Strategic Knowledge Management for the Localisation industry

This article, written by Janaina Wittner, Senior Project Manager at WHP and KM specialist (Janaina holds a master's degree in KM), was published by Multilingual Computing & Technology in 2004.

Market pressure on price has lead localisation service providers to re-think their business model. To increase their presence some, like Bowne Global Solutions, have chosen to grow through merges and acquisitions while others, like WHP have preferred to remain small and work closely with suppliers and partners in a networked enterprise model.

Whatever they preferred strategy, differentiation from competitors is the key to success.
Undertaking generic operational process improvement programs such as Business Process Engineering or Total Quality Management is relatively easy to imitate. Positioning strategies are also likely to be followed by others if profit margins are high. Competitive advantage based on those terms will thus not last very long.
Knowledge in the other hand can be used as a base for sustainable competitive advantage. Sharing knowledge and disseminating it internally throughout the organisation and externally across organisational boundaries is impossible to imitate. Not only knowledge is unique to each individual, it is also complex to understand and manage. How could one imitate the velocity of exchanges taking place externally with business partners or internally between individuals?

Knowledge Management and the Localisation industry

Knowledge Management as a discipline focuses on the management of knowledge within and outside organisational boundaries. They prescribe collaboration and sharing of information to avoid “repeating the same old mistakes”. The principal objective is to eliminate waste of time, duplication and re-invention of the same old thing over and over again, symptoms inherent to the localisation industry.

Localisation service providers’ organisational structure is usually, not to say always, project-oriented. A typical structure looks like the matrix illustrated below.

Project Managers interact with individuals from all departments in a collaborative climate but they have little structural incentive to transfer knowledge with one another. Issues solved during one project life cycle will thus increase the knowledge, the experience of the Project Manager in charge but not that of the others who will almost certainly face the same situations shortly after.

The same can be said of knowledge exchange within departments. Individuals are allocated to a specific project and work together towards its successful completion and not towards departmental harmony. How many tools localisation software engineers have written which are kept in their Hard Disks rather than being shared with others? How many third party applications do they know which is never presented to others? This appears a great shame if we agree with the Knowledge Management principle that knowledge doubles its value when shared.

Knowledge Management has for potential to alleviate these symptoms by creating a knowledge driven environment where translators, project managers, engineers and testers are encouraged to create knowledge, to use this knowledge and put into action other people’s ideas.

Forms of Knowledge

Before getting into the tools and Knowledge Management prescriptions, it is important to fully understand what knowledge actually is and how knowledge transfers work.

Two types of knowledge have been identified:
Individual’s explicit knowledge, which is expressed in words and/or numbers. An artefact typically presents it. A document describing how to Translation Memories should be created and/or maintained is an example of explicit knowledge. As an object this type of knowledge can easily be shared with others.
Individual’s tacit knowledge in the other hand is understood and implied without being stated.

It refers to mental models individuals follow in a certain situation without necessarily being aware of the rules directing them. Two software engineers analysing a proprietary engine for the first time will not understand the system in the same depth as they don’t have the same experience, the same background, the same ability or simply the same motivation.

It has been estimated that tacit forms of knowledge constitutes 80% of all knowledge available. Unfortunately it is also the most difficult one to share, as individuals cannot easily explain the decision rules lying behind their understanding. As a result, tacit knowledge made explicit is often of lower value than that of the original tacit knowledge.

For individuals’ ideas to become knowledge it needs to go through constant transformations from tacit to explicit forms in an endless spiral.

Tacit to tacit transformations usually take place in face-to-face situations. To make knowledge available, it needs to be captured in a document. Once in an explicit form, it can be classified to ensure that others have access to it. To use explicit knowledge, individuals must internalise, or understand it. Only at this point, knowledge is transformed back into its tacit form and the individual’s capacity to act is increased.

When designing a Knowledge Management strategy, it is important to take all four forms of knowledge transformations into consideration. The faster the velocity of these transfers the faster knowledge will become “the way we do things around here” and the sooner efforts will focus on the next step of improvements and knowledge creation.

How to manage knowledge?

Many localisation industry workers wrongly believe that knowledge management is nothing more than setting-up a large database where explicit forms of quickly obsolete knowledge is stored. The disciple of Knowledge Management however advises managers to invest at least three times as much on people networks as IT networks.

IT Knowledge Management can support all forms of knowledge conversion of which it accelerates the speed of knowledge transfers.

You are all too familiar with the systems given here as example.

The Expertise Location Software however, is not often used in the localisation industry while it could be of great help when trying to find individuals with knowledge in a specific area. The system works like a “yellow pages” of knowledge that contains a “who knows what” list and help thus individuals to work together. Another useful system not so often used, as it is difficult to implement is a Localisation Workflow System. It follows the process step by step and tracks each activity that composes the process in such a way as to keep Project Managers and other stakeholders informed of its status at all times. WHP is currently investigating the potential offered by the implementation of such a system. It hopes to accelerate the process flow.

Non-technical supports to knowledge conversions are many. A suggested agenda of actions that executives could deploy in order to build a Knowledge Management approach to doing business can be found below.

Knowledge Management Actions	Description of these actions
Mentoring	Communication of values, norms and practices. It is in fact, the tacit understanding of how things work in a specific organisation. A mentor was dedicated to lead, help and/or inform new employees joining the localisation team of Microsoft Ireland.
Training & Development	Explicit and tacit viewpoints can be shared by a group of individuals who come together to learn. Both technical training and general organisational training are important but non-localisation or business related education could also be of value. A localisation software engineer should not be refused German grinds on the basis that he/she should take software training instead. Understanding of languages may not be as critical to the engineers’ daily work but it has for potential to increase the individual’s capacity learn, reflect and ultimately act for the benefit of the organisation.
Knowledge Project	A group of individuals are brought together with the intent to generate a stock of required knowledge. It could be a group set-up to evaluate different types of Machine Translation and their process / cost improvement potential. Individuals can research in areas they have interest on but only a Knowledge Project given clear objectives and the necessary resource will develop the needed knowledge.
Reflexion on Knowledge repository	Repositories can provide information on localisation best practice or analysis of different topics such as cultural differences or internationalisation issues. Individuals should be encouraged to discuss and reflect on each of the knowledge entries. It is important to regularly review the content of knowledge repositories to update obsolete information within it and to make employees aware of the variety of information available or needed.
Adhesion to Communities of Practice	Make up a group of individuals who share the same knowledge, work on a collective project and share openly and critically with each other. Attendance to localisation conferences, membership to the LRC (localisation Research Centre) or LISA (localisation Industry Standard Association) and reading of localisation specific magazine are essential as it keep localisation providers aware of changes in the industry.
Set-up Intermediary roles	Individuals who take responsibility for developing a specific stock of knowledge and plan to share it with others. A software engineers can be trained on Catalyst and share his knowledge with others after some experience with the tool. The person selected for such a role needs to have good communications skills.
Collaboration	Individuals to come together around a specific task or project so that they can learn from each other. Collaboration is a necessary ingredient for any localisation project where the whole team share their understanding of a project requirement with the project manager who will in turn design a project plan; a schedule and estimate a budget in accordance with the client’s criteria and scope.
Social network analysis	Identifies and communicates who speaks to whom, how information is transmitted from one individual to another, or from one group or department to another. This analysis shows where there is poor communication and allows thus to design a plan of actions to be taken. In a collaborative climate, there is no room for distortions in the communication channel.
Scenarios	Brings individuals both from inside and outside the organisation to develop explicit stocks of knowledge about the future. It could be an evaluation of how the localisation industry might evolve or what impact Machine Translation will have over time.
Knowledge mapping	Identifies who knows what, how stocks of knowledge are related and how/where the information is stored. This is important information to have as it facilitates problem solving. It can be done on a spreadsheet or on a more elaborate database where not only the name and the skill are available but also the contact details, the position held within the organisation, qualifications of the individual etc…
Experiments	Allow one or more individuals to do something on a small scale that otherwise would not be done as a means to learn about it. It could be a localisation service provider that experiments writing technical documentation using a single sourcing Content Management system such as the one offered by AuthorIT. The experiment will certainly help when advising clients on how to write to facilitate the localisation process and thus ultimately reduce costs.

How to strategically manage knowledge?

Knowledge Management is to be planned as a strategy to meet objectives and thus ultimately reach the organisational vision. To improve people’s capacity to act, localisation service providers should encourage nine basic knowledge transfers amongst External Structures (clients, suppliers…), Internal Structures (administrative process, culture…) and Individual’s Competences.

Each of the nine conversions relate to strategic question operations managers can ask to analyse the knowledge transfer situation and act to improve it. Possible actions will be illustrated by those undertaken at WHP, a Localisation Service Provider.

Knowledge Conversions	Strategic Questions to ask
Individual to Individuals	How can we improve the transfer of competence between individuals in our organisation? How can we improve the collaborative climate? WHP mapped knowledge in a simple spreadsheet. Everyone has access to it and can thus ask the right person for assistance. WHP started also workshops where those with expertise in a specific area or software introduce it to others. In this context, a Spanish Project Manager who had previous teaching experience started giving Spanish classes to those interested. New employees joining the WHP team follow a formal induction process and those in junior positions are assigned a mentor. To ensure a good communication flow, production meetings are held on weekly basis.
External structure	How employees improve the competence of clients, suppliers and other stakeholders? WHP value having an open communication with stakeholders. Vendors receive regular feedback on the quality of their work and clients will be advised on how localisation costs and timelines can be reduced. Lead translation vendors are regularly invited by WHP for workshops. On this occasion, post-mortems are done on challenging projects, 3^rd party tools are presented and WHP processes are openly discussed. WHP is now planning to develop and extranet for formal exchange of information with stakeholders.
External structure to Individual Competence	How clients, suppliers and other stakeholders improve the competence of the employees? WHP project managers have regular meetings with their clients to ensure that they know and understand the processes and their client constraints. They are also encouraged to attend industry conferences. Gunther Hoser, the Director of WHP e-mails regularly articles of interest and makes localisation magazines available to all.
Individual Competence to Internal structure	How can we improve the conversion of individually held competence to systems and tools? WHP employees agreed on the importance of externalising knowledge and are now working on an Intranet portal. Feedback on procedural difficulties experienced by employees are analysed by WHP’s technical director in charge of process improvement solutions.
Internal structure to Individual Competence	How can we improve individuals’ competence by using systems and tools? WHP’s Intranet and Extranet search and categorisation capabilities will play an important role in increase the competence of individuals. WHP will be ISO certified this year, in this context workflows are being clarified and formalised.
External structure to External structure	How can we enable conversations among clients, suppliers and other stakeholders to improve their competence? WHP employees regularly attend localisation conferences. With a LISA sponsoring membership, WHP is also offering support to a community of practice.
External to Internal structure	How can competence from clients, suppliers and other stakeholders improve our systems, tools & processes? WHP employees discuss suggestions and feedback from stakeholders during productions meetings and the technical director researches process improvement methods and tools available in the market place.
Internal to External structure	How can our systems, tools and processes improve the competence of clients, suppliers and other stakeholders? WHP is investigating the potential offered by the implementation of a workflow system such as Bonita or DotProject. The extranet will also improve exchanges between WHP’s internal and external structures.
Internal structure to Internal structure	How can our systems, tools and processes be effectively integrated? A workflow system is here again the solution selected by WHP.

, Senior Project Manager at WH&P, holds a master's degree in KM.

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