galfridus

The Need

Knowledge is difficult to acquire. It’s even more difficult to share. However, as Socrates observed, “There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.”

Let’s be honest—it’s better people have knowledge than be ignorant. I think we can all agree to that.

So, how do we get some knowledge in folks’ hands?

I’m not interested in trying to solve the world’s social, cultural, or political problems here (while it makes a lot of sense to follow this path to deal with our cultural and sociopolitical issues, it’s out of scope for what I’m talking about), but I am interested in discussing knowledge management within IT and the service industry as a whole (because, yes, IT is part of the service industry) how we have to start bringing a discussion about knowledge sharing and management to the forefront.

The Problem

We don’t like to share our knowledge.

Or, when we do share our knowledge, we want to share it to specific people and lord it over others for not knowing it (or using that opportunity to use said knowledge as a way to show others how stupid they are).

I suspect it’s a fairly primal urge—we want to make sure we survive and our knowledge helps us survive. By not sharing our knowledge, it means our competition may die off while we thrive.

But…

Considering we no longer live in caves or trees and we heavily rely upon the knowledge of others (farmers, electricians, plumbers, masons, roofers, construction workers, manufacturing employees, etc.) in order to shelter and feed ourselves and our families, it’s time to start getting a little less selfish with our knowledge.

I ran into some of this at the university I used to work at—more than a few managers preferred to keep things locked in their silos (I’m sure they would claim they were protecting their staff’s jobs). I would work around this by working with the staff members I needed to and ignoring the problematic managers (if you were one of those problematic managers—surprise!). For the most part, it worked. But it’s not a solution, and it doesn’t work in most cases.

It really hit home for me when I started a new position after the university—everyone at this new job was admittedly hiding knowledge from others. It was a badge of honor in the veteran employees’ eyes for the newbies to have to learn the same lessons (sometimes very painfully) over and over again (like some sort of hazing ritual at a frat). Looking at that experience, and others I’ve observed and been told about, it’s clear in IT, “knowledge”—information accumulated and retained by an individual regarding specific topics—is something to be hoarded and lorded.

Sure, the C-levels and upper management love to talk the talk about knowledge sharing and training and development but they also don’t have a damned clue as to what it actually means. How many organizations do it? How many of them actually understand it? Sharing knowledge, managing that shared knowledge… this is difficult for a single person to do. Can you imagine how hard it is when you put two ore more people in a room and you start the corporate BS of pitting employees against one another? When you make it clear you value your “rockstar” and “kickass” (and, seriously, if you use either of those terms as an employer, I need to wonder how old you are mentally) aspects in some employees over the others? Of course they’re going to hoard the knowledge—you’re encouraging it!

Like Gollum and his precious, the IT worker and their knowledge are not to be separated without great anguish and struggle, and the inane competition employers make their employees go through only reinforces that attitude. Yes, I’m poking a sharp metal instrument into a cavity most employers try to ignore. They ignore it because they don’t want to anger the IT guy(s) as the IT guy(s) might take their toys and go home, and then the employers have to hire new IT guy(s) and hope that (those) person(s) can figure out what their predecessor(s) did. That’s when the bean counters start looking at return on investment (ROI) and the like and try to determine if it’s worth incurring the costs involved in switching people.

I’d argue it is. It’s time to get the cavity cleaned-out and filled (because that decay will only spread) and start focusing on being proactive, not reactive. Not only does it make sense for morale and customer service, but it will have a great effect on ROI and even customer retention.

Do I have the attention of the C-levels now?

The Exacerbation of the Problem

Admittedly, there’s a wrinkle in solving this. The wrinkle is the fact we’re human.

Yes, you have to tackle getting people to share their knowledge… but you also have to get past their embarrassment. See, most people (outside of an academic environment) suck at writing and they don’t want to write any more than they need to.

Just look at their emails and Slack or Teams and their Facebook posts. They aren’t good writers and they’re aware of it. Not only do they not want to share their knowledge, they don’t want to write it down and have someone critique it (or—worse—make fun of it).

In some cases, the lack of writing ability is hidden behind an anti-academic facade. I once had a manager, at the university no less, who was very proud of the fact they didn’t “know the difference between a subject and verb” and painted it as not surrendering to the academics around us. It’s really the same insecurity—a lack of comfort and skill in writing. It can be overcome.

The Solution

The answer, in a nutshell, is this:

Sharing and managing knowledge across the organization will make your support, delivery, sales, marketing, and other teams better at their jobs, will increase the opportunities for client and customer self-service, will increase customer satisfaction, will increase employee morale, will likely decrease customer churn and employee turnover, and will give you a better ROI than you are getting now across all those teams.

That’s the meat of the matter—extracting, publishing, and maintaining information that could be used to better experiences for co-workers, users, clients, and customers. Sharing and managing knowledge lifts everyone involved.

When you look at the KCS Academy’s numbers (retrieved on September 3, 2019), they paint a pretty picture about proper knowledge management that anyone can wrap their head around:

• 50–60% improved time to resolution for incidents and requests
• 30–50% increase in first contact resolution of incidents and requests
• 10% issue reduction due to the removal of the root cause
• 20–35% improved employee retention
• 20–40% improvement in employee satisfaction
• and support center cost avoidance of up to 50%!

Call me strange, but these are staggering numbers, are they not? Why wouldn’t you want to get this implemented in your organization? What is stopping you?

In terms of the writing skill (or lack thereof), it’s actually easy to work around—you hire content managers and/or technical writers who work with the others to craft strong knowledge articles and you implement a “no tolerance” policy for shaming anyone intellectually. These are pretty easy things to do and they really should be in-place already (if you don’t have someone managing your knowledge, then drop me a line). It really is the least of your worries.

The bigger issue? You need to get everyone onboard. You need to get all of them to share. You need to get them to play together nicely. I know you can’t bear to hear this, but you are going to have to get those who don’t play nicely out—they don’t have a place in an organization that focuses on knowledge sharing.

There is no one-size-fits-all solution here—sure, a startup might be easier to do this in because you can communicate with everyone one-to-one. However, startups are where I see most of the hoarding. A larger organization can just implement a policy and dictate it from the top down… and then it’s easily ignored at the lower levels.

Here’s how I would tackle it (in general):

1. The first thing I would do as the leader pushing this strategy, is I would get myself and specific managers and tech writers (most likely in support and delivery to start) certified by the KCS Academy. It’s actually a fairly easy training and certification program and you can use it to determine how to implement it in your organization.

2. Second, the CEO (or president, etc.—the person at the top) needs to make it clear that embracing knowledge sharing and management is the priority for the organization. Yes, it will likely start in the IT area, but it’s the sort of strategy that can organically grow within an organization. Knowledge sharing isn’t just for external audiences—it’s for internal ones, too. Wouldn’t it be useful to have not only a knowledge base for your users to utilize when they have questions about your service, but also one for on-boarding your new hires? There’s immense possibility when you start delving into knowledge sharing. Yes, by all means, start with IT—but then start reaching-out across the organization.

3. Once the strategy is in place (and I understand it might take some time—it took me six years to get a division-wide incident management process in place at the university!) you will need to start working with each team. This is where the real work will need to come into play because you will need to get each manager and each staff member to understand how important this is for the organization and its customers.

4. If someone is unwilling to share their knowledge, it’s necessary to find a way to work with them and have them adapt to this new framework. If they still won’t… then let them go. You can’t afford to keep toxic individuals around—even if they’re amazing at their job.

5. Find a tool that allows for easy creation, maintenance, and access to the knowledge. I like Zendesk if your customers/clients are individuals or small businesses, but it falls completely apart when you have enterprise clients. When it comes to enterprise clients, I suggest ServiceNow (or, if you’re an Atlassian shop, then the triumvirate of Jira, Jira Service Desk, and Confluence makes the most sense for individuals, small business, and enterprise—don’t try to bridge ServiceNow or Zendesk to Jira and Confluence as it’s more work than its worth).

6. Establish your initial knowledge management process as part of your incident management process and (especially for anyone with a lot of employees generating articles) work with your content folks to review and maintain what’s being submitted.

7. Constantly review the process and improve it.

I’m not saying knowledge management is the panacea to all your organization’s ills. It’s not going to solve harassment or negligence, but it will lead you to a more elegant support solution, both internally and externally.

As long as you make sure you are sharing knowledge, and manage that shared knowledge, you’re going to find it’s much easier to get things done in a sensible way. Lead the way, work with your teams, get rid of the bad apples, and share the knowledge.

Or stay ignorant, let the superheroes and the rockstars run rampant… and fail.

The choice is yours.