Dec 11
Asteroids and Budget Clearances
I swear, if we knew that an asteroid was going to hit the Earth on March 31st 2009, everybody would scramble like crazy to get their budgets spent in time and get their projects completed before the Big One hits us. Its been a crazy end of year with people expecting dry times next year (the asteroid) and getting what they can done now (and our blog has suffered in consequence). This is not necessarily a good thing, because KM can’t usually be rushed. So if an asteroid were really going to hit on March 31st next year, what would YOU do with your KM programme?
Nov 14
People Process Technology
Dave Snowden has been having a hoity toity about stupid categorisations over at Cognitive Edge, and he’s included the “People, Process, Technology” triad (some people add Content) into the Domain of the Damned. He asks: “All three have to co-evolve; why or why do people fall into the pit of reductionism and categorisation with such ease?”
Well I can think of one good reason why it’s good to have this trio (or quad) – not so much as reductive categories (Dave may be building a straw man here) but as useful reminders to people who need to span all three. Technology people do need to be reminded (forcefully and painfully sometimes) that process and people (and content) matter. People have to be reminded that magic only exists on TV and by sleight of hand, and the affordances and constraints of technology and tools have to be grappled with to be understood at the operational level. They don’t always understand that IT people can’t read their minds.
I see this trio (or quad) as a salutory mnemonic which has emerged from too many occasions where one or two of them have been privileged over the others – meaning that they have not co-evolved, and thereby the initiative has flopped disastrously.
That’s why I especially liked one of the Intranet Innovation Award winning cases this year, from a company called Transfield Services in Australia. The KM team there looked at a proposed rollout of Sharepoint Teamsites across the (global) company and evidently thought “aha! we need some process and people support here!”
So they put together their Gold award-winning “Teamsites in a Box” solution which helps new business units or communities set up their teamsites in a governed, user-and-collaboration friendly way. The solution helps a group define their requirements, deciding which functionalities get switched on or off, it helps them to define their objectives for the site and build a change management plan, there’s an intranet site about how to get the most out of a teamsite with good examples from within the company to look at, there are checklists and guidelines to help you through the setup and launch process, there’s training, both face to face and online, there is a governance structure with supporting policies looking after roles, ownership and responsibilities, deletion and archiving. ie They put people-friendly practices and structured processes in place to help the business units assimilate and get the best out the technology in a way that supports cross-company collaboration.
Though much of the rollout and management is what you might call “supported DIY” – ie locally owned – the initial set up is centrally provisioned by the KM team, and this enables them to look for prior examples of similar sites and iron out possible overlaps, or suggest linkages to other existing sites. Changes to the purpose, use or structure of the teamsites are also notified back to the central team, so they have a managed inventory of what the network of sites contains and what’s happening within it. A really nice mix of strong governance and guidance and light, local-context-friendly management.
Now this all looks like wonderful common sense. The fact it won a Gold Intranet Innovation Award suggests this kind of sense is not that common, and from what I’ve seen of normal teamsite rollouts (and Lotus teamrooms before them) is that structured, governed, consistent, supportive rollouts are more the exception than the norm. This is conscious co-evolution of people. process and technology.
Nov 13
Disobedience
Every now and then we struggle with clients who say something can’t be done within their organisation. They would never get permission or support from “them”. It’s even dangerous to ask “them”. Let’s just try to do this quietly without disturbing anyone, they suggest.
Unfortunately, if you’re trying to get any kind of large scale KM going, you can’t do it without “disturbing” people. At the end of the day, KM is not about what the KM team does, it’s about what “they” do out there.
So I was pleased to find this little gem of a post from Don Cohen from a couple of years back, about how a successful KM initiative started with an act of disobedience.
We have another client with a manager whom I would call flexibly stubborn. When one major initiative was rejected by senior management, where the more faint hearted might have just abandoned it, he took note of the sensitivities, went back and reworked it into a form that had fewer visible allergenic components, and gave it to them as a planned activity “for information”. Some important elements were dropped, but he made the judgment that they are currently unsolvable. At least something is getting done.
Now… how do we get knowledge managers to be more disobedient?
Nov 12
Metrics for Insight
A while back Mary Abraham tagged me on the meme of why when and where I blog, and over the past few days I’ve been coming to the conclusion that blogging for me is a way of storing my memory in the external environment. This is not just recall memory, but sustaining the continuity of thinking over time… blog posts help me to think things through discontinuously. As I come across topics and issues of interest to me, related to things I’m interested in thinking through, I try to relate and assimilate them. That’s also why categories are helpful memory mechanisms for me to recall where my thinking has been in the past.
So I appreciate it when I come across people who are also thinking things through as they blog. Lee Romero has started a series of blog posts (here and here) on how he’s developing some relatively simple metrics for the communities in his company. What I also like is the smart, thoughtful way he’s approaching the matter of metrics, not from the routine “how are we doing?” angle, but for how the metrics can give insight into the way that the communities are working, or raise questions worth asking.
Back to the meme: When do I blog? – Guilt (at not having blogged for a while), procrastination (from “real” work) or being grabbed by an idea. Where do I blog? Mostly at my desk, occasionally in airports. I tend not to blog so much when I travel.
Nov 10
Context as Memory
Shawn has blogged about how we use or arrange our external environment to give us memory cues, partly based on a wonderfully serendipitous conversation we had yesterday in a bookstore, leaping from title to title and using them as cues for discussion and memory. Externalising our memories is also something a function that taxonomies fulfil, and is my official reason why I never allow anyone else to tidy my desk. It may look a mess, but whenever I have to sift through things to find that bloody document I know is in there somewhere I’m also being re-cued on all those interesting things I set aside to look at later.. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Brain science tells us that we forget things so as to be able to focus our continuing or repeated attention on things that are important to us. It’s a filtering and discarding mechanism. We remember things if we are reminded of them. There’s a wonderful language learning website based on this principle, focused just on the memory aspects of language learning. It tests your memory of the target language by measuring your pauses and hesitations on receptive and productive tasks of the target language presented in context and then recalculates the optimal interval before it presents the language to you again, to lodge it in your long term memory.
The particular genius of this company, Cerego, is that they have also recognised the power of personalised context, so they have made the site a social networking site, where you can scrape content off webpages, videos, photographs, the system will identify the target language within it, and create learning content that you selected. And then you share it. There’s great potential in this approach for memory-intensive knowledge management and corporate learning needs, such as compliance-knowledge and technical knowledge.
But more broadly than this, it suggests that we need to design our environments to be continually reminding us of the things that matter, and not just assuming that if it’s in the database our task is done. We need cycles of reminding and remembering, and environmental cues to support this.
Nov 07
Kind Words from James
James Robertson has reviewed our KM Approaches, Methods and Tools – A Guidebook and said some very kind things about it:
“The value of this guidebook cannot be overstated. Too often, the potential benefits of knowledge management are lost under a sea of theory and jargon, making it hard for business people to put the techniques into practice. In their typical style, the Straits Knowledge team cut through all this, providing a no-nonsense description of KM techniques that is perhaps the clearest ever published. If you have an interest in knowledge management, this is a great place to start, and a wonderful jumping off point for further learning. Highly recommended.”
Nov 07
There’s Something About Failures
Two weeks ago I completed two weeks of reserve military exercise, at the end of which I participated in - observed, really - an After Action Review. It wasn’t the first military AAR that I had been a part of, but it was the first that I was impressed by. It wasn’t done the classic way, you know, going through the four standard questions. Instead, each key appointment holder asked to share what they would sustain (or do again) and what they would improve (or do differently).
Nov 06
Talking About Failure
Cory Banks has been talking on actKM about a project where he wants to share lessons learned through anecdotes about examples and incidents – I suppose to communicate the contexts where learning took place. One of the challenges in such cases is how to get the stories about failures (perceived or real). In the Ning social networking group The Mistake Bank, Cynthia Kurtz has just started a discussion thread about “mistake haikus” – “I’m wondering what would happen if people shrunk stories of mistakes down to a sentence or two. The point would be mainly to disguise the details of an embarassing story down to something so vague, yet still instructional, that it would be okay to tell.”
An interesting idea. Here’s my contribution, which still needs a little work!
Eager for challenge,
an impossible project
fails when winter bites.
Nov 05
Concession
A very generous concession speech from John McCain just now, asking his supporters to reach out and work with President-Elect Barack Obama to reach common ground and fix America’s problems. Hope indeed.
Nov 05
Justification by Faith or Works?
The learning ripples from the actKM conference are still spreading, on the actKM forum as well as in the blogosphere.
Matt Moore has published a very nice, pragmatic white paper based on his actKM conference session, giving guidance on how to justify your KM efforts to your various stakeholders. It forms a very nice procedural companion to the white paper I wrote some time back on “How to use KPIs in Knowledge Management”.
The assumption in Matt’s white paper is that you’ve been doing KM for some time and have some activity and output measures to show. Matt’s principal advice is to be aware of the political dimensions of decision making and support in your organisation – that your different stakeholders have different agendas, different things matter to different stakeholders.
It’s not just a mechanical numbers game. In fact, he says, numbers such as activity and downloads metrics “are vital to you but there’s a problem with them: No one else cares. And your task here is to make people care. So these numbers by themselves will not be enough.” So you need examples of impact to give context, understanding, and force to your numbers.
In a follow-up post on the actKM listserve, Brad Hinton makes the excellent point that numbers can mean different things in different contexts, which is why qualitative input is so important alongside the numbers to help interpret them correctly. He puts it so well that I’m quoting him in full (he kindly agreed):
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“When I had to supply metrics for the CoP’s I managed at a former workplace, I reported on activity (akin to hit rates) broken down in sub-categories like questions/answers/news/market opinion, etc. Because I often followed up on exchanges to hear from the person that received the greatest benefit, I often used their quotes in my report. And I would usually feature a “case study” of an exchange where the end result was positive (generated a new deal, saved time, helped my client, found a colleague with the info I needed, etc.).
“There were a couple of CoP’s that had relatively little action – low “hit rates”. But the value was often particularly high – for example, our CoP on the grains industry had low hit rates for a number of rational organisational and industry reasons but a monthly review of soil moisture, rainfall and crop conditions during a season were highly valued, particularly by lurkers in our credit department! By identifying the value (in this case risk mitigation on credits), low hit rates weren’t seen to be as “disappointing” to management as first thought.
“At inductions, I always used a couple of really successful “case studies” to showcase CoP’s as a way of learning on the job and making personal networks within the organisation.
“My conclusion is that “value” has to be regularly communicated and made visible using (where applicable) quantitative AND qualitative metrics.”
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And in a sign of a really good conference, one of the participants, Kerrie Anne Christian has blogged about how insights from the conference helped her address a sudden extinction threat to a number of CoPs in her company, and reminded her how important it is to keep the “elevator pitch” messages flowing to key stakeholders, so that they are aware of the value being created.
For me these two messages – helping our stakeholders see the value in terms that are meaningful to them, and looking beyond the blind numbers – are paramount to sustainability in KM. This is not about achieving salvation, where faith alone (depending on your tradition) can get us where we need to be. This is business in the mortal world. We have to justify what we are doing in terms of works, real impact on the business. And just playing the numbers game, as Matt hints, is effectively relying on blind faith. Nobody really knows what the numbers mean until we have concrete examples to show us what they mean.
