KM Strategy for Small- & Medium-sized Businesses
Compared to large enterprises, small- and medium-sized businesses (SMB) lack the resources to implement large scale knowledge management projects. They rather focus on practical and simple solutions. In SMB an initiative to foster knowledge sharing should not require additional work and the KM strategy should focus on elements that are straight-forward and bring tangible benefit. On the other hand, small organisations have the advantage of less barriers and obstacles for this kind of initiatives. And with the right mindset of the leadership, the KM strategy can be quickly and successfully implemented.
Vision
Each strategy should start with the aspiration to achieve something great. Often, this might be called the vision. Here is my humble suggestion on how this “dream” could be formulated:
“In order to strengthen our business performance, we want to network our knowledge workers, which will lead to better decision making and enabling innovation”
Strategy
For SMBs the knowledge management strategy should be simple and focus on the most important objectives. Based on my experience of KM in large and small enterprises I would suggest the following three pillars for a KM strategy:
Establishing a knowledge sharing culture. Even the best procedures and tools will not be successful if they are not matched with the corresponding behaviour of the people. Therefore, the awareness for KM and the right behaviour needs to be created on all levels within the company.
Embedding experience sharing in daily collaboration. Knowledge creation and sharing mostly happens in the daily operations when people collaborate. In SMBs, knowledge-related activities should not create additional work; therefore, simple small steps can be embedded in daily collaboration to ensure knowledge is transferred and people can learn from each other.
Creating a platform which allows people to network. Although the company is small, it is vital that experts can be easily identified and reached. And, each employee is an expert on some topics. The networking platform should allow people the share their ideas and expertise and then enable discussions. A recent McKinsey Quarterly article mentioned the benefits of ‘networked enterprise’ – The rise of the networked enterprise.
Implementation
As a third element of the KM strategy is the question, how do we put the strategic pillars into action. Here I would like to propose a set of very simple measurements for each of the three suggested pillars. These measurements should represent some basic, efficient activities to reach high value; more is always possible in a later stage.
Establishing a knowledge sharing culture:
- ensuring top management support by putting KM on their monthly discussion agenda
- embedding KM in the performance metrics for everyone; i.e. participation in the activities below
- create a monthly meeting where interesting “stuff” (e.g. projects, news, research, etc) can be shared; top managers should be participating
Embedding experience sharing in daily collaboration:
- creating transparency over activities with a central tool (project management, task list, or micro blogging)
- in workflow / project management methodologies embedding a step in the beginning to search for existing experiences
- ensuring that critical knowledge is captured at the end of projects and/or on a regular basis (e.g. After Action Reviews); these can be shared in the monthly meeting (see above)
Creating a platform which allows people to network:
- creating a structure where people can trigger questions to an unidentified audience; all employees can participate in the discussions
- providing a platform where people can post updates on their ideas, what they are working on, what they have read (also external sources), etc
- both could be achieved with micro blogging; the usage is fostered with the cultural measures
Tools
Despite the fact, that knowledge management should not focus technology or tools, this is still a very common question. Most of the proposed activities above, do not really require any technology and if possible, face-to-face conversations should be encouraged. Nevertheless, modern technology can support the sharing of experiences and reach the above KM vision.
The suggested activities above from a tool perspective focus very much on company-internal micro-blogging, which allows discussions and sharing of news and bookmarks. There is a set of tools which I could recommend for this; they are mentioned here in order of increasing complexity: Flowr, Presently, PersonAll, Liferay Portal, Confluence. Most important, focus on one tool, one entry point.
I deliberately excluded elements like document management; this is also important but especially for smaller companies this is less of an issue. I think, engaging people into conversations and learning more about the interests and current activities of our peers, is more important and should therefore be the first step.
These are my ideas, how small- and medium-sized business can engage in knowledge management, considering their limitation. Thinking further, similar thoughts could be applicable for small teams and departments in large-scale organizations. What do you think?
1 Comment so far
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Thank you for this valuable post that summarises very well the SME situation.
We’ve been trying to innovate within the collaborative KM space in large and smaller organisations for several years and it is definitely with SMEs that we currently manage to make the most impact with a relatively low amount of effort.
Feel free to check out our approach at Knowledge Plaza which has recently won a few innovation prizes in KM and Market intelligence.
http://www.knowledgeplaza.net
Cheers, Greg
Posted on December 17, 2010 at 02:05 AM | Comment permalink