Experts at Roche reveal how they created a KM ecosystem at KMWorld Connect 2021

Roche's productivity suffers daily from overflowing inboxes, chat notifications, endless meetings, and cumbersome systems.

At KMWorld Connect 2021, Daniel Poso, PhD, global people and product leader and head of strategy, digital transformation office, product development, Roche Pharma and Saju Sadasivan, senior strategy leader, Roche, discussed how they developed a knowledge management ecosystem for a globally networked R&D organization and reduced Roche's over-dependence on emails and meetings, as well as provide easier and faster access to information and experts.

“Knowledge to us is what we need to know,” Poso said. “We solve business problems not technology problems. To use we see technology as a solution.”

Roche is a global leader in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics. To Roche, knowledge is both material and primary output, Poso said.

Line organizations are important hierarchies of function and compartments of expertise but to deliver innovation in R&D-led industries you need x-functional mission-based teams, Poso explained.

This creates a hyperdynamic work environment. Roche’s KM goal is to supply employees with the maximum amount of relevant information in the shortest time. This is a moving target as information spaces are dynamic in structure and size.

According to Sadasivan, the company created the digital workspace. The workspace is a personalized digital work environment where everything is in one place, has machine learning driven curation, and contains a personalized information flow.

The key KM capabilities this Workspace provides are:

• Finding/accessing information: semantic search, active provisioning, peer-to-peer/expert
• Community management: social groups, mission-based teams
• Instream knowledge capture: after action reviews, lesions leard, and ad-hoc insights

The Digital workspace is a scalable combination of leading SaaS/PaaS technologies, Sadasivan said.

The Digital Workspace has benefitted Roche by providing greater productivity, better networking within a massive organization, greater responsiveness to business partners and stakeholders, and much less stress and more “deep work.”

Dr. Joe Perez, senior systems analyst and CTO, North Carolina Dept. of Health and Human Services/SolonTek Corp., discussed driving decisions with data during his part of the session.

“How do you get from being in data denial to being data driven?” he said.

He recommended 5 best practices, including dominance or looking at the objectives involved according to the organization’s goals. After prioritizing objectives, the second best practice directs companies need to link and find the relevant data.  The third best practice is to listen and draw conclusions from the data gathered. The fourth best practice is leveraging that data and putting it into practice. The final best practice is measuring the success and repeating this process.

KMWorld Connect 2021 is going on this week, November 15 -18, with workshops on Friday, November 19. On-demand replays of sessions will be available for a limited time to registered attendees and many presenters are also making their slide decks available through the conference portal. For more information, go to www.kmworld.com/conference/2021.