Knowledge-at-work

Anywhere - Anytime knowledge??

Many organizations have pinned their hopes on delivery of knowledge anywhere, anytime, just-in-time.

Time to share some thoughts:

In many ways, this latent desire parallels the technology vs. people schism in KM. Almost all the talk and writings are about technology choices, possibilities and needs - there is little sustained discussion around the social aspects, the connections, relationships, trust, identity issues that must be in-place for any meaningful knowledge exchange and sharing.

Most anywhere, anytime knowledge concepts tend to regard knowledge as an object, relatively static, possible to represent in digital formats, self-contained, easy to characterize and classify. These are properties of information rather than knowledge, they tend to gloss over issues of audience, context, shared understanding, trust, history & background, common language, mental models, value sets and worldviews.

JIT knowledge is possible, but it requires additional layers to be enabled.

If we have a shared space, have formed a relationship, built trust, made distinctions, crafted a pattern language together and are comfortable 'being' rather than just 'knowing', there is a foundation for exchanging, creating, sharing, validating and improving knowledge, then conditions for listening, becoming aware, engaging in deep dialog and trusting the shared content can be established.

The lofty goal of tossing knowledge nuggets over the proverbial cubicle wall is clearly far slower, far more social and less-certain, than ensuring technology driven access, enabling instant repository search or wrapping content in meta-data, would suggest.

Here is a link to 'the social life of knowledge' that takes an EU look at these very issues.

In my experience, anywhere / anytime / self-access knowledge qualifies as a myth, hoax or software selling ruse.

Knowledge-at-work | METS presentation

My METS presentation is available here in audio and video.

You can access the text at this link

Login = TSKMA
password = tskma

Navigate to Denham Grey>>PerForum and follow the child links.

Bicycle knowledge

This next week 07/21/04 I will be giving a presentation on KM in Cincinnati at the METS center

The theme will be knowledge at Zipp - the bicycle firm where I work. My talk will use the Tour de France as the metaphor. We will explore

* Knowledge mapping - where is key knowledge located?, what are the opportunities and gaps?, just what kind of knowledge are we talking about? why do boundary objects provide a useful framework here? what is the value of our expertise?

* Corporate memory - how we collect, store, remember, learn, exchange and protect our competitive advantage. I will be sharing experiences with using SocialText - a bloki, to keep departments and distributors informed, share ideas and collaborate on projects

* Tacit knowledge - finger tips and finesse. Much of the real knowledge in our manufacturing sits in the fingertips of our workforce. They 'know' when the material changes, have heuristics to deal with humidity and temperature changes, change they operations to accommodate changes due to resin aging and more

* Idea management - sharing insights. Looking at ways to surface innovations, coping with experimentation and trying to maintain quality and process standards, capturing incremental improvements

* Business scanning - collecting bicycle intelligence. Exploring ways to determine industry and customer preferences, divine competitor strategies and monitor market shifts. At Zipp we involve all our staff, partners, vendors and distribution chain in 'painting a picture'

* Collaboration - working with distributors, capturing customer needs. Gathering stories of good and bad product experiences, finding & implementing customer work-arounds, sharing repair scripts and short-cuts.

During the talk we will be using a visual hypertext tool (The Brain), wireless poling and survey technology to incentivise audience participation, capture feedback in realtime and seek answers to emergent questions.

Ever had that sinking feeling you are being dropped from the peleton as new technology decends?, looking for new ways to collaborate on a strategy or coordinating to chase down a break-away?, is your team self-organizing or do you rely on command and control?, do you have the agility and the shared mindset to react to a sudden event?

Should be an interesting & instructive experience!

Arranging ideas

"In my book, knowledge management boils down to arranging ideas"

This post by Amy Gahran captures something I feel quite strongly about - the role and place of thought organization vs. dialog, flow and emergence in KM.

Structuring personal ideas and thoughts is a very small part of KM as I see things - it's far more important to engage in dialog, participate in discourse, maintain networks and assist in the social construction of knowledge.

The power of knowledge does not seem to come from (re)working explicit stuff, but from making new connections, helping a group form new and meaningful distinctions, crafting, vetting and applying patterns, building shared meaning, keeping each-other aware of important events, changes and happenings.

John More has been exploring the attributes of explicit knowledge and pointing to the large reserves of tacit and implicit knowledge that underlies much of what we know. Seems as we spend more energy in structuring explicit knowledge, so we reduce the potential for reaching the periphery.

Arranging thoughts is but a small step away from treating knowledge almost exclusively as an object, branding and trading knowledge assets, accounting and building intellectual capital. Not the core of KM by any measure.

Now your thoughts!

KM encyclopedia

A community effort to gather our KM insights?

Can you contribute?

KM encyclopedia

Just come to my notice. Let's examine their ontology

KM on-line in decline??

Where should you be participating to gain the maximum from on-line activities?

My feeling is KM on-line discussion activity is strongly on the decline on-line. Over the past 6 months the KM on-line scene has changed rather dramatically. Compare the last time I visited this area.

The top spot - long held by Brint's ThinkTank has been vacated, this board has not see a new topic posted for the last month! This happened at roughly the same time Brint introduced on-line polling - any connection? Perhaps their poor interface design and confusing navigation is catching up?

Activity has shifted to the AOK listserv where Jerry Ash has maintained an excellent list of star presenters for the past 2 years. There have been some very interesting exchanges in the recent head-to-head between Dave Snowden and Steve Barth on PKM vs. CKM

The EU knowledgeboard has experienced steady interest and has started to use more synchronous mediums such as IM and phone conferences. Debra Amidon returns to the scene to explore innovation this month. I'm not too hopeful that anything new will result. Book review

The ACT-km listserv on Yahoo groups suspended Firestone and McElroy who indulged in a tit for tat type postings branding their critical rationalism, Popper and search for truth as the only way forward. This listserv is by far the most active and diverse right now (aside from AOK). Yahoo groups run by KMCI, KMPro and the many groups started by Ed Swanstrom have all but ground to a halt.

KM bloggers bloom

We have seen a remarkable shift towards blogging this past year. Perhaps this is helped by RSS aggregators that enable subscription?, by the rise of powerful blog search tools? or an emergent KM blogging community?

Time to update and revise & anneal my wiki list of KM bloggers methinks.

Do you any favorite KM watering holes to share?

Knowledge exchanges in the blogosphere

Do blogs really provide an easy, effective medium for deep dialog, creative abrasion and sincere knowledge exchanges?

IMO voicing, personal publishing (= push?), journalling, ephemeral commentary and cross-linking to like-minded blogs, is but a small facet of effective exchange.

At times I think k-logs are hyped by a few evangelists. If you look closely at the record, things are not all that rosy

* reciprocity is very poor - bloggers tend to say this does not matter, it is more important to be heard, to 'voice' or 'push' and publish your view - but reciprocity and a compact record help preserve the memory and emergent meaning

* 'community' happens from individual enclaves - bloggers retreat to their personal spaces to reply, the common 'space' is then fractal, distributed and walled - it lacks cohesion and persistence

* the 'record' is fragmented even categories and RSS feeds do not produce a coherent easily readable discourse that flows

* empathy is low - most times it is about branding and spreading memes and personal opinion rtaher than engaging in dialog.

Feel you need a more neutral container, a safe 'knowledge' space to commune, a 'Ba' to build trust and sustain dialog, equal edit access to encourage true collaborative writing (annealing / refactoring / facile annotation), an easier turn-taking flow to practice persistent conversation before you can have full sharing, develop the cohesion & trust to enable creative abrasion, supply sufficient context for sharing meaning and a pull space for deep listening / reflection.

K-logs are great for gathering news, RSS certainly helps with being informed, blog tools assist with finding memes - somehow I still feel blogging lacks the structures to engage in deep dialog. A cursory look shows little sustained turntaking, blog writers seldom reply directly to comments in their own blogs and themes 'die' quickly as individual writers move on to the next big item. Bloggers offer opinions rather than ask questions - inquiry and exploration are essential ingredients in knowledge formation.

What is your experience?

Connecting for knowledge

Valdis Krebs nails it once again!

How can managers improve the connectivity within their organization? Here are a few places to get started:

Look beyond the individual -- uncover their interconnections and multiple group memberships.

Know the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge and how it is shared and transferred.

Reward people for directly sharing their know-how, for including others in their knowledge-sharing networks.

Design computer systems that facilitate conversations and sharing of knowledge -- think communication, not storage/retrieval.

Help women and people of color connect to key knowledge flows and communities in the organization. This may help eliminate the glass ceiling.

Recruit new hires through the networks of current employees -- they will be happier, adjust quicker, and stay longer.

When transferring employees keep in mind their connections. Exchanging employees with a diverse network of ties can create shortcuts between departments or teams and greatly improve the overall information flow.

Ensure better coordination of behavior between departments or projects by adding crosscuts to minimize the path length of their information exchange networks. To reduce delays you want some redundancy in the paths -- if one is blocked then alternative communication paths are available.

For the HR department it is no longer sufficient to just 'hire the best'. You must hire and wire! Start new networks, help employees and teams connect --connect the unconnected!

What is connected knowledge? A competitive advantage! Your competition may duplicate the nodes in your organization, but not the pattern of connections that have emerged through sense-making, feedback and learning within your business network. And if you get Vancho's take on Einstein's formula correct, then connected knowledge is pure energy!

Beyond annotation

Annotation is: participation, engagement, collaboration, communication, contribution, critique. Adding to the diversity, having a 'voice' in asynchronous 'conversation', sharing your perceptions, surfacing assumptions, values and meaning, building identity, articulating deep thoughts.

An interesting twist to annotating is allowing everyone to edit everything. In extreme programming, this is known as refactoring, here the idea is to simplify the code without loosing functionality and is backed by a test battery that is run frequently to verify any changes.

Text annealing refers to changes in the original document made by individuals to reflect their version of the meaning and to make things clearer. Over time, what emerges is a text that all can live with, a way to surface the group mind and understaning.

This is a very different dynamic to having individual notes attached in serial fashion to the original document / object and then having a periodic revision constructed from the inputs.

An open source tool that has arisen to support these 'open' annotation styles is Wiki.

Annealing and refactoring seem strange to many folks when they first start, there is a fear of loosing your 'voice', of changing someone else's creation, and there is the danger of whole scale destruction due to the lax editing rights. I have found Wiki to be a very useful as a personal note pad and memory manger. If you are interested, take a peek at my open source, collaborative KM repository and do some annealing of your own.

KM Wiki

Here is a link to a conversation on Wikis, where to find them, what they are, how to set up one for yourself or how to subscribe to a public Wiki that is free or password protected (may require a fee).

Wiki discussion

Go beyond annotation - anneal and refactor