IKNOW LLC DISCUSSES BUILDING LEADERSHIP

SUPPORT AND MAXIMIZING THE VALUE OF A KM

PROGRAM
Session Overview from APQC’s 2017 Knowledge Management (KM)
Conference

Most leading organizations have developed enterprise

KM capabilities in some form, aimed at capturing and
This is a summary of information
reusing their collective knowledge to improve
shared during APQC’s Annual KM
organizational efficiency and effectiveness. However,
many find that knowledge-sharing momentum declines Conference, which took place
after the initial enthusiasm wears off. April 27-28, 2017 in Houston.

At APQC’s 2017 KM conference, Simon Trussler,

engagement director at KM consultancy Iknow LLC, said that a clear-eyed and analytical
diagnostic of KM operational effectiveness may yield important insights that can be used to
refresh an enterprise knowledge-sharing program. This review should address trends and gaps
in overall participation, knowledge contributions, content quality, and use of shared content.
Comprehensive data gathering and analysis on these topics helps identify the root causes
behind pervasive KM challenges as well as strategies to close what he referred to as the KM
achievement gap.

SIGNS YOUR KM PROGRAM MAY BE IN TROUBLE

Trussler began by describing common signals that a KM program may be in need of
rejuvenation.

“The single most frustrating thing for me in leading KM programs was seeing an email to all
staff, ‘Has anyone worked on this topic before?’” Trussler said. “That’s a sure danger sign
because it’s people going around the system.” Other signs of trouble include declining
participation and usage, dissatisfaction with search and retrieval, and feedback that knowledge
capture activities are starting to feel overly burdensome. Combined with negative rumblings in
the press and business community about KM, these issues can lead to a falloff of interest,
activity, and investment over time. “In my experience these can creep up on you—it’s not
necessarily a big bang,” he said.

Sometimes, the deterioration is the natural result of a KM program that fails to secure
continued executive interest, keep up communications through the organization, and maintain

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 its focus on the core objectives it was chartered to meet. However, in other cases, the changing
attitude toward KM may reflect broader changes in the business priorities.

“Your original reasons for doing KM may have changed if your business process has changed, or
there are changes in the available sources and tools, or there might be changes in the culture or
behavior in your environment,” Trussler said.

Regardless of the reason, it is important that KM leaders take action as soon as they start to
notice warning signs. To re-energize a lagging program, Trussler recommended a two-pronged
strategy that includes securing renewed executive support and leveraging analytics to identify
the root cause of the problems along with potential solutions.

A BUSINESS CASE BUILDS EXECUTIVE SUPPORT

“KM will never really take off within your organization unless your business leaders—the
executive team—passionately support it in their everyday work,” Trussler said. “And as KM
leaders, you need to make sure that happens.”

“The KM lead’s job is two-sided: You’ve got to manage up as well as down,” he said. Trussler
defined managing up as looking at KM from the CEO’s perspective, understanding how KM will
support overall improvement, and articulating the value proposition in language that business
leaders will understand. “You need a clear business case and a credible plan of action to get the
executive team to really support you,” he said.

Trussler emphasized the importance of linking KM to the broader enterprise goals and outlining
exactly how KM will support the business, but he steered the audience away from explicit return
on investment calculations. “I’m not a big fan of detailed ROI analysis,” he said. “I’ve seen it
done reasonably well, but my worry is that it could become a black hole where you get sucked
into endless analysis based on very theoretical numbers, and in the end people don’t really
believe it anyway.”

Instead, Trussler recommended a more informal approach in which KM leaders delineate the
elements of the business they believe KM can improve and then emphasize the relatively low
cost of KM investment compared to the potential upside to the impacted business measures. It
can also help to pull together some specific examples of where KM either helped the business or
could have helped had the correct tools and approaches been in place, he said.

Trussler highlighted several tools that he finds particularly useful in building executive-level
support. The first is detailed knowledge maps that list key business processes, the knowledge
needed to execute those processes, where the knowledge is today, how users access it, and any
barriers to getting that knowledge where it needs to go. According to Trussler, a good
knowledge map can help executives understand the problems KM will solve in concrete business
terms.

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 The second is a River Diagram technique developed by Geoff Parcell and Chris Collison (Figure
1). This diagram is used to rank different parts of an organization on a given set of capabilities,
with the blue “river” showing the spread between the highest and lowest scoring group
enterprise-wide. “It’s telling you the spread between best and worst in the organization,”
Trussler said, “and it’s also telling you about the overall level.”

River Diagram Example

Figure 1

According to Trussler, this visualization of data can motivate leaders to recognize internal gaps
that need to be addressed as well as areas where the organization needs to raise its overall
performance level. And if there is a large gap between the top and bottom performers on a
particular measure or capability, the KM team can use that to promote the need to transfer
knowledge and best practices across organizational siloes, thus strengthening its business case.

ANALYTICS HELP LEADERS SUPPORT KM

Once on board, leaders can proactively support the KM program by:

 guiding KM investment toward priority knowledge that creates sustainable advantage,

 directing teams to seek out information before inventing their own solutions (e.g., by
questioning them about reuse during stage-gate meetings or creating business measures
value reuse over reinvention), and
 encouraging teams to document and proactively disseminate their knowledge.

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 How can the KM team help leadership with these activities? “You can give them some data,”
Trussler said. He recommended using measures to answer the following questions for leaders:

 Who is (and is not) contributing knowledge and presenting to colleagues?

 Who is (and is not) answering questions and making themselves available as an expert?
 Who is (and is not) using the available knowledge and resources?
 Which projects generated reusable IP?
 Which areas are curating their content effectively and keeping it up to date?

These measures can help the organization “spot teams that are hoarding and not sharing vs. the
teams that are sharing a lot,” Trussler said. They can also help leaders pinpoint functional
groups, project teams, or locations that need to spend time updating or refining their
knowledge assets.

According to Trussler, the following interview questions can help the KM team understand user
behavior and gather insights to share with organizational leaders:

1. When you last had a new project, did you look for people who might have done something
similar before, and how did you find them?
2. Does your manager encourage you to look for previous content in the area you’re working
on?
3. For each core topic area, how easy is it for you to find relevant, curated content?
4. Who do you think has good ideas and content that they’re not fully sharing?
5. How quickly do you get an answer when you ask for help, directly or via a forum?
6. Does your manager encourage you to share your ideas and lessons learned with others
outside the team?

Trussler introduced several techniques to present data to executives, including charts that
highlight subgroups with lower rates of contribution/usage and tables that list quantity and
quality measures for content in various topic areas.

One tool he finds particularly useful is a user concentration chart, which shows KM
downloads/activities as a factor of the total number of KM participants/users. “The more
skewed the lines are to the top corner, the more concentrated the usage profile,” he said, which
may indicate a problem.

The example in Figure 2 compares the concentration of KM usage across senior vs. junior staff
members. “If you find your senior folks are not using your knowledge systems and are
delegating it all to the junior folks, that’s a bit of a danger sign. It means the senior people are
not appreciating the value of your knowledge communities or databases,” Trussler said. “In my
experience, a few senior heavy users can be important evangelists for KM systems, so they’re
worth disproportionately more than junior folks in terms of selling KM and its benefits to the
broader community.”

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 User Concentration Chart Example

Figure 2

In general, Trussler recommended showing leaders data comparisons among various parts of
the business. “League tables are extremely powerful—more than you’d expect, especially
among office or functional leaders,” he said. “No one wants to be at the wrong end of that step
chart. It’s a very powerful motivator to leadership to raise their league table ratings.”

ANALYTICS HELP THE KM TEAM IMPROVE THE PROGRAM

In addition to presenting data to leaders to encourage their participation and focus their
support, the KM program can use data to understand knowledge needs and improve its core KM
offerings. Trussler recommended the following interview questions to delve into the KM user
experience and help guide improvements.

1. How could basic KM capture be made easier for you? Do you feel it is sufficiently valued?
2. How often do you use informal channels (personal networks) rather than enterprise search
or enterprise communities?
3. When you search, what % of the time do you find what you need?
4. When you search, what do you think about the relevance ranking of results?

One of Trussler’s suggestions is to perform a comprehensive survey of what he called potential

knowledge. “What I mean here is going broad and shallow across the organization and getting a
good picture of what’s happening, which projects are being done where—getting a sense of the
types of knowledge available across the organization and what’s new in each area.” This
provides a basic record of activities, which allows employees to find out about projects and

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 connect with others who have done similar work. It also helps surface knowledge gaps and
critical knowledge that should be harvested.

Trussler said that taxonomy “health checks” and search quality metrics can reveal gaps in
existing knowledge documentation. He also recommended comparing data for different
subgroups to uncover locations, functions, levels, etc. that are less likely to contribute or use
knowledge.

“If people are not using it—especially if there’s been a negative trend in the usage—maybe they
need a refresh, or some more training, or maybe they’ve spotted a problem that others haven’t
spotted that you need to be aware of,” he said. He said that it’s wise to be “a little paranoid”
and focus on areas of vulnerability, even if they seem isolated. “Some problems are localized
today, but they may be warning signs of something bigger down the road,” he said.

Once the KM leaders understand the nature of the problem, they can start to identify targeted
fixes or new capabilities to develop, such as:

 Executive team outreach on business value prop and role modeling

 Renewed focus on governance, roles, and/or KM capture design
 Active “seeding” of knowledge forums and communities
 Enterprise search integration and expert-finding
 Content portfolio process and monitoring
 Investment in auto-classification and content discovery pilots
 KM effectiveness included in balanced scorecard metrics
 Inter-department league tables for knowledge sharing

The key take-away is to ensure that the proposed solution matches the root-cause problem.
“Based on this earlier work of identifying the gaps very clearly both on the behavioral side and
on the implementation side, hopefully you can arrive at good action-oriented solutions to make
KM work better,” Trussler said.

ABOUT APQC
APQC helps organizations work smarter, faster, and with greater confidence. It is the world’s
foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement,
and knowledge management. APQC’s unique structure as a member-based nonprofit makes it a
differentiator in the marketplace. APQC partners with more than 500 member organizations
worldwide in all industries. With more than 40 years of experience, APQC remains the world’s
leader in transforming organizations. Visit us at www.apqc.org, and learn how you can make
best practices your practices.

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