Working with others
One of the results of the chartership process has been a desire to help others who want to achieve the same thing. He received some useful tips about reflective writing, but they were more ‘generic’ and Hank hopes he will be able to add the extra dimension of his per- sonal experience in his role on CILIP’s Mentor Scheme, where he is currently working with others going through KM Chartership.
He says there were two big takeaways from his own Chartership. “For me, reflective writing was one of the challenges. I hadn’t done it for a long time, and it was interesting to get additional feedback on that. Understanding how to put it all in 1,000 words. I thought this would be a breeze, but your effective career history in two-and-a-half pages, was not straight- forward. Also, the evidence base was something you really need to think about. It took a lot more time than I thought it would with evidence annexes, documents, and references.”
But he said a big revelation was the fact that the thousand-word reflective piece was “not only career focused but had to based on the organisational context. For me that was a key takeaway and if people are thinking of charter- ship, think of it as something, ideally, within the organisation. There’s a big push and they’ve added more emphasis on the context of the organisation – asking you to be reflective of the organi- sation you work for. That look in-house, to demonstrate real tangible evidence (it might be an assessment or a pres- entation or a paper you’ve written), helped a great deal to compile.”
Prove value
Hank’s enrolment in, and support for CILIP’s KM Chartership programme is underpinned by a conviction in the value of KM. But this is one of his key concerns for the profession. “You need to prove value. It’s one of the biggest challenges and downfalls of the whole KM sector, that it’s often perceived as being intangible, soft or weak in value. But very much you need to prove the value, cost savings, cost avoidance and particularly in the oil and gas sector, it’s about reducing major incidents, making sure we don’t make the same mistakes. We could potentially be losing lives, losing production, harming the environment. This is where I’ve seen KM adding some real tangible benefits, real value.”
Asked for an example, Hank outlined the process for gathering and sharing “lessons learned” evidence and how this forced non-KM people to be conscious of KM and its value: “We were working with high performing Project Team, so
18 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
Knowledge Management – A primer and catalyst to support digital transformation, Hank Malik and Jordan Richards.
the KM value being achieved was being stated directly by the heads of project teams, which was documented. The big- gest push was about connecting expertise together and a lot of the value was identi- fied as anecdotal, captured through a very rigorous lessons learned approach. We physically went out to capture the knowl- edge learnings in the oil fields of Oman. It was about getting project teams to share their learnings into a knowledge base from which we could then extrapolate key learnings with monetary value. So, it needed culture buy-in. It needed support. “Unfortunately, I’ve seen quite a few KM teams closed down, particularly in this pandemic. They were not seen to be add- ing real bottom-line value. So, it’s more important now than ever that knowledge managers are seen to be generating real value.”
But how is this done? “The KM role is about selling. We capture and validate the knowledge, curate it, package it up and then publish and present it. I had a KM comms manager working for me whose job it was to do the marketing, the brand- ing, the website and design the newsletter. It has to be publicised and promoted because this is as much about marketing ourselves. But often KMers do a poor job of marketing and branding the value.”
Digital evolution: the need to re-skill Hank sees the marketing of KM value as an old problem – one that has been exacerbated and exposed by Covid. But the pandemic, combined with digital technology has also thrown up some new, more existential, challenges. The promise of digital and digitalisation may have been around for some time, but its real impact
on professions and culture are only just emerging. “I’ve been annoying people, saying they need to rebrand themselves for the digital world. Knowledge manag- ers have traditionally just attempted to gather knowledge through connecting and collecting and they have done this fairly well. But now I think they urgent- ly have to become familiar with new Digital tool sets. They need to be able to use business analytical and intelligence tools and communicate more directly with the professionals whose knowledge they are gathering. I think it will mean more skills needed as data scientists, more analytics. You don’t have to be a technologist, there are plenty of them around. But knowledge managers have to be able to talk in the new digital lan- guage. They have to be open to learning things about business analytical skills, business intelligence, things which the traditional knowledge manager veers away from. They need to embrace the opportunities of Digital Transformation and quickly.”
Turf war and future opportunities Another Covid-related threat and opportunity for KMers is the battle for virtual, specifically digital collabora- tion. With his history in collaborative technology, it’s an area of particular interest: “KM and collaborative tools go together. They are one of the building blocks of KM,” Hank says, adding that he has seen the acceleration of this during the pandemic as “a wonderful opportunity” for knowledge managers to “take that area”. Hank believes that “if Knowledge management doesn’t do it now, it’ll go to digital transformation and IT. They’ll take it away from KM.” From his personal experience across many sectors he thinks the evidence clearly shows that KM is always needed and that IT isn’t always the right delivery point for collaboration and collaborative tools. Hank’s argument is that collaboration is about humans, and so humans need to be put back into technology – and KM provides many ways to do this. From Hank’s point of view it is not a new problem. He says: “We had this in the early 2000s – eBusiness was going to transform the way we worked but they ignored the people, the culture piece, which is critical. In the 90s there was a huge explosion of big KM conferences. Every IT vendor was there branding their tools KM tools and KM solutions. It became a big bandwagon. In my latest book, Knowledge Man- agement – A Primer and catalyst to support digital transformation, written with Jordan Richards I mention we are now in Release 4 of KM (see graphic). This wave is the digital wave and again
September 2021
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