On March 3, Neil Olonoff posted a blog entitled “KM Solutions for the Coming Federal Hiring Wave.” He also posted the blog to the actkm group listserv, saying: “I’d appreciate your opinions as to whether you consider the solutions below to be KM services. I also would love to hear your thoughts on how KM can meet the challenges posed by a rapidly expanding workforce.” I responded to his post to actkm and will repeat my reply here to give it additional distribution in the blogosphere.
Neil: “Some of the major challenges of this hiring tsunami (and by no means all of them) include:
Personnel Location: In a situation where you have many new people added to the Agency, it becomes difficult to find out “who knows what” or who is responsible for a given task. Knowledge management provides a tried and tested answer to this issue, with “organizational yellow page” systems, sometimes called “expertise locators.” These systems simplify the ability to locate the right person quickly.”
Joe: Organizational yellow page systems are a tool for finding out “who knows what,” and they can certainly help with expertise location. But to characterize them as a “solution” is too strong, since the information in them is quite incomplete. I think they need to be supplemented with various social networking and web 2.0 tools, and also with programs that connect people inter-personally. In short, the “expertise location problem” is not a sharply defined problem that can be solved with an IT tool, but a problem that may need to be solved with a combination of activities and tools and affordances comprising an ecology of expertise location.
Also, I don’t think “expertise location” is a KM service. Rather, it’s something knowledge workers do when they need help with a problem. I think the KM service corresponding to this activity is a project or program helping people to create the necessary ecology including implementing IT tools, and also helping them to learn how to use the ecology.
Neil: “Knowledge Retention: The article also mentions the large numbers of soon-to-retire Baby Boomers. Most of the tacit knowledge in Agencies is in their heads. Before they leave, it would be advisable to attempt some transfer of knowledge to younger employees.”
Joe: If the knowledge in question were really “tacit,” I don’t think it could be transferred, since as Polanyi said it is “ineffable” and “we cannot tell it.” What you’re really talking about is mental knowledge of the retirees that can be expressed in some way by humans, and I don’t think that will be expressed, or can be easily expressed by retiring employees, without reference to the problem context that the mental knowledge solves. In other words, if you want to get the soon-to-be retirees’ knowledge, they’ll have to reconstruct and catalog both the problem contexts and the solutions they’ve used in the past, and Knowledge Managers will have to implement combined social and IT interventions to facilitate people doing that. This last is a KM service. But your statement above indicating knowledge transfer as a “solution” to the problem of “knowledge retention,” is not a “solution.” It’s only what a solution would produce. I don’t have the space here to provide a “solution.” And, again, I don’t think there is “a solution,” in the sense of some typical program that will do the trick in a formulaic way, but there are multiple things one can do to arrive at a program that will ameliorate the problem, and I think that narrative techniques will have a prominent place in any specific organizational context. I don’t think, however, that the most common approach, which appears to be a version of in-depth “exit” interviewing of soon to retire personnel is worth a damn.
Neil: Knowledge-Enabling of Processes: Most new hires and personnel who transfer into new, more critical positions, will need performance support in doing their jobs. Training is the usual answer, but it takes a long time and there most likely aren’t existing courses for all of these diverse positions. When jobs consist of definable processes, it might be useful to consider process mapping, and embedding of performance support content in the process, using some fairly low cost tools which are on the market. This will enable new employees to hit the ground running.
Joe: Here, I think the KM service is implementing the performance support systems which will deliver the just-in-time knowledge to employees in the context of operational processes. However, there’s no single solution. Rather, the solution will differ with each process mapped and embedded with performance support. Mark McElroy and I have discussed a paradigmatic case of this kind of support here.
But there are many variations that will differ widely according to context. Also, training and performance support in a process context don’t exhaust the possibilities of solving the problem of knowledge-enabling processes. In particular, mentoring by operational management in problem contexts is very effective provided the organization is structured in such a way that managers don’t have too great a span of control and the organizational hierarchy is relatively flat so that there’s time for mentoring new personnel in a problem context. The KM service related to mentoring is training managers in mentoring and introducing a mentoring culture that is demand-driven by the inexperienced personnel.
In addition, where possible, teams made up of experienced and inexperienced personnel should perform processes so that knowledge based on experience can be transferred easily in the context of problems that may arise. The KM service here is in introducing the culture of deep problem solving and “swarming problems” into teams, and in facilitating team operation by implementing supporting IT tools including social computing tools. Team problem solving, however, is knowledge processing not Knowledge Management.
Neil: Knowledge Sharing and Informal Learning: It is critical that Agencies establish the proper atmosphere for rapid and efficient knowledge sharing within and across organizational boundaries. Without this capability, every task will become more difficult as employees struggle to find answers to their many questions.
Joe: It’s a KM Service to intervene to facilitate “the proper atmosphere.” However, there’s nothing in the above statement that suggests the outline of a “solution” about how to facilitate “the proper atmosphere.” Such solutions, involve multiple practices, tools, procedures, etc. and are context-driven in the sense that the way to create such as atmosphere is dependent on an organization’s starting place. Steve Cavaleri and I have talked some about how to do this here.
Neil: Transition Help Desk: It will be useful for each Agency to establish a Transition Help Desk staffed by experienced employees to support new hires with basic information.
Joe: That’s fine, but is running the help desk, KM? If so, why? If not, where does KM come into the process of setting up a help desk? The answer to these questions depends on the distinction between knowledge processing and KM.
To Be Continued