The Future of Information Work: Knowledge Management

Making Community Work Inside Organizations

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:26:46 GMT

The broad success of communities on the Internet can be a bit baffling to those charged with helping facilitate knowledge sharing and transfer inside of organizations. In reality, although the technology may be the same, the cultural atmosphere holds almost nothing in common. The Internet consists of millions of users who self-select for a community. Out of those millions, a thousand, sometimes less (and certainly more), can make for a thriving community. If you create the right forum, people will come. As the community grows, it creates it own attraction and momentum.

That can happen inside of a company, but only in broad areas though, like HR policy. Most organizations want specific things from their knowledge management investments, like lessons learned around a particular topic or collaborative content development.

The problem is inside of a company, on project work, the groups don't self-select - they are often assigned and they have competing priorities. They often don't have a passion for the assignment, feeling more a pressure based on obligation than any kind of pleasure in participation. In these situations, a completely different approach must be taken that one sees on the Internet.

Here are some actions to take to ensure that an internal organization community meets its goals, perhaps at the expense of true community, at least on the front end.

The executive sponsor can't just be a sponsor, they must be an active user of the community site. That means:
- Not accepting e-mail or other channels as a means to gaining knowledge about the community's topic
- Driving meetings and conversations off the community site rather than some other channel
- Actively participating in feedback and contribution
Incentives, tied to internal management objectives (MBOs) must be used in order to link the community's goals (e.g., capturing best practices) to the definitions of personal performance
The site should provide clear value to the participants independent of incentives
Hold a meeting, in person, in a web meeting or on the phone to kick off the community. Let people discuss their issues before starting the software aspect of the site. Make sure the meeting facilitator drives toward commitment and consensus about the objectives. Be clear about learning and expectations. If it isn't baked, don't sell it as baked. In communities, disappointment can come swiftly, so make sure you manage expectations, management them some more, and that you are able to define progress and success.

Further recommendations

Start with a small project. Don't attempt solve all of your collaboration issues at once. Work with the participants until you have a formula that works for your organization, then expand - incrementally.
Define the platform. Don't let the participants get distracted debating tools and technologies.
The platform should be as integrated into current workstyles as possible
Create a learning back channel. If the community isn't established, you can't assume people will go there to tell you why they aren't going there. The community manager should have a e-mail back channel for understanding issues. Eventually this can go away, but you need to be practical at the start.

Inside an organization, the goal should be to create a platform for teamwork, not an emergent community with its own rules and goals. Organizations have goals and objectives and people fulfill those objectives with the work they do. If the community is disconnected from the value equation, it won't work. Make sure you align your community with your strategy, and that those involved understand clearly how it will be used and how participating will aggregate to their personal reviews. If the management community is consistent in how it interacts with a nascent community, you have a chance at success. Any distraction, or waver in commitment from leadership will create false starts and faltering adoption.

A successful community needs to be nurtured, it needs structure and it needs attention.

The Work of Reshaping the Planet

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 03:57:51 GMT

Today's Scientific American mail ran an article on China's Three Gorges Dam (read it here). China is receiving enough political scrutiny (well deserved) - so I would rather riff on this issue in a more general way - as the United States and many other countries have previously transformed huge ecosystems into land locked lakes.

Yosemite once had two great valleys. It now has one world renowned valley, and it has the Hetch Hetchy dam and its accompanying reservoir (for more see http://www.hetchhetchy.org/).

I placed this entry under the category of knowledge management because the most important part of managing knowledge is recognizing that we know something important to share and either repeat, or not repeat. This controversial reshaping of the planet has knowledge on both sides. On one, the dam builders have deep knowledge about concrete and water management, electrical generation and flood control. And on the other, ecologists and natural historians know the impact of dams on local ecosystems. And then we also know that politics can and will trump nature almost every time. We live in a growth economy, one where reworking the face of the planet is seen as innovation.

The question we must ask about innovation is not a simple one. Is creating something new, massive and technologically impressive as innovative as preserving the ecology and achieving the same goals in a less intrusive way. I believe we often take the simple route to innovation and use its lesser definition - though it may not seem lesser at the time because of costs, lost lives and other factors. But in reality, if we know how to do something on one scale, their is little innovation in making it larger. What is really hard is to walk through a forest and not leave footprints, yet be enriched by the journey. When it comes to water and power, we have transformed vast areas of the planet, decimated the land behind the dams and left places like the Gulf of Mexico dying at its delta from the no-longer trickles that reach barely into the sands as the great Colorado is swallowed by desert. We often fail to stretch our innovation from what we call innovation, to the hard task of achieving our goals without destroying our sources.

Where is your currente calamo? - Start tracking in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Wikis...

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:47:16 GMT

Ron Rosenbaum continues to educate. As I was reading The Shakespeare Wars I came across the Latin phrase: currente calamo, meaning to catch a writer at work. As I read this book, which details the the issues that scholars debate because they don't have good source material for Shakespeare, I am constantly finding gems. Scholars have plenty of content, but nothing in Shakespeare's hand. They don't know his process.

Until the advent of the computer, most authors post Shakespeare kept papers that ended up being treasured artifacts for future generations of readers. Now we run the risk of not knowing. In fact, we already don't know. We don't know the process behind most documents we read today. People throw away their history as they change jobs or go on to other assignments, or just to be ecologically frugal. Some major authors may keep boxes of old printouts, but even they loose much of the editing from their word processors. As we process words, we loose the words we process. For much of the marketing chafe this isn't a huge issue, but think about years from now, as our time is examined - we will have, perhaps, some end products, but no process. We won't even have attribution in many cases. We won't know how people arrived at what they wrote, how they revised, how they collaborated.

Of course, Wikipedia and other Wikis keep their history alive very actively, but they do it in a digital form that doesn't guarantee that generation from now it will be readable. We may think the Net is the last word in human communication, but it isn't. There will be new forms of communication, and unlike paper, much of what we have in the digital realm will be culled with the transition. Even though it is theoretically possible that data be transferred into new forms, look at all of your abandoned data over the years. The net will not come over in "whole cloth" to it successor.

We will know what people thought, but we may not know how they thought - and because of that, we run the risk of loosing that even sooner - because our lack of sharing the thought process is replacing real collaboration, learning and interaction with snippets sent from cell phone handsets.

All we can do is start documenting our thinking. Many tools do this in a passive way. We can just turn on track changes and at least keep track of our own thinking - because we may need to refer to it ourselves some day. Knowledge management starts at home.

Putting Your Knowledge Before Your Innovation

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 06:27:15 GMT

India's Minister of State for Industry, Ashwani Kumar is proposing efforts to use technology and innovation to assist knowledge managers (read it here).

It is my hope that Mr. Kumar was not quoted correctly, and that what he meant was knowledge management should be used to drive technology and innovation. KM can certainly continue to grow, but the growth of a knowledge economy is based on innovative new products, services, business models and partners - going into the market, being tested and evolving. To maximize the learning involved in an innovative knowledge economy, principles of knowledge management should be used to help focus and derive learning from the markets - from the interplay of technologies, from the success or failures of innovation.

The Work of Literary Criticism - The Shakespeare Wars

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 06:44:52 GMT

Ron Rosenbaum has created a book I am forcing myself to put down so I can concentrate on it. But through just the first two chapters he brings to life the wonderful exploration of meaning that connecting to literature can bring. He is poetically taken by Peter Brook's Mid-summer Night's Dream (some stuff on this production can be found here).

If you want to understand what reading is about, what language should be - what can happen when you find yourself touched in a profound way be words, then read Rosenbaum's The Shakespeare Wars.

One of the best ways to learn, is from a person who understands his or her own learning...

Poker: Giving Away Knowledge for Free

Sat, 05 Jan 2008 00:56:39 GMT

In the December 22nd Economist article A Big Deal, the influence of the Internet on professional poker is profiled. This article made me think about the projected skills shortages over coming decades. Perhaps, as young Annette Obrestad has learned, the Internet can be a place of enormous advantage. Endless lessons learned, open insight and discussion and inexpensive test beds built on both simulation and real interactions (not all Poker sites charge for the experience).

Let's take this to any other area: aerospace, phrama, financial services, programming. Rather than creating meritocracies with an entry fee, let's lower the entry level by giving away everything we know. All the skills needed to provide someone with the competency to create, assemble or repair a program, an airplane or a program (maybe even a person). We would create huge new opportunities for innovation, not to mention a new way transfer knowledge and create enthusiasm, or at least interest, in areas that may seem to esoteric for those who can only view the inner workings from a steep conceptual distance.

Giving away everything we know about mechanical engineering does not give away the proprietary information about how to configure a particular aircraft. This is the same argument I made against Nicholas Carr and the commoditization of IT. Just because the basic skills or applications are a commodity doesn't mean that the configuration and use is a commodity. But the more people who know the basics, the more able to workforce will be to take advantage of opportunities afforded by unique configurations.

For some reason I love watching poker on television. I have watched DVDs and yes, even won a pot or two myself. I wouldn't know as much about theory had I not spent time learning on the Net. I'm no where near Miss Obrestad's level, but she probably doesn't share my skills around speculative strategy - something for the most part, also informed by learning in non-traditional forms.

I think we should look at poker as a model for bringing implicit knowledge into the explicit world, and opening up that knowledge to all who are interested. Who knows, maybe we won't have the skill shortages predicted - not because more people are taking college courses, but because more people are learning on their own, areas of knowledge that might at one time seemed inaccessible to them.