KnowledgeFarm
Knowledge management solutions: Strategic advisory and consulting on People, Process, Content and Technology.Archive for Trends
Yes. It May Indeed Be About Downsizing.
I have a standard promotional talk that I do at conferences and early in the process of securing consulting engagements. Early on in it, I discuss the rationale for knowledge management and the pitfalls that projects can encounter when their sponsors and managers do a poor job of communicating their intentions to the knowledge workers who will be involved.
The value of knowledge capture and reuse, I intone, comes from enabling the organization to move responsibility for resolving frequently recurring issues down to the customer-facing agents who are the first to hear about them. The ideal I’m talking about is, of course, “first contact resolution” — enabling the first person who talks to the customer to quickly diagnose the problem, retrieve a resolution and remove the customer’s pain. If knowledge is captured effectively, it should lead to consistent answers and clients who are happier with the results. And because the issue stays at “Level 1″ and does not have to be escalated to more senior technical specialists, it costs less to resolve issues this way.
All well and good. But there often is a suspicious murmur in organizations going through the KM adoption process, especially those who describe the KM process as a “do more with less” measure. The literature of KM is full of references to projects that foundered because the team refused to comply, as they assumed the whole purpose of the exercise was to capture the expertise that makes individuals essential, so that agents could be reduced to expendable, interchangeable parts.
No, I assure my audience — the knowledge base provides more leverage from a static set of resources. Reducing escalations and making each agent capable of handling a wider variety of issues, by pooling expertise and rewarding contribution to the collective knowledge base, will increase each agent’s value, not reduce it. KM is seldom, if ever, about reducing headcount. This is one of my favorite slides; it never fails to elicit a room full of self-satisfied nodding.
There’s just one problem with it. These days, KM may very well be about reducing headcount. I’ve been involved in two projects recently in which enabling management to lay off staff was precisely the point. In one case, an assessment was intended to identify areas of expertise that had become redundant as a result of the restructuring of IT. In another, the knowledge base was conceived and built with the specific purpose of codifying procedures heretofore escalated to senior specialists, so that a number of those specialists could be let go and replaced by new kids who, using the knowledge base, would be doing the same work at 40% lower personnel cost.
I have interviewed people, to analyze and deconstruct their business processes so they could be modeled in knowledge tools, and to capture their trouble-shooting expertise — I knew some of these people would shortly be out of a job. They didn’t know, at least not in any official way. (Naturally, a lot of them knew in the many unofficial ways employees learn or intuit things like this — companies don’t go out of their way to hire stupid analysts.)
This isn’t what I set myself up as a KM consultant to do. It isn’t the sort of communication I advocate among members of a project team, or between a project sponsor and his or her constituents. And it isn’t what I’ve sold as the value proposition for KM for the last 18 years.
Nor, however, is it fundamentally wrong.
Companies are downsizing now, and it is pointless to make value judgments because of this. Some organizations will take the process too far, and one way this will inevitably hurt them in the long run is by reducing the essential store of knowledge that enables them to do what they do competitively. Management won’t see this until it is too late; at best, they will wind up inviting laid off experts back at far higher consulting rates. At worst, they will lose a technical or customer relationship edge that will allow a competitor to eat their lunch when demand eventually revives. But they will have no choice; the cuts often are mandatory and indiscriminate.
Can KM be a valuable enabler in a time of layoffs? I’m prepared to answer “yes.” You can gain a differential advantage by broadening the capabilities of your remaining knowledge workers, and this may be enormously important if you’re going to be trying to function with fewer of them. The advantage will be measurable if you are handling an equivalent volume of issues with little or no loss of productivity, as measured in terms of average time to close an incident, or some similar metric, and with little or no degradation of customer satisfaction.
Customer satisfaction is subjective and is dependent on expectation management. It’s probably a cold comfort, but customers are likelier to cut you more slack in the current economic climate. As for productivity gains, knowledge base proponents have always promised that knowledge sharing would enable greater capacity from thinning resources. The challenge is to motivate people who probably know their days in the organization may be numbered to facilitate this by sharing what they know, rather than simply taking it with them when they leave.
How do you get them to play along? To be blunt: Pay them.
Don’t undermine everyone’s confidence in management and the organization by imposing a KM program and then dropping the hammer on the team you are downsizing. Bad times bring morale issues; you will only make them worse for your layoff survivors by cloaking your intentions and then springing them abruptly. They will only be convinced that more layoffs are coming in waves, and they will refuse to participate in (or may even sabotage) the KM initiative if they feel exploited.
If layoffs are coming, explain the circumstances, be plain about where and why the cuts are coming, and offer what may be an enticing carrot: A knowledge transfer exit program.
Explain that everyone in the affected team will be asked to help establish a knowledge repository for the business function they support — customer service, tech support, HR, inbound sales, whatever. The business processes for that function will be examined and deconstructed to identify the most frequently recurring, mission-critical issues, problems or transactions — e.g., the “top 200″ technical problems managed by a service desk, the ones that place the greatest burden on the team. The solutions to those issues will be documented and encoded as core, “seed content” in a knowledge base, using a suitable software repository, so that all members of the team can diagnose and solve these issues quickly and effectively without escalating them to the next level experts.
Be frank — explain that for some members of the team, this project may be their last as employees of the organization, and that this is pure economics and not necessarily a value judgment on their individual worth to the organization. If possible, suggest that the quality of each individual’s contribution to the knowledge capture effort may be taken into account in the decisions as to who stays and who goes, but do not make this promise unless you truly mean it and know you have the authority to say it.
You are going to be taking people offline for some portion of their day to do this knowledge gathering — off the phone, away from the day to day work you hired them to do. You probably will take a hit to productivity, as it normally is measured, in order to get it done. Manage expectations with your customers. More importantly, let your employees know you anticipate the disruption and that no one will suffer consequences for this.
Finally, announce an amendment to the usual severance package for those you must let go. Offer to retain these employees for an additional period — three to five days, say — to participate in an intensive, facilitated debriefing and knowledge-building session in which these individuals work solely on completing the population, technical verification and polishing of the knowledge base. Position this as an opportunity to leave a personal mark on the shared knowledge of the team, and earn consideration for post-severance contract work or even eventual rehiring when the economic climate improves. Again, do not promise such consideration unless you know you have authority to do so and that contract work or rehire are plausible.
Some of your people will opt out, of course. Severance is a stressful business, fraught with resentment no matter how you handle it. But, handled correctly, with empathy and candor and with the right kind of facilitation, a knowledge transfer exit program might be the means by which you finally get the sponsorship, resource commitment and breathing room to launch a KM initiative you may have want to undertake in better days, but couldn’t.
More Petulant Thoughts About Energy
As I await the arrival of a service technician to fix my Kenmore oven and range, whose electronics apparently fried during a recent brownout, I’m pondering the likelihood of a future marked by frequent recurrences of this kind of life-hiccup.
We’ve been without a stove for a week. A two-hour brownout caused various devices in the house to shut down and then flail like landed trout, trying to come back to life. Most things came through this intact. But the stove’s will to live and fight its way out of the induced coma was so strong that it apparently burned out two different circuit boards clicking on and off, eventually settling irretrievably into something called Sabbath Mode.
This event worries me because we’ve had two power failures in the last week, and every damn thing in the house is electronic. Like NutraSweet, silicon is a ubiquitous element of middle class life. Can all these solid state ganglia that run our lives withstand frequent power drops and surges? Because I’m imagining these interruptions becoming increasingly common as utilities, like everyone else, fret through the ongoing — let’s say normalization — of fuel prices in the USA, relative to those of the rest of the world.
I’m reminded of the 2005 rolling blackouts in California. Those were caused by the failure of infrastructure to keep up with demand, but it wasn’t as though transformers were blowing up on every corner. It was a failure of the market to keep up an adequate supply — a failure of economics. Do continuing rises in fuel costs mean that we’re headed for more such supply side failures, and more rolling blackouts, this time not limited to specific markets like California’s?
Given the friction generated every time utilities attempt to raise their rates, this strikes me as likely, and suggests another prognostication: There are lots of appliance service calls in your future and mine, as power drops and spikes cause seizures in more and more of our cherished devices, whose innards may turn out to be more vulnerable than anyone’s recognized before.
Does Kenmore know this? Does anyone know? Is anyone tracking the failure rates of personal electronics? (How many American homes have uninterruptible power supplies? Is that a new market opportunity for someone?) Is anyone making market projections for replacement boards?
And what are the customer service implications? I mean, I’m not having a good experience today. The technician is running 3 to 4 hours behind schedule (maybe more — I’ll know when he eventually shows up). I do know that four replacement parts were due to be sent here prior to this call and only two got here. I’m wondering why I had to tell him this — isn’t he supposed to know where all these parts are before he shows up?
Maybe this is going to be a typical customer experience with electronics-dependent appliances from here on. Maybe some of these things, for that very reason, aren’t worth the trouble to own. There are lots of days when I miss experiences like turning a knob and having a blue flame pop up to heat my frying pan. How well an individual manufacturer’s products hold up under changing power conditions could become a point of differentiation when it comes time to buy a washing machine or a stove or a phone system.
(Phones…it used to be that when the power went out, the one thing you could still rely on was the phone. Not any more — the line’s still alive, but the phone now is a complex console and remote handset system stuffed with electronics and sucking power. I’ve already had two such systems eviscerated by lightning strikes. Today the lifeline is my cell phone…if it happens to be charged.)
I never was much of a gadget guy, and I tend to use only the most basic features of the electronics I do own. Maybe one of the little side benefits of the fuel cost crisis is that my attitude about these things will be vindicated. It feels that way today.
Fuel Costs vs. Face Time
The news for this traditional travel holiday weekend in the US is that fuel costs are actually cutting into Americans’ travel plans. It’s the first significant year-on-year drop in projected travel since the 1979 fuel crisis. This time around, it could be different, though. We all saw the ‘79 gas shock as a skirmish in the West’s cold war with OPEC — and as a temporary event. Today, however, there is a sense that oil prices in the US are permanently resetting themselves at a level more consistent with those the rest of the world pays.
Combine this ground level observation with the desperate measures airlines are taking to cope with fuel prices and it becomes obvious that something basic in the economies of the industrialized world is changing. Already, the relationship between service businesses and their customers is changing, and not for the better. And within organizations, this is going to have an effect on our relationships with one another. While the data really aren’t there yet to prove this, it is reasonable to expect the rising costs of air fares, car rentals and hotels to cut significantly into business travel, soon. (Possibly a leading indicator: Air travel in first and business class is already off. This is where the real value is for the airlines.)
What this means, if it’s borne out, is that we’re all going to start seeing less of one another.
That’s worrisome to those of us whose business it is to see to it that people in organizations successfully exchange knowledge. Knowledge doesn’t travel solely in explicit forms — in e-mails, memos, articles published in knowledge bases, or bulletins posted in SharePoint sites. Knowledge often is transmitted subliminally, or accidentally, in the body language and conversational nuance that only comes from face time.
That’s why executives insist on reviewing the troops in person; it’s why meetings (when they’re run effectively) continue to matter. If companies cut back sharply on travel to meetings, something that materially affects productivity and competitiveness — for individual companies and eventually for the economy as a whole — is going to be lost.
Closer to ground level, in service desks and call centers (the ones that are still physically located in North America), there is growing interest in a parallel coping strategy: The “agent at home” concept, in which customer service or help desk agents, instead of commuting every day to a warren of cubicles, do what they do from home, connected through CRM software, IP telephony and instant messaging.
What the agent at home loses is the opportunity to “prairie-dog” — to collaborate on problems with peers one cubicle away. But it’s a sacrifice many agents will willingly make when it costs $70 to gas up the minivan. This option is already making it possible for companies to find and retain capable people in jobs that are neither glamorous nor particularly lucrative — but actually can be done rather effectively from home, if these people are both disciplined and knowledgeable. So the agent at home has the feel of inevitability, at least in the US.
It seems self-evident that as people increasingly view themselves as knowledge workers (since everything that isn’t knowledge work is being outsourced), their ability to pick one another’s brains is of strategic importance to the organizations they work for. It is unrealistic to conceive of an agent at home operation without some kind of shared knowledge base. That one is obvious.
But work at every level, in every functional area in organizations, is increasingly collaborative, and collaboration is increasingly virtual. Those companies that have thus far resisted adoption of social media applications (forums, wikis, collaboration systems, blogging platforms, Facebook) will have to investigate them to fill the knowledge gap created when the travel clamps go on and peers become, more and more, disembodied voices and blog personae.
All organizations are feeling the pressure to change the way they operate. Asking technology to enable managers to go on functioning as they always have — e.g., using videoconferencing to try to run the same types of meetings they used to run in the face to face world — will be a short-lived pattern. Work is changing — and the tipping point, when it becomes too obvious to ignore, is likely to be expressed as a price per gallon.
