Interview: Bill Kaplan on Knowledge Loss and Employee Turnover

Bill Kaplan, CPCM is a retired US Air Force colonel who after a lifetime of successful implementations for other companies founded his own knowledge management consulting group last year: Working Knowledge^CSP. His path is a textbook example of success — always the most difficult kind.

Mimi Dionne: First, a bit of background.

Bill Kaplan: Early in my career, I was the Director of Contracts for a major satellite program office in the Air Force. When I look back, I realize the work I implemented in team operations and sharing across the organization is what’s known as knowledge management (KM) today. We formally exchanged information on a daily basis and once per year, much to their dismay, my contracting officers changed roles and positions to help ensure that they each knew what the other one was doing (and this is the early years of email and online sharing).

I retired in 1998 and went to work for SAIC. While there I wandered into a presentation one day. Kent Greenes, SAIC’s Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO), was explaining to the audience what I understood inherently. I joined his group and along with some others, built an internal and external Knowledge Management practice for our clients. I was there for seven years until Acquisitions Solutions (an entirely virtual organization specializing in government only acquisition and program management consulting) took advantage of my background in contracting and program management and brought me onboard as their CKO. I served this organization for five years, managing intellectual capital, working with other C-level execs to set up a robust and sustainable knowledge management framework.

MD: What was singular about the knowledge management framework you developed at Acquisition Solutions?

BK: I had two roles: internally I was charged to develop a strategy and the right implementing practices to transition the company into a high performing knowledge enabled consulting organization.  At the same time I was hired, the company was hiring other C-level executives to support the company’s growth and success.

We worked to transform the company from the top down and the bottom up. The Chief Financial Officer handled financial assets, the Corporate Development Officer was responsible for financial assets; Human Capital managed people assets; I was the Chief Knowledge Officer in charge of managing and leveraging the intellectual assets of the company. To continue to foster and sustain the collaborative behavior that had been the foundation of this virtual company for ten years, they charged me to build a KM framework — the right kind, implementing practices, capture, adapt and reuse knowledge, along with mechanisms, both personal and technical across the organization.

I worked closely with the Chief Technology Officer who was responsible for the technical assets of the company…it was a perfect relationship. I was able to provide guidance to the technical side of the house to support implementation of KM using relevant supporting technology. However, I’m from the camp that says KM is not only about the technology. The main focus is about people and processes. KM is about improving performance of the individual, the team, and the corporate level.

My external role was to develop a consulting practice based on lessons learned from our practices within the company. Customers found value in the fact that we were offering solutions developed from concepts and practices that we were using internally. The practitioner status helped a lot with our credibility. 

The KM Team applied the same knowledge management approach developed internally with our external clients: the framework included knowledge assets (a web-based dynamic group knowledge repository) highlighting reuseable information and experience, communities of practice to help move knowledge across the company, enabling technology to support connection, collection and collaboration, and Fast Learning processes to learn before, during and after process execution to make sense of it for reuse.

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Tags: employee turnover, interviews, knowledge management

Bill Kaplan, CPCM is a retired US Air Force colonel who after a lifetime of successful implementations for other companies founded his own knowledge management consulting group last year: Working Knowledge^CSP. His path is a textbook example of success -- always the most difficult kind.

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