Know Your Turkey: Best Practices for KM
It’s November, which here in the United States means it’s time to gorge on a turkey dinner with all the trimmings on Thanksgiving Day. If you’re not in the United States, you don’t have that knowledge. Canadians wonder why the Thanksgiving celebration isn’t on the second Monday of October, while in other countries, the fourth Thursday in November is just another workday.
When I lived in Switzerland, many years ago, it was almost impossible to buy a turkey. It seemed so quintessentially American and not at all Swiss. The one I found, in a specialty grocery store, was imported from what was then Yugoslavia, and my Thanksgiving dinner guests referred to it as the “red” turkey, since it came from behind the Iron Curtain. I didn’t really care. It tasted pretty darn good.
Turkey Dinners in London
In 2012 I was in London over the Thanksgiving holiday. An international conference scheduled itself on the critical dates, whether due to a desire to exclude attendees from the U.S. or a lack of knowledge about Thanksgiving, I don’t know—nor is it knowledge I’m keen to acquire. What amazed me were signs in restaurant and pub windows advertising traditional American Thanksgiving dinners on the relevant Thursday. I began to suspect it would be much easier today to find a turkey to cook in Switzerland as well. Can I confess that I didn’t take the local pub up on its offer of turkey and ordered fish and chips instead?
What changed? I can only speculate about grocery supply chains for turkeys, but I’m pretty sure an increased knowledge about American holidays, food preferences, and travel patterns contributed. You can look at the availability of turkey dinners on Thanksgiving Day outside the U.S. as emblematic of the changes we’ve seen in knowledge management. KM affects multinational organizations as much as smaller ones. Capturing internal knowledge, making it available for reuse within the enterprise, and profiting from efficiencies revealed by that knowledge is a central value proposition of KM.
Reducing Complexity
But KM is more than knowing the date of Thanksgiving. As anyone who’s ever invited people over for a meal is aware, knowledge of food preferences leads to a successful event. Uncle Mike is now vegan, Aunt Steph is allergic to onions, and Cousin Don insists that creamed onions are essential and if you don’t serve them, he’ll bring his own. Implementing a successful KM program within an enterprise is remarkably similar. All departments insist that they need something unique to their situation or they want their dashboard configured differently from the rest of the organization or they claim they need access to information they’re not actually authorized to view.
If you’re responsible for maintaining the KM program, you’d like to reduce complexity. You don’t want to be stuck writing code to satisfy both creamed onion lovers and those who are allergic to onions when you could be concentrating on the overall dinner experience. You’re looking for a sharing of expertise. Here’s one scenario: You cook the turkey; your guests bring their favorite vegetables, potatoes, and salad. I’m not even going to mention the agonies of desserts. Like the KM experience, you want a clear, comprehensive understanding of what people want. You want a team to foster excellence.
Legacy systems are another issue confronting KM professionals. Solutions that made sense even a few years ago no longer work. You need to identify new approaches to unique business requirements. Your family Thanksgiving turkey recipe, handed down from generations ago, could be irrelevant when you’re using your new convection oven.
When you are charged with automating work processes, your prior knowledge may actually impede progress. Automation adds new dimensions and encourages alternatives ways of working that increase efficiency. And who wouldn’t want that? Well, probably the people uninterested in altering their individual work routines.
Newer Technologies for KM
A friend of mine recently told me he thought KM was a mature technology. I don’t agree, at least not completely. Yes, KM has been around for decades and some of its tenets have become so embedded that they’ve become invisible. They’re simply part of the fabric of business life. Newer technologies provide additional opportunities for KM, which is very exciting.
Take cloud computing. It’s trendy to say you’re moving everything to the cloud, but from a KM perspective, the cloud offers tremendous potential benefits. Particularly if you take advantage of a hybrid approach to the cloud, you’re looking not only at a deployment option but also at reducing your investments in a complex infrastructure. Cost reduction is nice, but actual business benefits are even better.
These white papers will not provide recipes for roasting a turkey and they won’t give you advice for celebrating a national holiday in a nation where it’s not that country’s national holiday. But they will give you lots to think about with new approaches to knowledge management. Grab a turkey sandwich and a beverage of your choice while you prepare to learn about best practices in KM.