Note: I use the term 'intranet' very loosely throughout. I'm talking about the alternatives to using anything from a custom-built solution to something like a SocialText wiki or Microsoft Sharepoint.
First, some back story:
I once took over the leadership of a team of Learning Consultants (notice the capital letters). One of the first things I noticed was the impossibility of their ever refinding any of the work they had done previously. They had been lucky enough to have a 'Resource Development Worker' who knew where everything was. Then she left and they were screwed. I locked myself in a room to investigate and search out the handover notes my predecessor had promised were there on the network drive.
I ended up deleting hundreds of thousand of files. This for a team of five people. How did this happen?
The miracle of copy and paste is not unlike folding a piece of paper. How thick would a piece of paper be if you folded it fifty times? The answer is surprising. Starting a new project, people would simply copy and paste whole folders of files into new locations for convenience. Even doing this a few times makes things interesting. In one section I found literally thousands of folders with an average content of less than one document. In some sections there were folders containing literally thousands of files. It's fair to say they'd had their share of lumpers and splitters.
I never found the handover notes. The team was one of about 50 in the organisation who all had similar problems. A significant proportion of people sent themselves documents simply to store them in their inbox, away from meddling clickers in a system of their own choosing. Even though the Mordac-style IT manager had set a limit of 100MB on email accounts (and set up the system to block email after the limit had been breeched).
Think about this: customers' emails weren't getting through because our own IT department was blocking email accounts in order to save space that people were using in order to escape from a filing system containing millions of unusable files. Your organisation is probably the same.
It doesn't have to be that way. I took my team 'into the Cloud' with Salesforce.com (despite Mordac's squeals of protest and a threat 'not to be held responsible when it all went terribly wrong). But this is what I wish I'd done.
How to set up a Knowledge Management and Learning resource in your organisation -
A quick, dirty, naive step-by-step guide:
1. Check your premises
Knowledge managers should lead by example when it comes to finding creative solutions to practical problems. The first step along this path is to question our premises. When we fail to do this, we pursue outdated goals and methods, thereby relegating our KM programs to an increasingly irrelevant position within the firm.It's a cliche. But you have to ask yourself what you want to achieve. Search the web and you'll find guides to looking for the perfect Learning Management System or intranet solution. But these are often clunky and bloated. And the smaller, neater solutions are limiting. The limited feature-set of something like the 37signals software apps is elegant and perfect for administrivia. I tried Backpack with the team I mentioned above and they liked it, but only as a replacement for Outlook.
Knowledge sharing does not have to equal intranet.
2. Abandon the idea of an IT budget
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy?Knowledge Management systems are no different. When I was looking into sorting out the mess in the situation above, I didn't have a budget, initially. What I was supposed to do was to negotiate with the IT Manager and 'make my case' for a piece of his budget. Which plainly wouldn't have worked as his budget was tied up maintaining rooms full of largely redundant servers.
Most rational people would say, "I'll take them all please." Especially if you had thirty days to pay for them.
So, why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?
If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working?
And if they don't work, why are you running them?
What I did was work out how much money we were losing through lost customers. And how much I though we could gain from getting new customers. If you gain more than you lose, then you're fine. (Sorry, reality is slightly more complex than this - but not much)
The number I came up with astonishing. So much so, that I took it to the Finance Director for her to check with a sheepish expression on my face. (If you don't realise why this was such an unusual thing for me to do, then I'm happy for you.)
You can afford this.
3. Forget the idea of 'ownership'
Either you all own it or nobody does.
This is the weakest point of my guide. Having a manager to 'drive adoption' is stupid. But not everybody likes their job or feels strongly about helping things get better.
4. Use off the shelf solutions. And lots of them
Tumblr is free. Posterous is free. Wordpress is free. The internet is free. Facebook is free. Twitter (or Yammer) is free. There's loads more where they came from.
These solutions are tried and tested. People know how to use them and like them. All of them are capable of serving RSS feeds too, which means you can do interesting things with the information:
You can get information out of systems in lots of different ways. RSS is amazing.
5. Blow all your money on toys
If I had my time again, I wouldn't spend my money on 'solutions'. I'd make it brain-friendly and spend it on toys. Like Flip video cameras. (Incidentally, just in case you think I'm being frivolous about 'toys', consider this. One of the terrible open secrets of the IT industry is that organisations start using something like Sharepoint because the managers need it on their CVs as it's an industry standard. You probably know an IT or Knowledge Manager - ask them if I'm exaggerating and wait for the rueful smile. How's that for a toy?)
Spend more money on input devices than anything else.
6. Turn yourself inside out
If you find information useful, the chances are your customers will too. Give them access to your Knowledge Management systems. In the example I gave above, we ended up storing half of our new files and documents on the customer website - it saved us the trouble of having to email them out all the time.
Keep your Knowledge Management systems separate from your administrivia.
7. Build for people more than data
Knowledge Management experts seem to fall into two categories: those who focus on people and those who focus on information. The latter camp will talk about taxonomies and controlled vocabulary and metadata. And this is all very useful stuff. But, given a choice on how to find out some information, most people prefer to ask.
In the story above, I told you that I deleted hundreds of thousands of files. What I didn't tell you about was the team's outrage. When I asked the IT department if we could recover some of the documents, they gave me a form to fill out. I gave it to the team - and it never got filled in. None of the data was important enough to be worth the trouble of filling out a form.
When we looked at some of the breakthroughs we'd made in our work, we discovered that many of them came from trips to the bathroom or - amazingly - by picking up lost documents from the group printer. ("What, you're working on this too?!")
Knowledge Management systems are about making your experts visible to each other. Your experts are all your staff.
Basically, I'm talking about blogging, chatting and Personal Learning Networks. It works for millions of us online, it can work at work too. How wrong am I?
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