The ultimate intangible asset

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"

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?

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

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

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

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?

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!

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]

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

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.

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.

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!

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 ;-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."