Knowledge-at-work

KM pickings

Looking back over the KM scene after nearly 10 years what have we delivered?

Yellowpages
In my book, enabling connections, helping people to find people, finding competencies and expertise has been the key benefit. Yellowpages come in many shades and sizes - from auto-text miners sifting through e-mails and IMs for matching keywords to advanced neural networks matching patterns from training examples or social affordances such as informal virtual conversations to surface needs and abilities. Yellowpages when applied with empathy and nurtured in a climate of trust have delivered the highest and quickest return of all KM activities.

Lessons learned
Never as well received as 'best practices', learning histories, AAR (after action reviews) and formal reflection sessions where implications can be openly examined where alternatives are considered and where feedback is evaluated, have proved to be a key KM take-away

Best practices
Learning by refinement and by comparison (benchmarking) is often touted as the main leverage of KM. Far too often the repositories have fallen short of expectations, quality leaves much to be desired and participation is very unequal. Perhaps the largest failing of best practices has been inadequate specification of context and ability to maintain momentum.

Peer assists
Getting help from colleagues that have 'been and done' it before seems self-evident, but this activity is the one that is least practiced. Mostly it is a cultural thing - a reluctance (or impossibility) to work across functional silos. Organizations that commit the peer assists also have a good record of promoting mentoring and have a feel for the value of transferring tacit knowledge

Communities of Practice - CoPs
The last to arrive, CoPs seem to have legs. Informal continuous learning is a core competency at both individual and group levels. We pay far too much attention to boundaries, governance, charters and sponsorship and still have a ways to go nurturing the environment for healthy CoPs - rewarding learning, providing time for mentoring, supporting experimentation and encouraging learning from failure.

What lies ahead for KM?

Working taxonomies
Firms that develop a lingua franca, really share meaning, will be the first to take advantage of emergent technologies such as semantic web, autonomous agents and enabling the virtual agile organization.

Patterns
Gathering validated solutions to repetitive problems and involving the community in the formulation and testing is a proven way to capture expertise. Firms that identify, name, use and apply patterns will leap-frog ahead. They will have the foundation to avoid costly errors, see new opportunities, build on past winners and spot gaps.

I'm waiting to see what new knowledge practices emerge from WIFY, VoIP, SMS, Blogging and P2P file sharing.

Please let me know if you see any!

KM strategy is easy!

So you have read Davenport & Prusak or Von Krogh etal, you can drag Nonaka 1965 or O'Dell & Grayson from your shelves, you are now reading Knowledge Management and the Smarter Lawyer, the November 2003 copy of the Journal of Knowledge Management has landed on your desk and you have just returned from KM Europe's latest conference.

Now it time to survey the KM landscape- check the signposts:

Bottom up or top down?
Making knowledge work can be very hard if the organization itself is not prepared, does not have knowledge as part of 'the' plan, is blind to the need for opening up communications and just does not see the need to build a supportive culture of care and sanction for knowledge activities. Finding and supporting communities of practice which have no 'market', sanction or reception for their insights is a lonely road.

Re-use or innovation?
Let's clean up our internal act first, capture what we know, distribute local knowledge and avoid re-invention! Often firms become stuck in first generation "supply side" KM as Mark McElroy calls it, and never make it to sustainable competitive advantage from improved innovation or increased flexibility and adaptation to the market.

Technology or people?
Most firms know the answer here but do the easy one. They then wonder why ROI is low, a new fad come knocking and how to write-off those large IT expenditures.

Process or practice?
We need to have a clear understanding of how knowledge will be created in this firm then make sure everyone follows the approved process!, right on - you have just lost most of the opportunity and intrinsic motivation before you get out of the starting blocks. Knowledge work defies a straight jacket and k. process optimization will lead you into the wilderness.

Language or representation?
Should you concentrate on emergent concepts or automated inference? Will it be time in dialog forums or validating rule repositories that gather all the energy and funding? Do you need to pump up the ideas entering the firm or tighten up on the use of 'quack' heuristics?

Social learning or knowledge portal?
Do we really need to have folks wandering around talking all day?, let's rather build a super intranet and post all the best information so employees can read and make valid decisions based on the right information just when they need it. But people need to belong, to identify, to be stakeholders, to co-create before they will trust, use, evangelize, share and understand.

We need to focus here!, is a common cry so please take your pick:, customer insights, solutions to common problems, mapping what we know, building yellowpages, inventory [intellectual, human, structural, customer] capital, building relationships, capturing product knowledge, monitoring competitors, mining transactions, capturing web behavior.

Aha said the sage, what you need is balance, a bit here and some from there so:
Start small, grab the low hanging fruits, avoid enterprise wide technology solutions, culture an ecology of communities, encourage an informal idea market, work on hiring profiles, start new web forums that cut across silos, play with language, cultivate the emergent activists, encourage boundary spanners, staunch the IC outflow through professional networks by listening to frustrations, always watch the outfield, make business intelligence & customer knowledge everyones job, listen to newbies, kill losers fast......

OK test yourself:

* Do we really recognize and value knowledge creation (innovation)?
* Do we reward learning (even when it comes from failure?)
* Do we match quality talent with quality ideas even when they are not our own?
* Do we cultivate relationships and show empathy for intellectual diversity?
* Do we encourage deep dialog and creative abrasion
* Can we discover, share and use key business rules?

And who ever said KM was easy?

Source

KM Models - mix & match

Just how many KM models are out there?

Here is a partial listing from KmWiki

Part of the issue is scale KM models cover basic knowledge and information related activities such as gathering, structuring, storing and publishing to highly abstract life cycle conceptualizations such as the KMCI KLC

Rather liked the review of KM model taxonomies presented by Kakabadse, etal in their article " Reviewing the knowledge management literature: towards a taxonomy", Journal of Knowledge Management 7 (4) 2003 pp75-91.

Network Models
The focus is on connections, acquisition, sharing, transfers via horizontal exchanges. Important knowledge resides in a network of actors connected by 'boundary spanners'. Awareness of insights and information outside formal teams and groups is a key driver. Knowledge work is seen as building social relationships, social capital and attending to reciprocity. Competencies include empathy, facilitation networking via telephony and Internet tools.

Cognitive Models
Knowledge is seen as a corporate asset that requires careful capture, representation, storage, measurement, preservation and dissemination. Value comes from repetitive application of captured best practices and avoiding pitfalls documented as lessons learned. Key focus is on reuse, replication, standardization and 'weeding' of outdated routines. Finding the correct balance between exploration and exploitation has eluded many organizations that follow this model

Community models
Recognizes the close relationship between self-organization, continuous learning and informal exchanges for knowledge stewardship. Knowledge is founded in the thinking that circulates in a community, where language is shared, trust allows exploration of heuristics, patterns may be crafted and subtle symptoms and repetitive working solutions are spread via story telling.

Philosophical models
Based on interactive Socratic dialog within a strategic context this model values deep questioning of assumptions and continual inquiry into behavior of competitors, markets and internal processes. This approach values personalization over codification and uses very little technology. The key cultural drivers are maintaining open communication, encouraging deep reflection & learning, creative abrasion and belief justification.

Quantum model
This the authors maintain "builds on quantum physics, emergent quantum technology and consequential economy" I do not understand how this fits their schema yet!

Clearly it is possible to follow a mix of these models. Organizations that have made good KM progress in my experience subscribe to parts of the Network, Philosophical and Community models with a little cognitive modeling thrown into the mix. The key drivers seem to be connections & relationships, trust, empathy, community, deep dialog and technology to capture persistent conversations.

Facile annotation

Shared meaning is an important goal for any company trying to survive in the slower knowledge economy. With shared meaning, comes easier communication, greater alignment, more profitable identification of gaps, market shifts and competitor strategies, easier cross community sharing and improved awareness.

A key 'affordance' for supporting shared meaning and increasing understanding, is annotation, the ability to respond to written text, critique, amend and anneal. Facile annotation speeds idea cycles, introduces diversity of thoughts, supports & improves knowledge claim validation, creates conditions for synergy and helps with the emergence of new connections and promotes knowledge flow.

Annotation may be a digital Post it Note, a note in the margin, a comment on an instant message log by a 3rd party, a formal critique, comments on a memo, adding new content or correcting someone's spelling errors. What we need is the ability to attach annotations to a wide variety of objects (power point presentations, styled Word documents, discussion posts, chat room logs). Such annotations should be with or without date & time stamps, explicit author or pointers to the source. We should make provision for annotations to annotations as well.

Annotations serve to capture key learnings and to allow the emergence of improved context and meaning. Although the ability to have flexible annotation services is key, it is not the entire story by any means. There must be a culture that supports open communication, a recognition of the value of strong feedback, an acceptance of the key role of validation and critique, before any company will extract value from their annotation services and functionality.

Article based discussions from eLearningpost.com

Connecting and annotation

The irony is bloggers such as eLearningPost do not support easy and intuitive feedback and are mainly a one-to-many broadcast medium or publishing genre. I expect annotation to be a key KM functionality requirement soon. So what role does annotation really play in your organization and the way you work with knowledge ??

Is a guestbook or a comments form sufficient for real 2-way conversations, for relationship building and for enabling knowledge flow?

From words to concepts to objects

From words to concepts - a mighty leap

When we increase the level of granularity in text processing from a focus on words to working with concepts, we 'lift' the cognition level one step, we are looking at an information rather than a data landscape. There are less entities to deal with, new emergent patterns and exciting insights that come from wandering around a concept rather than a word landscape. Just take a look at what MeansBusiness has done here in the business content world!

From concepts to knowledge objects - adding inference

Now say we use a finite number of knowledge objects as our representation? and we start to work with:

* Patterns: optimal solutions to recurring issues / forces
* FAQ: answers to common questions
* Descriptive enumeration: situation descriptors as a mode of gathering intelligence
* Profiles: collections of pointers around object or people
* Distinctions: differences that make a difference
* Best practices: what is known to work
* Lessons learned: things to avoid also called anti-patterns
* Problem / solution pairs: working answers to recognized issues
* Stories: about people, equipment or process / management

Each of these 'knowledge objects' is then a validated encapsulation of local experience and expertise. Representation has moved from the individual to community levels in terms of ownership, validation, alignment. At this level, we already have shared meaning, reification and distributed understanding as by products (otherwise the proto-object withers & dies!). The next step is to build an object level ontology so we have standards and interoperability.

So if we apply inference, (event, activity, time, spatial logic & dependency reasoning) at this higher level, and go across those object types, will we not bootstrap ourselves to a new landscape?. It is kind of like natural language evolution is slow in comparison to computer language generations, where we can leverage interactions with artifacts, embed functionality and add shared tacit meaning to our digital creations.

What then is representation?

Ad hoc sketches, informal qualitative models, scenario construction, concept maps, rule sets, structured text all serve as representation, reflecting the expectations and experience of their creators, they connect collaboration to future use. They serve a dual role: (a) to facilitate design and critique and (b) to serve as the holder for the product to be, they are affordances in design, which they can enhance or inhibit. Representations, clarify, extend, complete and move unique experiences and abstract ideas toward the essential and typical. Representations are material, they allow ideas and experience to have an independent existence in an externalized form, they help to capture emergent thought. Like a lump of clay, a representation is tangible, it can be pointed to, passed around, played with. It takes thought experimentation one step further, eliciting new ideas.

Wiki - KM survey

Martin Cleaver and his fellow students from the Michael G. Degroote School of Business are running an interesting questionnaire on using TWiki for KM. BTW your inputs would be greatly appreciated by their class.

KM surveys have become something of a pain for me. They are always long, not too well-structured, often rambling and you hardly ever get worthwhile feedback or results. This one is a little different. The survey itself is in TWiki and about TWiki. You are taken to a sign-in page and the survey is then copied to your own wiki page which is created.

TWiki KM Survey

Being a Wiki you have control:

* You delete what is not applicable
* You can add comments and context at will
* You have access to your words and can see all other responses via the Recent Changes page

Survey replies

The students have promissed to publish a summary. I'm sure this makes the eventual analysis more difficult, but to certainly allows the respondents more freedom and gives them plenty of opportunity to provide valuable feedback.

Wiki and KM

Reflecting in the role of a Wiki in KM I see the major benefits as:

* Easy way to get folks publishing on the web (3 minutes!) rather like blogs
* A great environment for collaborative writing
* Space for capturing and refining patterns - proven solutions to repetitive issues
* Wiki is good for dialog, annotation, annealing and refactoring - all important ways to engage with text
* Emerging tool for capturing corporate memory, e.g. we are using a Bliki combo Wiki / Blog to gather process stories, record subtle changes in equipment parameters, track the rationale for test batches and gather customer innovations at our helpdesk

Had not thought of using a Wiki for a survey - but it seems to be a useful instrument for quick polling and conducting for formal inquiries.

Questions matter

"You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions."

Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize Winner)

It seems far harder to ask a really good question than to supply a correct answer - yet we tend to value answer people (aka experts) way above folks that ask 'dumb' questions. Reading this Brown & Isaacs article really brought home to me the power of dialog & a good question and made me far more aware of the subtle role that questions play in knowledge elicitation and transfers.

http://www.theworldcafe.com/Conversation.pdf

We use questions in group exploration & inquiry, as a way of teaching to probe and elicit further information and to capture implicit knowledge. Question skills are a large part of knowledge work - how you ask, when you ask, whom you ask, what you ask, why you are asking, are key issues that need reflection empathy and care.

Questions you ask yourself

Spark reflection, uncover knowledge gaps and help to make connections. Here is a webpage on using questions effectively

Keeping questions

There is a special role in virtual communities called "keeper of the questions" to gather key questions so they are not lost in the flurry of text, buried by new topics and are set aside so we can return to those gems and continually seek improvements to our answers or solutions.

* Questions are very strong attractors in the chaos of ideas, they gather, focus, attract and energize the conversation.

* Only? questions have the power to beak our current mindsets, they set in motion the deep reflection needed to alter our beliefs.

* It is the place and the space 'between not knowing and our desire to know' where we are most attentive, self-aware and alive. Questions hold the key to this special area.

* Compelling and quality questions drive knowledge creation and expansion in a fundamental way.

* Knowledge emerges around good questions.

* Questions energize and glue our conversation, draw people into the circle to participate and gather diverse opinions.

* Questions keep the conversation moving forward, awaken dormant discourse and may be used to guide the subject back on course.

Building a living glossary

A 'living' glossary where the community is actively involved in selection, collaborative writing, annealing and evangelism is a powerful way to create alignment, share meaning, improve communication, focus attention and help with making key distinctions.

Developing and using a common language (lingua franca) is perhaps the most powerful (and basic?) knowledge practice of all. Before we can share, understand, become aware, design or co-create new thoughts, we have to find a way to effectively communicate, separate concepts, recognise differences, discover and appreciate new terms.

If we are to design a knowledge space - we will need a glossary to assist us make sense of our individual worlds and leverage our shared meaning. Adopting terminology and definitions from elsewhere seldom works - what we need is discourse to surface meaning, conversations to discover individual beliefs and assumptions and dialog to arrive at a common meaning for the most used terms.

Here are some questions to help us think about building a glossary:

Design considerations

* Level and abstraction - should it be by keyword, concept, topic?

* Hyperlinking - should all word occurrences in the master text be linked?, should the glossary be available from a frame?, should only the first occurrence be linked? does there have to be a linked alphabetic term list? should related terms be linked?

* Authority - who has the rights & responsibilities to add, suggest, change. Can they also do the linking back to the text?

* Templates - should the end point offer more than a definition, e.g. examples, links to: key people, ways to learn & network, related terms & concepts. What glossary format is best for encouraging learning?

* Profiling - what weight should interaction with the glossary carry in determination / construction of personal profiles? i.e. what does looking something up in a glossary really tell us about individual behavior around text?

* User interface - what are the best practices here? e.g. should glossary terms already visited be distinguished? should you be offerred a mini-tour to make concepts clearer?

* Subscription - for update notification

* Bootstrapping - select an existing corpus that best fits with group goals and matches the domain, avoid starting from scratch, toss away all terms that do not resonate and build from the remaining core.

More than form, functionality and structure, the key to a living glossary is engagement with all participants

This Wiki page has links to examples and articles (minor repetition)

Moving CoPs ahead

What are the next round of challenges for communities of practice?

There is general agreement that CoPs have gained recognition as a worthwhile (perhaps dominant?) KM strategy. Companies have appointed CoP stewards, written CoP charters, formalized their processes for CoP formation, recognition, reporting and budget allocations, even collected CoP best practices and ROI templates.

We have seen CoPs fail, some that mature, some stagnate and others follow a trajectory to an end-point as a center of excellence, business intelligence group, super helpdesk, continuous learning center or some CoPs just fly beneath the corporate radar altogether.

Most 'cook books' give recipes for:

* Roles
* Competencies
* Policies
* Interventions
* Community governance
* Best practices
* Measurements & returns

Some offer guidance on software choice, list the artifacts a CoP can (should?) build, contain, develop, define & suggest ways to move expertise across CoP boundaries, or elaborate on ways to maintain energy, ensure diversity and encourage LPP (legitimate peripheral participation).

Current issues

* How to make CoPs scale and assess their 'health' or maturity
* Management of cross-organizational & global CoPs (language, distance, culture)
* Working the boundaries between CoPs - a zone of stress, complexity and innovation
* How to capture and put a value to the CoP activities and expertise - to placate bean counters

What next?

Think it is time to return to CoP basics. We need to take CoPs to the next level by increasing their participants learning, awareness and innovation potential. This is the crux of the issue and the real source of value.

* helping CoPs capture and manage their exemplars, cases, stories and examples
* gather experience and expertise, e.g. crafting, using and refining patterns and connecting these in a pattern language & informal ontology
* assist CoPs with environmental scanning, intelligence gathering and networking so they can make their members more 'aware', open and alert to impending changes
* find new ways to balance the tension between local specialization and maintaining cognitive diversity - keeping porous boundaries
* lift the level of discourse by working with distinctions, finding subtle symptoms, capturing useful heuristics, learning from failures and surfacing deep assumptions.

Returns from governance, policies, formal charters and measures are likely to pale in comparison to bootstrapping a CoP's ability to reflect, discover new concepts, test interesting emergent solutions and form a 'lingua franca'

KM fundamentals

* Understanding knowledge: What it means, how to work with it, who owns it, how it flows, finding who knows.

* Supporting knowledge: Making sharing and knowledge creation happen, applying new & useful knowledge level practices, developing & appreciating symptoms and diagnostics. Walking on a different (higher?)landscape.

* Scaling knowledge: Moving from individual insights, to group validation, to enterprise meaning, and then beyond. Overcoming the 'stickiness' at community level and the 'slipperiness' associated with professional / domain interactions.

* Speeding cultural changes: Knowledge is closely tied to people and identity, changing mindsets is more than altering process and habits. Making sure we 'listen' and empathize with discontinuous insights, killing NIH (not invented here)

* (How to) transfer learning: Making & taking new concepts to action, thinking together, collaborating and delivering to a market that will not wait. Retention, taking action and embedding not just access & experience.

Some things stand out here for me:

1) Deep dialog, a freedom to 'voice', creative abrasion where both challenge and empathy are high, a value set that includes 'listening' in all its forms as a core practice

2) An executive that 'walks the talk', believes in the power of openness and the innovation that springs from exploration and sharing. Top management that models what they wish to change and see happen

3) A recognition and reward system that is congruent with values of sharing, collaboration, member diversity and group synergy.

4) Appreciation and fundamental understanding of the dynamics of relationships, the changes due to an always connected, networked world, the principle of reciprocity and the social capital that drives innovation

5) A feel for the power that comes from shared meaning, co-design, the leverage of an ontology and the potential of shared spaces / forums.

I have seen these come to 'be' in self-selected communities of practice, that support identity, encourage social learning, engage in cycles of participation / reification, seek to create new knowledge, increase mutual awareness and build trust.