By Andrew C. Lemer, Ph.D., Senior Program Officer, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Washington, D.C.; Chair, APWA Engineering & Technology Committee

It happens all the time. Someone in the department who really knows her job gets a promotion or retires and her coworkers who remain behind discover that they don’t have a clue about many of the things their former colleague did so well.

Who were the key contacts on that road project? Why is the computer network set up this way? Where are those old drawings and specs stored? Knowledge important to the smooth running of the organisation has been lost.

We all have knowledge and we use it to make decisions and guide our actions, working alone or collaborating with others to get things done. We can build or expand our knowledge by drawing on information stored in books or file drawers; by being trained, taught, or mentored by others who know more about a topic or task then we do; and by experience, practice, and learning on the job. However we get it, the knowledge is uniquely ours and how we use it can make a real difference to whatever organisation we are part of.

The collective knowledge of a public works organisation’s employees and partners is a valuable asset—human capital.

Knowledge Management (KM) is a set of practices intended to help the organisation retain, enhance, acquire, and effectively apply its knowledge.

The exact causal relationship between knowledge and productivity is difficult to measure, but a survey of senior European corporate executives found that two-thirds put business intelligence and KM solutions at the top of their lists of technologies important to achieving an organisation’s strategic goals.

KM began to emerge as a discipline in the 1950s. Today its practitioners draw on theory and practices from diverse sources including personnel management, information sciences, education, economics, and psychology.

KM tools include personnel training and succession planning, information archiving and retrieval technologies, communities of practice and social media, and more. Any leader of a group of people can apply KM but doing it well takes some forethought.

To be effective, KM activities must be suited to the way an organisation is structured and goes about its business and they must have the support and participation of people throughout the organisation.

Such diverse organisations as the World Bank, Kraft Foods, and the Michigan Department of Transportation are using KM. The World Bank—more formally, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—lends money and provides supporting technical services and strategic advice to help developing countries expand their infrastructure and their economic and social capabilities to raise the incomes and living standards of their people.

The Bank offers extensive learning opportunities to its borrowers to enhance their knowledge of best international practices in engineering and financial management. Kraft Foods, now a division of Kraft Heinz Company, makes and sells a variety of popular grocery store items. Company experts nearing retirement undergo an extensive series of interviews to document details of product development, manufacturing, packaging, and marketing for which she or he was responsible; the information gathered is archived in computerised 'knowledge books' and made available as a reference to others in the enterprise.

The Michigan Department of Transportation is responsible for nearly 10,000 miles of state highways; and programs for aviation, intercity passenger services, rail freight, and local public transit services. The agency has adopted a paperless process for administration of design and construction, relying extensively on mobile devices and supporting quick access to project information in the office or in the field, to support and extend staff and consultants applying their knowledge throughout the facility development process and after project completion.

The growth of KM is in large part a result of rapid expansion of technologies for communication and information storage, processing, and retrieval; and the successful experience of corporations like Amazon, Southwest Airlines, and Zappos that have prospered by being particularly effective at team building and knowledge sharing. There are many articles and books that offer advice on setting up and using KM and present examples of how such organisations have done it.

The advice typically falls into four principal areas: KM leadership and direction; learning and communities of practice; knowledge capture and sharing; and skill-set management and succession planning.

KM leadership and direction

KM engages the whole organisation but commitment and leadership from the top are essential to making it work. There needs to be an identification of the areas of knowledge that are critical to the organisation’s goals and functioning. For a public works department, essential knowledge certainly includes the community’s facilities and systems, but also operating relationships between the department and other organisations such as police, fire, and City Hall. There needs to be also an explicit definition of the activities designed to maintain and expand the department’s knowledge and performance measures to track these activities.

Learning and communities of practice

Bringing together people who face similar challenges gives them an opportunity to share their knowledge and learn from one another. It also helps develop a culture of improvement and pride in achievement. Communities of practice can extend beyond the public works department to other government units and other jurisdictions. A number of web-based and mobile apps have been developed—some of them free for small groups—that facilitate formation and operation of these interest groups and knowledge exchange among the members.

Knowledge capture and sharing

Knowledge capture can be accomplished through formal procedures like those used at Kraft Foods or less formally through mentoring and shadowing practices. Turning in an individual’s or group’s knowledge into recorded information allows for storage and retrieval, for example through Internet portals and wikis. Assigning a departmental staff member to work with a consultant team or having a new employee accompany and assist a seasoned staffer for a period of time are examples as well. Such activities facilitate not only the sharing of knowledge among the department’s employees and partners, but also help to establish a common vocabulary and understanding of the organisation’s business processes and history; they can improve employees’ effectiveness in applying their knowledge to doing their jobs better.

Skill-Set Management and Succession Planning

Sports-team managers and coaches know well that the team is strongest when its members fit together well, without too much overlap and no significant voids in the skills required to play the game. While many people may think about succession planning only for top leadership, practicing Knowledge Management draws attention to the possibilities that any member of the team may be taken out of action at any time. Skills and capabilities are matched to the areas of knowledge critical to achieving the organisation's goals and effective operation.

Knowledge Management is not yet practiced among many public works agencies, but asking around and an Internet search yield some diverse examples: Arlington, Texas; Anne Arundel County, Maryland; Sacramento, California. Each of these agencies has implemented KM in a way that they feel is worth presenting to the public. The City of Arlington, a part of the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, has established an Office of Knowledge Management, "focused on the intellectual capital within the organisation…that assists employees in accessing relevant data in a fast and efficient way, and re-using it as part of normal work processes. The division’s primary focus is on identifying, creating, representing, and distributing knowledge for re-use, awareness and learning across the organisation.”

That kind of vision seems more typical of high-tech startup companies than local government agencies. But we are all learning that we need to make the most of our assets. Looking to Knowledge Management as a way to gain big payoffs in public works seems like a no-brainer.

This article was originally published in the June edition of the American Public Works Association's AWPA Reporter magazine. APWA and IPWEA this year signed an MoU around asset management education.  

Andrew Lemer, Ph.D., is currently a Senior Program Officer with the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. In addition to technical papers and occasional articles for the Reporter, he writes on civil infrastructure and human settlement at www.andrewlemer.com.