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Innovation is at the heart of any organization. All organizations strive towards:

• creating products and services for improved customer experiences.
• overcoming complex business problems using innovative processes and business models for increased impact and revenue.

In this era of digital disruptions and uncertainties, innovation is the key to create a competitive advantage and “design-thinking” is one of the most innovative tools to achieve Innovation and streamline organization knowledge.

So how does design thinking align with KM?

Knowledge Management helps organizations retain their experiences and knowledge to innovate, improve efficiency and productivity. However, many a times true KM transformation remains a struggle for many organizations when it is not seamlessly integrated with employees needs and challenges.  KM framework cannot be a success if it is too technology driven, people find it as an extra task, and they do not want to change especially when they do not see any direct benefit out of it.

Knowledge management should not be an abstract concept but should focus on solving concrete issues of employees by providing them seamless access to relevant information round the clock. Design thinking can be the key to meet employee needs and encourage the knowledge sharing culture.

Below are my thoughts on how design thinking can be a lifesaver and help organizations establish a successful knowledge management framework and enable it to thrive.

• Design thinking inspires innovation by putting end-users at center of the real challenges to be solved.
• Embracing collaboration by breaking silo culture and bring people together to come up with innovative ideas for increased business value and feedback for evolving KM framework.
• Empowering the end-users by putting into perspective their needs and creating solutions centered around their problems.
• Design thinking follows a progressive approach with room and tolerance for failure, making KM an iterative process for designing more appropriate solutions that are aligned to the needs of end-user.
• Focus on solution: Design thinking is the way to ideate on a solution to address a problem. It is focused on solutions coming from end-users rather than problems. It makes the solutions directly relevant to end users ensuring its absorption and adaptability.  

Follows a bottom-up approach for problem solving factoring 360-degree input from stakeholders from management to the end-user employee.

By following a design thinking centered approach while tailoring KM solutions, organizations can foster innovation, and develop KM solutions that are end-user centric resulting in improved work-experiences and innovative empowerment for improved business results.

Stay tuned for my next article on step-by-step approach on incorporating design thinking in your KM framework.

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Knowledge Management (KM) is fundamental to the effectiveness and success of every organization. A strategic roadmap to maturing an organization’s KM capabilities is what sets apart organizations that leverage their collective knowledge from their competitors who don’t have a handle on it at all. That is especially the case for organizations that are in the business of offering their knowledge to their clients, such as:

• Professional services firms that provide executive and management consulting based on the expertise and experience of their consultants and subject matter experts;
• Financial advisors who recommend the optimal set of investment strategies and tools to increase their client’s portfolio value;
• Legal advisors who need reliable access to laws, regulations, and related matters in order to apply them to their client’s unique situations or mitigate risk for their own organization; and
• Retail companies that have to guide buying decisions for their already informed customers who have direct access to all of their product information online.

Most organizations see the value of KM, but struggle with determining where to start and how to show progress quickly, continuously, and impactfully. In this blog, I’ll share the elements of an Agile KM Roadmap that will allow your organization to take an agile approach to implementing your knowledge management strategy. 

Workstreams, Tasks, and Milestones

The building blocks of an Agile KM Strategy Roadmap are workstreams, tasks, and milestones that are based on a current state analysis and target state definition.

Workstreams

Workstreams are independent, yet interrelated, KM efforts that add value on their own but ultimately create a more holistic solution when combined with other workstreams. 

The classic examples would be taxonomy design and governance, content strategy, and search design and implementation. Each of those workstreams alone will help an organization standardize the way it manages its knowledge and information while improving content findability. The outputs of these efforts can be combined into a web portal that indexes multiple repositories of good, quality content, resulting in optimal access to that content regardless of where it is stored.

Tasks

Tasks are the discrete steps towards producing the deliverables in each workstream. They are defined not only by the activities involved, but also the appropriate methodology for ensuring that the task is completed based on best practices.

Whenever EK designs a taxonomy, one of the critical sets of tasks is Top-Down Analysis, which involves conducting interviews, focus groups, and workshops with stakeholders and subject matter experts to identify primary, also known as “core,” and secondary metadata fields and values that should be included in the enterprise taxonomy design.

Milestones

Milestones mark the delivery date of a deliverable that adds value to the overall effort. This is important because all tasks within a workstream need to be purposeful, leading towards something that can be used. This may seem intuitive, but often times KM practitioners go through many efforts of producing something of value to the organization without ever delivering something that can be used to guide decision making or begin implementing. 

Examples related to taxonomy include the delivery of a report that summarizes all of the top-down and bottom-up analysis efforts and how the inputs gathered have helped to formulate the first implementable version of a taxonomy design. This report will not only summarize the work done, but provide the foundational information and next steps for continuing to improve the taxonomy design.  

Independent vs. Dependent Tasks

The art of crafting an Agile KM Roadmap is based on prioritization of efforts, as well as identifying the areas where tasks are contingent upon one another. In most cases, if you follow the approach recommended above, you’ll have a series of independent tasks that don’t require one to be completed before beginning another. There is a benefit however to sequencing your tasks in order to maximize how much value you add to the organization in the shortest amount of time.

Although not absolutely necessary, identifying and coaching the right group of individuals to lead each workstream is critical when it comes to driving efforts forward without losing steam. Without a sense of ownership and accountability for the outputs of the overall roadmap and each workstream within it, stakeholders assume that someone else is leading the efforts. Being explicit about who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed (RACI) brings transparency into who is doing the work vs. who is guiding the work. The key here is not only conducting a thorough stakeholder analysis that identifies the individuals needed to gain buy-in and adoption, but also hand-picking KM leaders (or those with high potential to become one) based on their interests, capabilities, and proclivities. 

Agile Tools and Ceremonies 

Once you have identified what you are doing, who’s responsible for doing it, and the order in which you’ll do it all within a set time period, such as 6-months or 1-year, you’ll need a way to track progress and a method for building in continuous improvement. Keep it simple to start with and then only build complexity as needed..

You can go low-tech and have a Kanban wall dedicated to the tasks you have To Do, are Doing, and those that are Done, utilizing a post-it per task. There are also no-cost, online options, like Trello, to help manage your tasks. Make sure that you manage your KM team’s “Work in Progress” capacity, meaning you allow them to commit to tasks, rather than assigning them tasks, based on their availability and their expertise-level to complete the task within a time-boxed period (or Sprint).

Set-up recurring meetings like a Sprint Planning session and a Sprint Review session to make sure everyone understands all that’s involved with each task, specifically the “Acceptance Criteria” that will determine whether a task is completed. In your agile cadence, build in time to check in with your team to determine what’s working and what’s not working so that you can identify actions and action owners that will help to improve your process and team dynamics.

A Few Final Recommendations

Now that we’ve covered the basics of an Agile KM Roadmap, here’s what you need to build into your plan to maximize the benefits of your efforts:

• Start with your users: Whether you are undergoing KM efforts to benefit your internal workforce or your external clients, you need to understand what your users need and want. Look at KM from their perspective by asking them questions, watching them work, and requesting information related to past effort that may or may not have worked. If you truly understand who you are doing this for from the very beginning of your effort, you will increase the likelihood of success as soon as you’re ready to roll-out the KM solutions you have developed.
• Define success metrics: Spend some time thinking about what you will measure in order to determine whether or not you’re moving in the right direction. If you’re developing a Community of Practice (CoP), you can measure the number of members in your CoP, how many people attend each session, or how your participants rate the usefulness of the information you provide them on your team site or at the various events you host. Beyond the success of the effort itself, ask what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) matter to the organization, such as revenue each quarter, and how you can align your success metrics to impact to those KPIs. With the CoP example, perhaps one of your Innovation Challenges leads to a new product that generates unexpected sales when you bring it to market.
• Manage change and communications: KM practitioners make the mistake of focusing on the solution they deliver as the end-goal when, in reality, they should be focusing on whether that solution is even used and adopted by the individuals it was designed for. Integrated Change Management is an absolute must for any Agile KM Roadmap. This is a workstream that needs to be initiated at the start of the KM effort and carried through until the end of the initiative and beyond. People who are impacted by your KM solutions need to know why you’re introducing new technology, processes, and way of doing things. This can often seem like an unnecessary disruption to their already busy workday. If they understand “what’s in it for them” and are involved in the decision-making process as the solutions are being designed, then they are more likely to change the way they do things because they were involved and engaged throughout the process, having input and insight from the conception of the KM solutions to the delivery of them.
• Leverage a combination of technical and non-technical solutions: Technology is often the first and only solution that comes to mind when organizations face KM challenges. Introducing new technologies such as a more robust Content Management Systems (CMSs) or a user-centric enterprise search portal can significantly improve an organization’s knowledge management maturity, however implementing the technology itself is not enough to yield desired results. Technical solutions are an enabling factor to good KM, but it needs to be designed and governed in a way that maximizes adoption and delivers actual business value. Your KM roadmap should include facilitated sessions that allow your users to interact with the designs, prototypes, proofs of concept, and production-ready versions of your technical solutions. It should also include sessions with senior leadership and stakeholders to help them understand how the technical strategy and product align with overall business objectives. By approaching KM with an integrated technical and non-technical approach, your efforts will result in not only an optimal experience, but you’ll also make the most out of the features your technical solution offers.

By taking an agile approach to designing and implementing your KM Roadmap, you can go from not knowing exactly where to find your knowledge and information to having an action-oriented plan for creating, managing, and finding information in a more consistent and reliable way across the organization. Within months, as opposed to years, you can demonstrate that your KM efforts are bringing order to the once chaotic landscape of systems, content, and people. If you’re ready to design your custom KM Roadmap, contact Enterprise Knowledge and our KM experts will guide you through developing a practical approach for improving KM at your organization.

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KM Institute partner, Enterprise Knowledge, shares more insight on the application of Design Thinking in development of an organizational KM strategy. . . scroll to bottom of page for info on new course on this topic from KMI.

At EK, we are mindful that for any Knowledge and Information Management initiative to be effectively adopted within an organization we have to ask ourselves two questions: “who will have to do their jobs differently?” and “what new processes and practices need to be put in place to ensure those individuals are equipped to succeed?” Not answering these questions can lead to ignored technology systems, subverted processes, and painful organizational change.

That’s why when we’re developing a Knowledge Management (KM) strategy for a client, we are intent on understanding the organization within which they are operating. Our goal is to help build a more adaptable workforce that is prepared for change – whether it occurs in organization structure, process, or technology – and can sustain their KM strategy over time.

Design Thinking: An Approach and Mindset

Determining how we can support the underlying organization is no small feat. To do so, we often leverage Design Thinking to reimagine how people can work more effectively together. The value of Design Thinking lies in the fact that it is both an approach and a mindset. As an approach to problem solving, Design Thinking necessitates that we seek to understand our end users – those individuals for whom we are designing a KM strategy. We treat our end users as partners and co-creators, discovering what is meaningful to them so we can be sure that we are focusing on what matters. To start shifting behaviors within an organization, it’s critical that we meet them where they are, immerse ourselves in their perspectives, and co-create solutions. We want everyone to be aligned about the challenge we are solving and understand why things need to change.

As a mindset, Design Thinking is about being open-minded and curious. It’s about building empathy and setting aside any assumptions that we might have about the people for whom we are designing. And it’s about being comfortable generating and iteratively working through various possible solutions, knowing some won’t work, but trusting that some will.

Building a New Organizational Model

How do we enable employees to embrace and adopt new ways of working that support a proposed KM strategy? American architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller once said “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” At EK, our approach to organization design recognizes that we have to create a future that is different from the present. We have to look at and reimagine various aspects of an organization. When we’re seeking to understand our client’s organization, we are looking to see where they fall on a spectrum of topics, including:

• Organizational Structure: Do employees have formal roles within a fixed hierarchy or is the organization comprised of self-managing teams, which support the creation of more fluid, natural hierarchies?
• Leadership Style: Do leaders manage by command-and-control or do they think of themselves as servant leaders?
• Information Flow and Knowledge Sharing: Does the company adopt practices of transparency, or is information considered power and provided on a need-to-know basis?
• Coordination: How do teams and departments work together? Do people typically work in silos? Alternatively, does the organization support cross-functional collaboration?
• Decision-Making: What guides decision-making – profit, growth, and market share, or values and organizational purpose? Are frontline workers given autonomy to make decisions?
• Mindset and Perspective: Do people in the organization follow established, stable processes (i.e., there is one right way of doing things)? Or is change viewed as an opportunity and, subsequently, people are rewarded for thinking innovatively?
• Performance Management: Does the organization operate as a meritocracy, with people advancing based on their individual talents, or is the focus on a team’s overall performance?

These are just some of the areas that we delve into through a combination of interviews, focus groups, and workshops as we think through how to help an organization successfully harness their knowledge. While every organization is different, we do see common elements in successful KM organizations. Organizations that are adaptable and promote openness and connectivity often have servant leaders, create channels to share information more broadly, empower teams (or departments) with responsibility, hold people accountable, and use a combination of centralized and decentralized decision-making practices. Ultimately, by looking holistically at the structures, processes, communication practices, tools, resources, and incentives that are in place, we can identify where change is most needed in order to help an organization achieve its Knowledge and Information Management goals.

Design Thinking and Organization Design

We approach organization design from a Design Thinking perspective, recognizing that if we want to create the conditions that change behavior, we have to understand our end users’ wants, needs, pain points, and goals, and the system within which they work. Our Design Thinking for Knowledge Management approach (DTKM) – Empathize, Define, Iterate, Prototype, and Test – allows us to do just that.

During the Empathize stage, we meet with people from across the organization of different job levels, tenures, and areas of expertise to look at the problem through their lens, surface pain points that they are facing, and discover unmet needs. Our objective is to understand why things are the way they are and to build a foundational partnership from which we can later co-create solutions.

Once we have a clear assessment of the organization’s current operating state, we move to the Definestage. It’s here that we analyze and synthesize the information collected during our interviews, focus groups, and workshops to identify the core organizational issues affecting the end users, and we visualize a target state for the organization that will support their KM initiatives. It is critical at this stage that we align leadership and staff around the vision for change, why change is needed, and what the risk of not changing is.

With our target state defined, we can start prioritizing where we need to focus – what areas of the organization need our attention the most to support their KM goals. That’s when we begin to Ideate. We work with our end users to explore new ideas and practices that will help nudge behavioral changes. We visualize new ways of working to see where, for example, we can simplify burdensome organizational processes.

Armed with possible solutions, we then move to the Prototype and Test stages. Since our focus is on people and processes and shifting behavior, our goal in this experimental phase is to start small and try out new ways of working through developing minimal viable “products.” From an organization design perspective, this could be testing different approaches to decision-making within a project team. It could also involve rolling out a KM training curriculum to a select group of end users to see whether it could be adopted enterprise-wide in the future. Ultimately, our goal is to see what works and what doesn’t, and iterate based on feedback.

Once we have a solution, it’s important to demonstrate quick wins and identify a KM leadership team and tribe that can commit to sustaining the change and ensure the new behaviors stick. People need to see tangible action that is delivering real value, and they need to see their leadership visibly and actively supporting the recommended efforts in order to participate themselves.

In Conclusion

Each KM strategy we develop and implement for our clients is unique. It is dependent on their needs, priorities, and goals, as well as the people, process, culture, and enabling technologies that comprise their organization. Similarly, there’s never a “one size fits all” approach to organization design. Our Design Thinking forKnowledge Management process is effective in keeping the focus on end users, learning about the context in which people work, and driving recommendations to the organizations that are practical, sustainable, and will enable new behaviors to stick.

As I’ve often asserted, one of the major reasons KM efforts fail is the lack of early, frequent, and consistent involvement from end users. We also continue to see organizations struggle with early KM strategy and decision-making, failing to get the buy-in necessary for a true KM transformation. This isn’t just about building users into the design effort. Beyond that, it’s about engaging them in the initial discussions regarding wants and needs and what’s working and what’s not, within the focused context of Knowledge and Information Management.

At EK, we counteract this lack of foundational involvement from end users by leveraging a series of top-down activities including interviews, focus groups, workshops, surveys, job observations/shadowing, and brainstorming games. Throughout all of these efforts, we leverage Design Thinking to progress collaboratively with those who need KM, from new employees to senior executives.

Overall, Design Thinking and Knowledge Management are a natural fit. Effective KM requires user-centered design with a laser focus on the real challenges preventing the organization from successfully harnessing their knowledge as well as innovative thinking regarding the practical solutions to address those challenges. The Design Thinking method directly addresses each of those needs and more.

Beyond the core benefit of putting the user at the forefront of the process, approaching KM from a Design Thinking perspective has a broad array of benefits, including:

• Helping organizations to cast off assumptions about their KM needs, which often focus too much on a technology solution;
• Letting real business needs and individual wants drive the KM strategy, ensuring a focus on business value and practical KM;
• Allowing for small mistakes, and learning from those mistakes, in order to achieve a KM strategy that will really stick; and
• Keeping a focus on showing value quickly and iteratively, assuaging questions and concerns regarding the efficacy of KM.

Approaching KM from a Design Thinking perspective, above all else, is about empowering your end users (those who will be asked to lead, sustain, evolve, and benefit from the KM program over time) to own KM within their organization from the start. At each step in the process, our Design Thinking for KM approach (DTKM) is equal parts education, coaching, brainstorming, action planning, and prototyping, aimed at helping an organization to get “unstuck” with KM by putting the end users at the center of the journey:

We’ve developed our DTKM approach into a specific KM Strategy workshop, but it’s critical to recognize that Design Thinking isn’t just about workshops. At EK, we align complete KM Strategy and Design efforts cleanly and clearly with the Design Thinking approach. What we have found is that the most effective initiatives don’t simply follow the Design Thinking stages in a linear fashion. Rather, they evolve and progress from stage to stage in increasing levels of user engagement and practical KM focus — we will often revisit a stage with a client to ensure we have framed the right opportunity and are focusing on what matters to their end users.

Moving forward, my colleagues and I will detail each of the above Design Thinking stages in greater detail, to ensure KM is user-focused, practical, and consistently focused on business value.

Looking for help getting unstuck with KM by engaging your end users and showing practical results? KMI offers the Certified Knowledge Specialist - Agile and Design Thinking for KM, facilitated by EK consultant, Claire Brawdy.  Next class: Feb 6-7, 2019, Arlington, VA (just outside Washington, DC).

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In my experience I’ve found that any successful taxonomy design effort stems from a strong understanding of the end users’ needs – hardly a small task. One way that I’ve worked to address this challenge is by incorporating Design Thinking into our taxonomy design process.

IDEO defines Design Thinking as a human-centered approach to problem solving that brings together the needs of people, technology, and business to solve complex problems with innovative solutions. The process is broken into phases, which can all occur in parallel and be repeated iteratively. This blog outlines how we at EK integrate each phase during a taxonomy design.

Why Design Thinking? Here at EK, we’ve seen countless instances where taxonomy design efforts suffer from a lack of buy-in and alignment, resulting in stagnation because users aren’t adopting and using the taxonomy. This methodology addresses those issues because it provides opportunities to fully understand users and their needs, and make sure that you’re truly designing for them. Using this approach ensures that a taxonomy design is one that users support and one that combines findability with usability.

Phase 1: Empathize

To start, you need to achieve an in-depth understanding of the problem that needs to be solved and remove any assumptions you may possess. This involves empathizing with users by observing and interacting with them to understand their experiences and motives. We’ve found this is often lacking in taxonomy design initiatives, where project stakeholders aren’t aligned on goals, or do not clearly understand the “why” of a taxonomy.  

There are many approaches that you can take in order to accomplish this goal. At EK, we conduct interviews and focus groups, and facilitate taxonomy workshops. Interviews and focus groups can help you learn what your end users struggle with when it comes to finding and discovering information. Be conscious of who you’re interviewing and what types of questions you’re asking. Are you interviewing a range of users, representing different levels of experience and different areas of expertise? Are you asking leading questions based on what you assume the problem(s) to be?

Workshops in particular are incredibly valuable because they provide the opportunity to involve actual business users in the initial design phases, mitigating the risk of incorrectly presuming design requirements. While interviews and focus groups arguably offer the same benefits, workshop participants can additionally become your strongest advocates for a taxonomy design, as they are truly involved from the very beginning. In addition to interviews, focus groups, and workshops, consider collaboratively developing personas and empathy maps to identify user differentiators and key user needs. Together, these tools will help you draw key insights from your end users.

Phase 2: Define

The Define stage involves analyzing and synthesizing all of the previously gathered information to define the core problem(s) affecting your end users. In this phase, you’ll need to clearly define all of the users’ needs.

At EK, rather than focusing on creating a problem statement, we shift the focus to creating an outcome statement. In short, we’re asking the end users to answer the question, “What will this taxonomy allow end users to do/accomplish?” Asking this type of question allows us to easily capture the expectations and desires of the end users and make sure that we’re delivering a product that works for them. Just like creating an effective problem statement, creating this outcome statement simultaneously focuses your end users on the specific needs and creates a sense of possibility that allows team members to bounce off ideas in the Ideation stage.

Phase 3: Ideate

Armed with your user insights and clear problem/outcome statements, you can progress to the Ideate phase to identify alternatives to viewing the problem and subsequently, new solutions.

Here is where you may begin to move towards initial metadata field and value identification and prioritization, keeping in mind the aforementioned outcome statement. While it’s important to preface this phase with criteria regarding characteristics of successful business taxonomies, it’s also important to get a range of potential ideas and make sure everything is at least captured. The resulting set of metadata fields and corresponding values can give a high-level overview of the important content characteristics which may need to be reflected in the taxonomy.

Phases 4 and 5: Prototype and Test

The Prototype phase offers the opportunity to test your potential solutions through inexpensive, scaled-down versions of the product or specific features. The final Test phase involves rigorous testing of the complete product. Taxonomy on paper tends to be abstract. Our prototyping and testing approaches bring real business context to the taxonomy design effort for our end users.

The metadata fields that are identified in the Ideate phase can help form a “starter taxonomy” that will be further tested and elaborated in order to become a truly effective business taxonomy. One way we tackle this phase at EK is through card sorting, a technique to discover how end users categorize information, which in turn helps to validate portions of a taxonomy design. The exercise can also help identify which categories need adjustments based on user feedback.

By the end of the prototyping stage, the team will have a clearer idea of the limitations of the taxonomy, the problems that exist, and a better understanding of how real users would act, think, and feel when interacting with the end product. In taxonomy design, testing of the complete product is ongoing, with alterations and refinements being considered and made through taxonomy governance to better reflect the end users and their evolving needs.

Conclusion

Progress in your taxonomy design effort starts with a clear understanding of your end users. That’s why Design Thinking can be incredibly helpful when building a taxonomy that will meet the real needs of your organization and your end users. This iterative, flexible, and collaborative methodology allows you to quickly identify, build, and test your way to success.