Mistakes to Avoid and Principles for Success

Many organizations today still struggle to get value from their knowledge management (KM) efforts. Even companies that have been benchmarked as the "best practice" can easily fall from the top. So, how can you get sustained value from KM initiatives? There are several key factors for valuable KM deployments. But first, let's learn from what has not worked. Here are the eight most common KM mistakes.

KM Mistakes to Avoid

1. Build something and hope that they'll come. This could be said for almost any technology project, but it's particularly common in KM. Why? Management is looking for the quick-fix, a silver-bullet technology. It's faster and easier not to get the users involved. A global mid-sized company embarked on a project to help the organization efficiently match expertise with their customer support needs. Their IT group built an expert locator system that was implemented using a traditional change management approach. In a project status report to management, three months later, they found out only 72 out of the 2,500 target users had completed their profiles. Six months of desk-pounding by management got the total up to over 200 users. Subject matter experts claimed it provided no value, and it took too much time to update. It was also not tied to any other data sources that could be leveraged to make the users' jobs easier and to help them keep the information updated. It was not until a portal was implemented that the system began to reach critical mass.

2. Implement technology tools without a business owner or a specific business problem. A Fortune 100 company felt it had a reasonable understanding of the business problem. A project team was commissioned to produce a new enterprise framework and a pilot for a community of practice. In the design phase, the team realized that the scope and the expected target users were off mark. So they adjusted the design. One month later, the original technology cost assumption was found to be off, and the original business justification was now ambiguous. The team began to build a new business case with a viable ROI but a different business sponsor was now required. The critical business owner declined to participate and the project was eventually cancelled. If a business case had been done before starting the project, the correct audience, business owner(s) and technology could have been anticipated.

3. Deploy KM Enterprisewide. Knowledge in most situations is contextual. Implementing an approach across the entire enterprise poses significant risk of failure. According to research by Robert Francis Group, up to 85% of all KM initiatives fail to achieve their business objectives. For example, a large energy company's IT group was asked to identify a technology solution for collaboration, in both teams and large groups, as part of the KM effort. Several technologies were evaluated and one was selected for the 50,000 enterprise users. Although the technology was best-of-breed, the standalone application was deployed to the entire enterprise. Adoption was slow. The implementation team did not answer the fundamental user question: "What's in this for me?" The result was a costly re-launch. This time, however, it was done on a project basis around core business groups with critical business challenges. In addition, the stand-alone application with other project-specific applications was surfaced on a portal platform. User adoption rate more than doubled.

4. Assume knowledge is only in documents and data. If "content is king," then the king is dead. Most companies are drowning in content and most of it is irrelevant. The most valuable knowledge in an organization is "implicit knowledge." As part of a KM initiative, a VP of an engineering firm launched a project to update and maintain engineering standards. Believing that this explicit knowledge was the key to knowledge longevity and transferability, the firm bought and installed a content management system. The system suffered from low adoption. Further exploration revealed that the less-experienced engineers had trouble applying the information to their specific problems, and the more experienced engineers only rarely needed it. A better solution would be to provide a continual method of capturing real-time knowledge from threaded discussions or instant messages, and indexing the salient points for quick retrieval and evaluation. Implicit knowledge would then be a result of the collaboration and made explicit and usable in context.

5. Not integrating unstructured content with the structured data. Since most companies have terabytes of unstructured content, they rely on search engines to index the documents and users to find the information by keywords. Unfortunately, the user is often unaware of additional structured data that relates to this unstructured content. Most documents do not contain the unique identifier that unlocks the door to the databases, applications and systems that contain a wealth of other relevant content. Most deployments do not take into account the relationships between the data and applications. Portals can help bridge this gap more effectively by linking disparate data and content sources through an interface to seamlessly present the aggregated results.