July/August 2007
What are the impediments to companies adopting knowledge management?
(Congratulations to the reader from Gift4Ever General Merchandise who submitted this month's topic!)

In This Issue:
Three Impediments to Knowledge Management Adoption
InQuiring Minds Want to Know

As a customer service or marketing decision maker, you may appreciate the essential role knowledge management (KM) can play in increasing employee productivity and improving your customers' experience. However, like many other organizations, you may be struggling to get your KM project off of the ground. Here are three common obstacles to KM adoption, and how you can overcome them.

Impediment: Obtaining executive buy-in
Executive team buy-in is required to secure funding and organizational support for KM implementations, and often hinges on the business case that proves ROI on the investment. Executive backing is dependent on a thorough understanding, and communication, of how a KM solution will quantifiably impact the organization.

Solution: Raise the visibility level of the problem the organization is attempting to solve; the executive team must be convinced that there is a problem that needs to be addressed. This can be done effectively using real-life scenarios within the company that illustrate the problem. Then establish baseline metrics against which you can model the performance of the solution in a controlled environment. Execute a proof of concept to demonstrate the solution and its impact on the organization. Include both tangible (e.g., metrics) and intangible (e.g., usability studies) data points to support your analysis.

Impediment: Starting with a project that is too large
Every organization involved in a KM implementation faces own barriers to moving forward with the initiative. Inter-organizational barriers are often why information silos appear in the first place. Therefore, the more expansive your initial project, the harder it will be to obtain buy-in from the stakeholders involved.

Solution: Break the KM implementation project into phases to reflect an incremental deployment strategy. For example, you can start small with training for a select group of champions, and then implement the solution group by group. Apply lessons learned from each initial phase to subsequent phases. Continue to roll out the KM solution over time until all groups are deployed. Alternatively, you may consider phasing the implementation by channel. Many organizations begin with a web self-service portal, and deploy the solution in contact centers in subsequent phases. The right strategy will vary by company, but in all cases, phasing the implementation into more easily controlled pieces will be preferable to implementing across the board from the outset.

Impediment: Starting globally instead of locally A variety of new requirements will arise and the level of complexity increases when you extend a KM implementation to global organizations within the company.

Solution: Define and initiate the project locally, and illustrate success with that first deployment before extending the solution globally. As you develop your plan for global deployment, be careful to consider how requirements may differ by region. Workflow, translation requirements, local autonomy, ability to reuse content, and content focus are but a few of the issues to consider.

In this segment, we highlight excerpts from the Q&A sessions at the end of recent InQuira-sponsored webcasts. We selected questions relevant to this issue's topic, and reproduce the responses offered by industry thought leaders featured in those events. This issue we feature David Kay, co-author of Collective Wisdom: Transforming Support with Knowledge; and Mark Buckallew, Senior Director of Product Management at InQuira. The archived recordings of each webcast are listed in the right sidebar.

Question: Most knowledge management initiatives seem to focus on and center around tools and IT infrastructure. What is a good rule of thumb for the mix between people, process and tools?

"Often the focus is on the tools. But I think the rule of thumb is that there needs to be consistent focus across the groups. If I were to lean in any one direction I would say that the change leadership – getting people aligned with the initiative, getting them trained up and coached – is probably where the biggest investment of attention, particularly at the executive level, needs to be. And, if you need to find a good process, get a tool that supports that and align people to it." - David Kay, DB Kay & Associates

"When InQuira implements KM, we identify the processes that exist today and how they might change, including what groups will be impacted, what roles will be impacted and who is the sponsor of the project. So the project is not so much a focus on the technology; much of our design and discussion is around how the organization will use the technology internally, how to enable these folks to use it, and what is going to be the impact to make sure all the people understand how they're going to be impacted. That's when you get into understanding where the buy-in has to happen in order to be successful." - Mark Buckallew, Senior Director of Product Management, InQuira

Question: How do you create the organizational culture change needed to be successful with the knowledge management initiative, especially if your executives really think of it in terms of just a project?

"During the buy-in phase executives are looking for improvements in customer satisfaction and ROI. There may be some intangibles there as well that they want to understand. Relating the benefits to elements of the change that's going to happen and why they will have to reinforce the benefits is the approach that I see some of our customers taking that seems to be successful." - Mark Buckallew, Senior Director of Product Management, InQuira

"Because culture is a downstream phenomenon, step one of getting the culture to change is to have the conversation about the business impact with your leadership. Emphasize that knowledge management really needs to become part of what your organization does and, in fact, part of what your organization is. Once you've made that case successfully at the top, then you can start to roll it down hill. Otherwise I think you're frankly fighting a losing battle." -David Kay, DB Kay & Associates

Question: Do you have any specific tips for how our audience might actually be able to sell the value of a knowledge management initiative and the KM tools to their senior management?

"Consistent with a consultant's favorite answer, it depends. And that certainly holds true here in the sense that every organization is struggling with different challenges; they have different initiatives. That being said, the common theme that I've seen through almost all of the customers I've worked with in this area is capacity and scale. It seems like I almost never talk to a support executive who isn't really concerned about how they're going to be able to scale the demand; how they're going to be able to do that cost effectively; and how they're going to be able to deal with the rising flood of customer expectations and multi-product issues. Whether you focus on it from the self-service side or whether you focus on it from the internal efficiency side, it seems like the common denominator is that knowledge management gives you the ability to deliver more customer success results relating to more customer issues with a constant head count." - David Kay, DB Kay & Associates