Knowledge Management: challenges and opportunities

In this article, I would like to talk about a project that is very close to my heart and very important for companies today: knowledge management.

The world of work has changed enormously in recent years. In the past, when employees joined a company, they could be expected to stay there for the rest of their careers. Thus, companies retained their knowledge throughout the years. They did not feel they had to train newcomers who replaced a departing employee and did it only sporadically. Today the world of work is no longer the same: employees rarely stay more than 5 years in the same company, and the very evolution of the work implies that knowledge must evolve.

Having the capacity to maintain the level of knowledge and skills of our employees despite movements, despite the short time they stay, being able to welcome and onboard new employees as efficiently as possible becomes a vital issue.

I. The genesis of the project

As a quality specialist, I am used to seeing documentation systems. I am used to dealing with files full of documents, Word files, Excel documents, PowerPoint, and PDF presentations, all of which are stored in folders available to everyone. These document systems, even if they represent the basis of critical activities, are ultimately unrepresentative of the complete knowledge carried out by the company.

Therefore, three years ago, I suggested to my managers that we launch a project to develop a knowledge capitalization tool. We called this project ODIN; in honor of the eponymous God of Germanic mythology associated with knowledge.

The principle of ODIN was to have a tool that would allow us to capitalize on all the group's knowledge while making it available to as many people as possible, keeping it up to date as much as possible, and allowing our employees, whomever they are and whatever information they need, to find it easily and quickly, with the assurance that this information was the latest and most up-to-date and that they could use it without any doubt.

Let me tell you, that's quite a challenge.

Mantu is a group present in some sixty countries with a large number of employees, a great cultural diversity, and knowledge that is all the more important because it is a consulting company and, therefore, our most important asset is people.

And that's how we decided to launch ODIN.

Based on the SharePoint platform, which lends itself rather well to the exercise, we decided to make this platform our knowledge management tool for the company.

II. The stakes

The stakes are high, the challenges are high, and the potential sticking points were even higher; the risk being to launch a tool that would require a lot of time, investment, and effort but that, in the end, would not be usable by anyone because it was too complex or did not meet the needs, or even did not meet the company's way of working.

A.??Cultural shock

This type of tool responds primarily to a need for capitalization but could go against a culture that is oral in some companies and not written. The habit of writing is hard to bring to a company if it is not already used to it.

B.???Knowledge in one place

This tool was designed in a matrix fashion. For extremely digital companies, it quickly becomes complicated to maintain an architecture and structure of knowledge and documentation that allows information to be easily found and prioritized. Therefore, ODIN aims, beyond its primary function of capitalizing on knowledge, to put in place good practices to manage our knowledge and documents and to be able to find them as easily and efficiently as possible.

C.?The life of the tool

Behind the pure exercise of completing the tool with existing knowledge, major questions arose concerning the maintenance of this tool over time.

The moderation of a tool such as ODIN, which is intended to be global and usable and used by all employees, raises major questions: how can we ensure that the moderators can make the right choices? How can we ensure that a certain number of practices are put in place and are common to everyone who puts knowledge into the tool while allowing everyone to add their knowledge most naturally and simply possible? How can we ensure in the same way that the confidentiality of the information is maintained?

To this day, I do not claim we have found all the answers to these questions. The moderators behind the tool today ensure a certain number of rules but leave a large part to the user's choice as to the formalism of the page they set up.

The real goal today is to aim for our people's commitment and involvement in this new tool without adding constraints that could ultimately discourage them from using it.

D.??Commitment

Commitment is an issue.

Implementing a new tool like this, a new practice, a new operating mode, or a globally shared tool to the entire group is a challenge.

It implies proposing a system that suits the majority beyond their different work culture and habits and finding a way to encourage our employees to come to the platform. To motivate our employees to visit the platform, we decided to set up several articles that come out regularly on very high-level subjects.

These include an analysis of the situation in Ukraine and its impact on our company. There are analyses of recruitment trends, for example.

These high-level articles reflect the opinions of our top management within the company and are intended to open the perspectives of our employees and to allow them to find on this platform thoughts from their management that they would not necessarily have had the chance to find without going to Odin.

III. What happens next?

This project, even though it was launched 3 years ago, is far from being finished.

Migration plans are still underway in many areas of the company, and we know that there is still a lot of knowledge spread across the group's different information systems. Nevertheless, I am confident this tool will make life easier for most of us. I'm thinking of the managers/directors and all the people who have to answer questionnaires for customers or answer questions from their employees. All of this should eventually save precious time and allow us to have a base of answers to avoid constantly reinventing the same responses.

IV. A bit of quality: ISO9001 in all this?

Of course, the ODIN Project was also an opportunity for me to deal with several issues relating to the ISO 9001 standard concerning the quality management system.

Indeed, this standard indicates that we must have document control, but also the ability to make the documentation available to those who need it.

In a group such as ours, the provision of documentation promptly is of paramount importance. Therefore, using a tool such as ODIN allows us to make it easier to make it available to the entire population and, above all, to remove a significant part of the problems we had, namely the Word documents that are scattered all over the systems today.

Today, ODIN is presented in the form of pages managed like Internet pages. This allows us to have a history, versioning, verification, and a totally integrated validation process into the tool. This avoids many of the problems caused by old documents.

Our tool is only at the beginning of its life, and it must now take its place in the daily life of our employees.

I have no doubt that with the necessary animation and the growing amount of knowledge it will host, as well as the advantages it will bring to the company, we will be able to make it one of the essential tools.

I hope to be able to talk to you again about ODIN soon and give you full feedback on the next steps of the adventure.