This document discusses promoting a knowledge-sharing culture at Vodafone Group. It describes Vodafone as a global telecommunications company with operations in over 60 countries. The document states that Vodafone has a unique opportunity to leverage its global footprint to make knowledge a key competitive advantage. It discusses challenges to knowledge sharing from both the supply and demand side of an internal knowledge market. It also provides examples of levers that can be used to promote knowledge sharing, such as incentives, collaboration, relationship building, and user-friendly tools. Finally, it outlines benefits of using web 2.0 tools to increase knowledge codification, searchability, and connections between employees to drive collaboration.

1. Promoting a Knowledge-Sharing
Culture
KCUK Conference, 26 July 2007
Marc Aafjes, Global Head of Knowledge Management
Vodafone Group

2. Vodafone is a truly global organisation with operating
companies and partners across all continents
• Vodafone Group is the largest mobile telecommunications network company in
the world:
– equity interests in 25 countries
– Partner Networks in a further 36 countries
• Vodafone has over 200 million proportionate customers worldwide (Jan 2007)
and had a total market capitalisation of approximately £72 billion at 26 May 2006
– fifth largest company in the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 index and the 22nd largest company
in the world based on market capitalisation at that date
• Vodafone has the unique opportunity to leverage its large and diverse global
footprint to make knowledge a key competitive advantage
– operates in markets with different degrees of maturity – enabling opportunities to leverage knowledge
from mature markets in new and emerging ones
– combining a focus on increasing operational efficiency as markets mature with a focus on innovation
to become the leading total communications company (across mobile and PC communications).
This presentation and represents my personal and generic views which are not necessarily
representative of the views of Vodafone.
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3. Knowledge-sharing challenges arise from both ‘supply’ and
‘demand’ side issues in the internal knowledge market
Internal Knowledge Market
Example Issues & Causes
‘Supply’-side:
Knowledge
Not ‘capturing’ or ‘indexing’ knowledge or expertise
•
‘Supply’ Lack of time and/or incentives
•
Lack of process, skills and/or tools
•
Concerns around confidentiality
•
Overestimating relevance and underestimating value of sharing
•
Ease of Searching &
Lack of trust in unknown ‘recipients’
•
Finding
Lack of willingness to help:
•
Lack of time and/or incentives
•
Knowledge Quality Lack of relationship with ‘requestor’ of knowledge
•
‘Demand’-side:
Effectiveness of Transfer &
Learning ‘Not invented here’
•
Available resource to ‘reinvent’
•
Political and emotional elements
•
Bad past experience:
•
Knowledge Inefficient infrastructure
•
Irresponsive ‘supplier’
•
‘Demand’
Low quality of knowledge – hard to contextualise
•
Promoting a knowledge-sharing requires a holistic perspective across the internal knowledge
market – both supply and demand, and across the full process.
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KCUK, Promoting a Knowledge-Sharing
Culture, 260607

4. Hard and soft incentives as well as a general great
experience are essential to promote knowledge-sharing
Example Levers for Promoting Knowledge-Sharing
• Establish Hard and soft incentives:
– Make it a formal part of performance evaluations and career advancement
– Drive comprehensive reward & (peer) recognition at individual and team level
– Senior leadership focus and showing desired behaviours
• Organise for collaboration:
– Provide cross-unit objectives to drive collaboration
– Right-size unit resources – making people more receptive to sharing
• Focus on ‘connecting people’ and building relationships:
– Make communities the cornerstone for your KM approach
– Use targeted job rotation to drive ‘connectedness’ and ‘shortest path’ across the organisation
– Use web 2.0 / social media to increase trust in virtual environments
• Make it low effort and good experience:
– Integrate it with people’s existing work processes
– Ensure good infrastructure – frustration with tools is a key turn-off
• Create heroes and communicate success stories
Organisational structure and management styles are key determinants of the optimal mix of
levers to achieve sustainable improvement.
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5. Web 2.0 opens up a new era to connect people and drive
collaboration in decentralised and virtual environments
Benefits of Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management
• Increased codification and structuring of knowledge:
– Enables people to put their mind on paper – i.e. blogs, wikis
– Drives collaboration and increased ‘building on’ each other contributions – i.e. wiki’s, blog replies
• Easier to find knowledge and information:
– Enhanced identification of experts via (automated) personal profiles – i.e. Linkedin, Xing, MySpace,
Facebook
– Better classification of knowledge via social tagging and bookmarking – i.e. delicious
• Enhanced ways to connect people:
– Adds a profile to a name – removing anonymity and increasing trust
– Makes it easier to get a referral to someone instead of a cold call – helps to increase willingness to
help (i.e. linkedin)
– Enables more sophisticated Social Network Analysis (SNA) to optimise network effectiveness
– Openness enables easier connection between people across different organisational clusters
Web 2.0 are relatively easy and low-cost to deploy but are likely to have significant benefits for
driving ‘bottom-up’ change.
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