Building a knowledge sharing culture requires that you
involve business users in development of your knowledge management solution early
and often. Here are some suggestions
based on my experience:
You can begin to get
your business users involved in the building the knowledge management solution
by having them help to identify the
documents or other content that has the most value to the business. I recommend
that you have business users participate in creating and applying the metadata
or taxonomy that will apply to the documents. The more precise you get in
describing content, the easier it will be to find later. By getting the community of users involved
early you can begin to explain knowledge management to them. The early participants and adopters can act
as evangelists later. With user feedback you can identify and tag the most
valuable material so that when users perform a search it appears at the top of
the results list.
There are other ways to begin to build the culture of
sharing. You will need to explain to
your business users: "What is in it for
me". They need to understand in a profoundly
personal way how they will benefit from the KM initiative and how their work
will change. This is usually done with
anecdotes about a success that resulted from sharing knowledge. You can find examples of when your company performed
the best; when everything worked just right, and ask people how it felt when
that happens. Most of the time, the best
practice involves collaboration, working as a team, and sharing knowledge to
win new business or deliver a high quality product. The KM solution will enable the company to
function like this more often. The
objective is to find a story you can tell about knowledge sharing that is very
positive and attractive. People can then begin to imagine how knowledge sharing
will help them with their work.
In addition to working with the business users, it's
critical to have visible top management support. This will not require much of top management's
time, but they will need to demonstrate their enthusiasm for knowledge
management frequently. They need to be
convinced that this is an initiative that will create meaningful results in the
business and they need to lead in that direction.
I recommend communicating frequently to business users, explaining
the KM planning and rollout and how it will benefit their work. Don't overpromise, but keep them well informed. Show them example screen shots of the search
page, or other functionality that will make their lives easier. You can use "use cases" or scenarios to
demonstrate how people will use the new tools.
This process of building actual scenarios that explain how users will
search and apply content is very powerful.