Knowledge Management in Pharma Conference. Part 2 of 2.

Part 2 of my thoughts after attending a KM and Pharma Conference.

This part is bit more unstructured than my usual writing.  Let me just expound on some notes I took.

Role Confusion. Of the 60 people who attended, each knows what KM means to them and their company.  But if I asked, I’d get about 40 different descriptions.  Many of the speakers began with a definition of KM they took from Wikipedia.  But then proceeded to explain their company’s KM program, veering from the definition.  During the breaks I spoke to participants who run KM in their companies — but what they do differed even more.

I wondered — what would they answer: Is KM’s role to create a library of information for others to access? To ensure that people share vital information with others? To regulate information sharing and be accountable for compliance?  Can it be “yes” to all?  if so — are they doing all? I’m not saying that any of these roles are not important or legitimate.  I’m saying that the diversity of roles under this category is confusing.  It reminds me of the title of one of my favorite books on categorization and language:  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.  There’s one word in the Dyirbal language that could refer to any of these three things — that says something about the way the Dyirbal people think.

One example:  In one company, KM was a service provided by the corporate library.  An employee (scientist) asks a question via email or webform. A research librarian is assigned to collect a response (e.g. pubmed articles, internal reports, charts), and emails back to the scientist.  This KM service focused on ensuring compliance to copyright and federal regulations. For example: some information is not allowed to be shared with the pharma sales representatives – so the librarians have to first be sure they know who is asking and whether they are allowed to see the answer.  Of course the librarians don’t have any ability to ensure that the email they send to a scientist does not somehow end up in the hands of a salesperson — so the front door is locked but the windows are wide open.

Role Justification. More than once I heard participants talking about justifying their role, or selling the importance of KM in the organization.  This too is an indicator that something is less than healthy.  Ideally, you don’t have to sell your value — it is apparent and sought after.  But when you do have to sell your value — clarity of role helps.

I have a personal philosophy:  Never defend your turf. Anyone who defends turf will only find that their turf betrays them.  Rather, always select worthy turf.  Worthy turf will defend you.  So whenever someone tells me how to “sell a program” I get nervous.  I’m not that comfortable with sales.  Pick a role that is clearly and visibly valuable, and you won’t have to spend energy selling it.

For Whom? One way to achieve a sense of clarity is to ask this simple question.  Rather than telling me what KMer’s do, tell me for whom they do it.  This shift in direction forces the conversation to bring clarity to the value of the activity.  Some of the talks were focused on the people the KM initiative was intended to serve — these talks were the clearest and most valuable ones.

Sharing and Hiding. This conference one had a parallel focus on the deliberate hiding of information (for valid purposes).  All the talk I have seen about KM and E2.0 (are they the same?, does one kill the other? supplement the other, etc.) seems to focus on the Cluetrain philosophy that Information Wants to be Free, and that organizations seeks to grow and share knowledge.  But the reality is that companies do have secrets — that even employees cannot share with other employees.

I remember that great quote from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference last June when Marcia Conner said “How many companies out there are hiring untrustworthy people?” as part of a message about corporate openness and the transparency — this quote receive a round of applause and many re-tweets.  But, with respect, my reaction then was “NO!! the issue isn’t about trust as much as it is about rules.  You can’t expect companies to open up all information to all employees.  It sounds nice, but it does not reflect business reality.  E2.0 cannot just offer an everything-is-open model.  Most vendors get this.  And BTW, plenty of companies don’t trust their employees, for good reasons.”

I’m not saying that KM = closed and E2.0 = open.  Instead, “M” = management.  To the extent one can manage knowledge (I don’t think so) or at least the process of transmitting knowledge (much more believable), management does not mean to open the floodgates and measure.  So information protection must be included in the conversation — and sometime we forget this part.

A point of irony:  This was a Knowledge Management  conference, but the company who sponsored this posted this policy (see photo).

Without this policy, they’d have a difficult time getting speakers. If you were wondering why I did not live tweet during the event, wonder no more.

The inside-out. At the same time as this conference, there was another one a few blocks away focusing on the participation of pharma companies on public social forums, e.g. Facebook, patient advocacy groups, or their own white-label social networks (see here for some examples).  This is a really complex issue – and for many of the reasons that KM is complicated in pharma.

I think that the externally facing social media folks and the internally facing KM folks really need to get together fast, because they are dealing with similar issues.  In other industries, there are clear differences between internal (enterprise 2.0) initiatives  and external (marketing, support, or CRM) initiatives.  In pharma, these two do not appear to be as distinct.  That was really interesting to me — because I’m not sure that pharma companies are organized to see just how much leverage there is here.

Just my opinion.

Tagged as: conference, knowledge management, pharma