SMR International: Building the Knowledge Culture

SMR International has adopted Building the Knowledge Culture as its corporate statement of purpose. In this statement, the company announces its philosophy of service and contribution.

Shared both implicitly and directly with clients, colleagues, and affiliates, Building the Knowledge Culture declares SMR International’s intention to use its influence to ensure that knowledge is used both to enable employees to do their best work and to empower the organization to act responsibly in the larger global social environment.

At SMR International, it is our belief that all institutions, including those in the private sector, have a responsibility to all of society. We believe, as Peter F. Drucker wrote in the Preface to Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices(1973) that “if the managers of our major institutions, and especially of business, do not take responsibility for the common good, no one else can or will.”

As a management consulting practice specializing in knowledge strategy development, it is our goal to enable and empower organizational leaders for addressing the responsibility gap in management and in society.

KM/Knowledge Services: Can We All Play? Are Universities Included Too?

The traditional "home" for KM/knowledge services has been the corporate workplace, and while this is probably not the place to go into the reasons why (a future post, perhaps? or a guest post from a reader? a KM/knowledge services specialist?), we can quickly speculate that the for-profit field has often been the breeding ground for innovation.

And with accelerated innovation one of the four identified deliverables, you might say (along with strengthened research, contextual decision making, and high-level knowledge asset management) of knowledge services, it seems reasonable to latch on to the idea that the non-profits and the not-for-profit institutions have lagged behind.

Not so. Every day we hear about new venues for the study and implementation of KM/knowledge services, and a fascinating stream in this direction is higher education. Strategy development (ex - "strategic planning") has long been a mainstay of academic administrative focus, and many companies and organizations specializing in knowledge strategy development have happily found a welcome on the campuses of some of the more forward-thinking universities.

For academics - whether part of the faculty, administrative staff, or having some other connection with the academy (university librarians, for example) - how might to KM/knowledge services be approached? Is it simply a matter of changing the words and phrases? When we define knowledge management with Prusak's and Davenport's working with knowledge for the organization do we make it work in the academy simply by defining knowledge management as working with knowledge for the institution?

And for that matter, is the management approach for an academic institution (OK - the administrative approach) the same as it is for a corporation? A research institute? A manufacturing plant? What are the differences? Are they subtle or are they major? Can an academic institution embrace Peter Drucker's philosophy as willingly and as successfully as a for-profit operation (and, yes it can, for we all know of Drucker's solid connection with the academy and his great success with charitable institutions and other non-profits)?

The question then becomes simply one of direction, doesn't it? How can the principles and philosophies behind successful change management, say, in the KM/knowledge services environment be stated for an academic institution? What language do we use? And is that language going to work in other operational structures?

Let's find out.

Strategy Development: Descriptive or Prescriptive?

A long time ago (1966 was a long time ago, wasn’t it?), George A. Steiner was well recognized as one of strategy planning’s most famous authorities. While KM/knowledge services directors in the 21st century might use slightly more up-dated language than Steiner used 44 years ago, developing knowledge strategy still works from Steiner’s “common characteristics” of strategic planning.

One of these especially still hits the mark: the whole idea behind the development of a knowledge strategy is “the futurity of current decisions,” thinking about how current (or recent past) decision making affects what will happen as the KM/knowledge services function proceeds into the future.

Our good friend Peter F. Drucker also brings knowledge workers closer to understanding the true impetus behind planning  knowledge strategy: planning for the future. In his classic Managing in a Time of Great Change, Drucker could be writing for knowledge strategists in 2010 (for could there be a time of greater change than the times we’re living in today?): “Traditional planning asks,” Drucker wrote, “‘what is most likely to happen? Planning for uncertainty asks, instead, ‘what has already happened that will create the future?’”

For Drucker, “strategic planning is not a box of tricks, a bundle of techniques” (Drucker’s emphasis). For our great management hero, strategy development was summed up in four important activities which can be applied directly to the development of knowledge strategy:

§  Analytical thinking and the commitment to resources in action

§  A continual process of making present entrepreneurial decisions systematically and with the greatest knowledge of their futurity

§  Organizing systematically the efforts needed to carry out these decision

§  Measuring the results of these decision against expectations through organized, systematic feedback

So there’s the answer to our challenge. Developing knowledge strategy is both prescriptive and descriptive, and the knowledge strategist simply has to position himself/herself to drill down as deep as it’s necessary to go. The task is to find the nuances, the private (or public) agendas, and the organizational goals that will bring forward the information the organization requires for managing its knowledge. Only when the knowledge strategy is developed in an atmosphere that includes both “how-things-are” and “how-things-ought-to-be” can the strategy lead to the results the organization is seeking.