Patti Anklam | Category Archives: knowledge management

Archive

July 3, 2011 by Patti

SoMe and KM lessons learned — more from E2.0

As I mentioned in my last post, previous Enterprise 2.0 conferences had a big focus on “adoption” — how to get companies and the people inside them to use new tools to get their work done. As I sat through sessions in 2010, I heard the lessons of knowledge management being learned anew. That is, I felt I could trace a direct line from these lessons to many of the bullet points I myself had used on slides during the years 1997 - 2005 as I worked inside organizations and as a consultant to knowledge management initiatives:

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.

Archive

June 30, 2011 by Patti

New themes for “Enterprise 2.0”

I spent two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston last week to get the pulse of this emergent ecosystem of vendors, practitioners, consultants, and thought leaders and to connect with many of my favorite fellow travelers from the KM world. A lot has been written already about the conference, and as usual the earliest blog posts were reportage and those coming along this week a bit more reflective. See especially Cecil Dijoux, Esteban Kolsky, and Sameer Patel (so far).

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.

Archive

April 25, 2011 by Patti

A New Book for Big KM

I have written about the Three KMs:

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.

Archive

April 15, 2010 by Patti

The 3rd SM: Enterprise SM

The use of social media in the enterprise is, of course the playing field articulated by Andrew McAfee as Enterprise 2.0, first in his seminal article and then in his great book. He nicely captured the adoption of web 2.0 tools within the bounds of organizations. I think of the trajectory from the introduction of the tools on the web to the current state as follows:

I think of social media as both:

Web-based technologies that shift focus from content to conversation, from publishing to interacting, and
Technologies and practices embedded in a web of relationships

This trajectory suggests, I hope, the reality of Clay Shirky‘s comment:

One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create.

He was speaking of the changes in models for interaction and community that he describes in Here Comes Everybody, but I think this is also true of the changes in business dynamics. These have been nicely captured — in the flow, as it were, by Stowe Boyd, who is convening Social Business Edge: Operating Manual for 21st Century Business in New York City next Monday. I’m excited about the event, and will be writing about it.

So what does it mean, exactly, that companies are adopting “web 2.0 practices?” There are some interesting answers from recent market research by Information Architected (Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen) for the 2.0 Adoption Council. Responding to the question, “What are the business drivers behind your Enterprise 2.0 initiative?” the top five answers were:

Connecting colleagues across teams and geographies
Enabling access to subject experts
Increasing productivity
Capturing and retaining institutional knowledge
Fostering innovation

If you have been around the knowledge management community for more than five years, these should all resonate with you as some of the key value propositions for knowledge management initiatives. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Knowledge management people have always been quick to try out and integrate emerging technologies into their practice. I would not be surprised if many members of the 2.0 Adoption Council (which won’t let me in, hélas, because I’m a mere consultant) have roots in KM. This would, of course, be the 1st KM: Big KM.

But this 3rd SM is altering the face of knowledge management. I’ve written before about the evolution of KM, including this framework:

And so here we are, where the twist is that social media have, in fact, provided the conditions for enabling action, but this has come about with a focus that I did foresee when I first created this chart in 2005. That is, the locus of knowledge is not just in the network, it’s in the conversations in the network. Content is no longer king. Social media has made it all about conversations.

Archive

January 12, 2010 by Patti

The Year of Personal Net Work

Chris Brogan writes about his strategy for deepening his personal networks. He starts off his list of tips with this one:

“Devote two hours a week to this effort. If, out of the 60 hours an average person works, you can’t find two for this, reconsider how you’re running your day.

This is not the only new year’s resolution I’ve seen along this line. As we become more and more connected through social media, the more we are aware of what those connections mean.

My new year’s resolution? I’m resolving to share more of my thinking, especially about personal networks. Here’s a slide show from this past October I hope you will enjoy.

Personal Network Management Km Forum Oct 2009

View more presentations from Patti Anklam.