Herding Cats or Training Seals?
Why Government Information Management Needs a Disciplined Approach to Change
Government is messy. If it was a corporation, the stockholder meetings would be wicked ugly. What do you mean, you can’t explain why you made that decision? Why CAN’T you produce the documentation? Who decided THAT would be a good policy?
Oh wait...that’s just a Thursday on CSPAN. If anything, government—most of the time—is WAY better at providing answers, supporting evidence and documentation for its actions than business. Unless you’re the current-as-of-this-writing Attorney General... then not so much (Ouch...I will refrain from flagrant political commentary from here on, I promise).
So what sets the information management needs of government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the Cabinet-level departments apart from commercial business entities? That’s what I wanted to know from my guests this month: First is Doug Brook, president, senior partner and CEO of the Triune Group; and then Jan Rosi, president, TOWER Software North America.
My central agenda was unclear and cleverly designed as a line of questioning, as usual. But I did ask my guests to try to delineate the sometimes subtle/sometimes profound differences between the ways and means and reasons for implementing content management technology and practices in the private and public sectors.
Doing the Right Thing the Right Way
“Success in government is defined in different ways than commercial organizations,” says Triune’s Doug Brook. “Some of it is subjective, and even nebulous.”
Triune is a professional services organization that helps develop knowledge-driven programs for the Air Force, and especially for the many civilian and non-civilian groups that make up the Air Force’s huge presence at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Fairborn, OH, just down the street from Dayton.
Doug is very plugged into the way a military organization, in his case the Air Force, works. And, it turns out, it’s not all that different from commercial organizations...with a special twist or two. “Cost and budget savings, cost avoidance, productivity gains, shared understanding...” he lists. But he’s ready to point out that the metrics for measuring success aren’t the usual “profit/loss” sorts of benchmarks. That’s why Triune has figured out an ingenious way to motivate its customers while gathering critically important feedback. “The Air Force gives out quarterly and annual ‘community of practice’ awards,” he explains. These are based on more-or-less questionnaires developed by Triune. “They tell us why they think they’ve earned an award, and they give US their success indicators. Getting this feedback was one of the smartest things we’ve done!”
But this being a military organization, those “success indicators” can be surprisingly non-businesslike. “One example is a group that moves shipping containers around Iraq,” Doug tells me. “They claimed their know-
ledge solutions positively impacted airlift and air drop operations, reducing the dependence on land convoys and therefore saving lives. Our knowledge management gets the credit for saving lives! You can’t beat that!”
Indeed. Military organizations do have a unique line of work. “One thing that’s unique about the Air Force is that people really want to share knowledge. For them it’s a noble thing; sometimes their jobs save lives out in the field. That motivates them differently,” insists Doug.
But despite noble incentives, know-ledge management is no easier in the armed forces than it is in the business world. You can’t force people to enter “knowledge” into a repository, no matter how motivated they are. “It has to be baked into their jobs. Nobody mandated any system in the Air Force, yet we have 170,000 users voluntarily pushing terabytes of data through the system,” Doug says.
“A few years ago we would get feedback from our training sessions from a few folks who said, I don’t share my knowledge! My knowledge is my power! Of course, that’s a cultural barrier everybody is trying to break down. But interestingly, there seems to be an age bracket where, below a certain age, everybody shares! It’s on my blog. Go read my website!”
Which normally would sound like a good thing. But there’s a hitch. “The problem is, a lot of the governmental agencies have had hiring freezes for a while. The civilian work population is old! More than 50% is eligible for retirement,” points out Doug.
And in a lot of cases, the retirement brain-drain positions will not be refilled. People are retiring, but nothing is being done to replace them. “Bob’s retiring? That means we pay that much less in salary,” says Doug. “That’s about as far as they’ve thought it through.”
People leaving with valuable know-ledge; the need to do more with less; the increasing pressure of information overload...sound familiar? This is the time you’d call in the information management team for a pow-wow. But Doug insists that IT is not the only answer. “What we’re really selling is BPR,” he says. “We look at what you do, who your stakeholders are; who your ‘customers,’ in quotes, are, and develop ways to streamline your efforts. We don’t tell you what to do; we tell you how to do it better.”