Last week I met online with Aprill Allen. She’s a KCS practitioner and trainer as well, located in Australia. We met at the (virtual) Member Summit from the Consortium end of September (watch the recap) and Aprill invited me for a chat. Aprill has a fantastic website and blog, Knowledge Bird, and she’s very active in knowledge management communities and on Twitter. As for visibility and showing one’s expertise, I can learn a lot from her!
It was great to talk to Aprill, to hear how she discovered KCS (as this method is not well advertised, it’s always interesting to hear how sometimes coincidently people stumble upon it) and how, as independent contractor she tries to sell the training and workshops. Trying to sell the KCS training by announcing it (online or through a training institute) doesn’t give much results, as we also found out here. KCS is not well-known enough, like ITIL or PMP as (different) methods are. I found that when we talk to potential customers, they think KM is important, just not urgent (enough, for getting budget). Making a mess of your knowledge base probably doesn’t hurt enough and I think employees are smart enough to find workarounds to deal with lack of structure. We try to sell KM/KCS in combination with an ITSM platform, because then the organization is more willing to rethink their way of working, as they have to do with the new platform anyway. It’s helpful to know how other trainers, even on the other side of the world, approach the sale of knowledge management, or more specifically KCS.