The Solution

Over the course of four months, EK facilitated focus groups and interviews with team members from across various business units at the organization to gather a diverse array of perspectives and establish a reference point upon which to analyze their current state and measure future success. The baseline scores for each workstream (People, Process, Content, Culture, Technology) within EK’s proprietary KM Maturity Benchmark were provided to the organization to allow them to gain an understanding of which factors were the most impactful on KM across the organization, as well as strengths they could leverage and areas where they could improve. Through these activities and a review of pertinent systems and documentation, EK identified critical business needs surrounding KM and the challenges that team members faced.

After a thorough analysis of their present capabilities, EK again utilized our KM Maturity Benchmark and collaborated with the company to prioritize three areas of focus:

• Enterprise Search: Implement a universal enterprise search tool to locate and pull content from all integrated systems and repositories across the enterprise, and present action-oriented search results in an intuitive manner to enable employees to find the answer to their query before or at the time of need.
• Content Strategy: Develop an enterprise content strategy to address current and future processes for content management, with the intent of mitigating unstructured content that is duplicative, obsolete, or outdated.
• KM Leadership: Establish an enterprise-wide approach to KM leadership, and formalize responsibilities for securing and procuring KM resources.

These recommendations, among others, were leveraged to create a fully customized, actionable KM Roadmap spanning three years, outlining activities, their estimated duration, and the order in which to approach them to guide the development of current KM practices at the organization.

The EK Difference

In EK’s conversations with the organization’s core team and stakeholders, we observed a keen interest in implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) within the organization, but no enterprise-level guidance to do so. We dug deeper to understand and learn more about their desires for AI concurrent to our assessment of their organization. To help educate and support the organization in their journey to Enterprise AI, EK held an AI Knowledge Share for approximately 50+ employees. EK also outlined three pilots that could be pursued to achieve more advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, providing staff with powerful tools to find and discover information at the time of need.

A key element of our assessment was the usage of EK’s proprietary KM Maturity Benchmark to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the five KM workstreams within the organization – People, Process, Content, Culture, and Technology. Each factor in the benchmark is based on proven KM best practices and denotes measurable practices and characteristics within an organization which are then evaluated by our team of impartial experts, reducing bias in defining the current state of KM at the organization and providing them with an industry-relevant, quantifiable measurement of their KM maturity. This analysis allowed EK to provide a practical baseline for context-based recommendations and ensured that we delivered a highly detailed and actionable plan for solving the organization’s KM needs.

EK approached this project with a unique combination of “soft” and “hard” recommendations and techniques, bridging the gap between KM concepts (people, process, content, culture) and practical KM solutions (technology, integrations). By combining employee focus groups and interviews with a quantifiable benchmark, EK was able to address each type of challenge in the organization, from search and content difficulties to a desire for greater KM expertise and leadership.

The Results

Over the course of this engagement, EK provided the organization with the following:

• Current State Assessment and Benchmark that assessed KM practices and tools throughout the organization, providing them with a deeper understanding of their KM maturity level and identifying high-impact areas for improvement;
• Target State Assessment and Benchmark that defined the future state of KM at the company, focusing on the improvements that will yield the greatest impact and business value. The Target State represents a realistic vision for what the organization can achieve upon improvement beyond the current baseline; and
• A fully customized, iterative, task-based KM Roadmap and Recommendations that addressed this organization’s KM needs and gaps to help the organization enhance its overall KM maturity and achieve its strategic objectives. The Roadmap included 14 recommended activities focused on Enterprise Search, Content Strategy, and KM Leadership, as well as provided metrics upon which to measure the organization’s success to help emphasize the business value of knowledge management to stakeholders and leadership.

Leveraging these deliverables will allow this organization to increase employee engagement by supporting cross-functional communication, enabling employees to work more efficiently and share knowledge more effectively. This will also boost productivity and increase rates of collaboration, retention, and satisfaction while cultivating innovation and creativity within the organization by building connection and collaboration among employees. The company will also be able to enhance their client reputation by eliminating discrepancies in product documentation and providing their employees the tools to better support customers, drive company performance by increasing exposure to new ideas across the enterprise, and secure information in shared spaces to prevent unintentional disclosures. Finally, these deliverables will ensure alignment across teams to a single set of goals and expectations for Enterprise AI, grounding the company in a future-oriented mindset.

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.