Knowledge management roles
As we said in Chapter 2, knowledge roles need to be created in a business to make sure that knowledge management is embedded in the business activity. Without knowledge roles, knowledge management becomes ‘everyone’s job’ and very quickly reverts to being nobody’s job. The key knowledge management roles within this environment are the knowledge manager, the knowledge management champion, the knowledge librarian, the community facilitator, the subject matter expert (SME), the central knowledge management team and the senior sponsor.
The knowledge managers and the knowledge management champions form part of the line management structure, shown in Regions 1 and 2 of Figure 6.1. This is the structure of regions and countries or assets and business units and teams who are primarily responsible for delivery of sales and marketing targets. The community leaders and the knowledge owners may sit within this structure or they may be part of the central support groups, reporting to the head of sales, head of marketing or head of bidding. The knowledge management team will most likely be a separate team reporting directly to senior management. More detail on these roles follows.
Knowledge manager
The knowledge manager is the person who ‘makes KM happen’ at the level of a team or a business group. Much as a project leader may set up a safety role within a project to make sure the project complies with safety expectations or set up a quality role within a manufacturing unit to make sure the unit complies with quality expectations, so they may set up a knowledge management role to make sure KM happens. This role might be described as the knowledge manager for that team, business unit or project.
The knowledge manager makes sure that the team or project that they are working with are doing the knowledge management that they are supposed to do. They make sure that the expected knowledge management processes happen at the right time and that the expected knowledge management technologies are applied at the right time. They ensure that staff get the knowledge they need, that this knowledge gets applied to the work and that new knowledge is captured and shared. They work by mentoring, coaching, facilitating and prompting to make sure that KM processes happen and that KM technologies are used. They are the people who translate ‘KM processes and tools’ into actions and activities that the sales and marketing professionals can understand and implement. The ideal knowledge manager is a people-centred personality who derives great reward from seeing others succeed. They tend to work in the background – educating, helping and assisting others to achieve their goals.
This role might be particularly important, for example, in a busy bid team, to make sure that enough attention is paid to knowledge management despite the hectic activity of bidding.
Knowledge management champion
The knowledge management champion is somebody at a relatively high level in a business unit or region, who acts to promote knowledge management within that part of the business. Their role is not as practical a role as that of a knowledge manager; it’s more of an evangelical or promotional role. The knowledge management champion works with senior managers to ensure that knowledge management is promoted at all levels and co-operates with the knowledge managers to ensure that it actually gets done in practice. Sometimes the knowledge management champion and the knowledge manager are the same person, but more often the champion takes the lead for a region, within which there may be many knowledge managers.
Knowledge librarian
The knowledge librarian looks after the knowledge library or the company knowledge base. They do not create and update the content within the library, but they make sure that the knowledge library is well maintained, well structured and easy to use. The knowledge librarian may have several roles:
They may act as champions for the knowledge library, ensuring that people are aware of it and of the value it can deliver.
They may provide training and support in the use of the knowledge library.
They may work with IT to ensure the technology behind the knowledge library is appropriate, with all the functionality required by the users.
They may work with the business to ensure that the knowledge library has an effective taxonomy and any required tags or metadata.
They may work with the knowledge owners to ensure that they are fulfilling their responsibilities and making sure that content is relevant, usable, up to date and stored in the correct place.
They may monitor the use of the knowledge library and report statistics, such as the number of readers, the number of authors, the frequency of update, etc.
Community facilitator or leader
The role of the community facilitator or community leader has been covered in detail in Chapter 4.
Subject matter experts (SMEs) and knowledge owners
In knowledge management terms, the central sales and marketing teams have two main functions:
First, they are responsible for managing subject matter knowledge on behalf of the organisation. So the head of marketing and his team are accountable for managing the company’s knowledge about marketing; and for making sure that this knowledge is up to date, accessible and available for the marketers within the business. Similarly, the head of sales and her function are accountable for managing the company’s sales knowledge, making sure that the company ‘knows how to sell’ – that they have the knowledge they need, when they need it, in order to operate to the required standard. They will do this through appointing knowledge owners (also known as subject matter experts or knowledge stewards).
Second, they are accountable for ensuring that there are communities of practice through which this knowledge can be shared. Very often, the head of sales, the head of marketing and the head of bidding act as sponsors for the sales community, the marketing community and the bidding community.
Knowledge owners are individuals who have the role of managing or stewarding company knowledge in one specific topic area. They are experts on their topic. So the head of marketing may, for example, appoint a knowledge owner for online marketing, a knowledge owner for TV campaigns and a knowledge owner for print ads.
The accountability that goes with this role is to keep the knowledge base up to date in this topic, so that people in the business who need this knowledge can find it easily and know that it is valid, up to date and presented in a usable format. They may be responsible for ensuring that the knowledge library is populated with content covering this topic. They may provide internal consultancy on the topic, although their role is not to keep hold of the knowledge themselves; their role is to share it and to make it widely available. They monitor the state of knowledge of the topic; they build and maintain the knowledge base, constructing the wikis or reference sites and keeping them up to date. They validate and broadcast new knowledge and make sure training in the topic is available and up to date. They are the ‘go to’ people for their topic.
Sometimes people play this role by default and Chapter 10 (the case study from the Ordnance Survey) describes people spending 80 per cent of their time as the de facto subject matter expert and only 20 per cent of their time doing the work in their job description. It is obviously better to make it their real job!
The central knowledge management team
During the implementation stage, a knowledge management project is set up to implement change in the organisation and to move the organisation to a state where knowledge management is embedded as part of the business. Like any project, there are a number of roles and accountabilities associated with delivering the project objectives. These include the KM project leader. The role of the KM project leader is an absolutely crucial one. This person delivers the KM implementation, leads the implementation team and manages the budget. Their accountability is clear. They are responsible for delivering the project objectives, within the agreed time frame and to the agreed cost and standard. Choosing the right person for this role is also very important. The KM project leader needs to be a respected member of the organisation, with a history of delivering organisational change.
In anything other than a very small company, the KM project leader will need a KM implementation team. The size of the team and the specific roles within the team will vary from company to company. You may need somebody on the team with a communication role, responsible for making sure that knowledge management communications to the wider organisation are timely and relevant. You may need somebody on the team accountable for coordinating a KM community of practice. You may need somebody on the team accountable for ensuring that the technology suite is complete. If you are looking to implement through the use of pilot projects, there will also be clear accountabilities related to pilot project delivery. It all depends very much on what you need to do to get knowledge management up and running. Make sure that your KM team members have a good grounding in sales, marketing and bidding, so that they can easily translate knowledge management concepts into the language of business.
You sometimes hear people suggest that the KM implementation team should look to ‘do themselves out of a job’ and that the final aim of KM implementation should be that KM is fully embedded in the business. An end to implementation, with KM fully embedded, is a laudable aim – but this should not be taken as implying that there will be no requirement for a long-term KM support resource. Even after implementation is over and the KM system is designed and rolled out, you need a person or a small group to keep up the momentum.
Their main tasks will be to maintain the KM system (updating technology, training people in the processes, coaching individuals with KM roles), running the monitoring and measurement activities, crafting the longer-term KM strategy and making the necessary interventions to sustain KM. Part of the successful longevity of KM within BP Drilling is due to the presence of a KM support team over the past nine years.
Senior sponsor
The senior sponsor is the senior person, perhaps a board member, who will ‘speak up’ for knowledge management in senior meetings. They are the person who will ensure that knowledge management has adequate budget and resources and that it is seen as being a value-added activity for the organisation. The senior sponsor need not be an expert in KM but should have a commitment and passion for it. They also ensure that the KM work is fully aligned with current and future initiatives.
It is very important that the senior sponsor understands the environment that knowledge management will face within sales and marketing so that the knowledge management team will put in place something that is fit for purpose and will deliver the required knowledge management culture change.