John Kay

1
Knowledge Sharing

• John Kay
• Member of Management Group
• PA Consulting

2
Making the most of your knowledge and information

• Becoming an information driven organisation
• John Kay
• March 2009

3
There is an immense amount of unrealised potential

• You have the potential to double the return on
  your intellectual capital
• The firm gets more benefit than it deserves
• Senior management is not aware of these symptoms
  of poor health in the business
• A one-size-fits-all-solution will not work and
  is wasting your money
• what this is telling me is that my staff are
  working 40 harder than their contract says they
  should, and I am wasting their commitment.

4
Good KM needs all six components..

• The assets
• Information and Data The explicit knowledge
  people need to capture and store in an organised
  manner
• Expertise and Skills The tacit knowledge and
  expertise that must be connected and engaged in
  information management.
• The enablers
• Business Processes How and when the organisation
  engages with knowledge
• People and Culture Organisational structure,
  roles and behaviours that are critical to
  effective Knowledge Management work
• Technology Services The tools and services to
  maximise the value of knowledge throughout the
  organisation.
• The core
• Leadership The binding element that enables
  sustainable results through sponsorship,
  objective setting, recognition and reward both
  within the employees and from management.

What should you amplify, and what must you fix ?
5
Some questions for you

• People within my council actively seek to share
  and use each others' knowledge and information
• Knowledge sharing is actively encouraged within
  my council and is built into performance
  appraisal
• Leaders exhibit good behaviours in sharing and
  using information and in collaborating with
  others
• Managers in my council encourage their staff to
  participate in networks outside their work team
• It is easy to find the people with the right
  skills or expertise when I need to
• Project and service teams actively capture and
  distil knowledge of their subject areas to
  support their teams, the wider council, and the
  sector.
• People can find information when they need it and
  it is in a format that suits their purpose.
• We make available to all staff, all the
  information related to projects we have done
  including lessons learned and research
• The information and data that my organisation
  collects is exploited fully to improve
  productivity and service quality
• People are aware of the processes they should use
  to work effectively with information and
  knowledge
• In practice all staff build on the existing
  knowledge and evidence base when planning new
  projects and activities

Questions Here
6
The objective is to turn information and
knowledge into value

• We recognise that these elements work to support
  KM performance through stages in a lifecycle

How the business deploys solutions to help us
achieve this value
Potential Value
Aware
Engaged
Using
Delivered Value
TO
FROM
What we expect to get
How we become aware of solutions
How we are competent and able to engage with
solutions
How we use solutions
The actual value we get
The diagnostic is independent of point to point
solutions (e.g. EDRM, GIS) and focuses on and
tests ability to meet specific business needs
e.g. compliance, management information, market
information, customer knowledge etc.
7
Architecture of the diagnostic
Core Question set
Each square on the maturity grid is fed by one or
more of the core questions set
Additional (e.g. open ended or client specific)
questions
Additional questions for examination of
client-specific issues or to collect comments
Demographic questions
Demographic questions use to segment data
Survey questions as seen by respondents
Diagnostic outputs
8
The PA diagnostic tool

• Compares current behaviours in the organisation
  with those of a perfect knowledge management
  organisation
• In use for almost five years over 3500 people
  from over 175 organisations
• Cross-organisational surveys identify the issues
• Deeper diagnostics help define an improvement
  programme
• Feeding into improvement programmes in (eg) DH,
  PJM, FCO, LTS
• Consistent themes have been found, significant
  variation in detailed findings

9
Diagnostic outputs maturity grid
10
Potential Interventions
A few strong champions KM training for
leaders Provide clear guidance on
priorities Insist that good of whole organization
transcends local Have persistence in vision and
direction Reward and celebrate delivery,
Information treated as a shared resource Single
dedicated source of key information Available
information and needs are thoroughly understood
by all All information is openly and easily
accessible to those who need it Metadata,
taxonomy, keywords and language all actively
managed Information storage, security,
availability and accessibility are managed
effectively, efficiently and economically Innovati
on in using and enriching information is
encouraged and rewarded
Organisational charts, staff directory and
personnel profiles Expertise register based on
taxonomy Processes and incentives to encourage
cooperation with information requests Solutions
that span the organization (i.e. not
siloed) Practitioners take an active role in
developing and delivering training
Based on information for action Integrate
information gathering into normal operational
processes Enforce consistent data
definitions Discrete, defined roles Consider
maintenance, security, approvals, flows Self
improving processes learning built in
KM activities and behaviours made explicit part
of personal objectives Reward and recognition
systems encourage sharing and leveraging of
knowledge Teamwork and cross-functional networks
(e.g. communities of interest) are the
norm People learn form mistakes, and are able to
share this learning without fear
Common standard technology infrastructure Single
integrated information delivery
infrastructure Retire duplicate systems Train
staff in one key application Effective
communication technology User friendly and
intuitive supports the way that humans learn
and work
11
How the survey has shaped action to improve
performance

• Department of Health local guidance notes
  central user manuals champions group all staff
  workshops IT education river of life
• PJM apprenticing scenario rehearsals value of
  data
• Learning Teaching Scotland set a vision ensure
  consistency supporting effective partnerships
• Knowledge Council close the find loop stronger
  central guidance data mashing

12
We know what success will look and feel like

• Clear view of what we want to get better at
• One, and only one, source for each information
  item
• Excellent information management and ownership
• A big picture that is shared by everyone in the
  organisation
• People working for, and thinking about, the good
  of the whole organisation and the effectiveness
  of each individual colleague
• Incentives to use their knowledge fully
• The obligation to share and the obligation to
  use
• Effective use of time proactive, important, not
  urgent
• Leaders who exemplify these behaviours

information for action
13
In summary

• Someone elses business case is not your business
  case engage the leadership team in identifying
  how improved exploitation of IC would help their
  business one or two things that we want to get
  better at these provide the reason for breaking
  the cycle of ineffective working
• It is hard to complete a jigsaw if you cannot see
  the picture on the lid of the box your
  intellectual assets are like the pieces of a
  jigsaw, owned and managed by different people or
  groups and kept in different places an
  organisational knowledge framework gives the lid
  of the box and becomes more important the more
  distributed an organisation becomes
• There are more good ideas than there are problems
  to solve none of these good ideas are wrong
  they always improve things somewhere and are
  therefore attractive however, they may not
  address the things that are your current key
  issues - apply the diagnostic to get a full
  picture of your current position so you can focus
  on applying the right ideas in the right place
• Exploiting IC is part of everyones job run an
  organisation-wide programme of workshops to help
  every one work out what they can do to exploit
  their, and the firms, IC more fully
• The people in your organisation know how to make
  this work empower local champions to provide the
  granularity of solution that you need whilst
  maintaining the unity of the organisations IC
  let them orchestrate the commitment to success
  that your people have.

We believe that a programme based on these
approaches has a payback period of under six
months.