| | June 20209CIOReviewLast, the third element of a business capability, technology, suffers if an organization poorly manages knowledge. Software applications are designed to implement an organization's business processes and business rules, and failure to capture those processes and rules in well-articulated, detailed, and accurate business requirements will lead to failure in software implementation. Systems that are designed and implemented without being well-informed by requirements will not meet the needs of the business, and will most likely suffer from low user-adoption or costly re-design, or both. The costs to an organization's technology management perhaps become the most obvious consequence of poor knowledge management among the impacts on people, process, and technology.I have also often heard, as an objection to implementation plans to better manage knowledge and to develop or improve reference documents, that documentation is a wasted effort if business process change is underway. Why document the current state if it will quickly be overcome by the future state? I would suggest a variety of reasons for this. First, during the interim period before the "future state" is achieved, the organization and the people in it will continue to suffer from the problems of an absence of knowledge management, so there is value even in an interim period to manage an organization's knowledge. Second, the creation of reference materials ­ the policies, procedures, and business rules that constitute a business's "organizational process assets" ­ is itself a valuable effort and will be anchored more in the certainty of the current state than the uncertainty of a future state. The next step of evolving those documents as processes change can thus be a more evolutionary change. Last, the current state will, much more often than not, inform the future state. The process of managing knowledge through the creation of reference documents is itself a form of business analysis that will often uncover missed details that would be important in the design of a future state. It could also establish a baseline that allows organizations to measure improvements and optimize the future state.Much of my career has been in the professional services, which rely on the expertise of highly-trained and experienced professionals. These expertise-based knowledge workers rely on information to do their work. The management of information and knowledge is critical to our success in professional services. Beyond the people-centric skilled services sectors, more than ever, the evolution of technologies across industries has made information and data critical to the success of organizations. A helpful approach I have found is in the series of international standards known as ISO 9000. ISO 9000 manages quality of products and services through the management and control of documents, essentially requiring that organizations document what they do, and do what they document. Knowledge management is the foundational capability to allow organizations to perform in the information age.Many readers may find obvious the essential and foundational nature of knowledge management to enable process management. However, I have worked in operational management and operational improvement in a sufficient number of organizations over the past 20 years to realize that this is too often an under-appreciated discipline. Many organizations do not develop documents or keep those that exist up-to-date or accurate. People in the organization do not read them, cannot find or access them easily, or do not receive training in them. Last, when I have seen this done well, it is often done by overcoming an incredible amount of both passive and active resistance by stakeholders who fail to visualize the benefits and appropriately prioritize this important work. After reflection on these experiences, I hope this article can help others appreciate the importance of managing knowledge to building business capability, in all three of its dimensions of people, process, and technology. Lack of documented procedures also creates inconsistency and inefficiency in an organization's processes (the second element of a business capability)
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