An uneasy affair: Can IT and knowledge management walk the aisle again?
An uneasy affair: Can IT and knowledge management walk the aisle again?
Month Date, 2007: Technology and knowledge management (KM) have enjoyed a less than harmonious relationship since KM’s inception. The jury is still out as to whether vendors, knowledge managers or the nebulous nature of KM itself has been to blame for its sporadic popularity. Right now, KM is on the up. How long that will last is another matter, and despite KM and IT’s uneasy alliance, it comes at a time of great technological advancements that are causing people to re-think the possibilities afforded by technology.
A question of growing importance, particularly to the government sector and large enterprise, over the next few years is how to stem the tide of knowledge flowing out the door as the baby boomer generation retires. Australia’s working population sits at about 13 million people according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Of that, 3.7 million are aged 45 or over. A 2005 ABS survey estimates that 90% of this age group intend to retire at some stage in the future. If these people retire at the average age of retirement in Australia (52) then about a third of the workforce will be leaving over the next 10-15 years. And it’s not just any third either, but a disproportionately wise and experienced third.
At the same time the flurry of technological developments spurred on by Web 2.0 technologies, SOA-driven improvements in data integration, and increased computing power are causing a renewed interest in the partnership between KM and technology. Enterprise users are now beginning to think about collaboration, knowledge and technology in a completely different way.
Yet many KM practitioners will be viewing the renewed buzz around technology with a cautious eye. The techno-centric approach to KM has attracted criticism, usually aimed at vendors, who some hold responsible for investments that often failed to meet expectations. But it’s not just the vendor’s fault. The appeal technology has as an investment is that it is tangible and discrete; its expense provides a yardstick to measure against progress. The techno-centric approach, some say, has caused a too keen focus on capturing and applying structure to information – an approach that neglects tacit knowledge and negates the notion of apprenticeship, something which humans are still far better at than machines.
Professor Peter Eklund, professor of information systems at the University of Wollongong and Objective’s Principal Research Scientist spent most of the 1990’s on research supported by the Australian Department of Defence, culminating in him being commissioned to develop a knowledge management system for intelligence. The system used thesaurus information and natural language processing to try to capture the “meaning” or sense of content. The mark-up could then be input into a knowledge-base for inferences to be drawn between documents.
Eklund believes the tension between IT and KM lies in people not understanding the limits of technology and he calls for a more human-centred approach to KM. “The machine plays a part in the process,” says Ecklund, “but does not define it. We should never forget the principle of placing the human at the centre of decision making. After all, machines can’t think, but even worse, they can’t take responsibility.”
And he’s not surprised that expectations for KM are over-hyped. “For the last 20 years people have been advocating a hard, mechanistic approach to KM that ignores the idea of what’s called ‘rational and inter-subjective human communication’. The essence of this is that humans do what humans do best and the machine does what we humans do worse. Most people object to doing things that computers can do, so why should we expect machines to do what we do?
Other reasons for KM’s sporadic popularity are because, as a school of thought, KM sits more comfortably with amorphous ideas debated in the arts or humanities than the mechanistic rigour of science. That knowledge is difficult to measure and subjective in its definition often repels those who want to see measurable benefits. It’s also why strong leadership is needed when implementing a KM system, preferably by someone who can bridge the gap between soft and hard concepts.
Gail McGuckin, Project Specialist for Knowledge and Information Management at Austrade says, “KM means many different things to many people. So defining KM is really very difficult but if you’re happy living in a sphere where there is ambiguity all the time, you can cope with that. And when you’re working in an organisation that needs to be knowledge enabled, you need to work with them to understand their objectives and goals to identify what KM means to them.”
She believes that culture deeply affects how technology is positioned in KM. She says, “The US is very focused on technology while the UK and Australia are not so focussed, although sometimes the tool you can implement to assist a knowledge enabled organisation may very well be a technology. Sometimes people always revert to technology because that’s a tangible piece, but it’s only a tool that enables an organisation to share their knowledge.”
Devil in the detail
In a survey of 71 of the world’s global law firms just 61% of firms had a formal knowledge management strategy while 62% did not build a business case prior to implementation. Global Law Firm Knowledge Management Survey 2006 conducted by Curve Consulting and ALM Research
Where benefits can be gained through knowledge sharing depends greatly on the physical dispersion of workers, HR structure and business processes of an organisation. These factors have played well to the legal sector: almost all mid to top-tier law firms have implemented a precedents or best practices repository to facilitate the sharing of acquired knowledge.
Gretta Rusonow, CEO of knowledge management consulting firm, Curve Consulting, says that Australian legal firms have been global leaders in KM. Using Allens Arthur Robinson as a leading example, she believes its success has been the alignment of a clear KM vision and strategy that is aligned with its overall business strategy. She says AAR ensures that each initiative is closely tied to the knowledge and business objectives of the firm, by developing a business case and project plan prior to the implementation phase.
This, she believes has been a major stumbling block for many organisations.
A 2006 survey she conducted with 71 of the world’s global law firms revealed that just 61% of firms had a formal knowledge management strategy. Without this, she contends it is difficult to align KM with the firm's business objectives. And while many respondents said they had developed a project plan prior to implementing the knowledge management initiative, only 62% of respondents developed a business case to go with it. Without management engaged in the process, how can they understand what value it could deliver?
Rusonow says, “The devil is in the detail. It’s critical to take the time to understand what you’re trying to achieve, the knowledge that gets you there and where gaps currently exist.”
Making technology talk dollars
While technology is seen by many as the facilitator, secondary to the principles of KM, it has no doubt been an enabler of it. If knowledge management is about leveraging your firm’s collective wisdom by creating systems and processes to support business objectives, then technology clearly has a critical role to play.
EMC’s principal software consultant, Paul Ricketts, has seen the rise and fall of various technologies used for KM and makes a distinction between collaborative and transactional knowledge management.
“About seven years ago web content management was becoming a strategy. KM was centred around the web, then portals, followed by a focus on collaboration. By the late 90s it was document management and in the early 2000s it was back to web content management. Now, we’re into collaboration and transactional knowledge management.”
Transactional KM, says Ricketts, is about developing work processes around unstructured information. It looks at receiving information as a part of a process. Whether it is email, fax, or paper based, an organisation is looking to electronically acquire and use it as part of an end to end business process such as mortgage processing.
A good example of transactional KM he refers to is EMC’s implementation at Realestate.com.au (REA). The implementation highlights what organisations are trying to achieve with web content management. That is, process efficiencies such as ironing out multi-channel publishing process duplications, ensuring employees are working with current content and removing the need to depend on the IT department. As with many good examples, the WCM implementation enabled the company to restructure its processes and align content creation more tightly with authors. To handle its invoicing requirements with greater ease and efficacy, EMC used its Captiva arm to scan and capture information from the most notorious source of process inefficiencies – paper.
Eklund agrees that identifying processes are essential to determining the ROI. He says, “To measure the ROI on a KM implementation, the project must be based on automating key business processes. By streamlining access to information and knowledge as a process works its way through an organisation, ROI can be measured against productivity improvements, minimising errors and eliminating re-work.”
On establishing an ROI, Rusonow says, “KM is often not measured because it’s too hard, therefore people only focus on quantitative evidence. Anecdotal evidence can be illustrated through the corporate law department of a large bank. Corporate lawyers often retain outside law firms to give advice on questions of law. Say that cost is $10,000 for each instance and the department doesn’t have means of capturing prior to questions of advice. If the company built a repository to store its advice, every time someone uses that instead of buying external advice, you’re potentially saving $10,000.”
Likewise, KM is about risk management, which ultimately comes back to content and its currency. If the language is not consistent with the latest rulings and bad advice is given, the firm exposes itself to risk. This same principle applies to pharmaceutical companies, banks, governments departments and any company that relies on the knowledge of their workers.