Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow

From Knowledge Management to Knowledge Flow Management

2011-11-27T13:27:00.001-08:00

Sometime between 2006 and 2009 I switched my terminology from talking about Knowledge Flow Management instead of Knowledge Management. I can‘t pin it to a specific day, but in discussions the term KM was more and more seen as having issues, as it does imply that you actually can manage what is in people‘s head - which I am convinced you cannot. So I am not sure what triggered it, but when I was thinking about flow it seemed quite a bit more appropriate, it does take more into account the complex and „uncontrollable“ elements of knowledge making it from one individual to another (in the form of shared information).

A picture I received for my 50th birthday painted after the original cover we had in mind for the book exemplifies the flow notion for me best:

So when I wrote „Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flows“ in 2009 (eventulally published in early 2010) I was fully convinced that this is the new term that I will be using in the future. After my book was out, I actually discovered a book from Nonaka on managing flows, a more theoretical discussion of the flows and knowledge, but until recently most people still stuck to „Knowledge Management“.

But what I am experiencing now is a wider adoption of the term „Knowledge Flow Management“. I don‘t know how much my book, the presentations and discussions I had since 2009 have had an influence to produce the change (and in the end it does not really matter). What I do know is that whenever I present the difference of thinking between „Knowledge Management“ as if knowledge is an entity extern to the human brain and managing the flows between (via paths made up of information), it is usually well received.

In early November I was at KMWorld 2011 in Washington, DC and I was actually surprised how often I heard the term „Knowledge Flow“. Carla O‘Dell, APQC president used again and again in her keynote and the APQC is actually now offering services that focus on the flow of knowledge and the integration of knowledge into the work flow. But she was definitely not the only one talking about knowledge flows, and I wasn‘t even presenting. And the theme of the closing session was picking up on that trend as well.

Last week I learned about a Knowledge Officer at a large international organization who has moved his „KM strategy“ to a „Knowledge Flow strategy“.

Document centric Knowledge Management is out - managing the flow of knowledge between humans is where things are moving. Another theme at KMWorld was social media usage, and that is not a coincidence, as it is a way to connect humans and their knowledge as opposed to trying to „make people document their knowledge so others can benefit from it“. The latter approach is just not a sufficient solution for what is needed today, where knowledge turnover is getting faster and faster and organizations have to deal with growing complexity.

So maybe „knowledge flow management“ is the better term, after all. Let me know what you think.

Get some Degrees of Freedom into your System

2011-10-13T01:42:00.000-07:00

One of my favourite newsletters (around KM issues), where I always find something interesting in is the one from New York based KM consultancy KnowledgeStreet. The newsletter is called Directions. The latest (October) issue discusses an article from the New York Times on the "Occupy Wallstreet" movement and the platform they use to interact.

The short section ends with the following statement:

"There's a lesson here for KM practitioners. When you build too much structure into Knowledge Management systems, you may think you're making it easier for users to find things. But you may simply be building a system that's most suited to capturing the knowledge you already had anyway. To capture truly emergent knowledge, you may need to start with a blank page."

This is something I have experienced (and written about) as well with KM initiatives (and the systems that might be in use). I remember one of our first KM initiatives was a Project Experience exchange and in early discussions and reviews of the simple system that we used, some that looked at it, wanted more and more process in the system. Or they wanted to mimic the exact structure and taxonomy that was in place at the time. Looking back, the only reason the system and the initiative could survive for over a decade was a push back (to some extend - not necessarily going back to a blank page) on those additional requirements and rather leave some degrees of freedom.

The point is that if you build too much process into a system, it is probably outdated on launch day, but definitely a few months later. So if you want sustainable initiatives you need to be flexible and leave some degrees of freedom. It is easier to change a process and communicate it then adapting a rigid system permanently to fast moving processes (and they will change if you want them to or like it or not). Those looking at requirements for "KM systems" often design the perfect thing for the launch moment, and at the same time sacrificing long-term survivability of it.

Some users might complain about the missing handholding at the start (that those system-embedded-processes might provide), but the same users (and others) will dump their acceptance of it, when 6 months down the road the system mimics processes that are clearly old and outdated. It is often not an easy balance to strike, but KM practitioners need to fight the urge to go towards too much process embedding.

Future Visions to support Knowledge Flows

2011-10-09T05:13:00.000-07:00

Last night I went to a concert with an African singer named Fatoumata Diawara who grew up in Mali. She sang in her native Mali language and announced in English and French. With dance and gitarre songs and a band she really put on a great lively show. But at one point my thoughts started to wander - sorry Fatou, maybe due to the somewhat repeated African rhythm - and I had to think of some future developments. It started with a thought of how it would be great to understand what she was really singing about and ended with some visions what the future might have to offer to us (and/or our children) - from a technology as well as a KM point of view.

With translation technologies going new ways (like crowd-sourcing translation or statistical translation), I think we definitely will make big strides in that area and with computing power, storage sizes and connectivity speeds will continue to rise, I actually think one of the dramtic things we will see is "on-the-fly translation", i.e. you might have a mini-headset that you speak German into and the person across from you will receive immediate and quite accurate translation into their ear-piece. The same will be true with communication via the internet. You chat or skype with somebody in Japan and everything you type or say will be simultaneusly translated for the other party. That doesn't mean there will be no foreign languages anymore, but you have a choice, whether you want to learn one to communicate.

Just like Arthur C Clarke predicted in 1964, that in our times we will be able to speak to anybody on the planet with a push of a button, I am predicting that simultaneous translation will open up a new ball-game. Also for knowledge flows in organizations. As translation will usually not be necessary anymore, searching and text analytics (another area that will have matured) will be able to go across languages.

This will be a huge culturual change as (while we have languages that get spoken across the world), the barrier of language is still very much a reality. Communicating with anybody in the world is possible as long as we do understand each other, but simultaneous translation will add another level of communication. Will it automatically mean that we do understand each other culturally? No, I would not go that far, but a bit of culture travels in the language and the more we cross-communicate and collaborate the better the chance some of that understanding gets passed as well. And the focus can actually move from language training to cultural training.

While I was at it, my thoughts wandered to a few more visions, that I see coming. A couple of years ago I saw Tim Berners-Lee (the key person behind the Internet) at Babson college presenting his ideas around the semantic map. And some of that is already being implemented (like semantic Wikis), and some of is happening without us realizing it. But for a real "understanding" exchange it just needs that metadata. One of the barriers for the semantic web to really take over in my mind is that SOMEBODY needs to put the effort in in categorizing, adding the "meaning" and "context" to the data and information that is being stored. There is a certain level of automatism that can happen and will happen I am sure, but some of the real valuable "metadata" will still come from humans. What I think will happen in that area are two things:

the use of crowd-sourcing (getting the input of the many)
the better integration of metadata generating interfaces for humans to use.

The first one will make it possible to cover the immense need of categorization, and the wide spread needed to make the automatic interaction between content possible. The second will enable the input of human intelligence. Providing context is effort, but once we can get to minimize that level people will actually do it.

The third thing that we will have in not too far future are widespread holographic images. Those have been around for some time, but it seems that we are getting closer. In Frank Schätzing's novel "Limit" one of the women living in a space station has her own holographic avatar which is a full body image of her that walks the room with a selection of dresses to choose from (and she can immediately order what she likes for custom production). This is only one way holographics might be used. But just like the recently hyped 3D-printing the idea is to transport 3D across distance and to me it seems the logical next step from the 2D digital transport that we are currently at.

I am fairly confident that those things will become a reality, maybe sooner as we think, as some of it seems to be possible in the lab already, and with the right killer-app these things could get the funding they need - just like iPhone and iPad finally made touch and multi-touch a wide-spread reality.

What do you think? What is your favourite vision for how knowledge work could evolve in the centuries to come?

KM when things get tough

2011-08-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

We are all hoping that we are not in for another big recession, but the financial news this week could could indicate that more companies might get into situations where the word crisis isn't that far. In those situations the question is what will and should happen to initiatives like those focussed on managing the knowledge flow. Unfortunately in the past they got under pressure. The only thing that often counts in those situations is immediate short-term measurable value. But is it really always always, what value looks like? Is everything measurable?

But lets think about it:
- Re-inventing the wheel is a luxury
- Not learning from mistakes is a luxury
- Missing out on innovative ideas on how to be more efficient is a luxury
- Having people work in isolation and not in teams is a luxury

If things are going well you might be able to afford some luxury, but if your organization comes under pressure to be more efficient, do more with less money, do decision makers really think they can afford that type of luxury? I would argue that making best use of existing knowledge is one of the cheapest ways of saving money. Of course if people go into the decision with the view on "Knowledge Management" that starts with technology and is all about buying some "software" or building a "knowledge base", they are probably right. The return of investment might be hard to justify, and who guarantees knowledge actually gets shared. But if on the other hand you focus on some dedicated resources that really think about smart ways of how knowledge can flow from one employee to another, or how they can break down barriers for knowledge flowing, there might actually be some short-term ROI possible.

So instead of large monolithic technology constructs, that you might have a hard time to fill, look at a more holistic way on how you can manage the flow of knowledge.

There is two recommendations I have:
- smaller very focussed initiatives, that provide quick wins
- investment into 1-2 people that drive the enhancement of your knowledge flow instead of investing in technology first
- To a certain degree people are not opposed to sharing knowledge, what keeps them are certain barriers. So if you are in for a pragmatic shorter-term win, why not work on those barriers one-by-one

So in economic tough times it is just the wrong decision to cut your "knowledge management" team, they can actually be very helpful in getting you out of the slump. You will need to put some trust into them and their activities, positive effects are not always measurable immediately and to the exact amount.

To summarize:

Wrong: Kill your KM team
Correct: Build on your employee's knowledge and ideas and find ways on how you can become more effective and innovative - and best to do that with the help of people that know what they do when it comes to knowledge flows.

Scaling for Translation

2011-07-06T07:59:00.000-07:00

One of my themes in Knowledge Management is that people often underestimate scale. For example when it comes to sharing internationally vs. doing it in small teams only. The web shows us every day what scaling can do. A platform like Facebook that grew to 600 Million in ca. 7 years is just one aspect of it.
Another one is the the fact that users moving in sync can have an impact on politics, on company revenues and much more.
One amazing example on how the knowledge of millions can be used to produce something otherwise impossible (or at least too expensive to do) is shown in the following video from Luis van Ahn on his CMU projects (reCAPTCHA and Duolingo) and the launch of Duolingo.com coming up.
The ideas behind Duolingo are amazing, using human translation and pattern recognition capabilities to produce a multi-million-head translation engine for static content, where machines usually fail. And they ask the right questions like "what would anybody motivate to help with it?" and as a consequence produce a win-win situation. And on top it has a social element to it, giving language training to people that can usually not afford it.

But even more as this concrete project I am struck by the precedence this type of project might take. I can imagine a number of similiar situations where you can transfer this to. Using human behaviour and scaling it up through millions of people participating (for a piece of benefit of their own - whatever it might be) is just an amazing idea. And of course you don't have to leave it at the human level, but I could see combining machine and human elements to create even more powerful entities. In a way Duolingo is doing that, as they likely have some clever algorithms that use the human input effectively.

This is true scaling and with applications like these we will see another speedup in a number of areas. With the scaling in knowledge sharing via our global connectivity I am sure a number of people already are working on clever ways to transfer this to other areas.

Knowledge Hiding reasons

2011-05-19T12:41:00.000-07:00

In a recent blog entry Fighting the Knowledge Hiding Epidemic V Mary Abraham mentions a number of reasons why KM failed and why people still don't share. I do not find the findings really surprising. And if you are struck by lightning with those facts, maybe your focus on Knowledge Management has been wrong so far. The fact that it is humans that share knowledge and that you have to look into the human factors should have been in your thoughts for some time.
$73 Billion - if the organizations would have spend half of the budget they had for their "KM project" on driving the human element forward instead of buying "KM software", if they had invested in proper KM drivership, strategic leadership and support roles, I am sure the outcome would have been a lot better.

But often after the budget is gone, the project leader is off to the next "project", no wonder it fails, if nobody is dealing with human elements, and corporate culture stays what it has always been.

In the list of reasons that are stated from Ian Thorpe, I want to pick on a couple of those. I hope people understand them correctly and read Ian's argument, which I do support.

It might sound like bad quality is the reason it is not shared (and there is those people that argue, that only the highest quality "knowledge" should make it into the flow). I disagree, and that is actually what Ian is after in this statement. Yes, you want highest quality where you can, but who is to judge quality in the first place. In programming a raw two-line piece of code can be more valuable than a finished 10000-line one, it depends on what you need at the moment. Also limiting to "presumed perfect" limits innovation. The much better approach is allowing "less-than-perfect" with a note indicating limitations. I have had those people tell me - I cannot share that, I need two more weeks", and I reply. Why don't you share it now, and write down what you would do if you had two more weeks. A lot of times people might run with what is there and get real benefit from it, and then one of them will do what the original author did not have time for. When it comes to knowledge sharing plug-n-play is not the only answer.

So, yes those are reasons, why people do not share, but I bey you to discourage that thinking to reap wider benefits from knowledge assets that might seem just raw to one person, but contain the enlightning idea to others that tehy were longing for.

Need a problem?

2011-03-17T10:35:00.000-07:00

The other day, I was pointed to (via my favourite KM newsletter from the folks at KnowledgeStreet to a service called "Need a problem" and was once again amazed by what people come up with. NeedaProblem.com is for those people that feel like they do not have enough problems. Life is too easy for them. They need a challenge. This sounded rather odd to me (as it might to many people, that have a problem or challenge here and there too many).
But there are a couple of lessons around this:
1. If the scaling is right you might find people interested in very wide varieties of offers.
2. A well-designed problem might not be the same thing as your daily mishap that produces a problem.
3. People like challenges, in fact a common issue with employees underperforming as well as kids for that matter, is supposedly that they are "underchallenged". So while the site calls it problem, it really is about challenges. And it seems possible to give people challenges and have them pay for it. Now why would they do that, you ask?

Here is what I believe is behind this:
Challenges are usually really great the moment you not only battled them but actually found a solution to it. Some people get a kick out of the intermediate solution steps, some really only get the big kick out of the moment it is solved.
Also, most people like learning, and a challenge triggers us to learn. Either we have to investigate to get a challenge solved or we have to apply knowledge from the past, potentially use it in new ways. And that learning can be quite motivating as we feel that we are somewhat getting ahead of ourselves.

Of course instead of paying somebody to give you a challenge, maybe you should start looking around yourself. There is a lot of interesting challenges that are not solved yet, that might be close to us, but just need to be identified as such. In some cases it might be one of those "not-so-motivating" problems, that actually hides a larger, more interesting challenge behind it, that is worth tackling - and you don't even have to pay for it, but impress your friends and colleagues for free.

Time to Share

2010-11-07T01:04:00.000-07:00

Last night at dinner I heard a story about knowledge and time. One of the topics that comes up very often when talking about knowledge sharing is about „preserving knowledge when a person leaves“. That is a big concern because people are more flexible, move around more, and managers are more aware that "knowledge can take a walk".

When thinking about this based on last nights story, three angles came to my mind:

- Preserve the knowledge early and ongoing - i.e. embed it through having experts share it within communities (not necessarily via documents), by mentor-ship and through networking.

- Try to capture knowledge when they leave - but not via „why don‘t you write down everything you know before you go“, but rather in some smarter ways like the knowledge transfers sessions I described in my book, or overlaps between leaver and replacement (where possible).

- Another way: Don‘t let them go unnecessarily

The story was about a woman that not only had longer years of expertise, but also several years of experience within that specific environment. She was a manager, she knew a lot of people in the organization as the type of her job was giving her the possibility to meet many of those in other departments as well. Being social she used that to her advantage over the years and at the same time turned into an important node within that organization (I am sure you met people like that).

Best of all it wasn‘t just that she knew those she needed to pull triggers, but they knew her and made best use of her department as well. As an important node in the organization, she enabled important knowledge flow.

Then she had a baby. Before she went, she asked whether it would be possible to come back 60% after a short time. There was an easy solution to cover the additional 40%. Still management did not let her do it. They came with a number of arguments, which were fairly easy to argue against, until the killer argument was brought out. A position like this has to be filled with somebody working minimum 80%.
In the end a less experienced, less social person got the job and the connectivity between departments deteriorated.

To me the management decision was very shortsighted. There were no financial implications, it was fear of leaving the old model. Some people still seem to be stuck in the factory model, where their employees work 8-6, use a time-tracking device every time they leave the room for a bio-break.

We live in the age of knowledge workers and many of us are in that category and the group is growing. It is much less about time as it is about what we do with it. With the complexity of jobs it is about experience, information and creativity to act in the right way. Work results can be astonishingly independent of the actual time spent. Especially when what we need to achieve is highly dependent on information, prior experience, and conclusions that we need to draw, time might be not as important as having a well established network for example.

You probably also know people that can achieve things in 2-3 hours, that others less-experienced in a similar role might need a full day for. And an experienced 60% person can definitely be more effective and valuable than a non-experienced 100% person.

A lot of innovative companies have understood this. But it is time, that all organizations that employ knowledge workers get it. The ones that do not might produce well filled-in time sheets, while their competition is getting ahead by keeping the smarter people with more flexibility.

What is that we need to teach our children?

2010-08-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

One occasion when I feel a real urge to blog is when I recognize a pattern, that I have seen before. Over the last few years there is one pattern that is coming back again and again. It has to do with information overload. A popular topic these days, but American psychologist Herb Simon stated already in 1971: A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention" and attention is needed to build knowledge from information.

But it also has to do with certain skills that make it possible to deal with that on an individual as well as an organizational level. On an organizational level one really helpful tool will be analytics helping to pre-consolidate and pattern recognition - of course in combination with a certain level of human interpretation and judgement (watch out for the upcoming book from Larry Prusak, Brook Manville, and Tom Davenport on judgment and how to cultivate it as an organization might give some answers to that).

On a personal level it starts with our children. As a parent of two digital natives I am amazed as to how they deal with the large amount of information that they are presented with. They have different methods than what we grew up with. Diligence and detail study as we might have done it with a couple of books looks different than scanning several Trillion Web pages from the Google index (that is a 1 with 12 zeros) and then picking the top 3-5 for their judgement, information need or to make a decision.

What they need to develop is methods to judge what makes sense and what is off the mark, what information they can trust, and what they can't trust. What sources to trust and which ones to question. How to quickly recover once they found out they used an untrusted or just plain incorrect source.

Those are the methods that will make our children more successful than their peers. Access to information will not make much of a difference when it is as easy for a 12 year-old kid in a small Borneo village to have the same access to it than a Harvard student.

It is making sense of the information, putting it into a frame of reference of prior learnings. Some of this will be based on experience, some of it will be based on learning through collaboration (again something that is becoming available much wider through social media spreading as it is).

But how are we doing in teaching our children to develop the right methods and heuristics to deal with this complicated task and they not only have to get good at it, they have to be faster and faster at it, as more information is flooding at them. They need good methods and tools to unlearn as much as they have to have efficient ways to learn. And they have to know the signs of credibility/non-credibility by heart.

One that said it very nicely recently was Harvard Law School professor John Palfrey in an interview with David Poque, that David highlighted on his blog:

"I think almost no emphasis is being put on giving kids the skills that they need to sort credible from noncredible information. Schools have to wake up and have to give those skills to our kids. It’s the critical thinking skill of the 21st century that they’re going to need, sorting credible from not credible information. And I think we’re asleep at the switch."

I fully agree, many still think of education as a way to "fill people up with information", but when information has such a short shelf-life it is the method and the developed heuristics that count for the future.

Here we go again - KM Vendors

2010-07-16T01:19:00.000-07:00

Company X, a knowledge management company, has announced product Y, that manages information so much better...

Have you ever seen a press release like the one above. I see quite a few of them lately. In the last 15 years of KM, this has been a reoccurring theme. In the early days of KM it was about content management and data warehousing. And as the term knowledge became cool, suddenly the same companies were offering knowledge warehouses, and knowledge bases. The content was still data or information and not knowledge but it just sold better that way. Of course a lot of those organizations investing into knowledge management software packages did not get what they were really after - the most valuable element - the flow of knowledge between their people. They might have gotten some enhanced information management, but without a more holistic view including the human side of knowledge success was often limited. The result was that the term knowledge management got somewhat burned, as something that doesn't work, the return was way behind what was projected and expected.

But KM did not die for some reason. It came back and I believe for the following reasons:

it was not a fad, the core ideas of leveraging knowledge across an organization are even more important today than ever
A growing number of people are getting it, creating KM programs and initiatives that look at it more holistically starting from a human side, and not from a technology angle alone
The social effects of some technologies put the human back in the center and have taken a huge foothold in our life. Namely Web2.0 and Social media tools have created a basis for hugely scalable human-to-human interaction. Where some researchers predicted we would be living with technology-agents to serve us by now, we basically went to a global human-agent system (I follow you on twitter or your blog on photography and it will free me from doing photography research myself).

With the revival of the KM wave here they are again, going for a ride on the wave. Knowledge is important, in fact for competitiveness it is key. Knowledge Management is important. Ok, so we are a Knowledge Management company now. In my view KM (or better Knowledge Flow Management, as I feel to be the better term), is more of a process, and technology is an enabler to successfully enhance that flow. But talking about a Knowledge Management Vendor is almost like talking about a Motivation Vendor. And to take that analogy further, it would be as if movie-theaters, restaurants, candy-producers or pharmaceutic companies making anti-depressives would now call themselves Motivation Vendors as with a great movie, a nice restaurant visit, a candy bar or the right drug you can get people's motivation up.

So if somebody wants to sell you KM as a product, make sure to confirm, that you are getting more than a technology foundation. If you really want to enhance your organizational knowledge flow that will definitely not be enough. In that case you will have to get a lot more in place than technology.

Awareness is where it starts

2010-07-14T05:36:00.000-07:00

Today while I walked by the Coca-Cola factory again (see Sharing Knowledge is not exclusive for Tech Companies) on my way to work, I spotted a sign just inside the enterance:

Beware of accidents
Last Accident: 9 days ago
Longest Streak without accident: 192 days

Those are pretty strong, I think. To be reminded that only 9 days ago somebody got hurt, one of your colleagues maybe? And seeing different numbers on that sign every day makes the message really repetitive. I am sure this is more effective to alert people than some guidelines hidden in a drawer about what to do to prevent accidents. It all comes down to awareness. I think awareness is a strong driver, and it is also a key behind making a knowledge flow programm successful. In fact missing KM awareness was named as the No.2 key barrier in a 1997 KM study done by the German Fraunhofer Institute. It it is also one of the barriers that turns out to be not that hard to fight.

Do your employees know that knowledge sharing activities are not only allowed within their activities, but that it is part of their core job to share their knowledge? Is it visibile that this is wanted behaviour or hidden in some policy document that nobody reads. Are top executives and line managers repeatedly expressing that it is wanted behavior that will help insure efficiency, innovation and competitiveness? Are those messages clear and easy digestible (i.e. backed with stories)?

To improve your knowledge flow most often it takes a culture shift and awareness is a good start to drive behavioural change. It is not the only driver, of course, but one of them, and it is one that you can implement fairly quickly without huge investments. Especially if the message comes from the top, it can definitely make a difference.

Knowledge is Power...don't count on it!

2010-05-27T00:45:00.000-07:00

The "Knowledge is Power" statement is often what people quote when they hear about knowledge sharing. And it is given as one of the reasons for sharing not happening.

It is seen as a barrier that inhibits people to share their knowledge because the knowledge represents their value and gives them power and will save them from being obsoleted and fired. As a consequence they will have a tendency to hoard their knowledge. I actually believe if this is your KM initiative participants/employees line of thinking, they are on the wrong track.

In today’s organization it is much less about the knowledge you have. It is a lot more about the potential of knowledge that you can build.

And the turnover of knowledge is increasing at high speed. A few hundred years ago it might have been possible to rely on certain type of knowledge for your life-time. Today it is very dangerous to think in that fashion. A new innovation that takes hold in breath-taking speed, can make all your valuable knowledge obsolete.

The value is often in the network and hoarding knowledge is a good way to exclude youself from valuable networks, as sharing has a reciprocity to it.
Also, often the act of sharing itself is a process that helps you gain and improve your own understanding. Have you ever experienced that your own thinking became clearer just by sharing an idea, and getting some feedback/new aspects back? So sharing a portion of your knowledge will enable you to build new knowledge.

Of course it is not about blindly sharing everything, but about interaction, and realizing that what you hoard today might be useless tomorrow, but in the mean time by sharing it might be triggering just the bit of knowledge to be created in your head that you will need for success.

How to brand your Knowledge Flow Initiative.

2010-04-08T09:12:00.000-07:00

A brand is a promise, but not one like "I'll pay you back the 10 Euros next Monday", but more like "I will never lie to you". The latter type is much harder to keep. So what good is branding in KM. Just like with any other brand it can simplify things, it can build trust into a knowledge flow initiative (not just talking about a KM system) and a good brand tends to channel participation and usage. It captures complex information and tacit components like feelings by giving it a symbolizing name.

Ok, so if a brand is good, how would build one for a knowledge flow initative? First of all NOT with a big bang launch (alone). I think frequently the driver of an initiative thinks with a big announcement, good executive support, and a lot of bells and whistles you can achieve this. And after a short while, marketing and initiative support (this is not technical support) go down very quickly.

But for a brand to develop you need consistent delivery on your promise. And just like with other promises, early on a couple of failures can kill the trust (and the brand for that matter). The consistency comes with an ongoing drivership, an investment beyond the launch resources (that then get dragged off to the next best project). Ongoing support at all levels, that also cover strategy and infrastructure adaptation and constant value delivery. And don't forget that ongoing marketing, even though it is to an internal audience. Brands do not build overnight, you will need what I refer to in the book as "a pulse". Something regularly, that captures more and more people and finally makes them see the value.

And if you establish a very strong brand, you are actually more likely to survive a few bloopers and failures.

Knowledge Sharing is Effort. Period.

2010-03-31T23:55:00.000-07:00

Knowledge is in people's head. To make it flow to others takes effort. Ignore that fact and you do not give yourself much of a chance to have a successful and longer-term successful KM initiative. But still some people think that offering technology will be enough to take that effort down to zero (the marketing messages definitely seem to indicate that sometimes). But it does take effort from the person that is supposed (and wants) to share any knowledge, in whatever way. And it doesn't matter whether it is a face-2-face situation (i.e. formulating thoughts in your mind to convey to others, making the active step of revealing information that others can turn into usable and actionable knowledge) or a more indirect situation (i.e. sharing information via technology based means (from Telephone to Twitter), such that others can pick up that information, put it into their frame of reference and context to create their "version" of that knowledge.

There is no such thing as a free lunch here. If you look at the general "knowledge sharing" with the indirection of documenting key information, it depends a bit on how that information is layed out, and, for example, whether the one sharing it thought like a contributor or like a re-user. In the latter case, it might take a little bit more (sometimes only different) effort, but the result is likely to be better, and the effort is going to be lower on the receiving end (not zero though)...

The issue is that key drivers sometimes think, all we need is some cool technology and the right attitude and knowledge can flow without that minimal investment. Get over it, it won't work. Rather focus on spending "smarter efforts", and minimalizing it. One way to do the latter is to reduce barriers, as barriers are guaranteed to increase necessary efforts.

And sometimes it is easer to spend efforts when you get support and backup, that is why a proper initiative support (not just technical support) is essential in my mind, to educate about how to share knowledge smarter, support directly (i.e. knowledge intermediary services) and to keep a general overview to make sure things are moving into the right direction.

Effort is cost, so the more you can reduce efforts, the higher the return on your investment, right? Wrong, there is a minimum (optimal) amount that just needs to be there, and often this is tuned to far towards zero and hence the results are below expectations.

Knowledge Management Tools?

2010-03-23T07:09:00.000-07:00

A blog post named "Knowledge Management Tools" made the round through twitter with a number of RTs today. I have to say I was a bit skeptical by reading the title, already. My opinion is there might be tools that can store and help share information, but for knowledge to flow it needs people. The article in my mind is making the "information=knowledge" mistake mixing the words and meanings, and in my opinion this is a major reason so many efforts on really trying to get knowledge shared and flowing around an organization have failed.

How far the article goes shows the following statement:
"Knowledge Management is nothing but a collection of technologies used for authoring, indexing and storing data, and of the application of this information and knowledge, where applicable"

Sorry, but that sentence says it all in my mind. It clearly says it doesn't matter if you are talking about data, information or knowledge it is all the same, and the only thing that is important is the technology to store "it". I have a different view on what knowledge is, and what it takes to share the most valueable of it. If you focus on the technology only, you are not really giving yourself much of a chance to reap the "invaluable advantage" that this blogger talks about.

Real attempts on getting knowledge to flow in organizations look different.

Measuring Knowledge and Idea flows

2010-03-23T03:30:00.000-07:00

The other day I found a very good blog post on measuring named "How do you measure an idea?" by Paul Williams. I think Paul created a great short write up of some of the key points on measures together with presenting some great measures to consider. His key points of "Use a portfolio approach" and "Don't go overboard", I fully support.
What I also notices on the measures he presents, is that a number of them are somewhat indirect. Ramping up the score on a measure like "Number of managers receiving creation/innovation management training" does not guarantee that performance will improve directly, but it will (especially in a portfolio with other measures) increase the probability and likelyhood. I also found (and discussed in the chapter on measuring) that those measures are worth a lot more than some fantasy measures that are either to complex or expensive to obtain or are driving the wrong behaviors. Knowledge sharing is related to culture and to influence and nudge culture changes takes time anyway, so the fact that those measures might be longer-shot than a couple of months is ok. Used in a portfolio approach they can be effective.

How can you exchange knowledge with customers?

2010-03-21T07:52:00.000-07:00

Often knowledge management is focussing primarily internally to an organization, but more and more the exchange of knowledge with customers is becoming attention. The part that has been in the focus for a while is knowledge about customers and that is where CRM (Customer relationship management) has played a support role.
But what about direct knowledge exchange with customers. Social media has opened up some barriers lately where tradtionally most organizations have had a considerable wall before. There is a lot of talk about engaging more with customers via social media channels now, and a number of organizations are testing the waters to learn from their customers or use the channels to get information, learnings and messages across to them as well as partners.

What is new about those channels is that they are cheaper and more scalable, but in some ways this type of exchange happened before as well of course. On a personal level every customer agent or those working with partners side by side have played a role in that type of knowledge sharing. But scale definitely makes a difference.

One quite effective channel that pre-dates the social media age is that of customer conferences. SAS has been involved in their first one of those in early 1976. Yes, 34 years ago and half a year before SAS was even incorporated as a company and it has been held every year since then. The key to them was that they were and are not just some marketing event. They are organized by customers and SAS is invited to it and serves as a sponsor of certain parts of it (like the opening session). What is quite amazing is that there is thousands of SAS users and partners exchanging knowledge, presenting successes, but also challenges to overcome. The event is a great example of what knowledge flow is about. You create time and place for people with a common interest and common business issues, and they will engage and exchange. It is a way to reduce the barriers that might be existing otherwise (distance, time for engaging etc.) One effect additional effect is that over the 34 years of the conference people come repeatedly and build trust levels with each other that enable even better knowledge exchanges than might happen with complete strangers.

At the conference there are also a number of SAS employees. They learn, they inform on what is coming and they engage in personal conversation. This spans from R&D programmers to executives including the CEO himself.
The next one of those events is coming up in a couple of weeks. SAS Global Forum 2010 will be held in Seattle Washington next month.

While engaging this way has a long tradition and the conference has been tuned year after year to attendees preferences, you can make the experience even more complete with social media. While there is a number of similiar events around the world SAS Global Forum only happens once a year.
Social media is a great additional tool to enhance the experience by extending beyond the event itself. This ranges from twitter to blogs, from Facebook to LinkedIn and includes a special community created by sascommunity.org, the wiki based user driven SAS community.

See more in the following two blog entries - SAS Global Forum Goes Social Take 1 and Take 2.

Today it is not necessarily about replacing one channel with another but offering an intelligent portfolio of channels to create a more complete user experience.

PS.: For those that happen to attend SAS Global Forum 2010, see you at the SAS Publishing booth, where I will be spending some time this year.

Sharing Knowledge is not exclusive for Tech Companies

2010-01-27T01:15:00.000-08:00

This morning on my way from the train to the office, I passed by a local Coca-Cola factory. There was a truck-driver maneuvering his big truck with ingredients (secret?) backwards through a narrow gate onto the factory campus. Amazing, the way Marcel (according to the sign in his front window) whirled that steering wheel back and forward inching this big thing through the gate, and at amazing speed. Marcel clearly showed that he knows a lot about truck driving. Would he be a candidate for knowledge sharing? Absolutely. I am sure, he would have some tips not only on how to drive a truck into this specific factory, but he probably has tips on how to get quickest to it, avoiding some traffic-jams, that his navigational system might not know about, tricks on how to deal with certain people in his job, how to communicate with those supporting loading/unloading or organizing his logistics... I could think of a lot of things. He might actually have a system already on board that helps him share some of those tips and learnings, I am sure there is things like that already, but maybe he doesn't have it yet. Or maybe his organizations has somebody specifically managing the knowledge flow between their truck drivers via events, a social platform. I am convinced it is worth it. I am also convinced that to get that working it is very important to think about the human issues, that are involved when managing that knowledge. If people think of "knowledge management" they very often think of "knowledge databases" and systems, they think of larger organizations. Those people need to widen their view.
A couple of years, I considered a position as a KM professor for "social workers", in the end I stuck to my current job for family and location reasons, but I see other disciplines opening up to the idea that managing their knowledge flow is worth it, apart from those organizations that are highly IT driven.

Promises and challenges - Voice

2010-01-25T01:29:00.000-08:00

Just saw an interesting blog entry on some trends regarding the Web found on mashable. I think a lot of what the article is talking about is very probable, and in some cases it is not rocket science to predict it, as some of it is in full swing already. There is one that will need a bit of work, however. The Voice-to-Text predictions. Apart from getting recognition correct, there is another more social challenge with it that might delay the "replace of the keyboard". The other day I was using my web cam with voice to colleage in the US, and I am actually sitting in an open space with colleagues. If I just imagine, that we all would be talking to your computers all day, distraction would be very large. The alternative is that everybody gets their quiet room, but the down-side would be another type of isolation. The interaction that we have on an ongoing basis face2face with each other is pure knowledge sharing at times. Dropping that by putting everybody in their own little room, so they can shout at their machines is just something I think might have a large cost with it.

But I don't want to limit myself in my thinking, there is probably a solution to that issue I am just not seeing yet. Maybe Maxwell Smart's "Cone of silence" is what we all need. Just saying there is a few more challenges ahead other than "voice recognition" for making "speaking to your machines" the standard procedure.

Would be very interested to hear about ideas that people have come up with to solve the "noise" issue in voice-to-machine interaction...

What role does KM play in Employee Satisfaction?

2010-01-21T12:59:00.000-08:00

Today it was announced that SAS reached the Nr. 1 spot on the Fortune 100 Best companies to Work for in America list. My colleague Dave Thomas discussed in what ways Social Media has helped with getting to this spot. And he hit a very important point in his blog entry - the role of trust. I am in the 17th year with SAS, and the relationships to colleagues, the interaction, the possibility and support to be able to meet regularly, have been strong drivers for the culture that I so much enjoy every day. Before I joined back in 1993, I had talked to three SAS employees that had independently used the words "the best company I ever worked for", something I would definitely say today, as well.

Together with the announcement on Fortune magazine's website, I saw a whole stream of Facebook comments and a lot of them were focusing on individual perks. Yes, those are nice, but in my experience they are only the visible element of a deeper strategy to enable and support people, and get stuff out of their way so they can make a difference. The key is not that people feel great about a massage, but that they feel great that there is some thought into what might make their life as a whole easier so they can do what they enjoy most, be creative and innovative, engage in challenges and work very hard to put out the best possible product and service, they can. This is what drives most of the people I enjoy working with so much here. They get excited about project challenges, that they mastered, not about "great, I only worked 35hours and 5min last week".

There is actually an expectancy that people want to make a difference, as well.

So what role does knowledge and its flow play in all of this?

Trust for one makes interacting and sharing knowledge easier, so any effective collaboration method, be it face to face or Social Media can help in that respect. I think it can be a virtuous cycle situation. If there is a trusting environment knowledge sharing becomes easier, and if there is a great deal of sharing knowledge and people actually experiencing that it makes them more productive rather than endanger their position, trust will grow. This latter part of the cycle is where managing this knowledge flow has a positive impact, and where you can add energy to push the cycle. But both sides are needed, without leadership keeping the trusting environment in tact, the virtuous cycle can break down quickly.

My whole point about managing knowledge flows (as I also discuss in the upcoming book) is, that it is primarily about people and not primarily about "knowledge management systems". SAS has had a focus on people since 1976, and the result is a streak of 34 years of growth and a No. 1 spot as a great employer.

Book - Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow

2010-01-19T06:24:00.000-08:00

After years of folks asking me whether I had considered it, in 2009 I actually wrote a book on KM. The writing was a lot of fun, I have to say. I basically put down a lot of the experiences that I had made since I started with KM in 1997, and the lessons I learned from things working well or not so well.

The book is all finished and in production now, and should be out end of March in the US, in some other areas of the world it will probably by early April, and as I live in Switzerland, I will likely have to wait until April as well before I get my first physical copy into my hands.

One of the bloggers at SAS, where I work asked for an early look at it and now wrote the following review of it. There were a few others that got a chance to read the draft and provide some comments. In case you are interested, check out my Amazon authors page, where I added a few of the quotes, that people like author and President's distinguished professor Tom Davenport made after reviewing it.

Last not least I put more information on the book onto my personal home page. And if you are interested in a trigger to get informed when it is out, connect with me on Xing.com oder LinkedIn.com or just drop me an Email, or have an eye on this blog.

Personally, I feel like it turned out quite well, but don't just trust me on that, better check what KM experts say about it...

KM Déjà Vu

2010-01-18T10:52:00.000-08:00

Knowledge Management has been around for almost 20 years as a business discipline. It has had its ups and downs, and after a phase where a number of people called it dead, it seems on a certain upswing currently. Google trends has fairly flat search rates, but the news rates are spiking again. The reason it doesn't die is because it failed in a lot of cases and people did not get what they really wanted from it. I strongly believe one of the key reasons it fails is when those driving it see it primarily as a technical discipline that is about systems. It is about people, knowledge is what is in people's head, not what you have in a database. What's in the database is data or if in the right context information, but it only becomes knowledge in the context of prior experiences and in the framework of one's mind.
In the first phase that "KM projects" failed the free mixture of those terms lead to wrong approaches. To distinguish data, information and knowledge matters. One of my main motivations to write my KM book was, that I saw and see too many out there falling into the same trap again. Just recently I stumbled over a few typical examples:

Strengthen your Knowledge Base - Ok, there are some valid points in his argumentation but it is largely about capturing "knowledge" in a "knowledge base" from an IT perspective
How to Utilize Knowledge Management System Software - Knowledge Management" as a "software bazar" is just not how it works...
Knowledge Management in Health Informatics - Nonaka's model of implicit knowledge is what lead to some of the problems of people thinking they could "store" and "retrieve" knowledge as if it is was data, and the authors didn't even study the model properly, otherwise they wouldn't mix tacit with tactical.

And these type of articles are re-tweeted (distributed) on Twitter to spread the message on KM. For me mixing data, information and knowledge is like mixing the terms car, train and plane happily in an article. You can take the car to the train station, and the train to the airport, but they are not all the same thing.

Business Analytics is different from Knowledge Management as well, maybe it becomes clearer when using the term Knowledge Flow Management. You can't manage in people's head but you can manage the flow of knowledge from head to head.
There is 3 major touch points that I see however:

BI and Business Analytics are on the feeding end for the flow of knowledge. Only when the basic information that knowledge is derived from is consistent, of high quality, and manageble can those taking decisions derive valuable knowledge from it. Also tools like data and text mining, predictive analytics are great enablers for knowledge discovery.
Managing the knowledge flow in an organization is a key business process and as such deserves to be analyzed with BI and BA technology just like many other key business processes
When implementing SAS solutions at a customer, success also depends on having the right knowledge and understanding (i.e. analytic capabilities and mindsets). BI Compentency Centers for that matter need to manage the flow of that knowledge.

Many organizations have not done the shift out of the "technology KM view" yet, or they are not looking into the topic of knowledge in a deeper way at all. As most peole seem to agree that knowledge is a key factor for competitiveness and survival, it is time to change that.

The break is over...

2009-10-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

Just created this new blog, but as I thought some of the older posts might still be of interest I used this great blogger-export-import features and added them here. Blog-Consolidation, one might call it. So why did I suddenly stop the older blog? Well in the world of Web2.0 there are so many things, so little time... and I actually spend a lot more time on internal blogging (within my company) than external activities.
A few posts on the company blog, and then twitter came along. Takes time as well, but each post is much quicker of course, so it is just easier to slide in.

Blogging is different than twittering - even though it is a similar activity the key is in the 140 character limit. A small "little" detail like that makes all the difference. The way people write it, the way people read it, the following everything a little quicker... so much for getting (re-)started...

2006-12-03T03:25:00.000-08:00

Scaling in Knowledge Sharing

The blog has been a bit innactive for a while. Mainly because I have focussed my blogging activities a little more internally to our organization. And there was only time for one stream of blog entries.

One of the topics I discussed in that blog is the power of scaling in KM. When it comes to assessing the value of knowledge management initiatives, scaling plays an interesting and widely understimated role. The effects can be surprising. What do I mean with scaling here?

Well, if I have an idea or knowledge asset (a piece of software, a process, a lessons learned etc.) and I re-use it myself a few times, I get a re-use factor (RUF) of 2-3 maybe. If I share it with my colleages next door, and they find it useful I might get to RUF of 5-6. If it is really good and I present it to my whole departement RUF might get to around 10-15.

But if we look at global organizations, the idea is more widely usable, and we can put it in front of and into the attention radius of 1000s of people worldwide, that is when the RUF can come up to full potential. RUF=100+ are not uncommon then, and suddently the cost involved in documenting the idea or knowledge asset on a minimum level will suddenly be negligible compared to the potential value. And it is not only about the actual idea and asset but also about the cross-organizational connection and communciation that might be inspired by it.

2005-05-30T14:17:00.000-07:00

Currently I am reading a great book on motorcycle driving. It's in German and the title could be translated as "The Upper Half of the Motorcycle". It is a very unusual book full with a lot of theory behind everything. And it is fully on the knowledge topic.

The author named Bernt Spiegel explores all those mechanisms that go in our head when handling a complicated tool like a motorcycle, which at the speeds they come now, is one of the most dangerous ones (at least for the individual handling it). At the same time it is probably one of the most fascinating tools as well, however. So it is even more important to handle it well, but how much of motorcycle driving is "automatic" and how much should you try to get it into conscious. Often if you start thinking about doing something you might even get worse at things, but what are some methods to "train" that knowledge so it automates itself in order that you can do the right thing, when things get tough. While the book talks about physical conditions that determine the actual machines behaviour, those are useless while you drive. They might be useful when analyzing a situation, but for handling the bike it is important to quickly read a situation and react on it, and that only comes with training that puts the behaviour into your automatic behaviour.

2005-02-04T05:12:00.000-08:00

Hi,

For those of you that follow the press, you probably have heard of the MAKE award. MAKE stands for Most admired Knowledge Enterprise. Whenever I talk to people about our own KM programs (at BI company SAS), I find them quite intrigued. The same is true for those that join our company from other organizations, when we give them an introduction to some of the processes, tools and systems we have at hand for them.

But to MAKE it to the MAKE awards you got to have the full press coverage on internal KM programs, articles, books, etc.

With the current level of investment in pushing our KM programms externally it might be hard to get on the list.

Well, whether you know anything about SAS or any other organization that could fit into the awardee list, you might have a look at the nomination site and see if your favourite KM organization is there, and if not, go and nominate up to 3 of them on the MAKE nomination site.

2004-12-23T01:15:00.000-08:00

Tacit knowledge is often what we perceive as expertise. It is well-known that it is hard if at all possible to capture it, but one of the questions to ask within this context is how do you know that somebody actually has it (expertise).

What makes an expert? Here is an interesting article I just found on www.bettermanagement.com . The article is named A True expert knows what question to ask. This reminds me of situations where I felt a little lost (in a presentation, workshop, meeting), and usually it was because I was so out of context, that I couldn't even ask the right question, so yes, if you can ask the right level of question, it means you are starting to show a degree of expertise, which also makes you a part of the community of pratice that you are dealing with.

2004-01-27T07:25:00.000-08:00

Into my inbox, I just received one of those invitations to a content management event. This one is from the Butler group and the event is in March in London. Not surprising I found this sentence in the announcement, that tells me what I am supposed to learn about:

"The convergence of content management, knowledge management, collaboration, and portals technologies to create the Enterprise Information Management Suite. "

Well that tells me once again, that Knowledge Management is another piece of technology, just like portals, content management suites etc. I would agree, that in a good KM strategy there will be content management tools, so whoever wants to take it serious should know about them, but to put it into one bucket is like putting Microsoft Word and Motivation (to write a sensible document) into the same bucket...

Not trying to argue against technology being a great enabler, just feel that this sort of mixing technology and holistic strategies was exactly the reason, why the term KM got burned.

2004-01-19T04:45:00.000-08:00

One if the issues with KM is that it is defined in so many different ways, by so many people. And that starts with issues in defining the underlying concepts of data, information and knowledge. The book "Business Modeling and Data Mining" by Dorian Pyle, that I glanced at today, started out with definitions of data, information and Knowledge, that I think are really quite good, so I's like to quote them here (read the book for the full discussion on those)

Data: a collection of unanalyzed observations of worldly events

Information: a summary and communication of the main components and relationships contained with the data and presented within a specific context.

Knowledge: an interrelated collection of procedures for acting toward particular results in the world with associated references for when each is applicable along with its range of effectiveness.

Or less formally (as Dorian puts it):

Data is what happened

Information is how you know it happened; and

Knowledge is what to do about it.

One of the key points in his discussion is also that knowledge is a process and not a thing (even though we tend to talk about it like a thing, that you can just pick up and take away)...

2004-01-13T01:28:00.000-08:00

Well today is blog day :-)

Just got the Gurteen Newsletter (from David GurteenSee his web site, who is a passionate KMer and his newsletter turns up all kind of interesting stuff). Today's letter started out about new years resolutions and pointing to a another blog named Mathemagenic. It talks about focus and that the focus should be where the heart, the passion is. In all the KM initiatives I have been involved in it was that passion that made it really work.

Passion by the ones driving it: Believe beyond immediate gratification.

Passion by the one sharing their knowledge: Wanting to help, feeling good once they did, putting in extra hours. Passion by the ones promoting and evangelizing: Believe that what they promote is of REAL value!

What also struck me in that blog a little further down was a question brought up in a quote from Martin Dugage what we need to know? This reminded me very much on a competition that was given out by the "Young Academy in Berlin in 2002" where they asked the question "What do we want to know?". After thinking about that for quite a while my conclusion was one good answer would be: "What do we need to know?". So I am not surprised this question came up. I am not claiming that this is the right question to ask, just that this is and will be in the future one of the main questions that people WANT to know the answer to. Why? Because information overflow is not going to get any better, so how to distinguish between what is worth it and what not, what to invest in, and what not to invest in.

Closing the loop to the topic above. I think "Passion" can provide answers to this question. When we are passionate about something, the question, what we need to fullfill it suddenly becomes a lot easier to answer, did you ever realize that. But if we are not fully behind it (we MUST do it), the question what do we need to know is so much more prominent and becomes suddenly a lot of importance.

2004-01-13T00:19:00.000-08:00

Working at the largest privately held SW company in the world, makes KM interesting from a number of sides. And some of my experiences in the field over the last 6-7 years might not be as easily transferable to a public company, but I think most of them are. So what are those lessons learned? Last year I wrote those up for a chapter of a book, that I think as a whole is a very interesting one, because it is one of the KM books written by a variety of KM practitioners, not journalists or University professors. The book came out sometime first half of 2003, but it is only now reliably available on Amazon.com. See Leading with Knowledge - Knowledge Management in Global Infotech Companies for more information.

BTW, the largest privately held SW company is named SAS, the Business Intelligence vendor and my chapter is No.14 on page 419, just in case you are interested in some of the historic details of our KM initiatives :-)

But there is many other companies describing what they did and learned during their KM journey. If you do get a copy and read it, why don't you rate it at Amazon... would be interesting to see, what others think of it.

2004-01-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

What good is a blog if it is not being blogged. Well I promise to make it more of a habit to feed it much more regularly in 2004.

The other day, I came across a new website initiative that enables people to share contacts via the internet: Open Business Club (OpenBC).

Well I am sure, there is a number of those out there somehwere. What I liked about this community is the fact that they take it very serious to balance the chance to getting in contact with the right people, and the control of privacy, they offer, so I added my profile to it, and already got one worthwhile (serious) contact. The fact that there is relevance to the issue ensured, by offering control features is one element that is common to a lot of programms for sharing knowledge, and sharing contacts with people that have relevant knowledge to offer is an important way in that.

Business relevance has been one of the main themes, I have been hearing when it comes to KM.

2003-07-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

One problem with the term knowledge management is that it is defined in too many ways. Yes there is those definitions of Gardner and others, but too often a company comes along and starts defining it in a way that their products might fit into the concept. They offer knowledge management solutions/software etc. What that shows in my mind is that KM seems to represent actually some value to some people, otherwise why would those companies go through that act of rebranding everything they do in that arena. I am personally more of a purist in that sense, that I believe there is actually no such think as KM Software as there is no people management software. There might be SW supporting part of what is needed to implement those things and to provide the tools that some of the KM processes can actually happen effectively.

KM can only happen with the right emphasis on people focus, and installing a software is not going to get you there by itself. On the other side, it is actually much easier to deal with technology with the complexity of people and organizations, but those that tell you that SW is the answer (and yes btw, we give you some process as well) are playing down those other elements (well they would not really make a lot of money on them, those are risky and a lot of it has to come from within the organization, and last but not least it will take time and patience which of course means a long sales cycle.

Even KM consulting can go only so far in my mind, if there isn't enough mindshare from inside, that can create a spirit for making sharing knowledge a natural part of what people within an organization do. It can make finding the right processes a lot easier, and guide on the way, but when you don't get that internal buy-in, it will fall apart 3 weeks after the consultant left...

2003-05-21T00:29:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome. This is actually my first blog. Have known about the concept for while, and seen some from others, so I thought I should give it a try, and see how it can be useful. The topic I want to blog about is one, that I usually talk a lot about as well (ask my friends). It happens to be the field that I work in as well, but it is so wide that it does not get boring to talk about it with people outside of my own organization.

What I am talking about is Knowledge Management (KM). I will actually refer to it as KM from here on to save a little on typing. The question since when I am working in the field of KM is hard to answer, it depends on the definition. One could say, I was very much working in that field during 4 years as a liason manager between a very large company in Germany, and a fairly small company in Silicon Valley, manage processes such that this partnership could work, had to do a lot with managing knowledge. This was not about documents so much as it was to get the knowhow of the small company (the experts) to those in need within the large company.

When I joined another US company, it took a few years until I ended up in a spot actually called KM. I think the term KM as such is not that old, the principles behind it are partly very old, but I think in combination with companies it has become increased attention within the last 7-8 years. And of course, attention can always be dangerous as well. In this case the term Knowledge Management was hijacked by many companies, that used it for their purpose to market technology. Some of the gurus are already moving away from the term, because the understanding that is created by some companies (be it SW vendors or Consultancy) is not what was meant originally.

In my eyes if the emphasis is on technology, then it is not KM, then it might be KM-support technology, which in my mind is not the same thing. Many have written, that KM is 80%people and 20% technology, I would refine that to 70% people, 20% process and 10% technology. Which does not mean, that once a KM initiative is fully up to speed and running, technology can play a significant role, but if you start with technology you are doomed. I have seen it often enough to be 100% convinced on that one. If you start with technology and do not put at last 5x effort, money, people on the soft parts (the people issues, the marketing, the ongoing support ....) you will some great technology and if you are lucky some will use it for a while, but you will not get a successful KM Initiative...

So much for now... more thoughts later....