Marc Aafjes’ Blog

I joined APQC’s 13th annual KM conference in Chicago between 30 April - 2 May 2008. A good gathering of practitioners from both private and public organisations with great presentations from thought leaders such as Larry Prusak and Steven Denning as well as interesting practitioner case studies. Here’s an overview of the conference. APQC also took this opportunity to launch a new KM site: www.kmedge.org

I also shared a bit about what we’re doing at Vodafone and clarified the concept I call ‘the Shadow Organisation’. Let me briefly explain this concept as the slides don’t really do this - by the way you can find the presentation at the bottom of the page or here. By connecting various participants across the company around the execution of our knowledge strategy we’re cultivating a meta network - the shadow organisation - that enables the company to enhance the value we dervie from the knowledge we have. Framing knowledge management in economic terms^1., the shadow organisation in effect is ‘making the market for knowledge’ by connecting otherwise disparate parts of the company around knowledge needs. This shadow organisation consists of the change agents that help us execute the knowledge strategy and embed sustainable change in all parts of the company.

The 5 key groups within the shadow organisation are:

1. Global Knowledge Champions in the functions (i.e. Finance, Marketing, Technology, etc.) - these are global senior leaders responsible for a major functional area.
2. Operating Company Champions (or business unit) - managers that support local execution of the programme and often have a senior staff function (i.e. local CEO office member).
3. Local Ambassadors/Brokers - these are employees (with varying seniority) recruited by the operating company champions within the various functions to support local execution with an emphasis on the function they’re part of.
4. Global Community Leaders - we have nearly 100 global knowledge communities in Vodafone and the leaders of these are a critical link as they structurally bring together people around specific knowledge domains. Where it comes to finding knowledge on a particular issues, they are often the initial experts responding to the need. The Global Knowledge Champions are often guardians/sponsors of these communities within their function.
5. Central KM team and project leads - we have a small central KM team that leads the execution, enables coordination and acts as an expertise area on KM matters. On specific projects (i.e. incentives & recognition, enterprise search, etc.) this is strengthened with leads and resources from other parts of the business such as HR and IT (these resources are often arranged by the Knowledge Champions).

While I wouldn’t argue that cultivating a shadow organisation is easy or that we’ve executed it perfectly, it does deliver a host of major benefits. Without spelling all of them out in detail let me highlight 2 which I believe touch the core of the most common and hard challenges practitioners face when executing a holistic knowledge strategy: securing funding and delivering sustainable change.

• Low centralised costs equals easier funding: a small central team means low costs and hence eases funding discussions. Almost without exception do KM leaders come across the challenge of having to continuously justify KM initiatives and my experience is that while most people acknowledge the potential high gain of KM, they get more adverse when high investments are required to achieve benefits that are inherently hard to measure, quantify or attribute directly. Some large multinationals have central KM teams topping 30 to 40 people and while this can definitely help accelerate initiatives it is unlikely to succeed in the long term as the real pay-off of strategic KM initiatives often goes beyond current or near-term budget rounds. Besides jeopardising funding, it also often means that the central teams takes on operational KM tasks (i.e. working with teams to learn from experiences with methods such as ‘after action reviews’ or ‘retrospects’) which I strongly believe should be taught and embedded across the business rather than done centrally.
• Widely distributed and empowered change agents enable sustainable change: enhancing value from knowledge requires sustainable change which from my experience requires a non-hierarchical network of change agents across the business. Especially when widely spread and enabled to ’self organise’, discrete activities from change agents start to reinforce each other. While there is also a good case to be made by focusing effort one part of the business to change with the aim of making success contagious, I believe that a company wide approach with small success stories everywhere not only increases the ability to achieve sustainable change for KM but also increases the overall value from the network effects that more rapidly can be tapped into.

I hope this clarifies the concept a bit more. Since the conference I had some interesting discussion with fellow participants - I’m looking forward to experiences from others on cultivating a shadow organisation.

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1. see the McKinsey Quarterly Article by Lowell Bryan “Making a Market in Knowledge” for a nice description of this [↩]