As the Knowledge Management profession prepares for its biggest challenges, one of the sector’s pioneers, Hank Malik, sees KM chartership as a much-needed evolution.

The discipline of Knowledge Management is facing both exciting new opportunities and a number of dangerous challenges, according to Hank Malik, a globally recognised Knowledge Management Lead, Specialist Consultant speaker, and author. Hank, whose career has included some of the largest management consultancies and IT firms, enrolled on CILIP’s KM Chartership programme when he returned home recently after eight years, working in the Middle East.

He had hoped to be in the first cohort of the programme but had to wait until his role as KM lead for Petroleum Development Oman came to a natural conclusion: “The KM Chartership programme has a number of different elements that need to be lined up – ducks in a row – and it was quite a challenge to do that. When my role in Oman ended, that was the perfect time to reflect on achievements and challenges.”

Why KM?

Hank’s route to KM started in learning and development. After university he worked for a big American IT company, Control Data Corporation, which had created one of the earliest eLearning platforms called Plato. “Later whilst working for Lotus I went to a conference in Boston and met the creator of Lotus Notes, called Ray Ozzie. Ray said he had got the inspiration for Lotus Notes from Plato, so a nice career connection there! Lotus Notes was one of the earliest software solutions for KM. It was the first killer app for KM. A breakthrough, and way ahead of its time; a collaborative early web-based platform.”

His experience of collaborative technology and early Groupware with its foundations in learning technology, helped to shape a foundation for his concept of Knowledge Management. “I think there’s a flow between the first bedrock of interactive learning, Plato, and the creation of Notes as a platform. And I see Notes as the founding tool of KM software.

“So I arrived in KM from a learning background, not documents, information or records – I guess we all come in from different elements and meet in the middle – but my view is that learning – including building the ‘learning organisation’ and learning from experience – has potentially the biggest value in KM. Applying Learnings from practices worth replicating and avoiding the same mistakes has achieved the biggest benefits for KM, particularly in the Energy, Oil and Gas sectors.

Career and qualifications

Hank did a masters in knowledge management in the financial sector before working for big management consulting names such as Arthur Andersen, PWC, IBM and Deloitte as an advisory and billable consultant in their external client-facing knowledge practices. He led KM Projects globally, including working in the US, Europe, Middle East, and Japan. Later Hank moved onto leading his own KM Teams within the Energy sector including oil, gas, and renewables both in the UK and abroad.

So, over his career he has experienced the value of professional qualifications both as an employer and an employee: “I was one of the early KMers to achieve the Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM) status from the Knowledge Management Institute and was bowled over by the inspirational Doug Widner, founder of KMI.

“That was one of the first global KM certifications, and I’ve been looking for other alternative accreditations. So, when I’m looking to hire both Knowledge Managers and KM consultants, a globally recognised KM qualification does add some credence, some value. But in the KM world there is a plethora of qualifications and accreditations from both academia and the private sector. It is quite confusing. So, by creating an internationally recognised standard through Chartership, CILIP can really set the foundations for something that is globally recognised. As an employer, if someone had the CILIP KM chartership or the CKM from KMI I would see that as valuable. It shows people have a willingness to commit to professional development and towards career progression.

Because there’s such a multitude of different KM training available worldwide, I was very supportive of Paul (Corney) and CILIP’s approach to giving some more standardisation. I was at KM UK in 2019 when Nick Poole presented the very early ideas about CILIP KM Chartership. It attracted my attention because it wasn’t a certification so much as a professional validation – accreditation – and what particularly interested me was that it was based on reflection, self-assessment, and self-evidence rather than an exam or a test.”

Reflection

“This is the first time I’ve taken a self-assessment accreditation as opposed to an exam. I found it both interesting and challenging. To be reflective you need to be honest with yourself and it’s hard to look at how I could have done things better or be self-critical. The honesty with yourself as a professional, I found that really interesting. I thought it was a valuable exercise in itself, even without the accreditation.”

Hank described how the process allowed him to apply a “lessons learned and retrospective” approach to his own practice, and to situations where, in a fast-moving workplace, he would not have stopped to look.

“Chartership prompted me to look back and reflect. I was finishing off a long-term engagement in Oman which had been a great success and we’d won global awards and recognition. But I also needed to reflect on what did not go so well or could have been approached differently.”

He said he was equally challenged and interested by the task of creating the evidence base to support this. He also found the focus – one that is less career-based, more organisation-based – helpful, and also that it linked knowledge management with information management, innovation, and LEAN Six Sigma.

Working with others

One of the results of the chartership process has been a desire to help others who want to achieve the same thing. He received some useful tips about reflective writing, but they were more ‘generic’ and Hank hopes he will be able to add the extra dimension of his personal experience in his role on CILIP’s Mentor Scheme, where he is currently working with others going through KM Chartership.

He says there were two big takeaways from his own Chartership. “For me, reflective writing was one of the challenges. I hadn’t done it for a long time, and it was interesting to get additional feedback on that. Understanding how to put it all in 1,000 words. I thought this would be a breeze, but your effective ­career history in two-and-a-half pages, was not straightforward. Also, the evidence base was something you really need to think about. It took a lot more time than I thought it would with evidence annexes, documents, and references.”

But he said a big revelation was the fact that the thousand-word reflective piece was “not only career focused but had to based on the organisational context. For me that was a key takeaway and if people are thinking of chartership, think of it as something, ideally, within the organisation. There’s a big push and they’ve added more emphasis on the context of the organisation – asking you to be reflective of the organisation you work for. That look in-house, to demonstrate real tangible evidence (it might be an assessment or a presentation or a paper you’ve written), helped a great deal to compile.”

Prove value

Hank’s enrolment in, and support for CILIP’s KM Chartership programme is underpinned by a conviction in the value of KM. But this is one of his key concerns for the profession. “You need to prove value. It’s one of the biggest challenges and downfalls of the whole KM sector, that it’s often perceived as being intangible, soft or weak in value. But very much you need to prove the value, cost savings, cost avoidance and particularly in the oil and gas sector, it’s about reducing major incidents, making sure we don’t make the same mistakes. We could potentially be losing lives, losing production, harming the environment. This is where I’ve seen KM adding some real tangible benefits, real value.”

Asked for an example, Hank outlined the process for gathering and sharing “lessons learned” evidence and how this forced non-KM people to be conscious of KM and its value: “We were working with high performing Project Team, so the KM value being achieved was being stated directly by the heads of project teams, which was documented. The biggest push was about connecting expertise together and a lot of the value was identified as anecdotal, captured through a very rigorous lessons learned approach. We physically went out to capture the knowledge learnings in the oil fields of Oman. It was about getting project teams to share their learnings into a knowledge base from which we could then extrapolate key learnings with monetary value. So, it needed culture buy-in. It needed support.

“Unfortunately, I’ve seen quite a few KM teams closed down, particularly in this pandemic. They were not seen to be adding real bottom-line value. So, it’s more important now than ever that knowledge managers are seen to be generating real value.”

But how is this done? “The KM role is about selling. We capture and validate the knowledge, curate it, package it up and then publish and present it. I had a KM comms manager working for me whose job it was to do the marketing, the branding, the website and design the newsletter. It has to be publicised and promoted because this is as much about marketing ourselves. But often KMers do a poor job of marketing and branding the value.”

Digital evolution: the need to re-skill

Hank sees the marketing of KM value as an old problem – one that has been exacerbated and exposed by Covid. But the pandemic, combined with digital technology has also thrown up some new, more existential, challenges. The promise of digital and digitalisation may have been around for some time, but its real impact on professions and culture are only just emerging. “I’ve been annoying people, saying they need to rebrand themselves for the digital world. Knowledge managers have traditionally just attempted to gather knowledge through connecting and collecting and they have done this fairly well. But now I think they urgently have to become familiar with new Digital tool sets. They need to be able to use business analytical and intelligence tools and communicate more directly with the professionals whose knowledge they are gathering. I think it will mean more skills needed as data scientists, more analytics. You don’t have to be a technologist, there are plenty of them around. But knowledge managers have to be able to talk in the new digital language. They have to be open to learning things about business analytical skills, business intelligence, things which the traditional knowledge manager veers away from. They need to embrace the opportunities of Digital Transformation and quickly.”

Turf war and future opportunities

Another Covid-related threat and opportunity for KMers is the battle for virtual, specifically digital collaboration. With his history in collaborative technology, it’s an area of particular interest: “KM and collaborative tools go together. They are one of the building blocks of KM,” Hank says, adding that he has seen the acceleration of this during the pandemic as “a wonderful opportunity” for knowledge managers to “take that area”. Hank believes that “if Knowledge management doesn’t do it now, it’ll go to digital transformation and IT. They’ll take it away from KM.”

From his personal experience across many sectors he thinks the evidence clearly shows that KM is always needed and that IT isn’t always the right delivery point for collaboration and collaborative tools.

Hank’s argument is that collaboration is about humans, and so humans need to be put back into technology – and KM provides many ways to do this. From Hank’s point of view it is not a new problem. He says: “We had this in the early 2000s – eBusiness was going to transform the way we worked but they ignored the people, the culture piece, which is critical. In the 90s there was a huge explosion of big KM conferences. Every IT vendor was there branding their tools KM tools and KM solutions. It became a big bandwagon. In my latest book, Knowledge Management – A Primer and catalyst to support digital transformation, written with Jordan Richards I mention we are now in Release 4 of KM (see graphic). This wave is the digital wave and again in this one I think KM has taken a backseat, and again technology has pushed away and thinks ‘we don’t need knowledge management now’. The problem is that knowledge managers often aren’t doing what is needed on this front. They aren’t doing the lessons learned, focus groups, knowledge sharing, the real tactile stuff we used to do because of more remote working. No ‘lunch and learn’ or getting people into a room, sharing and communicating. And I don’t think virtualisation and the push on hybrid working is helping with that either.”

However, despite the downsides of virtual, he does see the proliferation of online collaborative tools as a big opportunity for KM to demonstrate its value and the value of the human element in technology, connecting the two together.

Opportunity

The pandemic has meant working from home and the implementation of many solutions and the creation of what Hank calls the concept of the ‘hybrid worker’. In most cases though, he thinks the reality is digital chaos: “Workers are fatigued by the multitude of collaborative digital tools suddenly thrown at them. It happened so quickly with no direction or strategy about what tools to use where or when, about the governance, and the policy stuff about behaviour and change management. That, I think, all comes within the realm of KM and a lot of it has just gone out of the window. Maybe we should have been more forthcoming, saying ‘here, this will make your life easier – if you use this toolset, like this, with these supporting ways of working’.”

The problem of IT implementations clashing with human culture pre-dates Covid, but the pandemic and lockdowns have accelerated and highlighted the reasons why virtual and digital collaboration is unlikely to work without KM. “We’ve missed opportunities in the past with collaborative tools. As the likes of Yammer, Teams, and Slack, and the plethora of other collaborative tools appeared, they should have been part of a KM model but instead they’re managed by IT departments who don’t see KM as adding high value to technology. We lost a huge opportunity there. In some forward-thinking organisations these tools and their implementation do come under KM, but in 90 per cent it’s IT.”

However, Hank sees the current digital chaos caused by the unmanaged adoption of these tools as an opportunity for KMers to raise their profile in digital transformation. The battle will not be an easy one though: “I think Knowledge Managers should focus on the digital workspace, the collaborative thing. That’s our area: Learning, communities, networks and knowledge bases. But if you ask a digital transformation manager about KM, my guess is that it won’t be on their radar at all. I think that’s a huge gap we need to close. One of the questions out there is about humanising digitalisation and I think that is the role of KM. It’s a fantastic opportunity for KM if we can embrace it urgently and prove our value.”

This is from the upcoming issue of Information Professional, which will be out from 16 September.