CONTENTS

We knew it was round the corner, but it arrived just as we were saying ‘bye’ to 2022. Generational AI may probably have brought to us what the future would look like for KM. In this article, we review a range of other emerging tech trends as well.

Generational AI

For those who are yet to get onto the bandwagon, generational AI makes content creation ‘a piece of cake’. Its applications are immense. I even got a poem recently written by AI, and I didn’t have to do any coding except send a request for a poem from Chat GPT. 

What can generational AI do? Essentially it is content creation. It looks into existing patterns and based on that, it create new contents. Well, that is good enough to resolve many of the challenges that KM is facing. 

Once we have generational AI trained for content generation within an organisation, then case studies, client presentations, and proposals can be generated in a matter of time. This frees up users to focus on fine-tuning the content generated.

Content generation in KM

What does this mean for KM? Well, one of the biggest challenges that KM practitioners have been facing is in ensuring quality content. Creating relevant content would become easy going forward. As a matter of fact, the role of KM practitioners would be to ensure relevant patterns are available for content curation. They will have to work on exposing content from which patterns could be identified and content could be created. 

The skills expected of KM practitioners would definitely change. They will have to be even more technology literate. With the supply part of content being taken care of, what now needs to be looked into is the demand side.

Well, the demand side is not that bad. We have technology seeping in there also. All the relevant technologies are there. It is only how we bring it together that matters. 

Digital assistants

A key disruption that has been looming large for some time but yet to make an impact are digital assistants.

Digital assistants are common these days and we have become comfortable with them. However, they are not being used in organisations. Yet, they can be very powerful and can help individuals access information and perform tasks quickly and easily. 

“Digital assistants can provide answers to questions, help users find information online, schedule appointments, and perform other tasks based on voice or text input. Digital assistants can also integrate with other productivity tools, such as calendars and email, to help users manage their time and stay organised. In this way, digital assistants can assist with the acquisition, organisation, and dissemination of knowledge, making it more accessible and useful to users.” (ChatGPT)

The metaverse

When we are talking about digital assistants, we should be also talking about our own digital avatars. That’s right, our avatars in the metaverse. In a few years’ time, every company will have a presence in the metaverse. The way websites are today, in future you cannot think of having a company without a virtual presence in the metaverse. 

Metaverse is going to disrupt the way we work. If physically we are distributed, virtually we will be united. That is what metaverse is going to offer to you. What would be the role of KM practitioners?

Some of the key reasons why a KM practitioner was required will disappear with Metaverse. Everyone will be in the same location. It will be easy to find experts and work with them. Metaverse will boost sharing and collaboration and the role of KM practitioners will be to build a culture of sharing and collaboration in metaverse. They need to make individuals comfortable in sharing and collaborating via their virtual avatars.

Learning and knowledge

One area, however, that continues to be ignored by technology companies are tools that can help in managing and practising KM. While there are tools for the majority of the key areas of KM practice – including content creation, storing, searching, sharing – we do not have tools that facilitate lessons learned and institutionalisation of knowledge. 

Technology for this is already there, however since there is no clear market, technology companies will not jump into it. It will be left to individual companies to design and build a tool for the same.

The road ahead

Before I sign off, let me share what Chat.openai.com has to say about future of KM:

“It is difficult to predict the exact future of knowledge management, but it is likely that technology will continue to play a significant role in the field. There may be increased use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to assist with the organisation and analysis of knowledge, as well as the development of new tools and platforms for storing and sharing information. There may also be a greater emphasis on the use of collaborative and social tools to facilitate knowledge sharing within organisations. In addition, the use of mobile technologies and the proliferation of remote work may lead to the development of new approaches to knowledge management that are better suited to distributed and virtual teams. Ultimately, the future of knowledge management will depend on the needs and demands of organisations and individuals, as well as the evolution of technology and changing business practices.”

Many leading organisations have successfully implemented and harnessed KM initiatives, but gaps continue to emerge between strategy and technology implementations. KM foundations, systems, and project implementation are comprehensively covered in this aptly-named book, Making Knowledge Management Clickable.

“Organisations today face great challenges in the form of remote work, global diffusion of resources, tightening budgets, and greater competition,” the authors begin. They are co-founders of leading KM consultancy Enterprise Knowledge. Their 320-page book is packed with actionable advice, tips and checklists. 

Here are my key clusters of takeaways from this comprehensive book. See also my reviews of the related books The Handbook of Community Management, The Knowledge Manager’s Handbook, Virtual Teams across Cultures, KNOWledge SUCCESSion, and my book series The KM Chronicles for KM case studies.

I. Foundations

The authors describe the KM Action Wheel as consisting of six phases of knowledge work: create, capture, manage, enhance, find, and connect. There are five core elements of KM: people, process, content, culture, and technology.

The authors show that KM has a number of outcomes: improved content findability, reuse, organisational alignment, learning, collaboration, delivery, sales, and future readiness. Based on these dimensions and impacts, they describe a number of surveys for business leaders to assess and improve their KM quotient.

The authors advise leaders to come up with a ‘future state vision’ to set the KM transformation on the right path, based on perceptions of ideal states and industry trends. This should also include enterprise ontology and content governance, and be charted onto the roadmap’s phases like findability redesign and semantic search implementation.

II. KM systems

The authors describe three layers of a KM solutions ecosystem based on the KM Action Wheel. For example, the phases of create, capture and manage call for an effective content and learning management system, collaboration platforms, and asset repositories.

Enhancement is via analytics and taxonomy tools, while search and graph databases enable the find and connect phases. The authors compare a wide range of industry-leading tools in each category, based on effectiveness and impact. Application areas include digital asset management, metadata, faceted search, API integration, and discussion threading.

“KM needs to be in place before knowledge-centric AI solutions can be successfully implemented,” the authors recommend. They describe five levels of AI in this regard: answer, recommend, combine, infer, and advise.

III. Running a KM systems project

Rolling out an integrated KM system can be challenging due to the complexity and the need to break down organisational silos, the authors caution. However, benefits lie in robustness, productivity, and security.

Chosen tools should have the right community support and features. Design should span architecture, security, and user experience. A cautionary chapter lists common KM project implementation mistakes: lack of leadership support, missing design foundations, lack of end-user engagement, and overt focus on technology.

There should be clarity on governance, KM roles, and change management. While traditional taxonomy implementations are designed by scientists and librarians, the authors advise that a business taxonomy should be run by the business community and should be usable and natural.

“Define ownership and accountability. Plan for the length of the transformation,” the authors sum up. 

The road ahead

At a recent meetup of the Bangalore K-Community, co-author Zachary Wahl was a keynote speaker. He explained how KM technology solutions should be use-case driven, implemented in an agile manner, and be based on semantic web standards (eg. SKOS, OWL, RDF) for interoperability. 

KM should not be just about finding knowledge but making it understandable and actionable. “The key is to connect KM outcomes to business outcomes,” he emphasised. He described seven layers of KM portal architecture, and a maturity continuum for semantic solutions (see Figure 1 and Figure 2).

“The last 10 years have been very interesting for KM. KM is becoming synonymous with digital transformation, and KM is the foundation of AI. As data velocity continues to increase, KM will play a greater role in providing context,” Zachary signed off.

In the initial period of her first KM role in early 2000, it was a daunting task to convince people in the organisation to share their knowledge and experience (their prized possessions!) with others who could benefit from it. This was in complete contrast with the knowledge hoarding trend that was in vogue and had made everyone a king in their small kingdoms. A much bigger challenge was convincing people to user others’ knowledge and experience over their own!

But as they say, Necessity is the mother of all inventions. Ritu shares with us how she went about drawing people’s attention to the benefits of KM.

In order to create awareness about this new concept, she began with creatively using the most easily accessible tool - e-mail –to communicate the concept through interesting messages, teasers and pictures, leaving aside the lengthy and theoretical gyan (‘wisdom’ in Hindi).

In the initial days, her focus was encouraging people to share and replicate ‘Best Practices’ across the firm. A ‘Share’ (documenting a new practice/process/checklist) would get them 20 K Points (Knowledge Points) while a ‘Replication’ (acknowledging use of an existing best practice and documenting its benefits) would fetch 100 K Points! 

So messages like ‘Why create when you can copy (replicate)’ or ‘Replicating is fun, easy and saves time’ were floated across the firm, which were a major shift from what we are all taught in the schools (‘copying is punished,’ ‘use your own knowledge and learning’). This was a big change management exercise, Ritu recalls.

And then came the ‘age of experience’ – intranets, websites, centralised portals and loads and loads of documents.  

When Ritu joined KPMG India, she was tasked with taking the function to the next level, to establish the processes, technologies and systems that would enable the thousands of employees across multiple offices in India to learn and utilise the firm’s collective knowledge. This meant architecting product (the platform), processes and developing applications from scratch internally and also deploying some of the global processes and platforms.

The biggest challenge in bringing this together, she affirms, is always building the value proposition and addressing ‘What’s in it for me (WIIFM)?’ She went about addressing this through extensive stakeholder engagement and is credited with upscaling KPMG India’s KM initiatives and being one of the frontrunners in the firm’s global KM network.

Under her leadership of the KM function, the firm got awarded for Best Implementation of Knowledge Management by BBC Knowledge.

Ritu also feels that much of KM work is about winning people over and keeping them engaged.

In her current role at Khaitan & Co – one of the oldest and largest full-service law firms in India – she is overseeing the transformation of the KM function which focusses on removing redundancies, creating efficiencies through processes and systems, and supports business development and enhanced client delivery.

Ritu has been acknowledged as a Top Law Firm Management Professional by Forbes India.

She believes technology has a very big role as an enabler and a pillar of success for any KM programme, as long it is focussed on the users, not the creators. With the advent of newer tech solutions, the KM journeys have now become shorter and smarter for organisations. Coupling it with constant reviewing and reinventing of KM practices helps in reducing the clutter and improving productivity.

For KM to be successful, it is important to create user-friendly processes and systems, communicate the value preposition constantly, and connect with people and share their success stories.

Ritu sums this up with her mantra for the success of KM – Create, Communicate and Connect!

Most of the top tech companies hire talent from the top engineering colleges in the country.  The big advantage is that this talent is raw and can be easily molded into the organization culture and technical needs as per requirement. Over the years, the function of University Marketing has transformed into University Relations. This aims at harnessing the latent 

potential of campuses, with professors who are subject-matter experts and students who are eager to work on industry relevant problem statements.

Here are some insights into how Bosch Global Software Technologies (herein referred to as BGSW) is doing its bit that would go a long way in transforming industry-academia collaboration.

Liaising through campus ambassadors: For any relation to flourish, we need that one person who has vested interests in the success of both the institutions. This campus ambassador, an employee of BGSW and an alumnus from that college, serves as the key connect between the industry and the academia and frontends the engagement. It is always a pleasure and proud feeling for the students at the campus to see their college senior talk about their journey from campus to corporate. Tech talks, career counselling conversations, marketplace at the college campus are just a few examples of how we engage with the talent.

Joint curriculum design to make students industry ready: Very often we ‘complain’ that the students are ill prepared to face the challenges presented by the industry. BGSW experts and leaders are represented on the Board of Studies of many leading universities and have a chance to influence what gets taught as part of the curriculum. 

Taking this one step forward, we have been able to design, develop and jointly deliver electives at various colleges on topics like Automotive Electronics, Human Machine Interface, System Engineering for Electric Vehicle Technology, Thermal Management for EV, Automotive Embedded Cyber Security, Multicore Programming Concepts etc. For a successful execution of these courses at the campus, an extensive train the trainer program for the college faculty is done. Guest lectures from the industry experts is factored in in the course design to ensure the relevance & industry applicability of content from time to time. 

Another interesting facet of this joint curriculum is the rollout of higher education upskilling programs for working professionals. Here the aim is to co-create learning content to enable working professionals to upskill on trending technologies through a hybrid mode of learning. Recently BGSW, in collaboration with National Institute of Technology, Calicut announced a new M. Tech program in Electric Vehicle Engineering. We have similar courses running with other institutions like NITK Surathkal and other leading institutions.

Hacking innovative solutions thereby kindling the passion for technology: The current generation of students are intrigued by problem statements and hackathons are a sure-shot way of involving them in co-creating solutions for the future. At BGSW, we have multiple levers wherein we enable students to solve industry relevant problem statements. 

The annual BGSW-IEEE EV hackathon, jointly organized with the IEEE Kerala chapter, is a pan-India hackathon that throws open various problems in the electric vehicle technology to students across the country. The recently concluded hackathon saw ~1500 students across over 100 colleges in India innovate. The hackathon had various segments including a boot camp wherein the students were educated on the design parameters that they need to consider during their solution phase. The top performing students have been offered an opportunity to intern at BGSW and take their solution to the next level. 

BGSW has also been sponsoring problem statements in the inter IIT tech meet over the years and runs periodic hackathons to kindle the passion for technology amongst the campus goers.

Accelerating research through academia industry partnerships: While we invest extensively on the student fraternity to bridge the industry academia gap, we go an extra mile in investing in the faculty and leveraging their talent for co-creation. Periodic faculty development programs (FDP) on trending topics like Autonomous Driving, Functional Safety, Applications of Artificial Intelligence etc. are held. These FDPs help the practicing professors to better understand the application of the theoretical concepts that they teach the college students. 

BGSW also offers professors an opportunity to do their faculty sabbatical at the industry. During their sabbatical, these professors work closely with industry experts on solving real life statements. 

Another area where we work extensively is to do joint research with the academia. We currently have problem statements in the areas of autonomous driving, 5G, digital twin to name a few, where we are working with the professors and their research scholars. Most of the professors on the campus are doctorates & are subject matter experts. Their expertise is used to solve the industry relevant problem statements thereby paving the path for co creation. 

There is immense potential to be harnessed if the industry & academia come together and engage in a more structured way.

About the author

Mohan Bellur, General Manager HR, responsible for Learning & Development and Industry Academia collaboration at Bosch Global Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd. has over 23 years of industry experience. An engineer by qualification, he has played various roles in software development and leadership before transitioning into his current role in HR.  He can be reached at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mohan-bellur-always-learning/

Industry and the business environment are dynamic and continuously evolving. The world of education has to continuously update itself to keep pace with the changing business environment. Educational institutions are gearing themselves up to this continuous transformation by making students more industry-oriented with updated curriculums and through industry-academia interaction. Such collaboration encourages knowledge and technology transfer. Industry professionals with several years of experience, known as Professors of Practice, are engaged as faculty who share their knowledge with students in academic institutions.

The Government is also playing a very important role in this transformation. India’s Ministry of HRD, UGC, AICTE and other government agencies have undertaken several initiatives in this direction. The triple-helix innovation framework is a collaboration between universities, industry and government.  Universities are engaged in basic research, industries produce goods, and governments provide the required boost through regulations. Today, it has become a powerful tool in the country to build innovation and incubation centers in higher education institutions. 

There is a growing trend from industries to look towards educational institutions to set up R&D centers. All the premier institutes of the country like the IITs, NITs and IIMs have already established research and innovation centers funded by the government and supported by the industry. It promotes knowledge production and knowledge transfer, with universities playing a key role in supporting the development of a knowledge-based economy.

Atal Innovation Mission (AIM), set up by the NITI Aayog, is a Government of India flagship initiative to encourage a culture of innovation and to create an ecosystem of entrepreneurship in universities, research institutions, private and MSME sectors. As per the data available on its official website, 10,000 Atal Tinkering labs at the school level are engaging 7.5 million students in 7000 schools. 69 Atal Incubation Centers in higher education institutes have created an ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs in 18 states and 3 union territories and have created 32000+ jobs in India.

To enable all the initiatives under the Atal Innovation mission to succeed, the Government of India has also set up the Mentor of Change programme. It involves the public and private sectors, NGOs, academia, and institutions. It has a huge response with over 10,000+ registrations responding nationwide.

The industry also supports the universities and higher education institutions by providing internships to students. Internships help students apply the knowledge learnt in the classroom to real-time projects in work environments and live interactions with colleagues in the workplace. What is theory in the classroom, students get the opportunity to learn further by application. A lot of tacit knowledge transfer happens in the process.

A continuous transfer of knowledge from industry to academia and vice versa is seen in all institutions of higher education. Many institutions of higher education in India have established incubation centers to encourage their students to innovate and set up their own startups with the support of the industry. 

Some of the other initiatives involve creation of chair positions, provision of incentives, setting up of Centers of Excellence, cells for entrepreneurship development and technology incubation, formation of a National Knowledge Network to connect institutions, facilitating flow of technology from laboratory to market access, enhancement of technology transfer towards commercialisation, creation of research parks,  and setting up of venture Funds to support innovative entrepreneurship.  

In conclusion, while  industries gain a skilled, work-ready talent pool, and  academic institutions get hands-on experience with challenging problems alongside gaining access to new technologies, this collaboration helps everyone in the process to become more innovative through the transfer of knowledge.

Each year, as November comes closer, Afconians across the head office (in Mumbai) and various project sites (across India, Middle East and Africa) excitedly await the launch of K2D. Afconians speculate on the various categories – and of course, the prizes – in each category. Strategies are devised and alliances for teams are made. It is K2D season after all!

What is K2D you ask?

K2D or KNOW-vember to DISS-ember is Afcons’ Annual KNOWledge Sharing and DISSemination Festival. It is held from 1st November to 31st December. It began in 2017 as the brainchild of Rudolf D’Souza. It was developed and designed to gather the ‘Knowledge Gems’ that each Afconian possesses but do not have time to package and share with others. Afcons has adopted the Learn Before, Learn During and Learn After model to capture Structured Knowledge. The nuggets of experienced knowledge are collected through K2D.

You may have noticed the clever wordplay in name of the festival. This helps in stickiness and to reinforce the fact that this is a festival for Knowledge Sharing and Dissemination!

Typically, K2D consists of several categories. The nature of the categories includes submitting innovations, success stories, failure stories, best practices, moments of Project Pride, Afcons Book of Records, challenges overcome, developing standard SOPs, checklists or training materials, and even selfies or finding errors in the Knowledge Portal. Initially, the categories were mostly for individual submission. Over time, emphasis has been on collaboration and the category design has been also modified to encourage team submissions or project submissions.

Each year, K2D is designed around a theme. This can be Knowledge Capture, Whole Organisation Engagement, or Knowledge Application. This theme is reflected in the announcements, launch posters and other collateral. The launch of K2D is celebrated in the presence of the senior management along with all the project teams. Post the launch session, several briefing sessions are conducted either at the head office or at project sites.

Involvement of the Knowledge Ambassadors is a critical aspect of K2D success. At Afcons, each Project appoints at least three Knowledge Ambassadors each year. These Knowledge Ambassadors are encouraged to conduct small briefing sessions on K2D at their respective project sites. Whereever feasible, the HO KM team visits the project site to facilitate these briefing sessions.

Furthermore, to involve the whole project team, project managers and project department heads are encouraged to spearhead and be involved in developing a project level strategy for the site/department participation. The project leadership team debates with the project team members on what they will submit in the categories, how the information will be collected, and by whom. To facilitate these discussions, the briefing presentations include helpful suggestions into the instructions of each category on how to involve more people in the activity. A similar approach is adopted by department heads at the head office. Constant engagement is maintained to mailers, desktop wallpapers, and posters to keep the spirit of participation alive.

At the end of K2D, a panel of experts evaluates the entries based on broad criteria such as innovativeness of solution or method, cost savings, better utilisation of resources, increase in productivity, and learnings for the future. There are exciting rewards to be won including gold coins or Amazon vouchers. For winning projects, a significant cash award is given to the project to be used for the project employees’ welfare or amenities. Submissions which deserve special recognition are flagged and shared with senior management.

Over the years, KNOW-vember to DISS-ember has served as an excellent platform for knowledge capture, dissemination, organisation engagement, and talent identification in the organisation!

Managements across the globe are grappling with the challenge of capture and transfer of critical knowledge. We have the latest technologies at our fingertips and our understanding of the cognitive processes has never been better. And yet we struggle!

Perhaps it’s time to pause and reflect on some of the techniques used for knowledge sharing in ancient India, which had a thriving economy and culture. Could there be some learnings that can be replicated in some way?  

IV. Written and Painted Tal-patta-chitra (palm-leaf-picture)

The written text is also an important method but was not popular due to the limited number of literate people in ancient India. But this was supplemented with a whole body of paintings and related arts and crafts. 

The date palm leaves are boiled and the sap removed. After drying in the sun, the leaves are treated with turmeric (preservative). A sharp instrument is used to etch the details. Then natural dye is used to fill the etches and extra dye washed off. Tal (palm)- Patta (leaf)- Chitra (picture) is this art form that conveys stories pictorially. 

In organisations today, a lot of explicit knowledge is captured in documents, The overload of information means that it is important to ensure the right information is available to the right person just in time. The Importance of Talpattachitra was about sharing stories with everyone in a form that was simple to understand and recall.

There were other techniques too. But the objective of this article is to create awareness of how complex knowledge of Ancient India, was transferred accurately across generations in the absence of ‘modern’ communication techniques. The lessons and philosophies of these techniques cut across the veils of time and are relevant even today and beyond!