It’s about people! That’s not a revolutionary statement, but it’s one that needs to be re-enforced as knowledge management re-aligns itself once again within the digital age. Knowledge resides within individuals and at times, looking at our org charts, we can’t see the trees through the forest.
Numerous presentations at KMW08 focus on techniques that promote knowledge sharing by giving individuals an opportunity to make their mark in an organization’s knowledge, information, and document repositories. Yves Noble, from Capgemini, had a simple solution for his organization, “Copy what works on the internet”. Rather than investing in software, he and his team put the focus on investing in people. Using a mix of open source tools like Drupal, Mediawiki, phpBB and a dash of Google Search Appliance, in a year and a half, Yves successfully created an intranet where 27,000 active users connect, belong, share, and collaborate.
Social networking tools are about letting people do what they do naturally: communicate. I think communication is the basis of all learning and knowledge sharing, which results in what we all crave the most; opportunities to innovate. That’s what Celeste Merryman of NASA learned when she developed NASAsphere with the help of Tim Young of SocialCast. Accelerate communication and you accelerate problem solving. According to Tim, Gen Ys are the most adept generation when it comes to rapidly pinpointing expertise and information within an organization by-passing all chains of command. They want to solve problems quickly and in order to do that, they want effective communication tools. Suffice it to say, email is just not cutting it.
But if you think that that the biggest challenge to bring about this knowledge sharing utopia is putting into place a highly sophisticated IT infrastructure, then yes, you’d be wrong. The challenge seems to lie with the culture. When I was studying KM in school, rule number one was work within the existing culture of the organization. Janine Valvoda, Chief Cultural Officer, and Tracy Conn, Senior Program Manager of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, have a somewhat different approach. Their goal is to influence cultural changes by focusing on people, processes, content, and technology. For example, don’t just recognize people for the sake of recognizing them. Provide recognition to re-enforce cultural attributes that you want to see flourish. Recognize experts for their expertise, sharing between individuals, and collaboration between departments. Create a safe environment for people to engage in dialogue and ask questions using Collaboration Cafés. Finally, use technology, like innovative video tutorials, to capture and share experiences and expertise with others.
Peter Skarzynski, author of Innovation to the Core, in his opening keynote speech this morning struck two chords with me. His two major cultural drivers were putting an emphasis on openness and humility. Openness and transparency reminds us that within organizations we shouldn’t have secrets. Humility reminds us that there is always someone who is smarter than we are. I strongly believe in being humble since I know I learn from everyone I engage with and everyone from every domain is capable of adding towards my knowledge and understanding of the world.
Long story short, Al Yankovic was wrong.
#1 by Dale Arseneault - September 25th, 2008 at 04:59
(I’m quite enjoying my morning “coffee with Peter ..
)
Agreed.. Emerging technologies (Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 .. whatever), and their implementation, should be about people, but most of what I’m reading has an underlying assumption that “if you give people the technology, all will work well.” If that were the case.. well.. we’d complain less about ineffective meetings, wouldn’t we. About people certainly relates to culture, but also culture as embodied in business and cultural “practices”.. the way we go about diong things. I’m sure everyone’s been in meetings with the specific intent of generating ideas – brainstorming. And often there is an individual sitting in the back of the room, not contributing any ideas, but instead critizing the ideas as they come up, and hampering the ideation process. Often the criticism is not verbal, but sometimes heavy sighs, sometimes “tisk tisk”.. that kind of thing. Pointing out failures in cultural practices that are contratry to a learning and knowledge culture, and improving them, can have a significant impact on an organization’s business outcomes. Unfortunately, sometimes holding up a metaphorical mirror to ingrained norms can be a threat to people aligned with, or having a vested interest in, the status quo.
Your comments on Peter Skarzynski’s key note reminds me somewhat about Roger Schwartz’ ideas on colalboration culture and faciltiative leadership.
I’m also reminded of what Edward deBono calls the intelligence trap.
“A highly intelligent person will often take a certain view on a subject and then use his or her thinking just to support that view. This will be done with arguments that make a great deal of sense. But the more able a thinker is to support a point of view the less inclined is that thinker actually to explore the subject. Since the original point of view may be based on prejudice or habit, this failure to explore the subject is bad thinking. ”
It’s a habit everyone falls into, and presents a very subtle, but significant barrier to culture change. Being open to surfacing and exploring new ideas is critical to innovation and to a learning and knowledge sharing culture.
#2 by Andrew - September 25th, 2008 at 05:33
Constructive criticism intended – if it not appreciated, delete this comment.
You are pointing out that social networking tools are about people communicating naturally. If that is the case then why are your posts long winded and academic?
I bet you could tell me the same story with 1/3 of the content. Then I would read it. There is a balance between power point culture (which I hate) and blogging.
#3 by Andrew - September 25th, 2008 at 07:55
To quote Jack Lemmon is -Some Like it Hot- “Nobody talks like that,”
#4 by Peter Zakrzewski - September 25th, 2008 at 08:01
Blogging for me is about being vulnerable, so I appreciate all comments and constructive criticism. But I think you’re right it is a bit long and given that’s its almost a knee-jerk reaction to information overload, I fall back on a writing style that I spent way too many years trying to perfect. Similarly, the ideas aren’t all that flushed out and they need to be explored, dissected, analyzed and debated further in order to separate the wheat from the chaff. I’ve got a lot to learn about knowledge and information management and most definitely blogging.
Keep those comments coming!
#5 by Dale Arseneault - September 25th, 2008 at 09:19
(pfew.. good to see someone else offering comments besides me!)
Re: Andrew’s point about brevity, I’m tempted to say “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder – ’nuff said.”
Perhaps this IS Peter communicating naturally. Perhaps knowing that the key target audience for this series of posts on the conference are some of his colleagues, he’s intentionally posting in this fashion.
And.. what is “blogging culture” anyway? Is there a homogeneous one across all bloggers? Not from what I see, but I’m the first one to admit my experience is limited to what I’ve had the capacity to observe and consume. I’ve seen very, very short ones (that sometimes make no sense because there is no context).. I’ve seen detailed ones that read like an academic paper, I’ve seen blog post that do nothing more than point to other web resources, I’ve seen posts that do a great job of distilling and making sense of highly specialized, technical topics, and a bunch of other permutations and combinations. Audience reach aside, they’ve all got value to someone,whether the writer or the reader.
Sure.. in the “attention deficet” world we live in where rapid consumption and shallow thinking seems to be the trend, some (and I use the term) best practices seem to have evolved in certain circles. But are these practices universal truths. Me thinks not.
And one final point. Many of us operate under the assumption that the responsibility for effective communications resides with the communicator. I dispute that. Given the human processes of sensemaking and learning, the bulk of the responsibility resides in the receiver. There is no way that a communicator can anticipate an individual’s frame of mind, personal biases, distractions, receptiveness, capacity to learn, pre-existing experiences etc. Sure, some degree of targeting is possible in profiling aggregate market data.
So, in the context of readers consuming blog posts, is it not incumbent on the readers to absorb what’s useful and disregard the rest?
#6 by Yannick Pouliot - February 28th, 2009 at 23:21
“It’s about people!”, you say. True indeed, but why is it that the vast majority of knowledge-intensive organizations don’t have anything much better than institutional directories to help their stakeholders identify the right people?
The problem with knowledge sharing applications a la LinkedIn is their reliance on their users to maintain some sort of profile. This requirement has repeatedly been shown to be the Achilles’ heel of this class of knowledge sharing system.
For example, while definitely worthwhile and interesting, one can’t help wondering how NASA will avoid the data staleness problem with their NASASphere system. Employees are busy (note the 72% of respondent that indicated that NASASphere did not save them time), and it is asking a lot to have them maintain their profile on an ongoing basis.
When it comes to facilitating the identification of experts, a goal of NASASphere, one wonders what would prevent NASA from including an automated data mining component to the system to provide a more comprehensive, up to date and less biased assessment of expertise. This should be feasible, given that NASA’s work is usually publicly available and is highly technical/scientific.
This is the approach taken by ResearchScorecard.com and others. ResearchScorecard uses automated bots to mine “gated” research products of scientists (papers, grants, patents, and soon, clinical trials) available on the public Web to identify and assess the expertise of biomedical scientists, in this case, those operating at Stanford University and UCSF.
Similar to NASASphere, ResearchScorecard’s goal is to help scientists find and evaluate potential collaborators by providing a quantitative portrait of academic researchers in the life sciences. While finding scientists is doable using systems like COS Expertise, SciTechNet and LinkedIn, evaluating them to generate a ranked list a la Google is much harder, and is arguably the more valuable step. Contrary to user-updated systems, a data mining approach that relies on observable data makes it very easy to answer questions such as “find all scientists with expertise in X and rank them according to that expertise”.
#7 by Peter Zakrzewski - March 3rd, 2009 at 19:02
Interesting suggestion, but I wonder how data mining within organizations could be achieved unless sharing, openness, and transparency were the foundation on which all non-classified content was developed.
If a system could mine my content and reveal, what my colleague refers to as my “unconscious competence”, then by all means, bring it on.