APPENDIX A
Key Success Factors
Throughout the book I touched on a number of key factors that will make mastering your knowledge flow more successful.
The following list collects those key success factors into a convenient collection. Ordered by general areas of focus they combine important clarifications with specific actions and approaches.
Make sure to have these in mind when approaching any of the areas or pick specific actions to approach issues with your knowledge flow initiatives.
Analytics
• It is not part of knowledge flow management itself but rather an element for knowledge creation.
• It is an important dimension for high-quality knowledge to enter the flow around the organization.
• Develop analytical thinking in the minds of those supporting your initiatives.
• Feed analysis results back to all stakeholders.
Barriers
• Remove barriers to enable a natural knowledge flow.
• Attack barriers at the right level (i.e., from the top).
• The position that “Knowledge Is Power” can be a dangerous personal point of view.
• Acknowledge that sharing knowledge takes effort; reduce the effort but do not expect to reduce it to zero.
• More is not always better—offering too much information will often result in the targeted people skipping the information completely.
• Quality can be hard to judge; small and raw ideas can be more valuable than large complete deliveries.
• Encourage people to contribute to initiatives earlier instead of holding back ideas too long.
• Acknowledge legal limitations and work with legal groups if your organization offers such support.
Executive Buy-In
• Get executives to lead by example.
• Get their ongoing endorsement—not just for the launch.
Feedback
• Make sure to offer feedback to all participants.
• Provide regular ongoing feedback as well as occasional interesting facts.
Marketing
• Sell initiatives internally.
• Marketing must be ongoing, not limited to a big-bang launch.
• Create a pulse.
• Use internal and external success stories.
• Reach people via those places that they are currently using.
Measuring
• Measure conservatively, then look at tendencies.
• Carefully design measures—you must be able to measure in a way that does not inhibit the measured business process.
• Use a balance of multiple measures: qualitative and quantitative.
• Be very clear about effects, especially side effects of measures.
• Look at indirect changes—be careful with expecting any positive direct changes from measures.
• Provide feedback results to all participants (contributors, users, support team), not just management.
Motivation
• Financial rewards are poor motivators and usually backfire on you.
• Different people are motivated by different drivers—work with a portfolio of drivers.
• Reduce demotivators to give motivation a chance to develop.
• You cannot tell anybody to be motivated.
Reward and Recognition
• Different participants need different drivers.
• Use a portfolio approach—do not rely on one driver only.
• Design a system of drivers that contains redundancy.
Roles
• Develop special knowledge support roles.
• Build or hire experts to fill intermediary roles.
• Where you cannot build knowledge flow management expertise, buy it or have people obtain it via external communities.
• Anybody can be a sponsor, not just executives.
• Make sure your knowledge intermediaries bring the right mix of passion, service mentality, and human and technical understanding.
Scaling
• Do not underestimate the value that scaling can bring, even within an organization.
• Visualize scaling effects to your key stakeholders.
• Go global—and make sure your environment supports that move.
Support
• Do not limit support to technical support.
• Include usage support.
• Include contribution support.
• Make a similar-size investment in initiative support as in technology.
• Ensure that you have passionate people driving your initiative. Give them ownership and provide them with feedback channels that enable them to see progress.
• Locate your knowledge flow management support team where it can have organizational impact.
• Do not view knowledge flow management as something that can be handled in one project; rather view it as an ongoing initiative.
Systems
• Develop any systems involved in an iterative way, building on intermediate successes as you go.
• Ensure that your systems are designed in a modular fashion. Connect modules intelligently.
• Design your systems architecture to be easily extendable in a way that modules can be added or replaced as new technology becomes available or new needs arise.
• Focus on system flexibility. Business environments keep changing and you will need to be able to easily extend your support systems.
• Teach people to look beyond the system to see that they are also a collection of pointers to the one who knows, not just a repository of assets.
Web 2.0
• You need proper support; Web 2.0 and social media are not self-running, even though they might seem so.
• Do not underestimate cost and effort to transfer externally successful platforms into internal settings and get them succeed in smaller-scale environments.
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