Good KM leaders always want their programs to be better. Even if KM is delivering phenomenal results, they seek out opportunities to hone the strategy, become more efficient, improve the user experience, or boost the value delivered back to the business.
The drive for continuous improvement is a hallmark of APQC’s 2021 Excellence in Knowledge Management recipients. The six recognized organizations—which we identify based on analysis from our KM Capability Assessment Tool—are always looking for ways to up their game. Below are four tips to improve your own KM effort, based on these fantastic role models.
Tip 1: Align KM to Business Priorities
A common thread across our Excellence in KM recipients is a clear link between knowledge and business strategy. These KM leaders understand what the business cares about and how KM can help the organization realize its long-term vision.
Mercer is a great example of this. It is in the thick of a five-year business strategy enabled by three pillars: culture, transformation, and digitalization. Lisa Weber, Mercer’s KM leader, recognized that these pillars are also foundational to knowledge management.That made it easy to align KM to broader strategic priorities.
For example, Mercer’s KM team has embraced digital transformation to make content more quickly and easily available, developed sophisticated content analytics to inform business decision making, and relaunched its knowledge champions network to build a more knowledge-driven culture.
Learn more in this short video: KM Enablement to Support Business Strategy at Mercer
At the Dubai Municipality, KM and business alignment looks a bit different. The organization’s strategic objectives focus on innovation—for example, to be a creative and pioneering municipality and to drive environmental sustainability. Given this emphasis, Dubai integrated knowledge and innovation management into a single program. Knowledge and innovation specialist Soha Farouk Radwan says that this helps the organization create new knowledge and tap into the collective wisdom to innovate its programs, services, and operating models.
Learn more in this short video: Dubai Municipality’s Knowledge and Innovation Management System
Tip 2: Automate What You Can
Another theme we see across Excellence in KM recipients is a drive to streamline KM processes and minimize “busy work.” This allows KM staff to focus on more strategic tasks while making it easier for end users to contribute and interact with knowledge.
Prudential Financial is a great role model for KM programs looking to optimize and automate their internal processes. Prudential recently migrated more than 300,000 knowledge articles to a new central repository built on SharePoint Online. It established clear roles and responsibilities for content, including owners, approvers, and required review cycles. As part of this effort, it created automated workflows to notify owners and approvers when they need to take action. KM Director Allison Wilkins says the workflows make content review easier for stakeholders, since they just respond to the email reminders they receive. They also provide an audit trail for KM to ensure content remains accurate and up to date.
Learn more in this short video: Automated Content Workflows at Prudential Financial
Tip 3: Assess Strengths, Gaps, and Needs
All Excellence in KM recipients use benchmarking to evaluate their KM capabilities and programs. Diagnostics like APQC’s KM Capability Assessment Tool on which the recognition is based help these KM teams understand where they excel, where they could do better, and what their next steps should be.
Teach for America has taken the drive to assess KM a step further. According to Shannon Steffes, senior managing director for org-wide KM, most local groups in Teach for America understand the value of good KM, but don’t always know where they stand or how to improve. To solve this problem, the central KM team created a diagnostic that groups can use to evaluate their KM capabilities.
The diagnostic helps the KM team monitor and measure KM adoption in different corners of the organization. By illuminating needs and gaps, it helps the KM team connect groups to the tools, templates, and approaches most likely to help them. This, in turn, allows Teach for America to scale KM without adding centralized resources.
Learn more in this short video: Teach for America’s Local KM Diagnostic
Tip 4: Don’t Ignore Engagement Fundamentals
Even with slick strategies and technology, Excellence in KM recipients don’t lose sight of KM fundamentals. For many, this includes continued support for “classic” KM approaches like communities of practice. Communities have withstood the test of time for a reason: they connect people across siloes; support professional development; and ensure new ideas, good practices, and lessons learned flow to those who need them most.
Recipients focus communities on critical business needs. For example, the Saudi Aramco Project Management Office (PMO) has a community to support its project management approach. As Knowledge Officer Ammar Alomair explains, all PMO employees are members of this community, where they get immediate access to new project knowledge, innovations, lessons learned, and Q&A with experts.
Learn more in this short video: A Community of Practice to Support Project KM at Saudi Aramco
Excellence in KM recipients also actively promote and foster participation in communities to ensure they don’t fizzle out. PTT Exploration and Production Company Limited (PTTEP) is a great example of this. It keeps community members engaged through:
- online repositories and discussions with email and social notifications,
- regular meetings and workshops,
- 15-minute “morning talks” where members can ask for help on problems,
- an annual KM week event with speakers and adjudicated poster sessions,
- annual awards, and
- fun networking events.
Benjamaporn Boonsiriya, senior officer of technology and knowledge management at PTTEP, says that the diversity and steady flow of activities helps keep communities front and center.
Learn more in this short video: How PTTEP Cultivates Communities of Practice