Knowledge management became a hot topic in the late 1990’s as large companies struggled to leverage the intellectual capital within their walls. They found that despite having deep knowledge across the organization, it was hard to tap that expertise when needed, teams were constantly reinventing the wheel, and knowledge often walked out the door. Knowledge-heavy businesses, particularly those providing consulting and advisory services, set up knowledge management programs charged with creating knowledge systems involving people, processes and tech, to facilitate knowledge capture and sharing.
As global head of knowledge management (KM) for Unisys, a large tech consulting and solutions firm, I led one such program. The company had a loose network of practice heads with their own clients and P&L, yet many client solutions involved multiple practices. Our workforce was about 30,000 strong with experts on a wide range of topics and geographically dispersed. Our group of 17 approached knowledge management with a product mindset, where we designed solutions to address our users’ pain points and deployed those solutions at scale. Some of our accomplishments included:
- Asset management – Processes, policies and tools for capturing and reusing work products from previous consulting engagements. An example use case is a consultant needing IT security “boilerplate” for a new RFP.
- Consulting methodology – Working with a methodology team, we helped package and deliver Unisys’s end-to-end consulting methodology, ensuring the feedback loops were in place to improve it over time.
- Ask the expert – Processes and tool to enable consultants to find subject matter experts in the Unisys network on demand.
- Communities of practice – Set up and supported business and technical communities aligned with individuals roles and interests.
- Lessons learned – Established formal processes for conducting, capturing and actioning lessons learned from engagement projects.
- Collaboration tools – Worked with IT to institutionalize tools for collaboration including chat and team workspaces.
- Industry knowledge hubs – Delivered the suite of knowledge solutions and real-time industry data into industry portals which became the de facto intranet for the consulting organization.
- Knowledge sharing culture – Encouraged and incented consultants to make knowledge sharing a core responsibility of theirs, tying KM activities to the consulting methodology, individual performance objectives, and recognition.
For programs like ours, success requires buy-in from the top. Among all the things we did, the industry knowledge hubs were the easiest to sell to our industry CEOs. We built a sexy prototype as a way of selling the vision. Once we delivered our first industry portal, the FOMA effect kicked in and the other industry CEOs wanted ones for their businesses. When we delivered the portals on time and as planned, we earned the trust of the CEOs which we leveraged for our other initiatives.
Even with leadership buy-in, it was hard to change the behavior of the consultants in the trenches. Some of the same individuals who tapped our knowledge solutions regularly to help their projects were unwilling to contribute back to the system. We often saw the typical pattern of 90% of the contributions coming from 10% of users. Our attempts to tip the balance were only modestly successful.
One of the challenges most KM programs have is measuring success. It’s hard to quantify amount of intellectual capital being leveraged, loss of knowledge to attrition, and the like. To help, we built a knowledge management maturity model as a basis for setting our objectives. The model describes what organizations with different levels of KM maturity look like and in what areas they need to focus to become more mature. Where we felt Unisys had weaknesses, we would look to implement solutions to address them over time.
Linking our solutions to KM maturity kept us focused on business outcomes rather than work products and deliverables.