Quelle: CIO Asia
The Bank of Montreal's strategy for knowledge management(KM) may not seem like much of a strategy at firstglance. It doesn't call its initiatives KM; it doesn't sellKM as a lofty idea that will change the way its employeeswork; and it doesn't believe in spending huge sums of moneyto build new technology platforms for its KM projects.
Instead, it weaves small bits of KM into its most strategicbusiness projects. Its KM initiatives piggyback on the workand processes that are already in place. While its criticsraise questions over how impactful this approach is comparedto the big-bang KM efforts of many other organisations,clients of the Bank of Montreal's Knowledge ManagementCenter of Competency have been won over.
These 'customers'--the bank's lines of businesses--arelining up for more help, and it can only be because KM hasproven its worth, says Richard Livesley, senior manager ofKM, and application portfolio manager of Intranet andInnovative Solutions at the Bank of Montreal.
"The Center is run as a business within a business, and oneof our key success metrics is how many 'customers' are'hiring' us to work with them. Based on the numbers thatare, we know that our KM efforts are meeting the business'srequirements," he says.
The bank's Knowledge Management Center of Competency--housedwithin its Information and Technology division and formed inclose partnership with its Human Resources division--was setup two years ago to support its objective of becoming a moreeffective organisation through better use ofinformation. "We define KM as tools and processes that cancontribute to fulfilling the organisation's strategicbusiness goals, through using information and turning itinto something of value," says Livesley.
With only a two-year history, the bank's formal KM push istherefore relatively young. Before it set up the Center ofCompetency, however, it had already recognised the value ofinformation and dabbled in KM initiatives, albeitinformally.
On hindsight, the bank's decision to set up a central KMdepartment has turned its KM push from just existing tobeing effective. "Having a centralised department has beenstrategic to our KM push. Although we were doing KM whetheror not we had a department, we weren't doing itimpactfully. For KM to be impactful, a group of highlytrained and skilled people focused on the components of KMthat are important to the organisation, and whose skills canbe leveraged across the bank, cannot afford to bedecentralised as they are too specialised," Livesleyexplains.
The team of eight people at the Center comes from diversebackgrounds, ranging from KM and Human Resources to IT andprocess improvement. "Half of them are from social sciencebackgrounds and half are technical people. And 50 percentwere bankers and 50 percent were hired for the role," saysLivesley.
Livesley and his team made an early decision to start small,adding small bits of KM into work processes that bank staffhave to perform anyway. "Our strategy is not to put in ahuge, best-practice KM system from scratch, or make a bigdifference to what people already do, but to take what theyalready do and introduce an incremental change."
For example, when the bank wanted sales force best practicesto be disseminated to more staff across the organisation, itstarted by targeting an existing sales force effectivenessprogramme. As this programme already gathers salespeopleregularly to discuss and share best practices, it got itssalespeople to choose the best cases to be captured online,rather than try to include every case, or build a huge,best-practice system from scratch.
One of the first things that Livesley's department does isto scope out the strategic business goals and businessproblems within the bank that KM can contribute most to, bytalking to the various lines of businesses. Mostly, theseproblems focus on increasing organisational efficiency andgenerating new revenue streams. For instance, KM had tocomplement a management-led initiative, called BranchNetwork Design, which aimed to redefine and standardise thejobs of employees in 900 branches dispersed acrossCanada. KM's job was to assist in improving information flowamong these employees, who, despite working similar jobs,had different titles, accountabilities and customer servicestyles.
"We set up a central repository to Web-enable all theinformation around the project--such as descriptions of keyjobs--so that it was accessible to everyone. That became atool and process for standard and repetitive taskinformation to be published. It helped staff to be moreeffective by sharing information and being morecollaborative. We also picked the pieces out that hadsustainable value and made them available to people acrossthe country," he says.
Another project addressed the bank's need to significantlyimprove Web skills among its employees, as its trainingprogrammes tended to be face-to-face and did not emphasiseonline collaborative learning or knowledge development. Sothe bank jointly funded a programme with a corporateuniversity to create K-Café, an onsite learning venue thatincorporated online and collaborative programmes intoclassroom-style teaching.
Taking this business-led approach to KM has also relievedLivesley of the need to justify the ROI of his KMefforts. "Success is defined not by the results of our KMsystems but by the results of the strategies they support,"he says. The Center does, however, measure KM metrics suchas the number of people accessing the sites and documentspulled out or contributed.
When the bank started its KM push, it opted for a commontechnology platform to launch all its KM systems--only tofind that there was little value in that approach. "A commonplatform wasn't the way people naturally worked," saysLivesley. The bank now minimises introducing new technologyplatforms for its KM systems, but puts the systems on top ofexisting technology, most of which is Lotus Notes-based. "Wealready have enough technologies within the organisationthat would support KM. The biggest issue we face is nottaking advantage of what we have. Our challenge is toleverage what we have to increase our value to theorganisation and take advantage of the work that people arealready doing, and make a minor change to have a bigimpact," he sums it up.
Instilling the need to share information wasn't a toughroadblock for Livesley's team, because for the most part,the people he works with want to share. "Companies need totake advantage of what people innately want and make iteasy, supportable and rewardable for them to do the rightthing. So in setting up our engagements, we look to takeadvantage of projects where that need is in place," hesays. This principle is never more apparent than in itsapplication of KM to its Branch Network Redesignproject. "People who were in transformation from doing workone way to another way, and had different-name jobs, rolesand accountabilities, needed to know and shareinformation. So KM added the pieces of information theyneeded, giving them a place to go to find out what theywanted to know."
A Learning Financial Organisation
The goal of Standard Chartered Bank to become a learningorganisation is a worthy one. After all, as KatherineTsang, its head of Organisational Learning, says, a bankwhere employees learn from one another continuouslyimproves. (She defines a Learning Organisation as "acollection of individuals who feel energised, enthused andwell-treated, and who live the values of the bank, continueto learn, and become more effective in their dailydelivery.")
But that was a difficult goal to achieve in a company withan Organisational Learning function that was decentralisedand spanned 57 countries, each of which had its own learningcurriculum. "Although we were close to our business teams,there wasn't any guarantee that what Africa was doing wasthe same as what Asia was doing. There was also no guaranteethat everyone had the same access to learning--and that wasimportant if everyone is to grow and learn," says Tsang.
So last year, the bank embarked on a major revamp of itstraining function: it standardised its learning curriculumin 57 countries to ensure that employees acquire skills andknowledge from the same source. The curriculum is structuredby the bank's Oganisational Learning team, some with thehelp of consultants and top-notch universities.
Besides standardising its learning curriculum, StandardChartered is also installing, in phases, a sophisticatedlearning management system worldwide, wheretelecommunications facilities allow. "The main driving forceof this system is to allow everyone access to learning in aconsistent way, on a just-in-t-ime and just-enough basis. Werecognise that people are different, so the time and pace atwhich they wish to learn is also different. A learningmanagement system allows people to be themselves," addsTsang.
The platform hosts personal career development plans,learning catalogues, learning roadmaps to guide individualsin different job families and different stages of theircareers, a collection of e-learning that employees canchoose to do in their own pace, and a virtual classroomwhere classes can be conducted simultaneously, whether it isin Africa, Zimbabwe, Dubai, London or Singapore, byprofessors in, say, Chicago.
The Saba Software Inc. system has been launched in Hong Kongand Singapore, and is accessible by employees with access tothe Intranet. "It is a big project, part of our HRreengineering effort. It took two years and involved morethan 20 of the bank's top talents," Tsang says. This effortalso saw all its HR processes--from resources and talentmanagement to compensation and benefits--put on an onlinePeopleSoft Inc. platform.
Standard Chartered has taken a "blended" approach toe-learning that focuses on using different mediums toreinforce learning. Tsang elaborates: "Most of the learningthat takes place within the organisation will be acombination of e-learning and classroom learning. Employeescan first learn from the system before going into theclassroom. When they step into the classroom, they can thenfocus on understanding, reconfirmation, and using casestudies, 'live' cases and facilitation."
With e-learning, it aims to train a third more staff thanbefore. Standard Chartered's philosophy of celebratingindividual differences also extends to staff training.
Here, it encourages people to play up their strengths ratherthan train them according to a standard competency mode. "Itis important that an individual feels like an individual,rather than as a component of a big engine. It is onlythrough us feeling like we are treated as individuals thatwe will have the confidence and energy to perform," saysTsang. Finally, Standard Chartered takes pains to measurehow successful its courses are, using the Kirkpatrickfour-level evaluation model. "All our programmes areevaluated. We determine which programmes are level One, Two,Three and Four, at the beginning, and we involve ourevaluation team once the programme has been designed so thatwe can build the right metrics. We also do follow-upevaluation," says Tsang.