Several years ago, I was the lead architect for a Lotus Notes/Domino product development company. We specialized in sales force automation tools that were fairly successful at generating significant engagements with our clients.

Lotus and other vendors were beginning to talk about knowledge management (KM), and one of our product managers became interested in creating a product for the KM space. She prepared an excellent presentation about the business problems of data glut and difficulties of accessing information in the typical silos that exist in enterprises. She proposed solutions that amounted to authoring, taxonomy management, and searching processes that could integrate with our SFA tools and provide clients with new productivity aides.

After the several hours of exploration and thought, I came up with the question of the day: "So, what is this product going to do that adds value?"

Where’s the value?

I still look at much of the KM marketplace and wonder what real value the products themselves offer to enterprises. Certainly, significant products are out there that do many things to contribute to the productivity of the companies using them. But none of these products work well without substantial process and cultural changes in the businesses that use them. Without those changes, the KM tools simply provide an automated way of doing "business as usual," without truly impacting the productivity of the organization.

An example of this is a large multi-national company for which I've done some consulting. It embraced Lotus QuickPlace as a means to improve collaboration and reuse of knowledge assets among its engineering teams. It gave all teams a mandate to use QuickPlaces, but provided no direction as to how to categorize and index documents. After two years, this company has approximately 10,000 QuickPlaces with millions of documents that are inconsistently indexed, if at all. Most documents have no meaningful subject and simply contain one or more attachments. As a result, finding anything in this "Knowledge Resource" is nearly impossible. The company is now looking to implement a searching tool that cross-indexes these QuickPlaces and lets employees extract information from them.

Lessons learned

So, what’s the lesson? That's difficult to answer because I've seen few enterprises get a real measurable return on investment (ROI) from KM projects. But, I think, the lesson is that achieving ROI on KM projects is neither easy nor cheap.

You can start with quick and easy solutions, but if you don't change the processes and culture of the enterprise in a way that leverages those tools effectively, the ROI you achieve won't meet the expectations of management. You can invest in highly complex products or custom systems that -- without effective cultural changes -- will also fail to meet expectations. This means that the majority of the expense and effort involved in making a KM project successful isn't in the software products or custom systems development, but in the implementation planning and follow through to make sure the process and cultural changes occur. Basic questions concerning the taxonomy and authoring guidelines and standards generally require as much or more attention and effort as do the tools that support them.

Keys to success

In most enterprises, the information technology department can't drive significant process and cultural change. Change must come from (and be sponsored by) corporate leaders at the highest levels. Only then do the systems and tools that are put in place to support those new processes have a chance of being used effectively, and only when the tools are used effectively can there be any real knowledge management.

Let's say this again, with feeling: No KM technology or tool will be successful without a fundamental paradigm shift in corporate culture -- one that creates an acceptance and eagerness to do things differently. There are many vendors of KM tools that market their offerings as non-invasive to existing processes and users. This is a trap you should avoid. Not changing the fundamental way people and groups work will result in not achieving ROI from your KM efforts.

So, while you read about KM solutions, keep in mind their success or failure depends as much or more on a company's ability and willingness to make real cultural changes as the quality of the systems it implements. This means user training, emphasizing the benefits of the new way of working, and key executives championing the KM revolution. This isn't a quick set-it-and-forget-it type of fix, but rather an ongoing process. But, without it, it's highly unlikely your knowledge management implementation will be successful at all.

For more on successful knowledge management deployment, see Technical Editor Laurie Kimmel's article "Seven Critical Keys to KM Success" on page 12 of the November 2002 issue of Lotus Advisor magazine (http://LotusAdvisor.com).