"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."

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?)

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"

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.

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]