The Lotus Knowledge Management Framework demystifies the subject by mapping KM to strategic business goals.

Companies gain the most from knowledge management when they map their knowledge activities to sharply defined strategic goals. Lotus and IBM’s Knowledge Management Framework identifies four basic business goals that lend themselves to improvement through knowledge management: innovation, responsiveness, productivity and competency.

Innovation. In businesses characterized by rapid technological changes and compressed cycle times, innovation is often the primary source of sustained competitive advantage. The challenge for many companies is bringing employees together across the boundaries of time and geography to brainstorm, share ideas, and co-create new products and services.

Innovation has been a key objective of collaborative technologies for many years, although most electronic discussion groups veer off course and produce few measurable results. By structuring collaboration to achieve specific objectives or to resolve issues, knowledge management tools drive group interactions beyond the basic interactivity of discussion forums.

Tectonic shifts in markets require flexibility. Companies that can marshal the resources to respond to even the most complex and unexpected events fastest are the ones that thrive.

Responsiveness. Decades of technology investments have helped companies build systems that manage well-known and well-understood business events. But today’s business environment seems to present more unanticipated events — such as the recent turbulence in the Asian financial markets, dramatic changes in technology, or the sudden appearance of nontraditional competitors — for which traditional information technology is necessary but insufficient.

Knowledge management technologies often confer the greatest benefit when they simply help a company sense weak signals and to respond to them by marshaling its human and information resources on an as-needed basis to respond effectively to unexpected events. By identifying the “who, what, where and when” a company can quickly coordinate its activities in response to customers and events. In some instances, a company can “mass customize” its existing assets (both physical and intellectual) by tweaking them to meet specific customer needs.

The loud cry in the age of intranets and exponential growth on the Internet is for help in finding and reusing knowledge assets.

Productivity. A common lament of executives is “we don’t know what we know.” Employees are forever re-creating the wheel, failing to leverage learned lessons, best practices and expertise that exist elsewhere in the company. Most knowledge management efforts concentrate on effectively documenting, cataloging and distributing such corporate knowledge assets so that the left hand can learn what the right hand is doing. What organization wouldn’t benefit from tapping the expertise and knowledge that resides in its individuals and systems for use in everyday decisions? Or from reusing the knowledge created in one business process in another business process altogether?

Clearly, productivity depends on how well the knowledge created by individuals and groups can be captured and packaged for reuse by others inside (and outside) the company. More than that, however, knowledge management technologies must provide individuals with the tools to discover and mine corporate knowledge that has already been created. Once people find the corporate knowledge assets they need, they can improve upon those assets by applying them to new processes and problems.

Building employee skills is a natural target for knowledge management.

Competency. A company that wants to remain competitive must develop its people — both new hires and existing employees. New hires need to learn not only new skills, but also “how things get done around here.” To do so they read as much as they can, get “on the job” training, uncover resources through browsing the corporate web, enroll in a course of study, and even apprentice with mentors and other colleagues. Just as important is building the skills and expertise of existing employees. Anything a company can do to support and accelerate such learning is successful knowledge management.

Knowledge management tools and techniques can enhance the discovery and delivery of critical information and training to employees, so that a company can continually improve the skills of its people as a regular part of doing business.

The Lotus Knowledge Management Framework

Collaboration and organizational scale serve as the axes of a knowledge management framework.

When we examine these four strategic goals, it becomes clear that they are a function of two dimensions: collaboration and organizational scale. Together, these two dimensions form the Lotus Knowledge Management Framework — and the full domain of knowledge management solutions. Let’s look at each dimension more closely.

Collaboration runs through most knowledge-based activities.

Collaboration. The process of creating, sharing and applying knowledge involves varying degrees of collaboration. Some knowledge activities, such as individual learning (competency) or reusing well-defined best practices (productivity) require some collaboration, though perhaps not much. In these activities, employees are more likely to find knowledge resources in documents and databases, rather than through interaction with coworkers. Of course, the degree of collaboration varies within a sector itself: an instructor-led course is more collaborative than, say, browsing the Web (even though both are competency-building activities). In general, activities related to competency and productivity are relatively low on the collaboration scale overall.

By contrast, knowledge activities related to innovation and responsiveness are much more collaborative. For example, brainstorming sessions (innovation) and strategy planning meetings (responsiveness) are usually highly interactive, involving multiple people. They rank higher on the collaboration axis.

Return on knowledge investment is greatest when the expertise and output of individuals and teams are leveraged throughout the company.

Organizational Scale. The second dimension of the Lotus Knowledge Management Framework is scalability — that is, the extent to which knowledge management activities and output can be leveraged throughout the organization. Competency building and innovation typically occur on a small scale, at the individual or work group level. For example, people may attend conferences, workshops and training sessions to improve their individual competency; however, what they learn is not easily accessible for use throughout the organization. It is not scalable knowledge. Only when the output of individual learning or an innovation is packaged for reuse can the results be leveraged throughout the organization. A company can only perform well in the productivity and responsiveness sectors if it reuses knowledge assets created by individuals or groups and leverages those assets on an organizational scale. For example, in resolving customer problems, a productive organization’s help desk might reuse a knowledge base of previously answered questions. It is important to remember, of course, that scale does not necessarily imply a finite limit. Knowledge management is often successful when it is applied across and beyond organizational boundaries.

Knowledge created

or leveraged in one quadrant adds to knowledge learned

or reused in another.

This framework implies some interdependencies among the sectors. Without competent individuals, innovation, productivity and responsiveness are difficult to achieve. Similarly, innovation, productivity and competency are prerequisites for responsiveness. To extend the help desk example, a responsive organization might dip into communities of experts to resolve problems that have never been seen before. To be responsive, the help desk staff need to be more than merely plugged into a repeatable process, they need to be able to leverage the competence and innovation of the organization at large.

Smaller companies will realize better returns by concentrating on the collaboration dimension.

The Framework allows for flexibility. There is no predefined “route” to follow from one sector to another.

At the same time, these sectors are not wholly dependent one another. A company doesn’t need to reach knowledge management perfection in the competency sector before it can begin tackling innovation and productivity, or achieve excellence in all three before it can become responsive. There are modest, practical investments a company can make in any sector that can have appreciable returns in the near term. These investments do not presume complete knowledge management success within the other sectors. Lotus has identified some of these “quick hit” opportunities and has built solutions around them, which we will discuss in a later chapter.

The Lotus Knowledge Management Framework helps establish scope and priorities.

So, how does the Lotus Knowledge Management Framework help a company map its knowledge strategy? One of the vexing characteristics of the entire field of knowledge management is its broad purview: it is difficult to know where to start, and when — if ever — to declare victory. The strategic sectors of the Framework serve as a beginning.

For example, one leading consumer products company competes on product innovation. It must have a constant flow of new “killer products” in its development pipeline to stay ahead of the pack. While the discipline of brand management is well inculcated into staff (through significant investments supporting individual competency) and the methods for manufacturing and managing supply chains are well documented in best practices (heightened productivity), the firm is well aware that the speed with which it introduces new products (innovation) is what gives it a competitive edge. This company chose Lotus Notes as a knowledge platform because of its ability to foster innovation through collaboration (idea generation, sharing) among parties who cannot easily gather together in conference rooms to brainstorm.

The Framework can guide knowledge management conversations among business managers and information technology professionals.

The Lotus Knowledge Management Framework provides a useful tool for helping the executive team think about knowledge strategy in the context of how a company competes. The Framework also helps business people communicate with information technology staff about key objectives and tradeoffs, since almost every company will have to decide where its most immediate knowledge management opportunities and need for improvement exist.