Knowledge-at-work

Corporate memory - the hard way

The dream:

One of the central themes of KM is the design, building and maintenance of an effective 'corporate memory', a repository, a dare I say it, knowledge-base. Here the intellectual jewels of the organization will reside, easily accessible, expertly indexed, intuitively browseable. Here experts and novices will come for self-help knowledge, they will find the correct solution quickly, be able to apply the solutions with confidence, and learn from the 'collective experience of the organization'.

There is only one problem! this is a real dream. Many dollars have been invested, many organizations have egg on their collective faces, many repositories lie unused, shunned by novices and experts alike and yet there are more KM projects starting each day with the same vision / mission and yet another dream. Perhaps we think portals or automatic profiling or collaborative systems or social software will do it this time!

Where did we go wrong?

Knowledge vs. information:
We failed to clearly appreciate and understand that we were storing information, that context is key, content without community is not king, feedback, critique, continual validation and annotation is everything, information has a social side, knowledge flows via relationships not via access to static content.

Shared space:
We did not design for dialog, we built a vault to secure objects, when we badly needed a place to support relationships. We indexed, clustered and classified the content, when we really needed to point to people, we imposed order, when we should have co-designed, permitted emergence and shared the meaning, we had workflow and access rights, when we needed empathy, support, evangelism and interaction.

A hollow collection:
We discovered.
1) Collecting information is a breeze, even elicitation of rules and personal heuristics, [if we even thought that far], is the easy part, getting people to trust, apply & use 'strange' knowledge from others, is the major concern.

2) Knowledge emerges over time, it requires an environment of trust, a shared language, a familiarity, strong validation from colleagues you trust and lives in a community not in static text.

3) Knowledge to be used, requires understanding of context, rationale, implications, limitations and continual testing. Knowledge is fragile, it lives in the stories & spaces between individuals and communities, not in a database or entirely in a set of rules or collection of examples, or in policies or processes.

4) Knowledge changes, what you elicit the first time is likely to alter as individuals and groups validate, connect and use it, we were not prepared for unending cycles, we did not focus on reciprocity and
feedback.

5) You will not get real quality knowledge without trust, strong critique, deep dialog, open communications. If you do not elicit with an appreciation of maintaining the identity of the group / indivdual, you will only get shallow stuff.

6) Knowledge comes in many forms, we did not decide carefully what type of knowledge we wanted (knowledge of customers, of procedures, of policies, of strategy, of competitors, knowledge of best practices, knowledge from failures (the hardest to get, the most valuable?), knowledge of people - relationships, tips, tricks, short cuts, 'good' solutions, heuristics......)

7) The best elicitation is driven by dialog & quality questions, to get to the really good stuff, you need to have strong relationships and almost equally deep domain understanding, otherwise the gems get lost. We thought this was a library (organising and catalog) function.

8) Knowledge acquisition is NOT extracting concepts from documents, clustering objects, mining transactions. No system or tool can do it for you! we fell into the knowledge 'harvesting' trap along with others:

http://www.nelh.nhs.uk/knowledge_management/km2/harvesting_toolkit.asp
http://www.intelligentkm.com/feature/feat1.shtml
http://www.noweco.com/cerebe.htm
http://www.teximus.com/ProductFeatureCategory.jsp?instId=200&lang=en

Have we really learned anything yet????

On practice & tools

How do you balance the need for practice and the leverage of a tool while working with knowledge?

Here are some of my key knowledge practices
* crafting distinctions
* collaborative writing
* writing patterns
* compiling a 'source document'
* design & stewarding a living glossary
* personal networking
* deep dialog
* sharing thoughts and meaning
* co-design of collaborative spaces
* building team ontologies

Some 'tools' I work with are:

- Inspiration for concept mapping http://www.inspiration.com/
- Expert choice for AHP (qualitative) comparisons http://www.expertchoice.com/
- Webassistant for knowledge portals: http://www.webassistant.com/
- Exsys for decision models http://www.exsys.com/
- QuickTopic for annotation http://www.quicktopic.com/
- TypePad for blogging: http://www.typepad.com/
- PyWiki as a PIM: http://www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?DenhamGrey
- SocialText as an collaborative intranet: http://www.socialtext.com/

Still believe it is not the tools, but the empathy and social affordances that provide the leverage

Some more thoughts to share on knowledge practices

Community or capital?

Everyone positions themselves along the spectrum from knowledge creation (awareness, learning, community) to intellectual capital (knowledge assets, branding, knowledge exchanges). Through long exposure, I have come to recognize my passions and interests are clearly at the knowledge creation end. What I see happening at the other end is more about economics, PR, market caps and packaging than about the things that really matter to me, i.e. generating and understanding new insights, capturing experience and expertise, sharing and exploring. I do not wish to label or denegrate here, just my empathy is at the roots rather than in the leaves.

Intellectual capital is a HOT topic, it is the right emphasis to attract investment and to excite corporate sponsors, the right place to make money. I'm always left with this nagging question? Where does the knowledge really come from that we will package and sell as Intellectual Capital? Can you just go and buy IC or must it be nurtured, grown and supported?

A wellsprings person, my emphasis is on social capital, even the attempts to quantify "human capital" I find a little false, the key IMO is crafting supporting environments, building the right culture & attitudes, those are real difficult to see as 'capital' in any form.

The real challenges lie in getting groups to leverage their learning, to combine and synthesise their insights, experience and expertise. Once you have explicit knowledge or information it is a very different skill set that takes that product and positions it in the marketplace, negotiates value or legal protection.

My perception is that working with raw knowledge is the hard stuff, getting innovation cranked up, getting folks excited about learning, thinking and creating new stuff, is where the real gaps are. Once you have an intellectual product, you can apply proven methods to package, position, price and pitch.

What do you think?

Thinking of KM tools

How do you slice and dice the many KM related technologies and tools?

Etienne Wenger has done a great job methinks

So what are the essential or core KM genre?

1) Document / content / publishing management (includes intranets)
2) Helpdesks / customer service
3) CRM (includes sales force automation)
4) Business intelligence (includes technology scanning, newsfeeds)
5) Activity co-ordination (calendars, event notification, PM)
6) Knowledge markets / exchanges (FAQs, blogs)
7) Collaboration tools (discussions, chat, IM)
8) Community / association tools (membership, content, personal profiles, discussions, learning)
9) Learning environments (assessemnt, tracking, content, facilitation)
10) Corporate memory (conversation & content, annotation, reminding)

Next come environments and enablers:

- Intranets
- Extranets, VPNs
- Portals
- Number & text crunchers
- Visualization engines
- ASP delivery models
- Meta search & clustering

Beneath this level we then have supporting technologies:

a) Search
b) Clustering and profiling
c) Asynchronous discussion
d) Synchronous conversations
e) Web publishing
f) Notification & annotation
g) Persistent objects
h) Privacy gradients & security
i) Work flow & routing
j) Intelligent agents
k) Data & text mining

At a lower level we have:

i) Interfaces
ii) Algorithms
iii) Exchange standards
iv) Tools e.g. ontology builders, time reasoners, rule engines, triggers, workflow agents, shopping carts, directory services, encription, matching & reputation calculus.....

What are the main models where KM has shown great and consistent returns?

Automatic profiling: clustering and indexing of document collections and electronic messages, making content and people connections in-the-fly. Autonomy, Semio, Tacit, Orbital
Customer service knowledge bases: capturing solutions to common problems and publishing these on the web so customers can help themselves self-sevice. Think Eureka, World Bank stories.
Personalization: serving dynamic content based on web behavior mined from click streams.
Collaborative filters advice, recommnedations and suggestions based on similarity measures from a large database.

Further thoughts and links

TNKM & the KMCI

Don't fret if you can't place the acronyms.
TNKM = The New Knowledge Management and
KMCI = Knowledge Management Consortium International.

TNKM

Is the title of a recent book by Mark McElroy that puts forward certain claims about KM and how the field should be viewed.

TNKM Chapter 1

Mark makes a key distinction between 2nd generation KM (about knowledge creation) vs. 1st generation KM (about knowledge sharing) and sets forth a 'framework' to understand the role of knowledge claims, the relationship between knowledge and truth and differences between managing knowledge and managing the processes around knowledge production and distribution.

Here is how I view things from a post at The KnowledgeBoard:

I find Mark's quest to link truth and knowledge to be noble, idealistic and not quite 'with it'. Knowledge, in practical terms, is socially & locally constructed, utilitarian, satisficing and not the big 'truth' that the KMCI holds it to be.

Knowledge, when you consider the basics, is 'what works', we can argue context (local vs. universal), time frames (now or forever) and audience (my family your tribe) endlessly, sure we sometimes pay homage to larger system impacts, we attempt to discern longer term influences and effects, we may even embark on a quest for 'truth'; but we live in a world where decisions must be made, where most times we draw on tacit feelings, intuition and pure 'gut feel', where rational logics, explicit claim formulation and validation tracking, are an abstraction and an expensive artifice.

I wonder what Mark and Joe Firestone really think of key ethnographical writings by Ralph Stacey, Edwin Hutchins, Gary Klein and the work of John Seely Brown?. All these authors seem to come at knowledge, cognition, learning, expertise and decisions from a very different, more fruitful and pragmatic perspective than a quest for 'truth' and an abstract framework around claims.

Experience & patterns

Raison d'être

Patterns when applied with energy, adequate social negotiation, critique and sensitivity, represent meta-best practices. They capture the best of the best. An assembly of patterns gives rise to a super language, a high level efficient and very rich discourse. Patterns are part representation, part knowledge artifact (thing), part compact solutions and part validated experience. Patterns may represent strong reification, they carry meaning and an investment of community energy (cathexis) when constructed and shared.

Looking around the knowledge management landscape, I see lots of stuff on intellectual capital, knowledge architectures, data & text mining tools, portals CRM and more. What I do not see is discussions around how knowledge is created, how it is tested, how it gets transformed from implicit personal opinion & experience into shared meaning and becomes part of group understanding.

Most KM folks are busy creating communities, building intranets, selling KM consulting, doing fancy data and text mining, but there is very little going on at the deeper levels. Let's take some examples:

1) How does a group augment and organize its awareness, i.e. practice 'being mindful'?

2) What are the qualities, economic importance and means to validate & improve our collective knowledge?

3) What is the 'organizational mind' , what does thinking together really mean?, how can we improve and use these concepts in business?

4) How can we decode the knowledge & realize economic advantage from knowledge embedded in our collective practices?

5) Can we gather best practices and explore the way a group can know more than the sum of all the individual members knowledge?

6) Is there such a thing as group consciousness?

7) How can we leverage our collective learning?

8) What are effective ways to transfer sticky, situated, distributed knowledge?

Patterns and ontologies may be part of the answer!

What is a Pattern?

Each pattern defines a context of use, a recurrent problem that needs to solved, a group of "forces" pushing and pulling in different directions, and how those forces might be resolved to best solve the problem - a working solution based on validated experience. Both good and bad (anti-patterns) examples are also provided.

Pattern Language is an attempt to analyze, group, store and reuse ageless wisdom. They are not so abstract as to require the rediscovery of how to apply them successfully, nor are they overly specific to a certain situation or culture. They are somewhere in between. A pattern explicitly describes possible solutions to a issues within a specified or similar context, by describing the qualities of working solutions and the steps to implement them.

Remember that a pattern language does not only serve as a guideline for building or designing something, but as a system for talking about, deconstructing and classifying things.

Read further:

http://www.cpsr.org/conferences/diac02/patterns/patterns.html

Wiki pages on patterns

I will cover ontologies later

Mapping knowledge

Using a questionnaire has proved, in my experience, to be the least effective way to map and understand knowledge gaps, surface issues , to identify worthwhile new practices or opportunities

Why?

Knowledge is a complex subject, most people confuse information & knowledge and need exposure & training to understand and appreciate the distinction

A questionnaire will return what the respondent want you to 'see' rather than their assumptions, true experiences, actual issues and deep desires

There are always problems with 'your' interpretation and scoring no matter how carefully the survey wording is crafted and how mant times it is tested

To appreciate knowledge gaps, you need to understand the personal networks and work context - This is impossible to get via a survey - it requires immersion

Answers are clouded by personal and group assumptions / worldviews which are mostly tacit and unarticulated

Awareness of knowledge gaps comes best through conversation and engagement in practice - This awareness is emergent, never complete and strongly dependent on prior experiences and exposures

Surveys tend to overstimate the problem and the returns are very difficult to aggregate for the resons given

May I suggest some alternatives?

Convene an openspace gathering so participants can expore and reflect on their issues and gaps

Conduct an ethnographic, action research project observing and asking questions insitu to obtain situated recall and to document exceptions

Observe rather than ask - people forget, they remember selectively and with constant bias

Knowledge gaps come in many forms, the most prevalent is a lack of a forum (community) to surface distinctions, share insights, support learning and having trusting colleagues to make you aware

Conducting a knowledge mapping exercise is likely to give a more holistic picture and a far better ROI.

Knowing when you 'matter'

Art Kleiner is leading an interesting chautauqua around his new book on 'core theory'.

"...multinational corporations to political parties, exist to satisfy the collective will of some key group of people who comprise The Core Group, the people "who really matter."

* What does it mean to be a member of a core group?

* Do you have to be within the organization to be core?

* How do you recognize a core member?

* What must you do to become core?

* Is being a core member always desireable?

"in every company, agency, institution and enterprise, there is some Core Group of key people – the people who really matter. Every organization is continually acting to fulfill the perceived needs and priorities of its Core Group. It’s sometimes hard to see this, because the nature and makeup of that Core Group varies from workplace to workplace, and so do the mission statements and other espoused purposes that get voiced to the rest of the world. But everything that the organization might do – meeting customer needs, creating wealth, delivering products or services, fulfilling promises, developing the talents of employees, fostering innovation, establishing a secure workplace, making a better world, and, oh yes, returning investment to shareholders – comes second. Or later. What comes first, in every organization, is keeping the Core Group satisfied."

Visit Art Kleiner's website

KM questions

Asking hard questions is a key knowledge work competency

(1) How is organizational knowledge and its management to be conceptualized and researched?

(2) How is organizational knowledge produced, used, renewed, stored, retrieved, transmitted, and shared? How is it measured?

(3) What types of organizational knowledge are related to different types of innovation procedures and business systems?

(4) What information technology applications and systems support effective knowledge management in organizations?

(5) What organization designs facilitate the creation, development and effective deployment of organizational knowledge and why?

(6) What are the mechanisms that enable (or disable) organizational learning, how, why, and with what consequences?

(7) How do organizational learning and knowledge management contribute to organizational innovation and change?

(8) How do organizations remember what they know, and how is organizational memory strengthened (or weakened), updated, and used in particular contexts and through particular procedures and systems?

(9) How does social capital in organizations preserve knowledge, in what form, and for what use?

(10) What are the best strategies for managing organizational knowledge?

(11) How does knowledge management relate to business strategy and organizational performance?

(12) What evidence is there that firms’ competitive advantage stems from difficult-to-replicate knowledge assets?

(13) What processes do organizations use to synthesize and acquire knowledge resources, generate new applications from those resources, and develop dynamic capabilities and value-creating strategies?

(14) How to effectively manage knowledge across organizational borders?

(15) What are the relevant links between learning and innovation in organizations? How are they best managed?

(16) Is there a significant connection between knowledge and power and politics in organizations? What are its implications for organizational effectiveness?

[Source: http://www.learning-org.com/02.07/0144.html ]

Conference CFPs are often a great source for hard questions

Content, conversation, context

Three things need to come together to help learning and to assit knowledge work

Content
We need an easy way to capture thoughts, ideas, web links and useful didital fragments, e.g. quotations, pictures, graphics, documents. Once safely stored we have to index, cluster, assign meta-data, search, navigate, annotate, cross-link and collect feedback. Here are some thoughts on designing a living knowledge glossary that are applicable to gathering content too.

Conversation
I'm convinced that guestbooks, comment forms, IM links and chat spaces just do not cut it when you need to engage in deep dialog, practice collaborative thinking, work at a distance, build a corporate memory. After enaging in many KM forums, I've come to the conclusion, "we need a linear scrolling interface" - joining a virtual conversation that has explicit turn taking rather than post insertion to appreciate context, ease into the 'flow' and promote clearer shared meaning.

There are subtle advantages to persistent conversation, intergrated environments for idea management and an emergent social software genre that looks promising.

Context
Is the subtle gost that surrounds any effort to work with knowledge and to enable tacit transfers. Here are some further thoughts

Have been experimenting with knowledge portals from WebAssistant for more than a year, trying to work through these issues of finding technical and social affordances for knowledge work.

If you any ideas to share please jump in