Hi Tom, I talked to Carla about your post and have combined our responses here.

From Carla: Your observation is right on. Our research on RPA and other automation projects found that projects found that having KM (and HR) as part of the transformation team dramatically increased the satisfaction and perceived success of the project. While we don’t have templates, we have other content that might be helpful.

From Lauren: Yes, we find that KM has a lot to offer in terms of best practices and lessons learned for IT implementation. To generalize, KM teams tend to have more embedded change and communication skills than IT does, and KM has also had decades of practice nudging people to use new systems (with varying degrees of success). In organizations that have a close partnership between IT and KM, this is often something KM can offer in terms of reciprocity – IT can help KM with tools, and KM can serve as a liaison between IT and business stakeholders and help guide and support knowledge-related IT change efforts. I wrote an article for KMWorld earlier this year that touches on the KM/IT partnership and might be useful here: Knowledge management thrives on partnership.

In addition, KM infrastructure around communities, enterprise social platforms, and webinars can be extremely helpful tools in change management and communication. They’re also great venues for peer assists and endorsements and the organic sharing of success stories, which are so important to scaling the adoption of new technology. We talk about this in our Supporting Transformational Change Through KM white paper.

We don’t have any templates that walk people through the connections, but that is a cool idea and one I’ll consider!