Knowledge Jolt with Jack (comment-extended feed)

Globe: Expertise is overrated

2008-10-05T22:38:18Z

The Sunday Boston Globe's Ideas section has an interview with Philip Tetlock, who has a book on expertise: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. Tetlock has asked experts their predictions and then recorded the results. The basic result: experts don't do much better than a coin flip in predicting the future.

Interesting stuff. Experts are very good at reviewing what happened and explaining it through their particular lens of experience and expectations. But when it comes to predicting the future, there are just too many random factors to predict much better than a coin toss. Hopefully, scientific endeavors fare better than this, but we see it a lot.

NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston

2008-10-03T21:33:06Z

Doug Cornelius asked me to participate in the NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008, which for some reason was held in Boston this year. This is a group of lawyers (primarily) who are very interested in knowledge management in the legal profession. There are a number of my friends from KM circles associated with this group, and it was great to reconnect once again.

Unfortunately, I could only stay for the morning.

Does Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen from AIIM kicked off the day, talking about the topic of how KM is growing and changing in response to Enterprise 2.0.

They kicked off their discussion with a wiki window experiment. Half the room defined knowledge management on post-it notes, and the other half covered Enterprise 2.0. Interestingly, the general themes that came up in both wiki windows were similar, which was the source for the following conversation:

Knowledge Management	Enterprise 2.0
collaboration	training, professional development
social networking	forms
sharing	people
search	content organization
virtual organization	sharing & gathering
	efficient (something)

Carl talked about the general model for knowledge management, which is the familiar combination of Strategy, People, Process and Technology. What was new to me (even though I had read Carl's book) was a description of how technology supports knowledge management in enabling the processes of

Intermediation
Externalization
Internalization
Cognition

I really like this. For some reason it's the first I've seen this connection broken down this way.

So what is so different about Enterprise 2.0? Dan focused on the fact that there really isn't that much different in terms of KM. It's just that Enterprise 2.0 brings some new technologies and different focus in terms of speed and ease of use. And these new technologies -- and the way they are implemented -- allow for a number of interesting new behaviors. One of the big elements is the emergence of knowledge and people that is much easier with E2.0 tools than with email or other traditional tools.

They used an entertaining "evolution" slide to frame out some of this discussion. It had both the evolution of the technology from 1.0 to 1.5 to 2.0, and various categories of how people work around the tools. It garnered some laughs. And I liked the discussion of the cultural aspects of adopting KM or E2.0: if your firm is in the "islands of me" mode, be aware of the distance from there to "islands of we" mode.

Interesting phrase: "controlled transparency" in relation to the capabilities provided by E2.0 tools.

Much of this discussion was based on the AIIM Enterprise 2.0 survey and report.

Blogging as Knowledge Management

This was the panel in which I participated with Bill Ives, Mary Abraham and Doug Cornelius. "Blogging as knowledge management" isn't a particularly new topic, but it continues to be very interesting as people discover blogging and other social media and the potential impact on personal and group interactions. We ended up focusing primarily on blogging in general, rather than how to get blogs set up within a business.

I wasn't able to take extensive notes, since I was up front participating in the dialog. But the room was quite loud with conversation and back-and-forth between the panel members and the other attendees.

In our pre-conference phone call, we though of several potential topics, many of which we covered in the ensuing discussion:

Flogging. Maybe Dr. David Vaine video on mandatory blogging
Blogging policies (internal and external)
Blogging as PKM
Blogging as KM
Marketing as it relates to blogging
Devoting time to blogging
Blogging as a memory location. Blogging instead of email.
Microblogging (Yammer, Tumblr, Twitter).
Blogging as one element of a larger platform.

Along with some of these topics, we also talked about why we blog (note taking; learning; finding people interested in the same topics; connecting; thinking out loud; etc.)

This led into a discussion of writing and thinking and how "finished" the written word is vs. the spoken word. In blogging, while the thinking-out-loud element is important, it's also important to realize that the publish button is a publication of sorts. Even if I acknowledge that the thoughts are incomplete, they are still out there for people to ponder and re-use as they wish. (If I didn't want that to happen, I'd keep it in my personal notes blog or in my paper notebook.)

Another interesting aspect led to the marketing possibilities of blogging and that many people and companies (outside of law) have had great success with blogs and social media as one element of their marketing effort. But many firms are very fearful of blogs as marketing to the extent of claiming that blogs won't work for marketing. I suspect there is a lot of fear and uncertainty as to how to control the beast once it is out in the wilds of the web. I'll be interested to see how this evolves at my company too.

Funny: Bill joked at Mary's expense that "You can be a guy and talk about the 'people element' too." Mary is known as the "it's not about technology" person in the group. Just check the name of her blog.

Pretty much all the 50 attendees read blogs on a regular basis. (One person came up after and told me they were one of the few who didn't raise their hand.) And about a dozen people have their own blogs, easily half of whom I know.

The only problem with this panel was that Doug didn't give us enough time. We should have had at least two hours, as the discussion throughout the room was great.

Wikis

I have noticed lately that wikis seem like a much better technology for internal projects. Many of the internal wikis aren't known as "wiki" and a some of the vendors have eschewed that term in favor of things like "next generation web" or the like. They are replacing the entire corporate intranet with these next generation tools, creating an entirely writable internal web. I heard something very similar with the MITRE talk on social tagging within the enterprise.

"There is a tension between freedom and structure." Particularly in relation to wanting to use mashups that require some base level of structure to enable the mashup to work over time.

Bill Ives was writing about this discussion in more detail. I assume it will be blogged shortly.

References

I mentioned the MITRE discussion at KM Forum a few times. I wrote that up.

Carl & Dan recommended having a look at Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson in terms of understanding the importance of Enterprise 2.0 tools and the growth of emergent knowledge.

I met several people in the room at the ARC legal KM in the Modern Law Firm event back in 2006, which I wrote about on day 1 and day 2. I sat on a panel on a very similar topic then, and today's seemed to have a very different tone.

I mentioned a recent post from a product management blogger talking about using social media to find new customers. That was The next frontier of finding prospects by Paul Young on Product Beautiful.

Another call for human IT project management

2008-09-30T03:15:34Z

Brad Hinton has an item On customer experience for information and knowledge projects. This is a telling example of the opposite of what we'd like to see:

I was talking yesterday afternoon with a professional colleague lamenting the difficulties of information management implementations. He was asking (rhetorically) why it was so difficult to get implementations to work when the project plan and methodology had been so carefully worked out. And how come there was still confusion about workflow and work policies and procedures when the vendor-client relationship had been so professionally managed by the systems and implementation team (of one). He sighed deeply, shook his head, and said: “and now we have the system and we’re well into the implementation, but after that we need to start the change management process!”

Brad's post focuses on the idea of customer experience and he makes the connection between being aware of what your customers / colleagues / clients need and how you might go about designing the project.

I really like this connection between "good experience" and the development of viable project plans that get to the heart of creating a change within the organization. Otherwise, why bother doing the project to begin with.

The long and short is that the project must account for the needs and concerns of the people who are expected to be impacted by the project, even if these people aren't going to "do" the project itself. It is these people who know the rules and justifications for the way things happen today. Why would we avoid talking to them to find the speed bumps and shortcuts that exist within the organization?

Event: The Push and Pull of Knowledge Management in R&D

2008-09-30T02:49:29Z

InnovationWell are doing another event at Bryn Mawr (Philadelphia) on 13 October The Push and Pull of Knowledge Management in R&D:

Knowledge Management in the pharmaceutical industry has been undergoing a transition over the past 5-10 years. With recent changes occurring in the industry, shifts in the research focus at both large pharmaceuticals and small-mid size pharmaceuticals and biotechs are becoming more common. The way we view the information food chain has had to change. We are in a world where we need to have greater flexibility and easier access to data than ever before. We are typically working with external as well as internal collaborators on our project teams.

Representatives cover the market: GSK, Accelrys, Merck, Sphaera, Pharmasset, Pfizer, and the expected attendees. Maybe I can get a flag to attend and represent my company. I went last year on my own reconnaissance.

A study of KM bloggers

2008-09-27T02:01:07Z

Pumacy Technologies AG are doing a study of Knowledge Management Blogs. It's not completely clear what all they are doing. This particular report provides a ranking of 50+ blogs in the KM arena for the month of August 2008.

Interesting to see the combination of activity and Google PageRank / Alexa ranking. There are some blogs in the top rankings with little activity in August. This blog comes in an number 11 in the list.

In an explorative study about Knowledge Management weblogs Pumacy Technologies AG has been analysing active KM-blogs by comparing figures from August 2008.

Thanks to Boris Jaeger for letting me know.

Connected - Why is it so hard to get smart people to share?

2008-09-26T21:19:09Z

I came across Why is it so hard to get smart people to share? from Gia Lyons via a mention on the actKM mailing list. She covers some of the common downsides to attempting brain dumps from experts. Her notes reflect many of the conversations on this topic.

There is a brigade charge underway to capture the wisdom (knowledge + experience) of the retiring corporate crowd. The urgency is perhaps driven by the fact that these “wisdom holders” will retire, then turn around and charge their former employers a hefty consulting fee for continuing their services. Not a bad gig if you can get it. But, those who have tried the knowledge management (KM) thing in the past will tell you that this harnessing, leveraging, capturing, harvesting – pick your favorite over-used word - is a hard row to hoe. And for the record, please do not try to harness or harvest my knowledge. I am not a horse, nor a corn crop.

Back before knowledge management was a business term, expert systems work included the Knowledge Engineer role (and still does). This person was responsible for developing appropriate representations of the body of knowledge in the expert system. And quite often this included interviewing the experts to try to elucidate their rules and expertise: knowledge harvesting. While it works okay, there were always elements that either could not be discovered or could not be articulated by these means. As a result, expert systems never quite got to the point of perfection predicted by early proponents. And there was always some unsettling aspect of using expert systems alone that made people shy away.

The trap, I think, is in thinking that KM (or any other knowledge discipline) is only about writing things down. This trap is easy to fall into when the focus of the discussion is on the technology, rather than on people and process.

Back to basics then. There are experts within your business, and that expertise is all over the map from arcane technical topics to customer experts to company lore experts. They are employed because their expertise supports the business at some level.

Experts do a lot of things in the context of their work. They apply their expertise to solving business problems, whether in the lab or in the board room. They spend time honing their expertise: talking with people, attending conferences, reading, doing blue-sky experiments, etc. They also respond to questions and requests related to this expertise. (Experts do a lot of non-expert things in the company too -- including learning from other experts.)

So, when it comes to the experts, what do we want them to do? All of these things - in the right balance at the right times. Do we really want them to spend time being interviewed by knowledge engineers or writing down what they know outside of any context? Why not facilitate their current work? I don't think these projects should get in the way of their work by forcing them into artificial "harvesting" situations.

There are many directions to go from here. For example, maybe the mentees should be writing down what they learn, instead of asking the expert to take on the entire burden. If the knowledge transfer job is necessary, then it has to be in the context of work happening now or in recollection of how a particular project ran. At least then there is some context around which to hang expertise.

There is a balance of sorts between being the expert, becoming a better expert, and growing others' expertise. Adding to the workload only upsets this balance - and upsets the very people we are asking to "share."

KM professorship at Kent State

2008-09-25T01:03:28Z

The Kent State University program on Information Architecture and Knowledge Management has announced a new professorship, sponsored by Goodyear: IAKM Accepting Applications for Goodyear Professor Position

The School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University is pleased to announce the creation of the distinguished Goodyear Professorship in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management. The Professorship is possible because of the generous support of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. The Professor would be expected to provide academic leadership in the Information Architecture and Knowledge Management program and to serve as a liaison in knowledge management to the business community. The successful candidate's portfolio must include an outstanding record of academic or professional accomplishments in knowledge management.

Teaching competencies, teaching experience, research experience and work experience are sought in the area of knowledge management with competence in several of the following areas:

Document Engineering/Management
Business Process Management
Document, Records and Enterprise Content Management
Business Intelligence/Competitive Intelligence
Intellectual Capital Management
Digital Asset Management
Interaction Design/User Experience Design

The Master's Program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management is a unique, innovative program inaugurated in Fall 2001. It has three concentrations: Information Architecture, Information Use and Knowledge Management. In order to provide better access to knowledge management expertise, an online certificate and degree program was launched in fall 2007. Facilities include a state-of-the-art usability lab (http://usability.slis.kent.edu/), fully-digital classrooms with the most current hardware and software, state-of-the-art distance education tools, whether through interactive television or web-based synchronous or asynchronous learning objects, and instructional designer support.Interest in asynchronous digital distance learning is preferred. A tenure track or non-tenure track appointment may be awarded depending on qualifications and interest of the successful candidate, with rank also commensurate with the background of the candidate. Summer teaching may be available. Salary is competitive with a $90,000 minimum for a nine month contract; benefits are excellent. The position is available beginning spring 2009. Applications will be accepted until the position is filled; review of applicants will begin December 1, 2008.

Official job posting in their HR system: Goodyear Professorship in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management

How much structure do you carry

2008-09-24T13:26:12Z

Seth Grimes talks about the claim that "80% of business-related information resides in unstructured form, primarily text." I remember this being an important element of discussions of information management (and into knowledge management) as I was getting into the topic.

BridgePoint Experts' Corner: Unstructured Data and the 80 Percent Rule .

[snip] It does seem obvious that a very high proportion of data is unstructured: How much of your workday is spent reading or writing e-mails, reports, or articles and the like, in conversations, or listening to live or recorded audio? And in making the case for tapping unstructured sources, a very important asset in fields ranging from customer experience management to counter-terrorism, it’s helpful to be able to quantify the proportion, to put a number on it.

I like that he's taken the time to explore source of this claim, which appears to be more-or-less correct. But even more important, why is it interesting?

As I read through Seth's discovery, the thing that I thought is that at one point ALL data is "unstructured" because we can only add structure to it when we build a narrative around it. Of course, I know that databases are "structured" in that i can find a phone number vs. a fax number, if the fields are labeled properly. But the connections that I can draw about that data can really only be expressed in words and language. And this is when I add my own structure to the data, as well as unstructuring it from the formal rows and columns of a data cube.

[Yes, I know I am playing loose with information architecture concepts. Please forgive.]

Planning for a change

2008-09-24T02:55:17Z

That title has several interpretations, depending on punctuation and tone of voice. Will I finally be discussing planning instead of something else? Or maybe I am planning to do something new? Or...

This time it has to do with an article I came across (via Twitter?) that provides Jay Deragon and socialutions' perspective on preparing for implementing social networks. I hear in these tips echos of almost any change effort.

Doing The Right Things Right:

Many businesses will spend thousands and even millions of dollars rushing into social networks without a full comprehension of the medium or a systemic plan to maximize the value proposition. As a result we’ve developed “7 Steps to Business Planning for Social Networks“.

[excerpted]
Step 1: Current Situation: Organizational Assessment
Step 2: Problem/Opportunity Identification: Leveraging the Vital Few
Step 3: Possible Solutions and Gains: The How and Why
Step 4: Cost/Benefit Analysis
Step 5: Measures of Success
Step 6: Implementation Planning: Organization 1 -5
Step 7: Execution and Adjustment Process: PDCA

I was particularly encouraged in reading the details of these plans. Any change effort, particularly when it is technology-oriented has to justify itself in terms of how it is going to benefit the organization. The ROI discussion works only if the technology adds directly to the bottom line. But what if it doesn't? How will the technology remove painful aspects of the business? How will it make doing business easier or more pleasurable?

On top of these questions, which is as far as people often get, you need to consider how people's behavior changes both with the "pain" and with it gone or greatly diminished. This information can significantly impact the plans and the project for the change. Forgetting to acknowledge these behavioral changes is likely to kill the project.

Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise at MITRE

2008-09-19T15:59:48Z

The Boston KM Forum topic this evening was Tag Me! Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, a talk by Laurie Damianos of MITRE (an interview with her at CMU). Going into the talk, the most interesting thing to me is Laurie's title: she's a Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer - Can I get that job?

Why social bookmarking in the enterprise? MITRE started this project in 2005, when the concept was just blooming from the public web. The problems are familiar: employees at MITRE and elsewhere are having problems capturing, storing and finding references to valuable information. As with many companies, there was a culture of using email for everything and there were plenty of internal websites for corporate information with corresponding enterprise search. But there were no easy ways for people to highlight valuable internal and external information. Library awareness services were typically done as one-off activities and sent to the people who requested them, rather than discovered and provided to anyone who might need them. And there are a lot of internal/secure references that MITRE didn't want people publicly bookmarking (on del.icio.us). MITRE had a clue already as a number of people were already using the publicly-available social bookmarking tools.

After the setup, the bulk of the session was an overview of the project and included a lot of back-and-forth with the audience members. MITRE have built their own social bookmarking tool, based on the open source Scuttle platform. Scuttle is being used by a number of organizations (including attendees from MIT Lincoln Laboratory library).

In the overview of features (which are quite extensive), one could see a lot of del.icio.us and many of the other social bookmarking services. Some of the more interesting features include

It's possible to comment on bookmarks, though Laurie said it isn't used very heavily. The hope is that this can help build community.
One can email a bookmark, which sends the bookmark, comments and tags -- and the link to the social bookmarking system. This helped spread the usage of the tool in its early days.
Along with search/browse by tag and user, one can search/browse the content of the comments or bookmark URL itself, as well as the user metadata from the corporate directory.
It's possible to slice-and-dice the information in the tool, based on the metadata, with several layers of depth. This is something that's always seemed missing in del.icio.us - I can see who else uses a tag or what tags you use, but I can't do next-layer analyses. (My experience is somewhat out of date.)
They've added user photos to encourage engagement and interaction.
There is an automated link-checking feature. Once a month, the system checks all bookmarks for validity, and if broken it will email the (first) person who bookmarked to ask them to fix the broken link. It provides a "broken" icon for visual indication to users who might come across the bookmark.
They have added the ability to mark bookmarks as private, but they have not yet established private groups for bookmarks, though it has been requested.
They have an integration with del.icio.us, if users acknowledge their del.icio.us account. One thing the system does is check that internal URL's are not bookmarked on del.icio.us for security purposes.
There is a special set of tags that reference "corporate collections" that a limited number of users have authority to use, mostly corporate librarians. This lets the system highlight specific content in a separate location on the home page.
RSS feeds exist for tags, people, etc. Any search or cross-correlation can be turned into a feed and used other ways (mashups).
The "home page" does what many of the services do: lists of recent bookmarks, popular tags, recent tags, and new users.

The pilot was with a limited set of users, picked to be the ones that would advocate even greater usage. The initial users were hand-picked to get some content into the system, so the newer users wouldn't come to a completely empty system. They found that usage grew from the initial group as these users spread the word via email and other conversations. Usage grew as the team started promoting it more on the website and at the coffee station, and then it ballooned when they sent a mass email with the formal launch of the service.

Beyond the features, we spent a good amount of time talking about how people have reacted to the social bookmarking tool. A number of things that have been observed in the public social bookmarking tools have also been seen within MITRE.

People are adopting the tags used by others; groups of people have been using shared tags; and the general number of tags per bookmark are increasing.
The most popular tags are connected to newsletters and superusers. Initially, there were also a lot of popular tags like "to read" that aren't terribly informative to the larger community.
People have been bookmarking both business and personal materials. MITRE doesn't distinguish - "it's obvious" which are which.
Some personal tags include restaurant recommendations, which is great for visiting colleagues.
There are no obvious differences between the age/generation of users, though this hasn't been studied in detail.
Many of the terms used by users are not in the official taxonomy, and work is underway to expand the formal taxonomy to represent things according to how people expect to find them.
About 14% of the users are contributing to the system, which parallels studies and the general sense of contribution ratios in large communities (such as the 90-9-1 rule of participation).
There are a very few superusers - people who appear to spend all their time tagging.
Several information awareness newsletters have largely disappeared in favor of bookmarks with useful comments. These can be sent via email or mashed-up onto other web pages (via RSS feeds).

One interesting aspect of this being an enterprise service is what happens with bookmarks of those people who leave the company. MITRE have decided that their bookmarks will be removed after a 90-day period for review. They do this because they've decided that all bookmarks in the system need to have an owner. Obviously the system can't remove the content in the URL - it is just the bookmark and related metadata that are removed.

And the statistics:

Users: about half of MITRE's 6500 employees are signed up as users (not all employees can access the tool due to their assignments and location)
Bookmarks: 21,000 bookmarks
Bookmarks: 17% internal / 83% external
Tags: currently 5.4 tags/bookmark (initially it was 2.7 tags/bookmark)
Tags: 15,000 unique tags (not accounting for spelling errors)

Laurie Damianos was involved in the initial stages of the project, and when it became a clear success, the project was handed off to the IT organization. The IT organization looked at buying commercial software, but have decided to stay with their own project on top of Scuttle.

The advertised description:

In today’s fast-paced world, every knowledge worker needs to stay ahead in their area of expertise. But staying ahead of the pack is a key challenge with the explosion of information sources. How can people easily find relevant resources and quickly find them again? How do people share useful resources with their colleagues? How can people discover new topics, experts in other fields, and new information? MITRE is piloting “collective intelligence” tools to help users find resources and share them across the corporation. The goals of this effort are to leverage the wisdom of the crowds and increase the number of access points to relevant content. MITRE has built and fielded a social bookmarking tool – allowing users to bookmark, tag, and share resources as well as discover experts and new topics. Laurie will discuss findings on adoption, usage, and social influences and highlight some of the challenges we faced integrating this exploratory technology into the enterprise.

Personal Productivity - is that what I really want

2008-09-16T04:15:42Z

Matt Cornell has a nice piece on The real reasons for the modern productivity movement that he sums up with

Productivity is neither a cult nor a fad. It's a search for meaning. -- (me :-)

Interesting claim. He goes on to study it further in his article, and the commenters have made some useful connections. In one way, this represents the flow of thinking from

Am I working?
Am I working enough?
Am I getting stuff done?
Am I working on the right things?
Am I doing the right kind of work?
Am I satisfied?

Cue diatribe about the educational system taking us from a life of fun and internal satisfaction to being dissatisfied because external forces tell us we need to work to be happy. Read that somewhere else.

So... Is personal productivity the end goal, or is it just a piece of the larger puzzle. I want satisfaction in my life. Productivity is one element of helping me get there. But if I am "productive" in the wrong area, then the satisfaction isn't going to be terribly deep.

And a note at the middle level of working on the right things: Jordan Frank pointed to an article by Sarah Houghton-Jan on Being Wired or Being Tired: 10 Ways to Cope with Information Overload from Ariadne, July 2008. Rather than ten specific things, she provides general areas where one can focus and a number of things to check. Many of these sound very familiar as starting points to make it to the next levels of thinking about my work. Reading through the list, you'll note some repeated themes: weed, organize, use when appropriate. (Note, the article goes into much more detail on each of these elements. Please, go read it for the details.)

General Organisational Techniques

Make an Inventory of Information Received
Make an Inventory of Your Devices
Read Up
Think Before Sending
Schedule Yourself
Schedule Unscheduled Work
Use Your 'Down Time' to Your Benefit
Stay Tidy and on Top
Keep a Waiting List

Filtering Information Received

Weed, Baby, Weed!
Teach Others (!)
Schedule Unplugged Times
Unplug at Will

RSS Overload Techniques

Use RSS When Applicable
Remind Yourself
Limit the Number of Feeds
Organise Feeds

Interruptive Technology Overload Techniques

Use Interruptive Technology When Appropriate
Check When You Want to
Do Not Interrupt Yourself (!)
Importance of the Status Message
Lobby for IM in Your Workplace (!)

Phone Overload Techniques

Use the Phone When Appropriate
Turn Your Mobile Phone Off
Keep Your Number Private
Let It Ring
Work = Work; Home = Home

Email Overload Techniques

Stop ‘Doing Email’
Schedule Email Scanning Times
Deal with Email by Subject
Use Email When Appropriate
Keep Your Inbox Empty
Filter Your Messages
File Your Messages
Limit Listservs
Follow Good Email Etiquette
Delete and Archive

Print Media Overload Techniques

Just Because You Can Touch It Does Not Mean You Have to Keep It
Cancel, Cancel, Cancel
Weed What You Have

Multimedia Overload Techniques

Choose Entertainment Carefully
Limit Television Viewing
Use Your Commute to Your Benefit

Social Network Overload Techniques

Schedule Time on Your Networks
Pick a Primary Network
Limit Your IM

Time and Stress Management

Use Your Calendar
Take Breaks
Eliminate Stressful Interruptions
Look for Software Help
Balance Your Life and Work

Dealing with process and practice around collaboration

2008-09-16T03:25:03Z

I wrote about eating or fishing last week, and about the same time Bill Ives posted Is there Tension in Enterprise Collaboration (referencing Bruce Lewin's detailed thoughts in The Tension in Collaboration). The thing that caught me about this idea of Tension is often between those looking for formal process vs. those that want it loose and human. I think this is the same as the issue I brought up: technology implemented without acknowledging the human behavior is bound to miss something. (I think there is an opportunity to drop in some thinking from David Snowden here, but I can't put my finger on his words.)

Now jump to an article from Ross Mayfield on Leadership and Management of Distributed Collaboration. The post clarifies his comments about leadership and ideas around "chief community officer" roles. But there is a direct connection to the tension topic in the final paragraph that talks about a Mike Gotta definition of process and practice.

Process is "how work should be done." And Practice is "how work is actually done." When process fails (exceptions), people use practice to fix things. When process doesn't exist, practice fills the void. While people don't realize it when they engage in practice, they actually are tapping into community -- an informal social network within or beyond the enterprise to discover expertise and get things done. The problem is that we haven't had the tools to support good practice.

I really like this sentiment, and there is a direct connection to the thought that process (or technology) changes become problematic when the surrounding practices aren't accounted for. It's not just that we have to acknowledge the practice exists, we need to explicitly decide which practices need to stop or change, and what new practices need to be put in place as a result of the changes.

For those that don't recognize these comments, they are inspired by a Theory of Constraints idea around "the power of technology," but I still think they fit for any kind of change that doesn't acknowledge the practice.

Finally, an article linked by a couple of my Legal KM friends on The End of 'Command Control' Approaches to Knowledge Management? by David Jabbari from the August 2008 Law Practice Today. The thing that jumped at me here is the recognition of the value of collaboration (and the idea of practice) in the traditionally conservative environments of law firms. This has to be a good thing.

KM is about innovation, not efficiency

2008-09-15T18:29:02Z

Chris McGrath on the ThoughtFarmer blog gives us a Sneak peak at IDEO's take on Knowledge Sharing, including a screen shot of their ThoughtFarmer-powered KM tool. He's got a great quote from the project manager.

Yesterday I spoke with Gentry Underwood, the project manager for IDEO’s Knowledge Sharing project, about his presentation at Web 2.0. Gentry brought up a key distinction between IDEO’s take on Knowledge Sharing and traditional Knowledge Management: It’s not about being more efficient. It’s about being more innovative.

While I don't know that I have ever thought of knowledge management being about "efficiency," it is easy to see how efficiency seems to be the focus of "traditional" knowledge management projects. The best KM projects are those that remove knowledge-related problems from the lives of the people affected. This ends up being many different things, from the "knowing what we know" old school to "knowing what you need" to "knowing each other" ... and on to developing the new - innovation.

I am not surprised with the focus on innovation at IDEO. I've had people from IDEO talk in my knowledge management class at Northwestern (which I had to give up on my move to Boston), and it has always been clear to me that they aren't about technology for technology's sake. They gear their work on creating something new for their customers, whether that is a product or a new way to think about business processes. This may be why it is only now that they have gotten around to doing something along the lines of KM.

* Minor disclosure. I participated in ThoughtFarmer's entertaining Tubetastic promotional campaign. I am the "Tube Ombudsman" in the org chart.

What are the right things?

2008-09-12T03:51:34Z

Forrester Research published Product Managers Are Working On The Wrong Things by Tom Grant with Peter Burris and Christina Lee in July. I've finally had a chance to look at it (being one of the survey respondents).

In the technology industry, product management has a unique, strategic responsibility that is not shared with anyone else in the company: matching product and market requirements to decisions about products and services. Unfortunately, product managers do not focus enough on this core responsibility. For technology companies to get the most out of their product managers, they need to focus on the strategic inbound tasks instead of being distracted by too many tactical demands. Additionally, technology companies need to hire or cultivate product managers who have the skills and experiences necessary to produce high-quality product management deliverables — not something that anyone can do without training. Companies that make these product management reforms will be more competitive and better able to use product management deliverables to make better strategic decisions.

The overall tone of the article feels very negative about the current situation for product managers. Given that the survey only covered 49 respondents, I assume/hope the team at Forrester were also basing their opinions on additional experiences that they have with Product Management organizations.

In talking to some other product managers, the general sense was that the report does reflect more-or-less with what they've seen in their careers. Product managers spend too much time on the tactical activities, the day-to-day stuff. And they don't spend enough time on the strategic, long-term activities that will really make their products (and companies) shine.

This makes me wonder why? Are there simply not enough people to handle the tactical stuff? Is the strategic stuff harder than it sounds? Are we operating under the correct definition of product management? How are product managers being measured that the tactical behaviors swamp the strategic?

The table of contents gives you another idea of what the article covers:

Tech Companies Misuse Product Management (pp 2-10)

Product Mangers Lack Common Experience

Product Mangers Are Not Poised For Success

Product Mangers Do Too Much

How Good Can Product Decisions Be?

Product Management Is A Strategic Resource (pp 10-15)

Make Inbound Tasks The Core Responsibility

Shift Outbound Tasks Away From Product Management

Hire The Right People, Then Give Them A Career

Demand Quality Product Management Deliverables

Put Product Management At The Same Level As Other Groups

Codify Product Decision-Making

Eating for today or fishing for tomorrow

2008-09-11T02:44:19Z

Sigurd Rinde has a piece on the purpose of information technology that rings a bell for me. A quote from the close of Teaching how to fish - IT's ultimate purpose should do the trick:

IT today is mostly built so as to satisfy your craving for yesteryear's menu, don't get caught by the lure of that. Request that IT shall open new doors and new ways - IT should allow you to learn to fish.

This is the frustration with new IT projects. We're promised that the new gizmo will make us more money (or solve some problem), but there is no process to change how things work so that the money will keep rolling in (the problem goes away).

I suspect this is why people treat new IT projects with skepticism. They've seen them come and go to no great benefit. So, when you suggest that social software is a great mechanism to get people connected, it's no wonder that people aren't particularly interested. While the tools might enable that connection, it is all the underlying rules and ways-of-doing-things that need modification.

So, if I buy that groovy X platform, what do I need to do to make sure it actually solves the claimed problems?

One of the things people love (and sometimes hate) about librarians is their helpfulness, if you show least interest in wanting to become more self-serving. Wanna learn how to use that card catalog, let me show you. Don't know about our resources, here is how they are organized. Librarians are stewards of information, and they want to make it as easy for you to get to it, whether that is by setting up the homework help desk, or by showing you how to do it yourself. Just think how many more librarians would be employed if they operated under the "hire more librarians" mantra: no access to the stacks, all questions funneled through the reference desk.

Comment from Samuel on Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise at MITRE

2008-09-30T11:16:03Z

[This is a comment on Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise at MITRE from Samuel.]

Really interesting post, helpful for companies like the one I work for who have to start doing this!

Comment from Jack Vinson on Another call for human IT project management

2008-09-30T15:12:02Z

[This is a comment on Another call for human IT project management from Jack Vinson.]

This is an interesting comment, Forrest, but what is the alternative? How do you implement a change that happens to have an IT component?

Is the problem in the way "project management" is typically run? Or is there something else at hand here?

Comment from Neil Saunders on The good is the enemy of the best

2008-09-30T16:49:05Z

[This is a comment on The good is the enemy of the best from Neil Saunders.]

I think that you have been so brainwashed by management-speak that you have utterly missed Voltaire's point, which is simply that true excellence must always be at war with (or unaccepting of) efficient mediocrity.

Comment from Forrest Christian on Another call for human IT project management

2008-09-30T17:11:47Z

[This is a comment on Another call for human IT project management from Forrest Christian.]

I think it's project management itself. Large efforts were completed successfully prior to the advent of Project Management. It's a methodology or approach to achievement that has its place in certain circumstances. In others, a different approach or language for achievement is necessary. Sooner or later, PM will be viewed as simply a subset of potential approaches rather than the single way to do everything.

Comment from PM Hut on Another call for human IT project management

2008-09-30T18:01:58Z

[This is a comment on Another call for human IT project management from PM Hut.]

I run a website about Project Management and I do think, myself, that everything is a project (take a look at this series Project Management in my Life).

However, I do agree with Forrest when he's saying that people are getting very strict about Project Management, and following certain methodologies. The most successful PMs do not care about methodologies, they only care about getting the project done.

Comment from Samuel Driessen on Connected - Why is it so hard to get smart people to share?

2008-10-02T11:06:07Z

[This is a comment on Connected - Why is it so hard to get smart people to share? from Samuel Driessen.]

Nice post Jack! I agree. It reminds me of Snowdens thesis: "Knowledge can only be volunteered". Shouldn't a starting point for companies be do support social networking and/or expertise networking with tools. Within our company we've done that with Guruscan.nl. In this way experts can be found, asked questions and they can tell their story!

Comment from Patrick DiDomenico on NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston

2008-10-03T23:15:14Z

[This is a comment on NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston from Patrick DiDomenico.]

Great recap, Jack. Thanks.

I am surprised by the doubt of the use of blogs as marketing tools for law firms. Maybe it depends on what firms mean when they ask whether blogs "work" for marketing. Must a blog have been the direct cause of new business to have "worked" as a marketing tool? In my opinion, no. There is something to be said about brand recognition. Jordan Furlong wrote a nice piece about the importance of law firm brands in his Law21 blog today http://bit.ly/3v4Xx6

Kevin O'Keefe (Real Lawyers Have Blogs http://kevin.lexblog.com/ ) would probably have something to say about whether they "work."

Since I'm a KM (rather than marketing) guy, I am more interested in blogging inside the law firm. I am a big proponent of that: http://bit.ly/1duzH5

What was the consensus about microblogging inside law firms? Did it come up?

Comment from Jack Vinson on NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston

2008-10-04T03:11:44Z

[This is a comment on NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston from Jack Vinson.]

Patrick- Too bad you couldn't join us... You were the subject of some offline conversations associated with how anonymous one keeps their blog.

I think the nature of the marketing conversation was really that the _marketing_ department just didn't get it. The marketing dept at my company are just now thinking about doing something about social media. (We do happen to have RSS feeds for events/news, but most of my colleagues have no idea what they are.)

We didn't manage to get to microblogging. Or to Flogging. And we only briefly touched on the idea of the larger impact of social media.

p.s. Frappaolo has posted his slides to SlideShare

Comment from John Tropea on NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston

2008-10-06T22:12:59Z

[This is a comment on NY-Toronto Law Firm KM Summit 2008 in Boston from John Tropea.]

Hey Jack,

I posted on a similar thing the other day http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/10/02/the-km-core-sample-in-relation-to-im-km-10-social-computing-and-km-20/

My musing was that KM 2.0 is social computing, but with an overlay of facilitating and (as Snowden says) lightly constraining (governance)...as the reality is that social computing exists within a management framework.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/07/18/seven-ways-enterprise-20-differs-from-web-20/

In the end it has to add value, to both the individual and the enterprise.
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/08/29/roi-for-the-knowledge-worker-is-roi-for-all-and-how-km-took-an-ironic-approach/

Sorry, I'm not promoting my posts, I'm just saving space, as my blog has already spoken ;)

My notion is that blogs and networks assimilate offline interactions ie. conversational with people on your wavelength...so it's like the spoken word, yet it's written down (as Olivier from Headshift says, the re-materialisation of tacit knowledge is finally here)

Your post has just inspired me to post about blogs and the word "published"
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/10/06/is-publish-a-dirty-word-in-enterprise-20/

Comment from Jim Harris on Critical Chain software

2008-10-07T17:41:25Z

[This is a comment on Critical Chain software from Jim Harris.]

Hi.

Has anyone reading this actually used both PSNext and any other reasonably serious contenders in Enterprise PPM/IIM software, and if yes, please share a sentence or two about their relative merits/faults, or better yet, point us to a comparative/independent review.

Thanks for any help.

Sincerely,

Jim Harris