• Access to my self-paced ONA learning module
• Three 2-hour interactive virtual sessions with fellow learners. These sessions cover Scoping and Designing Your Project (with moi), Hands-On with ONA Surveys (with Kai and Laurie) and Hands-On with NodeX with (Marc).
• A year’s subscription to Optimice’s ONA Surveys tool for conducting surveys
• A copy of “Analysing Social Media Networks with NodeXL” by D Hansen, B Shneiderman and M Smith (2010)

I’d like to thank my friends at Optimice and my colleague Dan Keldsen (who hosts the online course at IAI University) for the opportunity to participate.

For full details, including a global course schedule, visit the course’s main site: http://www.optimice.com.au/onacourse.php

It’s always a rich pleasure to hear June Holley talk about network weaving. A few weeks ago, she talked about Network Weaving in the Leadership Learning Community’s ongoing seminar series.

In her talk, she outlined four key roles for network weavers and the primary activities for each.

It’s not a stretch to think about these as progressive roles. In a network, everyone can (and should) be a connector. What’s important is to articulate it and be conscious of it. As June also says, the “Number one job” of network weavers is to help more people become weavers. And we can all do that. Moving along the progression, each role requires more skill, more experience, more thoughtfulness. And investment on the part of the stakeholders and funders of an intentional network. Fortunately for the growing number of nonprofits beginning to invest in networks and in network weavers/facilitators/guardians, June’s Network Weaver Handbook is close to completion and available for pre-ordering. I was privileged to get a peek at earlier versions, and it’s an amazing set of resources for planning  and running network weaving events, working with people to help them understand their current and needed skills, and so on.

Slides and a list of resources from this talk are available on the LLC’s Network Weaving Page. This includes the “Network Weavers Role Checklist,” so you can test yourself against the roles listed above.

(The next webinar, October 10, features another of my favorite network facilitators, Nancy White: Communities, Networks and Engagement: Finding a Place for Action. Nancy will talk about building online spaces for networks, a topic that is also a current passion of mine. Look for another blog post soon.)

A recent webinar sponsored by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations (GEO), “What is the role of Networks in creating scale?” highlighted  the work and thinking that is showing results (and is part of the ongoing learning dialogue). The panel for the webinar,  included Diana Scearce, of the Monitor Institute (co-author of Working Wikily and more recently, author of the awesome “Connected Citizens: The Power, Peril and Potential of Networks“); Roberto Cremonini of Cremonini Consulting Network (who led knowledge management and networking activities at the Barr Foundation in Boston for seven years); and Gayle Williams, Executive Director of the Mary Reynolds Babcock foundation, which is focused on alleviating poverty in the southern U.S.  Nancy Murphy, from GEO, facilitated the panel discussion and kept the remote audience engaged and interacting.

Diana set the stage by providing a framework for network thinking and development, an approach that blends traditional mechanisms for supporting social change initiatives with network-minded mechanisms:

Foundations like the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation and the Barr Foundation have been using the networked mindset, and these approaches, effectively, and are working through the challenges of working with multiple stakeholders and learning how to put structures in place that support networked action — and learning — that require giving up on linear thinking and working organically.

Roberto gave a terrific example of how the Barr Foundation managed its funding for Boston youth sports programs by showing, side-by-side, what Barr could accomplish using a traditional approach versus what it could (and did!) accomplish using networked thinking:

Both practitioners emphasized the emergent role of weaver, or facilitator, or “network officer” (as described in the linked document by the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, a good and detailed description of the nitty-gritty of the work required); the need to work with the entire ecosystem; and the importance of understanding accountability.   The RE-AMP Energy Network case study provides a good example of building a network by starting with a systemic analysis of the ecosystem and the use of a skilled network facilitator.

A key audience question was, “How do you measure the success of the network?” Gayle Williams talked about the network that MRBF is funding to push tax policy legislation in Alabama. I liked her answer a lot: you can look at the results, actual changes in the tax policy, but also you need to be sure that the network is always asking the questions, “who else needs to be involved?”  How are the relationships? How easy is it for people to come into the network?” The speakers all agreed that organizational/social network analysis is playing a key role in helping people “see” their networks and understand how to improve connections.

This excellent webinar is available for replay at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYudIfermUg

I have always said (and written) that a network produces value based on its purpose, and also provides value to those in it. One of the cases mentioned in this webinar is one I have some personal connections to, the Barr Fellows program which is also supported by the Barr Foundation and facilitated by colleagues at IISC. My friend and colleague Claire Reinelt recently published a case study on this program, which weaves cohorts of nonprofit leaders in the Boston area. Fellows are given 3-month sabbaticals, a shared learning experience somewhere in the global south, and the opportunity to develop “authentic, honest, and accountable relationships with each other.”  It’s not hard to imagine the value to the city of Boston of such inter-connectivity across the Fellows, nor the amazing fund of social capital that each of the Fellows has to draw on.

This work, this investment, in networks and communities is one of the areas of commonality between what we are seeing in Enterprise 2.0 and the nonprofit world. In E2.0, the focus is on communities (see my comments on Rachel Happe‘s talk at the E2.0 conference — and her talk itself, The Strategic Imperative of Communities) but I refuse to get into the semantic arguments about the differences between networks and communities. For the purposes of declaring that work gets gone, goals get accomplished, and visions achieved best through connected sets of people, it doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter what we call them when there are opportunities to learn. The big learning so far this week: E2.0 and nonprofits agree. If you want to work successfully, you have to invest in networks. Community managers/facilitators/network officers/network weavers. Whatever you call them, you need them, and you need to invest in them.

• Focus on a business problem
• Have senior management support
• It’s 10% technology, 90% people
• KM must be integrated into your business processes; it is not something “extra”
• Look for key partners in HR, IT, and Operations
• Capture and distribute success stories
• Address “what’s in it for me”
• “ROI” is very, very hard to measure and may not be worth the trouble
• Culture trumps everything (that’s a direct quote from Tom Davenport)

And yet, speaker after speaker at E2.0 talked about these lessons without reference to the accumulation of learning within the knowledge management community (from which I believe many of these same folks came). I suspect that part of this lack of acknowledgment comes from not wanting to be tarred with the KM feathers. (Many people still don’t get it that “KM” isn’t one big monolithic system; that it is a collection of methods, practices, and tools that all support various aspects of identifying, creating, transferring, and augmenting both the hard and soft, explicit, tacit, and in-the-flow information, knowledge, and understanding that people need to know to get their jobs done. Think of these tools, methods, and practices as “apps” and good knowledge managers as people who are integrating these apps onto a platform. That’s the 2.0 way to think of it.)

Ok, so I got that off my chest. What was interesting to hear this year, 2011, at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston was that as the themes shift from technology to business transformation, the “K” and “KM” words are creeping in. (Yeah!).

• Sarah Roberts (@robertsgolden): “You can make information flow down in the organization, but can you make knowledge flow up?” “Individuals, left to their own devices, are pretty resourceful and knowledge-sharing prone.”
• Tom F. Kelly (@Moxiesoft): “The three key elements of success in social media: simplicity of design, knowledge as a center point, leadership” “Collaboration is about sharing knowledge, not data.”
• Mike Rhodin, IBM Social network in an enterprise is an everlasting knowledge repository.”
• Ross Mayfield (@ross): “Social software needs to create the knowledge trail as a byproduct of getting the work done, not as a discrete silo of “perfect” information.”
• Daniel DeBow (@Rypple) “For HR, it’s ‘who has the knowledge’ in the organization and collaborative tools can provide the answer.”

One of the “KM fellow travelers,” http://www.elsua.net/(@elsua), an IBM evangelist was also tracking a lot of the KM themes throughout the conference. Mining the tweet streams (I shower blessings on the capture of these by @jimworth), I found an number of Luis’ nuggets of recognition of KM themes:

• @elsua @joshscribner: finding experts, finding information, sharing knowledge. #IBM #BlueIQ ‘s 3 core values for socbiz. #e2conf” / Yes, sir!
• @elsua: #e2conf knowledge transfer remains one of the biggest issues for any collaboration strategy, regardless the generations #e2conf
• @elsua: #e2conf Ohhh, another flashback from KM in the late 90s: technology, process, culture (=people); was missing it, too! #E2conf

Most astounding to me was that Andrew McAfee, who coined the term eponymous term “Enterprise 2.0″ gave a big shout out to one of knowledge management’s clarion calls from 1998, a quote from Lew Platt of HP: “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as profitable.”  (And,  If Only We Knew What We Know was the title of APQC‘s O’Dell and Grayson book that was one of the first KM books.)  Then as if in answer to my unspoken question (“How does E2.0 take KM to the next level?”) he says, “Enterprise 2.0. Succeeded because it solves knowledge problem and gives everyone in the organization voice in a community.”  McAfee’s talk addressed, in a way, the tacit/explicit model in KM. In the first part of his he cautioned against letting “old fashioned management” get in the way of using social technologies that promote tacit exchange and knowledge generation. The second part, on “new-fangled computers” , he focused on IBM’s Watson and its Jeopardy championship. His conclusion: the explicit part of knowledge capture, storing and recovery has been solved. Let’s now focus on “looking for questions that computers are not good at answering.”

I am thinking that this new territory, that computers are not good at answering, and which even in its fledgling days (Marcia Connor said of E2.0, “We’re in the first minute of social business. The next 5 years will tell so much more.”) is pushing beyond what knowledge management was able to address: relationships.  I’ve said before, in the 3rd (current) era of knowledge management, “knowledge is in the network.” Social tools, within, beyond, outside, and organizationally orthogonal to the enterprise are going to give us unbelievably new kinds of knowledge about who we are, how we interact, and the creative results of those interactions. These are the lessons that we haven’t learned from KM. Now that we have tools for creating, evolving, mapping, and –especially — analyzing the impact of relationships we are going to learn a whole lot more.

On the vendor side, it’s clear that as the market is maturing; it’s all about the platform now (see my previous post) and there are a number to choose from. (Some look a lot like intranets, but I think we’re supposed to think that intranets are passé. To me, the intranet is the “home page of the enterprise,” social or not; it has to be where eyeballs start the day, where hands go to search, and where people connect with people and content.)

What felt different (and this has been said by many) is the shift in tone that occurred based on the selection of keynote speakers  away from vendor pitches (with a glaring exception or two) and toward thinking about the nature of business and work. The Wall Street Journal picked up on Jive‘s CTO’s comment  ”that the emphasis has shifted toward business outcomes” in its article Enterprise 2.0 is growing up.” But it was not just about business outcomes.

It was also about the nature of business, relationships (companies <-> customers <-> employees), and some pretty simple principles of management. I had picked Mike Gotta‘s workshop, Organization Next, to attend on Monday, bypassing (except for an occasional drop-in) the Blackbelt practitioner’s session. (Ok, so I was just looking for a larger picture all along and at least at this E2.0 conference I found a lot of good stuff to listen to.) Mike’s workshop was HR-focused, looking at ways that HR managers are coping with/thinking about responding to changes in the employer/employee relationship. Daniel Rasmus did a nifty scenario planning workshop that brought home the number of uncertainties that exist about the world we live in.  Sara Roberts of Roberts Golden also did some great interactive exercises around organizational agility and change management. It didn’t feel like a technology conference at all.

(Sara also did a terrific keynote on Wednesday, “why employees are/should be managing the company,” introducing the notion of working within a complex system: setting the proper boundaries that enable leadership to emerge. She started with the metaphor of streams of humanity on the sidewalks of New York and how people can move in and out of the stream easily.)

In his elegantly constructed Tuesday morning keynote, the always inspiring John Hagel nimbly set  the tone for a business-focused conference. Starting with last year’s big E2.0 question “How do we get adoption for social software?” he linked adoption to passion and performance (“If you are interested in performance you have to be interested in passion”). People who are engaged in activities they are passionate about will connect with other people — and if you’ve got the platform available, and right, then they will use it in conjunction with passion. The only metric that matters is engaging passion.

(Later in the morning, Bryce Williams from Eli Lilly talked about how social collaboration was enabling emergent leadership in the organization. In his terrific stories, he emphasized how people succeeded because they were able to follow their passions. In the afternoon, in a session on innovation, Roy Rosin from Intuit talked about building an innovation environment: “[it means...] letting people build on their passions.” Sara Roberts said, in her workshop on Monday: “Meaning is the new money.” )

Rachel Happe, of the Community Roundtable, talked about the strategic imperative of communities: “Relationship and Culture are the only sustainable advantage.” And, she insists, that it takes time to cultivate communities, that our tools and technologies are pushing people “on a collision course” with information (beyond the capacity of our brains to process well),  that people must be given time to develop relationships and in an environment — culture — that provides the context for acting on information. “All management is community management.”

Rachel also emphasized changing organizational structures, confident that network structures will remain viable.  Organization structure had also been a big topic for Sara on Monday, who brought it all down succinctly to “What are we trying to do?” “Who needs to be connected with whom?” “Who is already connected?” “How can we foster the connections we need?”

John Stepper described how the “social media” journey at Deutsche Bank started with that core KM method, communities of practice, followed by a community of media enthusiasts, and a focus on expertise before going to technology. He summarizes this approach nicely here. In his keynote, he described how working in networks (oops, I mean communities) helped people to “step out of the org chart.” Terrific phrase. More organizational talk from Jim Grubb, VP of Communications at Cisco: “Your “org chart” is a people chart that needs to be dynamically ordered according to what you need to do in the moment.”

Enterprise 2.0 itself is a highly collaborative event and organizational microcosm. The tweet stream transcripts (767 pages, 20 per page) and links to presentations and blog posts are all posted in the self-organizing wiki set up by Jim Worth.  The community that organizes around this conference deserves a better name than Enterprise 2.0 (and “social business” doesn’t cut it, either). This conference was renamed and repositioned from a series of conferences on collaboration software and technologies, I think around 2008 (after Andrew McAfee coined the term, which was just 5 years ago.)  The co-evolution of people and technology is reaching a point where we can, and should, be looking outside the boundaries of enterprise technologies to understand how to manage, work with, and enable people to work together to create value beyond the corporate sector. E2.0, Boston 2011 has opened the door to many more conversations about how we move into this future.

Let me start with the term. Platform. Railroad platform. Platform shoes. Platform bed. Diving platform. Political platform. Speaking platform. From the French, plate-forme, diagram, map, literally flat form (Merriam-Webster). The use in computer technology derives from the sense of a platform as a set of architectural standards consisting of hardware, operating system, and applications that provide the basis for a stable and (presumably) long-lived computing environment. A recent Economist article celebrating IBM’s 100th anniversary attributes IBM’s success to its ability to migrate itself (and more importantly, its customers) from one computing platform to another. Microsoft, Apple, and Google provide competing platforms on which to build information systems and applications.

In his landmark article, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, Andrew McAfee used the term platform 31 times referring to the online intranets, external web sites, and bespoke applications used for “generating, sharing and refining information.” A month or so later he elaborated on this definition of Enterprise 2.0 as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers,” and fully defined his use of each of those terms: “Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.”

The notion of visibility resonates with some of those other platform-y items: diving platforms, speaking platforms, even political platforms all suggest something that is distinct, somewhat above and differentiated from the fray. The emphasis on contributions and interactions doesn’t suggest the vertical aspect of platforms. I especially think of a diving platform: you climb it or climb onto it and from it, launch yourself into an immersive experience. But I also think of the platform as a place on which to stand, a place from which to move more creatively.

Steven Johnson evokes this aspect of platform. He sets the scene (as he does often in his book) by talking about Charles Darwin’s discovery of the coral atolls in the Indian Ocean. The coral ecosystem, initially structured on volcanoes submerging over eons, continues to build upon itself, a platform on which to build the next layer, always becoming, always emerging from what came before. He extends the metaphor, also, to computing systems and applications noting that even Twitter itself is a platform on which innovators continue to build and extend. “Emergent platforms derive much of their creativity from the inventive and economical reuse of existing resources,” he says, linking the notion of building upon and re-using to the way that city neighborhoods shift over time, as buildings are reclaimed, re-purposed, and re-occupied.

I really like the image of the collaborative platform as a coral reef, a rich ecosystem of people and ideas both using and building on the platform, contributing while they interact. Big schools of small fish, small schools of big fish, eels, crabs, and skates; rainbow fish and clowns; shy tetra and angels and sergeants finding their way, their food, their friends among the diversity of coral. And, like the Chihuly sculpture I mentioned in my recent post, the result is always unpredictable, but within the context of of a set of boundaries and constraints, designed for emergence.

I recently came across a couple of blogs that very nicely mapped this recipe to the concept of self-organizing teams. One, a very nice blog by Dave Gray who  continued his podular theme in a post, Give pods a chance. He likens pods to self-directed work teams, and then gives examples from 3M, Amazon, and the Chinese motorcycle industry.  He emphasizes that podular, modular design needs to happen in the context of a connected company. He says of Amazon:

Bezos does have an answer though: Break big problems down into small ones. Distribute authority, design, creativity and decision-making to the smallest possible units, and set them free to innovate. Small teams focus on small, measurable components that customers value.

Gray does not skirt the problem set: rewarding teams rather than individuals, dealing with loafers, and so on, but stresses that if you are in an industry in which complexity is increasing, you need to “take another look at organizational forms that play to natural human strengths, like ingenuity, curiosity, and the job of making a clear and recognizable impact on the world.”

Co-incidentally, Rachel Happe posted a vision of the social organization that provides additional detail about what it takes to provide an environment in which employees “self-commit” to projects that have been defined within the scope of the overall company strategy and direction. Managers are there to coach and support employees as they choose projects and navigate their careers. Rachel focuses on the social environment that is being enabled by the communications tools available to us; this is a nice counterpoint to Dave Gray’s description of how the pods (“projects”) innovate and create breakthroughs.

So, how did Dale Chihuly get me off my butt to finally write about this? It turns out that his projects are all about how he provides a vision, a set of guide lines, and a desired future state to the artists who work in his studio and who set up the art for exhibition. The Lime Green Icicle Towerconsists of over 2,400 individual pieces of glass that were blown and shipped to Boston. If you look at the video of its construction you may wonder about a detailed specification of how all the pieces were to be assembled. The fact is, there was nothing detailed. The parts were put together in Boston using the sense (vision) of what the finished piece was to look like, but was otherwise assembled in context, on the spot.

My sense of this is that the teams Chihuly is using are self-organized at two points in the artistic process: first, after he has a vision for a piece and describes the colors, shapes, and overall aesthetic that he is going for. Glassblowers work within these boundaries to create the amazing, individualistic shapes and contours of the pieces. Then, given boundaries for what the finished work is to be, they assemble those pieces, never entirely sure of what, exactly it will look like. The relationships among the pieces is always different, whenever a finished work is assembled, but the results are always true to a vision.

The concept is not unfamiliar to those of us who were engaged in various forms of process, work, and product design in the early 90s. As Francis talked, I wrote down “participatory design,” and “socio-technical” as those early approaches came to mind as he emphasized the core aspect of co-creation: working with all the constituents in the ecosystem of a product or process to understand their needs and working with them to design the product, process, or system.

He shared a great story about how the French postal service used co-creation as the starting point to address problems of low employee morale and declining revenues. The story illustrated, through increments, some of the principles of co-creation:

• Stakeholder won’t participate in customer co-creation unless it creates value for them. By letting employees determine their own hours, the postal service was able to decrease absenteeism.
• The best way to co-create value is to focus on the experiences of all stakeholders. Once postal employees began talking to customers, they discovered that much of the dissatisfaction with the postal service was because of the restrictions on their hours of service (closed from 12 – 2:00pm for lunch as is French custom) The postal service expanded its hours to match the times that people were normally in town for market (in rural areas) and even until 8pm in cities.
• Stakeholders must be able to interact directly with one another. Bringing customers and postal employees directly into conversation was the path to understanding the customer experience and how to improve it. They had to talk to each other.
• Companies should provide platforms that allow stakeholders to interact and share their experiences. In many cases, platforms these days are interactive (more on this in a later post). But in the case of the postal service, La Poste started having small meetings to coach customers about selling on e-Bay. This had the effect of greater use of e-Bay and (guess what?) more business for La Poste!

(I have taken the principles, bolded above, directly from the HBR article by Gouillart and Ramaswamy on this topic.)

A number of the themes within this concept resonated strongly with me. First and foremost, it’s a network story. I strongly believe, and have articulated many times, that “knowledge is in the network,” and that the future belongs to those who understand how to tap into, and to learn how to weave and leverage strong networks. In the HBR article, the story of how the Indian company ITC transformed their agricultural business in India — and the lives and welfare of the farmers on whom they depend — by creating a network built around e-choupals, internet kiosks spread across the countryside that provided information in local dialects on the daily weather, crop prices, and other news; advice on farming methods; and an email service that let farmers interact directly with scientists.

But the kiosks were only part of the “platform.” The real power in the network came as ITC identified lead farmers to manage the kiosks and create local networks around them. The conversations generated around the e-choupals identified new ways that farmers wanted to interact with ITC, so that ultimately ITC created a network of hub facilities, each of which provided higher-level services to 40 or 50 e-choupals.  These networks continue to create value for ITC at the same time that the experiences of the farmers are continually enriched.

The second theme that emerged for me in listening to Francis is how the process relates to, or could leverage value network analysis. (See also here.) Engaging all the stakeholders in understanding the ecosystem is a core part of the VNA methodology. Also critical is that, as the value network mapping process proceeds with stakeholders identifying each of the exchanges (tangible and intangible) that they have with one another, conversations emerge that speak to the quality of those exchanges. In co-creation terms, it’s about the interactions. I sense something a bit different about how the co-creation process goes a level farther (or deeper) than the VNA mapping and it will take me some time to think about how to introduce this into my VNA practice. But the end result is the same: ensuring that every member of the network receives value from the exchanges, and that ultimately the value network itself is creating value as an ecosystem.

I was still a little curious about how co-creation differs from its socio-tech ancestors, but didn’t get a chance to ask the question. Fortunately, @jackvinson was there and he offered the cogent insight that what is truly different is that the leadership that is promoting the process redesign have, in successful cases of co-creation, let go of requiring a specific result. That is (in complexity terms), in the old days management created too many constraints on the outcome whereas they must now be comfortable with setting looser boundaries and letting real value emerge. (I’ve been thinking a lot about the role of leaders and setting boundaries the past few days as well, after recent posts by @snowded and @davegray on self-manged teams, but I’ll save that for another post as well). And, of course, social media has transformed our ability to engage stakeholders in real, ongoing, deeply engaged conversations. What a great new world!

This quirky idea came from a Phil Campbell I am related to by marriage, that is, my brother’s marriage to Phil’s sister, Veronica. Phil and Veronica found out about and visited this small town in Alabama n 1994, and that discovery led to the the first Phil Campbell gathering in Phil Campbell in 1995. All persons named Phil, Philip, Phillip, Philippe, Philipp, Philippa, Felip, Felipe, Filip, Filippo, Filippu, Filipe, Filype, Phylip, Phillep, Pilib, Fülöp, Fulup, Phyllis, Philice, and Philomena that our Phil could find were invited.

In 1995, 22 Phils and 1 Phyllis showed up. 

The 2011 event was planned to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the town. Hundreds of namesakes had been located and invited, including Phils from Australia and the UK.    Phil also invited  Jason Biggs, the Hollywood actor who plays him in the upcoming film “Grassroots,” as an honorary Phil Campbell. Jason will be there.

However, last month’s tornadoes hit the town of Phil Campbell very hard; 26 deaths were confirmed, the school and churches were demolished. Under our Phil’s leadership, the gathering of Phil Campbells quickly became a relief effort. The gathering will go on as planned, but the Phils, Philips, Phyllises, Felipes, etc. will show up ready to volunteer for rebuilding efforts, and with as large a check as possible to go to the relief and rebuilding of Phil Campbell, AL.

You can help, too. If you haven’t (or even if you have) already donated to support tornado relief efforts, you can do so on the I’m with Phil site. Let’s help the Phils make it a really big check.

• Big KM is about enterprise-wide knowledge management programs that start with a top-down strategy and seek to reach the farthest corners of the corporation
• Little KM is about the quiet application of KM methods to business problems in a way that just makes sense
• The third KM, personal KM, is about about the conscious development of habits for identifying, locating, and processing knowledge and personal connections

Knowledge-based businesses, like professional services firms, were very quick to take up “Big KM,” beginning with content management, but were quickly joined by many early adopters, a large number of whom found their way to APQC.  Best practices have been the province of APQC (“Make Best Practices Your PracticesSM) since 1977; Carla O’Dell of APCQ wrote one of the first books about knowledge management in 1998 (with C. Jackson Grayson, founder of APQC): If Only We Knew What We Know: The Transfer of Internal Knowledge and Best Practice.

Since that time (or perhaps a bit before), Carla and her colleague Cindy Hubert have been convening practitioners of Big KM to work with them on case studies and transfer of best practices; it’s a closed, fee-based network that prides itself on providing members with evidence-based data on the impact of adopting KM practices. Over time, that network’s work has been codified in an extensive knowledge base of articles, white papers, and reports, some of which are available for free.

Just recently, Carla and Cindy have collated the work of the last dozen or so years into a book, The New Edge in Knowledge: How Knowledge Management Is Changing the Way We Do Business. It is clearly focused on the design of successful Big KM programs, and is rich in examples from its member companies, including Accenture, ConocoPhillips, Fluor, IBM Global Business Services, Petrobras, Schlumberger, the U.S. Department of State and (my favorite, because I’ve consulted to them over many years on their KM program) MITRE.

It’s a good book for what it is, that is, for people who are in corporate environments where it is still possible to do Big KM, and who either need a primer on the nuts and bolts of putting together large programs or are looking for some quick examples of what other companies have done :

• Getting the strategy right, and focused on a value proposition for critical knowledge and its flows
• Establishing a portfolio of techniques, tools, and methods, and getting clear about the approach to using these in the best combinations in the enterprise-wide program
• Putting a governance structure in place, along with appropriate measures and metrics to keep the program focused on providing value to the enterprise (noting that Big KM still takes pretty big bucks, when you factor in information technology infrastructure)
• Working through issues of that tough nut called “culture” and managing organizational change
• Introducing the new forms of social media and social networking and the potential that they have for transforming knowledge management practices

Each chapter concludes with a list of articles, white papers, or reports from the APQC knowledge base that provide additional detail and case studies.

The APQC started convening practitioners about the same time that Larry Prusak started the IBM Institute for Knowledge Management. IKM attracted many of the same people as APQC but  lasted for only a few short years. While APQC focused on proven practice, Larry’s cadre focused on pushing the boundaries away from technological implementations and toward understanding people and relationships. I was privileged to participate for a year during my stint at Nortel Networks during which I was impassioned by Rob Cross and his work in organizational network analysis and Dave Snowden‘s emergent (pun) work in complexity and the Cynefin framework. At Nortel, I was practicing “mini KM” (a full KM program within a division of the enterprise), but had my heart in the edgy and new. Since leaving Nortel, I have been consulting at this conjunction of networks, knowledge management, and leading in complexity.

The Cynefin model helps us understand where to position the strategies, tactics, and operational models of Big KM: if it’s simple, or complicated, then we can turn to proven good practice or get our arms around the complicated. But when it’s about human beings and knowledge flows, we have to look for other tools and means for managing a complex environment. In his Foreword to The New Edge in Knowledge, Larry Prusak says:

Knowledge is getter understood as flow. It is highly dynamic, nonlinear, and difficult to measure or even manage. Working with it entails new techniques that we are still learning about.

Carla and Cindy have, in this instance, captured some of what we have learned, and also point to some of the areas in which are still learning in Big KM. Little KM (even in Enterprises) and personal KM are much closer, I think, to the flow.  One of the things I learned, and teach, about mapping social networks is that the maps we create represent only a snapshot in time. The relationships and the environment inwhich they operate, are always changing. But the insights from this snapshot are always valuable.