Knowledge-at-work

Sharing knowledge - do we know enough?

What exactly is knowledge sharing all about?

Asking WIIIFM (what is in it for me) before you start to share defeats the objective, you are getting off on the wrong foot. In the same vein, asking you to enter a password protected space with the aim of sharing should send up warning signals. If your CEO comes back from a KM conference and sets up Lotus, LiveLink or eRoom with complex access privilege's, you should question if they have really got the message. Is giving in the knowledge economy just being naive?, How about the groupware vendor that sells tools, but sponsors no work on understanding collaboration, group processes or conducts no ethnographic research?, do you believe they have collaboration at heart or are they just selling more software?

If you share, do you really give knowledge away?

Sharing knowledge does not lessen your store, often it gets you more. Sharing plays a key role in relationships and bonding, happens in small steps and is assisted through community membership.

---

Sharing expertise as patterns

Patterns focus on solutions to repetitive issues or combination of forces and store valuable experiences in a very compact representation. Writing patterns encourages negotiation of value and meaning, pattern names give fast access to useful knowledge and help to clarify communication in teams. The problem with re-invention is often not a lack of communication but the lack of an appropriate medium for transferring key knowledge. Patterns are artifacts, not theory laden constructs and are not tied to any particular discipline or methodology. Their value comes from social consensus and trial by reuse.

---

Sharing meeting notes

This goes beyond taking and posting individual notes and sets forth the leverage from having shared  spaces.

• http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/384/landay.pdf

Sharing procedural & diagnostic steps - Launchpads

Beyond e-wizards are launchpads, e-memopads that allow dialog, store complex diagnostic sequences and pride solution steps. Helpdesk in a PDA?

• IBM's launch-pads

---

Capturing rationale

Context, benefits, downsides and reasoning are important aspects of sharing and major components of meta data and a corporate memory

---

Developing ontologies

Possessing a reduced, very focused terminology, where everyone understands the meaning and applies the right term, has profound advantages for companies when they come to apply search engines, construct navigation aids, use visualization tools, implement agent technologies or index their electronic documents. Benefits: faster and more relevant retrieval, more effective communication, meaning templates promote alignment, ease mentoring, reduce training costs. Reuse strategies applied to language.

Making deliberate distinctions to bring forth unique meaning.

---

Crafting joint concept maps

Concept mapping provides a highly visual way to show relationships between core ideas. Combined with the AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process)the maps may be used to build qualitative models, elicit gaps, test assumptions and check for consensus. The advantage is to invent best practices for interpreting and annealing concept graphs. The promise of electronic whiteboards is to offer us a new way to anneal pictures rather than text. A graphic introduces spatial reasoning, allowing qualitative visual clustering, distance metrics and intuitive affinity measures.

Although it is nothing more than a feeling right now, I believe there is much value in 'seeing' how we interpret graphics, looking for ways to elicit group consensus and including diversity. Developing a practice and a language for 'looking' at graphics is an important component of knowledge building in groups.

---

The Blackboard: a shared information space

Consider the wall map in a busy 'war room' with its colored pins showing spatial patterns, remember the blackboard (now it's more likely to be white) with a to-do list, the current concerns and issues or useful contacts.

• The blackboard is an affordance self-organization, short term coordination and memory

People, documents, meetings and other activities often serve as blackboards:  interfaces and boundary objects.

---

Sharing metaphors & stories

Sharing knowledge is comparable to sharing your lighted candle: you have the opportunity to share your flame with others who have unlit candles, increasing the visibility for everyone and losing nothing yourself or you may keep your candle to yourself and get by with a feeble flickering single candle which is eventually going to burn out anyway. By sharing the fire with others, we enable others to keep the fire going and grow it, benefiting everyone. Which scenario do you choose? Which scenario do you think most people choose? Why do you think people don't share knowledge more easily?

• Stories and meaning
  

---

Inquiry and reflection as sharing

Sharing is more than access, it is helping others make meaning and obtain understanding. Deeper sharing is possible if the domain is partitioned, the core concepts are negotiated, the environment is scanned and the feedback is shared in community. There needs to be reflection around joint meaning and reciprocity to have quality sharing.

• Denham's article: http://www.smithweaversmith.com/Ksharing.htm

---

Dialog & sharing

Role of idea generations (divergent ==> convergent rhythm, explicit time milestones) and the practice & place of summary, critique. Keeping identity in the background, creative abrasion, clash of ideas, building meaning around a prototype, making distinctions.

---

Sharing and networking

A network is essential to extend the reach of your sharing.  

• KM Mag 2001, Sharing needs a foundation: http://www.destinationcrm.com/km/dcrm_km_article.asp?id=683

---

Sharing as commentary

Blogging where you add commentary to links, point & link to insightful remarks, or ideas of other bloggers and highlight views that interest you is an emergent form of sharing. When this is combined with RSS feeds, categorization, specialist search engines and blog-rings it becomes a powerful genre for sharing.

• Are you blogging yet?
• Cafe conversations

Clearly KM folk talk a lot about knowledge sharing, but we have done little to explore the patterns, gather solutions, understand the role of context, and explicate the real meaning of this complex practice.

 

KmWiki AAR

With tinges of sadness I'm announcing the closure of KmWiki - personal playground, collaborative repository and knowledge sharing experiment.

Over the past 6 years this collection has grown to more than 1500 pages (estimate).  We have seen intense debates, innovative collaborative writing, exploratory annealing, artful refactoring, savage vandalism - the good and bad sides of open, collective, internet spaces.

KmWiki has been used to:

• Teach post-graduate classes -      business intelligence, user-interface design
• Build student portfolios
• Explore cutting-edge Km      concepts - boundary objects, descriptive enumeration
• Collect links and resources -      Km tools and
• Prototype articles -      knowledge mapping, ontologies, CoPs
• Store notes and record      history

We were open and operating in mid 1999,  way before WikiPedia, before wiki became an established genre and migrated behind firewalls into the corporate domain.

The interesting things I learned from KmWiki, was the leverage of a 'switchyard' - an open, personal  web page for collecting and arranging links (now available via del.icio.us), the unexpected help from community members correcting or pointing to broken links, the difficulty of maintaining continual, open refactoring and the disappointment and destructive nature of internet script spammers.

KmWiki -  'Au revoir'

Capturing tacit knowledge

How do you capture tacit knowledge through interviews prior to retirement??

In many respects conducting interviews to 'capture' important knowledge just prior to retirement may not be a good approach, why?

Relationships and trust are the key - do what you can to preserve contact and encourage connections - start a mentoring program, invite retired folks back to share their experiences and tell their stories.

http://denham.typepad.com/km/2004/0...rving_know.html

Tacit knowledge, by definition is hard to articulate, impossible to recall and difficult to discover - rather enter into a dialog, let the interesting knowledge emerge.

http://denham.typepad.com/km/2003/1...sting_know.html

Do not be fooled tacit knowledge cannot be hurried - it takes time to surface deep patterns, make important connections, find and evaluate weak signals.

Some more thoughts and leads

http://denham.typepad.com/km/2004/0...ring_knowl.html

So consider alternative approaches before you jump into those interviews - avoid strong structure, strive to maintain the relationship(s), give it time, let the interesting knowledge emerge.

KM - a political movement ??

At AOK Jerry Ash asks if KM can be considered a political movement playing across communities, organizations, cities and nations.

Here is my reply:

Knowledge work is best seen as a small group (10-150) process where  trust, identity and dialog can flourish. Once we move beyond these boundaries, we encounter serious issues with shared context, language,  meaning, divergent agendas, difficult aggregation, (can we really talk sensibly about the knowledge of a nation?), and experience a breakdown  with the raison d'être for knowing itself.

So KM as a political / philosophical / civic or national movement is pie in the sky stuff. At this level we are sliding down the steep part of the right hand bell-curve in terms of affectivity, utility and sense-making.

Knowledge is clearly a social phenomenon, but aggregating beyond the small group just stretches belief way too far.

Thoughts?

Clutching our knowledge assets

 

Can you really own, inventory, quantify, value and exchange a knowledge asset?

Depends on how you describe and define 'your' knowledge asset.

If you consider explicit representations, stable practices and proven capabilities that can be transferred reliably and error free, and where context is of minimal concern, you may just be able to grasp the asset. There will always be problems with a changing external environment (and markets) influencing judgments, imposing different conditions, increasing uncertainty and risk.

Emergent knowledge

The very concept of a knowledge asset is contestable & questionable, if you believe knowledge is emergent, ephemeral, socially constructed and arises from the co-construction of meaning in dialog & gestures.

"Human knowledge is not the aggregation of discrete, objective information, but a result of emergent processes of knowing through human subjective interpretations, or sense-making, dependent on complex historical contexts." (p6)

Stacey, 2002 puts forward the view that knowledge is a process of responsive relating, it's ephemeral and emergent in conversation, social engagement and gesture- not located as a mental model in an individuals head, - so it cannot be made explicit and shared. Knowledge assets lie in the pattern of relationships not abstractions than can be captured, explicated, assigned a value or stored.

Do these views not make the very concept of knowledge assets highly problematic? - what then happens to the field of knowledge measurement?

Connecting wikis

What if we connect domain specific wikis, extract and republish summaries, reflect and collect feedback and enable OODA loops?

So we have WikiPedia at the top of the knowledge foodchain - an evolving, open collection of smarts and pointers collecting and scraping domain specific wikis, who gather insights from the blogosphere and podcasters, who post the best of their heuristics, reflections, experiences and practices. Internal OODA loops that refine, update, assimilate and evolve the knowledge

Example:

The recently launched FluWiki is a domain specific wiki with this mandate:

• "a reliable source of information, as neutral as possible, about important facts useful for a public health approach to pandemic influenza
• a venue for anticipating the vast range of problems that may arise if a pandemic does occur
• a venue for thinking about implementable solutions to foreseeable problems

No one, in any health department or government agency, knows all the things needed to cope with an influenza pandemic. But it is likely someone knows something about some aspect of each of them and if we can pool and share our knowledge we can advance preparation for and the ability to cope with events. This is not meant to be a substitute for planning, preparation and implementation by civil authorities, but a parallel effort that complements, supports and extends those efforts".

Flu bloggers unite

Contributing to and feeding FluWiki are a cadre of dedicated flu bloggers individuals and groups that share a common cause, interest or occupation.

Some blogs which focus on pandemic influenza:

- Crawford Kilian's H5N1

- Effect Measure

- Just a Bump in the Beltway

- Epidemica

- Avian Flu

What may be happening here is a cascade of scrapings, nested OODA loops and auto-synthesis as news, practices and solutions bubble upwards from bloggers to domain wiki to Wikipedia.

Your thoughts, more examples and comments please