How much Knowledge Management can you outsource?

You have a successful Knowledge Management program under way. All is going well, but you are under increasing pressure with requests from the business, and you don't have enough resources to respond to the demand.

You think "I must be able to outsource some of this work". But how much can you safely outsource, and what are the elements you need to keep in-house?

Read on, and find out!

You can’t outsource ownership of the knowledge management strategy. Although it a very good idea to get an  experienced Knowledge Management consulting company to help you to draft a strategy, the strategy needs to be owned and delivered from within your own company.

You can’t outsource delivery of knowledge management implementation. Although it is a very good idea to get a good experienced Knowledge Management consulting company to help you with implementation, the implementation project needs to be led and delivered from within the company.

You can’t outsource leadership of the communities of practice. The CoPs own your critical organisational knowledge, and this needs to be owned internally.

You can’t outsource knowledge ownership. The practice owners, the knowledge stewards, the subject matter experts, all need to come from within the company. If you start outsourcing knowledge ownership, then you have really outsourced that particular capability. And that’s fine; companies outsource things like financial management or catering, but you are outsourcing the entire capability and not just management for knowledge capability.

You can’t outsource the ownership of content. The content owners need to come from within the organization, although you can bring in an experienced KM consultancy to help create some of the content in the first place.

You can’t outsource the application of the knowledge. Applying knowledge is done by your teams, your departments and your individuals.



You can outsource knowledge capture services, such as the capture of lessons learned from projects. This is an intermittent activity, and can sometimes be a high volume activity and sometimes not very much is going on, which makes it hard to resource internally. Knowledge capture requires specific skills, and you may not have a readily available pool of people with those skills in your organisation. This is an ideal service to outsource, and knowledge capture is a service we already provide to many clients.

You can outsource knowledge retention services, such as retention interviewing and the creation of knowledge assets from retiring staff. Like the example above, this is a specialized task requiring specialised skills, but one which is intermittent. Many companies outsource this service - Shell outsourced much of their ROCK interviewing for example. If you have a sudden workload of retention work, then look to outsource the service.

You can outsource the facilitation of knowledge management processes, such as peer assist, knowledge exchange, or community of practice launch.

You can outsource the administration of the online library or the online knowledge base. Shell, for example, outsource much of the administration work related to their Wikis, such as building cross-links between articles.

You can outsource lessons management, and the administration of your lesson management system. You can bring in people to do the day to day work of quality control of lessons, tracking lessons and actions, following up on actions, and gathering and reporting metrics; also the work of lessons analysis.

You can outsource audit of your knowledge management framework and application. You can bring in an external objective company on a regular basis to check the health of your knowledge management program, and to audit the degree of management of your knowledge assets.

You can outsource provision and maintenance of some of your knowledge management technologies. Technologies such as lessons management systems for collaboration tools can be provided from the client, rather than having to be hosted and maintained from within the organization.

So there are many things you need to do yourself, in-house, but there are a number of specialist services where it makes sense to set up a call-off contract, so you can respond to requests by pulling on a pool of external specialist resource.

Are you resourcing Knowledge management sufficiently?

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What level of KM resources are appropriate in a project?

Take a large construction and engineering project - the first of its kind in a new location.

The project will create two things -

1. An income stream for the owner
2. Knowledge, which can be used to reduce cost for future projects

Let's assume some facts for our imaginary project. Let's assume it's a big one.

1. Budget of $500,000
2. Timescale 2.5 years
3. Net Present Value (NPV) $1 billion
4. Work-hour estimate 10 million
5. 2 similar projects planned
6. Conservative estimate of the value of the knowledge - $30  million (3% cost saving on 2 follow-on projects of the same size and scope)

So we will spend 10 million working hours delivering the $1bn Net Present Value - how many working hours should we spend delivering the knowledge, given that it is worth 3% of the NPV?

Simple maths says we should spend 300,000 work hours delivering the knowledge. If the knowledge is worth 3% of the project value, then you should spend 3% of that effort on the knowledge, surely? 

300,000 workhours is 37,500 work days (at 8 hours per day) or 187 work years. That's a full time team of  75 people for the duration of the project.

75 people! Have you ever seen a project put 75 people onto KM?

Now a lot of the work would  be done by contractors, and you would assume a lot of those people would be knowledge managers working within the contractor organisation, so lets discount those for the moment.

The project management team itself might be, say 20 people, working 10,000 days over the life of the project. By the same logic, you would want 300 days (or 0.6 of a person full time) spent by the project management team on knowledge management. 

In most projects, the team would spend nowhere near this. They might have a one-day lessons learned meeting halfway through the project (1 day for 20 people is 20 workdays) and another one-day meeting at the end (another 20 workdays). That is a massive underinvestment of time and resource, given the value of the knowledge.

For your organisation, do the math.

Work out the value of the knowledge vs the value of the projects, and see what investment in KM would  be appropriate. 

It might surprise you - it SURELY will surprise your management, because in our (Knoco) experience, the vast majority of projects under-resource KM, compared to the value it delivers.

The four roles in KM

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This blog post arises from a conversation I have been having with Mary Abrahams over the roles of knowledge manager and content manager and content catalyst, following the "turf war" post below. She asked me about my definition of content, in the context of roles and role descriptions, and we agree that content is recorded material (documents, videos, photographs etc). As the conversation moved into the field of Roles, then I realised that it was becoming too big for a comment on a blog post, and becoming a blog post in its own right.

In a managed KM system, I see four main facilitative roles, which we can link to the four squares of the Nonaka and Takeuchi SECI model, the four squares being

Socialisation - the transfer of knowledge between people,
Externalisation - where tacit knowledge is extrnalised, and then can be recorded (thus creating content)
Combination - where externalised knowledge or content is combined
and refined
Internalisation - where externalised knowledge or content is
internalised or "learnt" by the user

(I just want to say at this point that not all content, in fact only a small proportion, is externalised knowledge. There is a huge amount of content which is information or data. Also not all externalised knowledge, by the N&T definition, is content, but for the purpose of looking at roles, I will assume that we can equate the two. Please feel free to question this assumption, but that would lead us into different territory).

So what are the roles?

Socialisation - the role of the contact broker, for example the facilitator of a community of practice, or the subject matter expert who puts people in touch with people, arranging knowledge visits, conferences, round tables, knowledge exchanges, mentoring, demonstrations, conversations etc.

Externalisation - the role of the facilitator, who facilitates peer assists, AARs, Retrospects, Knowledge handovers, who conducts interviews, and who creates learning histories. This could be close to Mary's "content catalyst" role.

Combination - the role of the knowledge owner, or content owner. There will be a content manager role as well, who manages the repository of the content.

Internalisation - this is a fuzzier area, and this is an area of weakness for many KM programs. The role here is the broker for the internalisation of other people's knowledge. It may be the facilitator of the Business Driven Action Learning exercise, or the facilitator or trainer of other exercises(trainings, briefings, role plays, scenario planning) where people can internalise explicit knowledge.

These roles are in addition to the basic roles of knowledge provider and knowledge receiver/user. They facilitate the flow of knowledge, rather than contribute to it. Also they are not neccessarily roles on the KM team.

These need not be separate people - the knowledge owner or content manager could act as the contact broker, the externalisation facilitator can act as the internalisation facilitator. Or it could very well be more than four people. There may be many communities, each with a facilitator. There may be many facilitators of knowledge capture and knowledge internalisation.

But if knowledge transfer is to work well, these roles are needed.

Bird Island knowledge management game, now commercially available

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I have blogged here before about the Bird Island game, and the way it can demonstrate measurable performance improvement through KM, making it the perfect sales tool to win over the cynics and doubters.

Up to now, we have personally delivered this exercise to our clients, charging a consultancy fee for each workshop. However many of our clients want to run this exercise internally within their organisations, without having to bring us in every time.

So as a response, we have now decided to provide annual licences for this knowledge management game. A one-time fee allows you to run the exercise as many times as you like in a year, with renewal fees at much reduced cost. And even though the exercise requires careful facilitation, we have built an online password-protected site containing full instructions, including video of key aspects of the exercise, all the handout and demonstration material, a full equipment list with links to equipment suppliers, a facilitators forum, and a photo-sharing gallery.

Have a look at the exercise description here, where you can find links to a full description of the game, and to the online shop.

Contact us if you would like to enquire further.

New publications for download

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You can find two new publications from download on the Knoco Website publications section; an article by Tom on Knowledge Retention, and an article by both of us on the Bird Island exercise, following on from my own blog posts on the topic. Look for the Publications tab at the top of the website main page.

Free knowledge management plan template.

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"Learn Before Doing" is one of the core mantras of Knowledge management. However there is often a lack of definition as to what this learning entails, and a lack of focus and clarity on who is accountable for what learning.

Knowledge management plans are a way to deliver that focus and clarity. A Knowledge Management plan is a document for a specific project, which details; "What knowledge is needed by the project" "What knowledge will be created by the project" "What system of processes, technologies and roles will be used to manage knowledge within the project" and "What actions need to be taken to implement the system"

To help project teams start to understand the concept of the plan, we have uploaded a simple KM plan template to the downloads section of our website. This is suitable for small projects, but too mickey-mouse to work for large, high profile or critical projects, where you will need something bespoke.

Please, download it, try it, and give us feedback!

Tools of the trade for the front-line Knowledge Manager

I am here in Chicago, having deep conversations with a real knowledge worker - a guy who has been working at this industrial plant for 35 years, and knows every aspect of his business. He is sharing his stories, his insights, his tips and tricks, and his visions and dreams - and I am listening hard and trying to record all I can.

Which made me realise, once again, that the main tools of the trade for the front-line knowledge manager are few and relatively simple

• a digital video camera


• a digital voice recorder


• a digital stills camera


• a set of sharp pencils, and loads of notebooks

With these, I have as good a record as possible of our rich conversations. These are the few simple tools I come back to time and time again, and which never let me down. Plus, of course, a lot of practice at listening!