Best practice

Best practice guide

Knowledge Management:
From justification to delivery

Knowledge is power: Transform the way your organisation handles knowledge,

to improve collaboration, cut costs, increase revenues and make the best
possible decisions at all levels.

www.ipl.com
IPL Limited

Best practice

Information is the only competitive advantage you have

Foreword

Every company can be global. Every company can have distributed supply-chains. Every
company is hunting for emerging market growth strategies. Every consumer is comparing
products and searching for the best service at the best price.
Everyone can be informed, but not everyone has the tools to ensure that knowledge is
available everywhere before it is needed. Knowledge drives every decision you and your
staff take; from day-to-day operational choices made by your employees, to strategic
changes made by directors. Having the best knowledge available to your decision-makers
is vital. Yet much is difficult to find: in peoples heads, on individual computer desktops, or
buried deep in personal email archives.
Knowledge management breaks down these barriers, putting information in the hands of
every employee by capturing and sharing it effectively; ensuring your staff can find what
they need quickly.
Implementing a collaboration system alone will not bring major benefits. People are the
lifeblood of your organisation and central to the success of your knowledge management
practice. Getting them to buy in to your knowledge management system will help ensure
that they, and your entire organisation, enjoy work efficiency, cost savings, strategic
responsiveness and increased revenues.

Gavin Chait is Head of Services at the

Open Knowledge Foundation, a non-profit
organisation dedicated to promoting the
creation, sharing and application of open
knowledge in the digital age.
Chait has a track record of championing,
developing and implementing knowledge
management systems. He runs Whythawk,
which focuses on market and business
analytics, knowledge management in large
organisations, as well as workshops and
seminars on information and risk.
Follow him on Twitter @GavinChait
or visit www.whythawk.com.

Increasing competitive pressure is squeezing margins and leading to greater decisionmaking scrutiny. Its critical to ensure your company has an information advantage. Dont
wait until you have lost market share or your profit margins have fallen to react: put the
right knowledge system in place now, so that when the crunch comes, you know where
to go for all the information you need to make the best decision for your organisation.

What is Knowledge Management?

Knowledge management is the process of capturing, storing,
managing and sharing knowledge in an organisation. A wellimplemented knowledge management practice minimises
the amount of effort individuals need to put in to get the
information they require to make the best possible decisions.
As a result, your organisation can enjoy cost reductions,
happier and more effective staff and a better culture of
collaboration. It also ensures business continuity and mitigates
the risk of knowledge being lost from an organisation when
individuals leave.

All material contained within this document is the

property of the respective author and should not be used
or reproduced without the authors permission.
Copyright IPL 2013

Best practice
Explain the benefits of Knowledge Management

Creating a business case

You may know your organisation has a
knowledge management problem, but
before you can turn your dream of delivering
a solution into reality, youve got a lot of
convincing to do, because these projects
take time and will impact on all parts of
your organisation. They can also require
significant investment in money and time.
Key to your argument must be a solid,
realistic business case, which you can
present to the budget holders. Youll
need to demonstrate why your proposed
knowledge management system is worthy
of investment, what savings and benefits
theyll get back, and when.

Put in place the structures

and systems that will help
ensure future decisions are
better-informed.
Virtually any organisation however big
or small would benefit from improving
its knowledge management processes.
A failure to manage and share knowledge
effectively leads to inefficiency, wastefulness
and potential loss of revenue. This can
be evident even in small and medium
enterprises (SMEs), but is magnified the
larger, more complex and fragmented an
organisation becomes. This inefficiency can
show itself in a number of ways, the severity
of which will vary between organisations.
The following examples are some of the
most common, and putting effective
knowledge management in place can
deliver benefits in all these areas as well
as ones you may not have expected.
Sub-optimal decision-making
Decisions at any level of an organisation
that are made without being fully informed
are likely to be sub-optimal. This is
especially true in organisations with multiple
autonomous departments, and even more
so if these are spread across different
countries. On a day-to-day level, this could
see one department spending money on
something that the organisation has already
purchased, wasting scarce resources.
At a higher level, a decision based on
incomplete knowledge could lead to the
loss of an important piece of work.

The difficult thing in these cases is that it

is often only in hindsight that you realise
the knowledge was sub-optimal, and that
improved knowledge management would
have helped. Waiting until the cost of such
inefficiency becomes obvious will make the
case for investment easier, but the smart
thing to do is to realise the value of sound
knowledge management now: be proactive
and put in place the structures and systems
that will help ensure future decisions are
better-informed.
Poor knowledge discovery
Implementing an effective knowledge
management system with a trusted search
function will help staff find knowledge more
quickly, meaning they can spend more
time being productive with that knowledge.
Additional features can deliver further
benefits, such as recommended/related
articles or a knowledge of the day feature
to help users find relevant material they
perhaps didnt know they were looking for
but that can help in their job.
Finding an expert
Your organisation may employ a subjectmatter expert in the area you need to find
out about, but without effective knowledge
management, there is no easy way of
discovering who they are, other than word
of mouth. By putting in place tools that link
individuals to knowledge, you build up a
web of expertise, which can reduce the
need for external training and bring to the
fore (and reward) hitherto unknown subjectmatter experts.
Compliance
Compliance with contracts, regulation or
legislation is critical. An effective knowledge
management system not only enables you
to compile the required information more
easily, but can provide the mechanism to
ensure all staff know what the rules are
and what the consequences are for not
complying. You can provide assurance
by including Business Intelligence tools to
deliver dashboards to different levels of the
organisation, so that relevant staff know at
a glance whether their area of responsibility,
or the organisation as a whole, is
complying.

Gavin Chait
Knowledge vacuums
If a key piece of knowledge is stored in
one staff members head, or even on their
computer desktop or email inbox, it is
only accessible by that individual. If they
are ill, on holiday, or leave the company,
that knowledge disappears from the
organisation. An effective knowledge
management system will capture this and
ensure that staff know exactly where to find
the knowledge they require. This will have
the additional benefit of reducing the time it
takes for new staff to get up to speed.
Lost revenue
Failure to manage your organisations
knowledge effectively can lead directly
to lost revenue. This could be as a result
of your staff taking poor decisions based
on incomplete knowledge, or missing
opportunities, such as the chance to move
into a certain market or even sell access
to your body of knowledge. Manage your
knowledge in the right way, and youll
dramatically reduce these opportunity costs
by maximising earnings from your existing
assets.
Prove the return on investment
Building a knowledge management
system and implementing the required
organisational and procedural changes
to make it work is a major, long-term
investment, but if gone about in the right
way, will also deliver benefits in the short
term.
The benefit of having an effective
collaboration tool in place thereby
removing departmental silos will be
visible immediately. Users will be able to
find what they are looking for more quickly,
become more efficient and make betterinformed decisions.
In the longer term, as usage of your
knowledge management system grows,
you will be able to analyse how it is being
used, learn what users are searching for
and where knowledge gaps exist; link
valuable pieces of knowledge; and create
a more holistic view of how pieces of
knowledge are having an impact on your
organisations revenue and profitability.
Gavin Chait has a track record
of championing, developing and
implementing knowledge management
systems.

Best practice
Understand the concepts of capture, share and find

The pillars of a successful

Knowledge Management system
As with any initiative that aims to exploit data
and information within an organisation, a
knowledge management system requires a
foundation built on solid data management
principles. The final system has to fulfil
three functions; capture the knowledge
that exists across the organisation, ensure
that knowledge is shared (within security
constraints) and, critically, enable users to
find the knowledge they need easily.

ways of working, managing and monitoring

the implementation of the knowledge
management system, and working with IT
to put controls and enablers in place. A key
objective for Data Governance is to reduce
(or even remove) alternatives to corporate
collaboration tools. This can often be
disruptive, such as reducing email and My
Documents storage to the bare minimum,
and controlling the use of external media.

Many knowledge management projects fail

to deliver their anticipated benefits because
the detailed requirements for capture, share
and find are not truly understood. There is
a belief that implementing a collaboration
tool and search engine, along with some
configuration, is all you require for success.

Knowledge needs to be discoverable,

and this is made easier when data is
tagged with approved terms. Youll need to
spend time up-front to develop and agree
a taxonomy of standard business terms
and their synonyms. This information must
be built into the knowledge management
solution, and users must be educated to
add this metadata to anything they upload
though specialist software can automate
this. The taxonomy should not be a static
entity: it will evolve as user and business
needs change over time. Part of your
business-as-usual processes should be
to maintain it by engaging with users and
monitoring what is being searched for. This
Metadata Management is an essential part
of the knowledge management foundation.

This involves data and information

management specialists setting policies
and processes to be followed, defining new

Capture

Metadata
management

Information
architecture

Data
governance

d
Fin

Building the foundations

Knowledge management is as much about
people as it is about systems, and people
are needed to affect the culture change
across the enterprise. The first step is to
recognise that users have to change their
ways of working and be encouraged to
share data and information they create. This
can only be achieved by implementing Data
Governance within the organisation.

Finally, the knowledge management

solution must be planned and architected
before implementation begins. Information
Architecture plays a vital role in ensuring
the solution meets the needs of users,
the objective being that they can easily
identify their working areas (which of
course incorporate the relevant metadata).
Users must be able to navigate around the
solution, following a structure that
makes sense to them. A badly thought-

Data security
management

Information
lifecycle
management

are

Todays search technology is powerful

and capable, but still requires robust data
and information management to expose
valuable knowledge and present it to the
end-user in an unambiguous form. This
will ensure your users can easily locate
knowledge, thereby creating the trust in
the search experience that is required for
them to build confidence in the tool. If they
cannot trust search results to deliver what
they need, they will abandon the knowledge
management tool and revert to keeping
local copies of the knowledge they require.

Sh

But technology alone will not deliver an

effective knowledge management solution,
especially where it involves Big Data. If
users are not in the habit of saving data and
information into shared areas, no amount
of clever software will help you. Moreover,
if different business units are not prepared
to share information more broadly, the
collaboration system will remain unused.

Ian Sinclair
through architecture will result in data and
information being created in inappropriate
locations and tagged with equally
inappropriate metadata. Without a sound
information architecture, it will be impossible
to guarantee that all the knowledge on a
certain topic can be found with possible
repercussions for those operating in strictly
regulated environments, and indeed overall
user confidence in the systems ability to
help them do their jobs better.
Completing the solution
By default, the collaboration tool will enable
the sharing of data across the organisation,
but no company exists where there is not
some limitation on what can be shared
(personal and commercially sensitive data
being two examples). Making knowledge
easily available has to be balanced against
legislative and regulatory requirements,
as well as any internal security protocols
that apply. Therefore, Data Security
Management is required, covering who has
access to what. It is this area that poses the
greatest risk to the delivery of a knowledge
management system, because a perceived
security breach often leads to a kneejerk
reaction where whole business areas get
locked down. To avoid this, the security
model that is built into the system from the
start must be rigorous, allowing users to
see only what they have permission to.
Lastly, the knowledge management solution
must display the status of the information
being shared. Opening up corporate
knowledge to the enterprise has many
benefits, but there are also risks, notably
the possibility of making business decisions
based on flawed knowledge. To help
overcome this, users must understand
exactly what provenance the material they
are reviewing has. Information Lifecycle
Management procedures help ensure that a
formal status structure is in place, identifying
key points in the information lifecycle, such
as draft, final, published, superseded or
obsolete. This is a critical function, because
it provides a safeguard that prevents users
from acting on knowledge that may be
limited in its application.
Ian Sinclair is a Business Consultant at
IPL with over 15 years experience in
delivering information and knowledge
management solutions.

Best practice
Highlight the virtues and build momentum

Implementing a successful
Knowledge Management system
A knowledge management system is not
something you can design and develop
overnight: to make it a success, you will
need to consider various things as you build
your business case. It is critical to consider
the requirements of your users and how
the system will meet these on a day-today basis, in such a way that improves
on their current ways of working. Hand
in hand with this must be consideration
of how your organisational processes
and structures need to evolve, and what
procedural changes you may need to
make the knowledge management system
a success. Only once you have a clear
idea of the system you need and how and
where it will fit, will you or your development
partner be in a position to make technology
choices and design the right system for
your organisation. Once it is in place, it will
only be a success if you push through the
changes required and the system is taken
up by your user base.
Appoint a champion
The first thing to do is to appoint a senior
manager as a knowledge management
champion, or better still, build a team of
champions. Depending on the size and
structure of your organisation, the whole
process from idea to implementation could
be lengthy. Over this time, the organisation
could well see changes in management
and vision. For instance, a board member
who was keen on the project may move
on, putting the whole process in danger
of stalling. Having a team of champions
there to keep reminding the business of the
benefits it will enjoy, bring stakeholders on
board and maintain the projects momentum
could be the difference between successful
delivery and the knowledge management
system never getting off the drawing board.

Listen to your users and the business

To develop the use cases, you (or a
suitable consultancy partner) need to
consider what the business requirements
for the knowledge management system
are, and ensure that it is built to address
these. Understand the direction your board
of directors wants to take the organisation,
because the knowledge management
system must help them deliver this vision.

The first thing to do is

to appoint a knowledge
management champion.
You also need to engage with the potential
users of the system to understand how
they could interact with it day-to-day. What
do they currently do? What frustrates them?
What would they like to be able to do?
What are the current information flows? Your
knowledge management system needs to
be designed to fit in with their current ways
of working as far as is practically possible,
because the less behavioural change you
require from your user base, the more likely
they are to adopt the system. The bigger
and more dispersed your user base is,
the less control you can exert over their
individual behaviour and hence the more
important this becomes. Some change is
inevitable, but by listening to and engaging
with your users from an early stage and
throughout the process, you increase the
likelihood of buy-in, helping ensure the
project is a long-term success.

Ewan Milne
Choose the right technology and
development partner
With your use cases defined, requirements
drawn up and purse-string holders
convinced, you can write your RFP and put
the project out to tender. Unless you have
a specific reason for wanting a particular
design or technology, its a good idea to
leave these choices up to those bidding for
the work. This will enable them to propose
the most suitable solution for your needs,
based on their experience. Encourage
questions from bidders during the process,
because this will help them tailor their
proposed solutions to your needs. Once
the bids come in, engage with the potential
suppliers to understand why they have
proposed things in a certain way.
There are numerous things to consider
as you select your favoured solution. To
implement a knowledge management
system, youre nearly always going to be
configuring an off-the-shelf product with
some bespoke elements. The cost, time
and complexity of building a system from
scratch is neither necessary nor part of your
core business. There is a choice between
open source and proprietary software, and
at first glance, the former may look more
appealing due to the often much lower
upfront cost. However, make sure you (and
your development partner) understand
the products licensing model, because
additional costs may appear as you require
greater functionality, thereby diminishing or
eradicating the price difference.

The use cases you develop as a result

of this process can then feed into the
development of a formal requirements
document and request for proposal (RFP).

Best practice
Other aspects to take into account are your
own (and the developers) knowledge of
the platform being proposed, the maturity
of the online support community, and
whether the functionality you require is
supported by your chosen product when
configured in the way you plan to use it.
This last point is particularly important,
because while a platform may in theory
support a given feature, it may not do so
in every configuration. Your development
partner needs to know the proposed
product and its limitations, especially since
product-based solutions are inherently less
flexible than entirely bespoke ones, where
workarounds are easier to create.
Think about what features you need
from your system: key to the success
of a knowledge management system is
effective and intuitive search. Consider
adding semantic search functionality
using technology such as SmartLogics
Semaphore. Quality search results also rely
on you carefully designing your taxonomy
of tag terms, such that articles stored in the
system are tagged using a limited and wellunderstood range of terms. This ensures
that similar material is effectively linked and
discoverable. Search is also helped by
avoiding a complex folder hierarchy when
storing files. In an ideal world, a big bucket
approach, where all documents are kept
in a single folder, is a good idea. However,
it requires meticulous tagging and naming
of files to avoid it becoming unwieldy and
difficult to find information. Moreover, users
often prefer to browse rather than search,
so a simple, but limited folder structure is
recommended to aid knowledge discovery.

Lastly, remember that the process of

delivering a knowledge management
system is a lengthy one, and requirements
will inevitably evolve over time. Your
development partner will need to be
flexible and pragmatic throughout to cope
with these changes and ensure you get
the best possible solution. Linked to this
should be consideration of the partners
ability to provide additional staff at short
notice if you require changes to be made.
Development methodology is important,
too. The initial delivery of a knowledge
management system requires significant
planning and thought before the system is
built, and so lends itself well to a waterfall
model. However, later changes can be
done in a more agile way to bring quick
benefits. Again, a flexible developer who
can select the best methodology for the
job is essential.

The process of delivering

a knowledge management
system is a lengthy one, and
requirements will inevitably
evolve over time.
Your development partner will
need to be flexible throughout
to ensure you get the best
possible solution.

People and processes

As important as the technology and design
choices are, the changes that will be
required to your organisational processes
and procedures are what will make
or break the knowledge management
system. Central to its success is getting
people to use it, and to use it effectively,
as discussed on the opposite page.
As well as reducing personal storage
allowances, you can encourage use of
the system by asking managers only to
accept and review work that is submitted
to them via the knowledge management
system (and rejecting a document sent
as an email attachment, for example), and
putting in place guidelines for the tagging
of documents or, better still, building in
automatic tagging when users upload
knowledge.
At a higher level, youll also need to think
about whether you need to change your
procurement processes and budget
allocation to be more centralised. This will
depend entirely on what model works best
in your organisation, but if you do move
to centralise procurement, make sure you
do not introduce unnecessary red tape to
the process. Staff who have been used to
having control of their budgets and are able
to spend it as they see fit will resent having
to jump through hoops to achieve things
they currently do with ease.
Ewan Milne is an Enterprise
Technology Consultant at IPL where
he has designed complex knowledge
management systems. He is a former
chair of the ACCU professionalism in
programming user group.

Best practice
Draw maximum benefit from your organisations knowledge

Running a successful Knowledge

Management practice
Once you get to the point where your
development partner has delivered your
knowledge management system, you
can congratulate yourself: you will have
worked incredibly hard to get it in place and
can be justifiably proud of what you have
achieved. But dont rest on your laurels,
because running a successful knowledge
management practice requires on-going
effort to ensure your organisation enjoys the
long-term benefits that your hard work can
deliver. We have looked at the advantages
a well-managed knowledge management
system can deliver previously in this guide,
so here we will focus on practical things to
consider when running your practice.
It is important to ensure best data
governance practices are followed and
that you are able to measure and quantify
the success of the system. Remember
that the primary goal of your knowledge
management system is to deliver benefits
to decision-makers by providing them with
intelligence about the organisation that
they did not have access to previously.
Everything you do should be geared to
making this happen.
Governance
With the knowledge management system
making information available across the
organisation (and beyond, potentially), the
provenance of the data it houses must
remain high. Users must know they can
trust it and therefore make decisions with
confidence. While it is probably not feasible
to vet every single document that gets
uploaded, you can include mechanisms for
retrospective review. This way, if someone
finds knowledge that they think is of poor
quality, they can raise this concern with the
creator or another appropriate individual.
Vital to the success of your knowledge
management practice is effective and
robust access control. Get this in place
before go-live and then monitor compliance.
However, you need to encourage a culture
of knowledge-sharing across the entire
organisation, because of the huge benefits
this can bring. The default starting point
for knowledge that is uploaded should
be that it is visible to all authorised users.
Information should only be locked down
in exceptional circumstances, with an
appropriate mechanism for users to request
access put in place.

You must also liaise regularly with your

legal, commercial and contracts teams,
because they need to understand what the
knowledge management system does and
what it is storing, to ensure compliance.
As laws and regulations surrounding data
protection, freedom of information and the
like change, the knowledge management
system will need to evolve.
Measuring success
There are numerous ways to measure
how much of a success your knowledge
management system is proving to be. In
purely quantitative terms, there are highlevel trends you can look at, such as how
often users are signing in and how many
searches are being run. These metrics
are not the whole story though, because
they do not focus on outcomes: you need
to understand how your organisation is
achieving cost savings or improvements
thanks to knowledge that was previously
unavailable. This is harder to measure, but
a correctly worded regular end-user survey
could provide valuable insight.

The primary goal of your

knowledge management
system is to deliver benefits
to decision-makers.
Are any areas of the organisation engaging
particularly well? Are any not using it? If you
find this to be the case, speak to the area in
question to learn why, and work with them
to bring them on board.
Then there is the qualitative side, which is
equally (if not more) important but trickier
to measure. How are staff finding the
system to use? Do they feel it is saving
them time? Have they discovered and built
up relationships with new individuals in
the organisation as a result of your linking
people to knowledge? Are new subject
matter experts coming to the fore? Again,
surveys may be the best way to measure
success in this area.

Chris Bradley
What value do you place on knowledge?
Over time, your knowledge management
practice can deliver even more benefits, by
linking knowledge to business decisions.
Consider the example where a salesman
in an organisation is working to secure an
order for a given type of technology and, as
part of his research process, he accesses
a particular piece of knowledge in the
system. He may be the only person that
year to do so but, as a result, he secures
the organisations biggest deal of the year.
At first glance, the piece of knowledge
may appear unimportant, since it was only
accessed once. However, in practice, it has
made a huge difference to the organisation,
which is important on two fronts. Firstly, the
fact that the piece of knowledge in question
was of value should be fed back to those
behind it and their superiors. Second, it
underlines the importance of the knowledge
management system to the organisation:
without it, the deal may not have happened.
A way to link specific knowledge to specific
decisions is to provide project teams
with workspaces within the knowledge
management system where they can
collect links to knowledge they are using in
their work this requires some behavioural
change from the staff involved, since
they will have to link knowledge to their
project explicitly. When projects then
report to the organisation on their results
and performance, it is possible to find
out the impact that a piece of knowledge
had by discussing this with the individual
or team concerned. As well as from a
commercial viewpoint, this can be beneficial
from a governance perspective, enabling
organisations to trace back to understand
why a decision was made.
The key thing to realise is that the
knowledge management system requires
on-going development and management
to ensure it is delivering maximum benefits
to the business, thereby facilitating the best
possible decision-making for stakeholders
at all levels.
Chris Bradley is IPLs Chief
Development Officer, and has worked
in the information management field for
over three decades.

Bringing your information to life

We employ knowledgeable, talented people who've built up plenty of experience helping clients
identify and solve their data issues in a language that's easy to understand.

www.ipl.com
hello@ipl.com +44 (0)1225 475 000
IPL, Eveleigh House, Grove Street, Bath, BA1 5LR