Driving organisational performance through KM

Process automation has been used to address organisational performance for a while now, helping to achieve financial, operational and human goals. But according to Michael Munro, executive adviser, internet business solutions group, Cisco Systems, organisations are coming to realise that human factors are just as important to the success and returns generated by technology investment.

Human issues such as information ‘feast or famine’, inappropriate skills or knowledge, and not being able to team effectively, often block an organisation’s route to sustainable success. At Cisco, we have recognised these issues and evolved a new way to approach process transformation. Technology advancements allow raw process automation to be enhanced with communication, collaboration and learning capabilities. These knowledge capabilities, delivered as embedded services, address the human elements and improve process performance beyond simple automation. The services add context to the process and improve the speed and quality of decision making. Our internet and intranet efforts provide many examples of this. Organisations looking to implement knowledge management (KM), portals or other web-enabled process transformation can accelerate their efforts by reviewing the lessons delivered by these examples.

What is knowledge-enhanced process?

Most organisations have implemented some form of knowledge-management programme at one time or another. Taking many different guises, these usually boil down to: How do we get the right information to the right people at the right time? Traditional KM programmes approach this as a standalone process for the creation, capture, delivery and application of knowledge, as distinct from traditional process automation. In other words, you have KM systems and transactional systems, but they never intersect. KM systems are implemented in a specific knowledge-management project.

At Cisco, we have traditional knowledge-management initiatives in certain parts of our business that are intellectual capital centric, such as consulting and technical support. But over the past 18 months, a new breed of KM has emerged based on the concept of treating knowledge as an integral part of process automation. Rather than an isolated effort, communications, collaboration and learning must be integrated within, and provide context for, the transactional activity that the user is performing. It combines the goal of these process automations with the goal of knowledge programmes to create a new target: ‘Get the right information, to the right person, at the right time, and empower them to take action with it.’

This combination of process automation, augmented by messaging, learning and collaboration as services, ensures we have both the ability to transact business and the information, skills and teaming capabilities to make better decisions about that transaction.

Examples of knowledge-enhanced process

At Cisco, we have many examples of knowledge-enhanced process change spanning all aspects of the business. The following examples explore how, by weaving knowledge services of messaging, learning and collaboration into existing process automation, we improved the fundamental desired outcome of the process.

Employee performance management

When we were growing staff at more than 1,000 people a month, it was critical to understand and measure the performance of all our employees, ensuring that our results-focused culture was understood and that employees continually developed the core skills required for a successful career at Cisco. But the process for workforce performance measurement and staff development was neither consistent nor well managed. Different teams were performing in different ways and at different rates. Our human-resources department launched a technology-enabled process transformation across the entire company. The result was a standard process, automated with a tool called e-performance management (ePM). It included basic appraisal form fill-in and approval, with escalation and tracking of completion percentages. The results were unspectacular.

While there were financial benefits from standardised processes, reduced overhead and improved visibility, the fundamental outcome of the performance and development processes were not thought to have improved significantly. Issues centred around the human-interaction side of the process, such as a lack of understanding of the reasons behind the process and how the competencies were interpreted, and a lack of engagement beyond just the manager and the employee. In short, it had become a process that was automated rather than a process to develop staff.

Faced with these issues, the ePM team realised it needed to provide context around the process. It had provided the ability to execute, but now it needed to provide the ability to make better decisions. It addressed this by extending the basic process with knowledge services, specifically:

Messaging – We improved the front-end communication and positioning of the tool in order to highlight the purpose of the process and to gain alignment with how the tool was used and the desired outcomes of the process. We also enhanced the view-status-on-activities function within the process, integrating this communication-of-status reporting into the e-mail system;
Learning – We added learning elements within the application to help participants understand each of the competencies against which they were being measured. We allowed each manager to tailor these elements for their employees, so as to form a basic understanding of the personal development process and to realise what actually makes a successful Cisco employee;
Collaboration – We added functionality to enable managers to solicit feedback – via the e-mail and web – from peers, employees and any other parties that might help them gain a better understanding of an employee’s performance. We wanted to ensure a broader viewpoint was available when evaluating individual employee and manager skills in a specific competency or in relation to a specific goal.
The results went above and beyond the straightforward improvement of metrics, such as completion rates and the frequency and ability to move employees to new roles as their skills base expands. By adding these knowledge capabilities to our process automation, our management team feels – and our employees confirm in their feedback through surveys – that we enhanced the skills in our employee and leadership teams. That is, we have made significant improvements to the fundamental desired outcome of a better developed team, which provides the flexibility to reorganise and launch new programmes and products quickly.

Business operations management

At Cisco, we have a consolidated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to provide a single source of ‘truth’ for all product manufacture and order-fulfilment information. This platform gives our business managers visibility of process transformation and a wealth of data to improve their decision making. We have used this platform to realise some significant process-automation gains and to share information with our contract manufacturers, to whom we have out-tasked 90 per cent of our product manufacturing. But all of this transactional and functional automation was without context.

While there was good data available, it took a great deal of time and energy to mine the transactional systems and capture the required metrics to make business decisions. Even then, understanding the data and acting on the metrics was problematic. The bottom line was, though the desired outcome of the process automation had helped the business run faster, it hadn’t helped us make better decisions.

We addressed this need to get visibility and consistency across the business by ‘wrapping’ the process of business operations with a set of knowledge services.

We created a metrics dashboard that reached into the transaction systems to allow managers to view the metrics they wanted to use to run their business, extended with these knowledge services.

Messaging – We created a dashboard that delved into the transaction data and displayed a red/yellow/green traffic-light status for each metrics we wanted to track. Each business-unit manager could select from over 100 metrics to build his or her own specific view based on their targets and issues. This gave all product and business managers instant visibility with regards to how their business was performing. A red indicator gave them the catalyst to explore more details in a targeted manner rather than spending time reviewing green indicators;
Learning – We published the definitions of all metrics as an integral part of the application. This allows users to get the information and understanding they need, when they need it, rather than all at once at the initial rollout stage. This was also embedded into the process for building specific views, allowing view builders to understand the metrics and identify those they want to use to manage their business;
Collaboration – We enabled managers and staff to work together to take action on these metrics, which, of course, supports our fundamental goal – the process of managing the business. To do this, we allowed managers to annotate specific metrics with questions, and for staff members to respond to these questions, even attaching files to explain the root cause and remediation of the red or yellow metric.

The results of this knowledge-enhanced process for managing the business have been significant. From a hard return-on-investment standpoint, we have reassigned over 20 full-time employees from repetitive and low-value reporting to high-value analysis and, more importantly, acting on the metrics. We have also increased our visibility in the way our business operates and focused on the most important outcome – the ability to make better decisions about how to run the manufacturing and fulfilment parts of our business.

Getting started

When applying the concept of the knowledge-enhanced process in your own environment, consider the following lessons that Cisco has learnt.

Understand the objectives and the issues

Senior executives may be interested in solving knowledge issues initially, but often lose focus when a more tangible problem emerges. To overcome this, it’s important to identify the strategic goals and programmes, with solid, sustainable, executive mindshare and knowledge issues. Ideally, identify programmes that can be addressed with messaging, learning and collaboration services. These problems might include:

Lack of alignment to, or understanding of, the vision or goals;
Too much information, except when trying to find something;
Lack of teamwork, especially with global project teams and other virtual teams;
Missing skills, insufficient training, incomplete or misaligned competencies.

Understand the process and its impact on the goals

Another problem KM efforts usually face is an inability to measure the value of the work. We have overcome this by tying the knowledge-as-services work directly to the outcomes of the underlying processes. To do this, identify:

The steps to the process and who performs them;
The desired outcomes of the process in terms of financial, operational or human goals;
How to capture and measure the achievement and improvement of these goals.

Identify the opportunities for knowledge services

Often, KM initiatives fall prey to what are unachievable and overly ambitious goals. By adopting the attitude that knowledge is a service, it is possible to narrow the scope to a set of key services delivered to targeted process. More services can be added later to drive reuse of the initial services. To do this, it is necessary to take the processes outlined above and identify opportunities to embed knowledge into them. We call these ‘knowledge touch-points’, and they should be used as targets for embedding knowledge as some form of consumable nugget or service. Questions to answer at each step to expose the knowledge touch-points include:

Can additional information be delivered, specifically around the issues in this step?
Does the person handling this step need to work with or contact someone else to improve this step?
Is there a specific skill or competency needed to complete this step?

Fill the touch-points from common services

The last major issue that traditional KM efforts face concerns the technology platform. Too often, these are monolithic, silo oriented or too complex. Building a platform that delivers granular knowledge capabilities as services means these services can be plugged into the process at the knowledge touch-points and used in flexible, distinct ways. These should be delivered from a common foundation so that services are usable by any application across the enterprise, with little or no integration work. Early services could include:

Messaging – Content services that can be used to aggregate multiple publishing systems and deliver content to applications or websites. For example, a publishing alert system that allows users to subscribe to content sources and see new content as it is published, regardless of source;
Learning – While learning systems are usually monolithic, there are services that can be extended from them. For instance, help systems tailored to the specific issues that the user is facing at a process step (context sensitive) is well known;
Collaboration – This area is ripe for services, with most organisations boasting multiple capabilities such as mail, conferencing, discussion boards, team spaces and virtual meetings. These could be broken down into services for delivery. For example, creating a discussion capability that can be attached to other applications like an individual staff performance review.

Additional success factors

At Cisco, we learnt other lessons as we evolved this model, including:

A realisation that not all KM needs are the same. Any monolithic system will be too inflexible or too complicated for a broad audience to use effectively. Delivering services allows the audience and process owners to select the types of knowledge-sharing (or management) services they require and embed it into their process efforts;
How to establish a shared-services approach. These services are neither applications nor infrastructure. Funding, governance, scope and support are all delicate topics that need to be adjusted to allow a common team to deliver services to both application and business users.

And finally

Organisations can increase the benefits of their existing process improvement and success of knowledge-centric automation efforts by considering what we have learnt at Cisco and building a modular knowledge-services approach to delivering learning and development context to process.

Michael Munro is executive adviser, internet business solutions group at Cisco Systems. He can be contacted at mmunro@cisco.com.