Knowledge-at-work

More on podcasting

What exactly is the role of podcasting in knowledge work?

To be honest - I'm not sure - the place, value and importance of podcasting is still emerging within PKM and corporate KM.

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Here are some areas where podcasting can contribute to businesses

eBriefings - from policy announcements to strategy changes - an easy way to keep employees and customers informed while on-the-go. eBusiness can profit from this genre too.

The opportunities for podcasting appear to be quite wide in the business and personal world but all applications and practices are still very new (post september 2004).

Podcasting tools lists these activities:

                    1.) Talk Shows
                    2.) Music Shows
                    3.) Interviews
                    4.) Story Telling
                    5.) Tutorials
                    6.) Directions
                    7.) Commentaries
                    8.) Sportscasts

Would add product fixes, PR, education, marketing, newsletter and blog supplements.

Clearly there are serious podcasting applications in education (listen)

My previous post reflects on asymmetry, notes the lack of affordances for interaction, collaboration and annotation. Here are more collected podcasting resources.

I'm still uncertain on the value of podcasting for knowledge work. Sure you can access information, but knowledge work is also about participation, creation, dialog, testing, experimentation, learning from failures and networking to others.

What is your experience??

Shallow vs. deep KM

How do you get top management to appreciate that real KM takes time, requires cultural change and needs continual executive support?

No easy answers here. Many articles and consultants recommend finding some quick hits then building the deeper stuff bit by bit once you have a reputation, some trust and a 'voice' within the firm. Engaging the leaders in a dialog can help to surface assumptions, pressing issues, current constraints and top management perceptions.

Explaining the distinction between information and knowledge, the leverage that comes from continuous learning, building and cultivating knowledge flows from customer relationships, supporting innovation and practicing knowledge crafting in communities as a strategy, is never easy. In the end, if the leadership just does not get it, you may have to 'walk away' or bide your time and try later. Knowledge activism requires patience and persistence. You never know how soon things may change, it often just takes one champion or a chance experience / remark to swing the deal!

If you can uncover some of those driving issues, (for your top management) it would be possible to suggest ways in which KM can help. We talked before on ways to do KM without great costs (aside from time), find a potential community, offer assistance and support and a 'forum', help them with simple knowledge practices:

1) Align on terminology and craft critical distinctions, i.e. form an ontology

2) Do some conceptual mapping

3) Encourage them to engage in community search, reflection and inquiry

4) Help them to share and know more about each other

5) Search for & engage customers who are eager to reciprocate, share innovations and gain market insights

Set the example, become a knowledge activist, lead by example. BTW the book by Georg von Krogh et al., 2000 "Enabling Knowledge Creation" has many useful practices and reasons for going deeper into KM.

KM - those first steps

Where to start a KM project?

In my experience things, are different from firm to firm when starting KM. For a number of clients, the quick win is discovering "what they have!", it subtle ways this is often very different from "what they know". Strange how different companies are: some seek to 'discover' their intellectual capital to leverage this in the marketplace, others wish to find 'tacit knowledge stores', a few (those that really get it!) wish to reveal constraints placed on experimentation, discourse, investigation, diffusion; seek to understand how topics and conversations become authorised, regulated, sanctioned or subverted.

Funding a knowledge mapping exercise speeds, decisions, yields insights and returns many times the investment. It helps to expose your client to key KM strategy decisions upfront.

Easy wins are:
1) Expertise registers and directories
2) An integrated customer interface
3) Intranet access to legacy data
4) Personal homepages and electronic request forms
5) Web conferencing (many to many communication)
6) Self-service FAQs to reduce helpdesk calls

Hard issues are:
1) Appreciating KM is not about moving and organizing existing content, it is all about crafting new knowledge and making connections
2) Making the cultural shift from individual to group deliverables, rewards and recognition
3) Learning trust, appreciating diversity, cultivating CoPs and practicing dialog
4) Changing to the notion that most creativity and innovation takes place at the edge of chaos, moving from planning and prediction to experimentation, falling forward, fast response, embracing and living with uncertainty
5) Understanding, appreciating and applying the fundamental distinction between information and knowledge, 'managing' the tensions between explicit and tacit, external & internal knowledge.

Good luck! 

KM waves - more of the same?

Where is KM headed?

Dave Pollard reviews KM paradigms in this thoughtful post that I somehow missed. He sees a paradigm shift from 1st to 2nd generation KM happening in 2005 that follows these trends:

From text to multimedia:
Connection moves from e-mail and phone to VoIP, IM and web presence.

From surveys and networking engines to conversations and expertise finders:
Content shifts from corporate repositories to personal publishing, from best practices to individual stories, from whiteboards & PM tools to mind-maps & open source, from forums to wikis.

From cost savings to personal effectiveness:
Focus moves from content & collection to context and connection. The shift is from groupware to personal empowerment, from single large systems to many simple local personal applications.

Constraints to KM, we have come to appreciate, are not technology driven but rather inhibited by culture, personal identity and behavior - we need soft affordances and accommodations rather than final fixes.

Like Dave, I left wondering if the KM movement has not lost it's 'memory' and we may be seeing a repetition of past blunders as new participants find their KM elixir?

New knowledge formation in community

 

Seems there are a number of avenues to explore here.

Let's start by looking at what we mean by 'new knowledge'. For me this takes us beyond information sharing, (although this may result in new knowing for individuals) knowledge is produced when new worlds are brought forth, when we make sense of our environment, when claims are socially validated and meaning is negotiated & shared.

New knowledge starts with the adoption of different frames / schema / ontologies / concepts by the community. In essence, the group will bring forth a 'new world' through their physical interactions and dialog. Ed Schein points to surfacing individual and group assumptions as the key to reformulating models and frames. He advocates for action research and involvement with the group to co-design new ways of thinking and acting rather than 'forcing'interventions

There are a large number of practices than can assist with knowledge generation. Here are some that work for me:

Mining past experiences for patterns that show the 'best' solution to repetitive issues, participating in pattern writers workshops to surface, document and validate such patterns, arranging patterns in hierarchical level (structural coupling) and crafting a pattern language to improve group communication and recognize gaps.

Making key distinctions: calling attention to subtle differences that make a difference, making the group aware, sharing signs, assigning names and sharing meaning around new conceptualizations. Distinctions can evolve into more formalized patterns with the recognition of repetition, addition of context, specification of forces and solutions and validation.

Sharing ontologies: developing agreement and sharing the meaning behind key concepts, bounding a discourse domain, deciding what is 'in' and what is 'out', surfacing relationships between and giving names to concepts and abstractions.

At a higher level the community needs to engage in practices such as language experimentation, building prototypes, teaching each other, structured inquiry, group reflection. They can recognize idea generations, i.e. time delimited, divergent - convergent - summary - critique - consensus formulation, and use this to bootstrap the next generation [Engelbart].

Part of these practices can be to record rationale, structure a corporate memory around key issues, capture 'as is' key situational descriptors and answers as Paul suggests in his descriptive enumeration, [DE] practice.

There are a number of affordances that can help here. Facile annotation, interactive (living) repositories, intuitive navigation, privacy gradients, many to many communication, persistent conversations, shared (situated) spaces, instant notification and presence detection.

Before any community can make use of these practices, there must be some 'attractor' to support alignment, encourage engagement, allow the formation of trust and to help with the formation of both group and individual identities. The ability to hold identity in check, engage in creative abrasion, enter deep dialog and having permision to fail forwards, is far more influential than any technological affordance.

This 'innovative social capital', as Mark McElroy calls it, is helped by having a shared purpose, empowering policies, leadership that walks their talk, open communications, equal access to information of market conditions and customer contacts.

Knowledge generation in communities requires a balance, it is not for the faint-hearted or for those with frail or ultra-strong identities, it requires hard work, empathy and a continuous thirst for learning. CoPs are formed through self-selection, many come, but very few stay to form the core, teach the periphery, build quality knowledge, and generate true innovation or really new knowledge.

Innovation may come from a variety of sources e.g. problems & issues (internal or external to the firm), from scanning the environment, from identification of gaps and deliberate attempts to fill them, from a strong group desire for learning, from a drive to be 'the best' or a vision to be the market leader, or the most flexible firm in an industry segment, or a policy to have 30% of revenues derived from new products each year......

Behind all this, knowledge generation is fundamentally a social human pursuit, an art, a tacit elixir, a fine balance and much mystery.

Podcasting for knowledge

Reflecting on the role and potential of podcasting for knowledge work - will it deliver JIT knowledge?

Listen to Tom Davenport's thoughts on KM. Will this genre really promote our sense-making, awareness, understanding and learning?

Currently podcasting is very much one-way broadcasting, true it lowers the barriers and access to radio sound bites, but there is limited feedback opportunity and almost no interaction. Affordances for annotation, commentary, refutation and analysis are missing or serial at best.

Improved indexing, increased attention by major search engines, personal search engines, a multitude of podcast directories and podcatchers, are making it easier to locate, subscribe and download targeted audio files. Here is a good resource list. A combination of blogs or webpages and podcasts offers increased feedback potential and may help with notification (via RSS feeds).

Podcasting and audio files IMO offer value in these areas:

• Audio FAQs 
• Conference reports
• Audio bite solutions to common problems for resolving issues 'on the go'
• Awareness and industry news when multi-tasking or on the commute
• Self-learning and serial programs on specialized topics

Here are some flows around podcasting in graphical form.

Thoughts