Intellectual Capital Punishment

The ultimate intangible asset

2004-09-22T20:19:00.000+01:00

If you've not had this sent to you by the office joker, take a look at www.wewantyoursoul.com , a spoof site that offers instant quotes on the value of your soul. Even better are the comments of indignation it inspires in the lowly-rated.

Sadly the actual quotation part seems to have been broken for quite some time - clearly the soul market is rather bullish.

"We want your brain" as the KM equivalent anyone?

"Failure Laundering"

2004-09-14T21:03:00.000+01:00

A colleague of mine slipped this marvellous expression into a conversation today: "failure laundering". It was in the context of an intiative that hadn't delivered and had gone very quiet, but instead of being formally closed it got bundled up into a new initiative. That way it wasn't seen as having failed, but merely reincarnated. Some 'change' management programmes can go on for years like this.

Another observation I rather like on this theme is "we never kill projects, we just wound them severely".

Is an intranet the last resort of the dis-connected?

2004-08-24T12:45:00.000+01:00

An interesting discussion going on in AOK about people'#s preferences for seeking information.

John Maloney wrote:
> I found a reference in Rob Cross's book, "The Hidden Power of Social
> Networks." People are FIVE TIMES more likely to turn to a colleague
> for knowledge than any portal, Intranet, system or Website. That is
> not a tendency, or even twice or three times as likely, it is five-
> times!

I replied: "Although I agree with the spirit of what you're saying about the need to
support the people-to-people side of organisations, I wonder if you're over-extrapolating from the evidence? Cross cites Tom Allen's work from 1977 (see e.g. page 2). The implications are limited about the technology and habits at the time. Cross goes on to say "Our own research and that of many others also continues to emphasize the point that who you know has a great deal to
do with what you come to know over time." I therefore can't find any data presented by Cross on the impact of portals or intranets per se. This isn't to say that it's no longer true that people prefer asking somebody else, only that I'd like to see a more recent study to support it."

"Secondly, just because in '77 people had that habit, it doesn't mean it isn't changing - or that there's resistance to change. People are lazy. Rooting through a paper filing cabinet is much harder than asking Nellie (as the archetypical colleague). Searching Google, now it exists, may be easier than asking Nellie. Older generations may have an ingrained expectation that databases rarely have the right answer; teenagers seem to assume Google can answer everything. If you wanted to know film times at the local cinema, would you ask Nellie first or use the net?"

"Thirdly, Allen's study was of scientists and engineers. This may not map onto business situations. One reason why portals are attractive is if they reduce internal service costs. You may not want your world-class expert answering the phone all day for routine queries, no matter how much the caller may prefer that mode. You want to keep them free for the
high-value, non-routine calls that are ideal for people-people interactions. Each query has a cost, but asking Nellie doesn't expose the requester to that cost. Would you be 5 times as likely to call a premium rate helpdesk if the alternative was to get the answer from a portal for
free? Organisations need to manage this."

Dennis Pearce, from Lexmark, then added:
"in addition to his "five times" result, Allen also found that the engineers he surveyed got their knowledge from the sources that were easiest and most familiar to them, not the ones that were most reliable or accurate, even when they themselves were aware of this. In other words, they
knowingly sacrificed accuracy for expediency." [my emphasis]

"I find this to be a much more interesting finding than the "five times" result, and one that seems (in my mind) to be more likely to be still true today. People have jobs to do, and sometimes you have to make do with the info you've got, given the time constraints you're under. Those who are developing new KM technologies are going to have to keep in mind that it's not just "better," but "faster and easier" that will be the big selling points. And it's a challenge to create something that's faster and easier than the way we've always done things."

Quite right - its so easy to forget that making something quicker doesn't just save time, it can also completely change how people work. When electrical appliances for cleaning first became popular (e.g. vacuum cleaners), commentators foresaw the liberation of the housewife. In reality, it just upped expectations of how clean a house should be.

Real Work, Necessary Friction, Optional Chaos

2004-08-23T19:14:00.000+01:00

Philip Armour in The business of software rejects the notion of estimting software by effort and advocates looking at the social component instead. WHat he has to say has implications way beyond the software industry though. He makes a good case for why putting pressure on teams can exponentially increase the cost fo the final deliverable.

Traditional estimating tools aren't effective, he argues. Lines of Code, for example, is inaccurate because in reality it's non-linear (1000 people can't do 1 line each). Indeed adding people can just create further delay (as set out in the classic "The Mythical Man-Month"). Armour attributes total project time to:
1) "the time it takes to factor our knowledge into an executable product" - this is what things like 'lines of code' measure.
2) Know-we-don't-Know situatuations where exploration required. Spiral (iterative) methodologies acknowledge that not everything we do goes into the end product, but instead goes into creating knowledge to make the product. i.e. fillling the knowledge gaps to the point where you've learned how to make it. Armour calls this "necessary friction".
3) "Optional Chaos" is co-ordination overhead, bickering and stress-induced chaos. Anything that does NOT disclose knowledge.

1) is a function on Know-We-Know and Know-we-Don't-Know factors
2) is a function of don't-know-what-we-don't-know, team capability and experience, team size and 'pressure', but the variability in the impact of this low.
3) is a function of team size and 'pressure' and highly variable in impact.
"When we attempt to accelerate projects, we introduce a high lelvel of [optional chaos]. High-stress projects put pressure on people to make quick, sometimes unvalidated decisions" [whose impact can then be catastophic].

Adding more people: "large numbers of people...increases the levels of both communication and mis-communication." More people means less equally distributed knowledge, so more chance for mis-understanding, and more time spent sharing knowledge that already 'known' rather than tackling learning gaps.

Outside of software, the implications are very similar: if you want a deliverable quickly, be aware that doublign the team size is unlikely to reduce the time to delivery that much, and in fact may make the deliverable cost far more than double. As a project manager, Armour offers a useful set of questions about how your team is spending its time. I particularly like that it clearly sets out that "knowledge work" is both 1 & 2, and that pressure just amplifies what takes most of the fun out of being a knowledge worker. Not the pressure per-se, but the side-effects it creates.

Mapping Collaboration Maturity

2004-08-03T23:51:00.000+01:00

TechUpdate - ZDNet article:
* "Procurement of collaboration technology and services is not well managed and is introduced without centralized guidance (e.g., business units subscribing to Web conferencing providers; end users using public IM networks; departments using teamware).
* Effective collaboration requires behavior change on the part of users as well as examination of information sharing and process structures. Collaboration strategies are less successful when not aligned with human capital management (HCM; e.g., rewards, incentives) and knowledge management efforts to improve performance and innovation. "

Presents a 'maturity model' of collaboration that emphasises the human angle too. ALso sounds a dire warning that if not controlled, overlapping systems will put significant stress on users. Lets hope IT and leadership can get it right this time. Otherwise yet again we spend $millions on technology and change that doesn't work and 'collaboraration' will be dismissed as the last failed fad.

Collaboration vs. KM

2004-07-25T22:31:00.000+01:00

Yet more hints of Collaboration being the new KM in Encourage Employee Socializing - CIO Magazine Jun 1,2004. One symptom of a new hype is the way it disparages the last one.

"The assumption underlying knowledge management efforts is that untapped power lies within an organization and needs only to be brought forth. But what if KM software, communities of practice and offsite team-building exercises are actually part of the problem?"

The article goes on to argue that indiscriminate sharing generates spurious collaboration and therefore you need to work out where to act. Exactly the same message of any decent KM position, of course.

More positively, the aticle is about a book by Rob Cross and Andrew Parker "The Hidden Power of Social Networks: Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations" , and the assertion that more collaboration is not necessarily better is a sound one.

What happened to the formatting?

2004-07-25T20:35:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the recent blank pages and current lack of sidebar on ICP. Blogger lost my template somehow so I'm currently trying to rebuild it. Scroll down if you want the sidebar content!

2004-07-22T23:19:00.000+01:00

Expertise management Still Waiting in the Wings

CIO Insight has a well-rounded introduction to Expertise Management: Who Knows About This?. The tone of the article pitches EM as a trend apart from KM, rather than a sub-topic of it "Because expertise management promises to deliver where knowledge management hasn't, it will have to overcome some bad PR". This is a little dangerous as, whilst the technology may be different, it still needs to fit in a KM framework and not dismiss the KM thinking that has gone before. There's no point in being really good at finding experts that are loathe to share, something the latter part of the article touches on with the issue of incentives.

As a concept its been around about a decade, but its slow uptake is frustrating. One reason given is, as always, power:

"the people who are more traditional in their view of the old command-and-control stuff don't like this. It's peer-to-peer, so it's very threatening to the traditional organization, just like the Web was very threatening."

It is a barrier, but I think there's an earlier barrier of even finding funding for a pilot, and that's getting senior managers (with budgets) to understand there's a problem to be addressed at all. Senior managers have a much easier expertise space to navigate:
1) The knowledge they need tends to be about the organization, so who the 'expert' is normally well-specified by the org chart whereas once you get down to the level of 'Engineer', this does not differentiate what they know.
2) Senior managers have influence so when they ask a question its easier for them to mobilise the organisation to generate a response
3) They trend to travel more so can network face-to-face. In many orgs, those who are naturally talented at networking also get promoted, so those near the top have no empathy with what its like to find it hard to access the right people

[Thanks to Ed Jones for the pointer to this article]

2004-07-22T21:25:00.000+01:00

Yogesh Malhotra of Brint makes a similar point regarding EM not being a a different beast to KM in Expertise Management and Knowledge Management: New Myths and Old Realities

2004-07-19T19:09:00.000+01:00

Wiki Best Practice
Dave Pollard talks about A recipe for Managing Risk and a company called ProCarta that justifies codification by focusing on high risk areas. What really caught my eye was this:

"The flexible nature of the software allows the ideas, suggestions, newly-discovered best practices and warnings to be written, wiki-style, into the recipe, providing additional guidance for other users."

What a great idea. Often best practice takes so long to agree on that its outdated by the time its circulated and hence becomes distrusted, or it dies because new insights require a whole new release cycle. This sounds like an excellent balance.

2004-07-18T22:38:00.000+01:00

Blinkx - Kenjin Lives again!
A new search engine blinkx is getting a lot of publicity now as a potential 'Google Killer'. A BBC article does a good job of putting it into context as a personal KM tool. What sets it apart is that it indexes e-mail and your hard-drive as well as the web. I've been experimenting with similar tools for some time and currently use Enfish, but this could tempt me to swap.

Like Kenjin, Blinkx watches what you're working on and suggests relevant links to e.g. what you're writing in a word processor. I found this rather distracting in Kenjin - possibly because following links is generally far more interesting than finishing a report - but Blinkx seems to do it more discretely.

It's only a Beta, so I don't want to judge too early as the results it gives currently far from Google-quality. Another downside is that it requires an installation to work which makes switching less simple than, say, defecting from Yahoo to Google search. But once switched, the lock-in is much stronger.

Also check out the Visualiser - looks like 'The Brain' software, but the way it grows as it continues to search is funky.

2004-07-04T22:44:00.000+01:00

Learning by Teaching
Last week I gave a guest lecture on Nottingham Law School's Diploma in Know How Management. I was curious to see how KM looked from the legal perspective, and it was great to meet such enthusiastic students.

I got a strong sense that they considered KM in industry to be well ahead of the legal world, and I'm not sure that's true. The conservatism of leadership, the ingrained practices, the unwillingness to share -- well, that could be anywhere.

The main speaker of the day was Richard Susskind who is regarded as a guru in legal IT-KM circles.

He commented that information structures in law tend to be taxonomy-driven and that they'd be much more useful if structured around how people use them for a given task. i.e. the opposite of the industry tendency to drive everything through process. I can see how this may have arisen - underlying much of his talk was a plea to be more 'systematised' in law i.e. to do the kind of automation that industry sprang from. To do this you need to be process-centric. Yet the application of legal knowledge is immensely flexible - the kind of flexibility that many in industry could learn from. And for that a more taxonomic structure probably suits. There's no great dichotomy really - basically, everyone needs both. With paper its impractical to file things in 2 very different ways, but with IT its not an issue. Well, it shouldn't be an issue except that few are taught to think this way and even when I talk to people about intranets, they still talk as if it were an either\or choice about where a file 'lives'.

Richard also bemoaned the short-termism of legal partners and contrasted with stock-market listed companies that plan for distant horizons. Yet I'd see it as the other way round - listed companies can go into frenzies on a quarterly basis for fear of a share-price dip.
I had a discussion with one participant about stakeholders. I was claiming that change in a small organisation was much easier as there were fewer leaders to influence. She pointed out that in a law firm you may have to speak to 50 partners to get them all to agree before you could move forward. My conclusion is KM is tough for all of us!

2004-06-19T14:14:00.000+01:00

The Email Production Line
Yesterday a conference company sent me an invitation that stated "our research shows that workers are now wasting up to 2 hours a day dealing with email". But isn't dealing with email itself the 'work'? Its like someone in a call-centre complaining they can never get anything done because the phone keeps ringing.

Overflowing in-boxes are not the real problem - they're just a symptom of the overall workload. Without the clarity of a hierarchy, we seem to spend ever more time consulting, informing and negotiating in work that has no well-defined process or stakeholders.

Some days I wonder if positional power ("Do it because I'm the boss") was such a bad thing. There was a dreadful reality TV show in the UK recently called "Hell's Kitchen", featuring the extremely authoritarian chef Gordon Ramsey. One element of his leadership was interesting though - whilst they were in the middle of service, there were no arguments, no challenges tolerated, as all the focus had to be on getting the food out. But after the restaurant closed, there was opportunity to reflect and discuss. I certainly didn't see anyone dealing with e-mails whilst the restaurant was open ;-)

2004-06-18T21:06:00.000+01:00

Sweet smiles, hard labour An article in last week's Guardian magazine by Madeleine Bunting gives a new take on 'Emotional Intelligence' by talking about 'Emotional Labour': "Once it was enough to put in the hours and offer up your brain and brawn: now, in overworked Britain, it's your feelings they're after." [article may have been deleted - try book review instead]

The life of a knowledge worker, it seems, is getting more exhausting.
"Clearly defined hierarchical bureaucracies have given way to much flatter, more fluid organisations. And as the lines of authority become less clear, much more falls to the individual employee to negotiate, influence and persuade. This is often called the "relationship economy", and what makes it particularly hard work is that it requires skills of empathy, intuition, persuasion, even manipulation, for which there is little preparation in an educational system focused on analytical skills."

I think the point about schoolign is spot on - and if you look at a many business trainign courses, they're all about filling this schooling gap. The closest I've seen is the style of MBA that emphasises group work, but this is leaving it late into adult life.

2004-06-14T14:10:00.000+01:00

Apologies to Jim McGee - in my last post I attributed the quote about messy hard drvies to AOK, but it actually appeared in Your say: Personal knowledge management, Knowledge Management Magazine April 2004.

2004-06-09T22:13:00.000+01:00

Personal KM in the New York Times

Interesting article on personal search engines: Humans vs. Computers, Again. But There's Help for Our Side.. The author highlights the growing problem of finding stuff on our PC's - stuff we know we already have, but can't retrieve efficiently. A comment on AOK put it well: when we were paper-based, chaotic filing was immediately apparent because the office looked a mess. Now we're electronic, few people see what a mess your hard drive is.

I'm intrigued by people's e-mail filing strategies. I like folders that match my drive folders (though their names keep diverging), others have 'July mail', 'June mail' etc. which works for them but would drive me nuts, some seem to rely entirely on search. None of these help unless you're certain it IS a mail you're looking for and not another file type.

The article lists some search engines that index your mail, files, contacts etc. so that search is much faster "ADM, askSam, BrainStorm, Chandler, Enfish, InfoSelect, iRider, Lookout, Onfolio, TheBrain and Zoot".

TheBrain is just weird, X1 looks good, but I'm a devotee of Enfish because it finds hits be they in mails, attachments, powerpoint or whatever. It seems to break easily, but, as testament to how I can't live without it, I've re-installed it 10 times now in the last 4 years.

Thanks to John Barrett of the AOK Ezine for spotting this.

2004-06-08T09:01:00.000+01:00

CoPs and Goals
Its hard these days to find anything new said on CoP's, but Madelyn Blair in an interview with KM Magazine made a great point about goals:

"If the CoP is over structured through specific goals that must be met, there will be no open space, and learning will be stifled. On the other hand, if the only goal is learning, the lessons gained may become so removed from the business goals that they can't even be communicated let alone acted upon. So, while it would be great to say that learning is the most important goal of a CoP, it must relate to the business goals sufficiently to allow for the lessons to be received and acted upon. "

This implies a timeliness to CoPs too - that even if what was learned was immesnely valuable in principle, its likely to be forgotten if it can't be applied soon after encountered. Just like all the training courses I've been on that faded before I ever got to apply the skills.

That said, a well-formed CoP would build up a degree of robustness that doesn't rely on shiftign around specific business goals: if its really based on practice then it's highly likely that its topic is relevant to the business because practice implies people are doing it routinely (unless that practice is Minesweeper). And if its a high-quality lesson, then it will be based on multiple cases that keep recurring, so the role of the CoP is to be custodian of that lesson until it becomes timely for a member to re-apply it.

2004-06-01T21:36:00.000+01:00

Recommended 2-page article in Harvard Business Review, May 04
Management Lessons From Mars: "NASA's fabled Faster, Better, Cheaper initiative sped up the agency's spacecraft development. But when missions began to fail, it was faulty organizational learning--not hardware--that was to blame. "

NASA demanded faster development by increasing re-use, but didn't put the KM in place to make this happen. They compressed the pipeline so much, that new projects couldn't learn what they needed to from exisitng projects becasue they weren't complete yet: "in short, NASA was raising the bar before seeing if project managers could clear it where it was".

Where I'm not sure I agree with MacCormack is his recommendation to "capture all the important learning" and "Institutionalize postmortems on all projects". If you're like NASA where every project has a high degree of exploration and uniqueness, then this may make sense, but if your business involves many projects that are just variations on a theme then you have to ask what the incremental value of each one will be. Moreover, for any sufficiently complex project, its unlikely that learnings can be transferred to people unfamiliar with that context, in which case the postmortem should focus on helping project members structure what they've learned for their own benefit (building organizational competence) rather than capture and transfer of 'learnings' as an object.

2004-05-12T07:27:00.000+01:00

Irresitable test - I got 75%
Spot The Fake Smile
Seen on David Buchan's (now sadly defunct) Thought?Horizon blog

2004-05-11T19:31:00.000+01:00

The Myth of Training ROI
I stumbled across this by Bob Dust from the 'Training' world, but it could just as easily be KM:

"The biggest problem with the ROI claim is the letter I, which stands for Investment. Contrary to almost all thinking in this profession, training is not an investment it is simply an expense. While investment sounds more important than expense, training is nonetheless, an expense. Investment is a business term that implies the adding of capital to an organization. Unfortunately, human capital does not qualify."

Too right! Its a play on words - we're dealing with lop-sided accounting that wants to call spending investing but can't value an intangible return.

Bob goes on to attack how ROI leads to decisions out of context:

"My college roommate worked at a local deli, one of several in the small town catering to the college students. With so much competition, the delis were price-competitive on their subs and sandwiches, almost to the point of selling them at break-even prices. My roommate told me that the owner didn’t care because he made all of his profit on the soft drinks, tea and coffee. His customers knew the prices of his sandwiches and his competitors’ sandwiches, but never mentioned the price of the drinks. If the owner had done an ROI analysis on his business, he would have eliminated everything but the drinks, and he would have found himself quickly out of business."

2004-05-10T08:04:00.000+01:00

The Tacit Knowledge of Team Leadership

Don't let the title of
Towards an Ecological Theory of Sustainable Knowledge Networksby Conklin et al put you off. Its full of insight about project teams (rather than knowledge networks in general). One thing caught my eye:

"The process of team formation is complex. Leaders have tacit knowledge about how to move a team through a process, and they access that knowledge in face to face meetings. When in virtual collaborations, they don't have that, e.g. they may not recognize that they don't have alignment about team goals"

Note that the barrier isn’t lack of knowledge, but the absence of the stimulus needed to retrieve it. The dynamic of the face-to-face interaction is what triggers the intuitive manager to take the right course. He may only sense subliminally the lack of alignment, but he'll intuitively do what it takes to correct that. Few managers would explicitly have a process with a "check alignment" gate, but they all know it must be done. Even bumping into a team member and subsequent chit chat can lead to an explicit awareness that they need information you hadn't thought to pass on.
Face-to-face we react as social animals - we meet, we chat. With email you don't 'meet' and chat is far less common. How often when you meet in person do begin with smalltalk? Whereas in email its acceptable – even encouraged – to get straight to the point. Yet without this social wavelength, few managers can access all the knowledge they need to implement a team formation process.

2004-04-18T17:50:00.000+01:00

The £10bn rail crash:
A superb piece of investigative journalism by James Meek for the Guardian about the mis-management of UK West Coast main line modernization. A project that was supposed to cost £1.5bn will now cost £10bn (more than the new US mission to the moon) and be 2 years late.

Though not spelled out, there is a strong thread running through the tale of apalling knowledge management and the dangers of unamanaged downsizing leading to the eventual collapse of Railtrack. At its heart seems to be management arrogance - a contempt for engineering expertise, a fixation on the city and shareholders, and some dubious hiring choices of executives and consultants.

For example:
"Railtrack was led to privatisation by two men, its chief executive, John Edmonds, and its chairman, Robert Horton. Edmonds was a former senior British Rail executive, Horton the former chairman of BP. Far from being loyal to BR's way of doing things, his experience on the state railways had inspired in him a scepticism towards in-house engineers and safety experts bordering on contempt. They were, he considered, overcautious, conservative, stuck in the mud. It was this which led him, at Railtrack, to shed the nucleus of in-house expertise that left the company unable to understand what its myriad specialist contractors were up to." (my emphasis).

[On Horton] "'He wasn't close enough to the railway to know what was going wrong,' said one rail industry source. 'So he was great at privatising, great with the City, good at getting private investment into industry. He didn't understand that he'd lost all his key operators, lost all his key engineers, and was chasing technology that wouldn't work.' "

A secondary effect of this loss of expertise was a loss of contacts to the outside world. Its plan relied on an ambitious new technology that had never been proven. When Railtrack should have heard alarm bells ringing, it was too isolated to pick them up:

"in January 1995, most of Europe's state-owned railways - 19 of them - came to the joint conclusion that [the new technology] was not ready to be used in the real world, and a simpler, transitional form of new technology should be the next step. Again, Railtrack ignored the warning. In fact, Railtrack may never have heard it: at this time the firm had barely any contact with Europe."

Even if connections had been made, it didn't even have sufficient knowledge to learn from them:
"Railtrack did not have its own sufficiently strong in-house knowledge and expertise to be able to use industry for what it was good at, to gather their views in and make a judgment."

The klesson, then, is to downsize with care, and be very careful about the inherent limitations of outsourcing.

2004-04-12T22:41:00.000+01:00

"An MBA in the wrong hands is a lethal weapon"

Pithy piece critiquing organizations that confuses internal change with externally-motivated adaptability. I think the author comes across as favouring reactive change too much, but you can't argue that quotes like this are alarming:

One company recently stated: "We as a management team embrace change, we thrive on it with constant changes in key personnel, capabilities, know- how and processes."

2004-04-06T22:22:00.000+01:00

The Next Challenge for Collaboration Vendors
It dawned on me that many companies are busy deploying portals in order to overcome sharing barriers by giving everyone the same tool. But even if they crack that, they’ll still have the same problem outside their world of control. e.g. If a design company goes to a manufacturer saying “come and work with us in our collaboration space” that’s fine if it’s the only one. But if the manufacturer works with 5 or 6 design houses, then their world becomes far too fragmented.

What collaboration vendors need to work out is a way to share collaboration objects so that systems understand them e.g. threaded discussions, documents, calendar entries etc. The portal is then just one way to render them. It shouldn't be that hard - email has always de-coupled the email entity from the reader application, Usenet did it for threaded discussions, Vcards do it for addresses, RSS does it for news and blogs and The FT syndicates 'news articles' as an object into company portals. This is, I think, what Web Services is getting at, though with an e-commerce drive at the moment (anybody out there know enough about Web Services to confirm this?)

2004-04-04T13:09:00.000+01:00

Conference Notes: Building and Sustaining a Collaborative Working Environment
Ark Group, London 4-5 March 04

A relatively small conference (~100 people) that focused on developing collaborative environments both internally and with clients. It didn’t always succeed in keeping this focus – it’s a small hops from collaboration to knowledge work to same-old-KM, but some of the issues raised, particularly around client collaboration, made it worth attending.

Comments on individual talks:

Knowledge Mapping by Ricky Ricks of Innoval
Ricky described 'K-Map', an approach almost identical to matrix mapping based around the product-attribute-process idea in QFD. What they've done nicely is deliver result through highly navigable web tool. The technique works really well for fairly simple, determinate processes like mass-manufacturing but can't represent processes with many conditions or complex interdependencies (soft-systems methodologies would be better here).

Health & Safety Exec by kenny.macdonald@hse.gsi.gov.uk
slides: www.hse.gov.uk/ark.ppt
Good account of getting a team to adapt to virtual working e.g. agreeing folder strcuture and appointing guardians, returning emails with attachments that should be in shared filespace etc. I liked this because Kenny was willing to say that its all these little nudges that make virtual collaboration work, though individually they may seem petty.

Chris Shano, Head of Knowledge Services, Atos KPMG Consulting, Knowledge & Research Centre
Appealing change management tool which they called the "mental progress model". It used a timeline horizontally marked with project milestones. Rows were stakeholder types e.g. MDs, consultants, experts and core project team. At points in timeline had “thought bubbles" of how they wanted stakeholder groups to be reacting. This makes it more discussible and provides intangible 'early warning'. For example, if you expectation management isn’t going well, it prompts you to do a quick test of what people are actually saying vs. the mindset you needed them to have according to the bubbles. I like this because in e.g. IT change it’s very easy to get sucked into just looking at the tangible progress and forget about the actual change that organization was looking for when it initiated the project.

Wragge & Co. Matthew Cleverdon
Matthew spoke about extending portals externally as a differentiator with clients. This has proven very attractive - a secure collaboration space was sometimes an advantage when managers were doing something so sensitive that they didn't want it on their own company systems. But it has big implications for support - you can't treat clients like employees and brusquely demand a user ID before you'll help them (what does this say about your average helpdesk!). It also raises questions about liability e.g. for data loss in a partnership or hacking.

Best Quotes of the conference came from Jonathan Odonde, formerly of the UK Sports Council
"We're spending £25M on elite athletes to do what? Win gold medals. It'd be a lot cheaper to buy the gold and just mint them ourselves."

"Collaboration isn't about exchanging documents. Living near a library won't make me the cleverest person in the room"

2004-03-29T23:38:00.000+01:00

Knowledge Worker Usability

Jakob Nielsen's normally excellent Alertbox this week is about
Productivity in the Service Economy . He argues that usability principles applied to interface design should be applied to the whole task of the white-collar worker to boost productivity:
"While intranet usability provides substantial initial gains, workflow usability can go much further and will save millions of jobs."

He goes on to say
"For intranets, we know that good design can double employee productivity... people using the worst 25% of intranets required 99 hours per year to perform typical employee tasks, whereas people using the best 25% of intranets accomplished the same tasks in 51 hours per year."

The problem is that measuring intranet tasks is possible because the task is finite and with easily defined success criteria. The vast majority of a knowledge worker's day typically involves fuzzily defined tasks and outcomes. e.g. "Produce a sales presentation" as a task could take hours to weeks, and there are many degrees of success. I was alarmed to hear him still talk about business process reengineering being needed to redesign workflow. All the big gains in knowledge work are outside definable (and hence optimizable) workflow. Which is why the difference between the best and the worst intranets - about an hour a week - won't really make much difference.

2004-03-25T08:08:00.000Z

Wikipedia
Anyone ponedering the 'What's in it for me?' question should look at Wikipedia. It's an entirely open encyclopaedia effort - even open to the extent that everyone has edit rights! Nobody is 'incentivized' to contribute, yet there are 233112 articles, many in multiple languages and the quality (from my random tour) ranges from good to excellent.

One thing though: there's no entry for "knowledge management" - maybe we're all waiting to be offered air miles before we'll contribute?

[thanks to Dermot Casey, Project Manager at GE Consumer Finance for making me aware of thiw Wiki via AOK]

2004-02-29T19:01:00.000Z

Its the last straw man that broke the camel's back

Though much-used, I'm fond of this quote:
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong (H.L. Mencken)

Something keeps happening to me quite regularly now: business friends who are not in the KM world confidently give me critiques of where KM failed. Their critiques are correct, but they're based on the hyped version of KM with a strong IT bias of the "everyone put their knowledge in a database" variety that I never subscribed to in the first place, and always heard people within the KM field dismiss as well.

The style of denouncement is very similar to how many KM articles began about 8 years ago explaining why BPR, TQM and similar fads had failed. How did KM fall into the same trap? KM, TQM & BPR all have at their heart some good ideas, but they're tackling difficult problems and therefore it takes considerable work to fully understand them. Those who did understand them couldn't give a short explanation because they knew it was inaccurate, but this makes it hard for the idea to fly. Those who didn't fully grasp it happily came up with snappier explanations that did take off - the hype. The hype version is much more mobile - infectious - than the full version, so it cannot be stamped out by patient explanation. Eventually people see the flaws in the hype and reject it, but by then they're sadly immune to catching the proper version instead.

2004-02-27T20:21:00.000Z

The trouble with reading old history books is that the past has chaged so much since they were written

2004-02-25T18:41:00.000Z

Diversity and Homogeneity (Part 2)
[Following on from yesteterday’s post].

We're social animals that innately classify tribal membership - in-group and out-group. If I spend an hour on a bulletin board on cycling helping a complete stranger, its partly because I enjoy the topic, but also because its a 'fellow cyclist' (note the affinity language in the cliché) - one of my tribe.

Where do these boundaries lie and how should an organisation react? I probably help other KM practitioners as readily as a fellow employee. Should my company be concerned?

Goodheart describes 'calculus of affinity', the sum we all do when deciding to help. "[its] easily mocked in media reporting of disasters - two dead Britons will get the same space as 200 Spaniards or 2000 Somalis. Yet everyday we make similar calculations in the distribution of our own resources. Even a well-off, liberal-minded Briton who already donates to charities will spend, say, £200 on a child's birthday party knowing that such money could, in the right hands, save the life of a child in the third world." would we equally decide to spend an hour helping somebody at the next desk to save 4 hours when we could help an unknown colleague save 2 weeks by using that our instead to write up some guidelines?

2004-02-24T18:35:00.000Z

Diversity and Homogeneity (Part 1)

An article in The Guardian (24th Feb 04) "Discomfort of strangers" by David Goodheart made me think back to my comment on weak ties, but applied to the “What’s in it for me?” issue in knowledge-altruism in organizations. Goodheart calls it the "Progressive dilemma"

Goodheart quotes David Willetts (a politician) "The basis on which you can extract large sums of money in tax and pay it out in benefits is that most people think the recipients are people like themselves, facing difficulties that they themselves might face. If values become more diverse, if lifestyles become more differentiated, then it becomes difficult to sustain the legitimacy of a universal risk-pooling welfare state. People ask "why should I pay for them when they're doing things that I wouldn't do?". This is America versus Sweden... Progressives want diversity, but they thereby undermine part of the moral consensus on which a large welfare state rests."

Now replace 'tax' and ‘welfare’ with "Knowledge sharing" and state with "organisation" and you have the 'codification' strategy where the 'state' acts as knowledge broker. The implication is that if your company lacks strong common VALUES or you're deliberately encouraging people diversity (different from knowledge diversity, which is fine) then don't try to create things like knowledge pools. If you really need them at this time, implement 'state subsidy' where you ease the tax burden by assigning dedicated knowledge officers to make helping easier.

The alternative to state-controlled welfare is individual charity. This is where 1:1 brokering comes in - both social networking and expert location techniques factor out the state by connecting individuals: reducing the "people like me" equation to "person like me" so its easier to trigger a sense of individual social obligation. In plain English: most people will help you if you ask them directly.

2004-02-17T09:52:00.000Z

Break the Silence provoking commentary on the silence\consensus culture that builds up in some orgs.

2004-02-16T21:47:00.000Z

I was struck by this candid comment from Dave Pollard on the AOK discussion Group

"I left Ernst & Young LLP last month after 27 years, nine of it as CKO Canada and Global Director of Knowledge Innovation. My job was to keep E&Y on the leading edge of KM, continuing to win awards for what we actually implemented. In recent years I had become increasingly frustrated because E&Y management was ideologically wedded to centralized Knowledge Management and the need for 'submission' (the choice of word alone is telling) of personal knowledge to massive central repositories which had become increasingly irrelevant, devoid of critical context, and hopelessly cluttered."

It's sad to see a company that once seemed to really 'get' KM to go so off the rails. This, to me, is counter-evidence to the "CKO's task is to "do himself out of a job" argument. Organisations change constantly, and the KM aspect needs to be renewed and championed through that change. Nobody would say "right, we have our financial processes defined, everyone subscribes to them, so we don't need a CFO or auditors anymore".

2004-02-15T16:00:00.000Z

A colleague of mine, Edward Jones, mailed me with an answer to my post on Innovation & The Strong Tie Dilemma:

"You might like to take a look at: How Breakthroughs Happen: Technology Brokering and the Pursuit of Innovation
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1578519047/qid%3D1076232436/026-1628484-8333221

The central point of the book, backup by case studies of 'ideas factories' such as Eddison's Menlo park is that this is how innovation can effectively take place - recombination of ideas from different small worlds by individuals who are plugged into different groups, bringing in ideas an opportunities but without being so embedded within a world that they are 'locked' into a way of thinking, calling the concept 'technology brokering'.

One specific example discussed is how a 'pump' training shoe was developed by combining previous work in shoes, medical fluid bags and small valves, with the design agency IDEO

The book goes on to comment that a common patten is that as these ideas factories get some good solutions, they become more closed, with a major challenge being to always retain both the sense of exploration and the partial connectedness in a way that is meaningful for all sides".

Superbly put Ed - thanks!

2004-02-13T19:26:00.000Z

No Science is better than bad science

I recently attended a talk by a well-known KM presenter. He opened by telling us about his wife, who was a school teacher, getting her pupils to do co-ordination activities such as rubbing their stomach and patting their heads at the same time. This, he explained, used both sides of the brain at once, so stimulated neurons to grow across the corpus-callosum. In doing so, pupils were allegedly more receptive to learning. Now I'm not sure where along the line the tosh was introduced, but this kind of pseudo-psychology immediately turned me off. There is no evidence at all that learninng a basic motor skill has any affect on other kinds of learning (though just waking somebody up with some exercise might, of course). Moreover, we're constantly using both sides of our brain in unison - e.g. every time we look at something the 2 half-images are combined by both hemispheres so each has a full image). Shame - it was a good talk, but it made me question the truth of other claims he made that I wasn't able to judge for myself.

If this kind of unvalidated 'knowledge' is passed around in KM, what hope is there of it ever progressing? No wonder to outsiders it seems to go around in circles year on year.

2004-02-07T15:54:00.000Z

Intellectual Capital Punishment now with Syndication Feed

Quite a few people have asked me for an RSS feed to this Blog. Though I barey understand the question, I think Blogger have provided an alternative through Atom.

A feed link can be found in the sidebar.

2004-02-07T15:30:00.000Z

The Spreadsheet for the Perfect Party

I recently read "The enigma within the knowledge economy", an article in the Financial Times (p.9 2nd Feb).

The FT reports on the "Information Work Productivity Council", set up by Microsoft to measure intanngible benefits. According to the article, it's a reaction to customers requiring more evidence of the value of IT investment in leaner times. No suprises there. What did disappoint me though, was the quote from HP's CKO, Craig Samuel: "If you can't measure it, you can't manage it". Shame on him for using such an outdated cliche. It reinforces the view that management is something you do with spreadsheets. He should be pushing an agenda that changes expectations about what information you need to manage, relying much more on trusting perceptions and qualitative evidence. Have you ever been in a relationship? Do you feel you have any influence on how well it goes? Yet have you ever measured love? Loyalty? When you throw a party what do you put in the spreadsheet to make sure its a success? Actually, anyone who pulls out a spreadsheet in the middle of a party probably makes it likely to fail. Managing knowledge workers, I feel, is much the same.

2004-02-06T18:25:00.000Z

Fads and Failures in KM
To say KM has failed is a bit like saying Nutrition has failed because people are still overweight. What people mean is that diets often fail: those pre-packaged, over-promising fad-inclined recipies for weight loss fail. Similarly, the IT-heavy, Knowledge-base ridden, one-size-fits-all approach to KM fails. But even that, I would say, is a little unfair. Most diets work if mindset and behaviour change happens at the same time. But this is tough to achieve, so when it fails its much easier to blame the diet and try the next fad.

2004-02-04T19:57:00.000Z

Innovation & The Strong Tie Dilemma

Here's a puzzle: Strong ties mean a common mindset and can inhibit innovation and reinforce the status quo (members' mental models converge and reinforce each other, making them very hard to dislodge). But innovation requires a 'high care' environment according to e.g. von Krogh. This because we need to trust to reveal half-formed ieas without fear of reprisal and to take risks in experimentation. Also a common language and high reliance on shared tacit knowledge allows is necessary to have an expert debate. Both of these factors imply strong ties.

So what's the ideal for innovation? Sounds like to really change things you need to nurture people who are recognised as part of a group but nevertheless sit on the periphery or are equally strong members of other groups too. A CoP seeking to innovate therefore needs to ensure it cycles members and conciously tries to bring in some of those that challenge it.

2004-02-01T22:33:00.000Z

Turning the Landing Lights On

Anders Hemre of Ericsson Research in Canada kindly mailed me in response to my Jan 21st post to share an account of his own experiences:
The point about bad CoPs and innovation from yesterday is right on. When we started with CoPs we also had an innovation cell [IC] going on. I put a question to both the innovation cell manager and the CoP leader about linking the two entities together. Great said the CoP leader, not sure about that said the IC manager. This is not surprising. More interestingly, I asked the IC manager what his biggest challenge was. He indicated that it was not about building stronger networks or getting better ideas, it was about landing the new innovation in the organization. To prepare and create conditions for a successful "delivery" was the biggest challenge. This is for senior management to address he added.

More on Anders work

2004-01-29T23:23:00.000Z

In the same edition of Guardian Society was an advert for the UK government's KM system: www.idea.gov.uk/knowledge - 30,000 in local government sharing knowledge it claims.

Anyone can sign up, and so far the posts on the KM discussion board are high quality.

2004-01-29T23:04:00.000Z

Social Ties in Britain
Interesting Social Ties article in Society Guardian Wed 28 Jan 2004 07:24:01

The Government Office for National Statistics does an annual household survey. From 2004 they want to assess social capital to build up picture over the years about 'neighbourliness'. Finally we can see if Yorkshire really is more friendly than the south!

Questions include groups people belong to, voluntary work, how often they see friends and relatives, liking for their area etc. The ONS is keen to avoid tieing this to physical space becasue, for example, in the young social capital is strong around school and town centres whch may be many miles away [sodding car culture!]

The survey diffrentiates between compares bridging "help you get on in life" and bonding "friends and family". Questions about contacts and friendships across ethnic divides were dropped as they annoyed people [ can you imagine? "So, do you know any foreigners?"]

2004-01-21T20:42:00.000Z

When CoPs Go Bad II

Imaginatik's Corporate Innovation Blog picked out another goodie on networking and innovation. We all know that weak ties - friends of friends - are most likely to spark real innovation. But as Boris at Imaginatik points out, this calls into question the claim that CoPs are innovative structures because what they do is take weak ties and strengthen them.
However, this isn't necessarily the end of CoPs in the corporate sense, because often the barrier to innovation isn't the bright idea - triggered by weak ties - but the ability of the organization to see it through to product (the 'amplification' of that idea through the various functions). If the CoP is aware of this, it can focus on keeping feelers in the outside 'world' for useful ideas to bring in and then nurture. Unlike the entrepreneur who is free to take an idea and run with it, the corporate innovator needs to roam in gangs.

2004-01-11T12:04:00.000Z

Lori Wizdo VP Business Development at Kamoon contacted me about an earlier post on Expertise Management software November 19th. She's been looking into profession networking tools out there like Ryze, Linked-in and Spoke. She comments "I am very skeptical about the concept that people will be willing to broker introductions through more than one 'degree of separation'". This does question the claim that such sites give you an advantage when building networks, beyond an initial chat-up line of "I see we both know X". More than one degree away and it hardly seems worth mentioning (e.g. "Hey, what a coincidence: we've both seen a Kevin Bacon movie").
Lori goes on to say that we will start to see the same patterns of protecting relationship capital that we've seen around intellectual capital. Oddly, I see this most in people in corporate environments contemplating self-employment, whereas I know several actual consultants that put a lot of effort into opening up their network (Mick Cope probably being the best example, to the extent that he recently published a book on networking)

Lori agreed to let me quote her if I added that that Kamoon was just as worthy of mention as Askme & Sopheon("Any warm, approbative comments about Kamoon are both wise and welcome."). So I did.

2003-12-15T17:56:00.000Z

A recent supplement to KM Magazine on Collaboration had a handy classification from Tim Butler, CEO Sitecape (looks interesting as a collab suite, by the way)

Library: long life content, many consumers, few creators, littlle or no feedbck
Solicitation: more respondents than requestors. Requestors often hidden (e.g. survey), usually moderated
Team: members share objectives. Read and Create about balanced. Small membership.
Community: self-grouping, larger than a project, some members just read but all encouraged to write too. Moderation common.
Process Support: self-service, routine or complex processes with rules. Peer-to-peer often triggered by exceptions. Often combined with other models.

2003-11-30T22:51:00.000Z

KM and Internal Comms
Last week I attended a conference on Internal Communications courtesy of Ark Group. The emphasis was very much on the link between comms and Org Change, but I was struck by just how similar the content was to KM conferences (had I walked in blindfolded I may never have noticed... well, not until I stubbed my tow on a big sign saying 'Internal Communications' anyhow). There were the same messages about 'people matter over technology', there was an interest in getting people to communicate and learn from each other, and, intriguingly there was the same angst about 'how do we get taken more seriously'. It seems Internal Comms people are no longer happy to be the journalist of the company newsletter and now want the ears of the chairmen to advise on how to get the message over. Anybody fancy forming a coalition? One ear each?

Whilst there, I was amused to see a flyer on a whole conference dedicated to 'email management'. My first reaction was that it was way over the top. But does it need bringing under control more or is it merely symptomatic of a deeper set of problems? Tony Quinlan's workshop synopsis struck a chord: "One of the first difficulties is that repetition, often a key component of a communication campaign, becomes taboo". Is it because we work in a world too complex for nice clear processes, so we're all broadcasting to each other in the hope that somebody is on top of it all? Because nobody is, we adopt increasingly extreme strategies (e.g. out of office messages that tell the recipient all mail will be deleted until you return), and force the very repetition we all resent?

2003-11-19T00:50:00.000Z

KM Europe 2003
Amsterdam RAI Centre 10-12th November

I attended the first 2 days of this event, which they claim is the world’s largest. The format is a free trade show and a number of free talks, and then a fee per keynote presentation. It was well attended (they had 1500 last year and probably about the same this time) though the vendor booths often looked very quiet. Here are some observations on things that stood-out:

Vendors
None of the products on display really looked like anything new – still the same old search and data management tools on the whole.
Entopia, with its bottom-up approach to KM seems to be taking off. I was disappointed with their Social Network Analysis offering, as its purely about visualising document sharing (probably the least of all possible networks you can map). They didn’t seem to have any proper network analysis tools behind it either. The only good thing is that its updated automatically, unlike the resource-intensive ‘snapshot’ produced by questionnaire methods.
AnswerWeb is a relatively new Dutch player in the Expert Location\Q&A sector (along with Askme and Sopheon – formerly Organik). It seems to lack the automatic profiling of people’s expertise though.

Presentations
(these are now online at: http://www.kmeurope.com/presentations.asp )
KM at Renault: Jean-Marc David
This is the first time I've heard about KM from Renault, but they actually have a very mature programme with roots in AI and Expert Networks in the 80's. Their current programme is “one of Renault's top 100 strategic initiatives” [top 100?!], based in a Business Transformation branch of their central IS/IT function.
Their approach reminds me of Ford, Rolls-Royce or Siemens: a manufacturing R&D best practice database with a mandate that employees contribute. Technical Domain Leaders do quality reviews before publication.

 Renault's suggestion scheme has 350, 000 contributions/year, saving €57M in 2002! This seems very much down to their culture of individual initiative and creativity to try things out.
 Collaboration: they felt it necessary to build an in-house tool to re-use existing systems e.g. Documentum, task management, issue management, news etc. rather than make the case for a whole new suite. In the end they co-built it with Nissan for both internet and Extranet use.
 Renault tried providing different template virtual collaboration spaces to meet the different needs of Communities of Interest, communities of practice, “micro-orgs” and project teams. But they found it didn't work as users were not comfortable with these distinctions, so now they take a more bespoke route of working with each client to define best mix of functionality for them.

David Snowden - Complex Knowledge - IBM Cynefin Centre
Snowden was on fine form, as always:
“We now know enough about group dynamics that we can compress the effects of 3-4 years ad-hoc network formation into 3-4 months of deliberate network creation. [i.e. its not that people are bad at networking, but that they're very often sub-optimal and now we know how to do something about it in a way we couldn't 10-15 years ago]. This is not the same as taking an informal network and making it formal - a mistake CoPs sometimes make, and in doing so kill of what was working already. e.g. one way is to find mavericks and let them self-organise a community.”

On the “US vs. Europe/Asian approach”. The US tries to find practice leaders and replicate wholesale. Europeans try to look at good and bad cases and find common principles. People learn very readily from worst practice because on the whole avoiding failure is a better survival strategy than only focussing on success.

This leads to:
* Rules: try to work out all possible events and define response
vs.
* Heuristics: these tolerate ambiguity but are less clear about when they apply exactly
We do need both, depending on context. [cf. laws vs. ethics]

KM has too often tried to manage by rules: design a system around an ideal set of behaviours and then put in place a change-management system to make people behave in the ideal way.The alternative, necessary for any complex system according to Snowden, is to use 'Boundaries' and 'Attractors'. With kids you have firm rules and come down heavily if crossed, but mostly try to keep kids away from the boundary by attractors such as football and food. When undesired patterns begin to emerge (e.g around vodka) you step in an disrupt the pattern.
“So why do organisations try to manage their employees in the 'rule' sense? When faced with a new task, would you rather go to the Corp. Best Practice database and follow a document, or talk to 4-5 people who have done it before and find out what happened? So why build 'knowledge bases'?” [well, one reason is churn – sometimes its hard to find anyone still available to talk to, let alone 5. Narrative databases may be the right compromise though - Sam].

Social Complexity:“Human Beings are not Ants!” Ants are condemned to always act the same (complex, but 'rational') way. Humans have free will and can choose to behave in a non-complex way by e.g. creating and following structures.

Contingent Complexity:
Snowden, having mocked consultants for their 2x2 matrices, then produced on of his own:
*Visible Order: cause and effect obvious to all (sense, categorise, respond = best practice). OK to manage this by a formal structure because the system is visible to all.

*Hidden Order: Cause & Effect is discoverable by experts (Sense, analyse, respond = good practice). Manage by tightly connected peers as well as central control.

*Complex Un-Order: Cause & Effect is coherent in retrospect (Probe, sense respond). The risk is that this looks like Hidden Order but its not, the C&E is only visible once the pattern emerged. There are just too many possible connections to predict analytically until its over. 9/11 investigations are falling into the trap of thinking that if they just throw enough analytical power in, then they will be able to detect the next patter in advance – they won’t. Manage by tightly-connected peers and loose central control. Worst-practice sharing works well here.

*Chaotic Un-Order: no perceivable Cause & Effect even after event (act quickly, then sense and respond).

In crisis management (Chaotic un-order), usually leaders step in and create a network around themselves to stabilise things (Visible order). But this is very brittle, so its better to move into Complex Un-Order by rapidly creating a peer network, then look for patterns you want to reinforce and ones to suppress as this leads to much more robust order.

IBM found that if employees can create their own informal communities, then the resulting number is roughly half number of staff! There is no way you could formally intervene to design all these, you do it by using attractors so that others 'swarm' round them.

Knowledge Acquisition & Modelling Process (KAMP) - Rolls-Royce
Michael Moss gave an overview of R-R's excellent programme for capturing engineering expertise. They do this by training and coaching graduates in the toolbox of techniques that rose out of Expert Systems (ES) in the 80's/90's. These are effective but little-known in the KM World. They fell into disuse because it was very costly to produce an ES, but if you stop at the documentation stage, its viable. Even better, its time-effective as graduates learn more quickly and experts typically only have to give up about 12 hours over 3 months. They gain by making answers to routine questions readily available, and the organisation gains a lasting resource that gives some protection against loss through retirement or moves.

What really makes KAMP work though is not just the capture bit, but the whole context of doing reviews to identify vulnerable knowledge, securing an owner for the output, having an established dissemination route (the ‘Capability Intranet’ they call it) and an ongoing quality/maintenance procedure. Over 130 have been done so far.

Verna Allee - Knowledge, Networks & Value-Creation
"We're learning that to market its much more effective to target hubs than to try to hit a whole network equally"

"People think Silicon Valley is really innovative but it isn't - which is why few survived the dotcom crash. They are good at technology innovation, but not at social innovation to adapt their businesses (e.g. moving from in-house R&D to network collaboration is what Verna means by social innovation). Nor do they innovate Business Analytics e.g. managing dynamic, intangible systems - they're still trapped in static business models. The survivors like Amazon and ebay are still around because they were innovating on all 3 fronts."

2003-11-18T23:20:00.000Z

Great to see so many blog entries around KM Europe - Lilia has collated a few Mathemagenic: learning and KM insights - 15 November 2003 and Lee Bryant has an excellent set of commentaries at Headshift.

2003-11-18T14:06:00.000Z

Sam Adkins posts a provocative assault on eLerning KM and more in Learning Circuits Blog: We are the Problem: We are selling Snake Oil. Some of the stats on retention are very alarming!

2003-11-14T21:29:00.000Z

Free social network software

This tool came my way Huminity social networking & chat software. I've not had chance to try it yet, but it looks like the idea is that you give it your address book. It then contacts everyone and invites them to join. You can then see their networks too, and so it grows... I'm not sure I trust it to make my contacts so public yet, but I bet it'd work great with a specific contact set e.g. friends in Ryze.

2003-11-14T18:23:00.000Z

The Kindness of Strangers
At this week's KM Europe I took part in Dave Gurteen's 'Knowledge Cafe' and, by lucky coincidence joined the table of Ton Zijlstra, a fellow blogger whom I met last year. A discussion on trust we had threw up an interesting insight for me. Why are people altruistic to strangers on the net (e.g. blogging, offering help in discussion groups etc.) but often so reluctant to help in the workplace? Ton pointed out that on the net you are not competing, so have nothing to lose by helping another. Whereas at work there are factors like status, jostling for promotion and potential negative comeback (e.g. for bad advice) that are all deterrents.

more on KM Europe soon...

2003-11-12T22:25:00.000Z

John Barrett's AOK newsletter pointed to a couple of interesting 'virtual workshop' tools. These differ from the likes of Groove or NetMeeting in that they reflect much more closely a workshop facilitator's toolkit where the emphasis is on discussion rather than, say, document collaboration or presentation. Facilitate's Conflict Resolution Technique: Collaboration Software for Mediation I found particularly intriguing. Conventional wisdom is that conflict needs the full 'bandwidth' of face-to-face, but I wonder if the anonymising factor of a PC actually makes it much easier to surface the real issues in a way that wouldn't be socially acceptable in person? Just as some forms of conselling done through computers make it easier for patients to open up. Anyone out there have experience of this?

The other tool to look at is Meetingworks

2003-11-11T20:25:00.000Z

Steve Ellis at KM Asia showed one of these video clips from EDS. Some of the funniest business advertising I've seen in ages. Running With the Squirrels -- High Version is great but 'Herding Cats' as the feeling you get doing KM just about sums it up.

2003-11-07T21:23:00.000Z

KM Asia 2003 Singapore
Tuesday 4th & Wednesday 5th November

This was a lively event organised by Ark Group that attracted over 200 delegates. The original July date was cancelled due to SARS, so it was good to see it back on its feet. I can’t say that Singapore’s Sun Tec centre was a favourite venue (as an event it felt relatively small and lost in such a huge place) and the room layout was awful, but otherwise it all seemed to go well.

Interest in KM in Asia seems very strong. Coming later to it than the US & Europe on the whole, they seemed to have got beyond the naïve ‘what is knowledge anyway’ stage much more quickly. One Australian delegate commented “we seem to have gone for initial enthusiasm and post-hype scepticism all at once!”

I was speaking on “How Many KM Solutions do you need?” – how to put together balanced KM programmes rather than one-size-fits all onslaughts based on just doing, say, intranets or CoPs. Most people seemed to ‘get’ the message, a pleasing contrast to, say, KM eXchange in New York 18months ago when a number of people felt they’d settled on a KM strategy and that was that. I'll be doing a repeat performance at KM Europe next Tuesday

Some comments on the talks:
Tom Davenport - Moving Along the KM Curve
Tom argued that it may be a good thing if management stop talking about KM because it means its been embedded into way things are done daily.

Ang Hak Seng - Singapore Police Force - KM Leadership
An impassioned speech, like having Fidel Castro the KM practitioner. Insights into how police had to abandon top-down structures to tackle entirely novel problems such as SARS.

Steve Ellis - HSBC - Changing Organisational Culture
Steve gave a very frank discussion of trials and tribulations of introducing KM to a rather conservative banking culture that went down very well. It did sound like KM was still struggling to stay afloat there though.
 He admitted that they initially made the mistake of trying to sell KM, rather than its benefits.
 He found that a KM Brochure raised awareness and interest, but not buyers [matches my experience too]. Indeed, he commonly found agreement on a NEED to do something, but no action because nobody had free resource.
 They tried KAPs - the Knowledge Acquisition process taken from Rolls-Royce and it has gone down very well, not least because the first person to be debriefed was CEO so subsequently everyone anted to be part of this ‘club’. The process uses structured interviews around experience, strategy & mistakes that are videoed and archived.
 HSBC found Intellectual Capital reporting a complete dead loss - executives just didn't want to know because felt they were measuring too much already.
 HSBC found the 'central' KM team structure didn't work and it has now disbanded.

"Don't set KM targets (nobody really cares how many hits your website gets)"

Jeff Trotter, Director of Knowledge E&Y - Building the Business Case for KM
KM seems amazingly well embedded in E&Y’s culture. They’ve been doing it a long time and the link to their business is very strong (and note this is about accountancy, they no longer consult).
E&Y have a brochure that everyone gets on 1st day, and a follow-up call on day 3 to explain what KM can do for them. They also have a knowledge-sharing agreement document that gets signed by everybody when they join.

David Gurteen
As I subscribe to Dave's handy quote of the day service, it seems apt for me to quote him this time:

"KM in good times means 'knowledge management', in bad times it means 'kill me'"

What is a knowledge worker? Dave got beaten up at a conference last year because people felt he was implying an underclass of non-Knowledge Workers. Good for him he stuck to his non-PC convictions and offered this: the main characteristic of a Knowledge Worker is that they get to decide each morning what their job is and how they are going to tackle it.

The famous "KM is a bullshit issue" still resonates – it’s a powerful re-expression of the knowing-doing gap:
"People choose not to change their behaviour because the culture and the imperatives of the organisation make it too difficult to act upon the knowledge. Knowledge isn't power. Power is power. Most people in most organisations do not have the ability to act on the knowledge they possess" - Michael Schrage

2003-10-24T20:24:00.000+01:00

The ever-informative Imaginatic newsletter pointed me to the IdeaFlow Blog . This article proposes using Logic Puzzles in teams as a way to discover each person's strenghts and weaknesses. To me it sounds a more memorable and robust way of disclosing these than the more formal profiling tools like the Belbin Test or Myers-Briggs.

Indeed you could replace all the questionnaires with a Compendium of Games:
* Extraversion-Introversion = Karaoke Night
* Sensing-Intuition = Cluedo
* Thinking-Feeling = Truth-or-Dare
* Judging-Perceiving = High-speed Monopoly

Mind you, there's nothing like a free bar and a session of Twister to get to know what your colleagues are really like, its just that nobody likes to remember it the morning after.

2003-10-17T23:56:00.000+01:00

Knet Map from Konverge and Know is another Social Network Analysis tool new to the market. Its simple 'question of the week' format makes it very easy to collect data. Trouble with all these tools is that few companies would appreciate the benefits sufficiently up-front to pay the kind of cash they ask for them.

2003-10-17T23:50:00.000+01:00

Mainstream Social Network Analysis
There are a few indications that SNA is being made more accessible to the business world. e.g.
Entopia -- Social Network Analysis is a plug-in for their Quantum Suite. I saw Quantum last year and it takes an individual-up approach to KM (think Personal Knowledge Management that tries to scale). The problem with this approach is that it can lead to lots of duplication and fragmentation as everyone keeps 'their' version of a file (think of how people handle e-mails with attachments).
The great thing about this new module is that it maps networks automatically based on real, rather than reported interests. Downside is that mapping your interests and contacts can trigger 'spyware' reactions in staff. Entopia has some privacy controls, but this is a very delicate area, and I think makes management very wary.

2003-10-04T23:35:00.000+01:00

I've just been to Intracom 2003 in Montreal. A predominantly Intranet-based conference but with a strong KM track. Turnout was good (more buoyant that other KM conferences I've been to recently), though there's still a general sense that KM professionals are struggling to keep the momentum of the programmes going.

Hubert St-Onge was there advocating that we abolish our Training departments. Unable to resist this provocation I cornered him afterwards. To me what he mostly seems to be anti is the politics\inertia of trad training departments that assume putting people in a classroom is the default answer. That much I agree with, though I do feel e-learning advocates understate the problems of motivation in self-paced learning.

Richard McDermott and Marie Eychene (Ericsson) gave a presentation on Virtual Communities that generated a lot of audience interest. McDermott had a nice observation that online quiet is quieter (are people silent in rapt attention or disinterest?) and loud is louder (an argument between 2 people can swamp a discussion forum and there are no social cues like rolled eyeballs to shut them up).

Naturally, there were some misses too - one presenter claimed "Knowledge in the world is doubling every 12 months, perhaps every 10 now". Pah! Content doubling I might believe, but knowledge? We also had the old humbinger of a hierachy of data-information-knowledge-wisdom, as if wisdom comes from knowledge by adding the right meta-tags.

2003-10-02T23:12:00.000+01:00

A lot of people comment that knowledge isn't like money because I can give you knowledge and still keep it myself. Most recently I heard this in a presentation from Loraine Ricino of Siemens where they had a quote from an exec in a promotional video "If I give you an idea and you give me an idea, then we each have 2 ideas, its that simple!". True, but it doesn't mean its cost-free.

"What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of the recipient. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" - Herb Simon.

2003-09-14T00:01:00.000+01:00

"If you lose your job, your mariage and your mind all in one week, try to lose your mind first, because then the other stuff won't matter that much."
Jack Handey The Lost Deep Thoughts

(and the perfect antidote to all that Cheese-Moving Little-book-of-Wibble Mindless-Platitudes-for-the-Soul drivel that floats around).

2003-09-10T21:07:00.000+01:00

Doublethink
Reflecting on my earlier post on
Collaboration, my enthusiasm is more muted that its a Good Thing for KM. What collaboration misses is the learning from the past. Indeed it can be so here-and-now that it encourages teams to try to solve things internally rather than looking outside. You have been warned :-)
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2003-09-10T20:36:00.000+01:00

Also in the Knowledge Market vein, but for much higher stakes is InnoCentive. Set up by Eli Lilley to seek solutions for R&D challenges outside the company, innocentive has become a network of seeker companies and over 25,000 scientists providing answers. Rewards range from $5000 to $100,000.

2003-09-10T13:25:00.000+01:00

Shame on me for only just stumbling on Google Answers but I love it. The idea is you post a question and the price $2-$200 the answer is worth to you. A pure knowledge market. Its not original - askme.com and themutual.net did something similar, but Google seem to have made it take off.

2003-09-09T20:03:00.000+01:00

Workshops

How do you turn a meeting into a workshop? Do exactly what you'd planned for the meeting, but on MUCH bigger pieces of paper.

Is it me or has there been ‘terminology inflation’ around ‘workshops’. Just as information became elevated to ‘knowledge’, it seems that any old get together has become a ‘workshop’. It got so bad at one company I worked with that they let out a collective groan at the mention of the word. “We don’t want another talking session” they complained. It turned out that ‘workshop’ was used for anything as it sounded action-oriented, but had been diluted so that any unplanned, ill-prepared meeting had been re-badged and people were sick of them.

Even when ‘workshops’ really are full, collaborative get-togethers with a proper plan, they still seem to be an abused format. From my experience of running workshops (and participating in many more), my checklist goes something like this:

"When workshops go bad" - what's wrong with workshops?
* They’re too often used to try to create definitive solutions – the result is often hasty and superficial (e.g. trying to generate a new process)
* They can be a very narrow channel (often people stop a debate just to get done by dinner)
* They encourage abstraction to the banal due to the consensus element (summary post-its lose all nuances of individual ideas). Its like one person’s initial idea is a sharp spike, but then everyone else lays blankets on top so it ends up as a vague lump
* There seems to be a macho element creeps in so that agendas are too-tightly packed (“restroom breaks are for wimps!”)
* It’s very hard to learn from outside during a session as this has a different tempo
* Decisions tend to show a primacy/recency (serial position) effect or undue influence of better orators

When are workshops useful?
* To generate initial ideas from scratch to be worked out later - especially from diversity of people. (this was the original format of brainstorming). Another example is risk analysis to get a broad set of ideas out.
* To reach consensus on something already thought-through i.e. an opportunity for dialog to produce a common mindset (don't confuse with a decision meeting) e.g. A proposed organisational restructuring.
* For bonding or other change experiences. The tangible output irrelevant, the issue is shared experience e.g. storytelling or the ‘change as theatre’ events described in To the Desert & Back where employees of a food factory were taken to a huge landfill site and shown the rotting result of the factory’s inefficiency.
* As a learning-by doing session (dissemination of knowledge already established by those who know it to those ignorant of it e.g. role-play to learn influencing techniques).

Don't use workshops to:
* Shortcut real analysis and creation (a Task Force or Working Group is much better)
* Decide anything not thoroughly understood beforehand (i.e. on a new and complex area, though it’d be OK if an appropriate panel of experts were involved)
* Pretend that by holding a workshop everyone has been consulted and has had a democratic say

Finally, my favourite tip comes from the 3M Meeting website on coping with energy dips. They recommended providing mints to boost blood-sugar levels. But why stop there? How about putting a little speed in the cookies, or drop a few E's into the coffee just before you need to reach a consensus for that all-round sense of bonhomie - better workshops through chemicals :o}

2003-09-08T22:11:00.000+01:00

I've been following the AOK Star Series Discussion with Patti Anklam recently. A lot of good stuff on Social Network Analysis. I'm very impressed that Patti not only held up her end of the dialog, but carried on blogging throughout: Networks, Complexity, and Relatedness

2003-09-08T20:30:00.000+01:00

I've a handful of conference appearances coming up. Its always fun to meet bloggers and readers in the real world, so if you're attending any of the following, do come up and say "hello"\"hello again"\"you know that post you made in June?... well there was a typo on line 5".

* Intracom 2003 October 1-3 Montreal (I'm on Day 2 in the Trends Track)
* KM Asia 2003 November 4-6 Singapore (I'm on Day 1)
* KM Europe November 10-12 Amsterdam (I'm on Day 2)

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2003-08-28T23:34:00.000+01:00

KM in Shuttle Disaster

A short article worth a read is Report: Knowledge management failures central to Shuttle disaster. Mostly what went wrong was an over-reliance on systems that failed to break down social silos.

"...This led to a series of discussions that took place in a vacuum, with little or no cross-organisational communication and often no feedback from senior managers contacted by low-level engineers with concerns about the shuttle's safety."

Organisatons have gone through tackling widespread availability of pockets of knowledge - leveling competence - and worrying about knowledge creation\innovation. Much less addressed are issues like this: the right information (I use information deliberately), in the right place at the right time, but nobody is listening to it.

Ironically, the reason people ignore alarm bells is due to over-confidence in their knowledge about a situation. Experts learn what's noise and what's important by refining a mental model of what matters. Sometimes something serious comes along that's outside that model so they erroneously reject it.

Secodly, if an organisation wants to learn, it needs to embed it in process:
"The Lessons Learned Information System database is a much simpler system to use, and it can assist with hazard identification and risk assessment," the board concluded. "However, personnel familiar with the Lessons Learned Information System indicate that design engineers and mission assurance personnel use it only on an ad hoc basis, thereby limiting its utility."

Again, novices are conciously incompetent, so use such databases. 'Experts' almost never do because they never get the trigger to check.

2003-08-28T21:45:00.000+01:00

Birthday Blog
A year ago I began blogging with a skeptical post: Intellectual Capital Punishment

Dave Gurteen asked me to give Blogging a go, and then jury-rigged it behind the scenes by telling other people to come visit the site. Despite some lean months, I'm still going, so I'm beginning to waver on the skepticism front. Still not heard from anyone interested in KM for Start-ups though (I can't imagine why in the current climate).

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2003-08-10T13:12:00.000+01:00

Collaboration is the new KM?
I refuse refuse to talk about an nth generation KM, as there was a spate of articles last year all claiming that 1st generation was this and 2nd generation was that, according to whatever message the author was pushing. But if I look at whats happening in the industry, I think the tone is changing subtly. We're seeing IT come back into the picture again, for example. It's as if we had to ask it to leave the room while we could have the discussion about the people element, but now its safe to let it back in.

My tip is that collaboration will become the next trendy term. We're going to have to go through the same loop as before: IT will push it, there'll be some initial successes, others will try to follow and fail, people will then say wearily "its all about people" and slowly we'll get it right. Lets just hope we can go through all that a bit faster this time. Why collaboration? I think it appeals because its less fluffy than 'KM' - people intuitively think its good (few CEO's are crying out for their people to collaborate less) - and it taps a current need: in trying to cut costs by e.g. reducing travel, people are feeling the pain of projects failing and mis-communication. 'Virtual teams' as a term has been around long enough, but few companies are getting it right. This is largely because when people sit close-by then you don't need to manage the information exchange. Take them more than 30m away, and you have to start planning (see Ward and Holtham's excellent The Role of Private & Public Spaces in Knowledge Management).

I think this is a good move for KM: it preserves the people+process+technology elements, but is widely understood and still people-centric. The trick will to be avoid reducing it to technology in the imlementation (see your average Portal\Intranet publication, for example)

2003-08-03T18:51:00.000+01:00

Who are we trying to convince?
Not so long ago I attended a seminar that included a panel discussion with some of the big names in KM. Inevitably, somebody in the audience asked "How do I convince management to do KM?". I hear this all the time and people never seem very satisfied with the answer, which usually says something like "make sure its linked to your business's strategy" (they might as well say "make sure its really convincing"). Some speakers then go on to add "...and make sure you don't call it KM".

Here's my hunch and it comes in two parts (like a camel's)
1) It's true that many companies, particularly the ones that had early KM success didn't call it KM, becasue it didn't have a label. And it wasn't done by KM people, because they didn't exist either. Often the old hands look baffled as to why these people are trying to do something unrelated to strategic priorities, and they get baffled looks back from people who feel they're stating the damn obvious and missing the point.

2) A fun thing to do at a KM Conference (not a phrase you'll hear often) is ask people how they got into the field. I've only met one person who said "I studied for it". So nearly all of us are enthusiastic amateurs - "professionaly hobbyists" is how I once heard it put. We're all trying to move away from a job we didn't like into something much more interesting - more interesting because it often involves dablling with things that used to be the domain of more senior people (take it from me, I used to be a janitor ;-)

Put it together and what have you got? People trying to take over "management's job" of launching initiatives by inventing a new profession. So I have to ask myself, is my question "how do I convince management to do KM" or "how do I convince management to let me join in the game?"

2003-07-26T14:17:00.000+01:00

One of Dave Snowden's much used quotes is "We can know more than we can tell" (taken from Polanyi). Intuitively, that feels right, but revisiting Being There by Andy Clark again today I had second thoughts. Clark argues strongly for writing being part of knowing - a thinking support tool. "By writing down our ideas... we can hold them steady so that we may judge them...We can store them in a ways that allow us to compare and combine them with other complexes of ideas in ways that would quickly defeat the unaugmented imagination".

To me the implication is that we can't know some things until we're able to tell them. Those who have had to go from expert to teacher will be aware of how the act of teaching deepens you own understanding.

Why this dichotomy? Well there are many things we call knowledge and different ways of 'knowing' (I know what an egg is vs. I know how to pickle eggs vs. I know what you did last summer) - see my earlier post on FASHEN.

2003-07-26T14:02:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the gap in service - please do not adjust your sets. Thanks for all those who mailed me - it's gratifying that somebody noticed! I hope to resume regular postings from now on (one or two a week). Stay tuned...

2003-04-14T17:25:00.000+01:00

The hazards of interviewing
"I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." -- Alan Greenspan

Not the most original quote I know, but he sums it up beautifully. The trouble with knowledge elicitation is that the knowledge elicitor is usually in the role of dumb chauffer that gets in the way of the person who really knows where they want to go... but can't drive.
Have you ever met the fearsome admin person that you know won't really understand your request but who insists on a full explanation before they'll pass you on to the person you really need to speak to? Have you then spent another 10 minutes undoing the garbled explanation of that that person got from their admin about why you're there?
10 years ago this was commonly called the "knowledge elicitation bottleneck" and the effects of interviewing were well known. Feels like its time to revive some of that. So, here's my own variant Greenspanism.

When you debrief you don't get the 'truth' as such but "an approximate articulation of what people are willing to say on what they think you want to hear, based on their imperfect recall of events they never fully understood."

2003-03-25T17:46:00.000Z

KM in R&D 2003
I took part in this Ark Group conference in London last week. The attendance was disappointingly small, but the round-table feel was a pleasant change from the usual classroom atmoshpere of a big event.

Main Question:
Is KM for R&D a special case? i.e does KM have anything special to say about the innovation process? This was not as well explored in conference as I would have hoped, and from the presentations you'd have to conclude 'no', as there was little that wouldn't apply to KM in manufacturing or sales. Mind you, one thing that emerged in discussions at the end was that if it really were so radically different, then KM would have a hard time encouraging knowledge flows in and out of R&D to other parts of an org.

Best Presentation:
Victor Newman from Pfizer. "Marketing will never understand a truly innovative product becasue it won't fit their mental models of the market".

Useful Concept:
Work out how knowledge would flow in your organization if geography were not an issue. Then look at what you need to do in KM terms to get the same flows going in the real world.

Intriguing Insight:
Knowledge banks, idea boxes, lessons learned databases etc. rarely get 'helped' by workers because there's no warm fuzzy feeling involved. An electronic 'thank you' just ain't the same. So either you need to make it clear that the repository is just an intermediary (e.g. I only Blog because people respond to what I say - eventually) or provide an extrinsic reward (read: cash). The trouble with cash is that people are much more sensitive to how its given, which means rules, which means game-playing by individuals to maximise their return. You don't get this with warm-fuzzy rewards because we have social systems that have evolved to moderate game-playing (i.e we see it as selfish, exploitative, manipulative etc.)

Best supporting Actress:
...sorry, got carried away there.

2003-03-01T17:44:00.000Z

Braintrust 2003
I took part in the Braintrust conference in San Francisco mid-February. Top marks to the organizers for creating an intimate, friendly atmosphere - one of the easiest settings for networking I've come across. Average participant experience was also very high - it didn't feel like the speakers were something different, they just happened to be the ones talking that year. Highlights:
* Tom Brailsford from Hallmark. They're using online communities for consumer research. Just by actively facilitating online discussions they have built a thriving community that gives them new product ideas and instant feedback on concepts. Even the CEO tests the water with them.
* Verna Allee gave an intelligent workshop on 'value nets', a handy way of visualising problems. What I liked is that after a 3 hour session I felt I had something immediately useful
* Kathy Hagan (formerly Pfizer) covered KM in mergers and acquisitions. It'd be good to see more people promoting KM in this area.
* Wendy Buckowitz (of KM Fieldbook fame) presented on a new survey by Buck Consultants. It's trying to value organizational knowledge by looking at the implied cost of training people. This is a great idea - when we downsize we tend to look at redundancy costs explicitly but bury re-training and role transfer costs. Indeed, if we put realistic numbers on individuals as being an asset anyway, we would probably ditch them less readily.
The questionnaire presents differently shaped learning curves and asks participants to select the best match for a given job. This is an elegant approach and its great that it highlights the time it takes to get learn how to get things done in a new organization - most of it being about adapting to a new culture. BUT the approach has some severe limitations that I fear will get lost in the headlines it will generate. e.g. They can't account for the negative effect of people getting stale - the cost of mediocre ideas may be greater than that of employee churn in R&D, for example. Its also based on judgement of - predominantly - HR folk who rarely think in this way and probably don't have robust data to support their choices.

2003-03-01T17:12:00.000Z

a better definition
I was amused by an article in my local paper: about a man imprisoned for assulting a fireman. The fireman had the audacity to try and rescue him because his house was on fire. Even the barrister [lawyer] defending him said "His record can best be described as horrendous". He went on to say "Mr X recognises that he has a drink and anger management problem" - so he's not just an aggressive thug then? So next time you do something dumb and you get called stupid, correct them and say "no, I have a knowledge management problem" :-)

2003-01-22T13:53:00.000Z

Like banning clocks to save time...
Couldn't resist sharing this with you from the editor of an e-mail discussion group I subscribe to.

"Today I received a nice note from a member who explained that he had to unsubscribe from all [name of discussion group] email because: Unfortunately new company policy dictates that out 'Inboxes' must be drastically cut down, which means I only have room for internal emails (and maybe not even that!)."

Seems and odd reaction to an even nuttier edict. My recommendation would be to immediately delete all e-mails beginning with the letters A-M... or perhaps those received after 2pm as they're clearly from slackers :-)

2003-01-21T19:23:00.000Z

Unleash the Grouchy Person!
The Imaginatik Blog references an interesting article titled Why innovation happens when happy people fight. It covers the need for constructuve conflict, but also the evidence for using humour and optimistic people for creative roles. What I really like though is that it advises you to hire a few grouchy people - they tend to be better at identifying risk and weaknesses. But becasue their misery is contagious you should only let them out of their office at tactical moments. I worked with such a person once - he had a brilliant analytical mind and when something failed we often realised he'd been telling us for 6 months, but to follow his thinking took hours so few people had the patience.... that really got him down.

2003-01-14T17:46:00.000Z

Ultimately, a CKO's job should be to fire himself ...
In his weblog Dave Gurteen has an entry on the role of the Chief Knowledge Officer. It relays the popular view that this should be a temporary role to help organizations migrate to a new way of working. I think this is misguided.

The CKO should champion the knowledge-based perspective of the organization and defend it against all the other perspectives that confront managers e.g. financial, legal, marketing etc. A CKO's first job may well be to bring about substantial KM change, but the organization will always be in flux and you need somebody to keep an eye on the intangibles through any subsequent organizational change.

If you get the place just how you want it from a KM point of view you can bet your dog that the next wave of changes due to e.g. legislation will start to undo half of them as an unplanned side-effect. You wouldn't change your accounting practices and then tell the CFO he was no longer needed for 'business as normal' would you?

2003-01-09T10:44:00.000Z

It was ME!
Apparently ICI did an interesting exercise where they took their most successful products and traced back through the organisation to find out where they'd originated. They found that the majority had come from just four people, and they'd never been properly recognised for it. I hope they were promoted to a cubicle with a window as a result.
[Source: Talk by Richard Potter of QintetiQ]

2003-01-07T14:10:00.000Z

Happy New Year to all my reader

2003-01-07T14:02:00.000Z

Forthcoming Conference Presentations
There's a couple of conferences coming up where I'll be presenting. If you're there please come and say "hello" \ "is your talk worth going to because there's another at the same time that looks more interesting" \ "is that soup on your tie?"

Braintrust 2003 in San Francisco, Feb 9-12. Great lineup of speakers with John Seely Brown giving the keynote. Braintrust is widely viewed as being the best KM networking opportunity and works hard to keep things intimate. There's a limit of 200 delegates and lots of peripheral activities to keep people connected. I'll be hosting a dinner discussion one evening - a lively debate is promised (especially once we have to split the check between us)
Exploiting knowledge management in R&D London 19-21 March. A more targeted conference with empahsising innovation and exploring what it is about R&D that makes its needs different from mainstream KM. download brochure

2002-12-24T15:53:00.000Z

Language as a tool
I've just been reading Being There by Andy Clark. Clark argues for the importance of understanding cognition within real environements i.e. that we manipulate what we have around us to help us think, what he calls 'scaffolding'. He argues that language too isn't just for communication but is also a valuable tool for individual thought.

For example, when putting together a chapter for his book, he used many papers, online references and so on to pull it together. Its not that it existed in his head and just needed to be transcribed "instead it is the product of a sustained and iterated sequence of interactions between my brain and a variety of external props. In these cases... a good deal of actual thinking involved loops and circuits that run outside the head and through the local environment" (p207)

KM implications?
1) That to transfer knowledge we sometimes need to understand how an expert uses loops and artefacts to support their cognition, perhaps on an ongoing basis (e.g. a spreadsheet for playing around with models, a favourite template, doodles and sketches)
2) Be wary of mistaking the loops outside the brain for explicit knowledge. Templates are no more explicit knowledge than giving somebody a knot in your handkerchief as a memory aid.

2002-12-21T18:27:00.000Z

Mark McElroy´s New Knowledge Management
I had an email from Mark McElroy on my posting of November 7th regarding his talk at KM World on Macroinnovation. I rather bluntly said I couldn´t see why he called this 'The New Knowledge Management' when Nonaka had addressed this in '95. Mark very courteously explained that he was trying to change the way we view business knowledge from Nonaka's use of "Justified True Belief" to one based on business knowledge being seen as claims open to challenge (falsification for those who know Karl Popper's work). An appealing extrapolation of this is what McElroy & Firestone call the "Open Enterprise", where much more of what happens in management is open to the scrutiny (but also the opportunity for improvement) of other employees.

If you're interested, there's a detailed presentation on Mark's website about the differences.

Mark and I are still having a dialog about his concepts. One thing I asked was if Popper's falsificationism ideas, mostly devised to explain the nature of scientific enquiry, really applied to business knowledge. i.e is business knowledge really the same kind of beast. I was reminded of a colleague once lamenting "knowledge isn't what it used to be - it used to mean science that had been tested and re-tested. I took decades to produce. Now knowledge seems to be anybody's experience or the gut feel of some poncey marketing manager".

2002-12-20T20:27:00.000Z

Those interested in innovation with a KM bent may want to keep an eye on Imaginatik Blog, an experimental blog from Imaginatik who specialise in ideas management. I saw a talk by Mark Turrell, their CEO who began by thanking the Little Mermaid (!). It was Disney´s policy of selling videos by limited release (thereby compressing 7 year's of sales into a few months and making very efficient use of their manufacturing) that gave Imginatik the insight of doing the same for soliciting ideas: they found it was much more effective to have short campaigns for ideas than to have an ever-open "suggestions box" on a given topic.

2002-12-10T17:58:00.000Z

Lonely Knowledge Manager Seeks Trusting Relationship, maybe more...
And here´s another quandry: in the past I´ve always rated virtual team working as a poor substitute for face to face (though better than nothing at all). Many KM articles assert the same - people need to see a face, shake a hand and all that before they´ll really open up. Ergo, virtual teams should meet at least once before they can operate successfully using collaboration tools like Groove.
The case against: There are now many accounts of people meeting electronically who fall in love and run away together before they ever meet. I read about one couple that exchanged 30,000 words in email in the space of a month. How many of your teams interact with even 10% of this intensity?

So clearly trust (and a whole lot more) can be established without face-to-face first. What matters is that its much easier to damage emergent trust online. So much more is missing (the bodylanguage, tone, chance to re-phrase when you see someone scowl etc.) so messages are more ambiguous. With dating-type scenarios, people are motivated to try much harder to get things right, to repair misunderstanding and keep the tempo up. You´ll never get that level of motivation in the office (not about work anyhow), but in the absence of motivation, education can go a long way.

Too often we just give people tools and expect them to get on with them. But Groove isn´t just another bit of MS-Office, and much more could be done to help people manage online working-relationships. People have managed this, stumblingly, with e-mail where emoticons (smileys etc.) replace some of the missing emotional bandwidth, but this is still missing from collaborative working rituals (not least because we don´t like to acknowledge emotions in the workplace at all!).

Must go - I´ve a chat going with this gorgeous blonde, 23, blue eyes who seems to know all about cars, soccer and hi-tech gadgets. Its almost too good to be true...

2002-12-02T16:18:00.000Z

Knowledge Flow through Plastic Cigarettes
We know that strong ties between individuals provide a rich conduit for knowledge flow. The problem is that strong ties normally occur between people who are co-located. Eventually, the knowledge pool reaches homogeneity and stagnation sets in (just like an old married couple who think alike and have nothing new to say to each other). Managers try to make new strong ties with things like cross-functional teams that spend a weekend in a forest or trying to cross a river using boats made of flipcharts and drinking straws. This creates a strong common bond in the form of shared loathing of outward-bound events, but there's no evidence that it has a lasting effect back in the office.

What's needed is an ongoing ritual that reinforces a sense of shared adversity and encourages cross-functional encounters. Smoking seems to be the ideal solution. If you want to know what's happening on the grapevine, ask a smoker. Secretaries seem to be particularly over-represented, the ideal scenario for boundary-crossing knowledge events (i.e. gossip). Building-wide smoking bans enhance the effect by forcing smokers into a freezing huddle near the doorways so they can share bodyheat (the most basic form of tacit knowledge). Once you've gone this far, talking about a project failure hardly seems like you're going out on a limb.

The implication of this is that KM strategy needs to balance an overt discouragement of smoking (punitive official policy) with a tacit encouragement of the practice. As this would have health implications, I suggest that plastic cigarette substitutes would be ideal. Plan for January with a series of notices inciting employees to take up giving up smoking as a New Year's resolution.

2002-11-29T17:20:00.000Z

Innovation.
-One school says necessity is the mother of invention, so great progress comes from adversity and pressure. Look at how war progresses technology.
-The other school says that real innovation comes from having space - no pressure, freedom to let your mind wander, in other words Slack.

Which is right? I think they're not actually the same sorts of invention. One is creative problem-solving within given constraints (ie. best with what we have), the other seems more apt for step change (i.e. best thing possible). It may also be that the wartime thing's a red-herring, because war also leads to massive investment, management decisiveness and a clearer set of priorities. at Henley KM Forum yesterday it was also suggested that managers should focus on creating space and let the pressure come from inside the innovators. I suspect managers need to be more nuanced than that depending on the personalities of their people.

2002-11-25T17:30:00.000Z

Is KM optional? Yes!
Yes, in the same way that if you look at a city and imagine removing all the parks, the theatres, the interesting architecture and replacing it with prefab buildings in concrete and vehicle-only roads.
In the same way that your house is best served by stainless steel walls and concrete floors, plastic chairs and vynyl tables, without paintings, texture, patterns or mementos.

...things still work. You can still cook in the kitchen, still travel from A to B and live in your building. But what's happened? The onset of a slow decay.

Is KM an option? Yes, in the same way that an athlete can stop training. He won't die. He won't suddenly stop being able to run. But in thhe long term, can he compete? So what do YOU expect? Why should I teach you to run faster than anyone else if all you want to do is stop limping? Does you mission statement talk about sprinting ahead of the pack? Of course it does. So do your leaders act like this is the mission, or do they only react to injuries and limps?

2002-11-22T15:50:00.000Z

This decision-support software is on special offer and a fraction of its old price Assistum .If you're interested in knowledge mapping, it could be worth a play. In effect its a rule-based system with the rules laid bare. So long as you're only reasoning over one case (e.g. the risk in one project) that's fine.
What I like about it is that it challenges your subjective rating of things. e.g. you may say to yourself "The risk of doing this project is medium". Assistum guides you through assessing the individual factors like market changes, innovation risk, your company's ability to run projects etc. When you finally return to the aggregate risk it may well say "You rated: medium risk, the engine rates: high risk because of the ratings you gave to factors X,Y,Z" You can then reflect on the mismatch.

2002-11-17T20:54:00.000Z

Slack.
Slack by Tom DeMarco, excellent new book by the author of Peopleware. The antidote to all the Fast Company, Lean and Mean, 24x7 macho posturing drivel that characterised most of the 90's.
CHoice quotes:
* Lister's Law "people under pressure don't think faster"
* "managers (good managers at least) are the lifeblod of an organization. Cutting them out is like giving blood to lose weight"
* "in fear organizations, authority has more force than reality... for a while"

2002-11-17T20:43:00.000Z

ROI
One of the better talks at KMWorld 2002 was by David Gilmour of Tacit on ROI and Measurement. The gist is that most people askign you to prove ROI are faking it: they rarely demonstrate ROI for the thigns that really matter to them, they just go ahead and do them. Hence its much more important that KM shows how it impacts ont he important stuff, than it is to show some pseudo-accountancy.

My own thoughts are that saying 'Whats the ROI' is one of those stalling questions that sounds like a legitimate request when said in front of the board but is really a way of saying "I don't believe in KM" that sidesteps getting into a debate about it. I suspect no senior managers ask the ROI question of things that really matter to them, i.e their real core values rather than their espoused ones.

So here's my list of "Expensive things that never get asked to show ROI"
* Global workshops where execs jet in from all over
* Most training courses
* Furniture beyond the bare necessities (including the ROI of carpets, plants and large desks)
* Most downsizing programmes (they show apparent savings, but they imply one investment strategy over another, and nobody works out which ultimately yields more)
* Attractive buildings vs. concrete monsters
* Public parks
* Travelling non-Economy class
* Owning a cat
* Calculating ROI
I'd welcome more suggestions!

NB I'm not saying nobody ever challenges the cost of these, only that thay have huge intangible impacts that nobody has a handle on. It all comes down to what accountants see as assets vs. costs. Sadly employees are generally seen just as a cost, so investing in them is impossible unless your organisation uses some form of Intangible Assets accounting. So the next time you're asked to show ROI, say "sure, just show me how you assess intangble assets and we can discuss where KM fits in".

2002-11-08T16:32:00.000Z

Wonderful! JIT Delivery comes to Knowledge Management in HBR. Davenport describes a classic expert system that could be 20 years old and gets away with claiming that this is the future for KM because its 'embedded knowledge'. Not that I'm compaining about expert systems getting a nod as still having value in very particular circumstances, it just doesn't deserve this kind of dressing up.

2002-11-07T21:37:00.000Z

Apologies for the silence - I've just got back from KMWorld 2002 in Santa Clara. I was a bit concerned that it'd merged with Intranets 2002 but in fact the combination worked rather well. e..g sometimes the KM tracks felt like the same old stuff, but there was something more engaging on the Intranet side. About 450 people showed up, mostly from multinationals. Dominant themes:
* CoPs and networks (done to death, if you ask me)
* Expert profiling and location - good talk from Aventis on their use of Tacit's tools
* Collaboration\vitrtual teams

Interesting emerging areas:
* Social Network Analysis (hardly new per se, but uncommon in KM conferences still)
* Innovation Management - especially ideas management. (Mark McElroy was claiming this was 'new' KM though really KM linked to innovation is what Nonaka was on about all along).

David Gilmore from Tacit also gave an excellent talk on ROI (actually more Not-ROI and why it was a trap). I'd been thinking exactly the same thing and it was great to hear it so elegantly articulated.

I was speaking on KM for New Ventures - a topic that drew a small crowd in a vast 600-seater theatre. On stage it was was like viewing through a fish-eye lens and all my jokes fell horribly flat (guess I should've included substance in the talk as well so I had something to fall back on ;-). I did give this blog a plug though, so if you came here as a result - WELCOME!

2002-10-09T18:04:00.000+01:00

Knowledge is Power!
I often get asked to demonstrate the value of KM, or show the return on investment. Tools like Benefit Trees are quite handy in this respect - they allow you to construct the response as a string of impacts from intangible things like 'improved customer understanding' to more traditional territory like 'increased customer retention rate'. It allows more constructive discussion around, say, the case for transferring knowledge between different parts of the organization. This is equally powerful in reverse - e.g. when people tell me I should be giving away my knowledge to others. Like hell I will - "What, you want me to write my own resignation letter too?" I ask. Oddly, these same tree-huggin' hippy KM types don't understand the source of my resistance and think I need culture change. Tsk. I find it helps to run them through the 'Knowledge Sharing Chain':

* share your knowledge
-> credit to somebody else
-> passed over for promotion
-> depression
-> alcoholism
-> marital breakdown
-> destitution
-> die a bum

Inspired by : Innervation by Guy Browning the only management book you can talk about at parties.

2002-10-06T21:05:00.000+01:00

Anybody planning to attend KM Europe 2002 ? I expect to go down for a day, see the free talks, check out some of the vendor stuff. If you're a Blogger it'd be nice to put a face to you - get in touch s.marshallATbigfoot.com [if you're not a spam crawler you'll know what to do with the AT]

2002-10-06T21:02:00.000+01:00

While I'm at it, anyone interested in Personal Knowledge Management may want to look at:
Book review: Know your value?

2002-10-06T20:58:00.000+01:00

When I started this Blog, I didn't believe anybody out there read them, so challenged people to get in touch. In fact a number of people have done just that - notably all of them bloggers themselves. However, nobody bit on the 'KM for New Ventures' angle. Pity, as I'm sure much of it translates for project teams, autonomous departments or fast-growing SMEs. An article of mine came out this month - hope it'll whet your appetites more on this:
Knowledge management for new ventures. Comments very welcome.

2002-10-01T20:12:00.000+01:00

Air Traffic Control Couldn't resist linking to this The Social Life of Paper (though its Stephen Dulaney that brought it to my attention Digital Dashboards). Gladwell talks about the paradox of air-traffic control using bits of paper all the time. It reminded me of some cognitive psychologists doing research on just this area - situated cognition they called it. They spent weeks observing ATC operators and began to build up a picture of what they did. But one thing puzzled them - ocassionally the controller would ask the pilot to make an unexpected change in flight path. "Why", they asked, "did the pilot need to divert his course?". "Well", explained the controllers "When 2 planes are stacked up at different altitudes we can't read their labels on the screen, so we make the fly apart to reveal the code underneath".

2002-10-01T19:51:00.000+01:00

Permalinks added by popular demand. Messy business.