Enterprise Knowledge Management: A Consultative Approach to Solving the Right Problems with Abby Clobridge (2/2)

Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional

Are you solving the right problem? To get a specific outcome, the problem we need to solve is not always what we think it is. Abby Clobridge, the founder and lead consultant at FireOak Strategies, and her team perform detailed discovery with clients to ensure everyone is aligned to solve the right problem(s).

This week in episode 293 we discuss Abby’s transition to becoming a consultant and her reasons for starting a business. We get educated on what knowledge management involves, some of the challenges related to achieving effective organizational knowledge management, and how we can each do our part to promote a culture of knowledge sharing. Listen closely for when Abby learned she didn’t want to spend her time just managing people.

Original Recording Date: 08-23-2024

Abby Clobridge is the founder and lead consultant at FireOak Strategies. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Abby, check out Episode 292.

Topics – Relatable Experience for Consulting and Starting a Business, Organizational Challenges in Knowledge Management, Uncovering the Context and the Problem, Centralized Governance vs. Crowdsourcing, Organizational Profiles and Evaluation Criteria, Knowledge Management Roles in the Enterprise

2:37 – Relatable Experience for Consulting and Starting a Business

• Was living in the in between space the relatable experience Abby needed to take to consulting?
  • Abby thinks it was. She understood navigating this space, knew how to communicate with other stakeholders and co-workers, and enabled them to make informed decisions based on their knowledge of the organization.
  • Abby also likes to solve problems. Once she helps solve a problem, she is ready to move on to something else. Abby says leaving a company every couple of years because the problems are solved is not very sustainable, but she gets to do this all the time as a consultant.
    • This perspective has influenced the work she does now at FireOak Strategies.
    • “I always tell our clients…and I truly mean this…when they don’t need us anymore, I think that’s a win. That means that you’ve graduated. We solved the problem that we set out to solve, and I feel really good about that.” – Abby Clobridge
• What made Abby want to start a business?
  • “I did kind of have an unusual background. I was working in technology, but I was not coming at this from a programming perspective or an engineering perspective at all. I think my ability to do that translation piece and think about process and think about governance and think about compliance and intellectual property…it was unusual 15 years ago. And I was able to leverage that.” – Abby Clobridge, on deciding to start her own consulting business
  • Abby says it was about the problems that could be solved and how that could help organizations.
  • Abby began as a solo consultant in 2010 and founded FireOak Strategies with the intention to keep the company small. For 5 years it was just her.
  • Being a solo consultant and business owner allows you to do only so many things at once like taking on certain projects of certain scopes / natures.
  • Abby recounts a specific project as being the catalyst for initially adding addiitonal staff to the company.
    • “I don’t want to get to the point where I’m spending most of my time managing other people and I’m not doing the consulting work because I really enjoy the consulting work.” – Abby Clobridge, on the conscious decision to keep her company small to grow one project or experience at a time
  • Going out on your own is challenging, and most people who do it likely do not know what they are getting themselves into.
    • “I was a good consultant, but I didn’t necessarily know anything about running a business. So you have to learn that really quickly and learn how to manage your own time and figure out what are your going to do and what are you going to outsource.” – Abby Clobridge
    • Outsourcing might mean deciding what to give to an accountant, who will call the insurance company or a lawyer, etc. You have to do this while trying to get new clients and complete existing client projects.
    • Reflecting back on the experience, Abby says her background did not prepare her for this initial experience as a business owner.
  • Going into business for herself was something Abby wanted to try, and she had no idea if it would work out successfully.
    • She did not want to keep relocating every time she wanted a new job or quitting and looking for a new job after solving the problem(s).
    • The variety of getting to solve different problems was very appealing to Abby.
    • Abby decided to try consulting for a year or two and go from there. She tells us it was not well thought out any more than the above.
    • Abby had good connections from previous jobs but did not have a series of projects lined up once she started her business. For those looking to start a business, it’s a good idea to have projects lined up which can be started right away.
    • Abby considered failure as a possible outcome to going into business for herself, but she felt that even if she did fail, it would not be so devastating that she could not do something else.
    • Abby had been on a number of job interviews, but none seemed exciting.
    • “Yeah, I could go in, and I could do this job in my sleep. I’m positive I can because it’s a job I’ve done before. I’ve solved this problem already. This environment is really similar, but I don’t really want to do it. I’m not going to be happy doing it. And I think I had that realization of…I don’t really know exactly what I want to do next. I had been working in university libraries for probably about 10 years at that point, and I knew I didn’t want to be a library director…. And I have all this experience that’s kind of all over the place but all connected to information management, architecture, technology…so what do I do with this? I felt like there were a ton of different things that I could do but none of them were what was supposed to be on paper at the next step, and it was just time to figure out something totally different…. I really wanted to try to do something that I thought I could enjoy and wasn’t going to be bored doing….” – Abby Clobridge, on starting her own business
    • If Abby failed as a consultant, she would be able to go back and get one of the jobs similar to something she had previously done. But she also considered that it might work.
    • Abby wanted to be able to take advantage of technology as it changed in whatever she did.
    • She also did not want to spend 60% of a week managing people and feels figuring this out was an inflection point in her career. Not everyone comes to this realization as fast as they might like.
    • Abby had needed to manage in the job she had right before going into business for herself. In higher education, it is assumed you will have a 1-hour 1-1 meeting with your direct reports. This also does not include time spent on team meetings, skip-level meetings, performance reviews, and new hires.
    • My feeling was, ‘how do I get back to the work?’ And someone said, ‘well, this is the work.’ Oh…this isn’t the work I want to do. And that was a moment for me." – Abby Clobridge, on realizing she did not like management tasks
    • John says when people decide to become managers, they might not know that is the job. The higher someone gets in an organization, the more meetings which are involved.
    • It was a challenge in the library world to find any type of balance between being close to the work and doing people management work. More options may be available in the tech world, for example.
    • For those who enjoy focused blocks of time to write scripts, reports, or work on projects…stopping to take a meeting can be frustrating. Abby learned this about herself.
    • “How can I take what I like to do and create my own job instead of shopping around to try to find one that’s perfect?” – Abby Clobridge
    • This is great insight for those considering people management.
    • John recently faced this same struggle at an internal work conference recently. There was a session about new products scheduled at the same time as a session on being a better technical manager.
    • “I know that I want to go to the new product sessions, but that’s not actually my job any more…. My technical session is how to advance my skills on being a technical manager.” – John White, commenting on the difference between knowing this fact intellectually and feeling it emotionally
    • Abby says you can learn a lot about yourself when you have to give people who report to you the projects you would like to be working on.

14:46 – Organizational Challenges in Knowledge Management

• Is providing consulting in knowledge management about educating customers on current toolsets, the cultural and organizational changes that might be needed, more about process changes, or something else?
  • Abby says it is different for every organization. Most of the time her company gets a call when an organization knows they could improve in an area but isn’t sure how they can improve.
    • One example is a team at a company saying they need a new intranet but the finance team not wanting them to purchase a tool to rebuild the current intranet.
    • Abby says a new platform doesn’t always solve the problem, but it does sometimes.
  • In these scenarios it is important to diagnose the problems.
    • Is it a problem of poor linking, information not being present, inability to access necessary information, or an actual platform problem?
    • Maybe it’s an internal cultural issue like employees not wanting to share information with each other.
    • The customer may not know what is possible, it could be a metadata problem, or it could be a governance problem.
    • “Making sure that we’re solving the right problem is the really key thing. We spend a lot of time in that kind of diagnosis / discovery phase trying to make sure that we’re solving the right problems.” – Abby Clobridge
    • Abby shares a story from her early consulting career where a customer wanted a new taxonomy, but she knew early on it would not solve their problem. She likes to focus on solving the right problem to prevent wasting time or delivering something that won’t fix an issue.
    • Some customers are more willing to address their problems and actually make changes than others. Over the last 15 years, Abby and her team have worked with a lot of clients who have very different approaches to everything. It often comes down to organizational culture.
    • If the answer is not write a check and buy something, some customers are very exited at this, while others do not want to hear it.
• John says we often see trends in the few companies we have worked with over time. Some companies see the amount of information people share as an indicator of employee value to the organization. He mentions only working for 1 company which had this baked into their culture. How common is it to see organizations value knowledge sharing?
  • This really varies across companies. An organization can say they mean it but not have the right incentives in place for their employees to execute well.
  • Abby recommends understanding how people are measured against knowledge sharing, where performance evaluations and human resources fit into that, and where organizational culture fits. A picture of the holistic current state is important to see if an organization is encouraging the behavior it wants. If not, then the culture will need to change over time to align incentives with behavior.
  • During times of economic change or organizational change (new CEO, etc.), knowledge sharing or a focus on good documentation may get lost or de-prioritized. Some may not perceive the efforts as being as valuable as they really could be for an organization.
  • Some customers may want to address a specific pain point like lengthy employee onboarding. Abby shares a scenario where a company took 3 years to get from new hire to effective employee. Shortening the time to effectiveness of an employee translates to dollars and can be very powerful.
    • Doing this takes documentation and regular knowledge sharing within teams.
  • Part of knowledge management is taking time to review the lessons learned, understanding that failures will happen, looking for ways to improve, and trying to avoid repeating the same mistakes. Abby says it is sometimes as simple as changing a mindset to more of a knowledge sharing mindset.
• John reached out to Abby about being a guest after reading her blog titled 8 Ways to Incorporate Knowledge Capture into Everyday Operations.
  • One important point from the blog was incorporating knowledge management into performance reviews. John finds this kind of mind blowing in a good way and likes the idea of someone being more valuable to a company based on how much knowledge / information they have provided back to help others.
  • If a company really values a specific behavior and wants to encourage it, aligning with performance reviews is one way to do that.
  • When it comes to knowledge sharing, anyone within the organization can do it, both the individual contributor and the manager. It shows that everyone can contribute value.
    • Abby gives the example of a new hire writing a process document that didn’t exist and sharing with peers. That is extremely valuable, but we need the company and its leaders to not consider that effort a waste of time but rather to reward the behavior.
    • John highlights the value of people pointing out blind spots within an organization through not being able to find something and then helping to fill the gaps like in Abby’s example.
  • Abby and her team are knowledge management platform agnostic. She is not a fan of standalone knowledge management systems.
    • There is a way to do knowledge management within the bounds of just about any platform (Microsoft, Google Workspace, Salesforce, etc.).
    • Many people are using Obsidian and Notion for personal knowledge management (a category of its own), and Abby supports that. These tools work well to get information into your second brain in a way that makes sense, but these tools do not scale for use across an enterprise.
    • “For work-related things, having knowledge captured and therefore searchable and findable and reusable within the places where people are going to do that…that’s where it needs to live, even if it’s ugly.” – Abby Clobridge
    • The goal of organizational knowledge management is for someone to find something and make sense out of it so it can help them quickly.
    • John says personal knowledge management tools have highlighted the value of the back link. Knowing what documents link to another document or refer to it is something that seems to be missing from the metadata in most data platforms.
    • Abby says existing platforms for knowledge management have room for improvement in various areas (backlinks, better metadata, etc.) from a capability and ease of use standpoint. AI will drive some of that improvement.
    • Abby was playing with Microsoft Loop recently. She appreciates the direction the product is going, but there is much more improvement needed. Perhaps in 5 years these platforms and tools will be much better and different than they are today.
    • John points out certain AI tools are great for summarizing data but may cause loss of the original source and document author in the process and could potentially take something out of context.

29:05 – Uncovering the Context and the Problem

• Do people take knowledge management and what it means out of context? Does knowledge management apply to internal-facing content, external-facing content, or perhaps both?
  • “I personally think knowledge management can mean whatever it needs to mean for any company.” – Abby Clobridge
  • If the goal is for an organization to have a knowledge management strategy and an implementation strategy that goes along with it, goes back to the problems that need to be solved. Sometimes it is internal, sometimes it is external, and sometimes it is both.
    • One example Abby shares is a company that wants to focus on knowledge base articles available to customers and perhaps how to improve access to information or onboarding within the call center.
    • Another example is an organization that has not been incorporating lessons learned wanting to use these as part of continuous improvement to avoid future mistakes.
  • Before beginning, the problem an organization is trying to solve should be specified as clearly as possible so everyone is on the same page.
    • The above often falls into creating new knowledge, using existing knowledge, properly managing and securing the knowledge, who the knowledge should be shared with, and even integrating with AI tools. Lengthy retention policies and never cleaning up old data can cause AI to provide bad data.
  • Abby highlights the issues above as a segue between her prior focus on open access to that of internal / external knowledge management.
    • Think about who the audience is and what you are trying to accomplish.
• After doing a lot of discovery, how does it generally go when Abby and team have to tell a customer they are solving the wrong problem?
  • Abby stresses the importance of doing discovery to ensure focus is placed on the right problems.
  • All of the discovery comes before deciding to invest in a new platform, etc.
  • “That’s the value of discovery. Are we sure we’re solving the right problems? Because there might be a very simple solution…. Organizational culture and governance have the potential to be really simple. At least, there’s not a direct price tag associated with them. But often it’s the most complicated to solve. Sometimes it’s just re-organizing things. Sometimes it’s tweaking what’s already there.” – Abby Clobridge
  • Many times for knowledge base and intranet projects there is a lack of process / procedure for governance issues like:
    • How often should a piece of content be updated?
    • Who will own the update / maintenance for specific items?
    • Are subject matter experts looking over any updates?
    • Can a user easily see the last time a piece of content was updated to determine if it can be trusted?
    • How do we report something is out of date, and whose job is it to do something about it?

35:01 – Centralized Governance vs. Crowdsourcing

• What about central governance vs. crowdsourcing information within an organization?
  • This depends on the organization, the space in which they are working, and the level of precision needed.
    • Consider situations like FDA regulations, material or machine tolerance levels, etc. where precision is required. In these cases, crowdsourcing is not the way to go in Abby’s opinion.
    • Crowdsourcing is quite valuable in the development of organizational best practices.
      • Non-profits could potentially find value in crowdsourcing.
      • The answer does not have to be all central governance or all crowdsourcing for a specific organization.
    • In circumstances where precision is required and greater accountability for the information is required, central governance will be the better choice.
      • Abby gives the example of the need for precision in the nuclear energy space.
    • “The other issue with crowdsourcing is nobody is responsible because everybody is responsible. Therefore, whose responsibility is it that we get things updated and that we have it maintained and that…somebody has signed off in saying ‘this is still the way that we’re doing things?’” – Abby Clobridge
    • If crowdsourcing a really large organization, consider things like:
      • How do you balance this with other work so employees can spend time contributing?
      • How does your manager feel about it?
      • Is it consistent within the organization?
      • Are roles and responsibilities and expectations clear that crowdsourcing will be part of the job? This is where HR comes into play.

37:33 – Organizational Profiles and Evaluation Criteria

• How could we use inquiries about knowledge management to evaluate a company during the interview process?
  • Abby says knowledge management might mean something different to different people, but we can ask about knowledge sharing (which most people understand). As what a new staff member should expect in terms of knowledge sharing.
    • If the interviewer cannot answer or really struggles to answer, it could be a red flag.
    • If the company values knowledge sharing, the interviewer should be able to describe programs and priorities around knowledge sharing or provide examples of how it is done at the company.
  • Ask whether knowledge sharing is a performance review metric.
    • Abby says this is not the norm, but she feels it can really accelerate culture change like nothing else.
• The profile of organizations that Abby and her teams work with generally fall into 2 buckets: * Small to mid-size organizations (usually around 50 – 200 employees) or organizations who have grown quickly but have not scaled up their knowledge management processes and technology stack * Fortune 500 / Fortune 1000 companies that may want to focus on a specific division and its operations * Organizations like this usually have a technology stack and technical skills internally. They may not have the time or people to focus on improving organization and searchability of data, but the organization recognizes the importance of getting people the proper set of useful information as quickly as possible. * Other organizations of this size may be looking at externally facing elements like a public knowledge base or a call center. People inside these organizations may be too close to the content and unable to look at it from the perspective of someone external to the company. * In a lot of these cases, the content may exist, but the system used to access it doesn’t work well or isn’t easy to use. * An organization may know something could be better but may not be sure what to do about it or feel overwhelmed by the task. Abby says it takes reaching a certain tipping point before someone is willing to take action (even if that involves re-organizing what is in SharePoint, etc.). * Structured and organized internal knowledge allow you to use AI tools like Glean and others to produce greater efficiencies. Many organizations know they are not there yet but are trying to be proactive.

44:26 – Knowledge Management Roles in the Enterprise

• Is there a need within organizations to have something like a librarian role?
  • Abby says she has been seeing knowledge manager roles and even departments, but she advises her customers not to view people in these roles as a dumping ground for stuff.
  • In an operations division, for example, the knowledge management team would not be responsible for updating individual pages in the knowledge base. They would be responsible for things like building automations based on content update frequency, making sure the right people are notified to provide content updates, etc. Abby refers to the role of someone in knowledge management as “serving as that catalyst to make sure that things are happening.”
  • There must also be accountability for people to actually update content pages. It’s a governance issue and can be where things fall apart.
• In a company that may not holistically value knowledge management / knowledge sharing, what can the front line leader do to create a culture of knowledge sharing for their team?
  • The front line leader can look at things like turnover or increase in staff. What could the team be doing to help onboard new members quickly?
  • “You’re probably hiring people who are coming in with a set of skills, so we’re not going to teach somebody Python scripting if that’s what’s needed for this job. We’re going to assume that they can either figure it out or they have that skill already. But we want it documented in this certain way or we want it done in this certain way, and here’s our company or our department’s special way of doing things. And that’s the part to focus on.” – Abby Clobridge, on a culture of knowledge sharing
  • Consider writing a manual for the department that the group collectively puts together so it doesn’t fall on any single individual.
  • Listen to Abby describe a non-profit former client in which each department had no standard operating procedures that were documented.
    • There was a specific department who wrote up their own operation procedures even though the organization had not mandated that any department do it.
    • The department which had done the documentation had someone leave and was able to quantify the time and effort saved in getting a new member up to speed. Sharing quantifiable success stories with other departments can influence their decision to take a grass roots approach rather than a top-down approach.
  • Sometimes it just takes a few people to start something inside an organization.
  • Even the new hire who sees a gap and puts together something to share with others (a process, a systematic approach, etc.) can contribute to organizational knowledge management.
• To follow up on this discussion, you can contact Abby on LinkedIn.

Mentioned in the Outro

• Abby referred to the things she enjoyed doing as “the work” – solving problems, solving the right problems for her customers. She did not want to get too far from that work. Being a consultant allows her to continue to do the work she enjoys even as her business has grown.
  • For business owners listening, hopefully you can structure your job to allow focus on the work you love for at least some of your day / week.
  • If you are a manager or individual contributor, can you find ways to do more of the things you enjoy in your work?
    • Could you do more of a certain type of projects, get deeper in a specific technology, or collaborate with a certain group of people more often?
    • If not, perhaps you can look for job descriptions with the first few requirements containing areas of work where you have expertise and that you enjoy.
    • Think about these things as you work through your Must Have List shared with us by Kat and Liz from Real Job Talk a few episodes ago.
• Abby’s story reminded Nick of a couple of previous guests:
  • Chris Williams took a role as a consultant to avoid boredom, which sounds a lot like Abby’s reasons for becoming a consultant.
    • Check out Episode 229 – A Depth and a Breadth with Chris Williams (1/3) to hear the full story.
  • David Klee wants to help his customers solve a specific problem once so that next time they can bring him in to fix a different problem since he already taught them how to fix the first problem.
    • Check out Episode 119 – Tinkering into Specialty with David Klee (1/2) to hear the full story as well as [Episode 120 – A Time to Build with David Klee (2/2)(https://nerd-journey.com/a-time-to-build-with-david-klee-2-2/).
    • This is also further surfacing of this theme of consultants as educators.
• Though we did not call it knowledge sharing or knowledge management at the time, Chris Wahl spoke about people inside his company blogging to build connections with co-workers.
  • Check out Episode 149 – Find Your Gratitude, Find Your Joy with Chris Wahl (2/2) near the end to read Chris’ blog article on this topic.
  • If people are sharing lessons learned inside their company in blog form, it would not only build connections but make people better communicators. This supports a culture of knowledge sharing and could lend itself to keeping content more up to date.

Contact the Hosts

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