Why We Were Wrong About KM ...and How to Make it Right

I just heard a song on the radio. The lyric in the chorus is:

“Shout all you want, it doesn’t matter; 70% of me is water;

70% don’t care about the rent; the rest of me is finding it harder.”

That ridiculous lyric is now hopelessly stuck in my brain, and somehow leading me to think about knowledge management, of all things. I’m wondering if we all weren’t wrong about knowledge management. I am now wondering whether 70% of an organization is water. Or, in other words, are organizations mostly made up of an inert element whose purpose is simple and mundane—while the 30% of our companies are doing all the hard work?

Despite the Carrie Bradshaw-like tone of that last sentence, I mean it seriously. The knowledge management industry (if you can call it that) has always taken a pretty high-falutin’ attitude about “the enterprise,” and it’s possible that its well-documented image problems stem from that strategic flaw. KM has long been touted as an all-or-nothing proposition. It is believed that the success of any worth-its-salt “knowledge-based enterprise” is directly proportionate to the extent to which every single member of the organization can interact with each other and the company’s various “knowledge repositories.” From the janitor to the chairman, a knowledge-based organization has to be utterly permeable to be agile.

Well, pshaw. I have a different idea.

The evidence is mounting that the famous “departmental point solutions” that many of us thought were mere baby steps to a greater goal, are, in fact, the end game. “

“The market has changed quite a bit from when KM made headlines in the ‘90s, when it was thought to the magic bullet,” agrees Marcelline Saunders, who is in charge of knowledge management at Hummingbird. “They realized there was value in the information people possessed in their heads; they just didn’t know how to get at it. So they attacked it from different directions, and brought in various systems to organize and manage some aspect of information. But they couldn’t deal with all of it.”

Because, perhaps, they didn’t need to. The low-hanging fruit for any KM system vendor has always been the organization’s relatively small legal department, Saunders notes. And rightly so; there is a self-evident advantage in making sure all the lawyers are aware of all the risks and opportunities at play at any given time, enterprise-wide. That information is found only in the unstructured document-set.

Saunders points out that more recently, the CRM function of a company has also begun to benefit from knowledge interchange. It's also limited to a fairly small and specialized group, she points out, but managing customer information can be said to have great value there, too.

But the same value proposition can’t be made as easily for a financial services organization, and even less so for a transportation/shipping company or a retail chain. Their information value proposition is more skewed toward structured data—earnings reports, inventory status from the ERP system, logistic information from shipping and receiving manifests. Anecdotes and story-telling may be great for lawyers, but not so much the guy shipping containers across the North Sea . “Making the entire organization ‘knowledge-aware’ might be an unrealistic goal,” says John Bellegarde, Hummingbird’s vice president product management. “Some people in an organization don’t benefit from knowledge management in their day-to-day lives. It isn’t a cure-all to all problems. It’s how much an individual ‘trades’ in their knowledge, and how much their expertise is dependent to their job function, whether or not having more readily available KM will benefit them.”

Granted, as Mathias Evin (Hummingbird’s product manager for data integration solutions) points out, structured data management and consolidation is a problem pretty much solved. There is much buzz—largely coming from the vendor community—to find ways to tie structured reports with unstructured information to provide a complete picture. The degree of traction this movement will gain remains to be seen.

But even if the two worlds unite in a seamless partnership, there will be only a small portion of any organization that will benefit from such a united knowledge-base. That 70% will likely have no use in their day-to-day lives for such a holistic view.

Truly knowledge-intensive industries might be the exception. Large law firms, for example, and professional service organizations have “knowledge teams” (I’d love to hear their cheers) that are focused not on the company’s mission-critical processes, but on developing the knowledge bases, adding value and improving the gathering process. It’s another level of abstraction for a company like that—knowledge IS the product in their cases. But for most of the world, knowledge work is fairly narrowly limited to a small group. I happen to think it’s that 30% from that darn song lyric.

So, what’s the best practice for bringing knowledge management to your organizations? Pick your fights. “KM is never successfully deployed as a huge enterprise-wide effort,” Saunders points out. “Usually, a small project is identified where there is definitely an ROI. There’s got to be a benefit that can be identified quickly,” she says, and it may be as small as avoiding mailing costs by deploying an electronic document management solution.

As for executive buy-in (which we have always identified as a key component), there still has to be that kind of mandate. BUT, the “good” executive decision is one that locates those specific areas where there is immediate benefit, and in those rare but beautiful cases where departments need to communicate between silos and through the firewalls. Just be careful to recognize: KM doesn’t solve every problem, and shouldn’t even try.

Market View: Consolidated or Specialized?

Mark Myers, vice president of strategic alliances at Convera, is talking: “You can recap the tops of the waves of KM for the past 15 years or so this way: First, you had the ‘applications’ that vendors sold as KM solutions. Then you had a portal craze, where pulling everything into a single view meant you were managing it. Now, the key movement is consolidation...and who knows where that will go....enterprise suites, I suppose ...” (not sounding too convinced).

I’ve known Myers for a long time, and on the day we talked, he and I were both kinda tired. Well, I was. Myers had been at a seminar in Houston, co-sponsored by energy-exploration giant Andarko, and was upbeat, as usual, and willing to talk about the state of the marketplace in a free-wheeling conversation that touched on the enterprise market, the search business and the opposing forces of consolidation versus specialization.

“If you have a 30,000-person, global organization and you want to manage all your knowledge, you’re going to be talking to Gartner and the rest about an enterprise-wide suite of products of some kind. But if you look at the Magic Quadrant, you’ll realize that it is not quite yet a mature market. And you might then turn to IBM or Microsoft or Sun, depending on your technology orientation,” said Myers.

“So we’re definitely beyond the three-legged stool of ‘people, process and technology’ when we talk about knowledge management at that level,” according to Myers. Strategically, he feels, companies are viewing KM through the filter that matches their needs most appropriately, with the expectation that these various “interest domains” all feed-up into, eventually, an enterprise solution of some kind. But it’s not there yet.

“You may be gravitating around content, so your focus is on ECM,” Myers explained. “Or maybe it’s collaboration, so you’re looking more closely at messaging and discussion groups. Or it might be search and categorization, or business processes...however you’re entering the stream, there’s still a long way to go before you’ll have the solution you’re looking for. There’s a lot of work still to be done in R&D, etc. So these areas are not tapped out.”

He went on to bring it into more “inside baseball” terms: “The industry macroeconomic question is whether it will all get consolidated into a few big offerings, and within those offerings these ‘component areas’ will get fleshed out, or will we have a gradually declining number of independent vendors doing cutting-edge work?”

What, I asked, does it look like from your industry’s perspective?

“Well, it’s a great example,” he said “There have been acquisitions in the search business, but there are still four or five viable vendors competing for the enterprise business. In the other areas, I think you’ll find pretty much the same thing.”

So the interesting conundrum is this: While best-of-breed solutions are still actively serving the marketplace, is it safer (for your overall KM strategy as well as for your career) to adopt the “one-stop-shop” concept of the enterprise suite vendors? (By the way, with Oracle apparently entering the picture in an apparently serious way, this decision has picked up a little more gravitas in recent weeks. Watch this space for more on THAT subject...)

Well, the answer to the conundrum, as usual: is: It depends. “For any of the areas covered by the enterprise suites, there is a class of customer who will buy best-of breed,” explained Myers “The search that’s good enough for the transportation sector isn’t good enough for a pharma company. There’s too much at stake for pharma companies to simply accept the ‘packaged’ search tool.”

The companies who need to be on the edge and require advanced search (to take an example, but the same is true of BPM and collaboration and all the rest) are themselves agile and engaged enough to derive business value from their decisions, Myers believes.

So how do organizations decide whether to go “best of breed” or not? In many cases, the decision is practically made for them, through competitive or other stimuli. For example, Myers points to government. “The government agencies that regulate industries that are themselves very knowledge-driven need to simulate the type of environment those industries have created. So the FDA is using the same level of tools that pharmaceutical companies use. One is doing the R&D; the other is analyzing what they did.”

Following on from the conversation with Hummingbird earlier, it is Myers’ contention that even within organizations, there remains a mix of solutions, and those have been chosen to address specialized needs—sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly (“Sometimes there’s one guy who just becomes convinced one product is better than another,” Myers says.)

“Take ECM, for example. If you scratch hard enough, you’ll see that there is no TRUE enterprise content management. There are products whose aspiration is to manage every bit of content for the company. But it just doesn’t happen. It happens to us: the FBI and the FDA use our product, but I know there are other search-software licenses in those organizations,” Myers contended.

“A pure enterprise deal doesn’t happen for any vendor, anywhere.”

So the bottom line is that choosing solutions for your organization is not easy. But it’s possible, thanks in equal parts to the emerging enterprise suite vendors who are reaching their crucial mass, as well as the specialized vendors who target specific and unique sets of needs. How do you choose? Well, you start here. I can’t think of a better graduate-level course in information management than reading and learning from the many authorities who have shared their expertise in these KMWorld White Papers. This one is certainly no exception.

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Andy Moore is a 25-year publishing professional, editor and writer who concentrates on business process improvement through document and content management. As a publication editor, Moore most recently was editor-in-chief and co-publisher of KMWorld Magazine. He is now publisher of KMWorld Magazine and its related online publications. As Editorial Director for the Specialty Publishing Group, Moore acts as chair for the “KMWorld Best Practices White Papers” and the “EContent Leadership” series, overseeing editorial content, conducting market research and writing the opening essays for each of the white papers in the series.

Moore has been fortunate enough to cover emerging areas of applied technology for much of his career, ranging from telecom and networking through to information management. In this role, he has been pleased to witness first-hand the decade’s most significant business and organizational revolution: the drive to leverage organizational knowledge assets (documents, records, information and object repositories) to improve performance and improve lives.

Moore is based in Camden, Maine, and can be reached at andy_moore@verizon.net.