Say what you like, but knowledge management (KM) still remains a kind of outlandish animal among IT specialists: It seems to be clear that knowledge is power (s), but usually this means some personal knowledge, own experience, trainings, pumped skills. They rarely think about corporate knowledge management systems, sluggishly, and, basically, do not understand what value the knowledge of a particular developer can carry on a company-wide scale. There are exceptions, of course. And the same Alexei Sidorin from CROC recently gave an excellent . However, these are still isolated occurrences.
So on Habré there is still no hub dedicated to knowledge management, so I am writing my post in the conference hub. It is quite reasonable, if anything, because on April 26, thanks to the initiative of the Oleg Bunin Conferences, the first Russian conference on knowledge management in IT was held - .
I was lucky to work in the Program Committee of the conference, to see and hear a lot of things that to some extent turned my cozy world of a knowledge management manager upside down, and to understand that IT has already matured to knowledge management. It remains to understand from which side to approach it.
By the way, on April 10 and 17-19, two more conferences on knowledge management were held: и where I had the opportunity to act as an expert. These conferences did not have a bias in IT, but I have something to compare with. In my first post, I want to talk about the thoughts that I, a knowledge management specialist, prompted participation in these conferences. You can consider this as advice for future speakers, and for those involved in knowledge management by occupation.
We had 83 reports, 24 slots and 12 days to make decisions
83, Carl. This . Despite the fact that this is the first conference, and few people are involved in centralized knowledge management in IT, the interest in the topic turned out to be great. The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that by the deadline for submitting applications, 13 slots out of 24 were already occupied, and the speakers probably believed that with the deadline, all the fun was just beginning, so in the last couple of days, almost half of the applications were poured into us. Of course, 12 days before the finalization of the program, it was unrealistic to work with each potential speaker in a quality manner, therefore, there is a possibility that some interesting reports were left out due to uninteresting abstracts. Nevertheless, I think that the program included strong, deep and, most importantly, applied reports with a lot of details and practices.
Still, I would like to draw certain conclusions from the analysis of all submitted applications. Perhaps they will be useful to some of the readers, they will give a new understanding of knowledge management. Everything that I will write next is pure IMHO, based on six years of experience in building a knowledge management system at Kaspersky Lab and communicating with professionals in the field of KM.
What is knowledge?
At the youth conference, each speaker, whether it be a methodologist, a university professor or a speaker who is directly responsible for knowledge management in his company, began with the question “What is the knowledge that we are going to manage?”
Needless to say, this is an important question. As the practice of working in the KnowledgeConf 2019 PC has shown, many in the IT field believe that knowledge = documentation. Therefore, one often hears the question: “We document the code anyway. Why do we need another knowledge management system? Isn't the documentation enough?
No, not enough. Of all the definitions that the speakers gave to knowledge, the definition of Evgeny Viktorov from Gazpromneft is closest to me: “knowledge is the experience gained by a specific person in solving a specific problem.” Please note, no documentation. A document is information, data. They can be used to solve a specific problem, but knowledge is experience in applying this data, not the data itself. As with postage stamps: you can buy the most expensive stamp at the post office, but it acquires value for a collector only after it has been stamped with a dispatch stamp. You can try to reveal even more: documentation = “what is written in the code”, and knowledge = “why it is written exactly the way this decision was made, what purpose it solves”.
I must say that initially and among the members of the PC there was no consensus about documentation and knowledge. I attribute this fact to the fact that people from various fields of activity really crept into the PC, and everyone was involved in knowledge management from different sides. But in the end, we came to a common denominator. But explaining to the speakers why their report on code documentation is not suitable for this conference was, at times, a difficult task.
Training vs. Knowledge Management
Also an interesting aspect. Especially in recent days, we have received a lot of reports about learning. About how to teach soft skills, hard skills, coaching, etc. Yes, of course, learning is about knowledge. But what? If we are talking about external coaching or “as is” trainings, is this included in the concept of corporate knowledge management? We take expertise from outside and apply it where it hurts. Yes, specific people gained new experience (=knowledge), but nothing happened on the company scale.
Now, if after completing the training, an employee came to the office and held a similar master class for colleagues (rummaged through knowledge) or transferred his impressions and key ideas that he had learned to some kind of conditional internal knowledge base - this is already knowledge management. That's just about this bunch usually do not think (or do not say).
If we take personal experience, it is customary in our department after the conference to describe impressions, keynotes, ideas, list recommended books, etc. in a special section of the internal portal. This is the case when there is no opposition between concepts. Knowledge management, in this case, is a natural extension of external learning.
Now, if colleagues who submitted reports about coaching would tell, for example, about how they share practices in their coaching community and what results it brings, it would certainly be about CM.
Or take the other side. There were also reports on how the company created a knowledge base. Dot. Finished thought.
But why did they create it? The collected knowledge should work? Outside the IT community, which is still more applied and practical, I often come across the story that the executors of a knowledge management project believe that it is enough to purchase software, fill it with materials, and everyone will go there to use it if necessary. And then they are surprised that somehow the KM does not take off. There were also such speakers.
In my opinion, we accumulate knowledge so that on its basis someone can learn something and not make any mistakes. Internal learning is a natural extension of the knowledge management system. Take the same onboarding or mentoring in teams: after all, mentors share inside information so that the employee quickly joins the team and processes. And if we have an internal knowledge base, where does all this information lie? Isn't this a reason to offload the mentor and speed up onboarding? Moreover, knowledge will be available 24/7, and not when the team leader has time. And if the company comes to this idea, the opposition between the terms can also be removed.
In my practice, I do exactly this: I accumulate knowledge, and then, on the basis of the collected materials, I make training courses of varying degrees of detail for colleagues from different departments. And if you add some other module to the knowledge management system for creating tests to control the awareness and skills of employees, then in general you get an ideal picture of that same corporate knowledge sharing: some shared information, others processed it, packaged it and shared it for target groups, and then they checked the assimilation of materials.
Marketing vs. Practice
The moment is also interesting. Often, if a designated employee (HR, L&D) is engaged in knowledge management, then his big task is to sell the idea of KM to company employees, to create value. Everyone has to sell an idea. But if knowledge management is carried out by a person who solves his personal pain with this tool, and does not perform the task of leadership, then he usually keeps the focus on the applied aspects of the project. And an employee from personnel development often experiences a certain professional deformation: he sees how to sell it, but does not quite understand why it is arranged that way. And a report is submitted to the conference, which is a half-hour purely marketing presentation, about what goodies the system brings, and does not contain a word about how it works. But this is exactly what is most interesting and important! How is it arranged? Why exactly? What incarnations did she go through, and what didn’t suit her in past realizations?
If you create a beautiful wrapper for the product, then it can be provided with users for a short time. But interest will quickly fade. If the executor of a knowledge management project does not understand its “meat”, thinks in numbers and metrics, and not in the real problems of the target audience, then the decline will come very quickly.
Coming to the conference with such a report, similar to a brochure, you need to understand that it will not be interesting "outside" your company. The people who came to listen to you have already bought the idea (they actually paid a lot of money to participate!). They do not need to be convinced that in principle they need to engage in KM. They need to be told how to and how not to do it, and why. This is not your top management, your bonus does not depend on the audience in the hall.
And yet, these are also two parts of one project, and without good promotion within the company, even the coolest content will remain yet another one Sharepoint. And if you tell How you sell the idea of KM to colleagues, what chips come in and which do not, and why, then the story will be very, very valuable.
But another extreme is also possible: we made the coolest base, used such advanced practices, but for some reason the employees did not go there. Therefore, we were disappointed in the idea and stopped doing it. We also had such applications. Why were the staff not supportive? Perhaps they really didn’t need this information (this is the problem of studying the target audience, you need to write a separate post about it). Or maybe they just didn't communicate well? And how did they do it? A knowledge management manager is also a good PR person. And if he knows how to strike a balance between promotion and the usefulness of the content, then he has a great chance of success. You can't talk about one while forgetting about the other.
Numbers
And finally, about the numbers. In the memo of the speaker of one of the conferences (not KnowledgeConf!) I read that the audience loves exclusive information - numbers. But why? Before that conference, I thought for a long time about how my numbers could be useful to the audience? How will it help my colleagues that I managed to improve some indicator of employee productivity by N% through knowledge management? What will my listeners do differently tomorrow if they know my numbers? I came up with just one argument: “I liked one of your practices, I want to implement it myself, but I need to sell the idea to the manager. Tomorrow I will tell him that in company X she led to such an increase in indicators that he “bought” this idea”. But not all of my performance metrics apply to any other business. Maybe you can offer some more arguments in favor of the figures in the reports? But in my opinion, spending 10 minutes of a report out of 30 on numbers, when you could spend them on practical examples or even a small workshop with the audience, IMHO, is a so-so idea.
And we were also given reports full of figures. After the first discussion, we asked the speakers to talk about the practices that led to such results. For those of them who, in the end, went to the final program, the reports differed from the original version almost completely. As a result, we have already heard a lot of feedback on the huge practical base that the conference provided. And no one has yet said that “how interesting it was to find out how much company X saved through knowledge management.”
Concluding this longread, I want to rejoice once again that the IT world has realized the importance of knowledge management for itself and, I hope, will begin to actively implement it, optimize it and customize it for itself in the near future. And on Habré there will be a separate hub dedicated to knowledge management, and all our speakers will share knowledge with colleagues there. In the meantime, you can rummage through practices in instant messengers, Facebook and other available means of communication. All only useful reports and successful performances!
Source: habr.com