Jul 29
How Stories Interact with Infrastructure
I’ve just finished reading Charles Tilly’s new book Why? What happens when people give reasons ... and why. He’s particularly interesting because of the way he puts stories into a context of a social system of reason-giving. He describes four basic types of reasons, conventions, codes, stories and technical accounts. The diagram below summarises the classification for the visually acute. Malcolm Gladwell has also written a very good review of the book, focusing on the four ways of giving reasons (thanks Maish for the initial introduction).
For me, however, looking at his book from a knowledge management point of view, I was taken by the way Tilly starts to explore the interactions between the four different ways of giving reasons - it’s the first time I’ve seen how stories can interact with knowledge and information infrastructure. Tilly’s account of how stories make technical accounts more accessible, or how codes solidify and extend the social insights expressed in stories, has got me thinking. I’ve probably got more thinking to do, but have already started sketching out some of these dynamics to structure my thought. Click on “Read more” to see where I’ve got to, and if you have comments, suggestions or questions, let me know.
Jul 29
Welcome to the Blogosphere, Dave
Dave Snowden is blogging furiously and (hopefully) scribing away on his long-awaited book in the “monastic” environment of Nanyang Heights in Singapore. Since when did monasteries have swimming pools? Welcome and keep posting!
Jul 24
Technology and Fingerprint Identification Experts - Trust them Both
Yesterday, we saw some relatives off at the airport. After they left, my husband wanted to step into the office for a moment to retrieve some documents to work on. It seems they have now installed a biometrics system for access into the office. He placed his index finger on the little oblong glass piece but the system could not recognize his fingerprint. It just beeped and displayed a red light. He tried several times again before trying his other index finger, for both fingerprints were previously provided as “passwords”. Nope. He then moved to another reader along the same corridor but for a different room to see if that was working. That reader worked fine. So he came back to the first one and tried again and again but in vain. Wiped his finger and tried, wiped the glass and tried, tried it fast, tried it slow and still no luck.
OK. Maybe that’s good – no office work on a Sunday – but it got me wondering, what if it was emergency and he needed to retrieve something urgently. If it was a system to sign in attendance like how the security guards do at some places, and if the reader kept failing like this, I can imagine them feeling helpless and somewhat frustrated, especially if they showed up for work. Then again, maybe they’d be happy to have an excuse to scoot off cos they can’t get in : )
Back to the new sophisticated technology, the system was supposed to “know” him and yet that knowledge could not be retrieved for his identity to be validated. Is it because of the reader was faulty? Or maybe it read the fingerprint fine but could not match samples fast enough before time out? Maybe it could not match any fingerprints at all? (As you can see, I’m guessing). He was not complaining for when I asked him who handled the job, it turns out it was one of his staff! Fair enough, the system is new and they are just ironing out the teething issues.
I used to be quite impressed with how crime investigators, my brother-in-law having been one, could determine identities of suspects/culprits just from fingerprints. Back then when he was with the CID, the work was manual and they had specialists to study the “design markings” (there’s probably a more scientific term for this) of the print and match them with prints from their files. Of course, that takes a longer time (can’t comment about probability of success – may be just as good). Then, the FIDS (fingerprint identification system) was introduced. Both methods were more for post-event use to help them determine identities based on fingerprints gathered at crime scenes, like an audit trail in a system. With biometrics, it is very much used as an authentication mechanism and so is pre-event. Either way, the over-reliance on systems could have significant dire consequences, especially if there are no back-up mechanisms to help with tracing or authentication.
Think it would be interesting to elicit some expert knowledge on recognising fingerprints before this knowledge disappears… and should the systems all fail us!
Jul 21
Explaining Knowledge Management #1
In this first video blog post from Professor Gervaise Germaine, we address the differences between data, information and knowledge. If you have other pressing questions of clarification about key KM concepts, do put them to Professor Germaine via the comments section on this post.
Jul 20
Punctuation Therapy
This is a brilliant, funny little elearning module about how to communicate professionally. Should be compulsory training for all KM consultants. Thanks Saul for the link.
Jul 19
Building Information Neighbourhoods
Yesterday I sat in a meeting where an IT manager was outlining his organisation’s strategy for overcoming information confusion. They have a proliferation of repositories, including hundreds of Lotus Notes databases, not to mention document management systems, document supported workflow applications, intranets and other databases. They want to provide common access to all of this, by putting an enterprise content management system on top of it, with a common metadata framework, taxonomy, search engine, indexing, probably an auto-tagging engine to minimise the effort in accessing all this liberated treasure. His diagram looked something like this.
I’ve seen it lots of times before, sometimes dashed out on whiteboards by IT managers in a state of near religious ecstasy, sometimes on the powerpoint slides of ECM/DMS system vendor salepersons. It’s called ECM Heaven.
Although we do quite a lot of work up in that “universal access engine” box (the ECM space with taxonomy and metadata and other heavenly instruments) somehow it doesn’t quite wash. Just the day before I’d been reading Maish Nichani’s new article Taming your “target” content (disclosure: I commented on his early drafts), and his opening words struck home:
Jul 19
Disaster Recovery Collaboration Among Organizations - Can It Be Done?
I received the McKinsey Quarterly alert today which highlighted the results of a survey they did on what executives viewed as the top current business trends. The survey of some 3,500 executives across the world indicated that innovation and the free flow of information are what are considered the biggest drivers of the pace of change in businesses today. While this is not a revealing insight, I still find it useful to have it validated every now and then. (Thanks to Matt Moore for also reminding us that innovation is what’s “cool” today.)
Back to the MQ report, what was interesting to me though was to learn that while risk management to deal with changes in economic, regulatory and financial elements was common, generally, most companies did not have risk management plans to deal with a pandemic, natural disaster or changes in geopolitical landscapes such as those arising from terrorism. What is interesting about this is that it’s not like we think it could not happen, what with the tsunamis/hurricanes, SARS, bird flu, etc. that we’ve seen these last few years, but really how will businesses handle such crises? And if they are not planning, is it because the outcomes from these “abnormal scenarios” are unpredictable, there are too many variables, or that they are not getting enough information on these issues? Is it because they do not want to think about the dreadful possibility or because information around how these “misfortunes” are managed is mostly sensitive and hush-hush? Assuming all these are true and that businesses need to live with the fact, it would seem like it would still be so critical to have some plan in hand.
It is generally true that businesses are less networked (for competitive reasons) than agencies/governments. Could they do the noble thing and collaborate on this front, jointly develop risk management and business continuity plans to deal with these possibilities and save having to multiply resources to handle such situations? It cannot be that it is only at the national level that disaster recovery collaboration and defence strategies apply.
Jul 17
Straits Knowledge Appoints Eminent KM Advisory Directorate
Straits Knowledge is delighted to announce the appointment of a KM Advisory Directorate KMAD (TM) made up of three eminent personalities from industry and academe who will advise us on KM matters. They have also kindly agreed to answer questions from Green Chameleon blog readers on KM matters by video podcast on a regular basis. Our three eminent KM personalities are introduced below. Please submit your questions to them in via the comments section below this post, or by email to enquiries-at-straitsknowledge.com
Jul 14
Why People Don’t Blog
Over the past week, I’ve noticed that the number of blogs on our website has dwindled somewhat. This afternoon, my colleague Patrick asked why I hadn’t blogged lately, a question that I knew would come sooner or later. So before he asks me again, I thought I’d better blog. Below are the top 10 reasons why people in organisations big and small don’t blog. They are based partly on my own experience and partly on my observations at work.
1.Some people find it hard to relate the blog to their work area
2.Some people take a long time to formulate what they want to say
3.Some people censor themselves so they can’t say what’s really on their mind
4.Some people are censored so they can’t say what’s really on their mind
5.Some people are resentful that others aren’t blogging as much
6.Some people think they blog too much already
7.Some people are discouraged by the lack of response to their blog
8.Some people are genuinely busy with projects
9.Some people have nothing interesting to say
10.The dog ate the blog
So what’s your excuse?
Jul 10
Crisis Required to Eliminate Politics
I have just completed reading a book about what I would consider one of the major barriers to knowledge sharing. The title of the book intrigued me more than anything – Silos, Politics and Turf Wars -and I thought this could probably help me understand what feeds the politics in organisations.
Brief overview of the book: the book is interestingly written in the form of a biography. It tells of a Jude Cousins, a marketing guy in a newly-acquisitioned organization, who when things go horribly wrong as a result of the merger, leaves to start his own consulting firm. He acquires a couple of clients, and as the chapters unfold, the book tells of how each of his client organisations have problems around, you guessed it – SILOS. Interweaved in the storyline are the moments of doubt and anxieties he has about the viability of his consulting business and about supporting his expanding family (wife delivers twins).
Cousins concludes his engagements with his client organisations successfully. The panacea which he introduces to them is primarily for senior management to collectively agree on a “rallying cry” for the organisation, a single qualitative focus, which he later refers to as a “thematic goal”. There was something that Cousins (Lencioni) said that seemed to resonate with what I myself had experienced about organisations and crises.
Cousins noted that when organisations are in a crisis, the call for organisational survival empowers people to look beyond their departmental agendas and prejudices to “collaborate” themselves out of the situation. He observed this especially in the A&E department of the hospital he brings his wife to, where budgets and responsibilities did not matter as doctors, nurses and even admin staff worked in harmony to save the lives of people brought in. Granted that not all organisations are in a crisis all the time or that we have to put them in one, the author promulgates that when people understand what a potential crisis could be, it would help them determine the rallying cry or thematic goal for the organisation.
A rallying cry surpasses current operational activities and agenda. Couched in the form of a statement, it expresses what the organisation uniquely needs to address to avert a crisis. In the example of the firm that Cousins left, the rallying cry was “Complete the Merger and Launch the New Company”. [There are subsequent steps to Cousins’ “silo-busting process” including determining “defining objectives”, articulating “operational objectives” and providing suitable metrics, and wrapping them within a stated time period for accomplishment.]
The resonance I felt was with the reference to the “crisis”. I recall that in a certain government agency that had concluded its major BPR study in 1998, the CE required that every staff member of the 900-strong organisation attend the communication sessions, which were held for 3 consecutive days. An effective change management strategy it seems on foresight and hindsight, the comms enabled staff to understand the changes that were to come as a result of new processes and technology being introduced, and more importantly how it was going to affect their work and jobs.
One thing he said that I felt tipped the “buy in” indicator positively, was when he said “if we don’t do this (change), we will be obsolete in a matter of time. Customers will not want to come to us [our facilities] because it would be so inconvenient for them to have to queue to be served. They would rather go to the cinema, or take up other leisure activities. Our stakeholders will stop funding our services, seeing that they are so unpopular and we would have to cut our staff strength and close down branches.” When staff were given the vision of the “potential crisis” that the organisation and they themselves could be in, they were more prepared to cooperate and support the change management effort. It was not seen as a threat in a “bullying” kind of way, it was seen as a real threat to what mattered, their jobs. I know this is not really a “politics-related” problem but a change management one, but it seems that the realisation of what could potentially be a “crisis” makes people less resistant and more cooperative.
I have seen, now in my consulting role, the silos and politics (not quite the turf wars yet) in organisations. While these organisations have strategies and programmes in place, would they also benefit from having a “rallying cry”? Is there a potential crisis that they need to avert ? Is it serious enough to make them care about eliminating the silos and politics?
