Yakabod has been providing knowledge management solutions since 2003, primarily for the US intelligence community to date. Their flagship product is the Yakabox Knowledge Network. I reviewed it on this blog earlier (see Yakabod Provides Robust Knowledge Management with a Social Side). Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support. I recently spoke with Yakabod CEO Scott Ryser and Ian Bramson, Director National Intelligence Engagements about their experiences helping clients with adoption issues and the services they provide for this effort.

Scott said that their developers are able handle any technical issues for their clients relatively easily. The harder tasks come with the change management and other people related concerns. They have set up an adoption services group to support these efforts and Ian is part of this group. A significant part of the change management effort is to enable a shift in the collaboration mentality. Since a lot of their work is in the intelligence community, they have had to encourage users to share their work before it is finished so others can comment on it and gain insights in a timely manner.

Ian said they offer two principal types of services: organization culture readiness and implementation effectiveness. The culture readiness involves a variety of methods including interviews, surveys, focus groups, and working on site with their users for direct observation of the work environment. This is the type of anthropology I used to enjoy in my past life doing large-scale knowledge management implementations. They started doing this informally but it has now become a formal part of their offering with a developing set of methods and measurements. It is offered to the client as part of step one along with a pilot of their tool set.

Scott said their knowledge management tools work best when wrapped around a business process, and there needs to be a lot of personal contact to properly integrate the tools with the process. I could not agree more. In fifteen years I never saw a successful KM effort that did not do this. The culture assessment looks at such issues as the structure of the organization, the nature of the hierarchy, the empowerment of employees, the presence of a mentoring system, physical and virtual work environment, and the promotion and reward system.

They share their results in an honest and through manner with the client, no matter how sensitive, and try to get commitment to address any issues that might be obstacles to a successful implementation. They focus more on raising awareness and getting commitment to change than producing the change. Scott said that the organizations can best change themselves, if they understand their issues and have the determination to address them. Ian said there is a saying in the government that you  ”speak truth to power and let power decide.”

Scott mentioned that they are at the beginning of this effort but they are collecting data. Once they have enough instances, they will be able to offer predictive statistics on what is essential for a successful implementation.

One of the issues they address is the collaboration dynamics in the organization. Are there opportunities for unstructured exchanges during business processes or is everything planned and structured? What is the speed of collaboration? How fast can people connect and what are the obstacles? Are there tools in place to support this collaboration? What are the information silos in the organization?

Another issue is the power of inertia. How fast can the organization change? Are they always re-organizing so employees feel that can ignore change? Are there frequent changes in leadership so employees feel they can wait out efforts? Are the employees savvy in social technology?

They also look at the implementation profile for the particular effort. Is the organization ready for this initiative? Is there executive support? Is there a sense of urgency? What are the consequences of not doing anything? What is the leadership strength of the sponsor? What is the financial commitment? How good is the fit of the solution with the need? Do the targeted business processes allow for knowledge sharing? How relevant is the process to the mission of the organization? Do the targeted processes go across the organization (the broader the better)?

Another key area is what they call “winning the middle.” They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful. This is especially important with enterprise 2.0 efforts as they often allow information to more easily go directly from workers to senior management, bypassing the filter of middle management. They look at the role of middle management in deciding on the effort, as well as their support. How does success of the effort fit into middle managers’ accountability areas? How does it affect their advancement?

A final area we discussed was the adoption strategy. It looks at such issues as the presence of a project-related coaching plan for executives and middle managers. Do people understand the nature of the required change? Is there a user advocacy process? Can the plan adapt?

Scott and Ian said that they take the assessment results and fold them into the implementation planning process. They create a dashboard using the Yakabox that looks at the key issues raised in the assessment. They allow for a constant comment stream from users to make feedback transparent to everyone. They give the senior executives a direct view into the thoughts of the users. I like the fact that they are using their own tool to aid the implementation. This gets people familiar with the tool, as well as demonstrates its value.

Yakabod also provides customer advocates (Yakabod staff working directly with end users) to enable feedback and to provide assessments of progress on the change management issues. They also train their replacements by recruiting customer employees to address these issues.

Scott said that while they╒ve been delivering services for a long time, they are just at the beginning of formalizing this offering. They realize that they have a lot to learn and will be refining their methods as they go along. I like this attitude. It will make them more successful in both the short term and the long term. This is an exemplary effort and I am grateful that Yakabod is willing to share their practices with us. I plan to check in after a while to see what else they have learned.