Working Knowledge^CSP: Creating Value from Knowledge

“Knowledge Management (KM) is about the effective use and flow of knowledge—its creation, use, and movement across the boundaries of the organization. It is a process of continual renewal. We collaborate with our clients to help them to more effectively leverage their knowledge so they can develop better solutions to the challenges they face, make better decisions using that knowledge, and operate faster than the speed of change,” begins Bill Kaplan, Founder of Working KnowledgeCSP. One of the early thought leaders in the application of KM in the government sector, Kaplan has been consulting on the leadership and practical application of KM as a business discipline to address operations and workforce performance challenges in the private sector since the 1990s. Looking back over his 20 years of practical knowledge management experience, he notes that a consistent challenge facing the public and private business sectors is mitigating the risk of knowledge loss from workforce turnover. “We know that organizations that invest the time and resources to develop a KM Strategy and use this strategy to implement a KM program will be better equipped to address and mitigate their risk of knowledge loss. Why? Because they will have in place a consistent and disciplined process to capture, adapt, transfer, find, and reuse the critical and relevant knowledge which is likely their most important strategic asset. To help mitigate this risk, we created a KM benchmarking methodology for clients to assess their KM maturity or health and the gaps between where they are and where they want to go in KM,” says Kaplan. Working KnowledgeCSP co-delivers with their clients comprehensive consulting solutions for KM assessments and “fit for purpose” KM strategies and frameworks. They also develop targeted KM training and workshops, deliver KM tools and templates, and connect clients with the necessary KM technology and tools.

“Every KM engagement co-delivers a solution with our clients,” says Kaplan. He notes that this has helped the company gain greater success by ensuring that their clients have key persons on the consulting team that delivers the KM solutions, helping to ensure that client retains an organic capability to sustain their investment in the newly developed KM environment based on what they learned as part of the consulting delivery team.

Additionally, they have developed an agile approach to KM strategy development—KMAgile. This approach helps co-develop and co-deliver sustainable client knowledge retention and sharing capability in approximately 14 weeks through the use of KM pilot projects built into the workflow. This informs the KM strategy real-time by involving the client teams in solving business or operational challenges using KM concepts and practices as part of getting the work done. “It’s kind of like flying the airplane while you build it,” quips Kaplan. Results and lessons learned from this agile approach are used to more effectively deploy KM across the organization.

Working KnowledgeCSP has developed a practice-based Concept-Strategy-Practice (CSP) Model that has three phases.