Knowledge Strategy Project

Knowledge Strategy Project (wo the appendix).docx Columbia University 1

BCI Knowledge Strategy Mor Sela, IKNS 4301, December 8th 2013

Table Of Content

Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 2

1 Organizational Context ............................................................................................................. 2

1.1 About BCI ........................................................................................................................... 2

1.2 Mission, Vision, and Values ............................................................................................... 2

1.3 Business Strategy ............................................................................................................... 3

1.4 Key Strategic Challenges .................................................................................................... 3

1.5 Organizational Structure .................................................................................................... 4

2 Assessment of Current Knowledge Services ............................................................................ 5

2.1 Communities of Practice .................................................................................................... 5

2.2 Content Repositories ......................................................................................................... 6

2.3 Information Technology and Communication Infrastructure ............................................ 7

2.4 Information and Knowledge Flow ..................................................................................... 7

2.5 Knowledge Services Value Map ......................................................................................... 9

3 Recommendations ................................................................................................................. 10

3.1 Business Strategy ............................................................................................................. 10

3.2 KM Vision ......................................................................................................................... 10

3.3 KM Mission ...................................................................................................................... 11

3.4 Knowledge Values ........................................................................................................... 11

3.5 KM Ownership ................................................................................................................. 11

3.6 KM Solutions .................................................................................................................... 11

3.7 Risks & Challenges ........................................................................................................... 14

3.8 Roadmap .......................................................................................................................... 15

4 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 18

Appendix 1: Lessons Learned .......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.


Introduction “If HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times more profitable” said HP’s former CEO Lew Platt1. Knowledge is arguably the most valuable asset of most organizations in the 21st century. To maximize the value of this asset, companies should become intentional in the way they capture, develop, share, and effectively use their accumulated organizational knowledge.

The objective of this paper is to recommend a knowledge strategy for BCI that will support the organization’s strategic objectives and contribute to its long-‐term competitiveness.

The paper starts with context about the company and its overall business strategy today; and an assessment of BCI’s current status as it related to knowledge management.

The core of the document is a recommended knowledge strategy that meets the above-‐mentioned objective. By applying scholarly research, analysis, and insights from the IKNS classes, reading and discussions -‐-‐ I recommend high-‐level strategic guidelines (KM Vision, Mission, and Values) as well as practical solutions for BCI’s top three most burning challenges related to KM. For each specific knowledge solution, the paper predicts potential business impact (value) and maps the strategic objective it aims to address. In addition, the paper addresses the risks and challenges associated with the recommendations.

1 Organizational Context

1.1 About BCI Best Communications, Inc. (BCI)* is a venture-‐funded company that provides telecommunication solutions. The company has developed unique technology that enables delivering high quality communications over unstable networks (such as the public internet) at a lower cost, compare to legacy systems. The company’s main offering is a platform that enables users to communicate and collaborate visually using a range of devices -‐-‐ from personal devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones to large room systems. In addition to this enterprise offering, the company licenses its Software Development Kit (SDK) to 3rd party developers. The company has 280 employees, ~35% of which are based at the corporate headquarters in NY, ~15% at the CA office, and the rest are spread around the US, Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific.

* To protect the confidentiality of the company, I’m using a fictive name and have changed information that could make it easy to identify the company’s identity.

1.2 Mission, Vision, and Values The company does not have a stated mission, nor does it have stated vision or values. However, when I asked director-‐level managers at BCI about their perception of these attributes, I got fairly consistent answers that allowed me to define the following implicit definitions:


! Mission: Making visual communications both affordable and usable, to enable its widespread global adoption as an enabler for more engaged telecommunication among workers and people in general.

! Vision: A world in which visual communications are as prevalent as voice communications.

! Values: The key value that uniquely represents BCI is innovation. BCI prides itself for being innovative both technologically and from a business model perspective.

1.3 Business Strategy BCI is a latecomer to the communications space. IP-‐based communications has been around since the late 90’s and is currently dominated by Cisco who has more than 50% of the market. However, BCI’s unique technology and pricing structure has the potential of disrupting the current status quo and capture a significant market share. Given this technology-‐based advantage, and given BCI broad (implicit) mission statement, BCI has decided to compete head-‐to-‐head at all market segments with the incumbent communication players. Given its competitors are far larger and have a well-‐established market presence, BCI is trying to completely disrupt the market by creating a unique offering that none of the incumbent players can offer today: Better user experience at a significantly lower cost*.

BCI is trying to penetrate all possible market segments concurrently – SMB, large enterprise, healthcare, financial, education, government, defense, service-‐providers, and app developers; and in all global territories. Moreover, in addition to targeting multiple market segments, the company product offering is very wide, providing applications for mobile devices (iOS, Android), PC (win, mac, Linux), multiple room systems, SDK and APIs. In my opinion, this strategy is extremely risky for a small company who enters an established market. This strategy of going after all possible market segments can be explained by Porter’s “The Failure to Choose” trap and “The Growth Trap” (Porter, 1996)2. The main risk is that by targeting on so many segments, given its relative small size, the company is unable to fully satisfy any of the segments it serves and is prone to jeopardize its credibility in the marketplace.

*Note: by “cost” I mean Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), not just the direct cost of buying/licensing the product/software. This includes cost of operations and network requirements.

1.4 Key Strategic Challenges Unfortunately I did not get a chance to interview the CEO for this project. Instead, I asked the Director-‐level mangers which I interviewed the following question: “In your opinion, if I asked the CEO to identify key strategic challenges that could be addressed by KM, what would be his answer?” The answers were quite consistent with the following four challenges clearly being the top priority:

! Agility: Outperform the competition by having agile product development and quick response to the ever-‐changing market dynamics.

! Usability: Improve product usability.


! Quality: Improve product quality. ! Reduce Cost: Look for ways to reduce the cost of the product and the total cost of

ownership (TCO) by customers.

1.5 Organizational Structure BCI’s structure is fairly typical for late-‐stage VC-‐funded technology start-‐ups. To save cost and be nimbler, BCI consolidates few typical officer functions such as COO, CIO and CHRO, having the CFO effectively filling all these functions.

The structure is designed in a way that allows a small company to target customers worldwide and in multiple vertical industries in a fairly efficient way.

The main challenge with this structure is that for the most part, only sales-‐related functions are distributed. This structure does not allow for high quality localization of the product, its marketing and the professional services that enterprise customers expects to get with it.

BCI’s plan is to modify its structure, adding more capabilities to its global centers following the next round of financing (most likely an IPO).

Figure 1 -‐ Organizational Structure

CEO

SVP Engineering

Product 1 R&D

Product 2 R&D

Product 3 R&D

Product 4 R&D

SVP Product Management

Product Management

Program Management

Technical Publicalons

QA

SVP Sales

USA

EMEA

APAC

ROW

Channels

Verlcals

SVP Sales Operalons &

Customer Support

Sales Operalons

Produclon

Customer Support

Sales Engineering

CMO

Product Markelng

Field Markelng

PR

Adoplon Services

Business Development

CFO

Finance

IT

HR

General Counsel


2 Assessment of Current Knowledge Services BCI does not have any official KM function, nor does it have defined any of its activities as a “KM practice”. That said, here is a sample list of KM practices that are taking place at the company (terminology and taxonomy are based on SMR Briefing, Sep 2012)3:

2.1 Communities of Practice ! Formal

Product Management & Marketing Forum: Weekly meeting (using videoconferencing) with all members of both the NY-‐based product management team and the CA-‐based product marketing team. The objective is to exchange information, keep each team updated about activities of the other team, and brainstorm ideas for the overall improvement of the product and its marketing.

! Semi-‐Formal: Yammer Groups: BCI IT has launched Yammer for all employees to collaborate internally without any governance or guidance about how to use it. The Marketing team and few marketing-‐oriented employees from other departments use this tool to discuss marketing ideas, share relevant industry news, as well as some casual “water-‐cooler-‐like” discussions.

! Informal/Social: Lunch Groups: During lunchtime, few unstructured/social COPs would typically gather at the cafeteria or in the company’s meeting rooms. While it is common for these COPs to group based on the work department/team, few of them would include employees from different disciplines in the organization. It is a fairly effective forum to share knowledge across organizational silos.

The above communities of practice meet Donald Hislop’s criteria4, i.e. they develop 1) a shared body of common knowledge, 2) a shared sense of collective identity, 3) some overlapping values. The traits and benefits of these practices are summarized in Figure 2 below.


Figure 2 -‐ Traits and Benefits of COPs

2.2 Content Repositories ! Codified:

The Company does not have an intranet, nor does it have any other common depository for its content. Each department/team may use a different repository. The Product Management team use Confluence collaboration software to store and collaborate on all internal product specifications. Sales use salesforce.com for depository. Customer Support use Microsoft Dynamics. Many employees store content on various network folders, again with no governance around taxonomy. This approach makes it very hard for employees to find and use other teams’ codified information/knowledge.

! Tacit: o Experts: Several employees are known for being very knowledgeable on various

topics, which are not necessarily their direct responsibility. Few of them are also


known for being very accessible and happy to share their knowledge with others. For example, Chris is known as an expert about customer’ operational environment, Paul is known as an expert about database technologies, and Mark is known as the go-‐to person for product demos.

o Staff Directory: There is no indication of expertise in the staff directory. There is no codified tool that may assist employees in finding other employees or consultants with specific expertise, other then their direct role.

o Orientation Training: Once a quarter, new employees are invited for a 3-‐day orientation training at the company’s headquarters. This training includes market, company, and product overview. It is also an opportunity for new employees to meet the CEO and other executives and get their vision. However, other than that, there is little further training and career development opportunities other than online courses that employees may take at their (non-‐existent) spare time.

2.3 Information Technology and Communication Infrastructure The Company has a very liberal and experimental approach to deploying and using IT applications. There is little central governance related to KM related systems. As a result, the company has never invested in creating a centralized content management system (CMS). In the absence of a central CMS, each department implemented a CMS based on its individual preferences. Marketing use SharePoint and Yammer; Customer Support use Dynamics; Sales use Salesforce.com; Engineering use CVS; and Product Management use Confluence. On top of that, email is extensively used to share information and many employees also use shared network folders to store & share documents.

While this lack of governance and unity across the company has some advantages (e.g. CMS is better optimized to the unique needs of each department) the negative impact of this approach is inefficient content management and ineffective inter-‐departmental communications. Knowledge acquired by one department is rarely available to the rest of the company.

From communication infrastructure perspective, the company is very advanced. The company is using its own product to visually collaborate between employees and with partners and customers. The company also leverages Microsoft Lync unified communication platform, mostly for instant messaging and voice calls. Yet, while many of the employees collaborate regularly using these advanced technologies, the shared tacit knowledge is rarely codified in a manner that allows future use of it.

2.4 Information and Knowledge Flow Information and knowledge (I&K) reside in any part of the organization, some of it is codified in digital format, some is in written documents (very few though), and the majority is tacit I&K that resides within the employees’ minds. It would have been not feasible to analyze each possible I&K flow within the time limits of this


project. Therefore, I’ve decided to analyze the flow of just two types of I&K assets: Product I&K and Customer Insights I&K. Table 1 addresses the following questions for these I&K resources:

! How does the I&K flow from the units who hold the knowledge to the units who use? ! What tools and investments has the organization made to improve the flow? ! What functions and positions help to organize and improve the flow?

Table 1 -‐ Information and Knowledge Flow

I&K Asset Type: Product I&K

(e.g. features, specifications, competitive positioning)

Customer Insights I&K

(e.g. customers’ requirements, needs, deployment environment)

Units who hold it Product Management Sales & Sales Engineering

Units who use it Sales and Marketing Product Management

How does it flow? Product Documentation – Product Management is responsible for documenting all product functionality, specifications and user guides.

Sales Training (virtual and/or in-‐person) – typically once a quarter or when having a major new product/version release.

Weekly ‘sync’ meeting between the product Management team and the Product Marketing teams (virtual).

Online repository of product specs and documentation (Confluence)

Feature Request Process – Both customers and their sales representatives are encouraged to submit feature requests (FR). The FRs are codified in a standard form by the relevant sales representative. It is then being reviewed and prioritized by an FR Committee, headed by product management and participated by stakeholders from Engineering and Sales Operations. The person who submits the FR gets the opportunity to “defend” it in front of the FR committee. All FRs are prioritized and stored online for future reference.

What tools and investments has the organization made to improve the flow?

The use of video conferencing technology makes both the sales training and the weekly “sync” meeting more engaging and efficient for remote participants.

Confluence is a fairly recent tool that was initially introduced by the Engineering team and was adopted by the Product

This process required very little investment as it is mostly based on manual work.

BCI should consider investing in an online-‐based FR application tool that will allow both customers, channels and employees to easily submit FRs and track their progress.


Management team. It is a useful and effective tool for content management, file sharing, and textual collaboration.

Moreover, such tool should allow voting and comments by others…to gain more insights about the demand for the feature and a richer description of it.

What functions and positions help to organize and improve the flow?

The Product Management and Product Marketing teams are the functions that drive the above initiatives. It includes the SVP of Product Management, VP Product Marketing, product managers, product marketing managers, program managers and technical writers.

The FR process requires active participation mostly by the following functions: Sales, Sales Engineering and Product Managements. Additional functions involved are Engineering and Sales Operations.

2.5 Knowledge Services Value Map Table 2 maps the current implicit knowledge services described above with the value they bring and the strategic challenges they aim to address:

Table 2 -‐ Knowledge Service Value Map

Knowledge Service Value Strategic Challenge it Addresses

Product Management & Marketing Forum

Improving alignment and collaboration between the two teams. Hence, increasing the likelihood of having a product that is more aligned with market requirements (Usability), faster response to market trends (Agility), and more effective & accurate marketing communications (Quality).

Usability

Agility

Quality

Yammer Groups Creating better relationships and collaboration across the organization. Hence, increasing the likelihood of finding faster solutions to problems.

Agility

Lunch Groups Creating better relationships and collaboration across the organization. Hence, increasing the likelihood of finding faster solutions to problems.

Agility

Orientation Training Quickly bringing new employees up to speed and increasing their knowledge on a variety of subjects

Agility


beyond their direct area of responsibility. Hence, increasing the speed in which new employees becomes effective and increasing the quality of their work.

Quality

Product Documentation Customers perceive documentation as an integral part of the product. Hence, quality documentation adds to the perceived quality of the product. It also improves the usability of the product and reduces customer service calls, which reduces BCI’s operational cost.

Quality

Usability

Lower Cost

Feature Request Process This process helps BCI understand what customers are looking for. Hence, it helps improving the usability of the product.

Usability

3 Recommendations

3.1 Business Strategy As the company moves beyond the “start-‐up” stage to the “growth” stage, it should start to shift its strategy and allocate more management attention to the long-‐term sustainability of its competitive advantage.

Such long-‐term strategy can’t rely merely on the current inherent technology advantage of its product. Just as BCI disrupts the current market status quo, soon enough, new innovators will arrive to the market and will aim to disrupt the status quo once again.

To effectively compete in such dynamic environment, BCI has to be a knowledge-‐driven company5, developing unique Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives that would result in constant and fast innovation of its market offering so that it effectively addresses the ever evolving needs of it customers. In addition, the KM initiatives should result in operation excellence, driving down cost and time-‐to-‐market, while maximizing product and service quality. Also, organizational knowledge should be leveraged for more educated and data-‐driven decision making.

3.2 KM Vision A company that embraces knowledge development, knowledge sharing, and knowledge-‐based decision making as core enablers of its competitive advantage sustainability.


3.3 KM Mission Leverage the organizational knowledge development, sharing, and analytics to drive constant innovation, operational excellence, and more informed decisions.

3.4 Knowledge Values A key success factor in the adoption of BCI’s knowledge-‐driven strategy, the company should embrace a ‘Knowledge Culture’. This means acknowledging the value of knowledge development, knowledge sharing and knowledge Utilization. Such organizational culture change must be driven (or, at least, genuinely supported) by top management of the company. Managers and employees should be expected and encouraged to codify their knowledge, share their knowledge with others, and rely on the accumulated knowledge of the company when making decisions.

3.5 KM Ownership To ensure that KM is becoming an inherent part of the organizational culture, it is recommended to appoint a Knowledge Manager that reports to a senior executive. Given the relatively small size of the company, this function could be achieved by either a part time internal position or an external consultant (the second option may be the most effective and efficient approach since there is no one inside the organization with the necessary expertise).

3.6 KM Solutions While there are possibly many KM initiatives that could benefit the company, I limited my recommendation to only the top three that a) could make the most positive impact and b) are practicable. The following table depicts three specific recommended KM solutions. For each solution, I included the problem it aims to solve, the value it is expected to bring, and the strategic challenges they address:

3.6.1 Content management and collaboration software

Problem Organizational Silos

Each department implemented a CMS based on its individual preferences. Marketing use SharePoint and Yammer; Customer Support use Dynamics; Sales use Salesforce.com; Engineering use CVS; QA use Jira; and Product Management use Confluence. On top of that, email is extensively used to share information and many employees also use shared network folders to store & share documents.

As a result, knowledge acquired by one department is rarely available to the rest of the company.

Recommended Solution

Adopt a company-‐wide social intranet platform, consolidating the various content management silos in the organization


I recommend using Confluence given its integration with Salesforce.com and Jira, which will continue to be used as content sources.

Expected Value Improving knowledge sharing, alignment and collaboration between all teams.

Hence, increasing the likelihood of having faster response to market trends/needs and higher quality offering

Strategic Challenges it Addresses

! Agility ! Quality

3.6.2 Knowledge Codification

Problem “We don’t know what we know”

There is no governance around knowledge codification and there is no significant attempt by management to drive it. Significant portion of the knowledge sharing is done verbally in meetings with no consistent note taking and/or decision codification.

As result, some key intellectual property is being lost when people leave the company. Also, there is inefficiency as different people “reinvent the wheel”, not knowing that the same issue was discussed and addressed before.


Knowledge Codification Governance and Incentives (a mix of stick and carrot)

The company as a whole and each department should define clear guidelines around what knowledge should be codified and how. For example, there should be a clear policy on who should take minuets of meeting, what’s the expected template, where it should be stored, and how it should be shared.

Also, in the spirit of gamification, the company should create an incentive and recognition program that will drive employees to share knowledge and follow the codification guidelines.

Expected Value Developing organizational intellectual capital and avoiding wasteful mistakes and redundant work.

Hence, increasing the likelihood of having faster response to market trends/needs and reducing cost associated with wasted time.



! Agility ! Quality ! Operational Efficiency

3.6.3 Knowledge-‐based Decision Making

Problem Leveraging organizational knowledge for better decision making

BCI doesn’t use codified knowledge to help make informed decisions.

For example, product pricing strategy is not driven by analytics of customers and competitive data.

“Knowledge becomes intelligence when and only when it’s transmitted to someone who can act upon it to create value.” (Tim Powell, 2013)6


Business Analytics and Strategic Intelligence

The company should utilize BA/BI tools and best practices.

I recommend looking at all major decision made (e.g. which target markets to go after, what should be the pricing, make/buy/outsource decisions, etc.) and trying to support these decisions by intelligence, based on knowledge, which is based on information, which is based on data.

(I’ll be in a position to provide more a more detailed recommendation after completing IKNS K4304 -‐ Business Analytics and Strategic Intelligence.)

Expected Value More informed decisions

Hence, increasing the likelihood of making smarter decisions that would help win the competitive game.

“Embedding analytics into core business processes creates sustainable competitive advantage” (Jeanne Harris, Accenture, 2013)7

Also, by using BA/BI, the company may evaluate their cost/efficiency and cut costs accordingly.

Figure 3 below illustrates how data can create value.


! Agility ! Quality ! Operational Efficiency


3.7 Risks & Challenges Change Management will likely be the biggest challenge in pursing the above recommended knowledge strategy. The risk is that due to inherent resistance to change, status quo will prevail and all the time, money and effort invested in implementing this strategy will result in no meaningful business impact.

According to Dale Stanley 8 , 60% of major knowledge strategy implementations fail, 80% of these failures are due to change management problems.

To overcome these dismal statistics, the appointed KM manager should implement a Change Management program that follows these principals9:

1) Sponsorship 2) Change Agents 3) Organizational Readiness and Managing Resistance 4) Communication Planning.

Figure 3 -‐ The Knowledge Value Chain1 (with a slight modification: replacing “Production” with KD and “Use” with KU)


3.8 Roadmap The roadmap for implementing the above recommended strategy might vary based on available resources. Therefore, at this time my recommendation does not include specific dates. However, it does outline the major milestones in the process. I’ve broken down the strategy to three tracks: 1) Strategic, 2) Social Intranet and 3) Business Analytics tracks. These tracks are not linear. Once the strategic track has passed the 4th milestone, both tracks 2 and 3 can start in parallel.

Track 1: Knowledge Strategy


Track 2: Social Intranet


Track 3: Business Analytics


4 Conclusion Like many start-‐up companies, in its early years of existence BCI focused its strategy and management attention on activities that would enable the creation a competitive offering (financing and product development) and initial market success (marketing and sales).

While BCI does implement implicit Knowledge Development and Knowledge Sharing practices that add clear value and address the company’s strategic challenges (see Table 2), these activities are sporadic and rather narrow in their scope. There is much more that could be done in the knowledge domain to drive constant innovation, operational excellence, and more informed decisions.

As the company moves beyond the “start-‐up” stage to the “growth” stage, it should start to shift its strategy and allocate more management attention to the long-‐term sustainability of its competitive advantage. Such long-‐term strategy can’t rely merely on the current inherent technology advantage of its product. Just as BCI disrupt the current market status quo, soon enough, new innovators will arrive to the market and will aim to disrupt the status quo once again.

To effectively compete in such dynamic environment, BCI should develop a knowledge strategy that would result in:

! Constant and fast product/service innovation ! Operation excellence, driving down cost and time-‐to-‐market, while maximizing product

and service quality ! Leveraging organizational knowledge for more educated decision-‐making.

In summary, here are the steps that I recommend in the roadmap to achieving the above strategy:

a. Clearly define and communicate the company’s Knowledge Mission, Vision and Values b. Appoint a Knowledge Manager that reports to a senior executive c. Adopt a company-‐wide social intranet platform, consolidating the various content

management silos in the organization d. Knowledge Codification Governance and Incentives e. Utilize BA/BI tools and best practices to drive more informed decisions

To ensure success of this strategy, a thoughtful change management program should be implemented.


References: 1 Daveport, T. and Prusak, L., Working Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2000) xxi 2 Porter, Michael E., What Is Strategy? (Harvard Business Review, 1996) 96608, 75 3 SMR Briefing, The Knowledge Audit (SMR-‐Knowledge.com, Sep 7, 2012) 4 Hislop, Donald, Knowledge Management in Organizations (Oxford University Press, 2008) 158-‐167 5 Stewart, Tom, Booz & Co., Knowledge Strategy, Knowledge Products, and Innovation (IKNS K4302, 11/12/13) Slides 6-‐8 6 Powell, Tim, Knowledge is Power – Not!, http://www.knowledgevaluechain.com/2013/08/12/knowledge-‐is-‐power-‐not/ (last accessed on 11/10/2013) 7 Harris, Jeanne G., Accenture, Competing and Winning with Analytics (IKNS Residency, 8/30/13) Slide 11 8 Stanley, Dale, Business Realities: Change Management (IKNS K4301, Session 5, Expert Interview video) 02:35 9 St. Clair, G., and Stanley, Dale, “Afterword: Managing Strategic Change” In Building the Knowledge Culture: The Knowledge Services Effect. (SMR International, 2009) 55–68

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