What do you identify as the barriers to effective knowledge management in your organization?
(Select up to three.) Organizational silos Lack of incentives
Lack of technology infrastructure Lack of organizational mandate
Frequent shifting of which people are in what roles at what time Compliance headwinds
55%
37%
36%
35%
35%
13%
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Learning by example
Our survey’s knowledge management leaders12 differ from the rest of our respondents in several ways, most notably in their definition of knowledge management. These leaders view knowledge management as more than a way of capturing and disseminating information; instead, they view it as a way of creating knowledge to develop new products, services, or solutions. By redefining the value of knowledge management, these
organizations are able to break down cultural barriers that have prevented other organizations from taking a similar path.
Philips, for example, did not just use knowledge management to reduce the time it took account managers and sales engineers to search for
information. It leveraged a knowledge management ecosystem to create new ways of engineering solutions for its customers. This shift in focus occurred when leaders realized that opportunities were lost by not sharing new services and solutions across markets. A service might be successful in the United States while account managers in Europe were not aware about its existence and success.
Despite the fact that knowledge about Philips products was available on the company’s internal sites, the company did not have a way of
embedding that knowledge at the right point in its engineering process. Now, at the start of any new project, engineers check the knowledge
management site, which uses AI to immediately search for other projects that may be similar and connect the individuals running those projects.
Instead of duplicating efforts, those teams can
collaborate up front, creating new knowledge and ultimately getting their innovations to market faster.13
A leading biopharmaceutical company took a similar approach. It used knowledge management to extract the lessons learned from the multiple early-stage trials that their products went through, combining those lessons into new knowledge that would enable the company to advance its solutions to market in a more effective way. This was quite a challenge in an organization where information had historically been shared on a need-to-know basis only. But by taking a step back to understand how and where knowledge could be pushed to create value, the company was able to break down those cultural norms.14
Pivoting ahead
Rapid technological advances have poised knowledge management to evolve from a static, back-office activity focused on documenting and warehousing information to a dynamic,
AI-powered platform that enables organizations to create, understand, and act on knowledge more effectively than ever before. To be able to take advantage of these emerging technologies, organizations need to marry two critical elements:
the physical systems and infrastructures to support the technology, and the processes, incentives, and culture that encourage people to use it.
Organizations that succeed on both fronts will be well positioned to create and act on knowledge in ways that drive tangible results.
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1. Natalie Steers, “Chris Boorman, Informatica: ‘A tsunami of data is hitting enterprises’,” MYcustomer.com, April 2, 2012.
2. Statista, “Number of sent and received emails per day worldwide from 2017 to 2023 (in billions),” accessed February 14, 2020.
3. Splunk, The state of dark data: Industry leaders reveal the gap between AI’s potential and today’s data reality, 2019.
4. Rosalie Chan, “Slack says that while its user numbers still lag Microsoft’s, what really matters is that users love its app a lot,” Business Insider, October 11, 2019.
5. Seth Patton, “Introducing Project Cortex,” Microsoft, April 11, 2020; SyncedReview, “Microsoft Ignite 2019:
Project Cortex AI builds enterprise knowledge networks,” Medium, November 8, 2019.
6. Ibid.
7. Erica Volini et al., Superteams: Putting AI in the group–Deloitte Global Human Capital Trends, Deloitte Insights, 2020.
8. Hans Visschers (global head of knowledge management, Philips), interview with the authors, January 15, 2020.
9. Phil Anderson, “IBM announces new industry-leading NLP features inside Watson Discovery,” IBM, December 4, 2019.
10. Conversations with company executives by colleagues of the authors.
11. Eric Gladstone, “Conceptual knowledge networks,” interstito, April 27, 2017.
12. We defined “knowledge management leaders” as respondents who said that their organizations were effecti or very effective in all four key knowledge management activities: sharing knowledge, preserving knowledge creating knowledge, and deriving value from knowledge.
13. Visschers, interview.
14. Conversations with company executives by colleagues of the authors.
Endnotes
The authors would like to thank Garth Andrus, Raviv Elyashiv, Kathi Enderes, Franz Gilbert, John Hagel, Julie Hiipakka, Steve Lancaster-Hall, Tiffany McDowell, Sameer Mithal, Craig Muraskin, Ido Namir, and Maggie Wooll for their contributions to this chapter.
Acknowledgments
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Current drivers
Organizations are struggling to navigate the fast- changing skills landscape. In our 2020 Global Human Capital Trends survey, 53 percent of respondents said that between half and all of their workforce will need to change their skills and capabilities in the next three years. It will be no easy feat for organizations to navigate this explosive rate of change effectively. They are up against a dramatically changing business landscape with constantly shifting skills and capability needs, greater expectations of organizations to respond to workforce development needs, and a lack of insights and investment to pave a clear path forward.
Today, the qualities that workers—and
organizations—need to survive and thrive are very
different from those they needed in the past. One reason for this is that economies are shifting from an age of production to an age of imagination. In the past, business success relied mainly on deploying precisely calibrated skills to efficiently construct products or deliver services at scale.
Today, success increasingly depends on innovation, entrepreneurship, and other forms of creativity that rely not just on skills, but also on less quantifiable capabilities such as critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and collaboration.1