Shah is Divisional Director of the Operations and KM Division at the International Enterprise Singapore (IES), a government agency tasked with spearheading the growth of Singapore companies in overseas markets. Apart from KM, he also oversees IES’s helpdesk, which supports local and overseas IES centres, as well as the implementation of Whole-of-Government initiatives in IES.

What are some of the KM initiatives that are currently on “maintenance mode” at IES?

I’ll share two initiatives. The first is RACK (Retention of All Critical Knowledge). When we started RACK in 2010/11, we focused on officers who were leaving IES only. Now, it has evolved to include officers who have returned from overseas postings, officers who have completed key projects, and officers who are locally recruited overseas. The initiative has been going very well. Ever since its launch, demand for it has skyrocketed. People see the benefits of using this tool to capture tacit knowledge.

Can you say more about this tool – RACK?

It’s a very simple and straightforward tool to use. It’s made up of three stages: preparation the sharing session and post sharing.

The preparation stage involves getting approval from the respective supervisors to proceed with the RACK session. We don’t do RACK with everyone – it depends on the supervisor’s assessment of the employee. If he thinks that there’s some important knowledge that needs to be captured, then the officer would be “RACK-ed.” If an officer has been doing something that’s typical, then there will be little of value to capture. Once we have gotten approval, we will scope the interview session with the supervisor. We have reached the point where the scoping of the interview is streamlined and very efficient. We have consolidated all the questions since the beginning. New supervisors who look at the questions immediately get what the session is going to be like. They then choose the questions that they think are important. They can customize the questions. Sometimes, they even come up with their own questions. Once we finalise the scope, we pass the list of questions to the officer who’s leaving – for mental preparation.

The KM Manager who will be doing the interview has to do some homework on what the officer has done. This is important so that she will be able to understand, to empathize, to probe further, to be able to ask relevant questions. The KM Manager will typically check the latest reports that the officers have written, the latest projects that they have done. These would be used as talking points should the interviewee need nudging.

Once that’s done, we will go the second phase, which is the sharing session. During the sharing session, the supervisor will lead the interview because they have the domain knowledge. The KM Manager’s job is to make sure that they do not deviate from the topics. It’s important to follow the structure of the questions to keep the interview session efficient and fruitful. The KM Manager also asks questions which may seem obvious to the supervisor, but the answers are nevertheless useful for new officers. We call it “stupid questions.” We encourage the officers to bring along their successor, who typically asks the most questions – on top of the list of prepared questions.

For post sharing, once the interview is done, we will take a few days to transcribe before letting the departing officer and then the supervisor vet the transcript. Once that’s completed, the supervisor will be given the final copy to share with his team, and we will upload a copy on our intranet’s Knowledge Library to share it with the rest of the organisation.

How often do you conduct a RACK session?

A RACK session takes place roughly once every two weeks. Sometimes, we even do 3-4 RACK sessions in a month.

How are officers of IES notified of new RACK reports?

In IEX, which is our intranet, officers can personalize the settings in such a way that the system will notify them whenever a market or sector which they are interested in has a related RACK report uploaded. They can also specify that they want to be notified whenever new RACK reports have been uploaded. They will receive an email with a link to those reports.

My team also sends out a monthly “ad” with “new arrivals” of RACK reports.

What are some of the challenges that you face with operationalizing RACK?

People leave the organisation so fast that sometimes, even with a month’s notice, you don’t have the luxury to sit down and do the sharing.

What is the other initiative that you wish to talk about?

The other ongoing initiative is our KM Advisory Services. It’s like a KM clinic, a modified version of one of your (Straits Knowledge’s) knowledge audit activities – the part where you identify pain points. We approach the Directors of each group and talk to them about how to manage their officers’ knowledge effectively. For example, when officers leave, or when new ones come on board and may face a steep learning curve. We use their pain points as a starting point. We focus on what exactly their problems are.

Do you use any framework or guiding questions during your Advisory Services?

We look at the lifecycle of officers, in terms of new officers coming in, existing officers, and officers who are leaving. In each of these events, somehow it will affect the knowledge of that particular individual, or that of someone else.

Sounds like you need to know staff movement of the various departments.

We are included in the notification of any staff movement. Once we receive the notification, we will kick in the process. In fact, that’s how RACK came about.

We did an experiment last year, with one of the groups. They were forthcoming; they wanted to know what they could do to improve their KM. It isn’t 100% KM. It’s a mixture of KM, information management and IT. It’s like a one-stop service. If we think that something can be done by our IT Team, for example, we will liaise with them. We will still front the service, nonetheless. This is possible because of our relationship with the Directors. We are no strangers to them, so it’s easy for us to talk to them. They’re quite open.

For example, one of the Directors asked us how to weave in the activity of accounting for knowledge reports. How do they ensure that as part of their business development process, whatever knowledge reports that need to be uploaded onto our intranet has been done? He doesn’t want it to be seen as additional work, to have to send out a reminder every time a report is due to be uploaded. It must be part of their process so that it will be natural for the officers to upload the reports once vetted by their boss.

So, we mapped out their existing business process, put in the contribution activity and a monitoring method. We proposed that the clerical officer – who typically knows the activities of the department – keep track of report submission. If an officer has done a report but has not uploaded it onto the intranet, then the clerical officer will send a reminder. This way, new officers will see it as a complete process. They won’t see that the one last bit is additional work.

Any new KM initiative planned?

We are in the midst of revamping our intranet. We will be introducing Personalisation and Awareness of Surroundings, two trends that we have identified as beneficial to our users. It’s through our Service Design exercise with them that we validated this – that officers want to know what’s happening around them. It’s the first step of our journey to “personalisation with intelligence.”

We have another feature, called Digital Assistance. For instance, if you own an intranet page that needs to be reviewed once a year, the system will remind you. Or, if there are activities whereby the owners require officers to do something, the owners will use this module to remind officers of their tasks, such as to go through online training or to do a survey. The plan is to build intelligence into the system but we’re still in the early stages.

What were your biggest challenges getting started in KM and how did you overcome them?

Management buy-in, and also the buy-in of officers and supervisors. RACK started off as a pilot project, and when you start a pilot you want to work with people who will cooperate with you. When you have done that, you have to be creative in showcasing your deliverables. We got feedback from the officers who were involved and asked them if the RACK sessions had gone well and if they would recommend it to others.

Officers and supervisors also believe that while it’s hard to capture implicit or tacit knowledge, doing something is better than not capturing it at all. The best way to overcome this is to acknowledge the limitations but at the same time produce the deliverables. Usually, new supervisors and new officers will find RACK useful. It doesn’t happen often but there are experienced supervisors who want us to do a RACK exercise but they do not attend the session. It’s not a failure. We’d rather capture something now, for the benefit of the successors.

What are some of the high points of your KM journey?

When we were able to implement RACK successfully. In a recent survey, 100% of supervisors think that RACK is a useful tool. Another high point was when IEX won the “My Beautiful Intranet” award by the Digital Workplace Group. And, we have the most dynamic homepage on the intranet because of Chattr! [a social blogging tool]. I believe that we have successfully put in place a tool that officers are comfortable in using and posting.

What’s your advice on how to maintain support and momentum in KM?

It’s very important to maintain close ties with the CEO as well as his subordinates, because the latter do not move as much. If you want sustainability, there’s no point in just talking to the CEO about KM if the Directors don’t understand KM. When the CEO leaves, you’re back to square one. Many agencies don’t try to do this. Maybe it’s their culture, that they can’t seek direct audience with the CEO. When there are many levels between the KM team and the CEO, it’s challenging.

If you were given the KM portfolio, then it must mean something to your management. So find out from them what their expectations are, and work towards them. And, get them involved. For example, as you reach a milestone or come up with an idea, bounce it off them. It’s important to work with them. Acknowledging their participation is also very important. To me, this is one of the most difficult things that KM practitioners have to do.

If you don’t have KM background, it’s ok. You can join societies like ISKO (International Society for Knowledge Organisation), join their activities, visits, forums. If you don’t have buy in from your senior management, it’s going to be hard to get started.

You have to get buy-in in a strategic manner. People will only be convinced if they can see the final deliverables; they need to see the final product. Or, show them what others are doing, what your sister agencies are doing.

Any final words?

Believe in what you’re doing.

Date of Interview: 10 May 2016

Nick Milton and I have written a couple of blog posts on the Kogan Page website to introduce our new book The Knowledge Manager’s Handbook, due out in 3 weeks.

Nick has written a post outlining four reasons why knowledge management can benefit organisations, and I have written a post describing some of the pitfalls you might encounter in implementing knowledge management and how to avoid them.

The Kogan Page website has a sample chapter for the book.

Every now and then we are asked by clients or potential clients whether we can help them conduct a KM Maturity Assessment. We are always very cautious about this, for the following reasons.

We have used KM maturity models in the past, but I (along with others) am quite sceptical about their utility as KM assessment and planning tools at the start of a KM journey. There are two major reasons for this:

(a) A generic assessment instrument takes a very templated approach to what is a very unique set of needs in any given organisation and so it tends to focus attention on generic steps and solutions that may not be appropriate to the context of a specific organisation at a given time, and it tends to miss “outlier” activities that may be important to that organisation at that time. For example, a typical framework would stipulate the need for senior management buy-in. We have worked with organisations where senior management buy-in would have indicated as a positive in the assessment, but when it comes to intangible levels of support, the management culture of walking the talk is weak, yet not easily observable in a formal assessment. On the other side, we have seen organisations where senior buy-in was not present at the outset, but where solid KM progress was made in portions of the business, leading to the scaling up of support (and more progress) later on. It is very hard for a generic KM maturity framework to pick up these nuances in a formal assessment, and the sequence of stages in a KM journey varies widely across different organisations.

(b) The KM maturity landscape in large organisations tends to be uneven, with peaks and troughs – some parts are more mature than others. An organisation wide maturity instrument tends to even these out and produce an averaged out assessment that is not representative of the ground realities in the organisation, or the the peaks and troughs in the landscape. This means that the overall KM assessment may not be representative of the ground realities in the different parts of the organisation. On the other hand, trying to get a partitioned set of maturity assessments for the different parts of the organisation is a complex and onerous exercise. A knowledge audit is a much more effective instrument for identifying different needs and possibilities.

For our upcoming book, The Knowledge Manager’s Handbook, Nick Milton and I discussed at some length whether we should include KM maturity assessments as part of our section of measurement and evaluation, and decided in the end it was better to leave it out, for the reasons given above. For KM planning and monitoring purposes, they simply don’t function very well. Nick has a couple of nice blog posts giving his perspective on this. I suggest you start here.

Maturity assessments can be useful in some circumstances. For example, they can be useful to trace the maturity of specific KM initiatives such as a community of practice, where there is a great deal of data on the different stages that communities of practice go through – far more stable and consistent data than KM implementations in general. We have also built customised maturity assessment frameworks for clients based on their KM strategy and roadmap – in that case, the maturity instrument is customised to track what the KM strategy and vision intends to achieve over a given period, and so overcomes the “one size fits all” issue. However you still have to be careful about the “averaging out” effect where you might miss uneven levels of progress in different parts of the organisation.

In short, I don’t recommend using maturity frameworks at the start of a KM journey – a knowledge audit is much more effective at supporting a structured needs analysis and determination of goals and objectives. Maturity frameworks can sometimes be useful as part of a monitoring framework once the strategy is developed, but should be used with some caution.

This is a summary of contributions by participants in three rounds of Knowledge Café discussions at KM World on November 5 2015, and facilitated by Patrick Lambe. We’d like to thank the 25 KM professionals who shared their challenges, experience and advice so generously. The topics covered in the discussion were:

• Challenge of inexperience
• What Buy-in is and is not
• Where buy-in needs to come from
• How to get support and buy-in
• Pitfalls
• Characteristics of effective knowledge managers

Read the notes here: 

Getting_and_Sustaining_Buyin.pdf

In this thoughtpiece, from my forthcoming book Knowledge Audits and Knowledge Mapping (Oxford: Chandos, 2016) I trace the origins of knowledge audits in the communication audits of the 1950s. Knowing the history of knowledge audits gives us access to the incredibly rich set of tools and approaches developed by organisational communications scholars and practitioners after the Second World War (and also, incidentally, those developed to support information audits in the 1980s and 1990s). The article also gives a framework for identifying different types of knowledge audits for different purposes. Feedback welcome!

Why do many enterprise taxonomy projects fail? In this thoughtpiece I explain why taxonomy projects are extraordinarily fragile in relation to the quality of the initial evidence gathering stage. I outline a methodology for improving the robustness and effectiveness of an enterprise taxonomy design, through a systematic knowledge audit at the project’s outset.

Download article here

So when we work on taxonomy and search in projects for clients, one of the most common over-simplifications we encounter (and there are many) is the assumption that the sole user problem to solve is a problem of “finding” or retrieving information against a clearly defined need. But if we pause even for a moment to consider our own working patterns, this is only one of several information scenarios. We might have an inkling of something and be looking for similar or connected things, which is where classifications help. We may not know specifically what there is to look for, we might be browsing to discover something that might be interesting or useful to our need. We might be indulging in “idle” curiosity (though I tend to think of curiosity as more active than idle).

Over at Brain Pickings, Maria Popova has a passionate piece on the Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, and how important it is to foster and support open curiosity. It reminds me of a story about Robert Falcon Scott, on one of his Antarctic expeditions. While out sledding with his team, a crevasse opened up and he fell into it. Crevasses in the melting season are dangerous, they can shift and move unpredictably. But Scott frustrated his team mates by not climbing up the rope immediately they lowered it to them. He was busy examining the inner structure of the crevasse. He wanted to see how it was structured, and observe how it behaved.

This was characteristic of Scott, his team mates later observed. He questioned everything, explored everything, even if there didn’t seem to be an immediate need or payoff for doing so. This made him extremely alert to small signals in a shifting, complex and unpredictable environment. He guessed accurately when it was unsafe to cross an ice sheet. He knew how to treat the dogs when they were uneasy. Curiosity pays off in many small ways. And when we organise our knowledge systems, we need to provide for curiosity too.

Hat tip to my colleague Ari for picking up this article.

This is the keynote address from Dr Steve Ellis of HSBC at the KM Singapore Conference 13 August 2009. The topic was “knowledge based working in the current economic climate” and Dr Ellis argued that while the pressures of an economic crisis tended to make managers less prone to think in terms of long term KM investments and gains, this environment (a) shows the value of knowledge worker skills and (b) focuses knowledge managers on delivering tangible value.

Watch it on vimeo here.

In this evening talk for iKMS, Ron Young explains that personal knowledge management is a foundational element for any kind of knowledge management, and argues that it forms a basic set of competencies for any knowledge worker.

Watch it on vimeo

In this second part of a talk on personal knowledge management for the iKMS, Ron Young argues that the arrival of Web 2.0 massively enables personal knowledge management, and that this will inevitably have an impact on organisational KM.

Watch it on vimeo

Art Schlussel was interviewed at KM World 2010 and the following 3 videos were recorded and produced.

In video 1, Art Schlussel covers:

1. Introducing the US Army KM Principles

2. What do the US Army KM Principles cover?

3. How do the KM Principles support KM Implementation?

Watch it on vimeo here.

In video 2, Art Schlussel covers:

1. How does the US Army build its KM Capabilities?

2. What is the US Army doing about KM Competencies, Education and Training?

3. What is the primary goal for KM Education and Training in the Army?

4.What sort of Skills need to be trained?

Watch it on vimeo here.

In video 3, Art Schlussel covers:

1. What are the factors that support or inhibit KM in a military context?

2. How can the inhibiting effect of a Command and Control culture be addressed?

Watch it on vimeo here.