Knowledge-at-work

5 KM books to pitch

What I need to pitch:

Applehans, Globe & Laugero, 1999. "Managing knowledge" A practical web-based approach. Addison Wesley.

The authors do not know the difference between information and knowledge enough said. My amazon review

Tissen, Andriessen and Deprez, 1998. "Value-based knowledge management". creating the 21st century company: knowledge intensive, people rich. Longman.

I feel I payed for the original lavish color plates that dot this book. It was the most expesive KM book I have purchased, over $115. Poor insights, trite prognostigation and glowing reports on the benefits of KM. Please do not repeat my error

Amidon, 2003. "The innovation superhighway". Butterworth-Heinemann.

Too abstract, wrong focus and way to self-serving to deliver anything. my blog review

Albert & Bradley, 1997. "Managing Knowledge". Experts, agencies and organizations. Cambridge.

They missed the boat forecasting the coming knowledge worker revolution. A superficial study of experts and the nature of knowledge work.

Duffy, 1999. "Harvesting experience". Reaping the benefits of knowledge. ARMA International.

Nothing original, useful or deep here. Duffy trots through the well-worn paths of setting up a KM project, building a repository, measuring ROI and implementing a strategy. Rather read Davenport & Prusak they do a much better job.

So what KM books have you pitched?

Selecting 5 KM books

A posting at the knowledgeboard gives a list of 42 books that anyone starting in KM may find useful.

Well 42 is a little too many for starters, so here is my list of 5 and some rationale for the choices:

* Deep smarts

A new book (2005) from Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap (remember Wellsprings of Knowledge?) that looks at the nature of practical wisdom. Experience-based competence takes time to acquire, is difficult to transfer and is related to intuition, beliefs, tacit models and awareness. This is very timely book as boomers leave the workforce in droves.

* Communities of practice

Etienne Wenger's classic that sets the ground for understanding social learning, reification, participation and domain. This book delivers new insights with every reading. Deep, basic and timeless.

* Working knowledge

Davenport and Prusak's 1998, primer for the KM practitioner. This covers the essential concepts of codification and personalization, the role of people vs. technology and the value of knowledge to business.

* Enabling knowledge creation

My favorite book on people related KM. The power of community, communication, conversation, content and context. Many savvy answers to eternal problems of cultural change and making KM happen within business. Do not pass this one by.

* Learning to fly

Collison & Parcell tell it like it is. A useful narrative of how to do KM within a large company. Learning before, while and after is a fundamental revisit of techniques for getting KM done.

Wonder what others have on that special spot in their bookshelf??

Social categorization

The ability to develop and share a common taxonomy / classification / ontology is a very fundamental knowledge practice that leverages knowledge creation, communication, promotes meaning and enables sense-making.

Tools to do this are far and few right now but likely to be moving toward center stage in the near future as:

Social search

having the ability to notify, share and improve / refine search results become available.

Shared desktops

Teams wish to synchronize the structure of their file folders and those of colleagues - making retrieval easier.

Intuitive navigation

Firms seek to provide access to content using visual tools, enable the location of related items, give a user-friendly browsing experience. This is greater enhanced if the staff share a set of key concepts and issues.

Some of the tools to do this are appearing:

* Topic maps - an emerging XML standard to assist data display, sharing ontologies and depicting relationships

* Visual browsers - open source code to map sites, display searches, navigate wiki and hypertext webs

* Concept mapping - practices for knowledge construction, learning and conceptualization

The starting point for this advance may be tools to extract key concepts from free form text.

Imagine if you wrote a text, ran a key concept parser, compared the extracted concepts to your groups ontology then selected the best fit meta-tags for later search and browsing - Now that would really assist content sharing!

Asynchronous repositories

Why explicit sharing makes a difference!

Have pondered that same question many times and have seen the benefits of a shared, explicit, corporate memory when working with co-located teams. Let me try to help make the case here: 

1. Reflection: 

In the fast and furious pace of f2f there is no time for deep reflection. This medium gives you the opportunity to review without the pressures imposed of 'thinking on your feet'. Many of our insights come from making connections and changing our internal models. There is something about 'seeing the text' that helps here. Perhaps it is the very process of moving thoughts from the brain to your finger tips as you type that does it?

2.  The Record:

so often we forget the bits and pieces that do not matter on their own, but when presented in context or when connected together can deliver magic. Having a record you can return to, that reminds you of commitments, resurfaces tacit ideas and helps with synthesis is a major help. Often my clients find it is not the actual text that is important it is the associated ideas and the insights that crop up and pop up that make this worthwhile.

3.  Getting in deep:

most groups do not take the time to dig down to the differences that matter. They gloss over assumptions, meld or skip different mental models, do not make the effort to clarify terms and combine to design distinctions. Using language to 'bring forth another world' is an advanced skill that is enhanced by this medium. This approach can surface vision and build alignment that is often not easy face to face. 

4.  Helping novices:

the biggest hurdle new folk face is understanding why: things are done this way, why we believe xyz, why we say abc. A written record (summarized at strategic intervals) goes a long way to bridging the gap between old timers and newbies. Conversations are a lot like stories, after reading through a discussion here you have a different feel and appreciation for people, their beliefs, their fears and their values.

5. Communication:

how often have you not wished we had recorded the reason or taken notes of the other things we talked about? Having a sustained practice of using this medium to spread the word, surface ideas, test assumptions, gives the group a decided leverage and advantage. I'm not sure if this will be sustained, but there are definite first mover points to be gained while the rest catch-up to this medium.

My thanks to Lars Heyerdahl for reminding me and preserving this piece

KM blogger community ??

How can we best define and circumscribe a community of KM bloggers? Talking to Lilia this afternoon we looked at ways to discover and explore this question.

Does such a community really exist?

Lilia feels there is a KM community based on her personal contacts and experience, and is currently looking at ways to quantify this. She mentioned an analysis of blogrolls (who mentions whom), a study of RSS feed subscriptions (who reads whom), cross posting and commenting on another's blog (who writes about or to whom).

We mused on the role of back channel communications (Skype, IM, e-mail, phone) and the role of personal contact via blogwalks and itinerant visits - almost impossible to quantify.

Been interested in KM bloggers since 2000 and have been watching the genre evolve. Not sure the community is quite as strong as Lilia feels, but this may be my bias from sitting in the mid-west

USA

and not participating f2f in the EU meets.

KM blog list

Here are my suggestions for the core group:

* Lilia Efimova - an early articulator, maven and key broker

* Ton Zilstra - influential broker

* Dave Pollard - thought leader

* Seb Paquet - well connected

* Martin Roell - strong proponent of PKM

* David Gurteen - a key node

* Jim McGee - key player

* Stuart Henshall - thought leader

* Jack Vinson - active contributor

* Jon Husband - always connected

Still pondering the position and roles of: Judith Meskill, George Siemens, James Robertson, Piers Young, Magdalena Boettger and others.

How do you see yourself - is the next question

KM in small companies

Recently there has been some discussion around the need and type of KM best suited for small companies with < 50 employees.

At Zipp we have used both explicit and tacit means to promote knowledge sharing, learning and innovation.

Explicit stuff

Our firm's 'knowledge' resides in multiple places - relationships with customers and distributors, symbiotic relationships with key vendors who conduct R&D in partnership, key athletes who share their insights and feedback on product performance, senior executives with unique market insights, shop floor workers with tips, tricks and heuristics and middle management with a sensitive feel for what is right and where the current issues lie.

We use SocialText to capture ideas for new innovations, collect market opinions from our far flung distributors, record work-arounds and 'scripts' or stories to inform customers on ways to remedy issues or actions taken to overcome product weaknesses.

Tacit rules

The real heart of our knowledge sits in the finger tips of the staff that lays up the composite materials, the rework experts that repair flaws so they are almost invisible and the QC staff that can feel a flaw or 'hear' an imperfection.

Weekly 'community' meetings where work cells gather to exchange insights, discuss problems, ask for help and self-organize, are the key to passing along tacit knowledge. Here team members share tips, critique practices, share lore and explore new ways to achieve mastery. Assigned mentors pass along experience and short-cuts to make the work easier and speed learning cycles for new staff or employees that have changed their roles and responsibilities.

I do not think small company KM is any different from enterprise KM, only there are more tacit exchanges, closer relationships and improved information flow due to co-location and awareness of what others are doing or thinking.

We share failures, 'walk around' examples of both good and bad practice and activity seek inputs on ways to improve our quality and customer satisfaction.

Do we need automated expertise finders? - NO

Do we need expensive meta-data characterization? - NO

Are we investing heavily in KM technology? - NO

Will we invest in special collaborationware - no likely

Do we seek to increase awareness, speed learning, improve shared understanding and provide the necessary context for self-organization - you bet

Are we supportive of learning by failure? - perhaps

Will we need more KM down the track - for sure