Strengthen your knowledge base

Liddament has a brief to improve patient care and the level of service being delivered to NHS Trusts and the Department of Health

Although the term knowledge management has been around for almost 20 years, organisations are still struggling to access and interpret the wealth of knowledge, both tacit and explicit, that they hold.

Today’s IT systems are certainly providing new and increasingly effective methods for businesses to tap into that much-vaunted knowledge base in order to shorten time-to-market, improve product quality, create new businesses and exploit fresh markets. Within this context, sharing knowledge across geographically dispersed organisational units has become even more crucial. When done properly, knowledge management provides an organisation with both a competitive edge and increased organisational performance because it allows employees to work smarter.

In today’s fragmented business environment, technology is a great enabler, providing tools and communication resources to allow greater sharing of information both within and outside organisations. The development of Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis, mash-ups and social networking offerings has created a means of capturing and disseminating knowledge that might otherwise be overlooked or get lost.

Knowledge management is currently being used for everything from how best to choose a target audience for the latest chocolate bar marketing campaign to retaining high-flying lawyers by offering them access to knowledge systems that allow them to operate at the highest level of their competence.

Knowledge management efforts tend to focus on organisational objectives such as improved performance, competitive advantage, innovation, continuous improvement and sharing of lessons learned.

For example, Martin Liddament, director of IT for the NHS Information Centre, has a brief to improve patient care and the level of service being delivered to NHS Trusts and the Department of Health.

“To fully understand the effectiveness and efficiency of the NHS in providing high-quality services, we need to draw data from different organisations, manage it correctly and then analyse it,” he says. “Only then will we derive better insights and understanding that will, in turn, inform better local decision-making and help improve services for patients.”

According to Duncan Ogilvy, knowledge management partner at law firm Mills & Reeve, there are big payoffs for getting knowledge management right.

“At one end of the spectrum is reputational damage – if we leave a lawyer to create a document from scratch hoping that they look up the law, but they get it wrong, we could lose clients and be sued for negligence,” he says. “At the other end is managing knowledge for increased profit.”

Mills & Reeve has found that by putting a lot of knowledge into a system and making it easily available to all 800 staff in offices across the UK, it is able to do things faster, or with less expensive resources, thus increasing profitability.

“The business dynamics of any law firm are very sensitive to the levers of profit – if we can get an extra six minutes of billable time out of each of the lawyers every day then we would be even richer,” says Ogilvy. “Six minutes less then we may not break even. So we are interested in managing knowledge to increase productivity and profitability.”

Law firms specialise in finding legal solutions to their clients’ problems – answers that perhaps unravel a commercial deal that has got stuck, or get an individual out of a scrape. It is here that sharing knowledge becomes a powerful tool.

“It’s not just about putting the right people together, it’s also about the new ways of doing things that they come up with when they are put together,” says Ogilvy. “In the beginning, the game was about capturing data. Now it’s about who should be talking to whom to come up with the solutions that haven’t yet been considered.”

Capturing information is certainly the starting point for most knowledge man agement systems. For Liddament and his team this has been a process of continual improvement.

“Over the past three years we have standardised our data and developed an environment where the structured data from disparate systems can be managed in a uniform way,” he says. “The unstructured stuff is a lot more difficult because it’s scattered across a variety of forms and files, but since we introduced SharePoint two years ago, initially to address collaboration issues, a lot of the unstructured stuff has migrated into the SharePoint project sites.”

With several thousand parliamentary questions needing to be answered quickly each year, finding information is an important element of the knowledge base.

“Having a large repository of information is fine, so long as you can navigate it, and get the information out,” says Liddament. “Guided navigation, context-aware searching and proactive searches are the functions that we are looking at next.”

Liddament wants a system that looks at what the user is actually doing and then comes up with information within the context of the activity being undertaken, or where they are in the system or process.

For retail organisations, a good knowledge management system helps them communicate with both their suppliers and customers. Garth Ralston, IT director at Nectar card operator Loyalty Management Group, uses knowledge management tools to ensure that organisations such as Sainsbury’s and their suppliers can obtain detailed insight into product performance.

“If a new chocolate bar is introduced, we can not only tell how well it is selling, but if it is pulling customers from another brand or from existing product lines,” he says. “We have a large database of transactional data held in a Kognitio data warehouse, including all the items put into a Sainsbury’s trolley during the past two years.”

It is from this wealth of information that marketing trends and analysis can help Sainsbury’s and its suppliers target and market new and existing products to their customers.

“Knowledge management really improves communication between retailers and their customers,” says Ralston. “Personalising information increases customer loyalty and from our data analysis it’s easy to recognise vegetarian households or homes with a new baby from their buying habits.”