In a recent post on Lucidea.com, well-known KM expert, Stan Garfield shared his tips for "Seeking Outside Help" in selling KM to others within your organization.  We at KMI have found that this is a common issue faced by knowledge managers, and hope you find Stan's advice useful. . .   

You don’t have to go it alone to sell KM to others in your organization. Take advantage of outside help by scheduling visits with others who are doing KM well, joining and participating in KM communities, using industry analyst reports, or using an outside consultant.

If you decide to seek outside help (and I believe you should), and you plan to schedule visits with other knowledge managers who are “doing KM well”, it’s important to prepare. First, identify people to visit by attending conferences, listening to webinars, participating in communities, and reading publications, blogs, and books. Good advisor candidates are people who make a major impression, are engaged in similar efforts, or are in the same industry. Of course, as you are seeking out these advisor candidates, you are continually learning!

Once you’ve identified and approached a group of potential advisors, prepare as you would for any informational interview. Below is a list of questions that should lead to a rich conversation about promoting knowledge management to leaders and end users. Be prepared to share your own experiences in these areas; peer mentoring is bidirectional.

• To whom have you had to sell KM within your organization?
• How did you go about it?
• What obstacles did you encounter, and how did you overcome them?
• How do you educate stakeholders and users?
• How do you communicate with stakeholders and users?
• How do you motivate people to demonstrate the desired behaviors?
• How do you work with IT?
• What other functions do you work with, and how do you work with them?
• What are your top three tips for selling KM?

If you’d like to read more on this topic, please consider my latest book, published by Lucidea Press, Proven Practices for Promoting a Knowledge Management Program, which offers a broad range of advice and insights drawn from my career as a KM practitioner.

Can KM be your "Superpower"?  Vanessa DiMauro of Leader Networks thinks so!  She shares a few tips for boosting your career in her recent blog post, which we are passing along to you today.

"Why KM Is Your Superpower"

Remember back in January when I predicted that, in 2018, more and more companies would hire knowledge managers? My crystal ball has served me well. We’re only a few months into the new year and a quick search of Indeed.com shows hundreds of KM jobs at big-name companies like Liberty Mutual, Comcast, Bristol Myers Squibb, Bain, Best Buy, Dana Farber, and Goodwin Proctor.

That’s because companies are increasingly realizing that knowledge managers have super powers. They can codify internal information so it can be tapped to meet customer needs. They can help organizations break silos and jump across organizational boundaries. And they can ensure that the right information—or the right person—gets to the right customer at the right time. It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s a knowledge manager!

Needless to say, it’s a great time to consider advancing your KM career. Here are three ways you can do just that:

Envision your role differently: You may be a knowledge manager already, but you might not know it. Often, professionals working in corporate communications, HR, or IT play an important KM role although it’s not part of their title. So make a list of the hats you wear and the functions you perform. Are you seeing things like capturing, organizing, and disseminating information? Developing processes that inform decision-making? Sounds like KM to me. Consider rewriting your job description to put KM front and center so that you can be recognized for the valuable work you’re already doing.

Steep yourself in expertise: Because KM capabilities are in demand, you can advance your career by reading everything you can get your hands on and following the thought leaders who have their finger on the industry’s pulse. Stan Garfield fits the bill on both counts. He publishes a treasure trove of articles, presentations, and resources on LinkedIn and on his blog. If you want to get smart or smarter on all things KM, Stan is your man.

Take the plunge: If you’re ready to take your KM career to the next level, consider pursuing a Master of Science Degree in Information and Knowledge Strategy at Columbia University. This program is designed to help business leaders across all sectors align business strategy with knowledge strategy and design and build information and collaboration products that drive growth and enable success. I’m proud to teach the capstone course for this program, in which students execute a consulting project for an organization that needs to improve its information and knowledge processes or expand revenue opportunities from knowledge-enabled products. It’s an incredible way to get in-depth, real-world, hands-on KM experience. And the faculty is certainly follow-worthy – be sure to check out my Capstone cohort Madelyn Blair, Nita Gupta, Tim Powell,  and Chris Samuels to get a feel for the power behind the program.

In an era when technological advances and economic shifts are making many jobs obsolete, investing in a KM career is about as future proof as it gets. My next prediction for folks who follow this path: you will be heavily recruited!

KM Institute would like to add:  If you don't have a bundle of cash or a couple of years to spend on a Master's Degree, consider earning your Certified Knowledge Manager or Specialist certification with KMI.  We hold public classes every few weeks in the Washington, DC area, or we will come to your location to conduct a private classes for groups of 10 or more.  See Events for upcoming classes.

As I’ve often asserted, Knowledge Management struggles with its own identity. There are any number of definitions of KM, many of which put too much stress on the tacit knowledge side of the knowledge and information management spectrum, are overly academic, or are simply too abstract. At Enterprise Knowledge, we’ve adopted a concise definition of knowledge management:

Knowledge Management involves the people, process, culture, and enabling technologies necessary to Capture, Manage, Share, and Find information.

The actions at the end of that sentence are the most critical component. All good KM should be associated with business outcomes, value to stakeholders, and return on investment. We discuss these actions as follows:

• Capture entails all the forms in which knowledge and information (content) move from tacit to explicit, unstructured to structured, and decentralized to centralized. This ranges from an expert’s ability to easily share their learned experience, to a content owner’s ability to upload a document they’ve created or edited.
• Manage involves the sustainability and maturation of content, ensuring content becomes better over time instead of becoming bloated, outdated, or obsolete. This is about the content itself, its format, style, and architecture. Management also covers the appropriate controls and workflows necessary to protect it, and the people who may access it.
• Share includes both an individual’s and organization’s ability and capacity to collaborate and pass knowledge and information via a variety of means, ranging from one-to-one to one-to-all, synchronous to asynchronous, and direct to remote.
• Find covers the capabilities for the knowledge and information to be easily and naturally surfaced. The concept of findability goes well beyond traditional “search,” and includes the ability to traverse content to discover additional content (discoverability), connect with experts, and receive recommendations and “pushes.”

We’ve taken this simple definition as the foundation for what we call our KM Action Wheel. The Action Wheel expresses the type of actions we seek to encourage and enable for the organizations and individuals with whom we work. It adds a bit of additional specificity to the aforementioned:

• Create recognizes that a key element of good KM is not simply the capture of existing knowledge, but the creation of new knowledge. This can take a number of forms, from allowing knowledge creation by an individual via innovation forums or social reporting, to group knowledge creation via better and improved collaboration and collaboration systems.
• Enhance focuses on the fact that effective KM will lead not just to the creation and capture of knowledge, but the sustainable improvement of that knowledge. In short, this means creation and stewardship of the leadership, processes, and technologies to make information “better” over time rather than having it fall into disrepair. Content’s natural state is entropy, and good KM will counteract that. Enhancement also covers the application of metadata, comments, or linkages to other information in order to improve the complete web of knowledge.
• Connect drills in on the “Find” action mentioned above, recognizing that KM is more than access to knowledge and information in paper or digital forms, it is also about direct access and formation of connections with the holders of that knowledge. This concept is even more critical with more and more well-tenured experts leaving the workforce and taking their knowledge with them. The more KM can connect holders of knowledge with consumers of knowledge, the smarter an organization is, and the more effective it can be about transferring that knowledge.

KM is important, simply put, because many, if not most, organizations and their employees struggle to perform these aforementioned actions easily, consistently, or at all. Effective KM is that which allows individuals and organizations to perform the actions discussed above in an intuitive, natural, and relatively simple manner.

This is not to say that KM isn’t already happening in any number of good ways. Many organizations with whom we work have already invested significantly in their own KM maturity or are at least ready to do so. When we conduct a KM assessment for an organization we even more frequently find “hero KM’ers” who are doing their best to perform these actions not because it is part of their job description, or because their boss told them to, or because the company processes make it easy to do so, but because they understand their value and are trying. Very few organizations are starting from “0,” and many have the potential to make meaningful steps if they know how to proceed.

As we enter the new year, KM Institute begins our 17th year of offering the flagship Certified Knowledge Manager program.  Well over 8,000 students have now taken our courses globally.  We have expanded our global reach with public and private courses conducted in West Africa, Europe, India and the Middle East, in addition to the United States.  New partnerships are forming in these regions as well as South America and South Africa.

To keep pace with this growth, we have expanded our instructor base beyond our Chief Instructor and KMI Founder, Douglas Weidner, to include KM experts both here in the U.S. and abroad.  At the conclusion of a recent CKM class, we interviewed a few of the students to get their feedback.

Please take a few moments to view the video below.  Enjoy!  And thank you to our students for participating in the interviews.

For more info on the CKM program, click here.