How to Promote Digital KM

Knowledge is Power!

Digital is all about flow, the mind flow, the information flow, and the knowledge flow; on one side, the abundance of data and only clicks-away information shortens the knowledge life cycle significantly; on the other side, the traditional KM (Knowledge Management) for managing the static knowledge at industrial age is no longer effective to build a digital intellectual organization.  Where is the KM value to the individual, the team, the organization, and the wider stakeholders? Overcoming any KM challenge is to keep the following in mind: implementing KM in today’s complex and quickly changing environments is faced with issues and obstacles that did not exist or could be overcome a decade ago. What’re the better-tailored solutions to promote and harness KM?

The seamless digital KM is on the way: A well-designed and relatively simplified KM solutions bound to unlock the Enterprise knowledge. It has the power to turn a downward spiral (ongoing cost-savings projects) into an upward spiral. The challenge is to get beyond the tipping point where the power is unlocked.

Leaders are KM advocate and practitioner. One of the ways to promote the KM is to make the Leadership Team the leading practitioners of the KM. You can take forward the experience of leadership in using the KM methods in their daily life to the mid-management & other levels of functions.

An integrated KM is well embedded into the core business capabilities with the recombination of people, process, and technology. A successful and durable KM solution in today’s environments is an integrated solution consists of one or very few processes, more seamlessly effective digital powered tools and the human factor. A further necessity is knowledge of hands-on experiences with the issues and obstacles that developed over the past decade and, of course, hands-on experiences with a successful implementation.

Start with a couple of ‘quick wins’: The audit is a good place to start point for KM - what weaknesses did it identify and what management actions were proposed? If the recommendation was simply 'to implement a KM strategy' then that's not so helpful! In that case, starting with a couple of 'quick wins' - sometimes an iterative process is better than waiting to come up with the perfect strategy. What are the information and knowledge issues that frustrate people the most? Are there too much duplication of effort because people don't know who's doing what? Mistakes are being repeated because lessons learned are not captured and shared?

A possible way to include KM in each project: make sure that each project has a KM step at the beginning, let's see what we can learn from what's been done before, and at the end of the project, what did we learn; what would we do differently next time. It is an ongoing capability to improve business effectiveness and maturity.

 An effective KM will help build the culture of learning. The willingness (or unwillingness) to see problems, admit to them, address them, discuss them depends a lot on the corporate culture: 
- Some organizations recognize the value to be found in difficulties, they usually do a much better job of recognizing what works or not, and learning from it, KM helps amplify the best practice.

A practical KM enables the business to learn from failures systematically and quickly. The organizations in which "no failure allowed" are shortsighted, by refusing to acknowledge problems, they miss opportunities to solve them and put things back on track. And by refusing to look at failures, they're condemning themselves to make the same mistakes over and over again.

Digital KM shall not be another management silo, it has to well embed, integrate, even converge into information management,  project/process management, talent/performance management, risk/governance, etc, with the ultimate business goal to build an agile, high –intelligent and high performing digital organization.