Building Your First Knowledge Management System

Building Your First Knowledge Management System - David Goldstein

A knowledge management system could improve customer satisfaction by providing your customers with better information on your products and services and keeping them in closer touch with your organization. Alternatively, a knowledge management system could make your employees more productive by providing them with easier access to mission-critical information and expertise. It could even improve collaboration within and across teams.

We have been working with organizations over the last decade to build knowledge management systems. Over the past few months, we have visited with many organizations that would like to build their first knowledge management system. The purpose of this article is to summarize the advice that we have given to IT and line managers at these organizations that are new to knowledge management.

Architect for the Big Picture and Prototype for the Quick Win

Managers who successfully implement knowledge management systems must juggle these two sometimes contradictory tasks. You need to have the long-term strategic goal in mind when you design your system. At the same time, you have to design and implement a working prototype quickly to learn how the knowledge management system works best in your company before making a significant technology investment.

You might want to follow these steps:

• Familiarize key managers in your organization with knowledge management technology by hosting a demonstration of SharePoint. Attendees should include senior managers with 揃ig Picture?vision and budget approval.
• Work with this group to define the significant business need and the strategic benefits of the knowledge management system. Typically the business need is improving operational efficiency or customer service.
• Work with a smaller group of line and technology managers to identify a working prototype that can be built in 2-4 weeks.

Here are some examples of business needs that our clients and prospects have identified:

• A professional services firm needs a database of client engagements. Senior managers want to use this database to more quickly create high quality proposals and consultants want to use the same database to jump start new engagements.
• Another professional services firm needs a system that makes it easier for team members to collaborate on project documents and then share these documents with their clients.
• A hardware vendor wants to build a knowledge management system to provide both internal teams and customers with access to the latest product and customer support information.
• An architect wants to build a knowledge management system that allows their project managers to more efficiently produce and retrieve information that it shares with its suppliers and customers.

Once the business need is identified, we recommend that you quickly build a working prototype. This will allow you to identify any weaknesses in your design and any business process changes needed to make the system a success. While building the prototype, keep your eye on the big picture梩he strategic benefit that will have a significant impact on your organization. This will insure that the prototype adds value. More important, it will increase the likelihood that the prototype can grow to meet the big picture need.

If You Build It, They Might Not Come

The main reason knowledge management systems fail is not poor technology or poor implementation. In their book Working Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 1998), Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak define the 33 1/3 rule. They state that if your organization is spending more than 1/3 its time, effort and money on technology for knowledge management, you抮e neglecting the 憇ofter?issues that might doom the project. Make sure that you consider the business process, organizational culture, and motivational changes that must accompany the introduction of the system.

Getting Started with SharePoint

If your organization has trouble keeping up with the latest technology from Microsoft and other vendors, you might not be building the systems your managers need to drive performance. Our consultants pride themselves in keeping up with the latest Microsoft technologies. We devote significant time to attending seminars, browsing the web, and reading the latest technology books. We then bring promising technologies in-house to evaluate them before recommending them to our clients.

SharePoint is a great tool to use to build your first knowledge management system. It supports document management, collaboration, and corporate portals. It has many valuable features 憃ut-of-the-box?and it is customizable by developers with knowledge of XML and SQL Server. It is also scalable. You can go from a prototype to an enterprise implementation. A SharePoint web page is made up of web parts. An administrator can build a template by adding, removing or moving out-of-the-box web parts. A developer can create new web parts.

Here is our suggested approach to getting started with your working prototype:

• Construct a 憈eam site?template for your prototype. This template could be used to store and access product information or to share project documents among team members.
• Design a portal to organize your team sites. Focus on making it easy for your users to navigate to the team sites that have the information they need.
• Get feedback on your design then customize. Adding new web parts is more costly than customizing a template. You might want to save this expense until you get some feedback from your users.

Want to Learn More?

I hope these ideas are helpful. If you抎 like to have us visit your organization, demonstrate SharePoint, and discuss your knowledge management needs, please call me or send me an e-mail message.