Knowledge Sharing Issues at Ubisoft
The Ubisoft KM team's mission is to enable employees to leverage content and knowledge so they can perform at their best. To do so, the KM team delivers company-wide solutions and programs intended to facilitate internal collaboration and knowledge reuse, for example, via internal social networks, documentation ecosystems, governance policies, enterprise search, and more.
More often than not, the KM team has witnessed that while the services and solutions delivered were of a high standard, they did not have the intended impact. In the past, the KM team has developed documentation ecosystems for new production teams. Six months later, when the KM team checked in, the ecosystem would be one big mess with duplicate content, no structure, essential knowledge missing, low user satisfaction, and a limited amount of sharing taking place.
Other relatively common examples of an inadequate knowledge sharing culture have been witnessed when teams decline to document or share their knowledge with other teams. Or when teams prefer starting from scratch by developing their own assets or knowledge, either because another team refused to share, because the team is more comfortable doing everything themselves, because it is too complicated, or just impossible to get access to the knowledge.
A global enterprise-wide survey is sent out every second year to all employees at Ubisoft. Some questions in the survey centers around collaboration, communication, and information sharing. Answers to these questions illustrate that employees highlight issues with lack of sharing, insufficient documentation, and silos between production teams as problematic. The same conclusions are drawn from user interviews and smaller KM surveys: Employees recognize the issues with knowledge sharing, but they either cannot or will not take the responsibility to improve it on their own.
Conclusions of a master thesis (Rose, 2012) on what influences knowledge sharing at Ubisoft showed that the identified barriers also existed almost ten years back. That indicates that some issues are deeply rooted in the Ubisoft culture and should be addressed if anything should change. In the “Main barriers to knowledge sharing at Ubisoft” section, examples and reasons for the most dominant barriers at Ubisoft will be detailed.
With all of this, it can be determined that great customized tools and well-defined content strategies do not have the expected impact, and KM services and solutions will never live up to their full potential. The KM team has realized that what is needed is an underlying culture that supports more and better knowledge sharing at Ubisoft. For that reason, the ambitious goal of strengthening a knowledge sharing culture has started at Ubisoft.