Friday, 16 August 2013

7 signs that your KM strategy is in trouble

warning sign

1. People outside your group don’t understand what you’re doing.
2. You keep changing vendors/technologies/products.
5. You’re prescribing organizational change.
6. You’re making big promises.

The focus on vendors, technologies and products in numbers 2 and 3 in Luke's list make me think there is a missing "sign 7", namely


It still amazes me how often you hear "KM is all about people" from teams who are concentrating solely on technology, vendors and products.

We have known for Years that KM is all about people AND technology AND process AND governance, but this is still something that seems to be given lip service, rather than being used to guide investment and strategy.

However much time and money you spend on Technology as part of your KM strategy, spend the same on People - assigning and defining roles, training people in those roles, coaching people in their accountabilities, listening to people, and building and supporting people structures such as Communities of Practice.

Then spend the same amount of time and money on Process - defining and introducing work processes, knowledge seeking processes, knowledge sharing processes, community processes, collaboration processes, team process and project process.

Then spend the the same amount of time and money on Governance - setting up the policies, expectations, training, support, metrics, rewards, recognition and so on.

Driving a KM strategy on technology alone and neglecting the other three aspects of people, process and governance, is like driving a truck with only one tyre inflated. Sooner or later, you are going to run into trouble.

1 comment:

Lisandro Gaertner said...

Vendors and any outside help is very important but if the execution is not carried on by the people from the company any efforts are useless because people don't feel there is real commitment with KM.

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