Manage the "Other Half" of your Knowledge, Kamoon Inc.
Up to 42% of the knowledge that professionals need to do their jobs comes from other people's brains—in the form of advice, opinions, judgment or answers. (Source: Delphi Group). So, it is somewhat surprising that so much of the focus in knowledge management, to date, has been on implementing processes and tools that support better management of explicit knowledge. This focus has come at the expense of tacit knowledge—knowledge which has not been documented or recorded and which exists in the heads of an organization's people.
Stephen Denning writes that, "explicit knowledge is the only knowledge that is visible and so it is tempting to focus on it. And yet we know that most of our real knowledge is tacit."
Enterprise Location and Management (ELM) solutions fill a vital role in an enterprise Knowledge Architecture by creating efficient, scalable and manageable processes so people can connect and collaborate with colleagues for answers, expertise or insight.
Extending the Knowledge Architecture
A Knowledge Architecture is comprised of the processes, technologies, and organizational structures that support the basic building block behaviors of knowledge management—contribution, collaboration, re-use and stewardship—to deliver maximum leverage of enterprise knowledge assets.
There are five primary functions that a complete Expertise Location and Management System must include to support all four of the basic building block behaviors of knowledge management:
- Expertise Profile Management;
- Expertise Process Automation;
- Expertise Process Measurement;
Create New Knowledge Assets
Many organizations make the claim that "our people are our most important asset," but few organizations manage, track and measure that asset with the rigor that is used to manage other organizational assets. Any well-run organization can tell you how many laptop computers have been issued to its employees. Few can tell you which employees can build a financial model with the spreadsheet application loaded on that laptop. A complete ELM solution includes the ability to define expertise profiles as a new knowledge artifact (and as a new asset record). A complete ELM system should allow these profiles to be easily and flexibly maintained, with little incremental effort, by leveraging the currently disaggregated information about employee expertise in operational systems (like human resource systems or learning management systems) and in unstructured information repositories (like document management systems). Knowledge Stewardship can be defined as the careful and responsible management of the knowledge assets that are of value to the organization. Managing expertise profiles as an information asset is a tangible and important step towards stewarding the tacit knowledge and implicit expertise of a firm's human capital.
Extend Personal Networks
Sharing knowledge and collaborating with colleagues is a natural behavior for knowledge workers today. It's the process each of us uses when we have a question, need advice, or aren't sure of the best way to solve a problem. It's a pretty effective and proven process. The only problem with the process is that it is completely constrained by the depth and breadth of our personal networks. An ELM solution acts an intermediary, identifying people who aren't in your personal network, but who have the knowledge you need. With efficient inquiry or search capabilities that make the right connections between people, the ELM solution simply provides scalability to a natural networking process.
A complete ELM solution must be context sensitive. To increase the likelihood of successful collaboration, the ELM solution needs to identify a specific person who can provide the answers or insight needed for a specific situation. For example, different experts would most likely be the "right" expert, given the answers to the following conditions:
- Is the question time sensitive?;
- Is the expert available, with capacity to respond?;
- Is expertise required from within my department, outside my department or both?;
According to Steven Morgan Friedman, Research Director for Basex, "In the ideal version of an expertise software package, there should be a very customizable set of business rules that allow each enterprise to send each query to the appropriate expert, or experts as need be...."
Leverage Expertise in Action
Many companies lack the infrastructure and business processes to match employee inquiries to the most appropriate expert for an answer. ELM solutions provide that core infrastructure. There is a challenge in formalizing this currently ad hoc process. The challenge is that there isn't just one process.
- A consultant who is in the early stages of a customer engagement...;
"I'd like feedback from colleagues on ways to approach this problem."
- A sales executive trying to close a deal in 24 hours...;
"I can't close this deal without an answer to a specific question."
These are completely different situations, which will trigger different interactions, which have different needs for escalation, and which have very different time horizons. A complete ELM solution will provide the power to define the entire Q&A process with action-oriented workflows and business rules, so that every critical question is answered. This is necessary for effective collaboration, and to ensure that the system delivers the results that will drive adoption.
Capture the Knowledge for Re-use
Many experts believe that the best source of high value knowledge is "on the coal face" —at the point where the work is actually being done. Capturing the tacit knowledge exchanged during such interactions allows you to convert high-value tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge with little incremental effort. Once the tacit knowledge is codified, it is another source of explicit knowledge that is available for re-use. A complete ELM solution should allow you to utilize this "previously asked questions" knowledge base. Increasing the rate at which this now -codified experience and learning is re-used accelerates the flow and distribution of that knowledge throughout the organization.
A lot of the knowledge shared amongst colleagues "on the coal face" is insight about how a process is best executed, in practice. When this "know how" is exchanged through an ELM system, valuable information on "proven practices" is uncovered.
A common impediment to knowledge contribution is that knowledge workers sometimes feel what they have developed isn't "good enough" or "finished" or "likely to be valuable to others." However, that same knowledge worker will be very happy to share the document with a colleague in the context of a specific question. A complete ELM solution allows people to attach documents and links in the question/answer dialogue, and thus can be useful in unlocking a whole new dimension in explicit content contribution.
ELM solutions can also support increased re-use of the existing explicit knowledge stores. For example, an expert who knows an area quite well might answer a question simply by pointing the asker to a document in the explicit content store—a document that the asker probably wouldn't have found without the advice. With an ELM solution, people can become the ultimate context-sensitive index to explicit knowledge stores.
Manage for Results
Early in the implementation of an ELM system, you will measure success by simple metrics like "number of questions asked/answered" and "percentage of employees who have used the system."
However, as your use of the system matures, you will want to prove the true business impact of use of the system. If the system's performance metric information is stored in a data warehouse, you will be able to correlate the use of the system with improvements in the operational business metrics that you manage, for example:
- Salespeople who use the ELM system have a closure rate, on average, that is x% higher than sales people who have not used the ELM system.;
- Research Teams who use the ELM system have x% shorter "idea to design" cycles.;
The information from the ELM solution can also be used to identify a knowledge gap. For example, if the information gathered shows that an inordinate number of questions are being generated, by a particular process, you know that you have a knowledge gap in that area. This is critical information to support knowledge mapping and knowledge strategy development.
The Benefits of Managing Expertise
Expertise Location and Management Solutions can deliver dramatic business value into the most demanding enterprise environments—large, complex, and constantly changing.
- Automating the process of connecting people to share tacit knowledge increases collaboration, reduces cycle times and increases quality of solutions.;
- Codifying the expertise of your people, with little incremental effort, increases the rate at which new learning becomes part of the enterprise knowledge base and ameliorates the impact of employee turnover.;
- Augmenting explicit, published content with human expertise puts additional high-value resources into play, whatever the business scenario.;
- Collaboration is directly fostered among knowledge workers within a business context.;
- Connecting the right people at every stage during the execution of key processes—to raise issues and quickly resolve problems—improves business performance.;
- Best practices are identified so that all of your people can benefit from them.;
By 2005, innovation-focused knowledge workers will represent 30 to 35 percent of the employed workforce in developed nations. (Source: Gartner Group). As knowledge work becomes the dominant source of value creation in an enterprise, it becomes increasingly strategic to invest in operational systems to support knowledge worker processes, and manage knowledge assets.
Yali Harari, CEO
A pioneer in the global e-commerce marketplace, Yali sets the strategic direction and drives operations at Kamoon. Her vision is to create efficient, manageable and scalable solutions that let people connect and collaborate with colleagues for answers, expertise or insight. Kamoon clients know their employee knowledge is fully leveraged to drive business execution and performance. Yali's unwavering focus and relentless pursuit of excellence has driven Kamoon to innovations like the unique application of business rules to the automation of expertise, and inventive e-mail solutions that support truly seamless deployment for widespread adoption and use.
Prior to joining Kamoon, Yali served as Managing Director, TesCom Systems Ltd., which experienced exceptional growth during her three year tenure. She also founded Citylink, a consultancy, specializing in business development for municipalities and urban institutes. Yali set the foundation for her career developing mission critical programs in the avionics systems department of the Israeli Air Force.
For more information on Kamoon, please visit Kamoon. If you are evaluating Expertise Solutions, log on to receive your free copy of Evaluating Expertise Location & Management (ELM) Solutions. This fifteen-page document is based upon the experience of over a dozen companies who are recognized leaders in knowledge management, and includes a useful features checklist.
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