Posted by Laurence Smith on June 29, 1999 at 17:04:26:

In Reply to: Re: KM mediator in a... posted by Reilly Atkinson on June 29, 1999 at 15:12:30:

Reilly,

I appreciate your thoughtful response, and yes you're absolutely right about bureaucracy, even the 'knowledge bureaucracy' - it occurs to me that sooner or later someone will write a book along the lines of 'beating the knowledge bureaucracy!'

We face all of the challenges you describe, large, bureaucratic, distributed, add to that, extremely culturally diverse, politically sensitive, a multitude of organisational challenges from water to corruption and a mission to change the world - literally - and knowledge sharing becomes a real challenge.

Whilst not underestimating the difficulty of the required culture change, we have started by focusing on how to 'connect' people. The principle being that rather than attempting to capture all knowledge, we want to capture just-enough that it is easy to identify who you need to connect with and then make that connection very easy to do.

The Bank already has over 120 Communities of Practice, which are very successful at sharing knowledge within their 'themes' - they are actually called Thematic Groups and go across the existing matrix of bureaucracy.

However, the success of the ‘Knowledge Bank’ relies on leveraging the Bank’s knowledge & expertise. ALL of the Bank’s process & expenses are ultimately focused on leveraging what the Bank knows about development, in pursuit of its mission to reduce poverty.

The Bank’s knowledge & expertise rests primarily in its people. But whilst there are myriad systems to manage codified knowledge in documents, there is no system to connect people. There is no way for a staff member to identify;
 What is the best way to do this?
 Who has done it before?
 Who else is working on something like this?
 Where are they & how do I contact them?

The consequence, is wasted time & wasted money as effort is ceaselessly duplicated & wheels continually re-invented to everyone’s increasing frustration.

Some of our recent thoughts on how to move forward are described in this ‘concept paper’ – would appreciate your feedback, and anyone else who is reading….

LINK – Living Intelligent Network for Knowledge

LINK addresses a major issue in the Bank. There is an increasing recognition of the significant value to be offered by the Bank operating as a ‘knowledge broker’ of development knowledge, rather than attempting to be a storehouse of ‘branded’ & approved knowledge.

The Banks expertise rests primarily in people’s heads, it is “tacit knowledge, which is probably the most under-leveraged corporate resource.”(6) A first step in making employees tacit knowledge accessible to others is to identify where it is. Providing a means for people to ‘publish’ information about themselves in a format that allows others to identify who they need to talk to & to ‘connect’ with these people in conversation, this begins the process of ‘externalisation’(1) of tacit knowledge.

The existing Bank wide Directory of Expertise already has some 30% of staff voluntarily listing themselves & describing their skills & experiences. With some development this system could be leveraged to provide the ability to search & find expertise wherever it is located within the Bank’s personnel. A unit should be identified that has a specific need to connect & manage its expertise around a particular project & then work together to create a format that is useful in helping them achieve their goals.

Best Practice(2) research suggests that a useful format may be based upon a ‘home page’ concept with people describing themselves in terms that make sense to them. There would need to be a careful balance between too strong a format & the absolute chaos of no-format. Management would not validate the content of each home page, the belief being that ‘false-advertising’ will soon be revealed by use. Additionally, as the system is voluntary & its purpose is to be ‘useful’ by connecting people & generating conversations that assist them in achieving their business goals, there is not the pressure of other ‘Directory of Expertise’ type systems which are often mistakenly linked to Skills Assessment & evaluative systems which encourage people to over-state their skills.

By ‘publishing’ peoples expertise in the form of Home Pages, the form & location of their tacit expertise is made explicit. The homepages become explicit knowledge artifacts that can be searched, browsed & surfed to locate the required expertise.

The process of ‘combination’ of knowledge, both explicit - the homepages, & tacit - the resulting conversations, begins the ‘knowledge spiral’(1) of knowledge conversion.

A powerful second step is to ‘map’ the social networks within the organisation to identify where the Hubs, Gatekeepers & Pulse-takers(3) are located. By identifying these people & involving them in the process it is possible to identify champions who will further promote the use of the system. This role is particularly suitable for the ‘hubs’ who are those people, that are most connected within the organisation & engage in a large number of conversations.

A Directory of Expertise is a very powerful system. However the next person with the same question has to go through the same process of searching, browsing & surfing. The system never gets any smarter, it relies on people to go & look, & the usefulness of their answer relies on how hard they search. Also they will not know that someone else was working on that exact same subject yesterday, missing a major opportunity to work together & avoid duplication of effort.

Because LINK uses the Directory of Expertise as a basic foundation & integrates it with an adaptive system that learns as it is used, it is possible to greatly enhance an organisation’s ability to leverage its tacit knowledge. Such a dynamic system(4) builds adaptive profiles based upon the above homepages, PeopleSoft data, CVs & FAQs (frequently asked questions). Upon receiving a question in plain English via email, LINK routs the question to the 5 or more experts in the organisation that it deems most likely to be able to answer. Of those 5 people, some may be traveling or busy, however research(5) has shown that if the question has reached the right person, someone who does have knowledge in that area, & is interested, then they tend to answer & often begin a dialogue, the trusting (socialisation) process is begun & community may emerge .

LINK learns over time who best answers what type of question & dynamically updates the profiles accordingly. Experts do not get swamped with questions they have answered before as archived versions are used & they have the option to forward questions that they cannot answer to people that they think can. Un-answered questions are routed to Knowledge Editors.

LINK has other powerful benefits in that it enables you to identify knowledge gaps – literally, questions that your organisation can’t answer, thus highlighting training needs. Likewise, it is possible to track emerging themes that may represent new product opportunities, new threats or crises, before they would normally become visible.

A particularly powerful feature of LINK is that it moves towards the explicit, that knowledge that the organisation would normally ‘not know that it didn’t know’ – the area of greatest leverage.

The earlier mapping of the social networks would enable the incorporation into LINK of the Gatekeepers as knowledge brokers & begins a process of ‘virtual socialisation’ as people become connected to people with similar interests whom they did not know before. This reveals the most powerful feature of LINK; it acts as a ‘virtual knowledge broker.’ Generally, knowledge is only shared within communities where people know & trust each other. The development of a facilitated ‘knowledge market’ helps Communities of Practice emerge by embedding trust into LINK, this would assist with the sharing of knowledge across Thematic Groups & Networks.

As more questions are asked, Lessons Learned (literally ‘questions answered,’) becomes a valuable resource, which along with the FAQs, becomes an archive of explicit knowledge artifacts that can be can be re-used & leveraged across the Bank, its partners & clients. Effectively, the dialogue of question & answer has been captured, thus providing a means to make explicit, with the rich context of the conversation, the un-tapped tacit knowledge of people within the organisation.

In effect, a powerful ‘knowledge spiral’(1) of externalisation, combination & socialisation begins. The fourth element of the knowledge spiral is internalisation, literally, learning by doing, & this occurs as people participate in LINK, gaining benefit & increasingly contributing. LINK is subject to increasing returns, & like the first fax machines, obviously becomes more useful as more people join, thus encouraging further participation.

LINK offers an integrated method by which the WorldBank can leverage the vast expertise & tacit knowledge of its staff. Furthermore, it is a system that could be extended to the Banks clients & partners; for example Alumni of the WBI could be members of LINK & client project team members could be enabled to ask questions. Essentially LINK is extensible to all staff, partners & clients worldwide, that have access to the Internet or email. It is in effect the ‘link’ between the WorldBank as a storehouse of codified knowledge & the WorldBank as the global knowledge broker for development knowledge, as well as the ‘link’ between staff, partners & clients.

(1) Nonaka & Takeuchi, the Knowledge Creating Company, 1995, P. 71. The Knowledge Spiral.
(2) Collinson & Greenes, BP’s Connect 1999. 70 new people a day join, the system has experienced 4,000,000 hits first 3 months of 99.
(3) Dr Karen Stephenson, UCLA.
(4) Beehive by Abuzz at http://www.Abuzz.com
(5) Ernst & Young, March 1999
(6) Gartner Group, Knowledge Management Technology & Architecture - Electronic Workplace

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