Old knowledge management practices no longer fit today’s fast-paced environment. The future lies in understanding knowledge sources, measuring where and how knowledge flows and reinforcing knowledge with supportive relationships.
Globalization. Technological advancements. Organizational flux. Leaner workforces. All of these factors are impacting knowledge management practices and causing significant changes in the field. The commonplace use of person-to-document techniques is no longer adequate for today’s knowledge workers.
As organizations remain in flux, contracting and expanding rapidly, simply accessing data and information is no longer sufficient to help the enterprise flourish and spark innovation. Workers face the growing need to improve processes, products and services, all while doing the jobs of three people because of layoffs. Waiting for knowledge to trickle down from the top is not an option.
The reality of knowledge management today is that people need tacit knowledge and know-how directly from the source. Just reading a document is not enough. People need to interact with the person who has improved his or her service rating, increased sales leads or completed a technology implementation. They want to see firsthand what went right, what went wrong, how success occurred and how they can emulate that success. They need support from the person who has done it before and who can encourage and guide them as they apply the knowledge. Globalization and technology have made it far too easy to feel isolated, and people no longer want to go it alone.
The future of knowledge management is about connections. People want relationships. They want to share knowledge with one another, and they want to be connected to their colleagues. A recent survey by Triple Creek Associates asked more than 1,300 Web-based mentoring participants to rate the effectiveness of various training and learning opportunities. Respondents overwhelmingly chose hands-on interpersonal methods of training as the most effective, with 88 percent rating on-the-job training and 80 percent rating mentoring/coaching as highly or mostly effective. E-learning ranked lowest, with only 37 percent of respondents rating it as highly or mostly effective.
Human interaction is critical to meaningful development and learning complex skills. The survey results show that people involved in learning feel relational interaction is more important than simply having access to documents, data or facts. Organizations must tune in to this reality and offer ways for people to engage in social knowledge relationships.
How do organizations get people to share meaningful knowledge? How do they help people find the right knowledge sources? How do they get them connected with one another? How do they encourage them to share insight and information?
These are the questions learning leaders must address immediately. It may seem trite, but the truth is the future of knowledge management is now. The world is constantly shifting and unpredictable. Organizations do not have time to engineer a system from the top down, nor does such a rigid formation help knowledge flow to the ones who need it most. Learning leaders and the practice of knowledge management must adapt right now to keep up with ever-changing needs.
To accomplish this, knowledge management must focus on four areas:
1. Understanding who the knowledge sources are.
2. Measuring where and how knowledge flows.
3. Getting knowledge to flow more rapidly and freely.
4. Reinforcing knowledge with supportive relationships.
Once these four areas are working in harmony with one another and information is free-flowing, knowledge management will become the fluid and adaptable entity it needs to be to effectively address individuals’ multiple and shifting learning needs.
Who Knows What?
Identifying key knowledge resources can be challenging. Layoffs and mergers have shifted the balance and knowledge equilibrium within organizations. People who were once knowledge sources may no longer be there, and what was once a smooth operation is now a frantic scramble to get things done. The stream of information and knowledge has been interrupted, and people are floundering to find footing.
With these realities, organizations need to look deeper than the superficial level of typical knowledge brokers. People who are valuable knowledge resources to their colleagues at a grassroots level do not always make their expertise and service known to leadership. They often do what they do without accolades or acknowledgement from management. In their minds, they may simply be doing their jobs.
These grassroots knowledge sources serve a great purpose to the organization. They help spread knowledge and skills to colleagues, passing along information and data at critical moments and offering support and know-how to those in need. In Triple Creek’s survey, 69 percent of respondents said transferring valuable knowledge through mentoring is how they contribute to the success of their companies.
When asked to indicate the level of improvement across 10 different areas due to mentoring, the top-ranked area was “expanding my network.” Organizations lose out when they overlook or ignore these hidden resources, making it critical that they pinpoint who their knowledge-sharing superstars are and leverage them for greater use and visibility.
An emerging practice called “social network analysis,” sometimes referred to as “social mapping,” addresses this issue by identifying who people go to for information. Do they follow a chain of command when searching for information, or do they go to their co-worker down the hall?
By analyzing where people seek information, social network analysis often reveals hidden assets or people who are known as the go-to source by colleagues but who may not be on management’s radar. This allows organizations to tap into deep wells of knowledge and ready sources of information as they move forward with knowledge-sharing initiatives.
Once organizations identify who their knowledge sources are, they need to identify where and how information is flowing. Is there an information bottleneck around one person? Does information get lost in a black hole around a particular team? Does the flow of information run smoothly between certain colleagues?
Understanding how knowledge is transferred in the organization is critical to moving toward a more democratic and free-flowing pattern of knowledge sharing. If learning leaders do not tap into grassroots resources and allow people to access one another, they will alienate large sections of the workforce and stymie creativity and learning. Giving people the freedom to self-organize and search out the knowledge resource they need at the exact moment they need it will create a more equitable and streamlined practice for sharing knowledge.
How Do We Get It?
In today’s hectic 24×7 world, knowledge must flow rapidly and freely from expert sources directly to the people who need it. No one has time to wait around for data. Knowledge is critical, and getting the information needed exactly when you need it is vital to achieving success. To thrive, organizations must create democratic and transparent ways to access knowledge resources in-house that will help their workers find and interact more easily with the knowledge source who is also their colleague. The mantra for knowledge management must be: accessible, ubiquitous and democratic.
The use of technologies that help people create one-to-one and one-to-many knowledge-sharing and learning relationships can facilitate this type of knowledge exchange, leading to a give-and-take of information and ideas between all parties involved. By keeping these interactions in-house, all of the information shared and the ideas created are kept within the company, rather than lost to an outside source. This not only strengthens the organization from an intellectual capital standpoint, but it also strengthens the bonds between co-workers and creates an environment of goodwill and camaraderie.
The in-house structure also spurs organizations to find and leverage untapped resources, those people who somehow slip through the cracks. In-house knowledge exchange puts an emphasis on opening up the lines of information and communication, and invigorates knowledge sharing. Embedding this practice into core processes within the enterprise — such as on-boarding, management training and performance improvement — creates multiple learning avenues for employees at critical junctures in the employment experience.
CDW Corp. brought these ideas to life through its holistic online development suite, Achieve It!, featuring Web-based mentoring. The suite was designed to help CDW build an inclusive knowledge-sharing and learning culture in which co-workers are empowered to address their development needs; make cross-organizational connections with one another regardless of role, department or location; and engage in informal learning.
The desire for supportive learning relationships at CDW has skyrocketed, and the legacy practice of mentoring was easily adjusted to meet its needs as a vehicle for knowledge management. As a result, CDW won a 2008 ASTD Excellence in Practice Citation for the program.
By reinforcing knowledge sharing with supportive relationships, organizations allow people to learn at their own paces, focus on their unique needs and learn in styles that suits them. Learning must be able to expand and flex to meet people’s individual learning situations and help them meet their performance goals. From needing general information about a subject to make educated decisions; to technical and relational skills to do their jobs and manage personal interactions productively; to greater understanding about career choices, organizational culture and knowledge of external forces that impact business decisions, each person has unique knowledge needs. And the scope of learning ranges across a broad spectrum of possibilities.
In the late 1990s, John Seely Brown created the image of knowledge ecologies to accelerate creative learning. He advocated a balance between spontaneity and structure that allows for the freedom to explore options and ideas while addressing the need to produce concrete work results.
Ecologies are nurtured by providing opportunities for growth. To flourish, organizations need an integrated approach that provides multiple learning opportunities. The reality is that no manager can meet all of the knowledge needs of one person, nor can a single mentor or a particular training class or a singular hands-on experience. To access the learning required in today’s environment, workers need the freedom to engage in multiple collaborative learning experiences. To be effective and impactful, these learning opportunities should be embedded into the structure of everyday work, where employees have the freedom to seek out knowledge sources and learn at their own paces.
The future of knowledge management lies in the growing use of social networks and person-to-person knowledge exchange. This underutilized but burgeoning strategy will help people connect more freely, learn more actively and apply their knowledge more effectively on the job. Creating a knowledge ecology in which learning takes place in multiple ways becomes much simpler when organizations offer integrated knowledge-sharing opportunities.
Identifying information blockades, finding people who are hidden resources and opening up the flow of information between colleagues are the pressing matters for learning professionals in the coming years. To address these concerns, people must be enabled and encouraged to connect with each other in collaborative learning relationships that are tailored to their various and unique learning needs, and they must be given opportunities to succeed. Only then will we have accessible, ubiquitous and democratic knowledge management.
