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Choosing a technology that helps knowledge sharing

The "connecting power" of information technology often leads companies to believe that, in itself, this technology can leverage the know-how of their professionals and partners. Bank staff throughout the world can connect with their peers through email or the Web. They can also access electronically the knowledge collections of thematic groups to get the collective wisdom of their professional practice. From this, it would be tempting to conclude that implementing a Web-based technical solution to share knowledge is a "no brainer." The reality did not match this perception. First, one has to remember that most of the knowledge of individuals is tacit. It resides deep in their minds and only a fraction of it is indeed explicit. Only the latter can be captured, synthesized and shared through the World Wide Web. Second, to effectively share this explicit knowledge, the information technology tool should be fast to access, user-friendly and easy to operate. It should provide classification and cataloging capabilities to easily found and quickly retrieve knowledge.

The Bank's experience in that domain is that setting up such a system is not an easy task. It requires a collective visioning effort from the organization on how knowledge will be shared. Many units have to be engaged from the onset in the development of the technology tools. Only this will ensure that the users' requirements are met. Then, the system may have a chance to be used in the future. Besides information technology, other technologies drawing on the tacit knowledge of people are essential to consider. Widely available tools, such as the telephone, electronic mail and video-conferencing, play a central role in the Bank knowledge sharing activities. The combination of technology tools and human practices is likely to be more successful than programs that focus on one or the other.

Communicating the values of knowledge sharing

In the process of communicating its knowledge management strategy, the Bank was fortunate to have the full commitment of its chief executive. The World Bank president held several "town hall" meetings with the staff to explain his vision. In 1998, the Bank published its annual World Development Report on knowledge and development. That year, it organized two Knowledge Fairs. It was there that thematic groups could display their knowledge sharing activities and could further illustrate with concrete examples the benefits of working together. The first fair took place in the lobby of the headquarters building in March 1998. It had thousands of visitors, including the Bank president and his senior managers. It generated an extremely positive response from the staff who could see and feel what knowledge sharing was all about. This first success lead the president to repeat each year the fair during the Bank's annual meetings where attendance exceeds 10,000 people from around the world.

Storytelling was also used by the KM program director and some network KM staff to sensitize the organization to the kind of problems that knowledge sharing was meant to solve. Presenting real-life, problem-solving situations allowed each individual in the audience to recast the stories into his or her own contextual work environment. Suddenly, the highway knowledge sharing story was becoming relevant to the expert on early childhood education without even pronouncing the word knowledge management or attempting to give an elaborate definition of it. Storytelling turned out to be a much more powerful and effective way of communicating the values of knowledge sharing than using one of the typical complex definitions and diagrams found in every knowledge management book. Story telling is also used during the inception program of new Bank recruits.

Introducing new personnel incentives

Traditional vertical hierarchical models of organization tend to exacerbate the "silo" culture of a company and discourage knowledge sharing behaviors. In 1996, the World Bank decided to adopt a matrix organization to precisely promote the exchange of information and know-how between regional units which had been lacking. Although changing the organizational structure of the Bank was an important decision, it was not in itself sufficient to provoke the intended cultural change. A year later, the Bank made knowledge sharing an integral part of its formal personnel evaluation system by modifying the small number of core behaviors against which people's performance is assessed. This sent a strong signal to managers and staff that the institution was serious about encouraging and rewarding knowledge sharing behaviors. Did this change produced and instant incentive effect? Not quite; some cynicism and posturing remained. It had to be supplemented by a series of monetary awards.

Annual performance awards reinforcing sharing behaviors were used by the Bank to foster knowledge sharing behaviors. A President Award for Excellence was introduced to recognize outstanding team behaviors. A Development Market Place was organized to promote innovation and ground breaking work with external partners. Seed financing was offered to the winning proposals. Finally, a pilot performance award was introduced in 1999 to reward cross-boundary work and client impact. It is expected that over time these incentives will accelerate the intended behavioral change.

Measuring performance

Measuring the performance of an organization-wide knowledge sharing program is a difficult, and sometimes ambiguous, undertaking. On one hand, the return on the significant knowledge sharing investments needs to be evaluated. On the other hand, the evolution of behavioral changes throughout the organization should be measured. A set of metrics for measuring progress is essential to the sustainability of the knowledge sharing program.

At the outset of its program, the Bank focused mainly on measuring inputs (such as budget deployment and recruitment of knowledge management staff) and activities (such as the number of help desks, communities, and knowledge collections available on-line). As implementation progressed, the focus was expanded to measuring outputs (such as the number of questions satisfactorily answered by help desks, the number of page-equivalent downloaded from the web, the number of knowledge databases and the usage of electronic tools). Outcomes, such as lending cycle times, the quality of services, staff and client perceptions are also measured. Measuring the overall impact of the knowledge sharing program poses a unique challenge. Managerial factors, changes in processes, and the external work environment are simultaneously taking place with knowledge sharing activities. As a result, the causal relationship between inputs and impact remains, at best, unclear.

To overcome the shortcomings of traditional performance measurement, the Bank decided to subject its knowledge sharing program to two independent assessments. In February 1999, Larry Prusak, director of the IBM Institute of Knowledge Management, lead an external panel of knowledge management experts to assess the relevance and impact of the Bank knowledge sharing program. The panel was also asked to make recommendations for improvement. The conclusions of the panel were presented to the Bank senior management in April 1999. The knowledge management strategy of the Bank was found "far-sighted in conception and sound in its fundamentals. It positions the Bank to play a key role in the world economy of the 21st Century."

This reassuring conclusion was supplemented in October/November 1999 by a benchmarking study of knowledge management programs in 80 organizations conducted by the American Productivity and Quality Centre. In February 2000, The World Bank was recognized as one of the five top knowledge management organizations in the US. In June 2000, an annual survey of experts of Fortune 500 companies, also selected the Bank as one of the top ten Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) in the world.