In a knowledge-based economy nearly all  companies deliver at least some kind of knowledge-based services. The corporate knowledge manager plays an important role in integrating knowledge management methods and practices at all levels of the company. This is more the traditional part of our job:

• Strategy integration: on the one hand the KM objectives should be derived from the business strategy. However, on the other hand it’s equally important to include knowledge-based objectives into the corporate strategy (e.g. intellectual property services)
• Process integration: the knowledge management processes have to be part of the day-to-day work. Therefore, most companies should rather have a “KM Process Integration Office” than a pure knowledge management organization.
• Content integration: most waste is created in the content lifecycle, typically tons of assets created with high effort are barely used again. The effective management of the content lifecycle is a key discipline for a knowledge manager.
• System integration: from obvious requirements, as e.g. an integrated search, to more complex ones, as e.g. offering easy-to-consume content channels for the most important stakeholders within or outside the company.

Knowledge Manager as an Orchestrator

Knowledge management is all about creating the right environment for the creation, sharing, and re-use of knowledge. This means essentially to create and maintain a productive collaborative environment. That’s may be what some of you would name “People Integration”. This is the communication part of the job which makes us certainly to one of the most visible role in the company. Not always to our good if e.g. you haven’t enough resources at hand to respond to the expectations of the field. Again, I would like to have a brief look at different levels of orchestration:

• Leadership orchestration: senior management support was always an important success factors for KM initiatives. Nowadays, the senior management expects more: they expect from their knowledge manager to be one of their trusted advisor regarding knowledge-based business strategies and operations’ challenges
• Corporate functions orchestration: what makes the knowledge manager role so interesting is that you have interfaces with nearly all corporate functions, e.g. marketing, education, research & development etc. Typically the corporate function leads are your peers and KM aspects are integrated into their work area too.
• Market unit orchestration: if you work in a global organization you know what I mean by orchestrating the various point of views at regional and local level. It’s not obvious e.g. to have standards and guidelines applied across all important market units.
• Communities of practice orchestration: the management of the lifecycle of those virtual teams of newbies and experts is typically the most challenging part of the job of a knowledge manager, because virtual team contributions tend to be perceived as “hobby” by most line managers.

Knowledge Manager as a Designer

Eventually, I would like to close this summary by outlining the creative part of the Knowledge Manager job which is basically all about applying new methods to address challenges and issues.

• Content consumption design: I’ve experienced the Design Thinking methodology as one of the most promising ways to develop solutions to make the consumption of content as easy as possible in a given corporate environment.
• Continuous improvement design: Applying the lean principles also helps a lot to avoid “waste” and identify improvement potentials at all levels of integration and orchestration.
• Shared services design: knowledge management requirements may be one of the most important drivers to offer a complete shared services landscape to the business role owners.
• Change management design: knowledge management is about connecting people to people and creating the right collaborative environment. Therefore, change is and will be a permanent companion to our work. Using change management methods helps me getting things changed.

So, I would be looking forward to getting your comments and feedback on this brief summary. Which aspect is the most important to you?

“Best Practices” are often “Past Practices”. Moreover, they are also typically difficult to re-use due to the different context in which they have been created.

Thanks to David Gurteen’s newsletter I’ve come across the “Positive Deviance” method which is in use especially in development projects. This approach focusses on those people in a community who as individuals or as a group achieve a better outcome even if they face similar challenges and use the same resources. The book review by Kevin Bishop of Anecdote clearly shows the paradigm shift in consulting which the usage of this approach leads to: rely on local expertise.

The very strong article of the Stanford Social Innovation Review establishes the bridge between Positive Deviance and Design Thinking. Design Thinking addresses the needs of the people who will consume a service or a service. Design Thinking – and this is like closing the loop for me – is also taught by the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (HPI) in Potsdam. No wonder that the HPI will be part of the next Vision Summit in Berlin (April 2011). I’m looking forward to participating in this event.

• if the investors desire a personal gain and take profit beyond the amount equavilent to investment, it’s not a social business.
• if the business relies on charity money, on bi- or multilateral donors or on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities of companies, it’s not a social business (see also “Defeat Poverty” article).

The seven principles of a social business are:

1. Business objective will be to overcome poverty (BTW: interesting article on a new way to measure the poverty of countries), or one or more problems (such as education, health, technology access, and environment) which threaten people and society; not profit maximization
2. Financial and economic sustainability
3. Investors get back their investment amount only. No dividend is given beyond investment money
4. When investment amount is paid back, company profit stays with the company for expansion and improvement
5. Environmentally conscious
6. Workforce gets market wage with better working conditions
7. …do it with joy

So, any examples of successful social businesses?

Yunus offers an example in the video above (Shakti Doi yoghurt production). The article in the Times magazine outlines one aspect which Yunus sees as an huge advantage for the Profit-Maximising-Entrepreneur who would like to engage in social business: to start a social business is connected with a learning process:

… You realise that you are now wearing “social business glasses” on your eyes, you see things which you never saw before.  You start sensing that your eyes were fitted with “profit-maximizing glasses” all along, while you thought these were your natural eyes in your economic world. Now when you turn your eyes to your own profit-making businesses you start noticing things which you never noticed before.  You bring new-gained experiences from your new business to your old businesses. … (Muhammad Yunus on Social Business)

I decided to pursue my growing second passion and started as a knowledge management consultant back in 2000. I’ve been with my current employer for nearly three years working as the knowledge manager for the 600-employee business transformation consulting group of SAP consulting.