Question

The Care Services Improvement Partnership (CSIP) was created in the United Kingdom to support improvement and development in a range of services across health and local government, for children, adults, and older people, including those experiencing mental distress, physical disability, or learning disability. CSIP have a successful track record in providing developmental support for provider organizations and commissioners across the UK National Health Service (NHS), local authorities, regional agencies, and voluntary and private organizations. In doing this CSIP can draw not only on the diverse background of the experienced clinicians, practitioners, and senior managers within the CSIP Team but also on specialists working for CSIP nationally as well as networks of people who use services and their caregivers.

CSIP is a knowledge organization and supports local organizations to ensure that their service improvement activities are based on the most up-to-date and complete evidence of good practice. CSIP has been well positioned to provide an "honest broker" and facilitative role between the NHS and local government and between both of these and the Department of Health, helping to forge the active partnerships that are critical to successful reduction of health and social care inequalities. CSIP takes a holistic, “whole-system” approach, involving health, social care, third-sector (voluntary and community) organizations, as well as the users of care services and their caregivers. CSIP employs a range of specialists, approximately 70 people, from a wide range of backgrounds. Many of the Program Leads are seconded from or also hold key roles with in local organizations, ensuring that their expertise and knowledge are based on current service delivery, issues, and practices.

CSIP has long recognized that it is a “Knowledge Organization.” The ways in which it helps its client and partner organizations to bring about service improvements relies heavily on its knowledge of, for example, the latest developments in new policy implementation and emerging good practice. Equally, CSIP is striving to “keep its own house in order” by making its internal management of key knowledge and information as effective and efficient as it can.

Therefore CSIP decided that it needed to continually develop and improve its working practices, working culture and environment, systems, and tools by implementing knowledge management initiatives and developing a knowledge management strategy to more formally identify, manage, and apply its knowledge assets. CSIP identified several key knowledge needs:

“We need to feel genuinely happy that we are getting best value from our knowledge, as we build on and share this within our team and the wider Health and Social Care community.”

“Knowledge is our business. We are ‘honest brokers’ of key knowledge for implementing policy, sharing good practice and effecting improvement and innovation in the design, commissioning, and delivery of a range of priority services in Health and Social Care across England.”

In terms of a more formal KM Process, the nature of the CSIP business requires them to excel in capturing, storing, sharing, collaborating, and harvesting key business knowledge. The same is true of making use of (or being!) leading experts and working in and with leading Communities of Practice.

“Prior to learning about formal KM approaches, it’s fair to say that we weren’t so explicitly aware of each of these aspects/elements of an overall process and what each one means or entails. Other elements of a formal process—measuring and maintaining and improving a KM system itself—were quite naturally not in our consideration before we began formally ‘doing KM’.”

CSIP also recognized the need to facilitate the above by encouraging and enabling those people involved to “tell their story”; sharing knowledge and communicating through as wide a variety of channels as possible.

“We need to be much better at telling our own story; because by doing so we better achieve our own organisational goals, we demonstrate our own value (to our funding organisations; to the taxpayer).”

CSIP undertook some specific programs

• KM awareness-raising and education across the whole organization.

• Establishing a KM Working Group (members trained in a KM Consulting Methodology to the level of Knowledge Practitioners to support the KM) lead, plan, and help manage the KM program of work.

• KM assessment surveys to determine the current level of maturity.

• Identification of key knowledge areas and critical knowledge assets.

• Development of a KM strategy.

• Training people in knowledge-working skills and using relevant tools.

• Creating knowledge roles across the organization.

• Linking fulfilment of knowledge roles with training and other support, and with the organizational (NHS-wide) framework for personal knowledge and skills development.

• (Before and after establishing a formal KM program) Strongly focusing on innovative developments in flexible and collaborative IT tools and systems. Particularly high technological freedom is ensured by using web-based, open-source technologies.

Program Implementation and key results

2006: Initial cohort of Knowledge Practitioner trainees (senior management team and IT manager); great enthusiasm for and engagement with ideas of KM and some organization-wide awareness-raising and education.

2007: Funding of first full-time dedicated KM post began early 2007; early successes included:

More awareness-raising sessions open to the whole team, widespread training and uptake of devolved website content management system, redevelopment of main external communications organ: a monthly e-bulletin (for the first time making use of now much more extensively populated website),

Publication of various Success Stories, drawing on the work of the whole organization.

More concerted development of web-based database and accompanying tool for management of work and corporate contacts, performance reporting, and early CRM-type facilities.

Training of those who then became the KM Working Group took place in early 2008: The first CSIPWM KM Strategy was written and approved in April 2008. The KM Working Group planned and carried out three formal pilot projects (analysis and enhancing of knowledge-based networks, processes, and IT tools) and various other work, The KMWG consists of at least one Director, the HR Manager, the Finance Manager, an IT representative, a Program Lead representative, and the KM Lead. This group reports regularly to the Senior Management Team, as well as reporting regular developments to the whole organization.

Throughout the period, more training was carried out on KM awareness and explanation of the KM strategy, and what it means to individuals, teams, the organization, and beyond. Furthermore, work continued to create knowledge roles, and more supporting systems development was commissioned (ongoing) of custom software for managing work delivery and performance reporting, contacts, events, CRM, etc.

The clear key results that CSIP is now experiencing from implementing the KM initiatives, so far, are:

1. Increased, team-wide awareness of KM and its benefits.

2. Training in knowledge-application skills; results include much greater use of a highly devolved website Content Management System, Confluence (Wiki), Skype, and other smarter features of the web and email systems. CSIP is now exploring narrative techniques as tools not only for enhanced communication but also for organizational development—both for the organization and as a service Improvement tool for its clients.

3. Adoption of knowledge roles, with much better management of knowledge bases in various areas as a result.

4. Clear increases in publication of stories of CSIP work, and a steadily increasing volume of visits to the website.

5. Enhancements to the way CSIP has been managing and reporting on the delivery of work.

6. Improved cross-visibility and shared knowledge of completed and current work all across the team, leading to more collaboration in planning and delivery of the work.

7. Building an asset of “learning logs” from completed pieces of work.

8. Positive description, analysis, and measurement of KM maturity from questionnaires and measurement tools between 2006 and 2009.

Why did CSIP embark on knowledge management? Summarize the various key knowledge needs identified by CSIP.???

Answer 1

The primary reasons behind why CSIP embark on knowledge management is that it wanted to maintain its image of being a knowledge organization. The business model of CSIP revolves around offering support to local organizations so that most service improvement activities are up-to-date. This gets facilitated with the objective of knowledge sharing. CSIP strives to collaborate with clients and partners to bring about service improvement, which depends heavily on knowledge sharing among the involved companies. Hence, CSIP made the choice to initiate its knowledge management initiatives.

The various key knowledge needs identified by CSIP are:

• Making the internal management of key knowledge and information effective and efficient
• Facilitating knowledge sharing among clients and partners
• Keep the overall service improvements in the industry up-to-date