Knowledge-at-work

XP and XK

Extreme knowledge (XK) is an approach to learning, working and product delivery that follows principles & practices in extreme programing (XP). The intent is to reduce time to delivery, reduce risk, improve learning, reduce errors and promote understanding.

XK improves knowledge work in four essential ways; communication, simplicity, feedback, and courage. XK workers communicate with their customers and fellow knowledge workers. They keep their design open, simple and clean. They get feedback by testing their products starting on day one. They deliver their product to the customers as early as possible and implement changes as suggested. With this foundation XK workers are able to courageously respond to changing requirements and technology.

XK / XP "requires an extended development team. The XP team includes not only the developers, but the managers and customers as well, all working together elbow to elbow. Asking questions, negotiating scope and schedules, and creating functional tests require more than just the developers be involved in producing the software".

Extreme Programming (XP) was created in response to problem domains whose requirements change. Your customers may not have a firm idea of what the system should do. You may have a system whose functionality is expected to change every few months. In many software environments dynamically changing requirements is the only constant. This is when XP will succeed while other methodologies do not.

For my money, knowledge workers will greatly benefit by following XP practices and principles as these promote tacit knowledge transfers, foster learning and trust, leading to greater understanding, awareness and agility.

Resources:

XP Introduction

What is XP?

XP FAQ

Do you have any XK experiences to share?

PKM

Organization of personal information is not knowledge work in my opinion and a focus on the individual does not leverage the basic strength of KM which is networking, collaborative spaces and group innovation / knowledge creation.

In many ways, my unease with PKM parallels my thoughts on the paradigms that focus on individual competencies rather than social learning. For me, the greatest leverage and largest promise in knowledge work comes from the social aspects. I find this to be a fundamental distinction and thus often see myself at odds with the PKM camp on many fronts. Let's examine some common PKM principles:

Focus on self-organization:
Organise your thoughts, gather & catalog your knowledge assets, cluster and categorize your sources, document your network, track your activities. The claim is knowledge creation starts with individual competencies. The focus is on fast and effective access to information.

No quibble that you need to capture & organize things but should this be the key focus of your knowledge activities?

The individual as the key engine for knowledge work:
Focus inwards, you can no longer depend on others (community, company, professional group) for your learning, security or long term future. The road ahead requires you to look out for yourself, build your competencies, guard your IP, brand your IC and continually market your skills. You need to take personal responsibility for your future. I wonder!

Knowledge acquisition and learning need social connections. getting ahead today means having a 'mother' community to test your insights, a group to share and learn distinctions, an intellectual guild to filter news and increase your awareness and a network to increase connections and gather ideas.

I'm thinking the important issues in a PKM are:
* The communities you belong to, your reciprocity & empathy
* The networked relationships you have along which knowledge can flow
* Your openness to new ideas, your willingness to alter your mental models and your ability to really listen

Here is how I see things:

The most valuable knowledge related asset any individual has, is their relationships for it is those relationships that determine knowledge flow, exposure and awareness to new ideas, potential for collaboration, social capital and trust.

Personal identity comes next. Without a positive feeling of self-worth, an empathy for others and a willingness to learn any individual will have a hard time with knowledge related work. An audit needs to observe and validate those unarticulated assumptions about self.

Technological competencies, application suites, familiarity with equipment, diversity of formats and communication mediums are not the key to knowledge flows, they determine the easiest and quickest way to communicate, but give no picture of personal motivation, make no or little statement about past experiences, do not attest to the individuals ability to deal with complex and abstract concepts, their need for learning nor do they tell us much about their interests, tacit knowledge or desires (motivators).

During a PKM audit, it is key to find touch points, common interests, shared values, learning gaps and to determine their group skills and collaborative work preferences. We need to surface their assumptions, appreciate their mental models and understand their views about knowledge itself.

The key deliverable from a PKM audit is an assessment of the persons tacit knowledge levels.

So

PKM to me is a paradox - knowledge in my world is socially constructed - it is not about organizing your thoughts, learning to use tools or developing individual competencies - it is about dialog, community and collaboration.

Now your thoughts?

Solutions or innovation ?

In our knowledge economy, access to ideas, help with innovative and critical thinking, fostering synergy and collaborative learning, are key drivers. This is like driving a car with a geographical positioning system onboard (new age technology), but at the traditional helpdesk, you are driving forwards all the while looking through your rear-view mirror. This is what most current helpdesks really do !!

So your firm has installed a helpdesk!, one of those modern technological wonders, you can track the status of 'tickets', you measure the average 'drop rate' & 'hold time', you know your first level resolution rate, and you have more SLAs (service level agreements) than you care to think about. Having planned ahead, you have a clear escalation 3 level process, you are building and busy customizing a canned knowledgebase, installed to bootstrap your 'corporate memory', you are proud of your 3rd tier validation & feedback rules, knowledge sharing is well ahead of the industry, you are mining your call logs for target problems and customers that need training, you are 'proactive' and have reduced calls by putting a FAQ on your intranet (self-help), your customer satisfaction ratings are creeping upwards. But are you really heading in the right direction?

Consider this continuum:

opportunities => suggestions => ideas => considerations => issues, => concerns => problems => crises.

Where does your helpdesk focus? What are you doing to capture informal innovation, keep abreast of subtle market shifts, track customer adaptations and product synergies, act upon market intelligence, leverage your firm’s weak ties? Moving from solving crises to learning about market opportunities is likely to be as important to your firm’s survival, future profitability and ability to compete as customer satisfaction, retaining loyalty and preventing re-invention is right now.

As your lowly helpdesk moves into the enterprise from behind the IT doors, give some thought to moving your focus from pressing problems to exciting opportunities. Attention to capturing innovation and market shifts, compiling composite, shared profiles and distributing meaning rather than just solutions may be the road signs to your next bonus.

In my experience helpdesks see themselves as almost totally problem solvers and solution collectors, even providing training is off the beaten track for most of them. This is sad and I lay the blame on the 'culture' of measurement that permeates almost all the helpdesks. Their eyes are on the metrics (calls waiting, longest hold time, time to ticket closure....) as these are wrapped around their SLAs.

There is a new role for the helpdesk, but one that has not arrived for most installations yet!, they can act as the corporate memory, connect people to ideas and to people with ideas. Using a help desk for creativity is often the last thing on the manager’s mind as they have cast themselves in the problem solving / fire fighter mold.

Imagine this:
You get a call just because someone is curious, they wish to know more, you have a living 'yellowpages' and refer them to xyz, you help them by suggesting some alternative sources they could try on the internet, together you examine their query from different points of view, you supply them with the company accepted terminology AND you solicit their feedback when they find the answer. There is some recognition system in place to help encourage contributions. This helpdesk's primary function is to gather & promote organizational intelligence and speed responsiveness to market needs.

Your helpdesk contains word association tools like Idea Fisher to help you brainstorm ideas with the customer, you can share a whiteboard and jointly scribble a mindmap, you have access to 'canned' stories, analogies and metaphors to help you and the customer stretch your collaborative thinking, At your finger tips is a bloki - a combination of Blog and Wiki to capture ideas and customer innovations.

The major focus at your helpdesk is to assist folks make connections and meaning.

Concepts at work

Looking for fast, single source, access to JIT information on key business issues? Do you have a whole library of business books, but no easy way to access the ideas and the gems across your collection? On the road and wish you could take your personal library with you?, Found a key concept in a book and wish to know what others are saying around that subject?

Ever thought what a concept really is, how they can be applied or what they mean?
* A container for (an) idea(s) and meaning

* A higher level abstraction or category

* An index term or symbol for use in navigation

* A representation of shared meaning and special language

What are the important aspects and qualities of a concept used in this way?
* Our agreement around its negotiated meaning

* The facts, objects, roles and relationships it represents

* It`s utility in a language sense, a handle or affordance for meaning

* The links & relationships to other concepts

So what do your concepts look like?
* Are they crisp containers, slicing the universe of objects?

* Do they have fuzzy boundaries and partial membership?

* Is it possible for an instance to belong to many overlapping concepts at the same time?

* Are they anchored in original meaning & difficult to change?

* Do they mutate under conversation, as the group changes and meaning is negotiated?

What tools do you use to handle concepts?
* Just what I know, I know (aka have not thought about this yet or just my head)

* An associative network like Idea Fisher

* A concept extraction engine

Concepts are thought kernels, make sure you do not throw out the wheat with the chaff!!

Concepts in practice - MeansBusiness

Take a look at their site, I think there is value in this approach and believe it can be applied to the business knowledge within your firm, giving access to memos, e-mails, research reports, white papers, project proposals, library literature and internet gems. The secret lies in crafting an ontology that delivers meaning to your organization and then hanging as much as you can off that 'knowledge map'. Just imagine what you can do with a useful concept level ontology:

a) List related training
b) Point to FAQs & solutions
c) Recommend experts
d) Show related concepts / topics
e) Display current gaps and opportunties
f) Indicate maket trends, customer wishes & requests
g) Post your latest answers, research and work in progress
h) Provide a hub for interested parties to make make contact

Now that is making content work!!

What are your opinions?

KM - good practices

Here are some recommended practices associated with KM that GreyMatter Inc. supports

1) Facilitate access & acquisition:
supports exposure to ideas and creates awareness, this goes beyond pull and push to active involvement of people in determining and evaluating their current information needs. It would include some proactive pushing of ideas, contacts and papers not requested by users, to increase awareness, encourage communal search and active mining. In partnership with knowledge structuring, there is a responsibility to see the people & information are easy to find and there is provision for adequate feedback to empower continuous learning.

2) Knowledge generation:
here we look to dialog, annealing, inquiry, reflection, and synthesis. It is taking the information, making links, looking for patterns and using concept graphs to identify and close gaps. This is a social constructive process, best conducted in a community of practice where there is trust and reciprocity. In my books knowledge creation is more about making links, altering mindsets, changing beliefs and sharing useful patterns than data mining for patterns in transaction data streams.

3) Mapping knowledge:
is closely related to identifying knowledge. Our approach places the focus on knowledge-related opportunities, boundary objects and leverage of knowledge processes (knowledge levels). Let me explain; a boundary object is a form or artifact that is passed from group to group. It requires some negotiation of meaning and serves to connect different departments, e.g. a purchase requisition or a customer order. Knowledge levels are where we take a step back and ask what knowledge do we have about knowledge? How can we judge, compare, validate and improve our knowledge activity?.

4) Knowledge structuring:
developing terminology, shared meaning, ontologies, abstraction and editing to make it less context specific and protect privacy. We recognize the importance of translating even between mental models e.g. engineers & artists. Concept mapping and navigation aids, stories, templates and automatic clustering creep in here as well. Ontologies seek to create and share terminology and meaning within a group or organization. This may sound rather pedantic and trivial, but some of the largest KM breakthroughs come from having effective communication and a clear common idea & understanding of the complex concepts we deal with.

5) Knowledge sharing:
goes beyond passive content delivery to support for continuous learning, dialog, to surface assumptions, systems thinking to help elicit mental models, backboards to co-ordinate and collect and a pattern language to promote effective communication. Sharing knowledge means you have a duty to assist others to appreciate the meaning, to assimilate the concepts and to understand how these can be applied. There is an implied reciprocity and deeper level of engagement here than just publishing your words.

6) Empowering learning:
is different from knowledge generation although closely related. We look at learning histories, best practices, left hand columns, personal journals, project reviews and distance learning here, recognize the value of deep dialog, the key role of quality questions and the importance of learning in community. Here is a paper I highly recommend that sets the landscape for learning:

The new conversations about learning

Yellowpages

The vision goes beyond finding people with specific skills and competencies, to helping groups learn more about their members, their individual desires, preferences, their connections & relationships to the marketplace and their inner interests and drivers.

A group or community where the members know each other well, is able to leverage opportunity and learn faster, does a better job of information filtering and recognizing opportunity, is able to 'translate' and improve the understanding for individuals and has greater trust. Such groups are able to access their intuitive knowledge of how members will react, form more cohesive sub-groups and teams and will find alignment is easier to achieve.

When co-workers know your expertise and preferences, they are able to draw upon it when needed, helping rapid alignment and speeding self-organization. Shared tacit knowledge formed in a community through conversation and dialog is a very valuable corporate resource, well-protected from competitors, impossible to copy and requires special conditions to replicate elsewhere.

The knowledge advantage is: a sensitivity for social capital, unique competency in fostering social engagement, building collaborative communities, setting the climate and the conditions for deep personal knowledge sharing. Experience with structured databases, automatic profiling, psychographics and finely developed skills in hosting, building trust, seeding conversations and leading through example will be valuable here.

Appreciation for the key role of identity, rituals for helping groups to open-up, empathy for reticent participants and incentives for open frank disclosure help to keep the directory alive.

Reflections
Conversations over content:
Concentrate on assisting feedback, comments and questions rather than static content. The really interesting aspects always emerge from conversations around shared interests rather than from a catalog of a person's skills. Design to foster dialog and encourage exploration, thus keeping the repository 'alive', active and updated.

Relationships over competencies:
A more valuable entry is people you know (and who & what they know) rather than things you can do. Why?, your skills are context, time and community dependent, relationships integrate access, allow the flow of knowledge and give access to people who keep knowledge active & alive.

Annotate all objects / documents with people links:
I have seen excellent yellowpages that go unused because everyday documents, objects, e-mail and bulletin board posts do not point to people, so the essential link and context for using the yellowpages (the driver!) was missing from the workplace. A yellowpages repository is only one part of the system, the other part is creating the 'pull' to get people to use the resource.

Individual freedom over strict format:
Capture the creative spirit and the individual context by allowing maximum personal freedom over design. It is impossible to predict what will spark the contact points between individuals. Spend money on the best indexing & search engine you can afford but keep this in the background. Forcing everyone to fit into a rigid classification scheme and to choose their terms from a limited list, stifles the emergence of subtle hooks and reduces motivation to keep the repository updated, it becomes a task rather than a personal expression with pride of ownership.

Updating is key:
Yellowpages that 'get behind', where the individual entries and the contact information is out-of-date build a negative spiral. It only takes one visit to turn a new user off!. Put your energies on keeping interest alive. I have found making at least an annual review is essential. One way is to require a formal review of yellowpages as part of the review process for promotion and merit assessment.

Use tools that help updating:
Tools that help with collecting personal profiles are useful and key to helping with updating. I do not think these can be used without personal review and fine-tuning, but they sure help to highlight new interests and acquired relationships & skills e.g. Autonomy, Tacit, Orbital, Abuzz, Netperceptions. The reality is people forget!, they need to be reminded of what they did, what they learnt, and who they have interacted with.

More thoughts & links

DIKW

Like a moth drawn to a flame - it seems destiny to return and reflect on the data - information - knowledge - wisdom sequence (DIKW)

Thoughts:

A line in the sand:

There is no clear progression and no real hierarchy in the DIKW sequence, rather a context dependent recursion. There can be a reversion, if you become aware that the context has changed, e.g. what you were processing as information may become data again if you are aware of external context changes.

The best thing to do is to have (hold) a few core characteristic so you position yourself along the continuum. Here are some of my 'milestones'.

I do not see a sequential progression data ==> information ==> knowledge ==> understanding / wisdom as the key feature here. To me there is recursion and placement along this 'trajectory' is very context dependent.

There are however core qualities around these concepts that make the distinctions useful. It helps to recognize the boundaries are fuzzy and the overlaps may be large at times. Mostly I liken this to the futility of drawing a line in the sand when you know the tide is approaching.

The key, to my way of thinking, is to highlight the subtle role played by context, framing and shared meaning when moving between these DIK concepts. Let's examine these core qualities and assumptions:

Data:

Facts, perceptions, measurements, observations. Assumptions: shared meaning and values. We need to validate measurements checking for reproducibility, consistency, veracity AND we need to understand the axioms to appreciate the value. There is a stand-alone data! to get data, there must be prior agreement on what is important, how it should be captured, measured, recorded and represented.

Information:

Arrangement, aggregation, abstraction from data and past experience. Here knowledge of purpose and needs of audience / user is key, visual display plays a huge role. We are interested in trends, patterns, sequence, clustering. We apply a model and see how well the data points fit. There is a message, explicit or implied behind all information. The questions we ask about information shift from those we are concerned with when looking at data, i.e. now we focus more on intent, ownership, application, interpretation, extrapolation. At this point we are evangelizing a message.

Knowledge:

Social validation, utility, uniqueness, shared meaning, understanding and acceptance are key attributes. Knowledge is 'local', tied to community and conformance. What counts and survives depends on if it works and how useful it is. Knowledge has qualities associated with relationships, people, flows, interactivity and emergence. It comes from a distillation of local experience, must survive informal social validation and may exist in tacit forms or be embodied. Knowledge also captures shades of awareness and the ability to act from experience and intuition without explicit recall of principles. The key to knowledge is communication, community, people and relationships.

I will leave wisdom to those that are wise.

Truth or utility ?

Been 'listening' to the recent discussions on act-km between Mark McElroy and Dave Snowden. They have looking at what separates knowledge from information and the basis for taking decisions

Knowledge and truth
The quest for truth is admiral and the 'gold' standard. I like the KMCI focus on validation of eplicit knowledge claims. I do not agree that truth is the main or the only test for the difference between information and knowledge as both Joe and Mark seem to suggest. I question their epistemology that claims a rational, independent reality and relies on representation- mostly our knowledge is locally constructed, emergent, highly intuitive and tacit in nature. We struggle to discriminate between personal beliefs and objective knowledge.

Knowledge and utility
In practice it is utility that drives most decisions, behaviors and activities rather than a quest for truth, which is abstract and difficult. We are always pressed for time, satisficing and rely on our intuition when making those hard choices. Taking a decision that brings greater utility, being open to change and being ready to make the next small adjustment seems to be the way to go. This is the path of the OODA loop and the Boyd cycle

Heuristics & sense-making
Striving for truth via validated 'knowledge claims' tends to overlook heuristics, time costs, personal scripts and sense-making - those rules of thumb, proven patterns, unconscious role plays, deep intuition and rituals - all important sources for making judgements, and choices when operating under risk and uncertainty.

When it comes to knowledge be a fighter pilot rather than a judge - make many incremental moves rather than spending time validating explicit claims.

I would greatly appreciate hearing your views

Web Assistant - a KE tool

For the past two years I've been using Web Assistant - a complex knowledge space that spans the spectrum from personal publishing to community collaboration. - a true knowledge ecology (KE)

Personal publishing:
Most of the key affordances for personal knowledge management (PKM) are supported. Ability to collect, sort and cluster ideas, an easy way to publish and receive feedback, a facility to gather, sequence and display passing thoughts. Web Assistant makes it easy to capture memes, annotate links, upload files and publish for private or public access via their digital element. These elements can be gathered into themes and published as a web page - sites or they may be sequenced for display in an e-presentation - a great way to present content for self-driven learnig.

Webdesks - offer a wrapper to categorize and index digital elements. Links to important Internet sites, uploaded files and e-presentations are displayed in a frame on screen giving quick access to key content. Webdesks can be published and allocated a permanent URL. Here is an sample PKM webdesk

Collaborative activity:
Dialog, conversation and discussions can be added to web desks or used on their own. Web conferencing (using WebCrossing) adds IM, chat and internal e-mail to the mix allowing synchronous and asynchronous communication in 1:1 and many to many modes.

Plans ahead:
WA has recently updated to WebX 5.0 and plans to add blogs, polling and Wiki functionality shortly. This will make for a very rich ecology.

Example of a training webdesk

As I move deeper into this 'knowledge space', I've come to appreciate the key role of facilitation. Newbies are overcome with navigation difficulties and have trouble grasping the subtle linkages between content and conversation that help to build deep knowledge spaces and wrestle with identity issues associated with persistent conversations.

Web Assistant is indeed a rich environment with a long learning curve. It will be instructive to compare the tradeoff between this mound of functionality and ease of use when comparing Web Assistant to SocialText - combination of Wiki, blog and e-mail.

Stay tunned!

KM in 2003?

Here are some thoughts:

K-logs take hold. This last year has seen the emergence of blogging as an important tool for sharing knowledge. Both at the individual level and behind the corporate firewall. Here is a blogroll of KM folk.

RSS - P2P syndication is rapidly emerging as a new way to spread information and follow distributed persistent conversations.

KM moves into law. A new book, KM-in-law bloggers, articles and great interest. KM is a hot topic in law firms this year. Some links

Social software makes a debut - new collaboration styles and tools such as SocialText will help to make it easy to work together.

I'm sure there are many other thrusts as well. Please share your views