Hands up who’s started a Knowledge Management initiative?
Now raise your hands if you didnt finish it, or you’ve started a second (or 3rd!) initiative because the first one(s) failed?
Unfortunately it’s a common story.
So let's start with what we mean by Knowledge Management? well 'Best Practice' (ITIL4® in this case) says this:
'The purpose of the Knowledge Management practice is to maintain and improve the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across the organisation'
Now as we know, 'Best Practice' isnt always 'Right Practice', but we think most IT leaders would agree that there's benefit in Knowledge Management, or as many know it, 'having a knowledge base'.
There's plenty of obvious reasons why you'd do it, such as having all the documentation in one secure place, making it easy to find, sharing knowledge amongst different support staff to help with staff attrition or knowledge gaps in your skills matrix, as well as sometimes sharing it amongst different support teams to improve collaboration. Or of course, presenting relevant documentation to end users for self help purposes, and so on.
One of the things that often gets overlooked though is wrapping a 'process' around all this i.e. rather than just dumping it all in a 'knowledge base' without really considering that this is a constantly evolving 'thing'. Although most ITSM / ESM tools these days will provide some out of the box configuration to trigger reviews of documents, approval processes and so on. So we're not going to focus too much on the 'process' bit here.
Ok, so if we all agree that it's important, why is it that Knowledge Management initiatives have great intent, yet, somehow, they don't really catch on?
From our experience, apart from the obvious blockers around people seemingly being 'too busy' we see a common reason being culture.
Yes, we strongly believe the success of Knowledge Management is linked to culture!
Did you know that there is a direct relationship between culture and the willingness to openly share knowledge?
We've all heard the saying that “Knowledge is power” and so not many people with that belief are prepared to give up their illusion of power.
This is an ego-related problem.
Ego, not in the sense of the chest-beating, trumpet-blowing, “look at me” behaviour, (although that can apply as well), but we mean a more sinister type of ego, based on fear.
Unfortunately, in many organisations, fear runs through the heart of the culture. Most commonly, for many employees there is the fear of losing their jobs or losing the organisations dependancy upon them, for the organisation to function (i.e. the knowledge is power belief).
It is often fear that destroys any well meaning Knowledge Management initiative. People simply don't want to share their knowledge because of fear of the consequences. Remember that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real, but if the organisation cannot dis-prove the fear, then whether the fear is real or not, the illusion of fear because of a bad culture, will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It is the responsibility of leaders to dis-prove this fear. So how do we encourage knowledge sharing?
As stated earlier, knowledge sharing is a by-product of culture, so actually leaders should look at culture first.
Is the culture toxic?
Is the culture riddled with beliefs based on fear?
What evidence is there that encourages the sharing of knowledge?
Culture is a leadership issue. It is not fixable by those without an appropriate mandate.
Culture cannot be fixed from the bottom-up, it has to be fixed openly with transparency and authenticity.
TRUST is the keyword of good culture. Are people encouraged to fail fast and learn from mistakes?
Those type of behaviours will start to build a culture of trust, and hot on the heals of trust we will witness the creation of a culture of sharing, collaboration and open-communications. It is from that type of culture that a Knowledge Management initiative can be instigated.
Without that kind of attention on culture, starting up yet another Knowledge Management initiative may just be a waste of precious resources.
Another key question ... should Knowledge Management ever really be just 'an initiative' ?
Accepting at some point, the law of diminishing returns will kick in, but if knowledge is a constantly changing 'thing', then surely the 'initiative' should never really end?
To read more on the importance of Knowledge Management being an ongoing 'initiative', this other article explains the importance of 'Shift Left' and how it impacts and improves user support.
If you'd like to talk to us about this topic, drop us an email at hello@itsmpeople.co.uk
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