7 Building a Knowledge Management Infrastructure

Social Security Administration

The Social Security Administration (SSA) is consistently ranked by its employees among the top 10 “Best Places to Work” in the federal government, an annual survey conducted by the Partnership for Public Service. The public likes SSA, too, ranking it near the very top among federal agencies for customer service in a 2011 survey conducted for the government IT community. If you’ve tried to access your earnings record on the SSA website recently and discovered how easy it has become, you will probably agree.

Successful agencies get that way and stay that way because they’re always striving to get better at something, and SSA is no exception. Even in places the public never sees, deep in the organization, innovative practices take hold and change things for the better.

The Office of Labor-Management and Employee Relations (OLMER), under the deputy commissioner for human resources, is one such place. Championed by Acting Associate Commissioner Ralph Patinella and Former Associate Commissioner Milt Beever, and spearheaded by Director Jim Parikh, OLMER has launched an integrated knowledge management (KM) program to automate and streamline the way labor/management information is posted, shared, and accessed within the agency. Through this endeavor, the agency is making a concerted effort to address one of the more complex human capital–related functional areas in government: building and sustaining a KM infrastructure to improve organizational performance through collaboration and information-sharing.

The Knowledge Management Imperative

To fully grasp what OLMER has accomplished, it is important to understand some basic aspects of KM. Human organizations have been storing and retrieving information since the dawn of civilization, but KM as a recognized field of practice dates only from the early 1990s. The advent of KM coincided with the rise of the internet and the personal computer and the resulting information explosion. At the same time, “knowledge work”—a concept first described by management guru Peter Drucker in 1959—was emerging as the dominant model in the workplace. In this new world, organizations would rise or fall to the degree they could harness and use information, now available in exponentially greater quantities than ever before.

Despite its importance, KM remains a relatively little known or understood concept. Most people who work in organizations have likely heard the term, but chances are they don’t have a good grasp of what it encompasses. They might define it as sitting down with subject matter experts to tap into their unique expertise and experience. That is certainly one aspect of KM, but the concept is actually much broader and more complex, encompassing everything from old standards like paper subject-matter files and standard operating procedures (SOPs) to more recent efforts to persuade subject matter experts to capture, catalog, and communicate what they know so that other individuals and the organization can benefit from their experiences.

In essence, KM is about taking what is often called “tacit” knowledge, or information possessed in isolation by one or more people in the organization, and making it “explicit”—readily available to other people through a variety of strategies and tools. Some of these strategies involve simply making information available in a file drawer, on a website, or in some other easily accessible location. Others require more active efforts to “push” information out through various communications media or “pull” or capture critical information from those individuals who possess it.

All these efforts—whatever label is attached to them—are for the purpose of capturing, organizing, processing, and readily retrieving information so the organization can use it to the fullest extent. This is the KM imperative. Not connecting the knowledge dots will inevitably lead to lost opportunities, wasted resources, and eventual decline in a resource-constrained environment.

Yet for most organizations, a systematic approach to KM remains elusive. Through the creation of the position of chief knowledge officer, a few federal agencies are starting to address KM in a more strategic and comprehensive manner. But for the most part, KM efforts like OLMER’s are still in their infancy, attracting nowhere near the attention that might be gained, for example, by the latest innovation in employee performance management.

Clearly, KM depends heavily on information technology (IT). Information can now be stored in vast quantities and made instantly accessible in ways that were almost unimaginable a few decades ago. However, successful KM also depends on a thorough culture shift in most organizations—from information-hoarding to information-sharing, from isolated stovepipes to true collaboration across the agency—that may be even more difficult to achieve than putting in place effective IT tools and systems.

The OLMER Initiative

At around 65,000 employees, SSA is the largest independent (noncabinet-level) agency in the federal government and is intensely focused on its mission: providing service to its external customers. As most Americans know, these services include old age, survivor, and disability benefits as well as the need-based supplemental security income program for the aged, blind, and disabled. Less visible are the many staff offices, including the Office of Human Resources and its components like OLMER, which provide internal products and services in support of SSA’s mission.

OLMER’s particular role is to manage SSA’s labor-management relations/employee relations (LR/ER) program, which includes formulating policy and overseeing and evaluating program activities in the agency’s 10 regions. This is a complex task, given the decentralized nature of the organization, with 1,300 field offices located virtually everywhere in the country. The Baltimore, Maryland, headquarters LR/ER staff number fewer than 40, with about 200 LR/ER specialists nationwide reporting to their respective component leadership.

When Jim Parikh joined OLMER in 2010, he found an organization that, despite its many strengths, had not yet taken the steps necessary to manage and use knowledge to the fullest. Important program information and documentation were sometimes unavailable or difficult to access. Expert knowledge and institutional memory were locked in the minds and file drawers of individual subject matter experts or savvy managers, with no systematic plan to tap into that resource and make it available to the organization at large. Work processes were in some cases still manual and lacking in efficiency and reliability. Tools and resources were needlessly duplicated in various offices across the country, resulting in much overlap as well as a failure to replicate successful local innovations across the organization.

Fortunately, Jim’s training and career gave him a solid foundation for identifying these problems and setting to work on a plan to address them. During the span of his career, Jim had read extensively about KM. When he joined OLMER in 2010, he already knew of tools and techniques that would improve the flow and exchange of information among the many work units in the organization’s day-to-day activities related to labor and employee relations.

Although consistency in administrative actions and adherence to precedent are paramount at OLMER, LR/ER specialists lacked ready access to information on grievances, arbitration cases, and other decisions. They also had no easy way to obtain the various labor-management agreements that were established in memoranda of understanding (MOU) around the nation. The LR/ER specialists did what they could under the circumstances, but the process was inefficient at best.

Jim also observed that OLMER was encumbered by manual processes for MOU approval/disapproval and workload tracking that failed to take advantage of the increased efficiency and consistency automation could provide. Even where efforts were made to take advantage of the “new” technology, the results were less than optimal. For example, each of the ten regions had its own website, with largely overlapping content but lacking an overarching framework.

Jim quickly realized he had to seek out someone who possessed knowledge of both IT and LR/ER work processes. The individual chosen would be tasked with automating outmoded paper-based processes and building web-based databases as well as knowledge-sharing tools that would become the platform for more effective KM. That individual turned out to be Chris Bowser. Chris’ unique combination of IT skills and human resource management knowledge made him the right choice to serve as the KM IT manager for OLMER.

With Chris on board, Jim could focus on the “people” side of the effort—the organizational transformation effort whereby the various systems and solutions become mutually supportive and together form a cohesive, integrated strategy. Given the highly decentralized nature of the agency’s LR/ER function, he realized that substantial effort would have to be directed to eliciting the cooperation and ultimate “buy-in” of OLMER components across the country.

Laying the Foundation for Knowledge Management

Convinced that lack of effective, consistent information-sharing was at the root of many of the problems in OLMER, in 2010 Jim launched a four-step process that would enable him and his staff to gain the understanding they needed to move forward with a KM initiative: (1) identifying key skills and organizations, (2) analyzing organizational needs, (3) making recommendations, and (4) developing strategic and tactical initiatives.

The first of these steps was probably the easiest to accomplish. Everyone in OLMER knew the roles of the various components within the organization and who the experts in the various subject matter areas were. As Jim puts it, “OLMER was known more by some of our employees as opposed to the organization. We know who the experts are and our task was to capture their expertise.”

Analyzing organizational needs was a more time-intensive process, but a fruitful one. Jim and his staff conducted a series of interviews with OLMER employees, customers, and stakeholders in an effort to understand their needs and identify specific problems. They asked key questions, including: What organizational issues are holding OLMER back? What roadblocks and bottlenecks are inhibiting the free flow and utilization of information? In addition to yielding valuable insights about what to do, this exercise helped build relationships that would be vital as the initiative proceeded.

The interviews proved to be revelatory. Employees expressed a strong desire to learn something new and different, to move into other specialties. They were “hungry” to learn and to be engaged. Better KM would not be the only way to satisfy this hunger, but breaking down barriers by providing better access to valued information would certainly help.

Employees also perceived a need for more automation, to get away from inefficient paper-driven processes. It quickly became clear that it would be necessary to take the time to re-examine and possibly re-engineer the established processes.

Employees and stakeholders didn’t just identify problems; they were also an excellent source of possible solutions. The recommendations compiled by OLMER staff from the interviews fell into five broad categories: storytelling, social media, knowledge repositories, knowledge fairs, and an expert exchange directory.

With the broad outlines of a plan beginning to form, it was time to reconnect and review these findings with decision makers within the organization. “We started having conversations with executives,” says Jim, “to ensure we would meet their expectations.” He wanted to make sure the solutions they were working on would meet the needs of both employees and management.

Implementing the Knowledge Management Program

Having received senior management support for the initiative, Jim and his staff embarked on the fourth and final phase of the developmental process: identifying strategic and tactical initiatives in each of the recommended categories to address the problems uncovered. When the final list was set, these initiatives ranged across the broad spectrum of KM initiatives—from process improvement to website development to innovative efforts to pull information from subject matter experts and push that information out to the widest possible audience of employees. Together these initiatives constitute the KM program that continues to flourish in OLMER (Figure 7-1).

While Jim himself fully embraced the concept of KM, he felt it was important to develop and communicate a message that would resonate with his staff and stakeholders. Finding that people are intimidated by the term knowledge management, he focused instead on getting them to embrace practical solutions to highly visible and readily understood problems—and how they and the organization would benefit from getting these problems solved. Jim’s aim was to “sell KM as a product/business goal: improving collaboration in order to bring a product to market faster.”

FIGURE 7-1 OLMER’s KM Infrastructure

Workload Management System

The creation of the LR/ER workload management system (WMS) stands out among the OLMER KM program initiatives, not only for its positive impact on organizational work processes but also as an example of how the initiative has contributed to the transformation of OLMER’s organizational culture by breaking down stovepipes. Taking advantage of a prototype system that was developed by the San Francisco region and featured at the 2010 national LR/ER conference, Jim and his staff proposed that the prototype be converted to the national LR/ER WMS.

Given the similarity of the work performed across the nation, the case for turning this homegrown innovation into a shared national system was compelling. Replacing an outmoded manual system with 14 discrete labor processes, the new system was not only demonstrably better at integrating the workflow, but has also become a vehicle for breaking down geographical stovepipes. Widely recognized as a success, the pilot system is scheduled to be implemented nationwide in 2013.

The new system offers many benefits for LR/ER managers and staff. This centralized, fully automated system captures the core business processes of the LR/ER function. It provides an automated web-based tool for staff to track and manage their assigned work. It also gives supervisors and project managers a view of progress on individual assignments and enables more even distribution of new work to staff. Additionally, it catalogs pending cases and has a sophisticated search feature.

Besides helping manage the workload on a real-time basis, the LR/ER WMS offers a vast amount of retrospective management-related information, enabling SSA to track trends and processing times as well as to analyze case decisions. The capabilities of a data-driven workload management system have overcome the initial inertia or resistance to a centralized system.

One of the many features of a work management systems like the LR/ER WMS is the ability to “embed” necessary knowledge into an automated process, much as SOPs have done over the years in organizations. Another example of embedded knowledge is the improved SOP for the MOU approval process. OLMER is responsible for approving labor-management MOUs before they go into effect. Therefore, it was only natural that OLMER should create a nationwide SOP that improves efficiency in this sensitive area. This system not only guarantees consistency in how MOUs are handled, but also interfaces at key steps along the way with the WMS to ensure that information is current.

SSA LR/ER Website

Another initiative of significant practical and symbolic importance is the SSA LR/ER website. As with the WMS, regional autonomy and sheer force of habit were barriers that had to be broken down to create this website. The challenge was to replace homegrown local IT applications with chief information officer–driven or other centralized initiatives to eliminate redundancies and universalize best practices.

Every one of the ten regions plus headquarters already had its own website for labor and employee relations. From the broader organizational perspective, this was a tremendously inefficient way to get information out; 67 percent of the content among the sites was determined to be overlapping. Having multiple sites also greatly increased the risk of providing inaccurate or outdated information.

The goal was to create a single website for one-stop shopping—an agency-level portal for disseminating up-to-date, accurate labor and employee relations information to managers, specialists, and rank-and-file employees. The goal was straightforward, but many challenges had to be addressed.

For instance, each of the regions was justifiably proud of its understanding of local employee, employment, and management issues and interests. The regions were confident that their websites accurately captured and conveyed appropriate and sufficient region-specific information. OLMER recognized this paradigm as an opportunity to leverage the information from each region by creating a central repository to share practices and procedures across the country.

Before they could gain any traction, Jim and his staff realized that they needed to balance local pride with the need for an enterprise-wide website. To ensure that the important regional elements were maintained during the web-design process, each region was represented on the One LR/ER Website workgroup, which had the task of identifying the best content for an agencywide audience. Even though the working group was large, having full regional representation allowed for more collaboration and better exchanges of ideas and information; most importantly, it fostered a spirit of ownership in the final product by all participants.

The new website, which went live in fall 2012, includes policies, procedures, training, and other resources for management and staff—more information than its many predecessors provided and at a fraction of the cost. Regions have the option to post region-specific information in addition to the agencywide content, including contact information. The site has the capability to ensure that specific LR/ER content intended as a resource for management only is offered on a restricted basis. It also has an interactive feature that allows agency program offices across the country to post information relevant to LR/ER and to share best practices.

Not content to focus solely on these signature achievements, Jim and his staff have pressed forward on several other fronts as part of their overall KM campaign. These efforts have ranged from the simple collection and storage of important data to bolder attempts to actively extract information from knowledgeable staff and push it out to the rest of the organization—or, as KM experts would say, to make tacit knowledge explicit.

To maintain momentum and continue enhancing the knowledge management repository, OLMER implemented recommendations from its customers and stakeholders. This important action served two purposes. First, it fostered additional buy-in and support from everyone. Second, it further enhanced the features of the system. For example, as a result of user recommendations, OLMER has established a virtual, searchable file of national union correspondence and another of labor-management MOUs. As a result, OLMER is now able to track and sort MOU agreements as they make their way through the approval process efficiently and effectively.

Knowledge Management Catalog

One particularly innovative repository is the KM catalog on the OLMER internal SharePoint website. This platform has been designed to enable OLMER senior experts and executives to share information on a variety of sensitive and complex labor-management and employee relations topics. Many types of information are stored in the KM catalog, such as notes and e-mails on specific ER/LR issues, tips on how to deal with particularly sensitive labor-management issues, thoughts and aspirations concerning the strategic direction of the organization, and formal program documents. For ease of use, the catalog is organized by topic and the folders are aligned with articles in the SSA labor-management contracts (e.g., leave policy, performance management).

Unlike many of the repositories, the catalog requires the active participation of the OLMER staff, specifically senior experts and executives. Getting senior-level employees to make full use of the repositories was challenging at first. However, as this initiative evolves, it is gaining momentum as potential users become more attuned to the value of sharing information as a way of promoting and learning about promising practices that might otherwise be lost.

In keeping with the recommendations, OLMER has also created a platform for “storytelling” as a way to share and disseminate information. To promote this communication strategy, OLMER establishes a platform at its national conference to showcase labor relations and employee relations challenges, opportunities, and outcomes based on specific case studies. Between the annual conferences, OLMER conducts monthly teleconferences to share information within the LR/ER community.

In addition to participating in conferences and monthly teleconferences, OLMER staff is permitted to participate in internal executive meetings as a way to obtain and transfer information. Additional vehicles include formalized training opportunities, meetings with stakeholders, and a scheduled video broadcast for training agency management and LR/ER staff (called the “LR/ER hour”). The broadcast catalog includes more than 25 in-depth and varied offerings, from collective bargaining rights and unfair labor practices to performance management to travel regulations. All these activities foster two-way sharing of knowledge and, ultimately, a culture of collaboration.

LR/ER Discussion Board

OLMER capitalizes on the power of information-sharing by hosting a labor and employee relations discussion board containing frequently asked questions on the SSA SharePoint network. The discussion board, which is currently restricted to the LR/ER community, is designed to pull in users by generating an e-mail to employees who have indicated an interest in a given topic. As with the KM catalog, getting executives and experts to take the time to weigh in is a challenge, but as the culture of knowledge-sharing continues to take hold, usage of this tool should increase.

Finally, OLMER has adopted the recommendation to create an experts exchange directory. This tool, accessible to all agency employees, describes which components perform which functions and identifies the individuals responsible for specific tasks within each component. Anyone who has spent time searching for a particular needle in the organizational haystack can readily appreciate the value of this directory, and it has already proven to be a highly popular feature of the overall KM initiative.

The Way Forward

Despite their many successes, Jim and his staff know that more work remains to ensure that the KM strategies, ideas, and practices continue to evolve and impact the mission, function, and outcomes of OLMER. In short, the office must consolidate the gains achieved and strive to increase usage of the less popular applications. “Our work will never be done,” declares Jim. “We will need to continue to look at processes and continue to engage staff to see where there is room for improvement.”

But clearly, a corner has been turned. The culture of information-sharing so necessary to support KM in all its facets has been planted, and Jim and his staff remain committed to continually seeking ways to reinvent themselves and their organization. As an example of their current efforts, the recently concluded national agreement with the American Federation of Government Employees became a springboard for modeling how technology can be used to deliver cost-effective knowledge transfer in a budget-constrained environment.

Key Lessons Learned

The OLMER story can serve as a source of successful “takeaways” for other agencies to study and emulate. To Jim Parikh, the foremost lesson of the KM initiative at SSA is to engage people throughout the organization and at every possible level. Roadblocks will emerge, but so too will change agents who will help provide the know-how and the energy to work around or through obstacles and sustain momentum. As Jim says, “Solutions are always there; you just have to ask the right question of the right person.

The SSA example also demonstrates the effectiveness of a multiplicity of initiatives, large and small, but all aligned to the common goal of breaking down organizational and interpersonal barriers that impede the free and beneficial flow of information across the organization. Certainly, the initiative has benefited from support at the highest levels of the agency, but it is the continual action at the local level that is helping most to transform SSA into a knowledge-sharing organization.

Another lesson is that while effective IT applications are a tremendous enabler for KM, they are not enough. It is hard to conceive of a successful contemporary KM application that doesn’t make full use of IT. But as the OLMER experience conveys, IT cannot do the job alone—it must be wedded to a strong and persistent emphasis on the “people” factor.