Thought leader: Crunch time

By Juliet Humphries

The economic gloom seems to deepen with each passing day and increasing stories of redundancies and budget cuts are enough to darken any knowledge management (KM) professional’s heart. However, perhaps now is a good time to reflect on the past ten years of KM and what we have been trying to achieve and consider whether this meets the needs of the current economic climate?
As the millennium approached we were grappling with the idea and implementation of communities of practice and after-action learning. Then, as we entered the current decade, we found ourselves focusing on aligning our KM strategy to our organisation’s business strategy and ‘selling’ the benefits of KM to our partners and business leaders. We then preoccupied ourselves with KM and business integration. With the self- evident linkages, in particular, between business development, learning and development and KM this led to an unprecedented rise in knowledge-focused projects and the broadening of the knowledge professional’s role. And of course the past ten years has also seen the evolution of technologies to better support KM initiatives. So where does this leave us now?
For those firms where KM is truly embedded, there may be a need to juggle budgets and put projects on hold, but the intrinsic value of KM will remain unassailable. The need to know (how, why, what, who, and so on) is understood to be fundamental to sustaining a healthy business. However, for other firms the current KM road may seem a bit rockier. There are many articles being written about how KM can and should prosper in an economic downturn and most of what is written cannot be argued with, at least in theory. But – yes there is a but – we are dealing with organisations that are not used to failure, however large or small, and organisations which are often not good at listening. There is a danger that the positive KM messages that exist will get lost as management focus turns to financials and reducing head count.
Should we continue to argue the KM case? Yes certainly, but some of us need to sharpen our message and our service delivery. We cannot continue to duplicate knowledge resources that we also pay hard cash for and we cannot continue to perform knowledge tasks that may, in a harder financial climate, be perceived as nice to have. Many law firms have shied away from hard KM metrics in the past with some justification. How do you attribute financial gain to any one piece of knowledge or knowledge activity? However, difficult the task may appear, KM needs to focus its activity on those areas which will deliver greater efficiencies to the business process and deliver real financial results. This is going to require hard work, good communication and close cooperation with our finance functions as well as those charged with managing the firm
KM has grown up a lot during the past 10 years but these are tough times and KM in many firms still needs to get a lot sharper in its message and its delivery.

Juliet Humphries is head of knowledge and learning at Bird & Bird. She can be contacted at: juliet.humphries@twobirds.com