Consider “Transformation Next” is Coming When You Ask if KM is Dead

At initial glance, most major industries and government agencies consider themselves very successful whether they have implemented a Knowledge Management (KM) program or not. That type of thinking is the ego driven corporation. It is a fact, we are in the knowledge age, just look around and you will find evidence that knowledge drives the global economy. As you start to peel back the layers of activity and look for what is really happening, “Transformation Next” is coming. Not transformation 2.0 or 3.0, this is not a continuation of what has transformed in the past. And to help design a path to an unknown future, you start to question, “will the success of their past get them where the future requires?” My impression is that leadership has been conditioned, for decades, to focus on success in a manner that has worked well in the past, but will limit their success going forward. This is exactly the thinking that requires KM to remain strong and part of our future, the future that is changing right before our eyes.

             It is an understatement to say that we live in a rapidly changing environment. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, estimates that every 2 days we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003. If that isn’t enough to make you pause, think about the 6 generations in the workforce, yes, SIX! 2017 marks the first year Generation Z starts to work fulltime. By 2025, less than 8 years from now, the “Boomer” generation will go from being 33% of the workforce to only being 8%. Now, consider the implications of the global workforce “brain-drain”. Knowledge curation is paramount now, more than ever, because running things the “old” way will no longer be the case. Change is coming.

             In May, at the 2017 Digital Transformation Conference, Geoff Tuff, an industry leader from Deloitte commentated this, about doing business in the 21st Century, he said; “It’s not the strongest that will survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.” Change is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and what usually follows is enterprise-wide fear. Fortunately, the reality is that people really don’t fear change, they fear the unknown. With that understanding, and with people being critical to success, this next transformation for every organization needs to define that future unknown state in a way that is:

• based on the needs of the workforce of the future
• identifies the behavior shifts that must take place in people and processes, and
• cautiously invests in the technologies to support that next generation IT environment

             “Transformation Next” for every single organization needs KM to reflect the unknown needs of a workforce demographic that in 2025 will look unlike any decade before with 92% “new thinkers” (28% Generation X, 33% Millennials and 31% Generation Z). This group of "new thinkers” embrace work and life in a way that places priority on 4 key elements: being adaptive, being creative, being social and expecting work to be personalized to them. The other major trend that accompanies this “Transformation Next” is customer experience. Choice is now paramount when it comes to “being” a customer, and if you do not give your customers an experience they want repeated, they are gone. No one needs to go to business school to realize if you don’t have customers you won’t make money. In the future, “Transformation Next”, if you don’t have workers that are connected through a strategy that manages the knowledge they need to be successful, they will be gone as well.

             Enterprise-wide culture change is not simple, and not for the faint of heart. It takes a strong sense of purpose and dedication to endure the challenges encountered to make real culture change. Knowledge Management and customer experience must be in your strategy to survive “Transformation Next”. In addition, this type of change is not activity based measured, it is not simply a one-off shift and then taking count of or credit for those shifts. Success in culture change, the real return on investment (ROI), is based on improving the baseline emotion of the workers and the customers through evidence that change is happening and is moving in the positive direction. This is still a human game, and people work with and return to organizations that make them “feel” a certain way. Are you ready?  Contact PJ for KM and Customer Exepreince Expertise at [email protected]