The Retirement Cliff and Its Implications

The “retirement cliff” refers to the impending wave of retirements as a significant portion of the workforce—particularly Baby Boomers—reaches retirement age. According to labor market trends, millions of experienced professionals are set to retire in the coming years, posing a critical challenge for organizations. The departure of seasoned employees risks the loss of institutional knowledge, technical expertise, and key relationships, leading to operational disruptions and costly efforts to regain lost expertise.

One of the most immediate financial consequences Enterprise Knowledge has seen on several of our engagements is the growing reliance on retirees returning as contractors to fill knowledge and capability gaps, often at significantly higher costs than their original salaries. While this can provide a short-term fix, it also creates a long-term liability. Research from Harvard Business Review and other labor market analyses shows that rehiring former employees without structured knowledge transfer can perpetuate a cycle of dependency, inflate workforce costs, and suppress the development of internal talent. Organizations may pay premium contract rates while still losing institutional knowledge over time, especially if critical expertise remains undocumented or siloed. Without proactive strategies, such as structured succession planning, mentoring, and systematic knowledge capture, organizations risk operational disruption, weakened continuity, and increased turnover-related costs that can amount to billions of dollars annually.

The Role of Knowledge Management in Succession Planning

Knowledge management plays a vital role in succession planning by implementing systems and practices that ensure critical expertise is systematically captured and transferred across generations of employees. Documenting key insights, best practices, and institutional knowledge is essential for mitigating the risk of knowledge loss. This process helps to strengthen organizational continuity and ensures that employees have the knowledge they need to perform their roles effectively and make informed decisions.

The Retirement Cliff: Challenges & Solutions

While the table highlights immediate challenges and corresponding solutions, organizations benefit from a deeper set of strategies that address both near-term risks and long-term sustainability. The following sections expand on these themes, outlining actionable approaches that help organizations capture critical knowledge today, while laying the foundation for resilient succession planning tomorrow.

Near-term Strategies: Mitigating Immediate Risk

Engage Employees in Knowledge Capture Efforts

Long-tenured employees approaching retirement have accumulated invaluable institutional knowledge, and their sustained tenure itself demonstrates their consistent value to the organization. When a retirement cliff is looming, organizations should take action to engage those employees in efforts that help to capture and transfer key institutional knowledge before it is lost.

Cast a Wide, Inclusive Net

Organizations often lack visibility into actual retirement timelines. Rather than making assumptions about who might retire or inadvertently pressuring employees to reveal their plans, frame knowledge transfer efforts as part of comprehensive KM practices. By positioning these initiatives as valuable for all long-tenured employees—not just potential retirees—organizations create an inclusive environment that captures critical knowledge. This broader approach not only prepares for potential retirement-related knowledge gaps but also establishes ongoing knowledge transfer as a standard organizational practice.

Acknowledge and Thank Employees

Explicitly acknowledge the expertise and contributions of key knowledge holders participating in efforts. By recognizing their professional legacy and expressing the organization’s desire to preserve and share their wisdom with others, leaders can create a foundation for meaningful participation in knowledge transfer activities. This approach validates key members’ career impact while positioning them as mentors and knowledge stewards for the next generation. Consider setting aside some time from their normal responsibilities to encourage participation.

Reward Knowledge Sharing

Employees are far more likely to engage in knowledge transfer when it is seen as both valuable and valued. In EK’s experience, organizations that successfully foster a culture of knowledge sharing often embed these behaviors into their core talent practices, such as performance evaluations and internal recognition programs. For example, EK has helped to incorporate KM contributions into annual review processes or introduce peer-nominated awards like “Knowledge Champion” to highlight and celebrate individuals who model strong knowledge-sharing behaviors.

Enable Employees to Capture Knowledge

Effective knowledge transfer begins with capturing critical institutional knowledge. This includes both explicit knowledge, such as processes and workflows, and tacit knowledge, such as decision-making frameworks, strategic insights, and the rationale behind past choices. To guide organizations in successful knowledge capture and transfer practices, EK recommends implementing a variety of strategies that help build confidence and make the process manageable.

Provide Documentation Training and Support

Organizations should consider offering dedicated support through roles and teams that naturally align with KM efforts, such as technical documentation, organizational learning and development, or quality assurance. These groups can help introduce employees to the practice and facilitate more effective capture. For example, many organizations focus solely on documenting step-by-step processes, overlooking the tacit knowledge that explains the “why” behind key decisions to provide future employees with critical context. In EK’s experience, preserving and transmitting knowledge of past actions and opinions has given teams the confidence to make more informed decisions and ensure coherence in guidance. This approach is especially valuable from a legal perspective, where understanding the rationale behind decisions is crucial for consistency and compliance.

Help Prioritize the Knowledge to Capture

Organizations can help focus knowledge capture efforts, without overwhelming employees, by prioritizing the types of knowledge to capture. If knowledge falls into one of these categories, it is ideal to prioritize:

1. 1. Mission-Critical Knowledge – High-impact expertise that is not widely known (e.g., decision-making rationales, specialized processes) is at greatest risk for loss. Encourage employees to prioritize this knowledge first.

1. 1. Operational Knowledge – Day-to-day processes that can be captured progressively over time. Suggest to employees that they take advantage of workflows and cycles as they are completed to document knowledge in real time from beginning to end.

1. 1. Contextual Knowledge – Broader insights from specific projects and initiatives are best captured in collective discussions or team reflections from various participants. Aim to make arrangements to put team members in conversation with one another and capture insights.

Embed Knowledge Capture into Workflows

Rather than treating documentation as a separate task, organizations should embed it into the existing processes and workflows where the knowledge is already being used. Integrating documentation creation and review into regular processes helps normalize knowledge capture as a routine part of work. In practice, this may look like employees updating Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) during routine tasks, recording leadership reflections during key decisions, or incorporating “lessons learned” or retrospective activities into project cycles. Additionally, structured after-action reviews and reflective learning exercises can further strengthen this practice by documenting key takeaways from major projects and initiatives. Beyond improving project and knowledge transfer outcomes, these habits also build durable knowledge assets that support AI-readiness.

Design Succession-Focused Knowledge Sharing Programs

Cultural silos and resistance to sharing knowledge often undermine succession planning. Employees may hesitate to share what they know due to fears about losing job security, feeling undervalued, or simply lacking the time to do so. To overcome these challenges, organizations must implement intentional knowledge transfer programs, as outlined below, that aim to prevent a forthcoming retirement cliff from leaving large gaps.

Create Knowledge Transfer Interview Programs

Pairing long-tenured staff with successors ensures that critical institutional knowledge is passed on before key departures. Create thoughtful interview programming that takes the burden off the experienced staff from initiating or handling administrative efforts. EK recently partnered with a global automotive manufacturing company to design and facilitate structured knowledge capture and transfer plans for high-risk roles that were eligible for retirement, including walkthroughs of core responsibilities, stakeholder maps, decision-making criteria, and context around ongoing initiatives. These sessions were tracked and archived, enabling smoother transitions and reducing institutional memory loss. EK also supported a federal agency in implementing a leadership knowledge transfer interview series with retiring senior leaders to capture institutional knowledge and critical insights from their tenure. These conversations focused on navigating the agency’s operations, lessons for successors, and role-specific takeaways. EK distilled these into concise, topical summaries that were tagged for findability and reuse, laying the foundation for a repeatable, agency-wide approach to preserving institutional knowledge.

Foster Communities of Practice

Encourage cross-functional collaboration and socialize knowledge sharing across the organization by establishing communities of practice.  The programs provide opportunities for employees to gather regularly and discuss a common professional interest, to learn from each other through sharing ideas, experiences, and best practices. Involve long-tenured staff in these efforts and encourage them to develop topics around their expertise. EK has seen firsthand how these practices promote ongoing knowledge exchange, helping employees stay connected and informed across departments, even during leadership transitions.

Offer Formal Knowledge Exchange Programs

Knowledge Exchange Programs, like job shadowing, expert-led cohorts, and mentorship initiatives, create clear pathways for employees to share and document expertise before transitions occur. Long-tenured employees are often excellent candidates to take the leading role in these efforts because of the vast knowledge they hold.

Ultimately, effective succession planning is not just about capturing what people know—it is about creating a culture where knowledge transfer is expected, supported, and celebrated. By addressing resistance and embedding knowledge-sharing into the rhythm of daily work, organizations can reduce risk, improve continuity, and build long-term resilience.

Long-term Strategies: Building Sustainable Knowledge Flow

While short-term efforts can help reduce immediate risk, organizations also need long-term strategies that embed knowledge management into daily operations and ensure continuity across future workforce transitions. That is why EK believes Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Knowledge Intelligence (KI) are essential tools in capturing, contextualizing, and preserving knowledge in a way that supports sustainable transitions and continuity.

Below are long-term, technology-enabled strategies that organizations can adopt to complement near-term efforts and future-proof institutional knowledge.

Structure and Contextualize Knowledge with a Semantic Foundation

EK sees contextual understanding as central to KM and succession planning, as adding business context to knowledge helps to illuminate and interpret meaning for users. By breaking down content into dynamic, structured components and enriching it with semantic metadata, organizations can preserve not only the knowledge itself, but also the meaning, rationale, and relationships behind it. EK has supported clients in building semantic layers and structured knowledge models that tag and categorize lessons learned, decisions made, and guidance provided, enabling content to be reused, assembled, and delivered at the point of need. This approach helps ensure continuity through leadership transitions, reduces duplication of effort, and allows institutional knowledge to evolve without losing its foundational context.

Leverage Knowledge Graphs and Intelligent Portals

Traditional knowledge repositories, while well-intentioned, often become static libraries that users struggle to navigate. EK has helped organizations move from these repositories to dynamic knowledge ecosystems by implementing knowledge graphs and a semantic layer. These approaches connect once disparate data, creating relationships between concepts, decisions, and people.

To leverage the power of the knowledge graph and semantic layer, EK has designed and deployed knowledge portals for several clients, providing a means for users to engage with the semantic layer. These portals consolidate information from multiple existing systems into a streamlined, user-friendly landing page. Each portal is designed to serve as a central hub for enterprise knowledge, connecting users to the right information, experts, and insights they need to do their jobs, while also supporting smoother transitions when staff move on or new team members step in. With intuitive navigation and contextualized search, the portal helps staff quickly find complete, relevant answers across multiple systems, explore related content, and access expertise—all within a single experience.

Augment Search and Discovery with Artificial Intelligence

To reduce the friction of finding and applying knowledge, EK has helped clients enhance knowledge portals with AI capabilities, integrating features like context-aware search, intelligent recommendations, and predictive content delivery.  These features anticipate user intent, guide employees to relevant insights, and surface related content that might otherwise be missed. When paired with a strong semantic foundation, these enhancements transform a portal from a basic search tool into an intelligent instrument that supports real-time learning, decision-making, and collaboration across the enterprise.

Automate and Scale Tagging with AI-Assisted Curation

Manual tagging is often cited as one of the more time-consuming and inconsistent aspects of content management. To improve both the speed and quality of metadata, EK has helped clients implement AI-assisted tagging solutions that automatically classify content based on a shared taxonomy.

We recommend a human-in-the-loop model, where AI performs the initial tagging, and subject matter experts validate results to preserve nuance and apply expertise. This approach allows organizations to scale content organization efforts while maintaining accuracy and alignment.

For example, we partnered with a leading development bank to build an AI-powered knowledge platform that processed data from eight enterprise systems. Using a multilingual taxonomy of over 4,000 terms, the platform automatically tagged content and proactively delivered contextual content recommendations across the enterprise. The solution dramatically improved enterprise search, reduced time spent locating information, and earned recognition from leadership as one of the organization’s most impactful knowledge initiatives.

Integrate Technology, People, and Process Within Succession Planning

The most successful organizations do not treat knowledge technologies as standalone tools. Instead, they integrate them into broader KM and succession planning strategies, ensuring these solutions support, rather than replace, human collaboration and expertise.

In EK’s experience, when AI, knowledge graphs, and semantic metadata are used to enhance existing processes—like onboarding, leadership transitions, or project handovers—they become powerful enablers of continuity. These tools help protect institutional knowledge, reduce bottlenecks, and enable repeatable practices for knowledge transfer across roles, teams, and time.

As part of a long-term KM strategy, this allows organizations to evolve from reactive knowledge capture to proactive, ongoing knowledge flow.

Measuring Knowledge Transfer Impact

As we have provided the tools and advice for ensuring impactful knowledge captures and transfers, measuring the effectiveness of knowledge transfer initiatives is the essential next step to ensure that succession planning goals are being met and that knowledge transfer efforts are producing meaningful outcomes. Key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics can help track the success of these initiatives and provide insights into their impact on the organization’s leadership pipeline.

Closing

Navigating the retirement cliff requires both immediate action and long-term planning. By addressing resistance, dismantling silos, embedding knowledge-sharing into daily work, and leveraging technology, organizations can reduce risk, preserve critical expertise, and build long-term resilience. Need help developing a strategy that supports both near-term needs and long-term success? Let’s connect to explore tailored solutions for your organization.

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This infographic showcases practical strategies we’ve implemented to foster knowledge sharing, ensuring critical expertise is captured, collaboration flourishes, and teams are equipped for long-term success.

Organizations can improve collaboration, streamline workflows, and strengthen problem-solving by creating an environment that supports and rewards knowledge sharing. Investing in knowledge sharing today ensures a smarter, more connected workforce ready to tackle future challenges. EK can help your organization improve collaboration and knowledge sharing, contact us to learn more.

The post Fostering a Knowledge-Sharing Mindset: How to Get People to Share What They Know appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

The Solution

Over a 5-month period, GCF partnered with Enterprise Knowledge to create a Knowledge Cafe program that addressed knowledge challenges and supported the organizational goals. The program was designed to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas across teams and enable new communication pathways to amplify learning and collaboration. Throughout the engagement, EK took an iterative approach, enabling the GCF team to ensure topics, deliverables, and training were aligned with their desired outcomes. 

In the initial phase, EK conducted discovery work to better understand the needs of stakeholders and ensure buy-in from leadership and employees. This was done through a series of interviews, in which business outcomes, desires, and topics of interests were discussed to tailor the approach. Desired outcomes for Knowledge Cafes included:

Figure 1: Expected Outcomes and Benefits of Knowledge Cafes at GCF

After the development of use cases and topics for discussion, EK facilitated two in-person pilot Knowledge Cafes to test different approaches to Cafe delivery and topics. These pilots were used to determine which Knowledge Cafe model would work best for GCF and to showcase different delivery modalities. EK also facilitated a retrospective of “lessons learned” that included pilot participant feedback and iterative sessions with the GCF team. EK used those lessons to develop a final version of GCF’s Knowledge Cafe Model and Manual.

Figure 2: In-person piloting of Knowledge Cafes at Green Climate Fund.

This Knowledge Cafe Model and Manual describes how to properly establish a Knowledge Cafe program. The manual includes details on all necessary considerations to deliver a repeatable, clearly communicated process. Lastly, EK delivered personalized training to prepare organizers and stakeholders for Cafe engagement. This training ensured a smooth transition of the Knowledge Cafe program to GCF at the end of the engagement to allow for the project’s long-term sustainability.

The EK Difference

The EK team’s discovery and analysis approach allowed the team to understand the workflows, pain points, cultural considerations, and desires of a variety of employees at GCF. EK utilized design thinking activities, including persona development and workshopping, to gain a better understanding of the needs, motivations, and hesitations of stakeholders. After learning about these needs, EK crafted tailored communications to accompany Knowledge Cafes in encouraging adoption of this new KM activity at GCF. 

EK also enacted an Agile approach that incorporated opportunities to engage in dialogue and feedback with GCF. EK utilized piloting techniques to validate assumptions, test different Cafe options, and gather learning. At the end of the pilot, EK performed a retrospective to adjust aspects of the Cafes to better fit GCF.

The Results

EK delivered a tailored Knowledge Cafe program to fit the needs of GCF. Knowledge Cafes strengthened a culture of collaboration, knowledge transfer, and learning. At the end of the process, the KM team was able to take full ownership of Cafes using resources such as reusable templates, presentation materials, and topics of interest backlog. 

Since the EK pilots, GCF has hosted regular Knowledge Cafes on topics ranging from personal interests to latest developments in climate change and climate finance. Over the first four Cafes, team members came together from across 14 different departments. Over 80% of participants fed back that the Knowledge Cafes allowed them to connect with colleagues that they don’t normally interact with. Over 80% of participants also fed back that the Cafes helped them feel included and comfortable sharing their insights during the sessions.

Figure 3: Graph illustrating participants’ self-reported connections across different divisions. Dark purple arcs represent new connections resulting from the two Knowledge Cafe pilots.

The consistent and positive response of participants showed that there is an appetite in the organization for a conversational type of knowledge sharing initiative that allows participants to listen and contribute without formal distinction between the panel, presenters, and participants. Knowledge Cafes have provided an opportunity to break down silos and foster a culture of collaboration within the organization. 

The Cafes have been a big success so far. We look forward to seeing Knowledge Cafes grow and evolve!

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If your organization is seeking innovative ways to promote Knowledge Management among your employees and stakeholders, EK is here to guide you. With extensive expertise in crafting and deploying strategies that enhance company culture and promote candid knowledge sharing, we are ready to provide you with tailored, operational insights. Hear directly from the experts on their KM experiences on EK’s Knowledge Cast guests about their KM experiences!

For a customized consultation and to learn more about how we can assist you, check out our KM Strategy & Design  and contact us for more information! 

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As investment consultants, my parents were contacted by a variety of people looking for advice on how to handle their finances, from a small savings account to million dollar inheritances. These conversations with customers were usually over the phone, and it was my parents’ job to turn those quick calls into actual client leads. In order to answer difficult questions and sound like experts in the financial world, they depended on Charles Schwab’s intranet and internal help desk. This information database and direct access to human resources supplied employees with a wealth of knowledge in a time when the internet was brand new and most companies didn’t have websites to advertise their products and services.  

Knowledge Management, in its simplest terms, is about connecting the right information to the right people at the right time. This concept is especially important in organizations where contact centers and help desks are a significant business function and employees with less experience may be speaking directly with potential clients or customers. Every employee in an organization, regardless of age or experience, should be equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to become an expert in their field and successfully communicate their company’s breadth of information and services to people who call in. In addition to the KM tools that will be detailed later in this blog, company leadership should prioritize and foster a culture of knowledge sharing, where information is routinely organized and shared in the correct channels and systems for enterprise-wide use. 

Help desks are frequently the primary point of contact for customers who have questions about the company’s products or services. Given frequent turnover and a difficult hiring environment, companies struggle to hire and retain the most knowledgeable people for their help desks. This is a problem, but cannot be an excuse. If experts are not available to fill these positions, those employees who do receive the calls need direct access to use cases, platform permissions, step-by-step instructions, links, and everything else that would be required to resolve the customers’ problems. 

Contact centers often serve a much broader purpose and are essentially a customer service department that handles customer complaints, orders, inquiries, etc. In this case, callers may already be frustrated, upset, or dissatisfied, making seamless access to the right information at the right time even more critical to deliver quality customer service. 

Apart from the knowledge sharing culture and values that a strong KM foundation provides, there are several specific KM tools that we recommend for superior customer service in any of these business areas:

	Knowledge Base A knowledge base is a repository of enterprise-wide knowledge that should be the primary source for call agents to solve and respond to customer queries. Similar to the one that my parents described working with all those years ago, a functional knowledge base should have intuitive search capabilities and a user interface that allows for easy and rapid navigation. This will improve employees’ experience as well as customer satisfaction, as employees will feel confident and empowered when they have the necessary resources at their fingertips to excel in their jobs.
	Artifacts  Call agents should also have direct access to artifacts that can be sent directly to customers for more detailed information or future reference. These can be FAQs, articles, how-to guides, device instructions, videos, or any other simple visual guide that can act as a follow-up to a customer call.
	Intelligent Chatbots There is no denying that in many companies, contact centers and help desks have declined in usage as customers have more and more access to self-service channels. Tech-savvy customers expect a useful and streamlined self-service experience, especially when contacting a larger company. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like chatbots can be extremely effective and dependable to solve customer problems and provide human-like resolutions using Natural Language Processing (NLP). When integrated with a knowledge base and visual guides, call agents can deflect calls directly to a chatbot with the confidence that those customers will get the answers they need as quickly as possible. This type of holistic support ensures that an organization provides assistance to every single customer while keeping employees from burnout and reducing support costs.

By establishing systematic and repetitive ways to deliver information to customers, an organization will possess consistent and positive customer experience as one of its key differentiators. Modern-day customers are used to digital self-service, but we all know how frustrating it can be to dial numbers over and over without ever finding a sufficient answer to a query. Until chatbots can entirely replicate human assistance, prioritizing Knowledge Management for contact centers and help desks will continue to improve customer service Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and give service organizations a competitive advantage unlike any other. 

Measuring customer service KPIs is a great way to quantify the effectiveness of KM in these parts of an organization. These KPIs can vary depending on the organization, but they include metrics like agent training time, agent errors, repeat calls, mean call time, resolution time, etc. Effective KM can help your organization lower customer service costs by reducing the time and efforts agents spend responding to customer inquiries, thereby building a strong business case for continued KM transformations. Are customer issues usually resolved during first contact? Are customers experiencing faster resolution times? Are agents prioritizing proactive development of self-service content based on common issues faced by customers? These are questions that KM stakeholders should seek answers to in order to identify service gaps in these departments and measure Return on Investment (ROI) from the implementation of the tools described above. These tools can be highly effective in improving these KPIs, and organizations should develop reporting that shows hard progress against these metrics to garner buy-in and support for KM efforts.

Once implemented, these tools can immediately begin demonstrating the benefits of KM for contact centers and help desks:

• Findability: With consistent and intuitive tagging of all content within a knowledge base, a call agent will be able to find direct answers to customer queries faster, easier, and more completely. A clear and easy user interface within a self-service portal will allow customers to quickly find answers to their questions and understand what an organization has to offer them. 
• Consistency: Information governance is a key tenant of good KM. An organization should establish governance processes for its knowledge base to ensure content remains new, accurate, and complete for call agents’ reference, varying from content reviews to ownership to workflows. Here at EK, we have seen countless knowledge bases overrun with outdated and obsolete content, and good governance practices are the best way to counteract that trend. 
• Collaboration: As mentioned before, a culture of knowledge sharing is a powerful way to ensure call agents and support staff are equipped for any customer question, even without the implementation of actual KM tools. Agents can work confidently knowing that they are surrounded by others who are willing to help and distribute knowledge in whatever way they can, adding another resource for agents who cannot immediately find what they are looking for in a knowledge base.  
• Consumability: Structured content (that with predefined formats and organization) will be easy for agents to read, quickly understand, and then act upon. Good KM will ensure content is delivered to agents in the right format, scale, and scope for the situation, maximizing readability and minimizing cognitive load. 
• Flexibility: Most of the time, an agent will need a quick and concise answer for a customer. However, in times when deeper answers are needed or desired, agents will have opportunities and resources to explore related content that is tagged similarly in the knowledge base.
• Supportability: Good KM dictates clear job roles and organizational structure. In more serious situations, agents will know when and to whom the situation should be escalated.

EK has experience with many projects of this nature, utilizing KM best practices to improve the efficiency of contact centers and help desks. One example is the work we did with the principal revenue collection agency of a national government overseas. In this engagement, the agency was having difficulty standardizing and managing content in their internal tool designed to guide service agents towards the correct information they need to support their customers. To help these service agents more easily locate content and navigate complex regulations and concepts, EK provided comprehensive Content Transformation Services which included Content Strategy and Governance Design. As a result of these efforts, the agency was positioned to standardize the way information is captured and managed across the enterprise, enabling content to become more findable, scannable, and intuitive to follow for service agents. Service agents spent less time finding applicable content within their internal tool, translating to a decrease in mean-time-to-resolve (MTTR) customer inquiries. 

Overall, Knowledge Management in contact centers and help desks makes it smoother and more efficient for agents to find and use information. Customers expect and will often demand timely, personalized service; if these needs are not met, the organization will likely lose that customer. Every organization with a contact center or help desk must make sure their agents are equipped and empowered with the right knowledge and tools to correctly answer questions and provide relevant information. By investing in KM in these areas, your organization can ensure the satisfaction and longevity of both customers and employees. Here at EK, we offer many services to help organizations improve document management, content governance, search functionality, and so much more that can further the best practices detailed above. If you think your organization could benefit from Knowledge Management, contact us today to learn more about our services.

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The Challenge

Their Challenge:

One of the top telecommunication companies in the world is pursuing an ambitious corporate strategy that entails a digital transformation of its entire operations, expanding its service offerings, and exploiting new business opportunities to become a global reference point and leader within its industry. They sought a partnership with Enterprise Knowledge (EK) to assess the company’s current knowledge management (KM) maturity and elaborate a vision for future KM capabilities and practice that would support this corporate agenda. 

During the process of defining a KM Strategy and Roadmap to guide the company in increasing its KM maturity, EK surfaced important considerations – based on the company’s culture and staff’s experience with past changes – that would need to be addressed when implementing the KM Strategy and Roadmap and introducing the associated changes:

• Communication around past initiatives has been either too complex for staff to understand the initiative’s value or hasn’t been sufficiently targeted to specific employee groups. Staff hasn’t had a clear understanding of how a change will benefit them, resulting in reduced engagement. 
• The company hasn’t typically established two-way communication channels during a change initiative to address concerns, mitigate resistance, correct misinformation, and allow for input that can drive improvements to those overseeing a change.
• Staff primarily follow vertical lines of communication to share information from senior leadership to non-supervisory employees. As a result, important information doesn’t always trickle down to non-supervisory employees. 
• Those in middle management have not been fully “activated” – they aren’t always communicating in a way to help their employees understand the need for and impact of an organizational change, nor are they holding their staff accountable to requested changes.
• There are many concurrent activities that are requiring staff to take on new projects and responsibilities, adapt to new requirements, and adjust ways of working. Staff are experiencing varying levels of change fatigue, and express uncertainty over how these initiatives are aligned and where to focus their attention.
• There are groups within the company who are more heavily invested in how things are done today as well as those who are more responsive to change. This reality plays out in the varying degrees to which people are willing to share information with their colleagues. 

The Solution

As part of EK’s nine-month, enterprise-wide effort to assess the company’s current KM maturity and elaborate a vision for future KM capabilities and practices, EK developed an Integrated Change Management Plan to support the implementation of the KM Strategy and Roadmap. To define a bespoke set of change management recommendations and communication practices, EK engaged internal stakeholders to discuss 1) lessons learnt from their past experiences with organizational changes, 2) the critical factors that mean the difference between success and failure on a project or change initiative, and 3) how information gets distributed across the organization and top down. EK disseminated and analyzed results of a KM survey to surface staff perspectives on what motivations (e.g., incentives, rewards, and recognition) could be offered or would be desired to support KM practices. Additionally, EK led interviews and workshops that informed our understanding of the company’s organizational structure, lines of authority, information flow patterns, cultural nuances, and those who could serve as key partners in supporting the KM Strategy and Roadmap. 

The Integrated Change Management Plans includes:

• A purpose statement to generate momentum and align on what success is anticipated to look like as a result of implementing the KM Strategy and Roadmap.
• A list of success indicators and preliminary activities to guide the company’s change management strategy and track whether outcomes are being realized. 
• The people who will be impacted by and whose involvement will be necessary in the implementation of the KM Strategy and Roadmap.
• Critical messages to use and considerations to keep in mind when communicating about the KM Strategy and Roadmap.
• Recommendations for how to address risks that are unique to the company’s culture and organization and that could jeopardize success of the KM Strategy and Roadmap if left unattended. 

The EK Difference

EK engaged the company’s KM project team in helping to define what success will look like for its KM Strategy throughout the implementation of the two-year Roadmap. Through holding a Visioning workshop with the KM project team, EK was able to co-create success indicators – i.e., outcome-based statements that are specific and measurable – that would ultimately support the company in tracking whether it is realizing the outcomes it hopes to achieve with a KM Strategy. This co-creation session was critical to gaining alignment on what success will look like and identifying a “North Star” for the Strategy. By engaging the KM project team as partners in this process, EK was able to understand what meaningful success looks like and develop a process that the company can use to define: corresponding metrics for each success indicator; the critical behaviors that will need to be performed consistently by the company’s workforce to bring about success; and the ways in which the company can provide support for critical behaviors to ensure those behaviors occur at the desired consistency and rate. 

The Results

The company was appreciative of the detail and customization that were evidenced in the Integrated Change Management Plan. The company continues to work with EK to provide training to KM team members focused on strengthening their ability to manage and lead change. With the Integrated Change Management Plan, the company’s KM Leadership Team are well equipped to: 

• Give the implementation of the KM Strategy and Roadmap high relevance and visibility;
• Facilitate open communication about the Strategy’s purpose and desired outcomes;
• Educate employees on how they can expect to benefit from having more robust knowledge capture, storing, and sharing practices in place;
• Communicate the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of leadership, middle management, and non-supervisory staff in leading and supporting the rollout of the KM Roadmap; and
• Make data-driven decisions on how to pivot communication and engagement strategies as needed.

The company’s Integrated Change Management Plan provides recommendations that will support the company’s workforce in sustainably adjusting to new ways of creating, managing, storing, and sharing knowledge, information and data. With an Integrated Change Management Plan to accompany its KM Strategy and Roadmap, the company is well positioned to realize its corporate agenda and goals of enabling staff to exchange knowledge, experience, and insights in support of collaborative problem-solving, decision-making, and the development of transformative services and platforms.

Integrated Change Management Plan for Top Telecommunications CompanyDownload

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You can register for the event by visiting the group’s Meetup page.

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Knowledge Management involves the people, process, culture, and enabling technologies necessary to Capture, Manage, Share, and Find information.

The actions at the end of that sentence are the most critical component. All good KM should be associated with business outcomes, value to stakeholders, and return on investment. We discuss these actions as follows:

• Capture entails all the forms in which knowledge and information (content) move from tacit to explicit, unstructured to structured, and decentralized to centralized. This ranges from an expert’s ability to easily share their learned experience, to a content owner’s ability to upload a document they’ve created or edited.
• Manage involves the sustainability and maturation of content, ensuring content becomes better over time instead of becoming bloated, outdated, or obsolete. This is about the content itself, its format, style, and architecture. Management also covers the appropriate controls and workflows necessary to protect it, and the people who may access it.
• Share includes both an individual’s and organization’s ability and capacity to collaborate and pass knowledge and information via a variety of means, ranging from one-to-one to one-to-all, synchronous to asynchronous, and direct to remote.
• Find covers the capabilities for the knowledge and information to be easily and naturally surfaced. The concept of findability goes well beyond traditional “search,” and includes the ability to traverse content to discover additional content (discoverability), connect with experts, and receive recommendations and “pushes.”

We’ve taken this simple definition as the foundation for what we call our KM Action Wheel. The Action Wheel expresses the type of actions we seek to encourage and enable for the organizations and individuals with whom we work. It adds a bit of additional specificity to the aforementioned:

• Create recognizes that a key element of good KM is not simply the capture of existing knowledge, but the creation of new knowledge. This can take a number of forms, from allowing knowledge creation by an individual via innovation forums or social reporting, to group knowledge creation via better and improved collaboration and collaboration systems.
• Enhance focuses on the fact that effective KM will lead not just to the creation and capture of knowledge, but the sustainable improvement of that knowledge. In short, this means creation and stewardship of the leadership, processes, and technologies to make information “better” over time rather than having it fall into disrepair. Content’s natural state is entropy, and good KM will counteract that. Enhancement also covers the application of metadata, comments, or linkages to other information in order to improve the complete web of knowledge.
• Connect drills in on the “Find” action mentioned above, recognizing that KM is more than access to knowledge and information in paper or digital forms, it is also about direct access and formation of connections with the holders of that knowledge. This concept is even more critical with more and more well-tenured experts leaving the workforce and taking their knowledge with them. The more KM can connect holders of knowledge with consumers of knowledge, the smarter an organization is, and the more effective it can be about transferring that knowledge.

KM is important, simply put, because many, if not most, organizations and their employees struggle to perform these aforementioned actions easily, consistently, or at all. Effective KM is that which allows individuals and organizations to perform the actions discussed above in an intuitive, natural, and relatively simple manner.

This is not to say that KM isn’t already happening in any number of good ways. Many organizations with whom we work have already invested significantly in their own KM maturity or are at least ready to do so. When we conduct a KM assessment for an organization we even more frequently find “hero KM’ers” who are doing their best to perform these actions not because it is part of their job description, or because their boss told them to, or because the company processes make it easy to do so, but because they understand their value and are trying. Very few organizations are starting from “0,” and many have the potential to make meaningful steps if they know how to proceed.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss how maturing your organization’s KM is important now more than ever, and cover the ways in which it can yield increased revenues, cost savings, and reduced risk for an organization.

Are you ready to get started turning your KM challenges into KM actions? Contact us and we’ll help you get started.

The post What is Knowledge Management and Why Is It Important appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.

Effective knowledge sharing is the lifeblood to knowledge-based organizations. High-performing organizations are ones that have mastered the art of empowering their newer employees with the knowledge and experience of the more-tenured, highlighting new ways of thinking and doing, and fostering a broad set of avenues for knowledge to flow up, down, and sideways throughout the organization.

Through my years of KM consulting, I’ve noted that too often an organization will focus on trying to fix the tools and technologies around knowledge capture, management, sharing, and finding, without addressing the behavior, processes, and culture that feeds mature knowledge sharing organizations.

Within this framework, the “if you build it they will come,” concept is blatantly false. Most team members won’t gravitate toward the shiny new tool just for the sake of it. A new technology may attract a small subset of early adopters or may generate an initial burst of interest, but without a focus on instilling and maintaining a culture of knowledge sharing in your organization, these tools can only do so much.

In my experience, there are three primary reasons people don’t share their knowledge, especially in the context of tacit knowledge capture in online KM Systems like communities of practice, micro-blogs, and threaded discussions.

• Lack of Priority – When we speak with knowledge holders we often hear phrases that include, “I don’t have time,” or “I’m too busy.” This often gets diagnosed as a lack of interest in sharing one’s knowledge, but at EK we often find the root cause to be a lack of priority stemming from management. If an organization doesn’t stress the value and importance of sharing knowledge, enterprise knowledge sharing can’t be woven into the fabric of the institution.
• Worry About Being Replaced – Everyone has heard the phrase, “Knowledge is Power.” Unfortunately, many people tend to consider this as job security. We often encounter individuals uninterested in knowledge sharing because they want to be the person with the answers. For them, empowering others with that knowledge means they’re less essential to the organization. We commonly see this in highly competitive organizations or functions and industries already experiencing high turnover.
• Fear of Getting in Trouble – In more heavily regulated organizations, individuals often have it drilled into them that anything digital is discoverable in court. This can sometimes lead to a negative loop, where individuals avoid documenting their knowledge. Even in less heavily regulated organizations, certain organizational cultures punish the squeaky wheel and instead encourage their employees to keep their heads down and get the job done the way it has always been done.

Though developing and sustaining a culture of knowledge sharing in your organization requires a broad array of techniques and tools, there are several keys that I find to be critical to overall success.

• Start at the Top – Knowledge sharing culture, like most organizational culture change, starts at the top. The leaders of an organization can invigorate or kill a knowledge sharing initiative based on the support they give it and whether they themselves use it. If an organization’s management sets knowledge sharing as a priority, it will be so. I recently had a CEO tell me he would write the first micro-blog for the company’s new wall and commit to visiting the space at least once a week. That type of leadership doesn’t always exist, but where it does, you’re likely to see a much easier transition to effective knowledge sharing at all levels.
• Reward and Honor Knowledge Sharing – Organizations that are the most effective at knowledge sharing are those that treat their experts like rock stars. The holders of knowledge should be rewarded not just for having it, but for sharing it. Effectively rewarding and honoring knowledge sharing can take many different forms. It can include tying knowledge sharing metrics to real incentives (bonuses, positive reviews, etc.), but certainly doesn’t have to. Simply recognizing individuals as experts and broadly thanking them is oftentimes enough. One organization with whom we’ve worked has begun providing unique online badges and titles to those who have shared their knowledge energetically and effectively, and the results have been excellent, with more in the organization seeking the same recognition and wanting to participate.
• Protect Your Knowledge Sharers – Ensure you’ve established appropriate governance, workflows, and training for knowledge sharing. This goes beyond saying “No, Stan, this is not the place for you to share pictures of your eight cats wearing matching bow ties.” Depending on the industry and framework of your organization, you need to protect your employees by putting the appropriate controls in place so they leverage their knowledge sharing tools in the ways for which they’re intended. Mistakes will happen, so having the right level of reviews and shepherding of content is also a critical investment to ensure these systems trend towards “better” instead of “worse.”
• Think About Email – People use email because it is easy, familiar, and fast. As you’re designing your future knowledge sharing systems and processes, recognize that it takes no more than 45 seconds to send an email with an attachment. Design your knowledge sharing system to allow someone to share in 45 seconds or less. That means sacrificing some level of granularity for the overall usability, but the level of participation will increase as the barrier to entry decreases. 
• Provide Context – Knowledge sharing systems without context quickly stagnate. If you’ve defined a broad and shallow community of practice for “Innovation” around your organization, don’t expect a lot of conversation. Knowledge sharing formats, especially at first, work best with more specific topics and context from day one. The fastest buy-in for knowledge sharing tools happen when the conversation has already begun. To that end, in advance of deploying a tool…
• …Seed Your Content – A critical step in the design and deployment of a knowledge sharing system is mapping what I call the “Eaters” and “Feeders” in the organization (those who will primarily consume content, and those who will primarily supply content). Recognize, too, that a Feeder on one topic is a potential Eater on another. Prior to rolling out a new tool, make sure you’ve enlisted a key number of your Feeders to begin conversations and use these tools in order that, by the time the Eaters get to see it, there’s something for them to consume.
• Communication Goes Both Ways – As with any KM initiative, two-way communications are critical for success. Help your users understand the importance and value of knowledge sharing, but also continuously seek their guidance and feedback on how to make it easier and better for them. If you’ve got a knowledge sharing tool or are planning on rolling one out, I strongly recommend you create a specific forum for ideas on how to improve the tool!

If you’re struggling with instilling a culture of knowledge sharing and setting up the right processes and technologies to leverage and help sustain it, let us know. We would love to share more of our own knowledge with you.

The post Why People Fail to Share Knowledge appeared first on Enterprise Knowledge.