Back in the late 1990′s, while at Grant Thornton, and then later when the management consulting organization was sold to Hitachi I worked on a comprehensive knowledge management model.
The model has application and relevance to integrating collaboration tools into any enterprise application. Carefully structured and planned it can produce great results, but it is a challenge. Finding ways to tie collaboration into the business technology, and making productive use of collaborative tools in the enterprise is the focus of a lot of today’s hype about Web 2.0.
In this article I review a few approaches I’ve taken over the years that have been very effective and powerful for creating dynamic collaborative organizations.
Customer Focused Lessons from My Former Life as a Customer Service Rep After High School
Several years ago before starting SAP consulting work I used to do customer service work on the phone. I can’t tell you how many times a customer would have a great idea, or a valid concern related to our products and services. It would have been ideal to capture and take action on some of these ideas. In fact, as a young “kid” I used to bring some of these ideas to our management and nearly all of them were ignored, or hushed, or told “I’m sure we already tried that…” and on and on. Basically, the customer service rep, your company’s “face” to the customer who knows them the best is often ignored. Sales people certainly don’t listen to the poor “lowly” customer service reps. But often they know the best what the customer is actually looking for. The key is to find ways to capture their knowledge and high points of their interaction with customers that relate to innovating new or better products and services, or solving recurring problems, etc. Collaborative tools are a great fit here.
The same is true for your company’s engineering and sales departments. The same is true for your manufacturing areas, your distribution, your supply chain, your finance areas, etc. Creating common collaborative communities of interest is a great way to advance your company’s value proposition and deal directly with competitive pressures.
Why Enterprise Collaboration Tools have Not Yet Taken Off
One reason is, in a word, geeks! I know, I am one (not really, but trying to fit in here :- )
Too many organizations undertake the introduction of social media for the purpose of introducing social media into the enterprise. Again, this is like having information without the context of application and experience. That information is NOT knowledge, nor are collaboration tools which are divorced from a specific business purpose very productive (if at all).
So, for example, Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter may NOT fit in your enterprise. And frankly I can not think of many enterprises where they would fit. However, being able to capture employee, customer, and vendor knowledge or suggestions or input or criticisms and making sure they are published internally to the right people may make a huge difference for your company.
Why Consultants and Collaboration Evangelists Have Not Shown Much Progress
Niether consultants nor business has learned how to use social media to drive business value. There are few consultants out there with a coherent or even minimally functional method for business to use collaboration tools to propel a company’s key value propositions. Even if you move down one layer beneath the value proposition to the competitive pressures in the marketplace these “social media mavens” there is still no coherent method for social media use.
It doesn’t have to be that way…
In my prior post “SAP, ERP III, SOA — Learning Organizations through Social Media Collaboration” there are 9 steps noted toward the end of that post on exactly how to use open source forum software for developing a learning organization. This same concept can be generalized and applied to knowledge capture activities around innovation or customer experience. The way you use these forum type tools inside the company depends on what your goals are, but the instructions for use are there.
Toward Transforming Information to Knowledge – A Working Knowledge Management Model
The knowledge management graphic and model (see below) was used to advance the concept of a learning organization because that was a clear business fit for consulting companies. In consulting a consultant’s capabilities are directly tied to their knowledge, and that knowledge is a consultant’s, and a consulting company’s capital or stock in trade.
Back in 1997 and 1998 I worked through the model and developed a systematic approach, by using primitive collaboration and social media tools, to convert consulting into knowledge centered learning organizations.
It relied heavily on:
- collaboration,
- cooperation, and
- information dissemination.
This was done by using the tools that were available at the time. A systematic process was developed to capture, then synthesize, organize and disseminate the information and knowledgeable individuals throughout the organization. By doing this a collaborative learning organization was developed.
Early Collaboration and Social Media Efforts that Started to Produce Results Shortly After Y2K
Even the most knowledgeable, talented, and proficient consultants get stuck sometimes. It is the nature of dealing with complex business and technology problems, sometimes you need a little help. We recognized the need in the business to have dynamic but high quality tools, templates, and resources available to consultants. And at the same time we also recognized the need to be able to tap into other knowledgeable experts within the organization on a moment’s notice, even if we didn’t know the individual to realize they had the skills we were looking for. And above all it had to be simple and almost instantaneous.
It had to be, the right knowledge, right now!
We wanted a structured method that was fairly simple and intuitive to create a collaborative environment. After looking at our technology landscape right after Y2K we started to use MS Exchange Public Folders, Outlook Shared User Folders, e-mail, and MS Messenger.
A Simple Collaborative Solution Using MS Exchange Public Folders and MS Messenger
We developed an MS Exchange folder structure that matched our client project needs and sales force needs for tools, templates, resources and our own best practices on demand. The beauty of MS Exchange was that the Web Access version allowed our consultants to leverage public folders through the web interface from anywhere, just like they were using MS Explorer / MS File Manager. The public folder structure was the perfect fit because there was little to learn beyond the new folder hierarchy. Dragging, dropping, and opening files in this MS Explorer like interface was intuitive and took no time to adjust to. This was immensely helpful at some client sites where security is very high so that only the client’s computers or hardware were allowed on the client’s corporate network. In other words, where access to internal resources would have been limited or non-existent this allowed for ready access to anything that was needed. Add to this the MS Exchange folder permissions are robust making security meaningful.
Together with this we used MS Messenger, but rather than just having an employee’s name that an employee in one part of the country had never worked with or even heard of, we applied their key skill to the logon name. From a standard list of key skill codes for SAP (SD, MM, PP, FI, CO, AM, CRM, SRM, APO, etc.) we placed that in front of the person’s name so that it automatically grouped like skills, and placed the skill reference first in a list of over a hundred resources. In an instant if you needed some input from a seasoned Sales and Distribution person you would just look on the list for those names starting with SD_Employee_Name. SAP practice users were then exposed to each other all over the United States by their skill codes so that even if they did not know the user, if they had a question of a colleague or peer they could just ask in real time.
There was also a regular weekly publication containing special “tips and tricks” for productivity or functionality. This was simply sent through e-mail and a copy stored in the knowledge management folder in MS Exchange. It could be referenced at any time in the future. This created a reusable knowledge repository that allowed the quality of the tools, templates, resources, presentations, and other material to be continually advanced and quickly reused.
When I left we had just started on the internal forum posting initiative. This was to provide a central location to capture knowledge sharing or information discussions in a searchable database. Using open source content management systems and open source integrated forums our goal was to create a central communication collaboration hub to capture and exchange ideas, custom coded solutions, and best practices. With the many available add-ons to the open source CMS systems we considered adding an internal high level project management status tracking system and resource request system for senior level managers to gain near real-time visibility to the status and resource needs of all of the many projects taking place all over the country.
This was a very practical way we leveraged existing technology and built the structure and processes around it to add business value. It enhanced the customer value proposition by providing better and faster customer solutions, more customer focus, and better internal employee interaction. In other words, this whole solution was low cost and used existing collaboration tools to advance business interests. It helped to promote end client satisfaction because of the nature and ability to gain “the right answer right now.”
The real issue is not to use collaborative tools in the enterprise just to collaborate. They must serve a business purpose and a business need. The business enterprise is not a social club, but social tools can be used to serve the business purposes or goals.
Refinements, Enhancements, and New Dimensions to Collaboration and Knowledge Tools
I’ve often joked that I get paid a lot to take the ideas and information that is already in an employee’s head and present it to the company as the solution to their problem. The difference between my approach and others is that I have no problem telling the company that the answers are right there with their own people.
As the efforts and my research on the subject matured I wrote a piece about my perspective on this issue as it had matured and called it “SAP, ERP III, SOA — Learning Organizations through Social Media Collaboration.” That article laid out a way to integrate social media tools like Forum software into the SAP help system. What this means is that end users can capture real time information about the system, or shortcuts, or requests for simplification or other useful information and disseminate it to the organization. This also provides a method for workers in any department or area, in real time, to provide feedback that focuses on the company value proposition or competitive pressures. Here is the model I produced:
1) Raw Information: The unstructured data, ideas, “crib notes,” and thoughts that we all have. However in this instance, it is the raw information surrounding the job or responsibility that the individual performs within the enterprise. Sometimes these are the “workarounds” to get something done when you run into obstacles or roadblocks, other times they are just shortcuts, techniques, to perform a job or function.
2) Organized Information: This is the process of capturing and classifying that raw information. This is where the “knowledge bases” and other types of information systems come in. Many enterprises make it this far. Sometimes these are the “workarounds” to get something done when you run into roadblocks or obstacles. Other times they might be the shortcuts or techniques to more efficiently perform a job or function.
3) Acquired Information Experience: This is the interaction with the organized information. This can be through search functions, employed taxonomies, reports, or other methods of accessing the organized information. This is after the capture of the information in steps 1) and 2) above, and involves its wider availability than in the individual who originally developed or “held” the knowledge or information. Few organizations or enterprises make it much further than this. However, this is the beginning of the true learning organization.
4) Applied Experience (Knowledge!): This is the practical application of the organized information after it has been acquired. Whether this acquisition is through word of mouth, training, or some type of information management system (that is wrong named a knowledge management system) or through a “knowledge base”. This is where the cost savings, revenue opportunities, continuous process improvement opportunities, and real competitive advantage begins to come to fruition.
5) Refined Experience: This is more of the inherent “knowing” what to do in a broad variety of contexts that may not be directly related to the task or issue at hand. It is when an individual can draw on that level of inner experiences mixed with intuition and make the right decision or provide the right answers when there is not enough information to make such a determination under normal circumstances. This can also be a type of “making the complex appear to be simple.”
This knowledge model I created in the late 90′s seems to be pretty well accepted today [Fn1]. Notice it is very different than an information model because knowledge by its very nature requires information together with the context of how, what, and when to apply that information together with experience.
The ERP III future will rely heavily on delivering on the value propositions of customer focus and innovation.
It is my belief that both of these pillars will occur through the use of corporate collaboration tools–, but only corporate collaboration tools that are focused on the business goals of capturing critical “knowledge” and information around these two key premises.
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[FN1] The knowledge model I produced was based on a synthesis of a number of sources I had studied at the time to try to bring some clarity around the confusion between “information management” and “knowledge management.” At that time, or possibly earlier, there may have been someone else with the same ideas and a similar model but I couldn’t find it then. So if someone else can claim *earlier* authoriship I won’t dispute it. I produced my first version right around Y2K.
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