News Feature

Finding the Lasting Value of Knowledge Management

By Tom Davenport

November 01, 2000 — CIO — "Is Knowledge Management still a big deal?" I’m often asked this question by conference attendees, consulting clients and concerned friends. The inference is that the movement is getting a bit long in the tooth. Those who observe such things might notice that the number of knowledge management conferences is down, and People magazine stubbornly refuses to name any KM expert as one of its 25 Most Intriguing People in the past few years. Even my wife, not known for her high level of interest in business trends, has suggested that I’d be wise to move on to other subjects.

It’s true that knowledge management is no longer the next big thing. It had its day in the PR sun but now has been eclipsed on the hype-o-meter by electronic commerce. You’d be nuts to try to market a new conference or a new book on plain-Jane knowledge management, though some variations on the subject (customer knowledge or new product knowledge) might still do well. No movement can remain a media darling forever, and it’s time to acknowledge that the bright lights have moved on.

But wait, the corpse is stirring. Knowledge management may be quiet, but it’s hardly dead. In fact, it’s just beginning to penetrate the fabric of many businesses. The early, flashy-but-insubstantial applications—best practices and lessons learned, for example—have given way to broadly focused initiatives that are transforming the way organizations work. These changes take time and are not amenable to shallow, sensationalistic journalistic treatment. In fact, only the most profound, gifted writers can comprehend and express them.

The two organizations I’ll focus on in this regard are the World Bank and Ryder System. They don’t have much in common other than the joint pursuit of knowledge-based transformation. Both are service organizations that are supplementing their primary offerings to provide knowledge to customers.

Banking on Knowledge

The World Bank Group has been dispensing loans to developing countries for 50-plus years. In 1996, James Wolfensohn, then the new president, announced that the World Bank would strive to become the "Knowledge Bank." As usual with such Olympian pronouncements, the bank’s staff scrambled to figure out what the heck Wolfensohn meant, and the skeptics argued that "this too shall pass."

But it did not. Instead, a large variety of initiatives appeared that penetrated almost every corner of the far-flung organization. Sure, there were the usual knowledge repositories, benchmarking efforts with other companies and consulting projects. But what the Bank has that few other organizations can boast is integration with the organization’s basic mission and processes. The Bank’s mission statement was modified to read: "To help people help themselves and their environment by providing resources, sharing knowledge, building capacity and forging partnerships in the public and private sectors." Its strategic plan included a major section on knowledge management that defined the concept and how it would be applied within the organization. By fiscal 2000 the Bank spent about $45 million, or 5 percent of operational expenditures, on knowledge management. Every staff member was expected to devote two weeks of time a year to knowledge creation, sharing and learning. "Communities of practice" or, as the Bank quirkily called them, "thematic groups," were organized for the creation and sharing of knowledge in key content domains, such as early childhood development, school health and disaster relief. Presently, there are about 100 such groups, and almost half of the Bank’s employees were active members of at least one group.