Turning Corporate Knowledge Into Business Benefits

“We don’t know what we know or what we don’t know”.

This client possessed extensive knowledge assets, but was unable to leverage them to deliver value. Their many project teams and divisions were geographically dispersed, and they had all developed disparate, localised project systems and processes. In order to achieve improved project outcomes and business benefit, they needed to manage their collective knowledge more effectively.

SMS was engaged to develop a comprehensive Knowledge Management (KM) Strategy for the bank project community and prepare a detailed implementation plan.

SMS employed numerous workshops and stakeholder interviews to identify and prioritise requirements, then plotted those requirements against a conceptual maturity model to reveal gaps and barriers.

Through collaborative workshops and interviews, SMS identified and prioritised business requirements and critical success factors. In the process, we also established stakeholder commitment to, and ownership of, the strategic process. We then plotted current and target states against our proprietary conceptual framework - the SMS Enterprise KM Maturity Model, and assessed the minimum KM attributes required at each maturity level, to reveal key gaps and barriers for tactical attention.

Deliver a common, managed KM Program, embed knowledge sharing, and leverage to derive business benefits.

SMS recommended that the client progress its KM maturity to the desired target level through the implementation of:

• a federated operating model
• an employee motivation program
• an enterprise KM portal
• a communications and training program

Of these, the operating and motivation models were recognised as essential to bring about sustained success in KM. SMS recommended a federated operating structure with central governance, inclusive of a quality management framework, and defined a three-part approach to motivating employees to share and reuse intellectual capital, focusing upon a balance of cultural change management with extrinsic and intrinsic motivators.

Active management of knowledge for greater stakeholder and competitive advantage.

The client endorsed and accepted the KM Strategy and Implementation Roadmap – in particular, the pragmatic approach and a clear correlation between strategic themes, business requirements and benefits, and implementation ‘packages’. Anticipated benefits include:

• increased professional development and support opportunities for employees
• greater project efficiencies
• improved control and compliance
• reduced business risk
• enhanced market recognition of execution capability