3 Caffeinated Knowledge: What Is Knowledge Management?

Chapter Objectives

• Define knowledge management

• Identify its origin and literature surrounding KM

• Define silos and how to bust them

• How to embrace knowledge transfer

3.1. WHAT IS KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT?

In the preceding chapters, I’ve shown you how a Knowledge Café can be a gateway to knowledge management. But what is knowledge management?

HOW PEOPLE DEFINE KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

When I hold a Knowledge Café or knowledge leadership café (by invitation only), I ask attendees to define KM in one word or phrase. Here are some of the definitions I’ve received.

• Archives

• Capture, share, knowledge

• Collaboration

• Transparency

• Communication

• Community of practice

• Database Platform

• Depth Disseminate Growth

• Diligence Organization

• Documentation

• Education Preservation

• Empowering, Visionary, Plan

• Essential Key to Continued Success

• Essential to Sustaining Personnel development

• Guiding Training Shepherding

• Important, Necessary

• Informal and Unstructured

• Information

• Intelligent Research Verify

• Intentional

• Interesting

• Interesting Needed Useful

• Leadership, Mentoring, Coaching

• Learning and Leadership Development

• Lesson Learned

• Lessons Learning

• Leverage

• Mentoring

• Necessary

• Needed

• Open Communication

• Organization Documentation Leadership

• Power Legacy Retention

• Power Positive Necessary

• Power to Improve Efficiency

• Powerful

• Preservation Insurance

• Retention of Information

• Security Efficiency Stability

• Share

• Share Information Efficiency

• Shared Communication

• Shared Resource Risk Retention

• Sharing

• Sharing Efficient

• Sharing Expertise Best Practices

• Sharing Knowledge

• Sharing, Best Practices, Efficiency

• Sharing, Caring, Preparing

• Sharing, Collaboration, Training

• Sharing, Mentoring, Legacy

• Sharing, Open, Transformational

• Sharing, Progressive, Valuable

• Sharing, Robust, Tacit

• Succession planning

• Success

• Success Crucial Important

• Time-saving

• Training

• Transfer

• Transparent Value Share

• Valuable Lacking Misunderstood

• Value Consistent Depth

As you can see from this list, there is no universal understanding of knowledge management—it is a massive concept. Defining it in one sentence is like the conclusion of the proverbial six blind men who visited an Indian Rajah’s palace and encountered an elephant, as masterfully described in Lillian Quigley’s children’s book. The first blind man put out his hand, touched the elephant’s smooth side, and concluded it was like a wall. The second blind man touched the round trunk and defined it as a snake. The third blind man put out his hand and touched the elephant’s tall leg and said, “Oh, it’s like a tree.” The next blind man touched its thin tail and defined it as a rope. Get it? Everyone describes the elephant from their vantage point.

I have seen dozens of KM definitions; however, there’s no single or agreed-upon definition of KM across the business, epistemology, social sciences, and psychology. In fact, author and professor John P. Girard gathered a collection of more than 100 KM definitions (Girard & Girard, 2015). If a concept like KM has so many definitions, it presupposes that it doesn’t have a definition at all. As important as KM is across multiple professional organizations, one would think that there should have been a Knowledge Management Book of Knowledge. During one of the workgroup revisions for PMI’s PMBOK® Guide, sixth edition (2017) (Project Management Body of Knowledge), I made a case for including KM. I was told that the KM concept is too broad, and that is accurate. I called a major employer who posted a job for knowledge management director in 2019 and realized that they were looking for a training director. Training is just a little piece of KM.

Here are some of the definitions I’ve come across in my KM research—plus some definitions of my own.

“Knowledge Management is the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” (Davenport, 1994). This classic one-line definition of knowledge management offered by Tom Davenport in 1994 is a succinct, single-line definition.

Knowledge is the “brain” of the human capital of an organization. According to Investopedia (2020), human capital is classified as the economic value of a worker’s experience and skills, including assets such as education, training, intelligence, skills, health, and other things employers value, such as loyalty and punctuality. Human capital is an intangible asset, not listed on a company’s balance sheet.

KM is a systematic approach for identifying, understanding, and using knowledge to achieve organizational objectives and innovations.

The Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines knowledge management: “It’s all about making sure the skills, experiences, and expertise of the project team and other stakeholders are used before, during, and after the project” (PMBOK® Guide, sixth edition, 2017, p. 100).

The means by which an organization builds, sustains, and leverages the know-how and experience of its employees and partners to deliver its projects and services and manage the systems for which they are responsible.

—National Cooperative Highway
Research Program (NCHRP, 2014)

Shyan Kirat Rai contends that, “Knowledge management is a discipline that promotes an integrated approach to identifying, retrieving, evaluating, and sharing an enterprise’s tacit and explicit knowledge assets to meet mission objectives. The objective is to connect those who know with those who need to know (know-why, know-what, know-who, and know-how) by leveraging knowledge transfers from one-to-many across the enterprise.

Knowledge management is collecting, building, capturing, acquiring, leveraging, elicitation, organization, distillation, codification, sharing, and transfer of both tacit and explicit knowledge. It is creating new knowledge and relishing the experience! That’s right! If there’s no fun in knowledge exchange, it’s like eating a fine delicacy on a full stomach.

What do speed, the advancement of science and technology, and innovation do to knowledge? A more technology-focused definition is that KM is a systematic way or solution that integrates with a variety of video and record management systems, captures institutional knowledge in heads of employees, and ingests digital evidence to a central repository where it is transcribed, indexed, and tagged; subsequently, enabling easy management, quick search, and retrieval, person-person-exchange, secure sharing while maintaining chain of custody and other legal requirements. Café is a part of the “knowledge use” architecture design. It works well because of human interaction at the center of the café.

Is knowledge capital? At what rate does it depreciate? If knowledge is capital, why is it not treated as such? In economics and sociology, capital goods are physical and nonfinancial inputs used to produce economic value. These include raw materials, facilities, machinery, and tools used in the production of goods and services. While money is used to purchase products and services, capital is more durable and is used to generate wealth through investment. I could make a case that knowledge is intellectual capital whose output is innovation.

There is a consensus among many intellectual capital researchers about knowledge capital or intellectual capital. Knowledge capital has been discussed extensively by many intellectual capital researchers, including Bill LaFayette, Wayne Curtis, Denise Bedford, and Seem Iyer in their book Knowledge Economies and Knowledge Work. In the book, they described intellectual capital and human capital (tacit knowledge, skills, and competencies, attitudes, and behaviors), structural capital (explicit knowledge-information, procedural knowledge, and organizational culture), and relational capital (networks and network relationships, and reputational knowledge) (Lafayette et al., 2019, p. 90). The authors contend that human intellectual capital focuses on individuals’ knowledge, while structural capital focuses on knowledge within the group or community, or organization. I can say that we have KM when we articulate and recognize the interfaces, intersection, and relevance of the intellectual structural, human, and relational capital within the group. Café is the intersection of these elements, so intellectual capital.

Can we have definitions that capture people, processes, technology, and simplicity? What about developing one source of truth for enterprise information, connection, and collaboration? In other words, a simple café-like process that knocks down the silos to create new knowledge for innovation. Any KM definition that omits innovation runs afoul of the true meaning and output of KM. New knowledge is the precursor to or bedrock of innovation.

Some of the greatest challenges facing organizations today are as follows: knowledge identification, capturing, acquiring, organizing and communicating, sharing, and retention.

Knowledge Management is defined as a discipline focused on integrating people and processes enabled by tools throughout the information lifecycle in order to create a shared understanding and increase organizational performance and decision-making.

—U.S. Department of Defense

All these definitions of KM capture different elements of the subject matter, but a few gaps exist. This brings me to my definition of knowledge management:

Knowledge management is an intentional mechanism and ecosystem for identifying, capturing, and sharing/exchanging mission-critical institutional knowledge assets, including the ones in the head and hands of employees and machines, creating new knowledge and having fun in the process.

Intentional:

KM is a proactive and intentional act of organizational strategy.

Mechanism:

KM is a vehicle for delivering a knowledge culture.

Ecosystem:

KM is a community of interacting organisms and their physical environment: a complex network or interconnected system.

Identifying:

Part of KM is a knowledge audit. It’s an inventory of an organization’s knowledge capabilities—an effort to understand, investigate, and qualitatively and quantitatively analyze its knowledge health, where it stands in terms of knowledge identification, repository, reuse, and transfer capabilities.

An enterprise knowledge management program must include many components to be successful.

Knowledge Capture. Capturing means collection, building, eliciting, the codification of both tacit and explicit knowledge; knowledge capturing is through knowledge interviews, last lecture, after-action review, lessons learned; knowledge (exit) interviews, storytelling, oral history, dynamic online questions and answers, forums, monitored crowdsourced platforms, and Wiki contributions.

Knowledge Sharing and Exchange. Knowledge transfer, distillation, collaboration, enhanced, and intelligent findability and discoverability

Institutional Knowledge Assets. Institutional knowledge assets refers to two of the organization’s knowledge bases.

Organizational Knowledgebase. Databases, documents, guide, policies and procedures, software, patents, consultants, and customers’ knowledge base

Workforce Knowledgebase. The totality of all intellectual capital: information, ideas, learning, understanding, memory, insight, cognitive and technical skills, and capabilities.

Tacit Knowledge. The knowledge that is only in the heads or minds of employees and is hard to codify. This is the totality of everything you have learned and known throughout your life, including skills and competencies.

Knowledge Audit. Systematic and scientific examination and evaluation of explicit and implicit knowledge resources in a company, including what knowledge exists, where it is, how it is being created, and who owns it (Hylton, 2002a, 2002b, as cited in Yip et al., 2015). A knowledge audit is knowing what you know, what you don’t know, what you should know, and what you should unlearn—and then prioritizing it all.

A knowledge audit is an overall evaluation of what is held inside and what is allowed out of a knowledge resource (i.e., the knowledge worker), regarding the organization’s system, process, project, or product. It’s a gap analysis of where the mission-critical knowledge assets reside and how they interact with the organization’s mission-critical and non-mission-critical functions. It is within the conceptual café that the audit process executes.

KNOWING WHEN YOU NEED A KNOWLEDGE AUDIT

Here is another way you can identify when you need a knowledge audit, according to Karl Wiig (1993a).

• Information glut or scarcity

• Lack of awareness of information elsewhere in the organization

• Inability to keep abreast of relevant information

• Significant “reinventing” the wheel

• An everyday use of out-of-date information

• Not knowing where to go for expertise in a specific area

A KM audit identifies and captures the individual’s intellectual capital, the organization’s knowledge (especially, hard-won expertise), and the external knowledge that impacts the organizational knowledge, sharing, reusing, creating, and rejuvenating knowledge.

In a research paper published by the African Journal of Management, Azizollah Jafari and Nafiseh Payani (2013) proposed four areas of efficient knowledge audit methods:

1. Identifying and accessing organizational knowledge

2. Identifying the organization’s experts and specialists in various fields

3. Prioritizing an organization’s knowledge fields for knowledge state improvement

4. Identifying potential points to share knowledge among experts, departments, and organizational units

“Lessons Learning” in Place of “Lessons Learned”

Knowledge gained is best when it is iterative and immediately reused—a living, dynamic activity. KM is systematically making sure that knowledge—skills, experiences, and expertise—are not only a post-project effort but occur before and during the project. In a KM environment, lessons learned are knowledge gained by unlocking the project team’s and stakeholders’ experience and expertise. Lessons learned become living activities—they are reused before, during, and after the project. It’s worth mentioning that 91 percent of project managers believe lessons learned reviews or after-action reviews on projects were necessary. Only 13 percent said their organizations performed them on all projects, and only 8 percent thought the primary objective of the reviews was to understand the benefits that would accrue to the organization (Ernst & Young, 2007, as cited in Marlin, 2008).

In many instances, the concept of lessons learned is a big joke. Some attendees in my café think it should be done away with and be replaced with “lessons learning”—a more actively used process. From my experience, those lessons learned documents are just for show or a check-off box. They never get referenced or used as input during newer projects. Whether it’s people thinking they already know everything, or if they’re too overwhelmed at project start to look into past lessons learned, or whether lessons learned seem antiquated, I think people are missing the usefulness. Author Chris DiBella said, “I’m actually working on a project to elevate ‘lessons learning’ and how I basically want to get rid of lessons learned and make it more of a Lessons Learned Implementation” (C. DiBella, pers. comm.). This should be the direction: lessons learned should be reconsidered in light of lessons learned implementation—where they become an integral part of any new project that gets launched. I will shed more light on lesson learning in chapter 10. In knowledge transfer, lessons learned are lessons learning. Here, we use lessons learned before the project begins, during the project, and after the project, and lessons become part of the process and a new way of doing things.

Creating Curiosity and Having Fun Sharing Knowledge

Knowledge management may create additional work but shouldn’t be burdensome; this defeats the purpose of KM. Adding to an organization’s knowledge base should excite workers and create value without burning out knowledge workers. Going to the café to share knowledge is simple and effective.

Where does knowledge come from?

Robert Audi (2003) distinguishes what he calls the “four standard basic sources” by which we acquire knowledge or justified belief: perception, memory, consciousness, and reason. A basic source yields knowledge or justified belief without positive dependence on another source.

We acquire knowledge through ourselves or others. Examples of knowledge acquired through self: experiences; reasoning: logical, inductive, deductive; instinct; learning; personal perception; convictions; personal growth; intuition: illumination, preparation, incubation, and verification; analytical thinking; failures and successes; faith or personal belief; trial and error; dreams; and unlearning. Through others and outside influences: mentors; other knowledge creators and sharers; reading; tradition; research; authority and SMEs; categorical syllogism; scientific approach; meditation; naturalistic inquiry; lessons learned from others and projects; inspirations; and training and development. Credit for some of the sources of knowledge: Dr. Raffeedali. E, Assistant Professor, MANUU, CTE, Srinagar.

3.2. PAST AND CURRENT KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

Knowledge management emerged in the 1980s and was influenced by cognitive science, business theory, social sciences, information sciences, and artificial intelligence (AI). According to KMWorld, the term “Knowledge Management” was first used by McKinsey in 1987 for an internal study on their information handling and utilization. In this scenario, KM went public at a Boston conference in 1993, organized by Ernst & Young.

However, Bob Buckman, one of the early pioneers of KM, attributed the label knowledge management to the creation of C. Jackson Grayson, who was the founder and head of American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) when they put on the first major conference on knowledge that was held in Houston in the 1990s. The second knowledge conference was put on by McKinsey and Brook Manville. Gurteen argued that at the subsequent conference by APQC, the term “knowledge management” was created to describe what they were doing or trying to do.

The author T. J. Beckman (1999) contends that knowledge management was coined for the first time in 1986 by Karl M. Wiig, the chair and CEO of the Knowledge Research Institute and professor of KM at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. They authored one of the first books on KM, Knowledge Management Foundations, published in 1993.

INTELLECTUAL ROOTS OF KM

Many authors have discussed the roots and origins of KM. See, for example, Karl M. Wiig (1993b and 1997), Harlan Cleveland (1985), Herbert A. Simon (1976), and Peter M. Senge (1990). Wiig in Knowledge Management: An Emerging Discipline Rooted in a Long History (2000), identified these intellectual roots of KM in this way:

• Religion and Philosophy (e.g., epistemology) to understand the role and nature of knowledge and the permission of individuals “to think for themselves.”

• Psychology to understand the role of knowledge in human behavior.

• Economics and social sciences to understand the role of knowledge in society.

• Business Theory to understand work and its organization.

• Rationalization of Work (Taylorism)

• Total Quality Management and Management Sciences to improve effectiveness.

• Psychology, Cognitive Sciences, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Learning Organization to learn faster than the competition and provide a foundation for making people more effective.

According to Encyclopaedia Britannica (2020), “From the earliest times, in Egypt and Babylon, training in craft skills was organized to maintain an adequate number of craftsmen. The Code of Hammurabi of Babylon, which dates from the 18th century BCE, required artisans to teach their crafts, transfer, and share their knowledge to the next generation. . . . By the 13th century, a similar practice had emerged in Western Europe in the form of craft guilds. It was a system suited to the domestic industry, with the master working in his own premises alongside his assistants. This created something of an artificial family relationship, in that the articles of apprenticeship took the place of kinship.”

The Knowledge Café concept nurtures a reciprocal knowledge-sharing interaction typical of craft guilds and articles of apprenticeship.

From childhood, we learn the know-how and how-to of everything. We often know more from what we see or do than what we hear. What we tell our children and what we do are both consciously and unconsciously knowledge sharing. Our actions must match our words for our children to learn what is right and wrong. Knowledge sharing has proven to be the most effective way of transferring knowledge and molding values for individuals and organizations. For example, in surgical residency programs, there is the powerful traditional teaching method of “see one, do one, teach one.” Apprenticeship, mentoring, coaching, cross-training, see one, do one, teach one, and sharing knowledge have remained the ways of transferring knowledge from one individual to another from one generation to another. The café environment is a space to begin this kind of discussion.

According to the World Development Report (World Bank, 1998), “Knowledge is needed to transform the resources we have into things we need, and to raise standards of living, improve health conditions, provide better education and preserve the environment, and to do this in the most optimum way possible. All these value addition activities require knowledge.”

While some of these KM definitions and endeavors are still relevant today, it’s fair to say that some of them are non-implementable or not sustainable.

Workplace knowledge management has a long history that has evolved to include on-the-job discussions and training, formal apprenticeships, discussion forums, reason behind corporate libraries, professional training, lessons learned, and mentoring programs (Liu, n.d.).

Knowledge Café is the bridge between the past and the future of knowledge management. We must adopt knowledge management in order to address the imminent loss of workers and their knowledge. The café seems to be the environment that mitigates information hoarding. The mindset of knowledge hoarding engenders a siloed workplace and prevents the organization’s cross-functional flow of information. Information hoarding effectively impedes progress. By bringing knowledge workers into the café, you are effectively unclipping their wings. There is an urgent need for a Knowledge Café handbook that makes the study understandable by all industry levels—the white papers and academic texts must be curated and conveyed in a colloquial voice.

Café-style learning is the university of the future. COVID-19 has made the impossible possible, and many who were not only apathetic but hostile to alternative work strategies like teleworking have come to embrace it. That is the working method of the future and the now knowledge economy. Café mindset will be the attitude toward knowledge acquisition, exchange, and transfer of the future.

When I became the president of the Project Management Institute Austin Chapter, we worked to bring 15 of my predecessors to the board transitions and strategic meeting in October 2017. I discovered that past presidents and board members couldn’t wait to disappear into thin air as soon as they finished their terms. No one even saw their brake lights! These leaders had performed great exploits and killed many demons. However, I chose not to retrace their footsteps by killing the same monsters. We brought all significant knowledge brokers and leaders to the café for simple but deep knowledge conversations and to make use of their knowledge and wisdom.

Project Management Institute (PMI) defines “knowledge transfer” as “the methodical replication of the expertise, wisdom, insight, and tacit knowledge of crucial professionals into the heads and hands of their coworkers” (Project Management Institute, 2015). Consistent and habitual knowledge sharing prevents organizations from doing unnecessary work while cultivating innovation. PMI’s research reveals that most effective organizations at knowledge management improve project outcomes by nearly 35 percent. The duality of leveraging experience and promoting innovation is vital. Organizations will advance from the effective use of their collective knowledge—old and new.

In a KM ecosystem, every employee becomes a purposeful advocate of knowledge free flow throughout the organization. Knowledge becomes obsolete quickly, bad news for those reluctant to share. New knowledge, new discoveries, new technologies, and new circumstances will always make irrelevant knowledge that is not shared. Furthermore, the knowledge that you do not share will eventually be replaced by a machine (World Economic Forum, Forrester, Gartner, Accenture, Hay Group, 2020 Workforce).

Every year, KMWorld publishes a list of the top 100 KM companies (see Wells, 2019, for last year’s article). These are the organizations that turn data and information into actionable insight that has real business value. Some of these KM companies include HP, IBM, Google, Accenture, Xerox, and Oracle, to name a few. Look at their knowledge management approaches for best practice.

Based on my research, the United States Army and NASA are probably the best knowledge management models in the public sector. Both have a KM Office and chief KM officer for their units and organizations. Over the years, I have worked with these knowledge management veterans. Retired army officers are some of KM’s best champions—based on their convictions of the value, relevance, and application in the military.

Knowledge management is gaining enormous traction in the public sector. The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan association representing highway and transportation departments in the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. In 2018, AASHTO established the Committee on Knowledge Management to provide a forum for collaboration among 52 member-departments for the exchange of information, industry-standard practices, experiences, and emerging approaches and concepts related to knowledge management (AASHTO, 2018). I was part of the committee’s designing taskforce. Because of the urgency of knowledge management, eight years ago, the Transportation Research Board (TRB) established a KM Task Force, now information and knowledge management committee, to support its diverse national transportation researchers, including 13,000 researchers and transportation officials that attend its annual meetings.

The Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) officially added “manage project knowledge” as one of the critical processes for managing a successful project in its sixth version in 2018. The authors recognized the essential loss of project knowledge due to knowledge silos among practitioners and aging professionals. Knowledge management is a necessary tool to address the loss of institutional knowledge. Organizations need it to build bench strength and improve organizational resilience. A KM culture is essential for the creation of new knowledge to meet the challenges of disruptive technologies. Knowledge management should be woven into the tapestry of every organization’s architecture.

3.3. KNOWLEDGE FAIR AND CAFÉ: BUSTING SILOS

You cannot have great ideas in a vacuum. New ideas don’t emerge from the filing cabinet. Databases and data lakes and repositories are not birthplaces of innovation. Silo is not the middle name of social networking. There are no great ideas inside the head of a hoarder. If you are willing to accommodate any idea, new ideas will be in your residence; there are great ideas in the middle of the noise. Café helps to unleash new ideas and innovation.

Most mission-critical knowledge is held captive in the minds of the organization’s workforce. Sharing knowledge is one of the most significant challenges facing organizations today. Organizations have failed to realize the potential benefits of bridging the knowledge-sharing gap. Many knowledge workers, including project managers and especially in the public sector, consider the information gained from professional experience as their job security. According to Hall and Sapsed (2005), employees in project based organizations struggle with issues regarding knowledge sharing. Employees’ “hoard” their knowledge to protect their specializations and positions. Knowledge workers are often penalized rather than rewarded for sharing their knowledge.

It’s fair to say, though, that there are costs associated with KM, just as there are costs related to any cultural change. Leadership, time, commitment, and resources are among the costs.

So, what is the secret sauce for a conversation and thoroughly integrated knowledge management system or program? There needs to be an unstructured and straightforward way to begin the discussion—a “youthification” approach that gives every knowledge worker a voice. I consider a café approach a home run among dozens of KM techniques.

What Are the Dangers and Disruptions Caused by Information and Knowledge Silos?

Natural silos occur because groups within the organization are defined by location, job function, process area, or other factors. I get it. These natural barriers create independent group cultures.

However, there are also problematic silos when teams, knowledge creators, or project managers within an organization are stranded on knowledge islands. They are not sharing valuable or critical work-related information that impacts other team members, project managers, relevant stakeholders, and the organization as a whole. Silos impede effective collaboration, disrupt feedback, and limit opportunities for maximum productivity, efficiency, and success. Silos impugn the ability to harness the collective will—knowledge of the community.

According to award-winning columnist and journalist Gillian Tett, the word “silo” does not just refer to a physical structure or organization (such as a department). It can also be a state of mind and occur in social groups. “Silos breed tribalism. But they exist in our minds and social groups too” (Tett, 2015). Silos arise because social groups and organizations have conventions about how to classify the world.

Silos are not all bad, but several silos within a team may be selfish and inward-looking, where information and knowledge are hoarded, and there is no space to create new and improved knowledge. Siloed teams can suffer from information obesity. Silos are the antithesis of eating our own dog food. Do we do what we preach, and do we see silos? In the Annual Employee Engagement survey at my organization, the 12,000-employee Texas Department of Transportation, 65 percent of all respondents extremely agreed that there are silos within our agency, even within divisions and sections and teams. It is an organization’s responsibility to create a café “safe space” to bust the silos. Today, several KM and silo-busting programs are reversing this trend.

Another example of silos is bottlenecks in a process that relies on one person rather than using several individuals’ expertise to ensure the best results and diversity of thought and knowledge. Several community members or individuals’ expertise is summoned in communities of practice (CoPs) to ensure that best outcomes and diversity of views and knowledge are utilized to produce the best solution. The assembling of CoPs must be organic and not mandated to be most effective. In our gig economy, building a KM base within communities helps to keep the workforce agile and effective despite turnover. Identifying and connecting knowledge workers in my community help us learn, help, share, and grow.

Stakeholders are often siloed in respective project teams and spend little or no time practicing knowledge management: identifying, capturing, sharing, rejuvenating, creating, and innovating critical organizational knowledge. There’s no time to ask questions about knowledge on a project, how to steward or manage it, and make it easily useable, accessible, and relevant to all end users. In silo-busting lunch-and-learn sessions I have facilitated, some attendees complain that their challenge is not the lack of willingness to share their knowledge but the lack of time. They indicated that taking time for appropriate knowledge transfer felt like abandoning their primary duties. Organizations are typically wired in a way that leaves insufficient time for KM. The café is the silo-buster!

Where Do You Start to Build and Nurture a Knowledge-Sharing Culture That Busts Silos?

I’ve thrown several ideas at the wall hoping that one will stick in terms of creating organizational momentum for a knowledge economy. I’m continually meeting hundreds of practitioners and CoPs across the United States who all seem to come up against the same demon of knowledge loss. I’ll tell you why I think Knowledge Café is the panacea.

Knowledge exchange opportunities increase stakeholder engagement. Café can be an incentive for employee engagement. In 2017, 88 percent of businesses sought to improve employee engagement in the workplace (Kronos Incorporated and Future Workplace®, 2017). An engaging milieu or engagement will increase the likelihood of knowledge sharing. People are less likely to share their knowledge in an environment that is not knowledge sharing-friendly or when they are disengaged. There is a binary choice for engaging employees—structured or traditional ways of an engagement or a nontraditional coffee bar setting that I call café-way. A café environment has an open hand, without preconceived outcomes that open the dialogue for engagement. In the absence of engagement, there is disengagement. An employee spends an average of 4.2 years at a job (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2020). Engagement during that time is important to capture, acquire, organize, communicate, and share knowledge. Besides, it can take 33 percent of an employee’s annual salary to replace a departing employee (Otto, 2017).

Capturing knowledge must be a strategic and proactive effort! Capturing employees’ tacit knowledge must occur long before their departure from an organization from retirement, transfer, or job change. Departing employees will not take a knowledge capture exercise seriously after they have submitted their two weeks’ notice. The organization’s knowledge capture must be regularly implemented and reinforced to nourish a healthy knowledge culture.

It makes me wonder about the future of the workplace and KM. Given the current fast-paced work environment across industries and in all roles, there’s insufficient time for data gathering, analysis, and reporting. Research by organizations such as Deloitte/Bersin and McKinsey & Company shows that the future of work is being shaped by automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, along with workforce talent, skills, and knowledge. KM will play a prominent role in the future of work, and the café makes it easier for this conversation to begin.

Bust silos by encouraging knowledge sharing and collaboration at the Knowledge Café. Diffuse silos by tracking and diverting the escalation path, and diffuse silo tension with professionalism.

3.4. CASE STUDIES: ORGANIZATIONS ARE MISSING OUT FOR NOT EMBRACING KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER—DR. NIDHI GUPTA

The following case study is from Dr. Nidhi Gupta, a trained dentist, and certified project manager. She understands the relevance of people, technology, and process in delivering dentistry and projects.

Introduction and Journey of Knowledge Management in My Career

I have been serving the public sector, the city of Austin, and the state of Texas for almost 10 years. I have realized that the public sector abounds in enormous amounts of data, and if this data is channelized and absorbed correctly, it can be put to great use for Texas citizens. The Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) has the mission to improve Texans’ health, safety, and well-being by offering reliable, effective, and timely support for services through good stewardship of public resources. Though knowledge management is one of the most talked-about subjects in the current era as it relates to benefits in policymaking and service delivery, it is also the most neglected practice when it comes to practical implementation—the human face-to-face interaction and knowledge exchange is sacrificed at the altar of technology.

Organization and Formal Knowledge Transfer Programs

As a public-sector consultant for Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), I see data that have been accumulated over the years that need to be studied, comprehended, and analyzed to reach some informed decisions. Though the agency uses several tools to disseminate knowledge, there are no formal procedures to strictly enforce knowledge transmission. There are increased efforts, especially with the execution of Senate Bill 200, to aggregate the knowledge centers and centralize the knowledge portals to attain effective decision-making and increase transparency and cost-effective reporting. All the program divisions, business areas, and IT are intricately working to accomplish this effort.

Investment in Knowledge Management

Currently, Texas’s state government relies heavily on data marts and data warehouses for data storage repository systems, but unfortunately, these systems vastly operate in isolation. As per the Senate Bill 200, 84th Legislature Regular Session, Health and Human Services is mandated to reorganize the information and data structure agency-wide to provide effective and robust analytics for the data currently residing across diverse source systems and information portals. Further, agencies are requested to define and streamline the data across different program areas and divisions to gather performance measures and create an informed dashboard and effective reporting system to benefit the Texans through data-driven decision-making initiatives. The long-term plan is to automate the knowledge repository, so the data-driven points can run the desired analytics and yield appealing decisions quickly, efficiently, and seamlessly.

Challenges Encountered While Transferring or Sharing Knowledge

Several challenges are faced during knowledge transfer. As the cross-division information and valuable data reside across several siloed source systems, it is virtually difficult to acquire the data, readily access the information, or comprehend and derive any useful analysis. As the federal and state rules and guiding policies change, the underlying information structures and policy guidelines also undergo substantial amendments, thereby putting a lot of onus on legacy information portals to update the information as deemed necessary. As the SMEs across each division and program area are scattered sporadically across the agency, it is challenging to identify the right resource group to assimilate the desired information. In a large agency such as HHSC, it is particularly challenging to identify and approach the correct knowledge groups and get their buy-in on the subject. The SMEs knowledgeable about the program sectors have no common avenue to share, collaborate, and contain the information. The information across divisions stays segregated, with no means to derive consistency and delineate standard business process definitions. Information across the systems resides in legacy systems that are incompatible with other systems and the latest technology trends available in the market. Due to this discrepancy, information and knowledge portals work in silos with no interaction agency-wide.

Issues Encountered When Knowledge Systems and People Don’t Communicate

When there are multiple systems across the agency, and the systems do not mutually interact, the information resides in isolation. The agency cannot benefit from the broad, and in-depth perspectives that the consolidated and unified system can offer. Such knowledge-sharing tools that work in isolation significantly impact the transparency, communications, and coordination within the system and hamper the aligning system activity with the agency priorities. Our organization currently uses these enterprise content management systems and elements: SharePoint, ProjectWise, OnBase, ontology, taxonomy, metadata, information architecture, and so on. There are PMRS (Project Management Repository System), ontology JIRA, and HP ALM as the chief tools to serve as repositories for project-related artifacts and documents in other organizations. At the same time, program-related information and clinical data reside in individual data source systems. For instant messaging, the agency uses Skype business to facilitate daily communications. As we develop systems to talk to each other, teams across the enterprise should café to understand the best practice for identifying, stewarding, and exchanging institutional knowledge.

Currently, the information gathering with personnel across diverse state setups, facilities, and divisions takes a significant amount of time. It may take even a couple of days to weeks to gather any preliminary data set depending on access issues to the knowledge information portals.

Significance of Sharing Knowledge

Sharing information is very vital to achieve successful outcomes and yield an effective collaborative work environment. Once the teams share their knowledge, there can be a significant improvement in the work operations, and staff can contribute equally and productively to achieve desired outcomes. Additionally, the workforce feels motivated, and Knowledge Café and sharing can help in innovations among the team members. Further, in the absence of any resource, the work will not be impacted, and the operations can move seamlessly. Thus, knowledge sharing can prevent the loss of critical know-how.

Is Knowledge Transfer a Challenge or Fun?

At times, our program divisions are actively involved in knowledge transfer. It encompasses engaging the subject matter experts and business area owners to participate in active brainstorming and Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions to deliver their share of information. However, most of the time, exchanging and transferring information is a challenge due to the difficulties involved in physically engaging the SMEs and bringing them on the same platform. People may show some reluctance in exchanging their knowledge set to safeguard their job security. Information residing in isolated systems with no mutual interaction between the system poses a massive threat to uniform and seamless knowledge dispersal.

Painful Results from Lack of Knowledge Transfer

Due to a lack of proper knowledge transfer, I have encountered impediments in ineffective knowledge dispersal and assimilation. There have been episodes when the project team has undergone frequent churn due to indecisive and unproductive occurrences because the knowledge gathered is redundant, has gaps, or is conflicting. This has led to adverse impacts on the project as this has resulted in further rework, inferior product, ambiguity, lack of precision, and delayed schedule. Incomplete and inadequate knowledge transfer has created a vague picture in stakeholders’ minds. The executive leadership has received skewed metrics on the project progress, accomplishments, and the next steps.

Conclusion

Knowledge sharing and dissemination are vital steps in an organization’s success. It involves little discipline to set up preliminary efforts and procedures to implement the knowledge-sharing program. Once established, the organization can benefit instrumentally.

About Dr. Nidhi Gupta

Dr. Nidhi Gupta works for the largest state agency in Texas, HHSC. Everyone seems to have similar challenges when it comes to exchanging and managing knowledge. KM is about systems talking to systems, and people becoming caffeinated with knowledge at the café exchange. Most organizations, especially in the public sector, are still trying to put their arms around the concept of knowledge management. A simple knowledge fair and café will explore where an organization is, what it knows, how they share, and why they should exchange knowledge.

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