At the time, Ketchum was experiencing a high rate of turnover. McKeon and other executives realized that incalculable amounts of expertise and knowledge were walking out the door every time an employee moved on. "In a professional services business, all your investment is in your people," says McKeon (now president of Chamber Edit, a company that provides portal software to chambers of commerce).

Ketchum’s system has three parts, which all require the participation of every employee: A document management system catalogs documents that previously existed on servers and hard drives at the company’s 29 offices; an expertise database contains an employee directory that lists staff biographies and photographs, areas of expertise, and client experience; and the client database lists past and present clients, and the work the firm has done for them.

Instead of gradually introducing the staff to the process of contributing information, McKeon worked with Ketchum’s workplace practices group to create a campaign similar to what the firm does to gear up for a new client. During what Ketchum dubbed Reboot Week, McKeon taught the staff how to use the new system through webcasts and conference calls. Employees spent the week going through files, documents and e-mails, and entering all relevant information into the document database, as well as creating and updating their personal pages in the employee directory.

Reboot Week helped staff members overcome their hesitancy about sharing client information. To reinforce that message, McKeon made sharing mandatory; each employee’s contribution to the KM system has become part of their performance review.

Pick the Right Tool for the Job

One of the biggest mistakes a company or CIO makes at the outset of a KM initiative is to get carried away with the technology. "If KM is just handed over to IT, it ensures failure. The CIO’s role is to make sure the technology end of a KM initiative does what the company needs it to," according to Born’s Wright.

Before the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in Washington, D.C., went forward with plans for a knowledge management system, officials took a look at their technology and realized something new was needed. The FHWA ran primarily on an Oracle platform, which worked well for database management but didn’t deal well with the kind of unstructured, research-based data targeted for organization, says Mike Burk, the FHWA’s chief knowledge officer.

The FHWA’s employees worked primarily within Novell’s GroupWise system and did most of their business via e-mail. Burk knew that employees wouldn’t constantly monitor the site for new information updates, but they did check their e-mail regularly. He worked with the FHWA’s CIO to link the existing Oracle-based system with the agency’s website; they set up automatic e-mail updates that notified employees whenever new information had been placed in the website’s knowledge base.