Lucidea’s Lens: Knowledge Management Thought Leaders Part 91 – Frank Leistner

The late Frank Leistner was the former Chief Knowledge Officer for SAS Global Professional Services, where he founded the knowledge management program and led a wide range of knowledge management initiatives up until 2012.

Frank worked with the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management and the Babson College Working Knowledge Center led by Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak. He participated in the Harvard Graduate School of Education Learning Innovation Laboratory (LILA) roundtable.

Frank was a member of the board of the Swiss Knowledge Management Forum (SKMF). He presented at numerous conferences and delivered keynotes in Europe and the United States about knowledge management, talent management, and social media topics.

Here are definitions for five of Frank’s specialties:

1. Collaboration: Interacting with peers and colleagues to exchange ideas, share experiences, work together on projects, and solve problems.

2. Communities of Practice: Groups of people who share an interest, a specialty, a role, a concern, a set of problems, or a passion for a specific topic. Community members deepen their understanding by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing their knowledge, reusing good ideas, and solving problems for one another.

3. Enterprise Social Networks: Internal, private social networking platforms used for communications and collaboration within an organization.

4. Knowledge Flow: How knowledge moves through organizations, including creation, identification, collection, review, sharing, access, and use.

5. Social Media: Web- and mobile-based technologies used to turn communication into interactive dialogue among organizations, communities, and individuals.

Frank created the following content. I have curated it to represent his contributions to the field.

Books by Frank Leistner

Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work

Chapter 1: The Human Touch

Because executive buy-in and leadership is a major success factor in driving organizational knowledge flows, it is also important that chief executive officers (CEOs) have the proper understanding as they get involved with strategies. After all, the CEOs are the ones who put the topic high on the future agendas of their organizations.

Knowledge management in the current understanding is often seen as a very technical, software-oriented area, and some people see it as relevant for high-tech organizations only, exclusively for those knowledge workers who spend most of their time online.

With the wider view I am taking, I claim that managing knowledge flows is something that can be applied and used in almost any type of organization. If you detach yourself from the idea that it is about storing “knowledge” in a database, you will see that it is applicable to you, even if you work in an environment that sees itself as being highly nontechnical. Some principles will even work for a group of physiotherapists sharing their experiences in various ways, such as in workshops, expert circles, and online forums.

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If you want to take only one thing from this book, then let it be the fact that successful knowledge flow management needs a holistic approach and that working on the hard stuff (the people issues) will be your most important task. By holistic approach I mean an approach that covers all elements according to their final impact on success.

Many people still believe that technology is the biggest portion of that equation. But with many organizations considering that their KM initiatives have failed, it seems clear that the other two (people and process) probably did not get the attention they deserved.

What do I mean when I talk about focus on people? Especially within the area of knowledge flow management, it is essential that people are fully involved, motivated, and prepared to share high-potential information based on knowledge they built. Otherwise, any initiative that attempts to enable knowledge to flow through the organization will provide only a fraction of the potential value. And to take it to the extreme, every cent invested in technology could be a pure waste of money. Without proper real attention to the other components for success, you might as well invest the money into something more worthwhile. In fact, if you get presented with any proposal for a “KM” initiative that will spend 95 percent on technology and only 5 percent on (ongoing) costs for support functions (and this includes not only technical support, but marketing, training, strategy, etc.), you might as well take the 95 percent sum and donate it to a good cause of your choice.

Connecting Organizational Silos: Taking Knowledge Flow Management to the Next Level with Social Media

Chapter 1: Your Organization Is Not “The Web”

Humans are a social species, which means usually we like to interact. For most people, sharing knowledge within the right, trustworthy environment is a positive experience. My experience on the SAS Enterprise Social Network (ESN), The Hub, was based on stories from people I trusted who had successfully resolved the same problem I was tackling. Stories are an important element for knowledge flows, but in larger organizations, face-to-face interaction is not always possible, so the stories that transport knowledge in a small environment have to be shared differently in a large environment. That is a challenge that once seemed to indicate a key limitation of digital knowledge sharing, but the participative functions of Web 2.0 provided a whole range of ways for people to interact on a daily basis—not only between different sites in the same company, but also across organizations, between individuals, and across major cultural and geographic borders.

Let us look for a moment at how social media has led to flows of knowledge between individuals across the globe that do not know each other. Where did the trust that is necessary for these interactions come from? Part of it is that information exchanges are often very specific and fairly risk-free. For example, if I want to buy a book on the Internet and rely on recommendations from two or three strangers, I am not taking a big risk. Over time, and by basing judgment on a critical mass of input, trust rises so that those consumer reviews on Amazon are actually of value for my decision. The majority of people commenting on products, hotel rooms, or services intend to share something of value. They are also able to see the value of the collaborative contributions of the crowd unfold.

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What role can a social media platform play in helping virtual teams? First of all, it can provide a general meeting place that anyone in an organization can usually get to very easily. So, just like anyone else, teams can agree to meet there to create groups (open or private ones) and organize themselves (around topics or projects). But teams usually do not operate in complete isolation either; they have other parties that they interact with to fulfill their tasks. An ESN provides some very good ways to enable this type of connection. The way that conversations are held on an ESN is usually a lot more visible, especially with the history of arguments and counterarguments. While this history does usually not go back for years, it does document recent discussions very well for all team members to see and learn from. As a result, learning and decision making are often faster with more participants—either those that are part of the team or others preliminary to the team.

From the SAS Global Professional Services Blog

5 Keys to Building a Successful Enterprise Social Network

1. Don’t start a social media effort with the goal to run it as a top management tool to inform your employees.
2. Look at it as a long-term initiative not as a short-term project. Technology will only be one part of the solution.
3. Get your most experienced social media experts (e.g., your bloggers) on board and get them to help you build momentum.
4. Choose an open and passionate community manager that is likely to stick with the initiative longer-term.
5. Create and manage a pulse through regular and ongoing activities. It will give your initiative the lifeline it will need to survive longer-term and provide a much higher return of investment.