice for managing and sharing knowledge. KM is a new field but not a new concept. Pieces of it have been present in organizations like the American Chemical Society, ACM, IEEE, in professions like information science, indexing, taxonomy/thesaurus development, special librarianship, and in management disciplines through MBA programs or peer management groups such as the AMA and Conference Board. But there is no one degree, or cohesive body of practices and methodologies that have combined all KM elements: management, information technology (hardware, software, networks), and information science (categorizing, storing and searching structured and unstructured data).
A number of professional
groups, local and national have sprung up to address parts of these disciplines,
to try to develop standards, and training programs. They are evolving and converging
but still discovering the pieces that constitute KM. Use the Web (http://www.brint.com)
to discover groups in your area that have participants who are practitioners
in a variety of industries including yours.
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SUMMARY
Learn your industry by reading,
participating, joining, and asking questions. Get others in the organization
to share their knowledge with you, and then work to devise processes that do
the same for sharing it throughout the organization, and preserving it for business
continuity. Vest in the industry while you vest in your job and in your company
by building expertise in how the knowledge processes need to work to benefit
the enterprise.
NOTE: You will find
that the knowledge in your industry is defined by the industry. Following the
additional readings is a non-exhaustive list of knowledge resource types that
are prevalent and useful in selected industries. There will be exceptions. For
example, a large chemical firm with its own law department will have law reporters
or an engineering firm might be doing bench science and have laboratory notebooks.
This table should give you an idea of how varied the scope of your knowledge
enterprise might become.
- Lynda W. Moulton ©2003
LWM Technology Services
Related Readings of Interest
Berkman, Eric. Skills. Successful CIOs Stress Business Acumen, Not Technical Expertise. CIO 03/01/2002, 4p. http://www.cio.com/archive/030102/skills.html
Davenport, Tom. Knowledge Roles: The CKO and Beyond. CIO 04/01/1996, 9p. http://www.cio.com/archive/040196/davenport_content.html?printversion=yes
Duffy, Daintry. Knowledge Champions; What Does it Take to be a Successful CKO? CIO Section II, 11/15/1998, 68-71. http://www.cio.com/archive/enterprise/111598_ic_content.html?printversion=yes
Russom, Philip. An Eye for the Needle. Intelligent Enterprise 01/14/2002, 6p. http://www.intelligententerprise.com/020114/502feat2_1.shtml
- Lynda W. Moulton ©2003 LWM Technology Services