Example of a Knowledge Audit for a tech startup by Mor Sela

Mor Sela -‐ IKNS 4301 -‐ Knowledge Audit.docx Columbia University 1

BCI Knowledge Audit Mor Sela, IKNS 4301, November 3rd 2013

1 About This Paper In this paper I’m assessing the knowledge strategy and other knowledge management elements of a company in the telecommunication systems space. To protect the confidentiality of the company, I’m using a fictive name and have changed information that could make it easy to identify the company’s identity. The Knowledge Audit portrayed in this paper is based on interviews of director-‐level managers at the company and on my personal knowledge of the company as I worked there for more than two years.

2 Organizational Context

2.1 Introduction Best Communications, Inc. (BCI) is a venture-‐funded company that provides telecommunication solutions. The company has developed unique technology that enables delivering high quality communications over unstable networks (such as the public internet) at a lower cost, compare to legacy systems. The company’s main offering is a platform that enables users to communicate and collaborate visually using a range of devices -‐-‐ from personal devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones to large room systems. In addition to this enterprise offering, the company licenses its Software Development Kit (SDK) to 3rd party developers. The company has 280 employees, ~35% of which are based at the corporate headquarters in NY, ~15% at the CA office, and the rest are spread around the US, Canada, Europe and Asia Pacific.

2.2 Mission, Vision, and Values The company does not have a stated mission, nor does it have stated vision or values. However, when I asked director-‐level managers at BCI about their perception of these attributes, I got fairly consistent answers that allowed me to define the following implicit definitions:

• Mission: Making visual communications both affordable and usable, to enable its widespread global adoption as an enabler for more engaged telecommunication among workers and people in general.

• Vision: A world in which visual communications are as prevalent as voice communications.

• Values: The key value that uniquely represents BCI is innovation. BCI prides itself for being innovative both technologically and from a business model perspective.


2.3 Business Strategy BCI is a latecomer to the communications space. IP-‐based communications has been around since the late 90’s and is currently dominated by Cisco who has more than 50% of the market. However, BCI’s unique technology and pricing structure has the potential of disrupting the current status quo and capture a significant market share. Given this technology-‐based advantage, and given BCI broad (implicit) mission statement, BCI has decided to compete head-‐to-‐head at all market segments with the incumbent communication players. Given its competitors are far larger and have a well-‐established market presence, BCI is trying to completely disrupt the market by creating a unique offering that none of the incumbent players can offer today: Better user experience at a significantly lower cost*.

BCI is trying to penetrate all possible market segments concurrently – SMB, large enterprise, healthcare, financial, education, government, defense, service-‐providers, and app developers; and in all global territories. Moreover, in addition to targeting multiple market segments, the company product offering is very wide, providing applications for mobile devices (iOS, Android), PC (win, mac, Linux), multiple room systems, SDK and APIs. In my opinion, this strategy is extremely risky for a small company who enters an established market. This strategy of going after all possible market segments can be explained by Porter’s “The Failure to Choose” trap and “The Growth Trap” (Porter, 1996)1. The main risk is that by targeting on so many segments, given its relative small size, the company is unable to fully satisfy any of the segments it serves and is prone to jeopardize its credibility in the marketplace.

*Note: by “cost” I mean Total Cost of Ownership (TCO), not just the direct cost of buying/licensing the product/software. This includes cost of operations and network requirements.

2.4 Key Strategic Challenges Unfortunately I did not get a chance to interview the CEO for this project. Instead, I asked the Director-‐level mangers which I interviewed the following question: “In your opinion, if I asked the CEO to identify key strategic challenges that could be addressed by KM, what would be his answer?” The answers were quite consistent with the following four challenges clearly being the top priority:

• Agility: Outperform the competition by having agile product development and quick response to the ever-‐changing market dynamics.

• Usability: Improve product usability.

• Quality: Improve product quality.

• Reduce Cost: Look for ways to reduce the cost of the product and the total cost of ownership (TCO) by customers.


I later asked the directors to define the key strategic challenges based on their personal opinion. As expected, this question did not lead to consistent answers. Each of them had very different views of the top priorities (mostly because each has a different area of responsibility within the organization, but also due to difference in personality).

2.5 Organizational Structure

2.5.1 Figure 1 represents the key units within the company:

Figure 1 -‐ Organizational Structure

2.5.2 How does the structure help the organization to achieve its mission? This structure is fairly typical for late-‐stage VC-‐funded technology start-‐ups. To save cost and be nimbler, BCI consolidates few typical officer functions such as COO, CIO and CHRO, having the CFO effectively filling all these functions.

The structure is designed in a way that allows a small company to target customers worldwide and in multiple vertical industries in a fairly efficient way.

CEO

SVP Engineering

Product 1 R&D

Product 2 R&D

Product 3 R&D

Product 4 R&D

SVP Product Management

Product Management

Program Management

Technical Publicakons

QA

SVP Sales

USA

EMEA

APAC

ROW

Channels

Verkcals

SVP Sales Operakons &

Customer Support

Sales Operakons

Produckon

Customer Support

Sales Engineering

CMO

Product Markekng

Field Markekng

PR

Adopkon Services

Business Development

CFO

Finance

IT

HR

General Counsel


The main challenge with this structure is that for the most part, only sales-‐related functions are distributed. This structure does not allow for high quality localization of the product, its marketing and the professional services that enterprise customers expects to get with it.

BCI’s plan is to modify its structure, adding more capabilities to its global centers following the next round of financing (most likely an IPO).

2.5.3 What type of work provides strategic value/importance to the organization? Given that the current strategy is based on product price and functionality (which is arguably not a strategy that meets Porter’s ‘sustainable competitive advantage’ strategy2), the types of work that provide the most strategic value are those that improve the product’s usability (in a broad sense) and reduce the cost associated with deploying it. Such work is mostly done by the Engineering and the Product Management organizations.

3 Current Knowledge Management Practices BCI does not have any official KM function, nor does it have defined any of its activities as a “KM practice”. That said, here is a sample list of KM practices that are taking place at the company (terminology and taxonomy are based on SMR Briefing, Sep 2012)3:

3.1 Communities of Practice • Formal

Product Management & Marketing Forum: Weekly meeting (using videoconferencing) with all members of both the NY-‐based product management team and the CA-‐based product marketing team. The objective is to exchange information, keep each team updated about activities of the other team, and brainstorm ideas for the overall improvement of the product and its marketing.

• Semi-‐Formal: Yammer Groups: BCI IT has launched Yammer for all employees to collaborate internally without any governance or guidance about how to use it. The Marketing team and few marketing-‐oriented employees from other departments use this tool to discuss marketing ideas, share relevant industry news, as well as some casual “water-‐cooler-‐like” discussions.

• Informal/Social: Lunch Groups: During lunchtime, few unstructured/social COPs would typically gather at the cafeteria or in the company’s meeting rooms. While it is common for these COPs to group based on the work department/team, few of them would include employees from different disciplines in the organization. It is a fairly effective forum to share knowledge across organizational silos.


The above communities of practice meet Donald Hislop’s criteria4, i.e. they develop 1) a shared body of common knowledge, 2) a shared sense of collective identity, 3) some overlapping values. The traits and benefits of these practices are summarized in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2 -‐ Traits and Benefits of COPs

3.2 Content Repositories • Codified:

The Company does not have an intranet, nor does it have any other common depository for its content. Each department/team may use a different repository. The Product Management team use Confluence collaboration software to store and collaborate on all internal product specifications. Sales use salesforce.com for depository. Customer Support use Microsoft Dynamics. Many employees store content on various network folders, again with no governance around taxonomy. This approach makes it very hard for employees to find and use other teams’ codified information/knowledge.


• Tacit: o Experts: Several employees are known for being very knowledgeable on various

topics, which are not necessarily their direct responsibility. Few of them are also known for being very accessible and happy to share their knowledge with others. For example, Chris is known as an expert about customer’ operational environment, Paul is known as an expert about database technologies, and Mark is known as the go-‐to person for product demos.

o Staff Directory: There is no indication of expertise in the staff directory. There is no codified tool that may assist employees in finding other employees or consultants with specific expertise, other then their direct role.

o Orientation Training: Once a quarter, new employees are invited for a 3-‐day orientation training at the company’s headquarters. This training includes market, company, and product overview. It is also an opportunity for new employees to meet the CEO and other executives and get their vision. However, other than that, there is little further training and career development opportunities other than online courses that employees may take at their (non-‐existent) spare time.

3.3 Information Technology and Communication Infrastructure The Company has a very liberal and experimental approach to deploying and using IT applications. There is little central governance related to KM related systems. As a result, the company has never invested in creating a centralized content management system (CMS). In the absence of a central CMS, each department implemented a CMS based on its individual preferences. Marketing use SharePoint and Yammer; Customer Support use Dynamics; Sales use Salesforce.com; Engineering use CVS; and Product Management use Confluence. On top of that, email is extensively used to share information and many employees also use shared network folders to store & share documents.

While this lack of governance and unity across the company has some advantages (e.g. CMS is better optimized to the unique needs of each department) the negative impact of this approach is inefficient content management and ineffective inter-‐departmental communications. Knowledge acquired by one department is rarely available to the rest of the company.

From communication infrastructure perspective, the company is very advanced. The company is using its own product to visually collaborate between employees and with partners and customers. The company also leverages Microsoft Lync unified communication platform, mostly for instant messaging and voice calls. Yet, while many of the employees collaborate regularly using these advanced technologies, the shared tacit knowledge is rarely codified in a manner that allows future use of it.


4 Information and Knowledge Flow Information and knowledge (I&K) reside in any part of the organization, some of it is codified in digital format, some is in written documents (very few though), and the majority is tacit I&K that resides within the employees’ minds. It would have been not feasible to analyze each possible I&K flow within the time limits of this project. Therefore, I’ve decided to analyze the flow of just two types of I&K assets: Product I&K and Customer Insights I&K. Table 1 addresses the following questions for these I&K resources:

• How does the I&K flow from the units who hold the knowledge to the units who use? • What tools and investments has the organization made to improve the flow? • What functions and positions help to organize and improve the flow?

Table 1 -‐ Information and Knowledge Flow

I&K Asset Type: Product I&K (e.g. features, specifications, competitive positioning)

Customer Insights I&K (e.g. customers’ requirements, needs, deployment environment)

Units who hold it Product Management Sales & Sales Engineering Units who use it Sales and Marketing Product Management How does it flow? Product Documentation –

Product Management is responsible for documenting all product functionality, specifications and user guides. Sales Training (virtual and/or in-‐person) – typically once a quarter or when having a major new product/version release. Weekly ‘sync’ meeting between the product Management team and the Product Marketing teams (virtual). Online repository of product specs and documentation (Confluence)

Feature Request Process – Both customers and their sales representatives are encouraged to submit feature requests (FR). The FRs are codified in a standard form by the relevant sales representative. It is then being reviewed and prioritized by an FR Committee, headed by product management and participated by stakeholders from Engineering and Sales Operations. The person who submits the FR gets the opportunity to “defend” it in front of the FR committee. All FRs are prioritized and stored online for future reference.

What tools and investments has the organization made to improve the flow?

The use of video conferencing technology makes both the sales training and the weekly “sync” meeting more engaging and efficient for remote participants.

This process required very little investment as it is mostly based on manual work. BCI should consider investing in


Confluence is a fairly recent tool that was initially introduced by the Engineering team and was adopted by the Product Management team. It is a useful and effective tool for content management, file sharing, and textual collaboration.

an online-‐based FR application tool that will allow both customers, channels and employees to easily submit FRs and track their progress. Moreover, such tool should allow voting and comments by others…to gain more insights about the demand for the feature and a richer description of it.

What functions and positions help to organize and improve the flow?

The Product Management and Product Marketing teams are the functions that drive the above initiatives. It includes the SVP of Product Management, VP Product Marketing, product managers, product marketing managers, program managers and technical writers.

The FR process requires active participation mostly by the following functions: Sales, Sales Engineering and Product Managements. Additional functions involved are Engineering and Sales Operations.

5 Implicit Knowledge Services As mentioned, the company does not have explicit knowledge management or knowledge services practice. Nobody is directly responsible for knowledge development and knowledge sharing. However, there are certainly many implicit practices that pertain to knowledge.

Based on my understating of the company’s strategy, its long term challenges, and my IKNS education; I would suggest the following mission, vision, and the value of BCI’s knowledge services:

5.1 Mission Leverage the organizational knowledge development, sharing, and analytics to drive constant innovation, operational excellence, and more informed decisions.

5.2 Vision A company that embraces knowledge development, knowledge sharing, and knowledge-‐based decision making as core enablers of its competitive advantage sustainability.


5.3 Value The value of BCI’s knowledge services should be directly related to the company’s strategic goals and objectives. The knowledge services should address the key strategic challenges mentioned in section 2.4 (Agility, Usability, Quality, and Reduced Cost).

Figure 3 -‐ The Value of Knowledge Services5

Table 2 maps the current implicit knowledge management practices (knowledge services) described in sections 3 and 4 with the value they bring and the strategic challenges they aim to address:

Table 4 -‐ Knowledge Service Value Map

Knowledge Service Value Strategic Challenge it Addresses

Product Management & Marketing Forum

Improving alignment and collaboration between the two teams. Hence, increasing the likelihood of having a product that is more aligned with market requirements (Usability), faster response to market

Usability Agility Quality


trends (Agility), and more effective & accurate marketing communications (Quality).

Yammer Groups Creating better relationships and collaboration across the organization. Hence, increasing the likelihood of finding faster solutions to problems.

Agility

Lunch Groups Creating better relationships and collaboration across the organization. Hence, increasing the likelihood of finding faster solutions to problems.

Agility

Orientation Training Quickly bringing new employees up to speed and increasing their knowledge on a variety of subjects beyond their direct area of responsibility. Hence, increasing the speed in which new employees becomes effective and increasing the quality of their work.

Agility Quality

Product Documentation Customers perceive documentation as an integral part of the product. Hence, quality documentation adds to the perceived quality of the product. It also improves the usability of the product and reduces customer service calls, which reduces BCI’s operational cost.

Quality Usability Lower Cost

Feature Request Process This process helps BCI understand what customers are looking for. Hence, it helps improving the usability of the product.

Usability

6 Conclusion Like many start-‐up companies, in its early years of existence BCI focused its strategy and management attention on activities that would enable the creation a competitive offering (financing and product development) and initial market success (marketing and sales).

While BCI does implement implicit Knowledge Development and Knowledge Sharing practices that add clear value and address the company’s strategic challenges (see Section 5.2, Table 2), these activities are sporadic and rather narrow in their scope. There is much more that could be done in the knowledge domain to drive constant innovation, operational excellence, and more informed decisions.

As the company moves beyond the “start-‐up” stage to the “growth” stage, it should start to shift its strategy and allocate more management attention to the long-‐term sustainability of its competitive advantage. Such long-‐term strategy can’t rely merely on the current inherent technology advantage of its product. Just as BCI disrupt the current market status quo, soon enough, new innovators will arrive to the market and will aim to disrupt the status quo once again. To effectively compete in such dynamic environment, BCI has to develop unique


Knowledge Management (KM) initiatives that would result in constant and fast innovation of its market offering so that it effectively addresses the ever evolving needs of it customers. In addition, the KM initiatives should result in operation excellence, driving down cost and time-‐to-‐market, while maximizing product and service quality. Also, organizational knowledge should be leveraged for more educated and data-‐driven decision making.

7 Additional Work Required Following this analysis of BCI’s current KM status and challenges, my next step is to suggest a knowledge strategy that addresses these challenges and provide a comprehensive roadmap for the realization of that strategy.

Sources:

1 Porter, Michael E., What Is Strategy? (Harvard Business Review, 1996) 96608, 75 2 Porter, Michael E., What Is Strategy? (Harvard Business Review, 1996) 96608, 61-‐78

3 SMR Briefing, The Knowledge Audit (SMR-‐Knowledge.com, Sep 7, 2012)

4 Hislop, Donald, Knowledge Management in Organizations (Oxford University Press, 2008) 158-‐167

5 Powell, Tim, The Knowledge Value Chain® (presented at IKNS 4301 on 10/10/2013)