Success Factors in KM

From consulting experiences in KM projects at CCLFI, having many of the following factors increases the likelihood of success and sustainability of a KM initiative:

1. Executive sponsorship: The top boss or top bosses understand, appreciate and show visible personal support of the KM initiative.
2. Internal KM champion: There is at least one upper-level manager or executive who is pushing for KM within the organization.
3. Cross-functional KM team: A group of middle to upper-level managers from different functional units is formally designated as the “KM Team”. The initial activities of the KM Team are: study KM further, formulate an organization-wide KM strategy and program or select and plan a more limited KM project, and promote KM across the organization.
4. Concrete benefits from a KM project: An “early win” or “low-lying fruit” yields measurable or visible results of KM (that can help convince some “fence sitters” and doubters) such as higher productivity, faster learning curve, less mistakes, faster work cycles, higher quality of output, etc.
5. Budgetary commitment: Once there is a KM program or project plan, top executives commit budgetary resources for it.
6. Communication: There is a continuing mechanism whereby KM — what it is and what its benefits are — is communicated across the organization.
7. Incentive system: Desirable KM behaviors are identified and acknowledged and/or rewarded, such as through an award, inclusion in the periodic performance evaluation system, conferring of special roles with honorific titles, etc.

Tables 1-3 is a summary of characteristics of 21 civil society or government organizations which CCLFI provided assistance in KM funded mostly by multilateral or bilateral development donor agencies or by the organizations themselves. The organizations are designated by code letters.

Initiation of KM

KM in the 21 organizations were mostly self-initiated (16 cases in Column 3 of Table 1), or else driven by the donor institution (three cases) or by headquarters (two cases). We observe that the motivation for seeking KM stems from the initial belief on the part of executives of the organizations that KM will somehow assist them achieve organizational objectives. CCLFI believes that KM should be demand-driven. CCLFI proposes or negotiates project design in such a way that the KM initiative (a) explicitly responds to a need or problem felt by the executives; or (b) processes are in place to align the KM to enhancement of performance and other organizational goals.

Part of the CCLFI engagement procedure is to look for executive sponsorship and/or presence of an internal KM champion at the upper management level in a potential partner organization. These are indicators of what CCLFI principals call ‘organizational energy’ for KM. CCLFI often recommends organizing and training an internal KM team to enable it to formulate the KM/OL strategy and programme for their organization. In-house formulation of the KM/OL programme provides better assurance of contextualisation, acceptability and shared ownership than a consultant-driven formulation. Interventions are based on the principle of mentoring the internal KM team as its members learn KM by doing KM. This engagement style stems from our belief that sustainability is more likely if in-house champions are nurtured and they develop a sense of ownership over the initiative thereby widening and enhancing organizational energy for KM. KM alone is about how to do a job well, but our KM experiences keep confirming the distinction between ‘knowing-how’ and ‘willing-to’ or ‘wanting-to’.

Table 1

In 10 of sixteen cases where there is an internal KM champion, there is also accompanying internal funding but there is no case where there was internal funding but no internal KM champion. It seems that having an internal KM champion leads to an organization’s decision to commit funds for KM in its budget, instead of the other way around.

Characteristics of KM initiatives

From Table 2, the scopes of KM/OL cases are evenly mixed between organization-wide (or network-wide) KM, and KM over a limited scope of one or a few selected business or work processes. The most common aims of the KM initiative are productivity (or efficiency) and knowledge sharing (internal). A few initiatives aim to better provide information to their partners or network members, as well as facilitate sharing of knowledge among them (external). Project-based organizations are interested in cross-project learning and knowledge transfer. Two organizations aimed to become a learning organization as part of their organizational vision.

Table 2

CCLFI learned the following lessons and insights from the scoping, design and implementation of these cases:

• Most organizations start having an initial idea of what they want in terms of scope and objectives of KM/OL. They rely on the consultant to advise them on the best way (methodologies, approaches and tools) to get there. They have a fair understanding of KM/OL concepts, and a belief that KM/OL is beneficial. This belief needs to be reinforced by concrete examples and metrics showing how KM is linked to individual employee performance and to value creation by the organization.
• A good way to select the KM approach or tools appropriate to an organization is a KM assessment. Many managers prefer simple and short assessment tools.
• Among the first tasks is developing among employees a common KM/OL language. This is not always easy, because KM is still a growing discipline and full consensus on meanings of KM/OL terms does not obtain among the global community of KM practitioners. Part of this task is clarifying the relationship between KM and the related disciplines of human resource management, information management and quality management. Among the concepts that usually need to be clearly distinguished for new KM/OL practitioners are: knowledge versus information; KM versus information management; tacit versus explicit knowledge; tangible versus intangible assets; human versus structural versus relationship capital; single-loop learning versus double-loop learning; and KM versus organizational learning. Most KM officers/units are under the information management department or organised from its staff. The distinction between KM and information management must therefore be clearly pointed out in these cases.
• Commitment of internal funds and designation of a KM officer or KM focal point appear to be good indicators that the organization intends to sustain their KM initiative.
• The common tendency is to view KM as ‘extra work’ or to believe that ‘the choice is between KM and their regular duties.’ The challenge is how to seamlessly integrate KM into the staff’s daily activities and to demonstrate to employees that good KM would sooner or later help them do their job better. Performance metrics help demonstrate this linkage.

Outcomes

Various behavioural changes from the KM initiatives are clearly observable but they seem to happen more slowly than was originally planned or anticipated (Table 3). Unexpected developments during KM implementation are related to changes in factors that affect motivation or incentives for KM:

• Change in top leadership: replacement, death
• Internal KM champion resigned or re-assigned elsewhere
• Technical and legal problems
• Increase, decrease or unavailability of next funding
• New support or withdrawal of support from headquarters or external stakeholder.

Consequently the lesson learned here is that KM must be accompanied by risk management to anticipate, assess, minimise or prepare for risks and moderate their impacts in case they occur.

Donor-partner (or donor-grantee) cultural gaps were found to be minimal. In many instances (10 of 21 cases), staff of the donor institution are all or predominantly Filipino. In 9 of 21 cases, the head or the programme officer of the Philippine office of the donor institution is a Filipina. Only in four of the cases were the staff members of the donor institution multicultural.

Internal and external knowledge sharing of project-generated knowledge is generally observed to be good (see last column in Table 3). Small donor-partner cultural gaps contributed to good external knowledge sharing. More interesting are the reasons behind the fewer cases where external knowledge sharing was poor: one case with infrequent donor-partner communications, hierarchical donor-partner relationship in two cases, death of the KM champion in one case, and gaps in the donor-executor contractual arrangements. On the latter case, the bilateral funding agency had difficulties in encouraging cross-project sharing because the projects were handled by executing agencies who were basically competitors (they bid against each other for the projects).

Table 3