EK's Zach Wahl recently presented at the annual KM Showcase in Tysons Corner, VA. Wahl's presentation, titled "Why Practical KM Matters More than Ever," covered EK's definitions of Knowledge and Information Management and discussed core business challenges and how KM can help to address them. The presentation also detailed EK's approach to KM Assessments, Strategy, and Agile Roadmapping. The slides detail EK's five core categories for KM assessments: People, Process, Content, Culture, and Technology.

1. WHY PRACTICAL KM MATTERS MORE THAN EVER
#KMSHOW18
January 18, 2018

2. ZACH WAHL
FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT, EK
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

3. TABLE OF CONTENTS
WHAT IS KM?
BUSINESS CHALLENGES AND KM SOLUTIONS
OUR APPROACH TO KM STRATEGY, DESIGN, AND IMPLEMENTATION
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

4. KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT INVOLVES THE PEOPLE, PROCESS,
CULTURE, AND ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES NECESSARY TO CAPTURE,
MANAGE, SHARE, AND FIND INFORMATION.

5. FIND
CAPTURE
ACT
KM IN ACTION
§ Capture entails all the forms in which
knowledge and information (content) move
from tacit to explicit, unstructured to
structured, and decentralized to centralized.
§ Manage involves the sustainability and
maturation of content, ensuring content
becomes better over time instead of becoming
bloated, outdated, or obsolete.
§ Share includes an individual’s and
organization’s ability and capacity to
collaborate and pass knowledge and
information via a variety of means, ranging
from one-to-one to one-to-all, synchronous to
asynchronous, and direct to remote.
§ Find covers the capabilities for the knowledge
and information to be easily and naturally
surfaced.
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

6. THE KNOWLEDGE AND INFORMATION
MANAGEMENT SPECTRUM
Knowledge Management
Tacit
Unstructured
Distributed
Information Management
Explicit
Structured
Centralized
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

7. BUSINESS CHALLENGES AND KM
SOLUTIONS

8. CONFRONTING
TODAY’S KM
CHALLENGES
WHY KM MATTERS
EXPONENTIAL INCREASES IN
CONTENT.
MORE BARRIERS TO
COLLABORATION AND
CONNECTIONS
(ORGANIZATION,
GEOGRAPHIC, ETC).
PROLIFERATION OF
KNOWLEDGE AND
INFORMATION SYSTEMS.
LESS STRUCTURE, MORE
SOCIAL.
LOWER STAFF RETENTION,
HIGHER LEVELS OF
RETIREMENT.
CONSISTENT PRESSURE TO
“DO MORE WITH LESS.”
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

9. TODAY, 80% OF BUSINESS
IS CONDUCTED ON
UNSTRUCTURED
INFORMATION – GARTNER
GROUP
KNOWLEDGE WORKERS
SPEND FROM 15% TO 35%
OF THEIR TIME SEARCHING
FOR INFORMATION – SUE
FELDMAN, IDC
FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES
LOSE ROUGHLY $31.5
BILLION A YEAR BY FAILING
TO SHARE KNOWLEDGE –
PAMELA BABCOCK, HR
MAGAZINE.
UNSTRUCTURED DATA
DOUBLES EVERY THREE
MONTHS – GARTNER
GROUP
EACH DAY IN THE U.S.,
10,000 PEOPLE RETIRE –
SOCIAL SECURITY
ADMINISTRATION
40% OF CORPORATE USERS
REPORTED THEY CAN’T FIND
THE INFORMATION THEY
NEED TO DO THEIR JOBS –
SUE FELDMAN, IDC
CONFRONTING
TODAY’S KM
CHALLENGES
SUPPORTING DATA POINTS
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

10. COMMON KM BUSINESS CHALLENGES
§ Findability
§ I can’t find my “stuff.”
§ Search is broken.
§ Knowledge Retention/Transfer
§ Our expertise is walking out the door.
§ We’re suffering from brain drain.
§ How do I get my job done?
§ Content Quality
§ We don’t know what we don’t know.
§ There are twenty different versions of
this.
§ I don’t trust I’m getting the right
answer.
§ Access to Experts
§ I wish I knew who could help me…
§ We’ve done this before, I think.
§ Collaboration/Knowledge Capture
§ We work in silos.
§ We’re duplicating effort.
§ I know we’ve done this before, but...
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

11. KM IDEATION MENU (FINDABILITY)
• Color Teams
• Review Circles
• Approvers/Reviewers
• Metadata Fields
• Content Governance
• Taxonomy
Governance
• Business Processes
• Taxonomy/Tagging
• Content Syndication
• Content Assembly
• Content Reviews • Content Audits
• Content Usage
• Content Cleanup
• Content Types and
Templates
• Semantic Analysis
(Duplicates)
• Analytics
• Taxonomy
Management
• Content Management
• Search (Hit Types,
Weighting, etc)
• Auto-Tagging
• Ontologies
• Semantic Web
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING
NON-TECHNICAL TECHNICAL
PROCESS
CONTENT
TECHNOLOGY

12. KM STRATEGY, DESIGN, AND
IMPLEMENTATION

13. KM IS HARD…
Everyone is busy
and you need the
help of people who
don’t have “KM” in
their job
description.
The past is littered
with failed KM
initiatives. It feels so big, so
vast, many
organizations don’t
know where to
begin.
KM efforts will
shine a light on a
lot of problems for
many
organizations.
A lot of KM is hard
to monetize.
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING

14. KM STRATEGY
Benchmark: Analysis and rating of an organization’s maturity on
variety of benchmarking criteria.
Target State Analysis: Design and definition of the future KM
state for an organization focused on KM Workstreams.
Current State Analysis: Knowledge gathering activities to assess
an organization’s current KM state focused KM Workstreams.
Roadmap: Fully customized, iterative, task-based plans to
achieve Target State of KM.
KM Workstreams
• People
• Process
• Content
• Culture
• Technology

15. DECONSTRUCTING KM
PEOPLE PROCESS CONTENT CULTURE TECHNOLOGY
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING
• Flow of knowledge
through the
organization.
• Knowledge holders
and knowledge
consumers.
• Understanding of
state and disposition
of experts.
• Existence and
consistency of
processes.
• Awareness of and
adherence to
processes.
• Quality of processes.
• State and location of
content.
• Consistency of
structure and
architecture.
• Dynamism of
content.
• Understanding of
usage (analytics).
• Senior support and
comprehension.
• Willingness to share,
collaborate, and
support.
• Maturity of “KM
Suite.”
• Integration with and
between systems.
• Usability and user-
centricity.

16. GETTING STARTED
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING
Where you are… …and Where you want to be.

17. EK’S KM BENCHMARK
§ Developed based on real-world
observations of several hundred
organizations.
§ Focused on measurable elements,
allowing an organization to score where
they are and understand the business
value of improving (based on five-point
Likert Scale).
§ Recognition that no two organizations are
the same.
§ Over thirty measurable elements broken
into five categories.
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING
PEOPLEPROCESSCONTENTCULTURETECHNOLOGY

18. SCORECARD OVERVIEW
1 2 3 4 5
Below Industry Average Average Industry Leading
Most organizations fall
somewhere within this range on
a majority of KM factors.
EK's Knowledge
Management Maturity
Benchmark is based on our
experience with hundreds of
organizations across
industries and around the
world on similar efforts. It is
used to score organizations
and determine where they
currently stand in terms of
critical knowledge
management efforts.
Top 5-10%

19. PRIORITIZATION

20. QUESTIONS?
HTTPS://WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/IN/ZACHARYWAHL
@ZACHARYWAHL, @EKCONSULTING
571-403-1109
ZWAHL@ENTERPRISE-KNOWLEDGE.COM