Above and Beyond KM

Even the best knowledge manager in the world has at least one project that flamed out spectacularly. But how many knowledge managers have conducted an autopsy to find the cause of death?

By autopsy, I don’t mean simply keeping a list of user complaints. What I have in mind is actually cutting the project open, digging around its inner organs and comparing them to the inner organs of a healthy, functioning KM project. (Sorry for the mixed metaphors.)

So what might a KM autopsy involve? A thorough examination along the following lines:

1. Did the project end up as you expected? If not, check your premises. Did you start with the wrong assumptions? Or were correct assumptions translated into the wrong objectives?

2. If you had the right objectives, did you bungle the execution? Where did you go wrong?

3. If you built it in conformity with sensible specifications, was there a problem with the roll-out?

4. Did your project require significant user training?

5. Did you provide all the necessary support for change management?

6. Is the rate of user adoption appropriate given the investment in the project?

Once you’ve completed this examination, you should have a clearer picture of the cause (or causes) of death. In medicine, the pathologist can stop right there unless the death in question is a criminal matter. In knowledge management, the death of a project is a criminal matter. So you have to push the analysis further — not to identify the culprit, but rather to understand what needs to happen differently next time to avoid another dead project. In KM, some of the most valuable knowledge we have to manage is the knowledge we gain about our own processes. That’s why we need to conduct KM autopsies.

What are people searching for and where are they looking? That’s the question asked and answered in a thought-provoking article in the March 2008 issue of KMWorld. While working with an admittedly small sample, the survey yielded some interesting findings:

- 62% of respondents said that they first search the Internet before searching more specialized resources such as their own company’s website or intranet
– while 13% of the time the respondents said they were searching for information about their own companies, they began their search on their company intranet only 2% of the time
- respondents tended to ask their colleagues for help before they tried their company intranet
- business users spend a lot of time searching for information at work (approximately 9.5 hours per week)
- knowledge workers tend to search using general indices like Google and Yahoo rather than specialized web sites or search engines

The picture that emerges is troubling:

- companies aren’t doing a good job of making their intranets the first choice for company information
- despite the hours spent searching, many knowledge workers are not searching efficiently
- knowledge workers don’t seem to understand the inherent weakness of general web search engines like Google and Yahoo when it comes to finding specialized, high-value content
- searchers tend not to use content aggregators, specialized vertical search sites or topical sites to find data

For knowledge management, these findings pose some real challenges. In many companies, it’s the knowledge management group that’s responsible for the intranet. The findings of this survey are a real indictment of the job we’re doing. So what must we do differently to make our intranets the first choice research resource for our colleagues? It might be worth asking them.

And while we’re talking with them, we should investigate why it is they are using sub-optimal search methods. Is it a lack of awareness about how search engines like Google and Yahoo work? Do they simply not understand that high-value content can get buried in the Web, but will tend to be more visible on specialized web sites? According to the author of this article, people in the online industry know that “the `good stuff’ gets hidden if it is thrown into the larger web grab bag. And very often, it isn’t even in the grab bag because it isn’t indexed.” Clearly the average knowledge worker doesn’t know this or they wouldn’t be using the grab bag search engine.

Despite this (or perhaps because of this), the author notes that there are some signs of progress in the growing recognition of the value of finding high-quality information rather than merely relevant information. As a result, there is renewed interest in recommendation engines, contextual search and vertical search sites. These are “tools that will tell [knowledge workers] what they need to pay attention to in the pile” of information they face. In this age of overload, this sounds like a step in the right direction.