The KM Cookbook

Stories and strategies for organisations exploring Knowledge Management Standard ISO30401

Chris J. Collison, Paul J. Corney, Patricia Lee Eng

• Publisher: Facet Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781783304349
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Knowledge Capital
• Index: Business

The KM Cookbook serves up a menu of success stories and strategies for organizations wanting to know more about Knowledge Management Standard ISO30401 – whether they intend to pursue certification, or simply seek to use it as a framework to review their existing programme and strategy.

The arrival of an internationally agreed standard and vocabulary, imbues fresh professional credibility to the field of Knowledge Management. Moving it on from a street food market of disparate approaches, it provides knowledge managers with a brand-new kitchen, and a moment during which they can pause and consider the service that they provide to their organisations.

The KM Cookbook uses the metaphor of the restaurant, its cuisine, owner, chef, staff, ingredients, menu-planners, customers – and a restaurant critic, to serve up ISO 30401 on a plate for the readers.

The second half of the book illustrates aspects of the standard by exploring sixteen different examples of KM in practice around the world, through the reflections of their own 'KM chefs'. Case studies include: General Electric, World Bank, USAID, Schlumberger, PROCERGS, Médecins Sans Frontières, Transport for London, International Olympic Committee, TechnipFMC, Linklaters, Syngenta, Defence Science & Technology Laboratory, Financial Conduct Authority, Petroleum Development Oman, Saudi Aramco and MAPNA.

This book will be invaluable for CKOs, CIOs, CEOs and knowledge and information managers seeking to gain professional recognition for their function and to review their approach within a new framework.

Part I

A new way to cook?

1

A new kitchen

We love cooking. Especially other people’s cooking!

Food is such a versatile and varied commodity. For some, eating is a functional activity; energy-in-energy-out. For others, it’s an experience to be savoured: full of subtlety and flavour. Eating can be a solitary experience, or a social expression of community and family.

Eating out can be a reassuringly consistent visit to a favourite restaurant chain, where you know precisely what you want, and you know that it will be delivered exactly as you like it. Alternatively, it can be an adventure, perusing an array of street-food vendors in search of new and distinctive tastes.

Food fads, movements and cuisines

Food movements have been with us for years, evolving from a focus on ‘convenience’ (satisfying hunger between time commitments), to ‘diversity’ (satisfying a curiosity for new, global flavours), to ‘sustainable and environmental’ (satisfying a desire for ethical and social responsibility).

Examples of this include organic food, and the Slow Food Movement, created as a protest against fast food and to promote locally grown, sustainable food.

As consumers share their experiences over time and begin to vote with their feet and wallets, some food movements give rise to recognised cuisines, served in many countries around the world — Turkish, Italian, Chinese and Indian cuisines serve as examples.

Management fads, movements and disciplines

Knowledge Management isn’t a new movement. In one flavour or another, it has existed as a management discipline for 25 years as a set of business improvement tools and approaches. As a discipline, it has always been a bit ‘fluid’ — encompassing everything from building people-networks, ensuring that organisations learn lessons and reuse good practices, dealing with the issues of retiring experts ‘walking out of the door with their knowledge’, and developing and implementing processes and technologies to help groups connect, collaborate, curate and navigate.

Much has been written, presented, and tried by tens of thousands of practitioners, including in-company specialists, hybrid HR, OD and IT professionals and external consultants. KM has often been accused of being ‘just another management fad’, yet whilst other methodologies have come of age, defined boundaries, declared methodologies and developed franchises — Knowledge Management (KM) has never had an agreed set of tools, a commercial accreditation, or a standard. Attending a KM conference can be a bit like visiting an international street-food market.

So, is KM ready to move from being a ‘movement’ to establishing itself as the equivalent of a ‘recognised cuisine’?

For a potential restaurateur who has moved beyond casual street-food and is looking to sell an experience to customers, the challenge — and the opportunity — is to provide a distinctive offering with consistency and professionalism. Here, success requires a number of elements: credible reputation, premises, staff, tasty and appealing menus and recipes, compliance with relevant food hygiene standards, and, of course, blood, sweat and tears. At the heart of it all, with its appliances, utensils, and food stocks, is the restaurant kitchen.

In many ways, the arrival of an internationally agreed standard and vocabulary provides knowledge managers with a brand-new kitchen, and an opportunity to pause for a moment and consider what they provide to the organisations.

In writing this book, we want to catch the excitement of the arrival of this ‘new kitchen’ and demonstrate how the arrival of the ISO Knowledge Management System Standard (ISO 30401) provides so much more than an opportunity to certify a KM programme.

It provides a moment to re-evaluate, to return to first principles, and to learn from others. Imagine you had the opportunity, not just to enjoy a new, well-equipped and fully inspected kitchen, but also the chance to sit down with KM ‘chefs’ from around the world, across different industry sectors and listen to their stories. That’s exactly what we have set out to do with The KM Cookbook.

Draw up a chair — we hope you’re hungry!

Exploring the kitchen metaphor for a KM programme

Every profession and industry has its own ideals, its own processes, and its own jargon. ISO audits and KM programmes are no exception. To explore how an ISO standard and the accompanying audits function, we have expanded the restaurant metaphor to explain how ISO 30401 would be used to audit a KM programme and determine its effectiveness.

There are many different ways to deliver the same cuisine. Some restaurants are fancy, some are casual, some are mobile — but all of them buy raw ingredients which they prepare for a variety of dishes. Chefs in all restaurants use a variety of tools to prepare the food; knives, chopping boards, whisks, pots and pans, and griddles. Different cultures use different utensils — hence the saucepan, wok and tagine shown on the cover of this book — but all strive to produce the best food they can and hope for rave reviews by their patrons. Using the restaurant analogy, let’s deconstruct a KM programme.

The raw ingredients for a KM programme represent the knowledge, insights, ideas, expertise and experience which we seek to combine and present in the best way to satisfy (and occasionally educate) a customer’s appetite.

The cooking tools and utensils are the selection of techniques and approaches in use; for example: communities of practice, expertise locators, artificial intelligence, knowledge packages and assets, archives, the recognition and reward system, and any other initiatives and processes used by the organisation to accomplish the goals and objectives of the KM programme.

Skilled staff are key to the success of a restaurant. A talented and experienced chef knows how to best use their tools to prepare the raw ingredients into something delicious, nutritious and appealing; skilled and experience wait staff know how best to serve and present the food as well as how to charm the customers. Similarly, skilled KM staff can use their skills to design and implement tactics to produce a vibrant and effective KM programme and also to engage, coach and encourage staff to participate in KM-related activities.

Just as chefs and kitchen staff need to develop and hone specific culinary skills, so KM programme staff should be ready to investigate, navigate, negotiate, facilitate, collaborate, communicate, curate and celebrate. Each of these skills are useful in creating, developing and managing an effective KM programme. We refer to these skills in Chapter 4, and a detailed discussion of these eight ‘ates’ and their contributions to a successful KM programme can be found in Paul and Patricia’s book Navigating the Minefield (2017).

If KM programmes are our ‘restaurants’, then the ISO Standard 30401 could be likened to the evaluation factors used to rate restaurants. Where TripAdvisor offers the rating categories of food, service, value and atmosphere, readers also consider the quality, quantity and currency of reviews to judge the merits of a given restaurant. The ISO standard was written by an international committee and provides evaluation guidance in the areas of organisational context, leadership, planning, support, operations, performance evaluation, and improvement.

Continuing the analogy, the ISO auditor may be likened to a restaurant critic, in that they assess each programme against consistent, defined rating criteria. The good news is that in this case, the rating criteria are published and readily available.

Standards for knowledge? How does that work?

As experienced practitioners, all three of us had a similar instinctive reaction when we encountered the idea of a KM standard. Patricia expresses it well:

When I first heard that ISO was going to issue a KM standard, I couldn’t believe it! How could anyone standardise KM? As a quality inspector for the US government for almost 30 years, I have written national and international standards and applied them to real-life situations. Having created the KM programme for the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (USNRC), I knew how complicated a KM programme could be and how it was specifically designed for our organisation and our specific culture.

People get nervous and defensive when a new program is proposed which takes resources from other existing programs. KM was such a program. So, I decided to do some research about ISO, its standards and ISO audits. Although I have decades of inspection and audit experience with the US government, I took the ISO Quality Lead Auditor Class to learn about the ISO philosophy and its basic tenets, and to find out what ISO auditors focus on when doing an audit. I got all that and more. I also learned what auditors could and could not do. After passing the Lead Auditor exam, I took another look at the ISO KM standard. I now saw value in the standard. Working with Chris and Paul on this book has given us the chance to help dispel some of the misconceptions, and to help others to see the opportunity it presents.

Just as a restaurant menu is designed based on the premise of the restaurant and the preferences of its customers, KM programmes must be designed for the organisations in which they operate. Each organisation has its own unique context, culture, mission and structure. What works in one organisation can’t be blindly copied and pasted into another organisation — just as you probably won’t find spaghetti in an Ethiopian restaurant!

Given that a KM programme is uniquely designed for each organisation, why then should anyone consider adopting a KM standard?

Most KM professionals and enthusiasts attend conferences to hear about other KM programmes, hoping to come away with a new approach or initiative to bolster or improve their programmes — a ‘secret sauce’ perhaps? Sometimes they learn a technique that worked well elsewhere which they decide to adapt for their own organisation, and sometimes they learn what to avoid. Either way, they usually return to their organisations determined to renew, experiment and reinvigorate their efforts.

In the restaurant business, there are obvious commonalities between successful businesses: well-conceived and well-prepared food, congenial and attentive staff, a pleasant ambience.

In the less obvious and more nuanced world of Knowledge Management it’s harder to derive patterns or examples for such questions as:

‘What makes a successful KM programme so successful?’

‘Is there an underlying basis for these successful programmes?’

‘What should each person newly assigned to work in KM know?’

These are the precisely the questions that the ISO KM Committee has tried to answer and document in the ISO Standard 30401.

An overv...