Define Your KM Strategy, Part 3

Stan Garfield

October 08, 2020

My two previous posts detailed the ten types of KM strategies. This third and final post in the series provides examples of how to apply these strategies.

Examples

Here are examples of possible KM strategies for three different types of organizations. Typically, not all ten types of strategies will be used, but these examples illustrate what might be considered.

1. Non-Profit Organization

Top 3 Objectives

Lower costs by preventing people from reinventing the wheel all the time.
Eliminate deficits caused by repeating the same mistakes.
Increase contributions by innovating and creating new capabilities.

KM Strategy

Motivate: provide incentives for sharing and reusing proven practices.
Network: create communities of practice to enable sharing and to stimulate new ideas.
Supply: collect stories on both failures and successes.
Analyze: look for patterns and trends in previous work and select proven practices from the collected stories.
Codify: develop standard processes to follow.
Disseminate: publish standard processes to the intranet and distribute proven practices in a monthly newsletter.
Demand: use communities to ask questions about how to perform tasks and allow searching the proven practice repository.
Act: follow the standard processes and reuse proven practices on new opportunities.
Invent: create new sponsorship opportunities and develop improved fund-raising techniques.
Augment: provide chatbots and voice recognition for contacting and responding to donors

2. Manufacturing Company

Top 3 Objectives

Increase orders by better collaboration between sales, services, and back-office functions.
Increase revenue by stimulating a flow of ideas for new products and services.
Increase profits by sharing and reusing lessons learned.

KM Strategy

Motivate: reward collaboration, submitting new ideas, and sharing and reusing lessons learned.
Network: enable cross-functional collaboration.
Supply: capture lessons learned and suggestions for new products and services.
Analyze: select best lessons learned and suggestions.
Codify: categorize and tag selected lessons learned and suggestions.
Disseminate: send out lessons learned in email messages and publish blog posts about new ideas.
Demand: provide query capability for lessons learned database.
Act: reuse lessons learned.
Invent: develop new products and services through collaboration and submitted ideas.
Augment: implement expert systems for designing, engineering, and building new products.

3. Consulting Firm

Top 3 Objectives

Increase win rate by improving the proposal development process.
Lower sales and delivery costs by reusing proven practices.
Increase engagement quality by collaborating with customers and partners.

KM Strategy

Motivate: measure and reward collaboration, sharing, capture, and reuse.
Network: get all consultants and project managers to collaborate on projects, actively participate in communities of practice
Supply: capture proposals and other project documents for all projects.
Analyze: select proven practices from contributed project documents.
Codify: ensure metadata is attached to submitted documents, and cleanse proposals to use as standard templates.
Disseminate: make it easy for everyone to find reusable content, methods, tools, templates, techniques, and examples.
Demand: search for proven practices and proposal templates for each new project.
Act: reuse proven practices and proposal templates on each new project and employ customer and partner feedback to improve project quality.
Invent: use customer and partner feedback to improve existing services and create new service offerings.
Augment: automatically determine the specialties, roles, and interests of consultants and automatically deliver important information relevant to their work at the time of need.

Summary

Motivating, networking, supplying, analyzing, codifying, disseminating, demanding, acting, inventing, and augmenting are the ten types of KM strategies. Incorporating them in your KM program will help achieve the Top 3 Objectives by prescribing specific actions to take. These should be communicated to the organization so that everyone understands what is planned and how they should participate.

Stan Garfield

Please read Stan’s additional blog posts offering advice and insights drawn from many years as a KM practitioner. And learn about Lucidea’s Inmagic Presto, with KM capabilities to support successful knowledge management programs.