How did you get into this field?
I've been a knowledge manager since my youth. I didn't know that's what I was, and it wasn't called that. When I "dug" into my past, I found that I had been managing knowledge throughout every project I finished. I finished quite a few projects, but I needed to organize the information collected to be accessible and available for future generations. Some finish a project and move on; I don't. I needed to manage everything in boxes and write what was there so that if we ever needed it, and today we do, it would be accessible. In retrospect, I know I managed knowledge because I did it using the same methodologies I use today and recently, even with the same technological tools.
For example, I characterized and set up an internal site for my colleagues' use. This happened inadvertently to make my work easier, save me from distributing material by email, and allow direct access to content without the need to request it from me. In retrospect, this was the basis for the marketing portal that still works today. I started with the 'softer' materials and added core materials and structured work processes to the portal. At that time, I wasn't a knowledge manager and did this intuitively in addition to my role, but using very similar methodologies - I checked what they wanted, the current situation, what exists, what's needed, and that's how the portal was born.
I assume that's also how I got to the role. At the time, I didn't know that the topic of knowledge management was developing in the organization. They offered me the position, and whoever suggested it didn't even know I had been doing it in marketing. They sought someone to manage knowledge from within the organization and recommended me. I joined after the process began after some prioritization of topics had been done. Some work had started, and I joined it.
What does your day-to-day look like?
My role is to be a dream fulfiller; my room is the fantasy room. With me, users are allowed to express all their wishes regarding how they would like to manage their knowledge and work processes without considering other constraints (of course, of course, only in knowledge management!!!).
My role is also that of a coordinator, coordinating between many functions in the organization and being the user's voice towards management, their colleagues, and information systems. I see the difference between knowledge management and information systems. People don't always know the difference, especially since knowledge management is often under information systems. Because of this spillover and the tension between information systems and the user, I try to stand in the middle. In checking the user's needs against the technological systems, I try very hard not to be told that this can't be done and that it can't be done.
I try very hard to manage my time and not let my time manage me. I have at least half of the day structured, in meetings or sessions, and the other half is less structured, where I solve problems that have arisen. I try to set up organized meetings with content experts and sponsors regarding their needs and requirements in existing portals or those in process. Although we have a work plan, various needs arise along the way. In the learning curve process, which over time becomes more and more moderate, all kinds of innovations pop up. I try to keep them updated and provide users with solutions according to current technological capabilities. The marketing portal, for example, was built according to the knowledge that existed at that time, and today, we are upgrading it according to existing technological capabilities and the experience gained in knowledge management.
Besides that, I have a regular and structured round with my implementation and setup team. We check task progress, maintain existing portals and any needs that arise in them, and address unplanned issues. Due to limited resources, we try to stick to the work plan and don't respond to every request, but we don't always succeed. I dedicate both pre-planned time and ad-hoc allocated time to this. Sometimes, it takes half a day, three-quarters of a day, or even a whole day.
My team consists of a coordinator from the information systems department, with whom I sit daily regarding what's happening now. Besides him, there's the person responsible for implementation, with whom I also sit quite a bit. She has a whole technical team that deals with the actual implementation, i.e., writing codes, setup, and design of the portals. In addition, the team includes a graphic designer, who is responsible for designs, and a small team that assists me with all sorts of runs, QA on portals being set up, checking content and typos, and all kinds of "holes" in the portals.
Much of my occupation is dedicated to preserving customers I can't currently respond to. It's not easy when a person comes to me asking to set up a portal for them, and I have to tell them that it's not in the work plan and that we don't have time and workforce resources to respond. I try to find intermediate solutions, such as open libraries for sharing or something else. Everything has advantages and disadvantages - whether this specific solution suits them, whether they can manage it, and so on. Even a temporary solution like libraries requires accompaniment and training, which require time and resources that we don't have. It's complicated, and there is the element of refusal.
When I was accepted for the job two years ago, no one saw how people would cooperate. One of the fundamental issues that concerned us was getting people to collaborate and share knowledge.
Today, I'm not there at all. Today, people have come to me and asked me to set up a system for them. Employees from all layers of the organization send me booklets they've found and want me to upload them to the portal. Every report that comes out in the organization is sent to me, and they ask me to upload it. This undoubtedly teaches about the internalization of knowledge management in the organization. In the past, the cow wanted to nurse more than the calf wanted to suckle. It's the opposite; today, I can't respond to everyone. The awareness in our organization of the importance of preserving material has existed since time immemorial, at least as far as I know, in the areas I've dealt with. When people finished a role, they would come and ask what to do with the material they had accumulated and where to put it. Just as I had a need when I finished a project to document what I had done, so did other people who didn't want to throw away the material because it was their baby and out of a sense of responsibility. There was a willingness of employees, even in senior positions in the organization, to hand over their material in an orderly manner for preservation. Still, the tools available to the organization were not set up to turn these contents into shareable ones. Today, we have how and where to do it and enjoy excellent cooperation. The benefit of knowledge management is clear to everyone. For example, we engage in practical research, so if we need to examine buying costly equipment today, the employee turns to the research portal, takes out the relevant report from there, and sends the appropriate people the link from the portal. All this is done with a straightforward search in the portal. People see the practical benefit, and because of this, I have a demand that I can't meet.
I see the success of knowledge management today in the marketing work I did at the beginning of the way, defining knowledge management as a way of life and not as a project, 'recruiting' managers and employees to the idea, involving them in the process and creating excitement for the topic. Positioning those engaged in the knowledge management process as an elite unit, which I defined as the "Knowledge Management Commando," branding - giving a name to the move and instilling confidence that it will indeed happen. When I started the project, no one believed me that it would work - they said it wouldn't succeed, that our company wouldn't invest money in it, that they would retreat from the idea in the middle, that no one would maintain it, that it wouldn't work. There was a lot of disbelief because we are a manufacturing company, and what doesn't yield immediate ROI doesn't count with us (I assume, as happens in any other organization). Knowledge management is something you don't see as having an immediate purpose. There was a lot of skepticism, but the moment the first portal went live and was placed on every employee's desktop, knowledge management received a big echo in the organization, and this marketing work spread its wings.
One of the things that contributed to the implementation of the portal was the production stoppage: every year, we have a production stoppage. This is a planned shutdown of all facilities for maintenance. This action requires a lot of coordination because, on that occasion, they do a lot of repairs that can't be done when the equipment is working. This is a period when there are many contractors and maintenance people on site. They try to minimize it as much as possible because every day without production is a day when they lose a lot of money. At their request, we set up a "mini-portal" for them with essential tools for the production stoppage period that allowed sharing and transparency. Anyone interested and authorized could see the tasks and the activity deployment, as well as who, where, what, when, and how. It was a small portal with few documents that made a big boom, which we didn't foresee or think about. We gave them a functional tool without interfacing with any system; we gave them the information they needed. Their desires have developed today, and we can provide more sophisticated solutions.
One of our great successes is changing work patterns - for example, we set up an accounting portal and opened "workrooms" for them to manage all the complex activities of preparing financial reports, sharing their documents, distributing tasks, presenting schedules, and more. Today, the division manager instructed that all documents should be saved only on the sharing platform and nowhere else. In team meetings, they bring up the portal on the screen and manage the discussions in front of it.
This shows that knowledge management is not just a server of information but a functional work tool, and we are cautious to turn it into one, and because of this, the project succeeds. An information server is convenient for searching. We assume an employee looking for something enters the portal for about 10 minutes. He enters to look for a form, procedure, or drawing and then leaves. We want the portal to be a work tool, and the moment it is, it connects all the people to this page called 'My Professional Portal.' Today, I try to preserve the spirit of knowledge management but don't engage in "selling" because I can't meet the demand. Every portal goes live; there's a festive launch; the celebrants are given a notebook with a dedicated inscription for the relevant portal, a hat, and a cup. For the New Year, computer reminders were distributed.
What are the challenges that exist at work?
I see three prominent challenges. One is rooted in resource management and coordination. Financing, user management, technology people, management people, we're talking about hundreds. Hundreds in the organization and their interests are not always identical, and they don't always have time to do the things we all want to be done, precisely because knowledge management is important but less important to us as a manufacturing organization than work that brings profit, than the central occupation of every employee. Apart from me, most of them do this in addition to their role, and this dance requires a lot of mental strength and psychology.
Managing resources and coordinating between employees from all ranks and different organizational units is challenging. T provides service and solves problems that can't always be solved. For me, this involves many topics involving several companies and many employees. I also ensure the project's reputation is not harmed, which is essential to me.
The second challenge is technology. We work with SAPortal. Our users' requirements, on the one hand, and the desire of the knowledge management team how to turn the portal into a possible and convenient work tool require the integration of many technological systems into the portal, such as ERP SAP systems, production management systems, computerized laboratory management systems, shipments, report generators and so on. For this, we sometimes need to be very creative. Being creative in this view of daily work and schedule requires assertiveness and saying, "OK, now 4 days of development work". We usually do this when we know that we'll use the component we developed for additional portals afterward.
The challenge is to harness the technological team to cooperate and be creative in solving problems on the one hand and to decide how many resources to allocate to different needs and how to prioritize them on the other. I assume there's no "impossible" in technology; there's "how long it will take me" and "how much it will cost me" in technology. When a new solution is found and implemented, the joy is great. The multiplicity of technological systems and the difference in technological systems between the companies belonging to the group are an additional technological challenge.
A third challenge is the geographical dispersion of the companies and the dispersion of infrastructures. For example, we have a plant in the Sodom site, where seemingly the most trivial thing was to open the existing portal in Sodom to the employees at this plant. Still, despite physically working in Sodom, the employees belong to another company in the group, which has a separate computer system and network. When we came to bring up the portal for them, it didn't come up because they're not on our network.
Another challenge is the fact that we have many control rooms. Since we provide, among other things, also personal information to the employee from the portal in the control room, I can't give this information on the open control computer to everyone. Many control room operator employees don't have personal computers, and I need to provide service to them, too. The solution we found is creating computer stations, "kiosks," as we call them, scattered throughout the plant areas, where we installed smart cards that would know how to identify the employees and bring up their personal information when they bring up the portal. This way, the employee can check how many vacation days they have, report attendance, check refunds due to them, and more. This solution wasn't trivial and involved many employees from different occupations. These are things that when they said 'knowledge management in ICL' they didn't think about...
What knowledge management solutions exist in your unit?
The active portals are an organizational portal, a research and process engineering portal, and a marketing portal. An accounting portal went live these days. A portal for the economic department is waiting for technological implementation, and so is an environmental quality portal. We are currently in the stages of responding to production needs, raw material development, infrastructure and city engineering, quality, and safety. Since we can't respond to everyone's demands at once in the given time frame, we gave some of them an initial solution of shared knowledge management libraries, which still don't include the content interactions that can be provided in a portal. It's a flatter solution, but it exists and is better than nothing.
The going live of some of the solutions depends on processes in the organization; for example, we were on the verge of finishing the characterization of a safety portal, which required close interfacing with the operational systems and changing some of them. At the same time, we were facing an upgrade of the organizational SAP system, so work on the portal was frozen until the work on the SAP was completed. It's a huge challenge to decide which applications will be implemented in which technological systems; we invested work in defining the needs, finished the characterization, and didn't move to implementation since needs that arose through knowledge management can now find a solution in the upgraded operational system. Therefore, the solutions given in the characterization need to be re-examined.
The research and process engineering portal refers to both the academic aspect (research) and the practical aspect of the field (process engineering). Under the umbrella of process engineering, additional needs arose that didn't come up in the first stage of defining the needs. Over time, it became clear that there was a need to separate the operational topics added "on the go" in process engineering from the research portal. We integrate many technological systems within the portal. A user doesn't know where they're getting the information from. On one page, they can find information from the document library, drawings from SAP, a PI (production management software) graph, a report from Focus, etc. The user doesn't know where everything comes from; they know they see everything they requested. For example, there are components of contacts and rolling birthdays, which is a hit. Users don't know that these are data automatically drawn from the HR system. Or the production graph drawn from the production management system. The success is that they turn to me and complain about everything, without distinction - that their birthday doesn't appear in the portal or that the production graph doesn't work. As far as they're concerned, they don't know that the date is updated in the personal file and only drawn to the portal or that the production system isn't working and, therefore, the graph in the portal isn't correct. The portal is the address they turn to for every issue; it is the face of everything.
Where do you see the project in 5 years?
Knowledge management will be a straightforward work tool in five years with no alternative. It won't be a unique project, but it is part of the company's norm. And new employees who join won't know any other reality. In five years, the companies abroad will also be full partners in all the applications they need -- (this is already in progress). ICL's centers of excellence, which are already being established and are designed to share information and work processes across the organization/across companies in the conglomerate, will also be a routine way of life.
An Amusing Story from Knowledge Management
I've been working in the organization for many years, and until the start of work on the portal, I knew a minimal group of people. When I arrived at kickoff meetings and interviews, they would ask me if I belonged to an external consulting company. Today, there isn't anyone in the organization who doesn't know how to reach me or knows that the portal's name is Aluma. Some in the organization don't call me by my name but refer to me as Aluma.
It amuses me that employees come to me to receive knowledge management gifts—a hat, cup, notebook, or other item—which are only given to those who join the process. Even if their organizational unit hasn't established a portal, they aren't entitled to it by "law.” I happily oblige because many hat-wearers, "cup-drinkers," and users of other Aluma marketing items are ambassadors spreading the gospel of knowledge management wherever they go. And why should I complain?
Questions? Nurit Biran: nurit.biran@iclfertilizers.com
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