A Matter Of Degree

Wall-E and Knowledge Management

Wall-E Rubik's, originally uploaded by The Wall-E Builders.

Inspired by the Clutter Diet Blog's post about Wall-E as a great organizer, I wanted to post my take on Wall-E's knowledge management practices. If we look at Wall-E's on-the-job skills, as well as his collection of objects, as his "knowledge," he:

- Readily shares his methodology for doing his job
- Shares his filing system and what is filed there
- Lets his taxonomy grow organically (the spork!) rather than constraining it to a predefined set of categories
- Takes time to learn about new things rather than opting for the safety of his work routine.

For me, the movie raised these questions:
If you're the only one who knows how to do what you do, whether at home or at work, is your filing system intuitive enough for someone to find what they need if something should happen to you? Could they find it by browsing, keyword searching, or by both means? Could what you keep (versus what you discard), and how you keep it, actually save your life or your career?

Tag as you search?

Today I attended a seminar hosted by the Boston KM Forum on categorization and tagging.  One of the speakers, David Hobbie, brought up a great point - that tagging / categorizing in the enterprise happens when a document is saved into the content management system, when a better way would be to have people tagging documents as they find them in search results.  The first scenario – tag on upload – involves questions such as Which version do you tag?  How can other users tag and rate?  The second scenario – tag on search – accounts for these issues and will lead to richer search results in the future.  I’m not advocating doing away with tag-on-upload, but I’d like to see Hobbie’s idea implemented in the enterprise applications used by my clients.

 

Last night I attended a talk on Enterprise Search from Microsoft by Tara Seppa at the New England SharePoint User Group.   Microsoft emphasizes the value of SharePoint’s “actionable search results” (by which they mean “preview helpful summary information and clear graphical representations of files; move, delete, copy, and drag & drop files; send, forward and reply to messages directly from search results, and open and run applications from the results”). The tag-as-you-search concept would be great functionality to add to future releases of SharePoint Search.

David’s blog:

http://caselines.blogspot.com/

New England SharePoint User Group:

http://www.clearwaypartners.com/SUGHome.htm

KM forum topic:

http://kmforum.org/blog/?p=70

Actionable search results definition from the whitepaper Microsoft’s Approach to Enterprise Search:  Bridging the Gap between Information Management and Enterprise Search

Social Networks and Smoking Cessation - what it might mean for your organization

I heard a great article on NPR this morning about a study which shows that when an individual quits smoking, this has a ripple effect on family members and friends, with the result that those in the social network are more likely to quit as well. 

"There's no doubt that people are influenced by the behaviors of individuals that are not just one degree of separation from them, but two and three degrees of separation. There's a kind of cascading influence," says Nicholas Christakis, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study, which appears in Thursday's edition of The New England Journal of Medicine.

This story was an inspiration, as I see so many companies struggling with behavioral and cultural issues that affect productivity and delivery.  If the clustering / hive intelligence effect that the article describes can work the same way within the social network of an organization, then there's hope for cultural change if a few key individuals will adopt the desired behavior, and spread this to their colleagues.

What issues is your company struggling with, that technology alone can't solve?  Here are a few that I see all the time:

• adopting a new tool, application, or platform
• using a naming or filing convention
• allotting time to non-billable activities that are critical to improving the practice or organization

In most cases there are at least a few people in any company who are doing the "right thing" already.  What will encourage them to spread their behavior to their network, and beyond?  How can the social network be strengthened so that desired behaviors might spread more rapidly?  And how can you start tracking this spread, to be able to show that positive change is happening?

Update - my colleague Marcel pointed me to a similar NPR article about social networks and weight gain / weight loss.

For Knowledge Management, Add a Human

This blog was inspired by tonight's discussion at the Boston KM Forum.

In my work with clients who are implementing a knowledge management platform, I see the same scenario again and again:

The client has a lot of disorganized:

They say:

"I can't find anything!"

So the client does this:

Then they say:

"I get too many results! It's a big pile of junk!"

So they do one or more of the following:

• Faithfully slog through the pile of junk ("Maybe it's on the next page of results")
• Go back to the old way ("I'll squirrel away the content I know and trust")
• Evaluate other search tools

When what might really help is this:

i.e., add a person.

A human to bridge the gap between the content and the people who need it.

Gian Jagai, who spoke tonight about his role as a Knowledge Manager, mentioned the need for a Community Coordinator, to facilitate the knowledge shared in a Community of Practice.

Dan Galant, the instructor of the Mindsharp course I recently took, said "Sharepoint is going to bring back Library Sciences," and that the best implementations he's seen are the ones where the organization hired a librarian to come in and organize the content.

They're both talking about the same thing – the need for a human to vet the content, to link information and technology and the user community. I'm not saying anything new here, but most of the organizations I work with don't have this role, and aren't planning to hire for it. Yet here are just a few of the ways this person could improve knowledge management at a company:

• Analyze search results and requests, then create links between what people are searching for and the best content or expert for the job (in SharePoint, these are your Keyword Best Bets)
• Identify premium content and tag it as such
• Update old content (or make sure someone's updating it)
• Interview experts, and document knowledge and information (this could be as simple as adding wiki entries)
• Distribute content to those who could benefit from it (RSS feeds are one way of making this easier)
• Document the requests for research help, and interview users about the ways an improved knowledge management system has benefitted the organization, to generate metrics justifying further investment.

One of the main things I've learned from working with SharePoint is that no matter how well you set up this tool, and no matter how many features it has for facilitating knowledge management, the customer probably won't be satisfied if they are relying on the technology alone to do what they need it to do.

Unfortunately, the folks with whom I work most closely and feel this lack of user satisfaction most acutely are influencers rather than decision-makers, with no authority to hire this community / content coordinator.

I don't know the answer, but I want to start recommending this role as part of the SharePoint team my clients will need as they roll out their collaborative portals.

Thanks, KM Forum, for a great discussion!

Execution vs. Innovation (and how Microsoft SharePoint is positioning itself these days)

I attended the AIIM expo today to hear the keynote speech by Microsoft's Jeff Teper, with demo by Arpan Shah.  Teper's talk, "From Business Intelligence to Blogs and Workflow to Wikis: Accelerating Both Empowerment and Governance in a Rapidly Expanding World of Information," discussed the difference between companies that are execution-oriented and those that are innovation-oriented.

The execution-oriented companies are concerned with governance, control, and regulating their internal content.  The innovation-oriented companies are concerned with collaboration and empowerment of their users.  The two types appear to have different strategic and infrastructure needs, but in reality, all companies need to combine the right amount of both.  Execution-oriented companies need to innovate in order to survive in the marketplace, and innovation-oriented companies need some standardization of their work process and product so that they don't end up with duplicative effort and chaos. 

Teper showed how Microsoft designed SharePoint (MOSS 2007) with both sides in mind.  It has what Teper called the Governance Accelerators:

• Consistent site & information architecture
• Information management policy
• Rights management
• Auditing

And it has the Empowerment Accelerators:

• Employee self-service
• Role delegation
• Intuitive User Interface
• Pervasive Collaboration

Which way does your company tend - toward execution or innovation?  Is one of these words part of your mission statement?  Have you experienced situations where you needed to enable your organization to work in a different direction than you usually do?  I'd love to hear stories or examples from the real world, now that I'm looking at things through execution-vs.-innovation-tinted glasses...

Blogs are from Mars, Wikis are from Venus?

At a seminar I recently attended about how blogs are used in the corporate environment, one of the speakers, Susan Dobscha, Ph.D. (Associate Professor of Marketing at Bentley College) mentioned that she believes blogs are a masculine form of communication, and wikis are a feminine form of communication.  (In this context, blogs represent an individual making a statement to maintain independence and status in a hierarchical world (see Deborah Tannen's Difference Theory), and blogging involves a strong sense of identity and ownership, whereas wikis are a collaborative and iterative effort without a single identity or owner, to create a network of links based on consensus.)

At first I bought in, because the association was appealing, but it doesn't hold up.  It's easy to say that it's masculine to hold forth on your opinions (whether anyone responds or not), and it's feminine to organize and edit without being in the spotlight.  Blogging is hurling arrows around and wiki-ing is nest-building, right?

I kept thinking about rocks covered with petroglyphs, paintings on cave walls, and hieroglyphics - I can't prove that no women were involved, but my sense is that the men were doing this collaborative, uncredited work.

I thought, too, about women and fashion - how women use clothing to make a statement and show status (think of an actress at the Academy Awards, or a bride on her wedding day) whereas men in those situations generally wear variations on the black tux.

I'm sure there are other examples that show how men have a history of collaboration & consensus in their communications (e.g. The U.S. Constitution & Bill of Rights) and how women have eschewed compromise in favor of victory (the Suffragettes?).  What are your thoughts?

Finding Experts - Part One

An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.

-          Niels Bohr (1885–1962), Danish physicist.

On 10/19/06, I attended a seminar held by the Boston Knowledge Management Forum on “Finding Experts.”  Access to expertise information was much-needed at my previous firm, but as of the time I left in July 2006 there was no solution planned.  In my new position I will be working with MOSS 2007’s new capabilities around social networking and expertise capture, and I wanted to learn about what others had done to facilitate access to experts.

Larry Prusak was there to discuss Keys to Success in Finding Experts.  My takeaways from his talk were as follows:

What works, w/r/t employees finding the knowledge they need to do their jobs:

• Smallness – where co-workers have instant access to each other and sharing is a way of life
• Mission-critical organizations – where people are there because they love the work (e.g. the space program, scientific research projects)
• Colleagues that like each other
• Being there in the same place / knowing each other (as opposed to spread out geographically)

For any other kind of business environment, you need enforced social norms, i.e. carrots as well as sticks that will make employees contribute to the knowledge base, keep their own profiles updated, etc.  (This was where knowledge management fell apart at my previous workplace – the firm did not fall into any of the above categories, hours billed was what mattered, and there were no incentives for performing non-billable tasks such as contributing to the knowledge management portal, even though the firm’s leaders recognized the importance of collaboration and KM.)

Other key points of Prusak’s talk:

• Knowledge is expensive.  Prusak gave the example that it takes the same amount of time to learn French today as it did in 1800.  In other words, knowledge is based on experience and you can’t speed up the process or take shortcuts.
• The knowledge at one firm sets it apart from other firms.
• The value of knowledge is in interpretation and adaptation. (“What would you do with this problem?”)  This is why knowledge is different from information.
• 80% of employees’ knowledge is in their heads, and it can’t be captured in documentation.  Facts can be documented, but not the interpretation and adaptation of previous learnings.
• Instead of spending time and resources trying to capture knowledge, it’s better to enable employees to find each other.  To do this, you need both tools and process.
• Individual knowledge is not important – it’s the practice (i.e., the group working together).  There is not that much difference between what people know, so stars are not as effective as a highly-functioning team. 
• Knowledge work is profoundly social and has to be coordinated to work well.
• There is a need for the indexers and abstracters – the intermediaries or synthesizers who understand knowledge and help people work better.

In the coming weeks I hope to be learning and sharing more about how other companies manage Expertise information both internally and externally.

The full list of speakers at the KM Forum:

Larry Chait of Chait and Associates, who spoke about two products, Tacit’s Activenet and AskMe, and explained how they work.

http://www.chaitassociates.com/




Larry Prusak, Co-director of the Babson Working Knowledge Research Center and founder and Executive Director of the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management (IKM)

http://www.laurenceprusak.com/




Rock Griffin, President, Skyward Consulting Group, whose presentation on LinkedIn totally hooked me.

http://www.skywardconsultinggroup.com/




Phil Knutel, Assistant Professor, and Director of Academic Technology, Library, and Research Services, Bentley College, who demonstrated Bentley’s faculty database:

http://www.bentley.edu/academics_research/faculty_research/faculty_database/faculty_detail.cfm?id=694653




Bob Wolf, Ph.D., former Manager at the Boston Consulting Group, who presented some fascinating network analysis diagrams.




Cesar Brea, Monitor Group, who spoke about social network analysis.

http://www.marketspaceadvisory.com/team.html




Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School, who shared some interesting findings from his work with Match.com.

http://dor.hbs.edu/fi_redirect.jhtml?facInfo=bio&facEmId=mpiskorski@hbs.edu&loc=extn