Building with and Leveraging Technology

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Information and communication technology (ICT) has provided organizations with new and exciting possibilities to improve knowledge management and facilitate sharing and learning. Knowledge management is a rapidly developing discipline, and includes the use of email, online discussion groups, organizational intranets, search engines, downloadable documents, help desk applications, as well as more fundamental systems such as personal and group filing, project archiving, and so on. These tools and technologies can help to better capture knowledge and improve organizational memory (through e-mail, portals, databases, for example), as well as expand the opportunities for dialogue and sharing knowledge (through communities of practice, open space technology, relay training etc.).

Please do not make edits to the lessons and case studies below as these belong to the participating organizations. All comments and observations on the lessons, however, are highly encouraged, as are any additions.

WOCCU

WOCCU conducted a review of current intranet use to help identify how project experiences filter to/from the home office and aided the understanding of how to improve the structure to enable greater usage and efficiencies with this shared space. This required a survey of intranet use by project directors and staff, the results of which helped drive changes to the intranet infrastructure to be made by WOCCU’s information technology team.

Freedom from Hunger

Freedom from Hunger, however, allocated a significant part of the BELO grant to the launch of an on-line, interactive knowledge portal serving three main audiences—FFH staff, partners, and industry counterparts—and focusing on microfinance and training-related tools and strategies that target poor women. To effectively carry out their work, FFH’s growing staff and network of partners required mechanisms for readily accessing and exchanging knowledge and information on a variety of simultaneous initiatives, in three languages and at any time around the globe. FFH decided to hire a Knowledge Management Specialist with the technical skills and experience to develop this knowledge portal, but also to identify information needs and opportunities and to ensure that the ongoing development of this system would be driven by staff demand for knowledge.

CARE

The Economic Development Unit (EDU) within CARE also spent considerable effort on the development of a knowledge sharing application to support the BELO pilot, but unlike FFH, this on-line portal was not organization-wide, but limited to the Village Savings and Loans (VS&L) program. Typical of international NGOs, CARE country offices tend to have various levels of access to and expertise in the use of technology, and country information and communication infrastructures are also variable in terms of efficiency and reliability. These ICT challenges were in fact an important reason for conducting a careful assessment in each country in order to match the knowledge sharing application against technological opportunities within all participating countries. The knowledge sharing application was set up to provide a single entry to knowledge assets that CARE, partner organizations and external VS&L and microfinance practitioners could use to design and implement VS&L programs. This “one-stop-shop” for VS&L practitioner knowledge needs provides access to templates to help draft a project proposal with VS&L components, information about the streamlined VS&L MIS, sample work plans for planning a project, contact information for key VS&L practitioners in a specific context or practice area and other tools that can help VS&L practitioners effectively do their work.

Practical Action

Practical Action continued to make use of its existing intranets, and did not devote any project grant funds to further develop technological capabilities. Practical Action’s Project Management and Information Support System (PROMISS) provides reflective learning tools and it is an organization-wide requirement that all operational work complies with the system. It has a strong emphasis on peer review and learning. The system involves a series of reiterative steps, covering: idea development and appraisal; project design and approval; planning and implementation; monitoring; evaluation; learning and sharing. These steps are supported by questions, processes and standards on the intranet.

Lessons Learned

Lesson #8 Create the technology infrastructure and design for its use early.

Knowledge management and sharing infrastructure needs to be put in place first and can take a long time to be assimilated into staff day-to-day processes. For low-tech organization or unit, some of the biggest growing pains were in the scoping and project management of IT implementations; this was particularly the case for smaller entities since informal tacit knowledge is more frequently shared. Portal development proved to be a monumental task.

Lesson #9 Technology must be recognized as a means and not the end.

On the other hand, the knowledge management technology should not be the centerpiece of a KS&L strategy. An organization or program can start small and quite low-tech and use resources that are available for free. CARE and PA, for example, used free on-line resources; such as Yahoo and Google groups, blogs and wikispaces to disseminate information and conduct on-line discussions.

Lesson #10 Building a KM infrastructure does not in anyway ensure its usage.

The axiom “if you build it, they will come” does not apply to KS&L technology. Providing the knowledge infrastructure does not overcome the real hurdles to individual or group learning, such as culture and behavior. There is also the danger that after strong activity in launching a new knowledge database or web portal, the initial enthusiasm fades and contributions to the knowledge application become very rare.

Lesson #11 Motivation for ongoing sharing through the infrastructure is necessary to keep it dynamic and giving.

One successful way that FFH came up with to keep people visiting the web portal was to make the landing page the staff bulletin board featuring minutes of the weekly staff meeting and interesting announcements updatable by all staff worldwide. Comments from off-site staff indicated that this enabled them to get a better “pulse” of what is going on in the main office, creating a stronger organizational network.

Lesson #12 The bigger and more open the KM infrastructure is, the more important a viable plan becomes.

A large portal serving a breadth of stakeholders requires more integrated thought than a smaller one for a limited group of users. By placing information for the technical public, partners and staff in a single portal an agency can kill more birds with one stone, but needs to weigh the information needs of all user groups. In the case of FFH, the knowledge management team had to develop an integrated strategy for information storage and retrieval that made sense to each of the three audiences, while continuously updating the taxonomy to meet the changing needs and functionality of the users. While this approach took more work in design and will also in upkeep, it has moved FFH forward as an organization that is actively sharing it knowledge and is therefore open to critical analysis—a learning organization indeed!

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