Homework Responses Wk 7

1. senior leaders to provide sponsorship and insight into broader organizational strategy, and

2. cross-functional stakeholders to guide implementation.

Senior sponsors should be visible, engaged business leaders who have something big to gain from the implementation of KM. Often, they're people who lead business areas with major, urgent knowledge needs (e.g., experts are retiring, new hires can't get up to speed quickly). In selecting cross-functional stakeholders, look first to your colleagues in HR, IT, and process improvement—APQC research shows collaborating with these functions improves effectiveness. 

As the KM effort matures, most organizations staff up a KM core team, identify KM champions and facilitators across the business and establish an executive steering committee to provide ongoing stewardship. If you think this sounds like a lot of people, you're right! You need engaged people at different levels and in different areas of the business to really build knowledge sharing into the culture. But that doesn't mean you have to spend a ton of money or take away too much time from folks—especially if your processes are smart, your content and IT infrastructure aren't cumbersome, and your strategy is compelling.

In organizations with strong KM processes, knowledge flows like a city water supply: when someone needs it, they just turn the tap. The KM team, like a city planner, knows how everything flows beneath the surface. They can identify bottlenecks, reroute flows, and measure inputs and outputs. But the end-user doesn't need to understand how all that stuff works. For them, getting the knowledge they need is simple and easy.

APQC has identified a standard knowledge flow process that describes how knowledge flows through organizations. It's a seven-step cycle:

1. Create new knowledge (this happens every day, all the time, across all areas of the business)

2. Identify knowledge that is critical to strategy and operations

3. Collect knowledge so it can be shared with others

4. Review knowledge to evaluate its relevancy, accuracy, and applicability

5. Share knowledge through documentation, informal posts, and collaborative activities

6. Access knowledge through pull (e.g., search) and push (e.g., alerts) mechanisms

7. Use knowledge to solve problems faster and make more informed decisions. 

For KM teams, the key is to identify ways to build these steps into the business processes people already use every day. For example, you can build knowledge collection into stage gates, or integrate knowledge review into certain job roles. Technology tools can also help with this—by, for example, delivering relevant alerts in the flow of work—but ultimately, you need to understand people's processes first. 

Additionally, in an emergency people shouldn't have to wonder who's in charge. Create a business continuity team with members in every part of your organization, in every location where you operate. These individuals will lead the local response to local events as well as the organization-wide response for both local and broader-based emergencies. They should stay involved in planning and testing throughout the year to keep the plan up-to-date and gain the familiarity they'll need to perform under the pressure of an actual emergency. High-level support is crucial to make sure business continuity gets the attention and resources it should.

Think through the kind of disruptions that could occur in each place where you do business. Assume the worst, then figure out what you'd need to do to maintain your most important operations. Rank your recovery priorities in business terms such as revenue, regulatory implications, brand concerns, customer protection—whatever matters most to your organization—then map these to applications, people, facilities, and equipment. Once your business continuity team has agreed on this analysis (which isn't always easy), it can start to identify recovery strategies and costs around each process. This will also help IT make sure that the most critical applications will be available to the business within an established recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO).

Work Cited:

1. Williams, D. (2015). Nuts and Bolts of a Knowledge Management System. Journal of Information & Knowledge Management, p.1550035.