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High-Touch KM for a High-Tech World
- 1. The world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. HIGH-TOUCH KM FOR A HIGH-TECH WORLD An APQC Webinar for the SIKM Community December 18, 2018
- 2. SPEAKERS Lauren Trees Principal Research Lead, Knowledge Management APQC Carla O’Dell Chairman of the Board APQC
- 3. 3©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APQC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN 2019 New Technology for Content & Knowledge Management Adopting New Behaviors for Knowledge Sharing, Access, & Reuse
- 4. 4©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APQC KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN 2019 New Technology for Content & Knowledge Management Adopting New Behaviors for Knowledge Sharing, Access, & Reuse The people approaches are what make the technology approaches work
- 5. 5©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE NEWEST WAVE OF HIGH-TECH KM THE NEWEST WAVE OF HIGH-TECH KMTHE NEWEST WAVE OF HIGH-TECH KM
- 6. 6©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WHY NOW? Digital transformation Moving to the cloud Affordable options for experimentation
- 7. 7©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 13% 14% 18% 20% 25% 25% 40% 51% 53% 0% 20% 40% 60% Chatbot Blockchain Machine learning Robotic desktop automation Intelligent automation AI & cognitive computing Robotic process automation Data management Advanced & predictive analytics TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENTS OVER NEXT 18 MONTHS Source: Exploring Process Automation N = 208, 2018
- 8. 8©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HOW NEW TECHNOLOGY ENHANCES KM Automate routine knowledge processing & analysis Leverage organizational knowledge to automate other routine work Improve how users search, discover, & interact with organizational knowledge
- 9. 9©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HOW HIGH-TOUCH KM CAN HELP US PREPARE THE IMPACT OF HIGH-TOUCH ON HIGH-TECH TRANSFORMATION
- 10. 10©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ALLOCATION OF KM COSTS At the median level, KM programs spend >5x more on staff and contract personnel than technology Source: KM Program Benchmarks and Metrics, 2018
- 11. 11©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNDERSTAND YOUR “PEOPLE” MATURITY APQC’s Levels of KM MaturitySM illustrate how you build your KM capabilities Level 1 Initiate Growing awareness Level 2 Develop Localized and repeatable practices Level 3 Standardize Common processes and approaches Level 4 Optimize Measured and adaptive Level 5 Innovate Continuously improving practices Dynamic Knowledge Leveraged Knowledge Applied Knowledge Ad Hoc Knowledge
- 12. 12©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MATURITY ACROSS 12 CAPABILITIES
- 13. 13©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THE “PEOPLE” ASPECT OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION Build skills & capabilities Create a plan to manage change Communicate, listen, & respond
- 14. 14©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CREATE A PLAN TO MANAGE CHANGE
- 15. 15©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. WHAT MOTIVATES KNOWLEDGE SHARING & REUSE? Benefits emphasized most when explaining why employees should participate in KM Source: APQC’s Promoting KM & Making It Stick Survey, 2018 N = 353
- 16. 16©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. YOU NEED A STRATEGY FOR CHANGE A KM change management strategy: Helps recruit & inspire business advocates Boosts standardization & consistent adoption Helps ID & address barriers to knowledge sharing & use Source: Develop a Change Management Strategy to Support the KM Strategy and Approaches, 2016
- 17. 17©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HELP EMPLOYEES ADAPT TO DIGITAL & AUTOMATION 1. Build awareness 2. Communicate the value 3. Educate the business 4. Engage leaders & end users in the process Source: Make Success Automatic: Best Practices in Robotic Process Automation, 2018
- 18. 18©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HOW ENGIE MANAGES CHANGE AROUND AUTOMATION Key Audiences Channels • Senior stakeholders • Subject matter experts • Direct marketing • Promotion at meetings, conferences, & events • Video channel & webinars • Monthly newsletter • Yammer • Case studies Source: Setting up a Robotic Process Automation Program with ENGIE, 2018
- 19. 19©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HOW COLLINS AEROSPACE MANAGES KM CHANGE Source: You Can't Have One Without the Others: Knowledge, Process, and Change Management for Improvements, 2018
- 20. 20©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. BUILD SKILLS & CAPABILITIES BUILD SKILLS & CAPABILITIES
- 21. 21©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. KM SKILL SETS FOR THE FUTURE Tech savvy / familiarity / fluency Ability to listen to business needs & match them to best available solutions Partnering Innovation skills: agile, design thinking, systems thinking Change management
- 22. 22©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. LEARN TOGETHER: KM PARTNERSHIPS 22 Learning IT Process/quality Engineering/R&D Corporate communication Traditional Stakeholders with a clear business case Jointly solve a knowledge problem & publicize the results Business Groups Innovation Teams: New ventures, start-up hubs Digital disruption Data & analytics Marketing Non-Traditional
- 23. 23©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. HOW KM BUILDS DIGITAL COMPETENCIES Mentoring & experience sharing help employees develop knowledge & skills Virtual networks strengthen collaboration, relationships, & trust in the digital sphere Transfer discipline knowledge Career pathing & counseling Develop business acumen & soft skills Share insider knowledge
- 24. 24©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ACHIEVING COMMUNICATIONS MATURITY
- 25. 25©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MESSAGES THAT RESONATE MOST WITH EMPLOYEES 70% Success stories of how KM has helped teams & projects 41% Explanations of KM’s value and importance to the organization 39% Endorsements from peers who have participated 29% Metrics showing KM’s ROI or business impact 20% Explanations of career or professional development benefits of KM participation N = 348 Source: APQC’s Promoting KM & Making It Stick Survey, 2018
- 26. 26©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. GET NOTICED WITH A KM BRAND KM event posters at MSA Branded KM swag at Collins Aerospace KM branding & posters at CCC
- 27. 27©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. COMMUNICATION IS A TWO-WAY STREET Ask sponsors & advisors for feedback Monitor metrics to understand trends & patterns Conduct surveys & act on the results Use your community leaders & business liaisons
- 28. 28©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APQC RESOURCES & OPPORTUNITIES Download complimentary research How to Future-Proof Your KM Effort Do We Need to Change How We Change? How Bechtel Promotes KM Using Change Management ConocoPhillips Rides the Storm of Change in KM You Can't Have One Without the Others: Knowledge, Process, and Change Management for Improvements Using Change Management in KM at Consolidated Contractors Co. Benchmark and contribute Take our 12-question 2019 KM Priorities survey to direct future research Benchmark your program with the KM Benchmarks & Metrics survey Assess your capabilities with the KM Capability Assessment Tool Member Resource Collections Promoting KM and Making It Stick Closing the Change Management Gap Supporting Transformational Change Through KM Achieving KM Maturity and Business Impact Accelerators of KM Maturity
- 29. 29©2018 APQC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. APQC'S AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN KM 2019 Awards go to organizations achieving Maturity Level 3 or higher Submit entries through the KM Capability Assessment Tool by January 31 Award recipients will be honored at APQC’s 2019 KM Conference happening May 2-3 Award recipients will need to register for the conference to receive their awards in person
- 30. QUESTIONS
- 31. The world’s foremost authority in benchmarking, best practices, process and performance improvement, and knowledge management. 123 N. Post Oak Lane, Third Floor | Houston, TX | 77024 | apqc.org
Editor's Notes
- LAUREN
- INTRO OURSELVES Thank you for joining us to talk about the digital workplace & skills for the future. My name is Lauren Trees, and I am APQC’s principal research lead for knowledge management—which means I lead our research in everything from content management to communities, collaboration, and strategies to get employees to transfer deep experiential knowledge. (Elissa to introduce herself)
- LAUREN I know it’s late in the year, so we wanted to give you a sneak peak of the themes and ideas we’re thinking about as we move into 2019. I’m sure most of you have heard us talk about digital transformation and how new technology is affecting KM approaches and processes. And speaking from the research side, that’s going to be a huge focus for us next year; we have a lot of research planned around technology adoption, content management, cloud, search, natural language processing. But as we talk to our members about the impact of new technologies, we’re constantly reminded that all these cool new tools, especially the ones that fundamentally change how end-users collaborate and interact with knowledge, are changes just like any other. Everything we know about engaging and supporting end users and managing change remains true, and it’s more important than ever to KM success. So those are the two poles that APQC KM is focusing on for next year, the high-tech innovations, and the high-touch approaches needed to build communities of collaborators, drive KM participation, and navigate change. That’s why Bridging High-Touch and High-Tech is the theme for our 2019 KM Conference (the week of April 29 to May 3 in Houston) and also for our research agenda: because the people approaches, those high-touch things we do to motivate people and transfer knowledge, are what makes technology-driven KM work. All the tech in the world can’t help you if you don’t have that culture of sharing and reuse where people know how and why they should participate and it’s built into their work.
- LAUREN I know it’s late in the year, so we wanted to give you a sneak peak of the themes and ideas we’re thinking about as we move into 2019. I’m sure most of you have heard us talk about digital transformation and how new technology is affecting KM approaches and processes. And speaking from the research side, that’s going to be a huge focus for us next year; we have a lot of research planned around technology adoption, content management, cloud, search, natural language processing. But as we talk to our members about the impact of new technologies, we’re constantly reminded that all these cool new tools, especially the ones that fundamentally change how end-users collaborate and interact with knowledge, are changes just like any other. Everything we know about engaging and supporting end users and managing change remains true, and it’s more important than ever to KM success. So those are the two poles that APQC KM is focusing on for next year, the high-tech innovations, and the high-touch approaches needed to build communities of collaborators, drive KM participation, and navigate change. That’s why Bridging High-Touch and High-Tech is the theme for our 2019 KM Conference (the week of April 29 to May 3 in Houston) and also for our research agenda: because the people approaches, those high-touch things we do to motivate people and transfer knowledge, are what makes technology-driven KM work. All the tech in the world can’t help you if you don’t have that culture of sharing and reuse where people know how and why they should participate and it’s built into their work.
- CARLA Before we jump into the people aspects, I’m going to spend just a few minutes making sure we’re all on the same page about this concept of the digital workplace. I think this is a buzzword that means different things to different people, so I’ll let you know what I see as the main components, and you all can add on to that definition as necessary.
- CARLA At APQC, we’ve marked 2017-2018 as the tipping point for the adoption of new digital and automation technologies, and especially elements of intelligent automation and AI. People have been talking about RPA and cognitive computing for several years, but last year early adopters really got going with their implementations (that group tends to include a lot of large professional services and technology companies that want to experiment on themselves as they ramp up their and services in this space). And following on from that, we’re seeing that second wave of organizations that are a little bit behind the bleeding edge start to experiment and run pilots. So why now? What was special about the past year or so that all this is coming together? I think first, like so many things in our world, the perception is driving the reality. With so many articles and so many people talking about digital transformation, a lot of senior leaders have internalized that and started to ask questions and push their organizations forward in terms of digitization. (I was talking to a KM leader the other day who said a said that a senior VP walked into her office and said, “we need a chatbot!”) But as you get past the hype, there’s a lot going on inside organizations to warrant this idea of transformation, which often boils down to taking the great digital user experiences that we’re used to as consumers and moving more of that inside our organizations, so we don’t feel like we’re driving a Ferrari at home and a little red wagon at work. And a big part of it is the rapid adoption of automation to take over repetitive, routine, and transactional processes and tasks. How many of you have RPA deployed right now? EY has 838 robots inside and thousands with clients. The second big force here is the adoption of cloud computing – vendors are pushing hard toward software as a service, and organizations are seeing the benefits and getting on board. For the people I talk to in the KM space, the adoption of Office 365 is a huge part of this, with between 2/3 and 3/4 of organizations incorporating Office 365 in their digital transformations. Last year, commercial subscriptions to Office 365 starting bringing in more revenue than traditional on-premises installations of office, and Microsoft expects 2/3 of its commercial Office customers will be using Office 365 in about year. And moving software to the cloud opens up a whole range of possibilities that we’ll touch on in a minute. And that brings me to the third factor here, which is affordable options for experimentation. It used to be that you had to sign a six-figure check to even experiment with something like Watson, now through the cloud you can experiment with the tools for free and launch proof-of-concept projects without making a huge up-front investment. So obviously that opens automation and AI up to a lot more organizations and also to different types of applications.
- CARLA This is data from work that our colleague Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland did earlier this year about technology investments over the next 18 months, which I think does a nice job of laying out the progression of these trends. The largest number of companies are investing in data management and analytics – that’s a majority of surveyed organizations. Most organizations are realizing they need a more sophisticated, systematic way of managing and making sense of their data, especially new data streams that weren’t previously collected. Two out of 5 are investing in robotic process automation for routine tasks With a smaller percentage (25% or less) progressing to intelligent automation and AI (with machine learning as an enabler). And then 14% and 13% investing in blockchain and chatbots, respectively. So if you were plotting these on an adoption curve, I think you have the broadest number of organizations looking at data management and analysis, then a smaller subset using that for automation, and a still smaller subset for true intelligent automation Robotic process automation or RPA is the use of software bots to mimic human action, usually by applying a combination of process steps, business rules, and decision models. RPA is best applied to automate high-volume transactional processes with limited variation. When you get into intelligent automation, you’re incorporating things like machine learning and AI to let the software take on more complex and variable tasks.
- CARLA And as conversations about new technology tend to go, it started as pretty abstract and predictive: new tools have these impressive capabilities, and we might be able to use them in KM to do these cool new things. But over the past year things have solidified to the point where we can share specific real-world examples, which is our goal today – to talk about what early adopters are doing with some of these tools. And the most intriguing applications for KM fall into 3 categories: The first is automating routine knowledge processing and analysis – so how you can have software do some of the lower-value administrative work involved in harvesting, organizing, processing, and delivering knowledge. The second is around how you take the digital stores of knowledge that we all have and expose that knowledge to software that can take on elements of low-level, routine work across the enterprise. The third category consists of ways to improve how users search, discover, and interact with organizational knowledge. And at least right now, I think these are the most important ways that new technology can help us knowledge managers, both in terms of doing the work of KM and applying KM to support the work of the business.
- LAUREN Before we jump into the people aspects, I’m going to spend just a few minutes making sure we’re all on the same page about this concept of the digital workplace. I think this is a buzzword that means different things to different people, so I’ll let you know what I see as the main components, and you all can add on to that definition as necessary.
- LAUREN So why do we care about automation in KM? When a lot of people think about the investment than an organization makes in knowledge management, they think about what they’re spending on technology But if you look at the cost benchmarks that APQC has collected for KM programs, organizations actually spend more than 5x more on staff and contract personnel to make KM happen than they do on platforms and systems. And I know a lot of programs are being asked to do more every year, without a commensurate rise in budget or staff. So if KM teams can offload some of the lower-value, repetitive tasks they’re responsible for to a bot, they should be better positioned to scale up.
- LAUREN (Darcy’s notes) First, I’m going to give a brief introduction to the Levels of KM Maturity. What you see here is APQC’s five-level maturity model for KM programs, which was developed in conjunction with our first KM Advanced Working Group 9 years ago. Level 1 is the most basic level. Here the organization lacks consistent KM practices, and whatever knowledge sharing and transfer is going on is random, informal, and yields no impact to the business. At Level 2, you’re establishing your fist KM strategy and business case, as well as working to build governance and sponsorship and designing KM approaches. Level 3 is all about managing and what you create at level 2, standardizing KM across the business, and embedding KM in people’s daily workflow. At Level 4, you’re expanding KM throughout the organization and marketing them to a more diverse audience. And at Level 5, you’re working on optimization and continuous improvement, as well as embedding KM into the business model.
- LAUREN (I don’t think we need to say much here, but we do need to situate where the “people” stuff sits within the larger holistic model)
- CARLA in summary To control costs and scale up to do more! Better search is the holy grail of KM. Any thing that makes it better is a win. Chatbots are something that execs understand and pretty easy to deliver on.
- Lauren (shift us from governance to change)
- LAUREN I think effective change management always has to start with the “What’s in it for me?” You want me to spend my time and energy shifting the way I do things – how is that going to benefit me personally, and how is it going to help the organization? We asked about this on our “Promoting KM and Making It Stick” survey this summer, and I’ve got the top 5 responses here. What we found is the benefit that organizations emphasize most frequently is the opportunity to save time. And I think that resonates because almost everyone has had that experience where they’re looking for information they know is there, but they just can’t find it or it’s behind an access wall. Or they spend a lot of time building expertise or recreating IP that they know a colleague could help them with, if they only knew what colleague or project they’re looking for. And saving time is also a dual benefit – it helps individuals get their work done and get home on time, and it also improves efficiency and helps the organization more broadly. Organizations also emphasize the chance to improve productivity and quality and improving decision making. But one of my take-aways from this data is that relatively few organizations emphasize the professional development benefits of participating in KM. Only 14 percent focus on KM’s role in employee learning, and only 3 percent talk about KM as a way for people to build their personal brand in the organization and increase their visibility for new projects and opportunities. So I think more focus on that personal development side might be helpful in terms of encouraging participation and driving change.
- LAUREN Once you know the messages you’re going to use to motivate people, you need a strategy to get it done. You need to think through how each change is going to affect people out in the business, what kind of motivation and support they’re going to need, and then make sure you’re addressing their concerns and helping them get through it in a meaningful way. For the project we’re doing now I interviewed one KM leader who said the top competencies she looks for in her KM staff are patience, a nurturing sensibility, and an ability to adjust to people’s needs and hold their hand until they get it. In a lot of cases you really do need to provide that concierge-level support until people get it, and a change strategy can help you do that more efficiently and effectively. What our research shows is that organizations with a KM change management strategy are more likely to have active KM advocates and champions out in the business, more likely to achieve KM standardization, and they’re also more than 4x more like to identify and address barriers to knowledge sharing and use. And that makes sense – whatever barriers you face in getting KM accepted and embedded across the organization, a good change strategy will target those stumbling blocks and help you get through them.
- LAUREN And Elissa has already talked a bit about change management as a skill gap. I don’t think that the change management around digital and automation is significantly different than any other change – it’s just a big shift and requires a lot of education, hand-holding, and reinforcement. And there’s also a lot of fear around things like RPA and AI in terms of people losing their jobs – so you have to address that in your communication and be proactive. 1. BUILD AWARENESS—use targeted messaging, meetings, and town halls to convey the need for change and develop a high-level understanding of the technologies you’re planning to adopt. 2. COMMUNICATE THE VALUE—communicate broadly and through one-on-one engagements to provide context around the value of the technologies you’ve selected, and particularly the impact it will have on employees’ jobs. 3. EDUCATE THE BUSINESS—use training, mentoring, and success stories to explain the technology’s applications, features, and limitations. 4. And then finally, ENGAGE THE BUSINESS IN THE PROCESS—people support what they help create, so get their input early on, play that consultative role to listen to their needs and show them how this is going to fit in, and clarify the role they need to play in successful implementation.
- ELISSA CHANGE MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION The CoE has a robust internal marketing strategy to promote awareness and buy-in for RPA. The key message the CoE conveys is that RPA will not replace full-time jobs. “In our business, we haven’t got groups of people just doing the same task every single day—our business isn’t like that,” said Ruane. “RPA will enable our employees to do more value-added activities and value-added work, which actually provides job enrichment.” The CoE’s marketing tactics include: webinars, direct marketing to senior stakeholders, monthly newsletter, social platforms like Yammer, an RPA video channel, RPA case studies, and RPA promotion at meetings, conferences, and other events. SMEs are a key focus of the CoE’s change management and communication efforts. The CoE works carefully with SMEs to ensure they understand, on a regular basis, what’s going on with RPA. When ENGIE first started using RPA, there was some resistance. However, this has now dissipated as teams see the benefits which are being realized. The CoE is currently achieving an average 9.5 out of 10 internal customer satisfaction rating. “In fact, we tend to find that people welcome us with open arms, because we’re frequently solving business problems for them ,” said Ruane. “That’s not to say we don’t focus on change management anymore, though, because we do see that as really important.”
- LAUREN And I wanted to end this talk on change management with an example from Collins Aerospace, formerly Rockwell Collins, to show how well-thought out their change efforts are for KM. They follow the ADKAR model, where you think about change in terms of building awareness, desire (so those motivators we talked about earlier, knowledge and ability (what you want people to do and how) and then finally reinforcement (to remind people and embed the change). This example is from a recent large-scale project to roll out a knowledge base and other resources for their Quality function, and as you can see They’ve laid out a change management plan in terms of communications, sponsorship, coaching, training, and resistance management. They through all the challenges that might derail the change, the top barriers to achieving the change, and then they work through how to deal with them. And they also have a change management playbook to help them and sponsors roll out this and other large-scale changes. So I just think this is a great example of how putting yourself in your end-user’s shoes, figuring out what’s going to prevent them from adopting new behaviors, and working out a mitigation strategy up front is so powerful. So for all of you who are planning these high-tech transformations, or maybe you’re in the midst of it already, I think this a good thing to role-model.
- CARLA
- Carla In either case…. if you cultivate these skills you will be ready and Don’t worry about your job in KM So here are the six skill sets to have on the KM team or in your collaboration partners. Tech Fluency = speaking the language of the business as well as the technology and being able to do the translation. You’re going to need someone familiar with what it can do and willing to play around just see how it might be applied to your business partners knowledge problems. Need to be fluent in the new innovation skills and sprints methodologies (Agile, design thinking, systems thinking, etc.) The question is what KM tasks (like curating and autotagging) are going to be replaced by computer programs are which are going to be better done by humans. Partnering skills and collaboration are the key to successful KM programs in general and especially here. Need to be able to hear the business needs and not be a hammer looking for a nail. Business people need change management support -- messaging, strategy etc. CLICK If you act like a robot you can be replaced by one….
- Carla (Before the click) KM has always played well with others. Partnering with other functions is the lowest cost and risk way to see and participate across the enterprise and have simple experiments that will touch many. It also keeps KM in the main stream of the Digital Transformation. Click #1: Traditional partners Click #2: Business groups Click #3: Non-traditional BCG Ventures “innovation sprint” Deloitte KM got “seed money” from global innovation group, which also does market sensing. Aa very smart place to start. Even non PS - have all spun off mini-groups and skunk works to be Agile, move faster than traditional IT.
- CARLA Leaders obviously play a huge role in shaping the culture and people’s attitudes toward digitization. When it comes to some of the technology, innovation, and social skills we’ve been talking about, one technique that can help spread those across your organization is formal and informal mentoring. Elissa and I partnered on a best practices research project on mentoring in 2016, and what we found is that different forms of mentoring can help organizations with a variety of needs. Career pathing & counseling are the most obvious application of mentoring and what a lot of people think about when they think of mentoring. But in the context of digitization, mentoring can help transfer knowledge about new technologies, how to use them, and how to get value from them. And this can happen through traditional mentoring, peer mentoring, or reverse mentoring where some of your less experienced employees who have a knack with technology guide and support more experienced employees for whom this is a little less intuitive. Mentoring can also be incredibly valuable in helping employees build their critical thinking and people skills so that they can better lead and participate in the digital workplace. In the research we did, we saw this across all mentoring relationships: simply giving employees time to interact with more experienced colleagues they can learn from and emulate increases their social maturity and fosters leadership and interpersonal skills. Other programs incorporate soft skills more explicitly into their mentoring. For example, MD Anderson Cancer Center has a program called mentoring connections where employees meet with 4 different advisors for 15 minutes each to get help with a job-related problem. It also has a group mentoring program with 90-minute sessions where a senior person shares their techniques for something like critical thinking or enhancing your emotional intelligence. So if you feel like social work is a real gap in your organization, I would encourage you to find the people who do that well and engage them as teachers and mentors to spread those skills. And then circling back to the conversation about virtual collaboration we had earlier, for cultures that are struggling to adopt digital ways of working, I would encourage you to invest in virtual communities and networks focused on topics of interest across the organization. First of all, these structures provide informal peer sharing and mentoring opportunities for people to find others who have experience with a technology or capability and can offer some advice or support. They are also incredibly helpful in teaching and reinforcing some of the virtual collaboration behaviors you need employees to adopt in the digital workplace. And as people get more comfortable with virtual relationships, you can start to move to the next step of building trust in intelligent systems and the guidance and outputs they generate.
- LAUREN (Transition to communications)
- LAUREN When we look at the TYPES of messages that resonate most with employees, the vast majority of KM leaders say that people respond to success stories of how KM has helped teams and projects. And I see a direct connection between that and No. 3 on this list, which is endorsements from peers who have participated. People want to hear from and about people like them, what it’s been like to participate and what value their colleagues have gotten. And that really brings it home. So this is another way that you can use people in those KM business roles, your champions and advocates, to help spread the right messages. And then people also need to hear why KM is important to the organization, and if you can back that up with metrics that demonstrate the value, that’s even more powerful. And where you can combine some metrics with success stories, I think that’s the absolute best type of communication because people understand the scope of the impact, and at the same time it also makes it real and personal for them. And then finally, it also helps to communicate the career or professional development benefits of participating – and this works particularly well if KM engagement is seen as a way to get noticed and promoted in the organization.
- LAUREN As you move into those higher levels of communications maturity, it’s crucial to develop a BRAND for your KM program and initiatives. And this is another theme we’ve seen so clearly in the recent case studies we’ve been doing – almost all the organizations have developed really distinct catchy brands for their KM efforts, and they reinforce that in their marketing and especially in tangible marketing assets like posters and SWAG. So I put a couple of examples up here for you from our recent research. On the right you have Consolidated Contractors Company, which is the biggest construction company in the Middle East. They’ve branded their KM portal as Fanous, which is the Greek and Arabic word for “lantern” (so the idea is KM is lighting the way). And they use this very recognizable logo throughout their KM marketing and branding. And of the reasons they picked this word is it’s easy to pronounce in nearly every language – so they felt it would be a good global brand that everyone could embrace. And you can see they use that log on posters at their various sites, as well as in all their digital branding and email. Then in the middle, we have a picture from Collins Aerospace, formerly Rockwell Collins. And I wanted to share this as an example of KM swag, which as been a huge theme in the case studies we’ve done. So many organizations have talked to us about having keyboards or mouse pads or something on people’s desks that reminds them about the KM program and the importance of sharing and using knowledge. And in this case, the KM team was giving out branded mugs that say “I’m a knowledge doner.” and one of the KM leaders said that once they were giving these out, other leaders were coming to her and saying, hey how do I get one of those mugs? And it was just a great natural conversation starter to say, well, have you contributed to the knowledge base? So it’s a visual reminder about KM, and also an ice-breaker. And then finally we have this awesome poster from MSA advertising one of their KM events. MSA makes safety equipment and products used by other companies, and what they’ve found is that employees are motivated to participate in KM when they connect KM to the mission of the organization (which is to save lives and keep people safe). So a lot of their branding and marketing focuses on that – you can see the tagline up there, Are you prepared to protect tomorrows’ customers? They ran another campaign for a KM-sponsored design challenge where the tagline was “it takes just one idea to save a life.” So all great examples of branding your KM program and events in ways that motivate people and stick in their minds.
- LAUREN And then I wanted to end by emphasizing that communication is a two-way street. Especially when we’re “managing change,” it’s easy to do a lot of push communications and think you’re done – but that feedback loop is so important. So as part of your communications (and change management) strategy, make sure you’re asking for feedback, looking at metrics and survey results, and using your community leaders and other liaisons out in the business to understand how end users are experiencing your KM approaches and communications. And then you can tweak and improve from there.
- CARLA