Archive for KM
by Bill Ives
April 19, 2011 at 3:14 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, KM, knowledge management
The subtitle of The New Edge in Knowledge is How Knowledge Management is Changing the Way We do Business. Knowledge management is becoming one of the longest running shows in business and Carla O’Dell and Cindy Hubert of APQC have been there from the beginning.
The book begins with a foreword by another of the KM All-stars, Larry Prusak. He notes a 1995 conference at UC Berkeley and offers some of the main principles of knowledge management that were articulated at the time:
“Knowledge is a fixed pool, a collection of resources that can be measured and used by standard management practices.”
“Technology is the key tool to unlock the value of this resource,. The more technology the better.”
Now before you jump all over these old school ideas that gave KM a bad name, Larry does it for you. He notes that these principles were not suitable for working with an intangible such as knowledge. He adds that despite this KM did not die and is experiencing a resurgence. I would agree on both counts.
He modifies the principle as follows:
“Knowledge is better understood as a flow. It is highly dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to measure or even manage.”
“Although technology surely has its place, working with knowledge is primarily a human activity…”
Carla and Cindy pick up on this and note several new trends that have increased the potential for knowledge management such as enterprise 2.0 tools and the increased reach of the digital world in the work place, including mobile access.
Now there are those that use knowledge management as a whipping boy in describing the benefits of enterprise 2.0. There are also those that prefer to show how enterprise 2.0 helps achieve some of the promise of knowledge management. Clara and Cindy are in the latter group and I belong there as well. I think it is the more constructive approach. This promise is what first attracted me to the Web 2.0 tools seven years ago.
The book provides a comprehensive version of how best to implement knowledge management in 2011. It begins with an updated framework to guide program design initiatives and goes on to cover developing a value proposition. It then offers a variety of approaches to chose from and examples of successful ones. There is a chapter devoted to the new enterprise 2.0 tools and how they impact approaches. These tools are explored further as they go into detail on social networking. Following chapters cover governance, culture, and metrics. Four in-depth case studies conclude the book.
If you want a guide to implementing knowledge management in 2011, this is a good book for you.
by Bill Ives
January 7, 2011 at 3:45 am · Filed under
KM, knowledge management
Here is a useful list of knowledge management blogs to start the year. It includes three categories: general knowledge management, Web 2.0 and content management, and collaboration. The list from Biz-gasm offers a brief description of each listing so they took some time to get to know the sources. There are several FastForward bloggers on the list. All the ones I know on the list are excellent and I learned a few new ones to check out. Of course, there are other great ones that are missing but this is a nice start.
by Bill Ives
December 29, 2010 at 3:56 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, KM
A new article in the Sloan Review by Hind Benbya and Marshall Van Alstyne, How to Find Answers Within Your Company, covered the rise of internal knowledge markets. They define these markets as “protected environments where users trade their knowledge via price mechanisms.” They note that “while these markets have existed in different forms for years, their use to facilitate knowledge transfer inside organizations is relatively new.” Early adopters include: Infosys, Siemens, McKinsey & Co. and Eli Lilly. These firms appear to have demonstrated an increased value for internal knowledge markets for managing information flows over traditional top-down centralized knowledge-management solutions.
Market forces can differ when regulating knowledge. This article provides guidelines on how to design, launch and sustain internal knowledge markets. An internal knowledge market is further defined as a forum within an organization that matches knowledge seekers with knowledge sources. This system is more dynamic and provides just-in-time guidance rather than the centralized codification of best practices.
I can see this but then I always found these centralized knowledge management repositories to be ineffective. The only old school (pre-enterprise 2.) knowledge management efforts that I found to be effective were more nimble process-aligned systems. In these case both guidance and expertise was aligned with process steps. This was more fluid and better matched to business value.
These internal knowledge markets represent a third approach. The authors note that they are not for everyone and require organizational scale to be effective. They more explicitly build in incentives to participate. They quote David Ritter, CTO of InnoCentive, a supplier of knowledge markets – incentives need to take three forms — spendable currency, recognition for expertise and the opportunity to have a positive impact. However, if you do not set the pricing mechanism right you can flood the market with poor quality content as HP and Siemens found out.
I wish that my former firms had such systems, as I really like to share knowledge, even when there is little reward. The authors raised another point that I saw first hand. When colleagues are also competitors, individuals may hoard information for personal advantage. This was especially true when employees were ranked against each other in performance reviews. Instead rewards based on quality of contribution can promote information sharing. In this case anyone who passes a certain milestone is rewarded. Coworkers can help each other so collaborative knowledge trading helps teams succeed. I like this approach much better.
Knowledge markets appear to require a lot of economic fine tuning but they are rewarding positive behavior. If they are done right I think these markets can have a positive impact on organizational culture, in general. However, there is risk and participants can manipulate markets to their own ends leading to a negative impact on culture. This is where the fine tuning comes in to avoid gaming the system. I think there is a lot of potential here but it will not be easy.
by Rob Paterson
May 12, 2010 at 1:10 pm · Filed under
Collaboration, Community, Culture, Innovation, KM, Network Effect, Relationships, Social Media, Social Networking, Social Objects, Trust, Trusted Space, User Revolution, Wikinomics, Wikipedia, Wisdom of Crowds
A really weird thought has been building in me for months. Have books been a bad thing?
Is this better?
If so – why?
If so – Is this the campfire of all campfires?
So what’s my argument?
Many people are convinced today that the birth of the web is making us stupid. That the web is only superficial. That only dense books can contain and spread real knowledge.
I am coming to the conclusion that the opposite is true. That books make us stupid and that the web, like the campfire and for the same reasons as for the campfire is what makes us clever.
So here goes. All our foundational knowledge was discovered around the campfire. Imagine you a hominid sitting around the fire at night. You are awake. You are looking at each other. I would imagine that at first, before we could speak, we sang or made music together. The fire elicited a social dance of interaction and community.
I think we can surmise that the campfire helped us speak and so it helped us become conscious. Something like this happened about 100,000 – 60,000 years ago. For suddenly our tool development, art and technology took off. All the foundations of our world today were discovered in a 10,000 year period. Tools had been the same for a million years. Within a 1,000 years they were completely different. We invented pottery. We invented metallurgy. The wheel. Everything we depend on was discovered then. Not only discovered but widely disseminated in a short period of time.
How did this occur?
My bet is that it happened because of the social process created by the campfire and by our hunter gatherer culture of equality. Such an environment extracts order from chaos. Design from intuition. It is ideal for the exploration of implicit knowledge. It is ideal for discovering things that we don’t know exist. It is ideal for taking half baked ideas and refining them. Let’s use a thought experiment.
How did pottery get invented? Surely no one said “Let’s have a project to invent Pottery!” How can you invent something that had never existed? No it must have happened like this – The People stopped for the night after a rainfall. The next morning, as they prepared to leave, the fire keeper noticed that beneath the coals that she was harvesting, the ground had baked to a crust. Maybe she could carry the fire in this thing – this bowl. That night as they shared the food around the fire, she told the people what had happened and showed them the “bowl” that she had lifted out of the earth the day before. And the conversation began – how had that been? Did it hold the fire well? What else could it hold? What if we put it back in the fire? Would it hold water? And on and on. Experiments were made. Some earth worked better than others. At the seasonal meeting with the Cousin Peoples, the People shared their story with the others and gave up a “bowl” as a gift their elder. At the next season meeting, the two tribes spent days sharing the stories of the experiments that they had been making…….
There was no peer review. There was no authorized way of doing it. No one was telling anyone. They were sharing and asking and arguing. They were having conversations!
But with the book comes authority. With the advent of the book, much of knowledge development stopped. Only the in group was allowed to play. What mattered was not observation. Not trial and error. Not experiment. Not sharing. But authority. Most of the accepted authority were texts that had no basis in observation or trial and error. Ptolemy, St Augustine and Galen ruled.
Worse because of the “Book” people who did observe or test were killed or persecuted. The Book stood for the ONE WAY. It spoke not you.
For a while, with the advent of the press, knowledge opened up.
But where did the great advances then come from? Did they come from the Universities? No they came from amateurs – from Natural Philosophers. Who met in clubs over dinner to talk about their work. Gradually, the “BOOK” came back. Only papers written and approved inside the authority system counted as being right. People outside the authority system were discounted.
Knowledge was seen as an explicit thing – an object. The Book was its metaphor.
But now with the web, we have a global campfire. Once again, we can play with ideas, with observations and experiments. Once again we can share with equals who will not knock us down. Even better, this time the group around the fire is not 35 people but all of us.
What new things will come from such a process? Surely amazing things. Things that could never have come from the use of books.
As a person who loves books, whose life is reading, I now wonder……
by Paula Thornton
July 31, 2009 at 11:30 am · Filed under
Collaboration, Culture, KM, Social Media
A brief survey of recent Enterprise 2.0 posts (title links clickable).
Colleague Bill Ives adds his own perspectives from his experience to one of my posts on his personal blog. His experiences seem to reinforce mine.
While Bill Ives already covered this, it’s worth repeating. Former FFB colleague, Euan Semple, was filmed in a series of short pieces to share his thoughts on Social Media within the enterprise. Euan’s perspectives are always quite sound, based on his own experiences bringing Enterprise 2.0 solutions to bear. The series includes 15 segments (each, just over a minute).
It’s clearly a great reference to point others to.
The human factor is what powers the enterprise, not the procedures.
The major question mark this piece raises for me is the concept of emergent consensus. What we haven’t figured out yet is how this will work. For E2.0 people are busy — unless you throw them all into a room together, it is not likely that they will collectively give attention to a particular issue. This still needs some study — which issues are that important that they need such a focus (which is expensive), will the relevant facts be available for a decision to be made? [the list goes on]
Based on my experiences in the recent past I’m often left saying, “Trust? What’s that?” Because our financial mechanisms aren’t focused on such things, I’d contend that this is a huge issue that kills productivity and adds to project failure. I’d also contend that if HR wanted to really add value they’d be heavier on ‘behavioral’ consultants to bring into teams.
“Once you have been part of an Agile team it is hard, maybe impossible, to go back to a dysfunctional team. In the Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions of a Team the core foundation for TEAMing is TRUST. I assert that this issue is the same in social media, or collaborative communities online, where we must find tools and take risks to establish the trust between ourselves and our potential teammates. When the TRUST is threatened the entire TEAM is threatened.
It’s only through TRUST is the team willing to have CONFLICT. And without the ability to disagree the TEAM cannot work through difficult tasks”
Be sure to check out the diagram — it tells a phenomenal story, as well.
While product focused, colleague Bill Ives brings out relevant points:
“Like a number of enterprise 2.0 providers, they realize that many of the issues for a successful adoption of their offering are not technical and they have broadened their offerings to include adoption support.“
Are you listening technology providers? There’s a larger picture here that has to be addressed. I will say that I do not agree with much of what they’re recommending (perhaps that’s a post worth working on). It’s less a matter of disagreeing, but things like “They realize that you need middle management support for the initiative to be successful” is a goal but not a focus — it’s achieved by other means.
Footnotes
This seems to have turned into a bit of a Bill Ives celebration. Purely incidental — or maybe Bill just covers really relevant stuff.
I did not cover @dhinchcliff’s assessment of the E2.0 market — because it’s not about the technology — but it’s a great general reference.
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