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home > July 16, 2007 issue > article
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| Photography by Rick Steele |
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| Ron Simmons |
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Knowledge management as a tool for mission support
By Ron Simmons
Special to Defense Systems
Although the military excels at training soldiers for combat, the Marine Corps is addressing an entirely new challenge. That challenge is to increase efficiencies in mission support activities, such as decision-making, daily coordination and interunit collaboration. The key is to frame these activities as daily business processes that are as important to military operations as they are to corporations.
For example, the request from a combat theater for new technologies must go through a business process that involves analyzing the requirements, evaluating the solutions, identifying funding, receiving executive decisions and approvals, acquiring the solution and shipping it to the combat theater. The military needs to improve the efficiency of these business processes while continuing to execute its primary missions, just as corporations have done. The payoff for corporations is less cost and more profits. For the military, that means less cost and better mission support.
The challenge of shifting business processes is not disputed. Most processes have not been refreshed in more than 20 years, and most have slipped into being conducted informally through e-mail — perhaps the worst venue for these critical processes. However, most organizations are not willing to suffer the pain of reorganizing and retraining a workforce to work more efficiently. Thus enters the potentials of virtual work environments (VWEs) and knowledge management (KM) to modernize these outdated processes.
VWEs are adaptable, integrated, shared community workspaces where people who work in the same location or are distributed worldwide can collaborate, work on tasks and solve problems cooperatively by using organizational knowledge and processes virtually. In other words, a well-defined environment for the practice of KM.
KM, perhaps more familiar, is a discipline that uniquely combines process, people, technology and training to efficiently generate, codify and transfer organizational knowledge.
Combining VWE and KM produces a work environment and processes anchored in technology rather than paper, verbal communications and tacit knowledge. KM provides the interpersonal disciplines of sharing, communicating and collaborating on top of the technology to provide the key success factor. The difference between simply deploying the technology and building a robust, fully functioning VWE is a KM training infrastructure.
The training infrastructure for a VWE is totally nontraditional. It is constructed with several core premises:
- Workplaces comprise adults who learn better outside of a classroom.
- The most successful training paradigm is “adult learning,” which considers workforce characteristics such as being self-directed, goal-oriented, relevancy-
oriented, practical experiences and life experiences.
- Training works best if it is embedded in the daily business processes and not viewed as an additional assignment.
- The cost of training should be recovered by gained efficiencies which then funds additional training — reinvesting the return on investment.
Based on these premises, here are the critical elements in a KM training infrastructure.- KM facilitators are selected out of each unit, provided a short compressed VWE/KM class and then embedded back into their units. These individuals no only become the first-tier support for each unit’s technology orientation to VWE, but also assist in shifting outdated business processes into the VWE, modeling KM behaviors, and mentoring co-workers on VWE and KM.
- A VWE community of interest (COI) comprises all of the organization’s facilitators and any support employees. This COI becomes the catalyst to identify risks to the VWE process as well as the source for sharing innovative solutions. As the organization matures the VWE process, this COI becomes the broad-based champion for the VWE process — thus not requiring any one executive champion. The COI creates the VWE standards.
- The KM he1p desk is not modeled after the classical information technology help desk but rather is created to be the second-tier support for the facilitators. Support is focused on answering VWE and KM processes questions with rapid responses that ensure positive experiences for the organization. The KM help desk also acts as the cybrarian for the development of the organization’s VWE knowledge base as well as the expeditor of the hard issues. The help desk reinforces VWE standards.
- As the organization moves its processes into the VWE, so does the COI. The lessons learned, training material, solutions documentation and the help- desk knowledge base are all located in the COI's VWE and are constantly refreshed to reflect the latest progression of the organization’s VWE journey. This virtual office becomes the knowledge repository of the organization’s process maps.
So will this VWE training infrastructure work? And will it shift organizational processes into more efficient business/mission solutions? I have implemented this model twice and am applying it in other opportunities.
The first implementation was at the Federal Aviation Administration from 2002 to 2006. FAA’s VWE houses more than 22,000 workers and is used extensively for FAA operations. For these 22,000 workers, there are approximately 350 KM facilitators and one KM help desk-employee.
Consider the budget is to train only 350 individuals and not 22,000. FAA hs reporte4d that some business processes have been reduced from six months only two months. Other business units have reported efficiency gains which allowed them to repurpose 30 percent of their employees from daily repetitive tasks to more meaningful mission tasks. In fact, the FAA’s VWE was named in February 2007 as one of the top five government solutions that used technology to enhance collaboration.
If the FAA could be considered to be VWE 1.0, the program at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command could be considered to be VWE 2.0. This program started in spring 2006 with the purpose of validating the principles that were formed from the FAA experience.
In less than a year, this VWE process – including the KM training infrastructure – has been proposed, initiated and propelled into the command and other parts of the service.
The evolution of this VWE 2.0 has occurred with the same predictability as found in VWE 1.0, but at a substantially faster adoption rate. The command has passed through their first 1,000 users with 10 facilitators. Many of the mission processes have been rapidly prototyped in the VWE and are now being exercised and refined.
So what are the net results? The modernization of military and corporate business/mission processes which are produced by VWE/KM concepts offer more agile and productive operations. Working faster, better, cheaper and smarter can become a reality. It can reduce time wasted in finding organizational information, the inadvertent use of outdated information and duplication of efforts.
At the same time, the cost of implementation of a VWE is recovered rapidly by these operational time and cost reductions. The key is balancing people, process and technology by implementing a KM training infrastructure.
Simmons is the director of KM Integration at the Capabilities Development Directorate of the Marine Corps Cyber Development Command.
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