We make cars. Lubricants are used everywhere in our cars – the engine, gearbox, differential, wheel bearings, alternator bearings, steering wheel bearings, window winders, on and on. We have a lubrication engineer, Olive D’Oyle. The lubrication engineer’s job is to make sure we use the right lubricant at all these points. If the engine is running at a higher temperature, we may need a different lubricant, but it would need to be compatible with the automatic gearbox fluid, and have a life that met our warranty, and lots of other stuff (or we may need to be told not to do it). We didn’t define the role precisely – the incumbent can’t say – "I don’t do windows, because that would get me involved in the car body, I only do drive trains". The problem was we were degreasing the arm of the window winder before assembly and stripped out the slide lubricant, so Olive had to work with our suppliers. Then we had a problem in the paint dip bath – a motor didn’t appreciate the combination of heat and thinners vapour and its bearing ran dry, so Olive fixed that. Now she works all through the processing equipment used to create the product. Then it got ridiculous – the CEO complained about his blinds squeaking, so poor Olive had to go and advise on a new type of solid lubricant no-one else had heard about. That got her into infrastructure. Apparently, early in Olive’s tour with us, she was approached by the tea-lady.
TL – Can you help me with my squeaking trolley, sweetie.
Olive – No, my role is only to support the processes of lubrication, not to be actively involved in them.
TL (who had been a Mob boss in a previous life) – Listen kiddo, don’t send me off to a nonexistent department for Lubricating Tea Trolleys. Help me with this, or you get a cream pie in the kisser.
Olive – OK, OK. The Mark IX tea trolley has sealed wheels, so can’t be relubricated. Get Purchasing to buy you a new one.
Since that day, Olive has got herself involved in everything we do, without being pushy except when it is needed. The CEO loves her, says she makes the place run like a well oiled machine. He doesn't forget that she stopped a recall on a million engines before it could happen, stopped us from going broke. Olive is normally pretty self-effacing, but that day she had to face up to the Chief Engineer and the Vice President of Marketing, and tell them it couldn't be done.
The lubrication engineer is not imperialistic, but very occasionally has to strongly intervene to prevent failure. I see a KMer’s role as much like this – everywhere, but in the background. Sometimes the advice is – don’t use human knowledge, get IT to do it. Sometimes, we need more people in Department X or we will have a serious safety problem, they are not keeping up to date. Sometimes, sorry, but IT can’t do this one, or not yet anyway – there is too much flux in the application.
We are pitching the benefits of KM to a CEO of a major corporation or the director of a government agency.
KMer – We should set up a Knowledge Office. It will decide what are knowledge processes, and it will decide the conditions under which it will support them.
CEO – Let me get this straight. I should set up a new bureaucracy to do what – have more turf wars. When it is set up, you will fight with IT over what you see as knowledge access, and they see as a cycle path that no-one uses taking up a lane of their information superhighway. You will want your knowledge repository front and centre, they will see a lot of high value corporate disk space that is never accessed and should be archived.
KMer – But if we build it, they will come.
CEO – I’m not so sure. I looked at that Yellow Pages thing. If I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, I couldn’t use it, and if I did know what I wanted, I didn’t use it. And anyway, a Google search on the Intranet told me something more interesting – we have three departments claiming to do Developing Countries Financial Delegation, when I thought we had abandoned the practice. Was your Yellow Pages going to tell me that?
KMer – But that’s not really KM. What about your people exchanging horror stories?
CEO – You are setting us up for failure – that’s how you get horror stories. As a company, we have high goals – we try very hard not to make mistakes. It’s fine if they sit around and swap ways of minimising and avoiding risk, but they already do that – it is so obvious we don’t need a new bureaucracy to tell us that.
KMer - What about knowledge from cultural artifacts?
CEO - What about it. People took a century to unravel Egyptian hieroglyphics. We have a timescale out to the next quarter's earnings. Get real. Talk about the here and now, not some hypothetical benefit.
KMer - When we have clearly marked bins in the organisation for its knowledge, things will run better.
CEO – No they won’t. Firstly, you will just blame the people for any shortcomings. I can do that now, but I think, to be fair, we are too slow to expose our people to new knowledge, some of the knowledge is fleeting and needs to be acted on more quickly than we do, some people are overloaded with the sort of knowledge flux in their jobs, some of the knowledge leaks out of our organisation to our competitors, like oil out of a sump. That’s an idea. Why can’t you be more of a team player like Olive D’Oyle. Talk to Olive about how to make changes in an organisation in a painless way. Secondly, knowledge can’t be captured in bins – I don’t know what knowledge I will need every day, where I will get useful knowledge from. What if there is no bin for what I want, when I don’t even know what I want. You will need to promise something much more active and dynamic than I have heard so far. If you can show how to make the organisation hum like a well-oiled machine without new turf wars, I will be all ears. I am sure IT could use the different way of looking at things, but you will have to sell your ideas to them, I’m not going to impose them.