Knowledge Management – Tales from the Front Line

James Andrews, British Red Cross

(CILIP London event, 14^th May 2012)

I decided to attend this event for two main reasons:

•  I’d not been to a CILIP London event before, and was looking forward to meeting some London-based information professionals – especially those I follow on Twitter

• The event title suggested it would be a practical look at KM with some real examples of active workplace initiatives to enable collaboration and knowledge sharing

I was also curious to find out how much James’ experience was aligned with the “Introduction to Knowledge Management” course (TFPL – excellent!) I attended in 2011.

James identified three main types of knowledge management – Sharing, Storing and Seeking. He also listed People, Processes and Technology as being the three key enablers of KM.

He then talked about the “Cynefin” framework, developed by Dave Snowden as a practical application of complexity theory to management science. The framework is based around five domains – Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disordered. James touched on it only briefly, and I would certainly need to study it in more detail in order to talk about it here, but this YouTube link gives a brief overview.

Every KM event I’ve been to has stressed the importance of person-to-person connections over technological solutions, and this was no exception. However, technology certainly has a role to play in KM:

• To automate processes, releasing people to do more creative and interesting tasks
• To enable collaboration
• To help with sharing, storing and seeking information and knowledge
• To increase efficiency and reduce risk.

James then moved on to some real examples of KM in action at the BRC.

• Intranet “people and skills” search – a collaboration between the Intranet team and the HR department. This contains contact details, profile pictures, optional status updates (a la Facebook) and a free text section for job description, responsibilities, experience etc. It also has a section on language skills. The introduction of this tool has had two significant benefits:

1. Those seeking particular skills amongst the staff have a time-saving method of doing so
2. Previously all staff would receive an email enquiring about particular skills – now that distraction has been removed.

•  Communities of Practice - quite a few of these now exist, in areas such as Project Management and Marketing. Each CoP has a wiki space to use as they wish – collectively known as “Open Mic”. James suggested it’s a good idea to provide a page structure for a wiki, rather than just a blank page, and to recruit champions to get things up and running

• Information Management - until the 1990s, each branch of the Red Cross was a separate charity. When they all came together under one umbrella, the new organisation inherited a legacy of document silos, making information management across the board extremely difficult. Most information sharing was carried out by email. To address this problem, several initiatives have been introduced including:

1. Workspaces (within Sharepoint 2010) – this feature serves both a document management and a collaboration purpose. They are being tested on a sample of 100 people to start off with. Information is being organised by function rather than by team, for the first time, which they hope will be a more robust platform if the structure changes again in the future.
2. Information Governance – to set boundaries and guidelines for information management. This includes things like minimum metadata standards for documents being stored.

Finally James returned to the subject of people, and how important interpersonal connections are for knowledge management. He touched on the subject of facilitation, and reminded us that there are a number of facilitated activities available to KM practitioners, such as Knowledge Cafés, Peer Assists and Peer Reviews. I have found these sites extremely useful for further information: 

http://ianwooler.wordpress.com/know-how-to/ 

http://www.idea.gov.uk/idk/core/page.do?pageId=8152469

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(thanks to Ian Wooler for the recommendations) 

As soon as I saw James, I realised I’d heard him speak before – I think it was at a NETIKX meeting on Sharepoint, sometime in 2011. It’s possible, then, that I was hearing some of his points for the second time, but I think they resonated much more for me this time, as I’ve now started working with research team leaders in my own organisation to identify the key KM challenges we face.

So what of my expectations for the event? I did get the chance to put faces to names for a few Twitter colleagues; I also met other interesting information professionals, as you always do at this kind of thing. And I was not disappointed in my expectation of the subject matter; James did an excellent job in bringing the subject to life, with his real examples of initiatives at the BRC. I was particularly interested to hear about their “people and skills” search, as this is something which I’d already identified as being highly desirable in my own organisation.

In terms of what I already knew about KM, a lot of what James said was familiar to me, but it was interesting to hear about the Cynefin framework, which I’d heard of, but knew little about. I’ll be reading up on that in the next few weeks.

All in all, a good event, well worth attending. I’ll be looking out for the next Cilip London event.