Weekly Knowledge Management blog by Stan Garfield

New Directions, KM Thought Leaders, Open Source Social Software, Beyond Google, What Would Churchill Do

Stan Garfield — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 02:32:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What will you be doing next?

A: After spending the past 25 years at Digital Equipment Corporation, Compaq Computer Corporation, and the Hewlett-Packard Company, I have taken a new position as Community Evangelist for Deloitte's Global Consulting KM group.

Q: What will become of your blog?

A: All previous content will be preserved on hp.com, but there will be no new posts there after this one. To read my subsequent posts, follow me in Twitter.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

This series has concluded. See KM Thought Leaders for a list with links to more information.

KM Blog of the Week

From Nancy White in CPsquare

Open Source Social Software by Josie Fraser

Open Source Social Networking Platforms
Open Source Social News
Open Source Social Bookmarking
Open Source Virtual Worlds
Open Source Lifestreaming
Projects to watch/Upcoming

KM Link of the Week

From Mireille Jansma in actKM

Google searches, at the very most, 20% of the web. Here are some links in case you really want to bypass Google and start exploring the real web, not just the entry point.

KM Book of the Week

What Would Churchill Do?: Business Advice from the Man Who Saved the World by Stuart Finlay

Google Book

Table of Contents

The Unintended Consequences of Treating People Decently
Don’t Hesitate to be Pleasantly Ruthless
Stop & Smell the Roses
Your Past can be a Bridle or a Spur
The Habit of Detail
Negotiate Hard for Your Convictions
Your Own Words Can Make a Tasty Dish
Avoid Being a Slave to Technology
Stay Passionate for Things you Don’t Agree With
Demonstrate That People Matter
Keep Concentration in Compartments
Praise and Entertain
Survival of the Freshest
Success is Happily Finding Your Level
Don’t be Afraid to Coldly Comprehend
Dealing with the Stalins of This World
Entities Can’t Show Loyalty

Turning Churchill into business guru from the Swindon Advertiser

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Leadership Maxims, Avoiding a CoP Mid-Life Crisis, Library Clips, Knowledge and Learning Toolkit, Ten Commandments for Business Failure

Stan Garfield — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:21:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week
[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What advice do you have for leaders?

A: Here are three maxims on authentic leadership.

Maxim #1: PICKLES

Passion – have passion for your work, convey it to your people, and demonstrate it in your actions
Integrity – establish, maintain, and promote core values; be fair, honest, and responsible
Communication – regularly let stakeholders know what is going on by communicating convincingly, completely, and compellingly to inspire, align, and motivate
Knowledge – know as much as you can about your work, share your knowledge with others, and encourage them to do the same
Love – love what you do, love your organization, and show love to the people with whom you interact
Empowerment – listen to, trust, and support your people
Service – serve your people, your organization, and your community

Maxim #2: Three Rights

Do what is right – logically, financially, morally, ethically, and environmentally – with decency, integrity, and fairness
Do it the right way – honestly, accurately, correctly, and completely – with good effort, resulting in high quality, and meeting all commitments
Do it right away – don’t procrastinate, make excuses, or avoid what is unpleasant – the sooner you start, the better

Maxim #3: 3P Cube

1. Passionate	2. Persistent	3. Persuasive
1. Propose	2. Plan	3. Produce
1. Prototype	2. Pilot	3. Perfect

And from this previous blog post, here is a suggested credo to follow.

Endorse, communicate, and exemplify the following credo:

I will practice and reward caring, sharing, and daring – caring for others, sharing what I know, and daring to try new ideas.
I will insist on trust, truth, and transparency in all dealings – earning and respecting the trust of others, communicating truthfully and openly, and demonstrating and expecting accountability.
I will look for opportunities to help, thank, and praise others.
I will eliminate criticism, blame, and ridicule in all interactions with others.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

Richard McDermott is currently recovering from open-heart surgery, and I wish him all the best during his recovery. He is starting Phase 2 of a CoP study with the primary, but not exclusive, focus of health and financial services. This week I feature one of Richard’s articles - How to Avoid a Mid-Life Crisis in Your CoPs: Uncovering six keys to sustaining communities.

Summary from the Canadian Health Services Research Foundation Networks Digest

Communities of practice (CoPs) hold great promise for organizational improvement and thrive when first established; however, they can be difficult to maintain beyond mid-life due to loss of momentum, lack of attention, and a tendency to localize.

Healthy communities mature into "influence structures" or active teams of peers who demand or are asked to take on influential roles in their organizations. These teams set short- and long-term goals, establish formal roles and structures, and assume vital organizational tasks.

While some CoPs falter, others mature into dynamic entities that seem to share six characteristics:

Clear purpose - The community sets and evaluates clear short-term and long-term goals. It might establish annual goal-setting and assessment processes or simply make sure the purpose of its work is clearly articulated.
Active leadership - Community leadership is passionate and actively promotes the work of the community; one group leader spends 25% or more of her time on community leadership.
Critical mass of engaged members - CoPs thrive on the work of a committed, stable, active core group of members who view membership as a key part of their job and/or their career; core members in some communities are expected to spend 10 percent of their time on community activities.
Sense of accomplishment - CoP members have a strong sense of accomplishment knowing they are addressing vital problems that advance community goals.
High management expectations - Management's high expectations challenge the community to become involved in substantive business operations.
Real time - Involvement in the community is a real, not a subsidiary, aspect of members' work.

Mature communities are distinguished in three related ways:

They are communities of peers, not hierarchical, authority-based structures.
They focus on developing a body of knowledge that serves larger organizational goals.
Individual members' influence is legitimated only through the expertise, creativity, and knowledge he or she contributes to the community.

KM Blog of the Week

Library clips by John Tropea

KM Link of the Week

From Ray MacNeil in actKM

Toolkit for Knowledge and Learning

A previous blog post featured the PDF version of Tools for Knowledge and Learning: A Guide for Development and Humanitarian Organizations. Here is a link to the HTML version.

Strategy development - This competency relates to how an organization might start to look at its knowledge and learning in a strategic manner. The tools presented provide different frameworks which can be used to plan, monitor and evaluate knowledge and learning initiatives.

The Five Competencies Framework - The first tool in this guide explains how to apply the Five Competencies approach, and therefore serves as a starting point for readers, to help establish clear rationale and entry points for using this toolkit.
Knowledge Audit - Knowledge Audit provides a structure for gathering data, synthesizing findings and making recommendations about the best way forward for knowledge and learning initiatives against a background of the broader structural, operational and policy factors affecting an organization.
Social Network Analysis - Social Network Analysis has been called the most systematic way of analyzing relationships and knowledge flows between individuals and groups. Properly undertaken, SNA can yield invaluable data about how to tailor and focus knowledge and learning activities to organizational needs.
Most Significant Change - Most Significant Change is a narrative-based mechanism for planning programs of change. As so much of knowledge and learning is about change, and this change takes place in a variety of different domains, the MSC tool could prove invaluable.
Outcome Mapping - Outcome Mapping is a participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation methodology which focuses on the contribution of a program to changes in the actions and behaviors of the 'boundary partners'. Applied to knowledge and learning strategies, OM has a number of potential benefits.
Scenario Testing and Visioning - Both of these tools focus on the future of an organization, and enable imaginative and creative ideas to play a central role in developing and rolling out knowledge strategies.

Management techniques - If leadership is the process of working out the right things to do, then management is the process of doing things right. Here are a range of simple approaches, from assessing managerial responses to mistakes, to assessing the forces for and against stated organizational changes, which might prove useful to managers working towards the learning organization.

The SECI Approach - This approach, made popular by Japanese management specialists Nonaka and Takeuchi, is based on systematically managing the conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge, through four easy-to apply-processes based on simple principles of group dynamics.
Blame vs Gain Behaviors - Managing a learning organization requires a managerial approach to mistakes which is healthy and balanced, and which encourages staff to take certain risks and to be honest about the consequences of their actions. This simple process enables groups to reflect on their own approach to mistakes and errors, and how they might go about addressing these, through use of a series of generic 'Blame' or 'Gain' behaviors.
Force Field Analysis - Force Field Analysis enables teams to work out what their goals are, and systematically to identify the forces for and against achieving them. This is the classic change management tool developed by Kurt Lewin, pioneer of action research, and can be an empowering and energizing tool for teams.
Activity-based Knowledge Mapping - All activities require different inputs and generate outputs; increasingly, these inputs and outputs are information based. This tool, which has been drawn from the field of business process re-engineering, enables the mapping of inputs and outputs for key activities, with a view to improving their efficiency. This provides managers with an in-depth understanding of the different processes they are overseeing.
Structured Innovation - This tool works by listing the characteristics of a specific problem, and brainstorming the possible variations. Done correctly, this tool enables groups systematically to generate new ideas and assess their potential. This is useful for managers who feel the need for more creativity and
Reframing Matrix - Everyone sees problems in different ways, and one of the key problems with knowledge strategies is that knowledge is in the eye of the beholder. This tool enables different perspectives to be generated, and used in management planning processes.

Collaboration mechanisms - When working together with others, the whole of our efforts often proves to be less than the sum of the parts. Why? Frequently, there is not enough attention paid to facilitating effective collaborative practices. The tools in this section can be applied to reflect on the workings of teams, and to help strengthen relationships and develop shared thinking.

Teams: Virtual and Face-to-Face - This tool enables teams to work through five stages towards a 'shared responsibility'. Either face-to-face or virtually, teams can cross the five stages assessing where they lie in terms of different areas, including atmosphere and relations; goal acceptance; information sharing; decision making; reaction to leadership; and attention to the way the group is working.
Communities of Practice - Communities of Practice enable similarly minded interacting people to work towards generating and collaborating on knowledge and learning initiatives in a variety of ways, through a number of overlapping functions.
Action Learning Sets - Action Learning Sets are a structured method enabling small groups to address complicated issues by meeting regularly and working collectively. This tool is geared especially learning and personal development at professional and managerial levels.
Six Thinking Hats - This tool offers a way out of the habitual thinking style by enabling participants to use different approaches and perspectives to analyzing decision making. This is particularly useful in that it allows a broad and objective view of decisions, and one which covers more options and possibilities.
Mind Maps - Mind Maps are a graphic technique to enable participants to implement clearer thinking in their approach to many different tasks. It is useful both for individuals and for groups, and provides as non-linear method of organizing information.
Social Technologies - Social Technologies cover a broad swathe of tools, all using technology to build collaboration and sharing of tacit knowledge. There are many different forums for this, chiefly internet-based tools but also including telecommunications, radio and face-to-face socializing.

Knowledge sharing and learning - So much of effective knowledge and learning is about two-way communication which takes place in a simple and effective manner, and applying simple techniques to try and build on past experiences to improve activities in the future. These essential tools are covered in this section.

Stories - Storytelling is an approach which can both allow for expression of tacit knowledge and increase potential for meaningful knowledge sharing, particularly by permitting learning to take place through the presence of a narrative structure.
Peer Assists - This tool encourages participatory learning, by asking those with experience in certain activities to assist those wishing to benefit from their knowledge, through a systematic process, towards strengthened mutual learning.
Challenge Sessions - Challenge Sessions are a structure framework geared towards solving problems by allowing participants to supplement their habitual thinking with new methods, centered around working towards dealing with problems that are made up of conflicting requirements or challenges.
After Action Reviews and Retrospects - The After Action Review facilitates continuous assessment of organizational performance, looking at successes and failures, ensuring that learning takes place to support continuous improvement in organizational learning and change.
Intranet Strategies - Intranets can have a great impact on knowledge management, particularly in the fields of information collection, collaboration and communication, and task completion. Following the necessary approach, this tool can substantially increase the likelihood of an effective, useful system within an organization.
Email Guidelines - Email is one of the most commonly used communication tools in the modern business environment; there is an increased need nowadays to manage this tool to reduce the risk of overload. This tool helps to control this tool and therefore increase its effectiveness as a communication tool.

Knowledge capture and storage - Knowledge and information can leak in all sorts of ways and at all sorts of times. To make sure that essential knowledge is retained by an organization requires, a range of techniques can be applied, from traditional information management tools such as shared drives, as well as more modern techniques such as blogs and knowledge based exit interviews.

Taxonomies for Documents and Folders - This tool has been in existence for many decades in the form of classification schemes and indexing systems, and still can have a great deal to offer in terms of structuring information for easier management and retrieval.
Exit Interviews - Exit Interviews represent a specific learning process, not just a way to leave a company, and one which highlights the importance of capturing and storing know-how. This can minimize the loss of useful knowledge through staff turnover and ease the learning curve of new staff, benefiting both the organization and the leaving staff.
How To Guides - This tool enables the capture, documentation and dissemination of know-how of staff within an organization, to help them make better and wider use of existing knowledge. The ultimate goal is to capture an effective sequence or process with enough accuracy so that it can be repeated with the same good results.
Staff Profile Pages - Using this tool, an electronic directory storing information about staff in a given organization, can facilitate connections among people through systematizing organizational knowledge and learning initiatives.
Blogs - A Weblog in its various forms enable groups of people to discuss electronically areas of interest in different ways, and to review different opinions and information surrounding such subjects.
Shared Network Drives - Shared Network Drives work in most organizations to store and categorize information. If used correctly, and under systematized good practices, they can enable better retrieval of knowledge and improved information sharing across an organization.

KM Book of the Week

The Ten Commandments for Business Failure by Donald R. Keough

Don Keough - a former top executive at Coca-Cola and now chairman of the elite investment banking firm Allen & Company - has witnessed plenty of failures in his sixty-year career (including New Coke). He has also been friends with some of the most successful people in business history, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Jack Welch, Rupert Murdoch, and Peter Drucker.

Now this elder statesman reveals how great enterprises get into trouble. Even the smartest executives can fall into the trap of believing in their own infallibility. When that happens, more bad decisions are sure to follow.

This light-hearted “how-not-to” book includes anecdotes from Keough’s long career as well as other infamous failures. As he writes, “After a lifetime in business I’ve never been able to develop a step-by-step formula that will guarantee success. What I could do, however, was talk about how to lose. I guarantee that anyone who follows my formula will be a highly successful loser.”

Don Keough’s Ten Commandments for Business Failure

Quit Taking Risks
Be Inflexible
Isolate Yourself
Assume Infallibility
Play the Game Close to the Foul Line
Don’t Take Time to Think
Put All Your Faith in Experts and Outside Consultants
Love Your Bureaucracy
Send Mixed Messages
Be Afraid of the Future

And the Bonus Commandment:

Lose Your Passion for Work - for Life

Interviews

Atlanta Journal-Constitution: Don Keough’s How-to-fail book exudes decades of success
New York Times: How to Fail in Business, a Guide to Success
Wall Street Journal: Coca-Cola Director on How to Fail in Business by Trying Really Hard

Links

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Finding a KM Job, Putting Ideas to Work, GE SupportCentral, SLA Click University KM Certificates, KM Concepts-Methodologies-Tools-Applications

Stan Garfield — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:27:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week
[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What advice do you have for those seeking a KM job? Are there any tricks of the trade that are worth passing on?

A: Set up daily email job alerts for “knowledge management” at these sites:

Attend conferences, blog, publish in periodicals, and lead or participate in KM communities. Volunteer to speak on a community call or at a conference. Develop a good reputation as a thought leader, useful correspondent, and generous helper.

Personal connections are the key to finding a position. Do things for other people without worrying about yourself. Send email to people to share useful information, ask for advice, and connect people with similar interests with one another.

Take advantage of your social and professional networks. Cultivate friendships, offer help, and answer questions. If you wait until you need to find a job to start networking, it is too late, and your motive will be obvious. Continuously build your network in both good and bad times.

Connect in meaningful ways with members of your network. For example, invite them to speak to a meeting which you organize, quote them in your blog, or ask them questions. Reach out regularly to members of your network, including respected thought leaders who you may think are too important to care about you. Each point of contact is a reminder that you are out there, and may trigger a subsequent connection.

Don’t be afraid to let everyone you know that you are seeking a job and to ask for their help. You never know which connection will be the one that pays off. Members of communities have empathy for one another, and will go to great lengths to try to help other members in times of need.

Let the communities you belong to know that you are seeking a job, providing links to your resume, blog, and personal profile. Update your Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social software profiles to show your status as seeking a job. Share job postings with other members - by helping them, you will set an example which will encourage them to reciprocate.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I was asked by APQC, "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

I posed this same question to many KM thought leaders. This week features Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak.

Putting Ideas to Work by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak, and Bruce Strong

Knowledge management can make a difference - but it needs to be more pragmatic

Over the past 15 years or so, many large organizations have embraced the idea that they could become more productive and competitive by better managing knowledge - the ideas, insights and expertise that originate in the human mind.

In practice, however, some of them are still struggling to make it work. Their knowledge-management efforts, while useful in some ways, haven't necessarily led to better products and services, more effective employees or superior work processes.

What went wrong? Some firms stumbled by focusing their knowledge-management efforts solely on technology at the expense of everything else, while others failed to tie knowledge programs to overall business goals or the organization's other activities. A new approach is needed if knowledge management is to transition into a more pragmatic discipline, one that can be used to improve specific job functions and work processes.

Back to School

The Issue: Knowledge management, in practice, has fallen short of its goal of transforming the way companies work.
The Problem: Many firms have focused solely on disseminating knowledge via technology, ignoring the other aspects of knowledge management.
The Bottom Line: Organizations need a broader management strategy, one that addresses how they are creating, sharing and using knowledge.

The article provides a closer look at each of the three knowledge-related activities and suggestions for managing them effectively.

Knowledge Creation
Knowledge Dissemination
Knowledge Application

Additional Links

Tom’s Blog
Larry’s Blog
Babson College Blog (old)
Why is the KM Experience Different in Europe? by Larry Prusak
The Future of Knowledge - Commentary on Larry's APQC keynote by APQC's Jim Lee
Which Way Forward for KM? - Interview with Larry by KnowledgeBoard’s Louise Druce

KM Blog of the Week

From Chris Johannessen

GE’s Enterprise Collaboration Backbone by Oliver Marks

General Electric, the venerable multinational that was founded in 1878 in New Jersey, have at their core a hugely sophisticated enterprise collaboration system that is arguably the largest in the world.

A major corporate culture change sponsored by Gary M. Reiner, GE Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, defined more collaboration and transparency as goals for the 21st century in the late ’90s. Development of SupportCentral subsequently started internally at the turn of the century in January 2000, and today the system is at the center of GE’s worldwide operations. A development team of about one hundred is located in New Haven, Mumbai and Mexico.

The numbers are huge: 400,000 global users in 6,000+ locations around world, all working within a 100% web interface available in 20 languages (your user interface language is defined by your sign in permissions). The system gets over 25 million web hits a day, greater than employee usage of Google and Yahoo combined. Users have created over 50,000 communities with over 100,000 experts signed up to answer questions and manage information; experts are GE workers with full-time jobs who use the system because it helps them do their job better.

Thousands of business processes have already been digitized in an internal world where knowledge and work processes are critical. Everything is behind the firewall except for ‘pinholes’ to external destinations which allow external vendors, suppliers and customers to collaborate on specific projects. There are 30,000 external users who come in through the firewall pinholes to participate in specific communities.

The cost savings are so many millions a year that GE, despite being a famously metrics driven company, doesn’t require an ROI justification model for SupportCentral budgeting. As CIO Gary Reiner said in a recent Fortune interview, SupportCentral “is becoming…the heartbeat of the company.”

A Humbling Experience by Chuck Hollis

GE's SupportCentral

Yes, they do the blogging, wiki, discussion thing -- that's just for starters.

We debate on ideal SM models occasionally -- people-centric, community-centric, discussion-centric, document-centric, process-centric, etc.

They had support for every one of these models -- seamlessly integrated. People can engage in any mode that makes sense to them. As one example, personal workspace content can be part of a community, discussion, process, etc.

Presence? Just part of the environment, thanks. They described themselves in a "post-email world". Nice.

Mashups? Deployed for quite a while, thanks -- all corporate repositories could easily be accessed. They'd lost count of the umpteen thousand mashups people had created.

What really blew me away was their integration of process tools. Business processes can be defined by anyone, refined by anyone, instantiated by anyone, measured by anyone. As a result, they could count 50,000 different business processes that were captured on the platform in some form or another.

When you get a glimpse of the future at work, it makes you take a moment to reflect on a few things.

First, the functionality they'd deployed was many years ahead of anything I've seen or heard about in the marketplace. More importantly, it was developed and deployed in response to documented business needs from proficient users who'd made this platform the core of their business life.

Second, they invested early and continuously. Sure, they had to fight for budget and recognition just like any other business investment, but their sustained commitment had obviously paid off in a tangible, sustainable business advantage.

Third, the rest of us are now at a substantial competitive disadvantage if we decide to compete with GE. Thankfully, they're a customer and not a competitor. Because they were so early, they probably had to invest more than those of us slowpokes who are relative noobs to all of this.

Fourth, it gave me tangible proof that social media / social productivity / social computing can work at mega-scale -- and I had a greater case that these techniques would re-make how business gets done in the future.

Fifth, if you're running one of those cool "web 2.0 in the enterprise" events, I'd make a special point of inviting Mark (or one of his team) to present. Everyone else talks big about the future -- but it appears the future has existed for quite a while at GE.

And if you're contemplating being a vendor or consultant in this space, I'd make a big effort to see what they've done, how they did it -- and, most importantly -- why they did it.

What Got Tossed Out The Door?

A whole bunch of "conventional wisdom" that I really didn't agree with anyway.

First, it clearly isn't a generational thing. If you're of this view, I now have documented proof that you're dead wrong. Score one for my generation's ability to adopt new ways of working.

Second, traditional corporate cultures can't change. If there was any corporate culture more button-downed than GE's, I'd like to see it. And it now appears to be completely transformed around social computing.

Third, the assumption that this has to be a top-down mandate. Sure, Mark and his team are pretty senior, but they had to do this the hard way -- by convincing hundreds of thousands of people that this was a better way to work.

Fourth, that business justification is impossible. GE's culture is all about hard savings, and documented value. They routinely discredit soft justification. And they have been convinced in a big way -- and for quite a while.

Fifth, that social media is incompatible with business concerns. Their environment is pretty much business-oriented. There's not a lot of "social" going on the platform -- and it works very well, thank you.

KM Link of the Week

From Mary Morgan in SIKM Leaders

SLA Click University Knowledge Management Certificates

The Knowledge Management (KM) Certificate Programs, an exclusive benefit of membership to SLA members, consists of three different levels of curriculum, enabling information professionals and other knowledge workers to choose courses based on their specific function within their organizations. In the program, SLA members can earn a certificate in knowledge management, a certificate in knowledge services, or a dual certificate combining the two.

Recognizing the critical importance of knowledge management for SLA members, SLA and SMR International have joined together in a strategic alliance to design and develop the certificate program, drawing on the two organizations’ combined research, consulting experience, and training expertise. The programs are appropriate for seasoned KM professionals as well as other interested knowledge workers not currently performing a KM function, and are open to those working towards a full KM certificate and members seeking occasional courses to enhance their professional development and expertise.

The Programs

The Certificate in Knowledge Management is designed for information professionals and other knowledge workers who are interested in transitioning into a more formal KM role in their parent organizations or who are seeking to learn more about KM in anticipation of a future need for KM expertise in their careers. In defining knowledge management, the program recognizes that there are many different definitions of this popular topic. Generally speaking, KM is thought of a management practice that is used to help enterprise leaders manage explicit, tacit, and cultural information in ways that enable the organization to reuse the information and create new knowledge.

The Certificate in Knowledge Services is designed for information professionals and other knowledge workers who are interested in bringing the benefits of well-managed information, knowledge, and strategic learning delivery into the service of the larger organization. Knowledge services is defined as the convergence of information management, knowledge management, and strategic learning. Knowledge services is putting knowledge management to work, the practical side of KM. As such, knowledge services enables the organization to function as a knowledge culture, with knowledge development and knowledge sharing (KD/KS) enabling excellence in service delivery with respect to research, contextual decision-making, and innovation in the larger enterprise.

The Dual Certificate in Knowledge Management and Knowledge Services is designed to provide information professionals and other knowledge workers with the expertise and skills they need for building an enterprise-wide knowledge culture for the organizations in which they are employed. The program combines theoretical and practical approaches to the subject, delivering an end result for the larger enterprise that serves as a framework for measurable and tangible benefits in the utilization of information, knowledge, and strategic learning in achieving the corporate or organizational mission.

While the primary goal in developing these programs is to allow SLA members to earn one or more certificates, each of the courses has inherent value and any course may be taken a la carte.

KM Book of the Week

From Paul McDowall in ikmf_figs

Knowledge Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (6-volume set) edited by Murray Jennex

Knowledge management (KM) is an emerging, interdisciplinary business model dealing with all aspects of knowledge within the context of the firm, including knowledge creation, codification, and sharing, and using these activities to promote learning and innovation. It encompasses both technological tools and organizational routines of which there are a number of components. These include generating new knowledge; acquiring valuable knowledge from outside sources; using this knowledge in decision making; embedding knowledge in processes, products, and/or services; coding information into documents, databases, and software; facilitating knowledge growth; transferring knowledge to other parts of the organization; and measuring the value of knowledge assets and/or the impact of knowledge management.

Knowledge Management: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is the defining reference source for all theories, concepts, and methodologies within the KM discipline. This comprehensive, six-volume collection of research from an international body of KM experts includes chapters on Implementing Knowledge Management (KM) in Organizations; KM Systems Acceptance; KM Communication; Knowledge Representation; Knowledge Sharing; KM Success Models; Knowledge Ontology; and Operational KM. Encompassing over 300 chapters from more than 500 contributors drawn from the world’s leading KM experts, this collection will provide libraries with the defining reference to the field and set the standard for all fundamental and emerging models within the discipline.

PDF File (3420 pages)

Section 1: Fundamental Concepts and Theories in Knowledge Management
Section 2: Knowledge Management Development and Design Methodologies
Section 3: Knowledge Management: Tools and Technologies
Section 4: Utilization and Application of Knowledge Management
Section 5: Organizational and Social Implications of Knowledge Management
Section 6: Managerial Impact of Knowledge Management
Section 7: Critical Issues in Knowledge Management
Section 8: Emerging Trends in Knowledge Management

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

KM Communities, Influencing KM Adoption, Patience to Develop Communities, Discussion Forum Best Practices, Management Gurus

Stan Garfield — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:51:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What KM communities do you belong to?

A: I belong to, or have belonged to in the past, these communities and discussion lists:

actKM Discussion List
APQC
com-prac (Communities of Practice)
CPsquare
Gurteen Knowledge Group
IKMF (Interdepartmental Knowledge Management Forum)
KM Chicago
KM Group (KMG) Philadelphia Chapter
KM.gov (US Government)
KM4Dev (community of international development practitioners)
KM-Forum (India)
KM-Forum (National Centre for Science Information (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science)
KnowledgeBoard
Learning to Fly
Midwest KM Community (I lead this community)
Search CoP
SlideShare KM Group
SIKM Leaders (I lead this community)
Taxonomy CoP
Working Knowledge Research Center at Babson College

Here are three lists of KM communities:

My List
Curtis Conley
Boris Jaeger (See "Discussion Groups" and "Societies, Associations & Communities" drop-down menus)

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I was asked by APQC, "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

I posed this same question to many KM thought leaders. This week concludes a series called "Selling KM: Lessons from Experience" based on the answer from Richard Cross. This is the final part.

Part 4: How to make friends and influence organizations to adopt KM

Selling is like a journey - there is no finish line

Treat the following as rules of thumb. Ignore them at your consultancy peril. Recall that buy-in to KM is a permanent process. You are selling all the time!

Start Where the System is

This is classic change agent wisdom. Yet in practice the rule is often violated. It is easy for the enthusiastic KM practitioner to forget the hostility of jargon that prevents laymen from understanding their professional mysteries. Starting where the client is can be called the Empathy Rule. To communicate effectively, to be able to build our KM strategy, it’s important to understand the culture of the system, working with the powerful and not against them. Above all, Stay Alive.

I learned my lesson here from a professor at a French university. We were in the prestigious offices of a Munich customer with a motley group of radicals, former unionists, and change agents in a company. We were busy preparing our leaders’ PowerPoints and position papers for presentation to the president and his top team later that day. (Rather like performing on Pop Idols or the X factor, only the best would do.)

My client had brought in his personal coach to talk to our sponsors. And hear his presentation. Initially I was envious, though didn't show it at the time. One of the Swedish team members commented with dismay how this coach had publicly contradicted my client and our team leader.

When the professor stepped in our room and told us one graphic story, it helped me understand so much more about the dynamics of organizational change.

Rafael entered the room and you could sense we were not comfortable with his presence. He then picked up a blue pen and drew a perfect map of the Seine as it flowed through Paris. He picked up a red pen and positioned the landmarks. We waited. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he proclaimed, “here is a map of Paris. There is the left bank and the right bank. You are on the left bank; you are the equivalent of the student radicals in 1967. You want to change the world.”

“True, you are right,” he continued, “about the organization you live and work in. It needs to change. It must change. You must also understand that on the right bank live those who hold the power. You will never change those people.” There was a dramatic pause as he picked up a black pen. With an artistic flourish he connected the two banks of the river. There was a theatrical pause. “You must build bridges” he exclaimed.

We loosely followed a couple of Saul Alinsky's (whose work heavily influenced Hilary Clinton) “Rules for Radicals.” All the former Union representatives had gravitated to this change team and our After Action Review in a Bier Keller captured the following three lessons:

The most effective means are whatever will achieve the desired ends
Make the enemy live up to his/her own book of rules (one of our team was the presidential speechmaker and we found that what he said outside the organization had far wider currency than anything that went down the line.
A good tactic is one that your people enjoy (wherever we went, the entertainment costs were top quartile)

Never trust someone who says “Show me the ROI” or “You can only measure what you manage”

Anthropologists maintain that in every culture there are apparently rational questions that mask hostile intent. “Show me the ROI” or “Yes, but how do you measure it?” generally fall into this category. When confronted with these types, start to get alarmed. The most important point I recall from my sales training is that a customer’s concern in a complex sale is risk. According to my sales training mentor, Roger Sugden, consequences (risks of going ahead with you) must be managed. Most lurk behind the surface.

Roger also emphasized that difficulty stating, quibbling over minor points (like the pantone color of a slide), asking for demonstrable ROI, and jargon bashing (we offered TQM training at that time) could also be early warnings on risk, customer insecurity, and lack of their (or your) credibility.

Price concerns and guaranteed ROI then become respectable and convenient ways to express concerns over consequences. It's easier for people to tell you that they have decided not to buy because of these issues than to explain issues such as mistrust, scars from mistakes made before, politics, hassle, not interested, risk to career or company, or the simple fact that they don’t like you.

Consequences are psychological issues in a person’s mind. They are not in the real world - only the customer can resolve them. In selling KM and TQM, Roger would advise me to help the customer, not resolve the problem on his behalf. He would also say to get the real concerns out in the open, and look to develop trust rather than engage in futile intellectualizing about ROI.

In an AOK dialogue hosted by Jerry Ash, Hubert Saint-Onge concluded that “I fully subscribe to the need to measure all that can be measured but I don't believe that you can only manage what you can measure. As a matter of fact, I find this one of the most mindless dictums to ever be uttered by people who appear to be otherwise reasonably coherent.”

My bottom line: the purpose is to improve, not prove.

Find a Partner in Crime you trust

The best detectives work in pairs. Don’t do anything alone that could be accomplished more easily or more certainly by a team.

One case springs to mind when I was brought into a customer by one of our account managers as our man on KM and member of the editorial board of Inside Knowledge. I remember the meeting as if it were yesterday (it’s easier to remember victories than defeats):

It wasn't a polite interrogation; rather, it was a challenging conversation.
The challenge from me to the customer (and vice versa) was also crucial.

After fifty minutes of sparring and focused discussion, I summarized my perception of his situation: “It seems that with your sophisticated analysis and clear vision, you're the only one in the organization who understands what really needs to be done and cares about the consequences of inertia. Your problem is how to enable others to achieve the same level of urgency and really want to do something about it. It's about developing a shared perspective. It's not something you can do by yourself as an internal change agent.

So how can we best address the issue? He requested our help.

There were two other factors that enabled the successful sale of my KM-like proposal (I used the K word three times in the proposal). First, the friend-of-a-friend meeting had been set up by a smart account manager who absented himself from the meeting on my instructions. Second, I was lucky - the client had (I learned later) been mauled for his academic and visionary ideas by his colleagues. In the end, we worked as partners. We both took risks. He adopted a stealth approach and had no KM budget - the training budget took quite a hammering that year. I worked without a PO.

Know When You’re Beaten

To balance the success story, in contrast to the challenging conversation I just described, there was another KM effort that didn’t work out. The sale was made and we got the work. For a number of reasons, I complied too early on to the customer’s whims and became a victim of their own insecurity. Relations were good with the CEO and the IT director, but as the project started, they disappeared from the scene. My project team became the enemy within and started to vet my work, edit the slides I produced (there was one PowerPoint character they banned!), and sabotage all efforts at progress.

Yes, I was consulting with a dysfunctional organization. Hoist by my own petard of competitive desire to knock out the competition, I’d not read their organization culture. I should have spotted that the smokescreen of clarification questions and objections from the junior level were symptomatic of their resistance to change. They’d created a bureaucratic process, and through a bureaucratic process they subverted all attempts at real change.

There are some organizations (and individuals) that are neither ready nor capable of changing. It turned out later their allegiance was with their previous consultancy supplier. Sometimes it’s best to cut one’s losses, sooner rather than later!

Conclusions

Over 10 years ago at one of the first KM conferences, Leif Edvinsson asked an audience that was ready to understand and espouse KM to list the questions they had about KM. Once he had heard the questions, Leif suggested to a shocked audience that implementing KM successfully was about asking the right questions. He was right. Remember, in selling there are no prizes for finishing second. Do your homework. Prepare your questions.

Selling and consulting on KM is tough. You are selling intangibles, selling and creating value, and selling yourself.

Acknowledgements

The advice covered these past four weeks stems from personal experience. Much of this was gained while working with and for a leading research psychologist, Roger Sugden, in the area of sales effectiveness. And while at Xerox, I had responsibility for sales training and selection in Africa, India, and Eastern Europe, and experience in selling KM. Thanks also to the Association of Knowledgework and Jerry Ash for their catalytic role in developing this paper.

KM Blog of the Week

From John Smith in com-prac

Do Enterprises Have the Patience to Develop Communities? by Rachel Happe

Communications, expectations, and business seem to move faster than ever these days. With the constant buzz of the Blackberry, a continuous stream of Tweets, and in incessant interruption of IMs our attention spans have dwindled even more. Our collective attention and patience is a dwindling resource. Yet, community dynamics still require a long-term view.

Communities – and I don't mean flash mobs, groups of 10 people, or event attendees because those are not communities – take time to develop and flourish. Measuring communities based on quarterly earnings calendars is a bad way to go but most businesses are focused on short term performance. We are under such intense pressure to show results that we often abort efforts that play out over longer periods.

Communities are one of the hardest types of organizations to launch, develop, and sustain. Two years is a reasonable ramp period and growth comes in fits and starts – metrics have to change over time too. I suggest the following:

Phase 1 (0-12 months): New members, page views, ratings, comments
Phase 2 (12-24 months): UGC, posts/user, visits/user/month, % of active members
Phase 3 (24 months +): Activity of community leaders, initiatives/ideas generated, ROI/value measures

KM Link of the Week

From Dan Randow in KM-Forum

Best Practices for the Online Discussion Forum

Here is the User Guide that we wrote for people using our system (which is a mail list and a web-based discussion forum, like say Yahoo! Groups but without ads). We chose to orient this towards individuals trying to get their work done, and identified these three common tasks.

Keeping Track of Conversations
Following Conversations Closely
Contributing to Conversations

KM Book of the Week

From Steve Denning in actKM

Management Gurus by Andrzej Huczynski

Management gurus have existed for as long as the leaders of large, complex organizations have had intractable problems to solve. This seminal text asks key questions such as: What is the secret of the success of management gurus and how can it be emulated? In this revised edition, Andrzej Huczynski brings his analysis of gurus into the twenty-first century. He identifies the essential ingredients of popular management ideas and contends that company managers, business school academics and management consultants all have the possibility of attaining guru status by following the guidelines contained in this book.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Popular management ideas
Recurring themes
Historical context
Requirements of managers
Promotion of management ideas
Public presentation of management gurus’ ideas
Succession of management fads

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

KM Leader Job Description, Selling KM Face to Face, Dead KM Walking, KM Method Cards, Communities Manual, Brain Rules

Stan Garfield — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:18:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What is the job description for a knowledge manager?

A: For a KM leader, here is a suggested job description.

Tasks

Improve business results by institutionalizing a knowledge sharing culture. With the help of the senior executive and the other leaders in the organization, take steps to achieve a positive culture which rewards caring, sharing, and daring.
Define, maintain, and execute the KM implementation plan for the organization. This is the overall program plan for the KM initiative.
Define, communicate, and implement people, process, and technology components for sharing, innovating, reusing, collaborating, and learning. These are the core elements that enable the KM program.
Define KM measurements and rewards for the organization and KM goals for all relevant members. This aligns individual and organizational objectives.
Report regularly on the organization's performance against KM metrics. This lets the leadership team know how the program is progressing.
Implement action plans for people, process, and technology projects. These are the detailed implementation plans for each project leader.
Lead the organization's KM teams. These include the program staff, the core team, and the KM community.
Manage the organization's KM communications. This keeps all users informed on the program.
Actively participate in communities. Model the desired behaviors by being visible as a leader and member of multiple internal and external communities.
Network with other KM Leaders. Demonstrate the use of social networks to stay current in the field of knowledge management.

Experience

Management: supervised people, led work teams, managed a business or functional unit
Project management: successfully managed projects to meet deadlines, provide deliverables, and adhere to budgets
Communications: published documents, gave presentations, and managed communications programs
Knowledge Management Components: for many of these, performed evaluations, led implementation projects, and used them regularly
Reputation: has earned the respect of people both inside and outside of the organization based on accomplishments, networking, and communications

Skills

Leadership: able to influence others, lead work teams, and manage projects
Communications: excellent at writing, speaking, presenting, and using a variety of communications vehicles
Process and Technology: able to quickly learn and master a wide variety of tools and processes
Knowledge Management Components: expert at using many of these
Analysis: able to seek input, analyze information, consider alternatives, and make good decisions

Attributes

Adaptable

Flexible: willing to try different courses of action
Resilient: overcomes difficulties, withstands setbacks, and meets challenges
Open-minded: considers the opinions of others

Assertive

Takes initiative
Consistently achieves challenging objectives and meets commitments
Makes effective decisions in a timely manner

Calm

Maintains a high level of performance even when under pressure
Even-tempered even when dealing with unpleasant circumstances
Balances logic and emotions when interacting with others

Client-focused

Understands clients' needs and concerns
Responds promptly and effectively to client needs
Eager to be of help to users

Creative

Develops innovative approaches to problem solving
Invents new ways of doing things
Willing to try out bold ideas

Collaborative

Acknowledges others' contributions
Works effectively with individuals of different backgrounds and from different groups
Willing to seek help as needed
Shares personal knowledge
Builds partnerships and networks

Curious

Stays current in the field
Open to new ideas
Asks others to share their knowledge and experience

Dynamic

Gets results
Balances analysis with action
Sets high standards

Influential

Gains support and commitment from others even without formal authority
Resolves differences by determining needs and forging solutions that benefit all parties
Facilitates teamwork across organizational boundaries

Personable

Gets along well with many different types of people
Nurtures new relationships
Well-liked as a manager, employee, and colleague

Also see:

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I was asked by APQC, "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

I posed this same question to many KM thought leaders. This week continues a series called "Selling KM: Lessons from Experience" based on the answer from Richard Cross. This is Part 3, with the final part to follow next week.

Part 3: Face-to-Face Selling

In front of customers

Inside selling, the prime issue is control of attention. Effective sales people do this by demonstrating genuine and natural empathy. Early in my career, research on effective sales people concluded that while highly competitive, they were behaviorally switched on to notice when the customer’s attention and intentions were elsewhere. They engaged with their customers as well as internal staff. Optimistic in outlook, they were caring, behavioral and good forward planners.

In action, the best sales performers structured the sale and kickoff connecting with the customer at a conceptual, business, and personal level. From the outset they gained credibility and the rights to explore sensitive business topics and question and nudge the customer to a decision. Comfortable both on the top and shop floor, the most successful looked like Directors, saw themselves as Directors and acted like them. No door was closed - on stage in front of the customer (both internal and external) they were ‘all singing, all dancing’ brochures that responded to the needs of the audience.

The above attributes are not dissimilar to Rob Cross’s energizers described as “fully present and engaged at all meetings: such people listen actively and use their expertise appropriately. Their interactions are marked by a sense of progress.” It is interesting to note further similarities: energizers create room in interactions for people and note the positives. When they disagree, they offer alternatives and disclose their own logic. They are able to separate the critique of the idea from person who offered it.

Similarly goal-driven, effective sales people are flexible in output and create trust step by step. They have self belief. Under pressure from customers with tough challenges, rather than disagree with the customer directly (and expose the customer’s stupidity) they reveal difficulties and problems by asking smart questions - and give themselves thinking time.

They may not offer the elegance of your KM solution, or may be based on an industrial model of consultancy. You may not want to do business with this person, but your decision makers do.

Structuring the Sale

There are as many selling strategies as there are KM strategies. The approach summarized below is a framework based on asking the right questions at the right time. It was originally developed for multi-national organizations including Xerox, IBM, Motorola and McKinsey by Huthwaite. Roger Sugden, a former colleague, was one of their early researchers. It's a highly consultative style of selling which is best used with flexibility.

Effective salespeople (not just those involved in KM) recognize that statements of dissatisfaction and expressions of interest are only the start of the sales process. A basic premise of the approach is in order to persuade that it is important to understand. Consequently, either naturally or through training, they recognize there is a need to probe deeper and to help the customer to explore the problem in greater depth, and to appreciate its true significance. They have a structure for the sale that builds mutual trust with the end result in mind - progress and change - symbolized by a result, a purchase order.

Contextual Clarity and Behavioral Certainty

Based on an understanding of the buying cycle, after sufficient but not excessive situation questions where they establish contextual information facts, effective sales people also gain insight into personal drivers, attitude to risk, and connections of the buyer(s). They are well prepared, and have often conducted a risk assessment even before they have met customer.

Problems, Problems…Opportunities

One of the easiest ways to identify whether someone has received sales training is by the number of problem questions they ask. Verna Allee talks about the fact that there is really only one management question: What do we need to pay attention to in order to be successful? Linked to this a focus on searching for problems can create the appropriate conversational context.

The seller’s problem questions typically explore the customer’s needs in terms of identifying the precise (where possible) nature of the problem: its extent, its frequency, its impact, and the seriousness of it. They also help clarify, in this stage, what the customer sees as the main benefits of solving the problem - business drivers in their jargon. Generally they begin with What, How, When and Where.

Work out the implications…leverage the consequences

Implication questions are designed to help you understand, not to prove a point. They are not designed to increase the threshold of pain to unacceptable levels. They help you raise awareness of the effects of problems associated with the status quo or state of flux. In line with one of the fundamental principles of consulting, the intent is to create moderate, not excessive, pain. They help build the seriousness of the problem so it becomes significant enough to take action. Their purpose is focusing on the consequences, amplifying, extending, and expanding the effects and linking a problem in one area to other potential or actual problems.

Questions structured in this way help the customer to build a picture of needs that leads naturally to a tipping point in favor of a decision in support of change. They also expand the buyer’s perceptions of value and get down to the basics - buying signals or explicit needs. Generally in a sale involving multiple decision makers, such questions also help develop common ground - a shared perspective and feeling of urgency around a problem. Often an energizer, sometimes called an inside coach, will lobby and help develop a shared perspective through raising this type of question on a one-on-one basis or using these issues to provoke group discussions on these areas.

Where implication questions work best is when they help link internal problems with the wider world of the customer and focus on issues that have impact on the key performance indicators such as the bottom line. They are most relevant to decision makers whose success depends on seeing the beyond the immediate problem to the underlying effects and possible consequences at a business level. Be warned: they are totally ineffective when you develop implications you can’t solve! It also pays to be sensitive in how the questions are asked. A conversation or dialogue is acceptable; an interrogation is not.

The objective is to ensure that both parties have a clear understanding of exactly what is required in order to solve the problem. More important, they also explore the potential benefits of implementing the solution and create a desire for action. Only then do effective sellers begin to explore potential solutions (their own) with the customer. This is a crucial step, because the customer must be left with a clear understanding of the value of the solution versus its cost, the need payoff.

The purpose then is to energize the buyer, to develop their perception of payoff from working with you and your approach and develop a clear explicit desire for you and your solution. Since you know the capabilities of your solution, it’s always easier for you to see the payoff. Do not believe your own propaganda. Whether you believe your approach has value is irrelevant - the buyer has to believe it also. If you start to make wild claims about what you can solve, there is a risk that the buyer or others will focus on the ones you can’t.

In a complex sale, your success depends not just on your own selling ability, but on how well people sell on your behalf. Consequently, it’s also useful to get the buyer to explain the benefits to you, not the other way round. This can help rehearse internal energizers and increase their confidence in you.

But what about KM?

You’ll probably notice that in this approach there has not been that much talk about KM per se. Correct. One point that may help is to remind ourselves at all times that telling is not selling. To demonstrate the capability of KM, it is essential you have completed your groundwork before you introduce your solution. Remember that your buyer has to have expressed an explicit need.

Because KM is based on how people really work and collaborate, you can learn from the experiences of others. There are benefits if these features and advantages can meet explicit needs stated by buyers. The goal is to develop the buyer’s problem so that it is strong and clear, and in so doing, develop their desire for and ownership of a joint solution.

Next Week: How to make friends and influence organizations to adopt KM

KM Blog of the Week

Dead KM Walking by Patrick Lambe

A fascinating, robust and sometimes sharp discussion with Larry Prusak and Dave Snowden on the topic “Is Knowledge Management Dead?” They think that KM as a field has been irredeemably corrupted by the many false plays and hijacks it has been subjected to, while I still have hope. Watch the podcast for the full story, and a million thanks to Larry and Dave for a great conversation.

Also by Patrick Lambe:

A set of concise summary cards covering KM approaches (e.g., CoPs, Information Literacy, KM Champions), methods (e.g., After Action Reviews, Pre-Mortems, Anecdote Circles) and tools (e.g., Wikis, Taxonomies, Competency Frameworks). We’ve used them in a variety of activities with our clients, often in helping them to visualize and plan how they are going to operationalize their KM strategies. Our clients have used them to provide quick reference guides to their KM activists and champions, and also to identify training and competency development needs. They’ve been so successful, that we finally decided to bite the bullet and produce a commercial version of them.

KM Link of the Week

From Peter Hobby in KM4Dev

Capitalizing Knowledge, Connecting Communities (CK2C) Communities Manual

CK2C and FRAMEWeb.org have developed this online manual to support communities and collaboration. CK2C is a US Agency for International Development project to strengthen knowledge sharing and learning in natural resources management. We have compiled the resources on this site from the US Agency for International Development and other sources as a one-stop manual for starting, maintaining and closing down online communities. It is a work in progress and we are looking for feedback.

This site has grown out of awareness that communities need care and feeding just like any other natural resource. The main sections of the manual are listed below. Discussion and history pages are available across the top of each page as you move through the site. The sections in the main navigation area are organized around a lifecycle approach to communities and the tools and templates are available to supplement your work on CoPs.

Navigation

Overview
Planning Communities
Getting Started
Management
Leadership
Members
Sustaining
Closeout
Communications

Tools and Templates

Communities Questionnaire
Community Charter
Community Lifecycle
Community Roles
Metrics
Principles and Rules
After Action Reviews
Additional Resources

KM Book of the Week

From Allan Crawford in SIKM Leaders

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School by John Medina

Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know - like the need for physical activity to get your brain working its best.

How do we learn? What exactly do sleep and stress do to our brains? Why is multi-tasking a myth? Why is it so easy to forget - and so important to repeat new knowledge? Is it true that men and women have different brains?

In Brain Rules, Dr. John Medina, a molecular biologist, shares his lifelong interest in how the brain sciences might influence the way we teach our children and the way we work. In each chapter, he describes a brain rule - what scientists know for sure about how our brains work - and then offers transformative ideas for our daily lives.

You will discover how:

Every brain is wired differently
Exercise improves cognition
We are designed to never stop learning and exploring
Memories are volatile
Sleep is powerfully linked with the ability to learn
Vision trumps all of the other senses
Stress changes the way we learn

In the end, you’ll understand how your brain really works - and how to get the most out of it.

Table of Contents

Introduction 1
Exercise Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power 7

Our brains love motion
The incredible test-score booster
Will you age like Jim or like Frank?
How oxygen builds roads for the brain

Survival Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too 29

What's uniquely human about us
A brilliant survival strategy
Meet your brain
How we conquered the world

Wiring Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently 49

Neurons slide, slither, and split
Experience makes the difference
Furious brain development not once, but twice
The Jennifer Aniston neuron

Attention Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things 71

Emotion matters
Why there is no such thing as multitasking
We pay great attention to threats, sex, and pattern matching
The brain needs a break!

Short-term memory Rule #5: Repeat to remember 95

Memories are volatile
How details become splattered across the insides of our brains
How the brain pieces them back together again
Where memories go

Long-term memory Rule #6: Remember to repeat 121

If you don't repeat this within 30 seconds, you'll forget it
Spaced repetition cycles are key to remembering
When floating in water could help your memory

Sleep Rule #7: Sleep well, think well 149

The brain doesn't sleep to rest
Two armies at war in your head
How to improve your performance 34 percent in 26 minutes
Which bird are you?
Sleep on it!

Stress Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way 169

Stress is good, stress is bad
A villain and a hero in the toxic-stress battle
Why the home matters to the workplace
Marriage intervention for happy couples

Sensory integration Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses 197

Lessons from a nightclub
How and why all of our senses work together
Multisensory learning means better remembering
What's that smell?

Vision Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses 221

Playing tricks on wine tasters
You see what your brain wants to see, and it likes to make stuff up
Throw out your PowerPoint

Gender Rule #11: Male and female brains are different 241

Sexing humans
The difference between little girl best friends and little boy best friends
Men favor gist when stressed; women favor details
A forgetting drug

Exploration Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers 261

Babies are great scientists
Exploration is aggressive
Monkey see, monkey do
Curiosity is everything

Links

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Search Questions, Issues in Selling, Knowledge Strategy, Web Conferencing Tools, The Necessary Revolution

Stan Garfield — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 18:14:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: Are there ways that you’d recommend a relatively non-techie person can learn about search? We are dealing with the following issues:

How to affordably provide the highest quality search ability for an internal network?

We currently have access to Microsoft Search. Are there other technical solutions we should consider?
Are there similar organizations that have best or promising practices in this area?

What’s the best way to develop and test keywords/synonyms used by a search engine?

Could/should we try to develop the following:
“What do users ultimately buy/go to after viewing this item?” (a la Amazon)
Search Assist (see Yahoo)
Enterprise search to integrate social networking content
Recommender system
Reputation system
Personalized search options - Ways for users to build on previous searches (see Amazon’s Recent Search feature)

Data cleaning:

Are there affordable options in addition to Yahoo’s Search Assist and Google for catching misspellings that can negatively impact search results and user satisfaction?
We’re struggling with the need to clean our data as we encourage staff to share their work. With limited staff capacity and time, are there sustainable ways to address this issue?

Do we need to consider mobile device search? If so, how does this change the search function and design?

A: I suggest that you post your questions to one or more of the following communities:

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I was asked by APQC, "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

Part 2: Issues in selling: research advice when selling KM

It’s better to seek than it is to give

Given that buyers go through a cycle and it is critical to locate the phase in which they are in this cycle, what else may be helpful in KM sales efforts? In selling, behavioral research suggests that:

Customers place higher value on what they conclude than on what they are told
Customers place a higher value on what they request than on what is offered freely
Just because you are right does not mean your valid conclusions will be implemented (this is particularly the case in large corporations)

We are not persuaded by listening to the opinions of others. Presentation of ideas does not change opinions. Giving information has a low impact on other people and rarely succeeds in the long term. It’s much more effective to let people talk themselves into acceptance.

Connect to Inside Energizers

In selling KM with its collaborative goals of knowledge sharing, idealism is essential. At the same time it’s important to bear in mind that even in the Knowledge Age, organizations are not, as a rule, Shangri-Las of social harmony. There are apparatchiks following fashionable fads and the company line with gusto, people out to make a mark, those who hold grudges, and some (mainly KM but occasionally TQM or Six Sigma) who want to be heroic and visionary.

There is one influential group when selling to a major organization. These are the target-oriented and ambitious. With an average tenure of two years in their role, this latter group simply wants to make an impact, force the pace and move on, rather than stabilize change. Short-term in approach, they can be your best allies and sponsors in selling a KM initiative - or your worst nightmare. What counts for this group is not history or what others have done. It’s what you’re doing for them today, and can do for them tomorrow.

Rob Cross, in his work on social networks, has written widely about “how work really gets done in organizations.” In trying to sell and influence KM and other related change, his research on mapping energy levels in social networks is relevant. His work concluded that position in the energy network is four times the predictor of performance as compared to expertise, use of informational networks and/or use of impersonal sources such as databases. These energizers win out with customers and the internal labor market where the ability to motivate others is as important, or more important, than knowing the answer!

As Rob Cross put it “energy has a dark side as well…we all know people who can drain the life out of a group” as soon as they enter a room. De-energizers are disastrous to all associated with a KM effort. For whatever reason, a case of “can’t change” won’t change; they see roadblocks everywhere, and every conversation derails KM and other initiatives.

In selling KM we are only as good as ourselves and connections - our weakest link.

Focus on the dissatisfied and powerful

Linked to the research on energizers, a useful distinction can be made between the receptive, dissatisfied, and powerful. It’s distracting and deceptive to spend too much time with the receptive (easy to say in retrospect), and encountering the receptive can feel like an organizational episode of Groundhog Day.

The objective should be to address the locus of dissatisfaction, as this has more value in terms of creating and stimulating the desire for change. These are the people who are hurting most. If you only associate with the receptive, your ideas get lost in translation.

The essence of selling KM then becomes to build on the experiences of the dissatisfied, and help them elaborate on pain points, ultimately to build a case for change, and then to access and develop a relationship with the powerful (those who can approve, prevent or influence action). Sometimes (particularly in the area of strategic change) it is not possible or desirable to access decision makers who are located all over the world. An inside energizer can intervene on your behalf, with great credibility. By contrast, a de-energizer ‘on your side’ can be counter-productive.

As Mark Pontin, one of the great sales trainers, used to brutally say, “If you don’t have a relationship with the person at the top, you have no influence in an organization.”

Next Week: Face to Face Selling

KM Blog of the Week

Is Your Knowledge Management Strategic? by Mary Abraham

KM Processes: with respect to knowledge, the methods an organization uses to

create
harvest and refine
store and retrieve
distribute and share
apply and leverage

KM Enablers:

organizational factors (e.g., structure and culture)
technology

KM Drivers:

mission and business strategy
the firm’s intellectual resources

Managing the gap between what a company needs to know to execute its strategy and what it actually knows is the most strategic role of KM. If you're serious about developing a Knowledge Strategy, you will have to do the following analysis:

Assess knowledge gaps
Assess your knowledge resources
Assess your learning cycles

KM Link of the Week

From Stephan Dohrn in KM4Dev

Which Web-Conferencing Solution Is Right for Your Company? by Robert Poe

Selecting the right hosted or premises system for online meetings involves complex choices.

The Web-Conferencing Leaders

Cisco - WebEx Meeting Center; Unified MeetingPlace
IBM - Lotus Sametime Unyte; Sametime
Citrix - GoToMeeting
Microsoft - Live Meeting; Office Communications Server
Adobe - Acrobat Connect Professional

Others suggested in comments

Elluminate Live!
Great America Networks
GizmoVideo
ReadyTalk

KM Book of the Week

The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals And Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World by Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, Nina Kruschwitz, Joe Laur, and Sara Schley

Imagine a world in which the excess energy from one business would be used to heat another. Where buildings need less and less energy around the world, and where “regenerative” commercial buildings - ones that create more energy than they use - are being designed. A world in which environmentally sound products and processes would be more cost-effective than wasteful ones. A world in which corporations such as Costco, Nike, BP, and countless others are forming partnerships with environmental and social justice organizations to ensure better stewardship of the earth and better livelihoods in the developing world. Now, stop imagining - that world is already emerging.

A revolution is underway in today’s organizations. As Peter Senge and his co-authors reveal in The Necessary Revolution, companies around the world are boldly leading the change from dead-end “business as usual” tactics to transformative strategies that are essential for creating a flourishing, sustainable world. There is a long way to go, but the era of denial has ended. Today’s most innovative leaders are recognizing that for the sake of our companies and our world, we must implement revolutionary - not just incremental - changes in the way we live and work.

Brimming with inspiring stories from individuals and organizations tackling social and environmental problems around the globe, The Necessary Revolution reveals how ordinary people at every level are transforming their businesses and communities. By working collaboratively across boundaries, they are exploring and putting into place unprecedented solutions that move beyond just being “less bad” to creating pathways that will enable us to flourish in an increasingly interdependent world. Among the stories in these pages are the evolution of Sweden’s “Green Zone,” Alcoa’s water use reduction goals, GE’s ecoimagination initiative, and Seventh Generation’s decision to shift some of their advertising to youth-led social change programs.

At its heart, The Necessary Revolution contains a wealth of strategies that individuals and organizations can use - specific tools and ways of thinking - to help us build the confidence and competence to respond effectively to the greatest challenge of our time. It is an essential guidebook for all of us who recognize the need to act and work together - now - to create a sustainable world, both for ourselves and for the generations to follow.

Table of Contents

Endings, New Beginnings

A Future Awaiting Our Choices 3
How We Got into This Predicament 14
Life Beyond the Bubble 33
New Thinking, New Choices 42
The Future is Now
Never Doubt What One Person and a Small Group of Co-Conspirators Can Do 57
Aligning an Industry 68
Unconventional Allies: Coke and WWF Partner for Sustainable Water 77

Getting Started

Risks and Opportunities: The Business Rationale for Sustainability 101
Positioning for the Future and the Present 119
Getting People Engaged 140
Building Your Case for Change 157

Seeing Systems

The Tragedy and Opportunity of the Commons 168
Spaceship Earth 179
Seeing Our Choices 196

Collaborating Across Boundaries

The Imperative to Collaborate 227
Convening: "Get the System in the Room" 234
Seeing Reality Through Others Eyes 250
Building Shared Commitment 267

From Problem Solving to Creating

Innovation Inspired by Living Systems 285
Unleashing Everyday Magic 292
You Don't Have to Have All the Answers 302
From Low-Hanging Fruit to New Strategic Possibilities 310
It's Not What the Vision Is, It's What the Vision Does 324
Redesigning for the Future 334

The Future

The Future of the Corporation 348
The Future of Enterprise Variety 356
The Future of Leadership 364
The Future of Our Relations 374
The Future of Us 378

Appendix 382

BusinessWeek: Peter Senge's Necessary Revolution

Peter Senge, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management and founder of the Society for Organizational Learning, is perhaps best known for his 1990 best-selling book, The Fifth Discipline, which introduced the idea of the "learning organization." Now, Senge has a new work that promises to be as influential as the first. In The Necessary Revolution: How Individuals and Organizations Are Working Together to Create a Sustainable World (Doubleday, 2008), Senge and his co-authors grapple with the daunting environmental problems we face, and highlight innovative steps taken by individuals and corporations, often in partnership with global organizations such as Oxfam, toward a more sustainable world.

It may seem surprising that an expert in management and organizational change is focusing on sustainability, but there is a strong connection to Senge's work. In his earlier book, he laid out an approach to management that combines systems thinking, collaboration, and team learning. As he describes it, a learning organization is one in which "people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together." Such organizations tend to be more flexible, adaptive, and productive - critical qualities in a time of rapid change.

In The Necessary Revolution, Senge applies the same thinking to a system bigger and more complex than the organization: global society. The book is a call to arms, an argument to business leaders that they must rethink their approach to the environment or, as one executive told Senge, "we won't have businesses worth being in in 20 years." But the authors don't linger on the problems, focusing instead on the stories and insights of successful innovators, on creative solutions, and on practical approaches to meeting these challenges.

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Building networks, Selling KM, Meetings as KM behaviors, IBM in a KM shift, Super Crunchers

Stan Garfield — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 23:49:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield
KM Question, Thought Leader, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week
[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: I would like to know your insights on building people-to-people networks for increasing knowledge sharing and participation: how to go about it, using discussion forums, and other ways to create a knowledge-sharing environment.

A: There are many ways to go about this. Here are some that you can use to create, build, and sustain communities.

The first thing to do is to decide what topic you wish to address in a community. Pick a compelling topic that will be of interest to many people in your organization. The potential members must be passionate about the subject for collaboration, and it must be relevant to their work.

You need a committed leader for the community. Volunteer to be the community leader, or identify someone else with the right attributes. The community leader should know the subject, have energy for stimulating collaboration, have sufficient time to devote to leadership, and then regularly spend time increasing membership, lining up speakers, hosting calls and meetings, asking and answering questions, and posting information which is useful to the members.

If communities already exist in your organization, then get the answers to these questions:

Is your topic already covered as part of another community? If so, offer to help the leader of that community.
Is there an existing community that is focused on a related topic? If so, approach its leader about expanding it to include your topic.
Is there an old community that is inactive but could be resurrected or migrated to form the new community? If so, ask if you can take over the leadership, or harvest the membership list to start the new one.

The community will need a critical mass of members. You usually need at least 50 members, with 100 being a better target. Try to take advantage of existing networks:

Is there an existing team that could be the core of a new community? For example, is there a team whose mission aligns with the topic for the new community? If so, these can be the initial members.
Is there an existing distribution list of people interested in the topic? If so, use that list to invite people to join your community.
You can use Social Network Analysis to identify people who are linked but who may not be part of a formal community. Then invite them to join your community.

Once your community is established, publicize its existence to help recruit new members:

Write and submit articles to existing newsletters that reach your target audience.
Use existing networks to inform possible members about your community.
Send a one-time broadcast message to the entire population containing your target audience.
Request that links to your community be added on all relevant web sites.
Offer an incentive to join, e.g., a member will be chosen at random or the 100th member will receive an iPod or equivalent gift.

Create one or more tools for the community to use:

Threaded discussion forum
Collaborative team space
Web site or portal
Wiki
Blog or newsletter

Keep the community active:

Hold a regular conference call with a scheduled speaker.
Hold periodic events such as face-to-face meetings and training sessions.
Post at least once a week to your forum. Include a summary of a community event, a useful link, or a thought-provoking topic to stimulate discussion.
Look for relevant discussions that are taking place in email exchanges, public distribution lists, or outside of your organization. Then redirect those discussions to your forum, copy or link to the key points, or summarize the highlights.
Regularly suggest to those with questions or interest in your topic that they join your community and use its tools.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I was asked by APQC, "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

I posed this same question to many KM thought leaders. This week begins a series called "Selling KM: Lessons from Experience" based on the answer from Richard Cross. This is Part 1, with additional parts to follow in subsequent weeks.

Part 1: Learn to sell and accept that you are in sales

My number one lesson from involvement in KM is that above all it is a selling activity, the hardest sale of them all. Like it or not, selling is competitive, David Dorsey’s superb book The Force outlined a year in the life of a Xerox salesman and conveyed the associated ultra-confident state of mind that can make a salesperson feel like an athlete playing in the zone.

Does this matter for those involved in selling KM? Absolutely - the reality is that we compete for the attention of our executives against the best of the best, from the well-groomed and trained McKinseys, through to squadrons of business-consultant trained systems integrators. At times it is not clear that we are playing the same game, let alone present in the same stadium as business leaders, line managers, and the ‘in crowd’ of consultants. My refined view now is that if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. So if selling is not for you, then forget KM or become a guru. Big distinction - people buy from gurus!

So here is some advice grounded in experience. Take the following observations not so much as sound advice rather as issues to consider when you are selling KM to your CEO, your peers and your colleagues. I lean heavily on my experience of SPIN, a research-led sales approach devised by Neil Rackham over 30 years ago. It’s basic and has a sophisticated simplicity. It also works.

The Nature of the Selling Game

Focus on the Customer

This is a comprehensive rule. It’s still surprising how many organizations claim to be customer focused yet still expect customers to dance to the tune of their year-end symphony. Having had international responsibility for TQM earlier in my career, my advice is grounded with a focus on the customer (either internal or external) and your relationship with them.

Too many KM strategies neglect the individual or collective customer. Walking, talking brochures, books, and purposeful presentations focus on products, technologies, and solutions such as narrative, storytelling, or communities. Unfortunately, such strategists create value for their own organizations or themselves, not for the organizations or customers they sell to. Remember customers have feelings too, and you can’t manage them.

Understand the Buying Cycle

It’s critical to align efforts to your customers’ buying cycle. The customer decision cycle can generally be broken down into distinct phases. Consider your own organization (or personal) lives. If you’re completely satisfied with a supplier or situation then there is generally no decision to be made. In a changing world a stability zone is comforting. The decision process begins when you ’ can’t get no satisfaction’ or something changes.

Phase One, based on recognition of needs and the gap between where you are and where you want to be, is developed either through perceived problems in your old world, or possibilities and promises of a better world. The time lag from irritation to action in recognizing the need for change and doing something about it can vary, depending on the perceived seriousness and scale of an issue in the light of emotional triggers, contractual obligations, and customer impact.

If you have decided to change, in Phase Two options are developed and evaluated. Once options are selected, there is Phase Three, described by sales professionals as resolution of concerns. During this anxiety-ridden phase, analysis paralysis and doubts may prevail as terms are negotiated, plans are debated, ROI cases explored and best intentions forgotten.

Once a decision is made, in Phase Four (implementation), the sale is not over yet. For a KM professional, internal influencing skills prevail as users have to be bought into the decision. In software sales, the possibility of ‘new toy’ syndrome also has to be minimized in order to ensure promised benefits are delivered.

Selling as a Change Process

Any buying cycle can also be seen as a change process. First there may be a state of equilibrium, when a customer is not aware of the need for change. Typically a customer balances their need in terms of their level of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the extent to which it is important to satisfy their need, as well as their perception of the benefits and ease of adopting the proposed solution.

They offset this against the perceived cost, in terms of the financials, the energy and disturbance in implementing the new solution, the risk of changing from the familiar to something new, (we can’t all be pioneers) and the level of overall satisfaction with the existing situation. Rather like a frog in boiling water, some buyers resist change and their conservatism or complacency has to be nudged, or in some cases is jolted by what is often termed the shock model of change.

Many customers approaching a decision are obsessively aware of the cost implications of the equation. The price of the solution is clear, but when the solution is unconventional, there is no clear precedent, or it is likely to have a significant impact, there be a risky shift, where the buyer is nervous about the upheaval which may result from its implementation. They start to have second thoughts and internal debate derails action.

With a major decision, buyers don’t always look on the bright side. Their level of seniority, security, and anxiety plays a role as they consider the business and career risks should anything go wrong. At times they will express resistance to change; at others they will be distracted by more pressing priorities. What was once an exciting case for change may become a forgotten priority.

All of these factors can tip the scales against making a change for an unconventional and unproven KM initiative. Any seller who lacks credibility and jumps to a solution without understanding the complexity and interaction of the above factors encounter hostility of the ‘show me the ROI’ nature or ‘it is all a bunch of concepts’ type. Without knowing how to respond to the customer’s concerns and prevent objections, those associated with selling KM run the risk of having their solution rejected.

At a wider organizational level, the buying cycle is likely to be further politicized and complex with a multiplicity of customers, influencers and stakeholders. As my former Professor Andrew Pettigrew in his study of organization change noted, generally there is a tendency to stick to the old system that works. It takes courage and a crisis (real or constructed) to change.

Next Week: Issues in selling - research advice when selling KM

KM Blog of the Week

Adoption idea: meetings are KM 2.0 behaviors by John Tropea

What I found in my last conference call is that most of what we talked about in the call can also be done online, in our community page, when we are not present at the same time (asynchronously).

These are three types of things we did in the conference call, that cover blogs, forums, and wikis:

News and status around the globe from each team member [BLOG]
Discussion about issues people had since the last call [FORUM]
Brainstormed an idea for better usability for one of our systems [WIKI]

I realized in one meeting that we covered the use of 3 of the most important social tools. Why do we need so many meetings, when we can be collaborating and conversing perpetually? The more we use social tools, the shorter our meetings can be.

Nothing beats synchronous group chats to discuss out issues, but we can sometimes do most of this discussion, updates, and collaboration online, and call a short meeting to finalize and action our findings. Next time I talk about social tools adoption, I can tell people you are doing it anyway, only this is doing the same thing when we are not all in the same room. We can still collaborate, discuss, update when we are not in the same room.

The fact is people are fine to physically participate in informing their status and what they’ve been up to, discuss issues, and collaborate…but when it comes to doing this online they feel weird being social (open and visibility). Instead they use email as it’s more closed and private, and they do all three things with email (status, discuss, collaborate) that they do in person at a meeting, it’s like email is their asynchronous voice. Part of the adoption process is to help people get over the awkwardness of being social online, we have to guide them by informing them social tools are not extra work - it’s what you are doing anyway.

KM Link of the Week

IBM gambles on a shift from the KM model - Into the big blue yonder

With a corporate population bigger than many small countries, IBM first assigned staff to dedicated KM systems in 1994, before it became an established discipline. A lot has transpired since then. Rob Lewis discovers that for the bluest blue-chip of them all, superior knowledge sharing is now key to survival.

IBM has a string of KM accolades to its name – so how come it’s moving away from the whole knowledge management model? Because the decentralizing impact of Web 2.0 calls for a new approach, or what the big blue calls ‘knowledge sharing’.

It’s a bold move considering the firm has been working under the management model for over a decade. Chris Cooper, knowledge sharing solutions leader at IBM Global Business Services (GBS), deems it a ‘philosophical repositioning’. “Management suggests control: control of process and control of environment. The sharing tag is quite important to us,” he explains.

KM Book of the Week

Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres

Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new book, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightning speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From Internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision makers are calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results.

How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula outpredict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers. In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate us.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Rise of the Super Crunchers 1
Who's Doing Your Thinking for You? 19
Creating Your Own Data with the Flip of a Coin 46
Government by Chance 64
How Should Physicians Treat Evidence-Based Medicine? 81
Experts Versus Equations 103
Why Now? 129
Are We Having Fun Yet? 156
The Future of Intuition (and Expertise) 192

Links

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Open source blogs and wikis, Words of Wisdom, Leadership Principles, 800 Pound Gorilla, Introduction to social network methods

Stan Garfield — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 20:49:00 GMT

KM Question of the Week

Q: Giora Hadar (in multiple forums): I need your help identifying free, open source blogs and wikis that could be installed within an intranet.

A: Karen Huffman (in Federal Knowledge Management Working Group):

Open source wiki: MediaWiki - same application used by the State Department for their eDiplomacy site. You'd have the open source community as your support but not a vendor.
Vendor-based enterprise wiki: Confluence - I think many of the military groups may use this tool. I think this wiki originally developed out of the open source community but I wouldn't probably consider it open source now. Have a good security structure/matrix.
IBM Lotus also has a wiki application called Quickr that has blogs and wikis included.
WikiMatrix allows you to select several wikis to compare and contrast features and functionality.
WikiIndex talks about different wikis and which wiki application they use.
See my Wikis 101 that I built for Special Libraries Association.

A: Sebastian Rottmair (in km4dev): Have a look at OpensourceCMS this is where you not only see the different products but you can actually play with them and see if they fit your needs.

A: Stephen Collins (in actKM): If you're looking for a platform that can be installed inside the wall, most of the mature wiki platforms have that ability. However, your "free, open source" requirement presents a challenge. MediaWiki is probably the only one that I would recommend (as opposed to being *the only one* altogether) that fits both criteria and has the necessary maturity to suit real enterprise deployment. MediaWiki still requires users to learn wiki markup to author content. It's not hard, but does present a barrier to entry. My more frequent recommendation to my clients is to consider one of:

Atlassian's Confluence which is definitely enterprise grade and not terribly expensive in the grand scheme of things. It certainly fulfils many of the requirements most orgs have and is very easy to use both from an admin and user standpoint
Confluence hosted, everything as above, just hosted
Socialtext's commercial product, either appliance or hosted
PBWiki's hosted product, which is very good
Socialtext's open source offering

Or, you could get very innovative and try something like Jive's Clearspace which is incredibly good. Or build a Ning community which you can start for nothing and then go paid at a pretty low price.

A: Michael Sebastian in Choosing a blog platform (ragan.com): Here’s a list of four blogging programs - three free, one at a price.

WordPress - Free
Drupal - Free
Roller - Free
Clearspace - $59 per user or $69 per user for the real time chat

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I was asked by APQC, "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

I answered the question as follows:

Start by defining your most compelling business needs and opportunities, not by selecting technologies. Implement processes and tools which address these. Don't roll out a tool and try to get it adopted if it does not meet an existing high-priority need that most target users would agree on. Collaborate closely with IT, while ensuring that IT meets the needs of the business, not the other way around.
Keep people, process, and technology in balance in your KM program. Appoint a leader for each in your core team. Try things out and iterate, rather than taking a long time before implementation. Meet commitments, produce useful deliverables, and solicit feedback for improvements.
Build a core team of highly-competent, creative, results-oriented, respected thought leaders. Expand the team into a virtual one by inviting KM leads from all key stakeholder organizations. Govern using formal project management. Communicate relentlessly.

I posed this same question to many KM thought leaders. This week's answer is from Susan Hanley.

"My immediate answer would be is that if I were asked to give a keynote speech on knowledge management I’d probably turn it down! That term has so much baggage and means so many different things to different people, that I’d be sure to not meet someone in the audience’s expectations and I hate to get bad reviews when I give a presentation!

These days, I’m much more interested in giving speeches on topics where I can leave the audience with at least one (hopefully more) very specific takeaway that they can act on immediately. So, when I talk about deploying SharePoint successfully, I toss out as many of the ideas in my “bag of tricks” as I can fit in to the context of the speech and what I can remember to share (it’s not easy to remember all the good stuff unless people ask me lots of questions so I know what they want to hear!).

I don’t like to talk about generic “knowledge management” but rather about “Hey, you’re trying to achieve some business objectives with this “collaboration” technology you’ve already chosen to invest in and I’ve got some experiences that you may find useful. I’ll tell you what I can in an hour, I’ll give away even more in my book and my blog and my website, and if you want more, I’m available for hire!” Sure, all your great advice comes in there too, but I try to embed these sometimes “squishy” concepts into practical action steps in the context of a very specific project.

I don’t feel like I’m a big thinker like Larry Prusak or Steve Denning – I’m a little closer to the “dirt” than they are and I try to get my “big thoughts,” assuming I have them, into something much closer to building solutions. That’s why I totally agree with everything that you’ve said and I embed that in techniques and artifacts to actually make these ideas real for project teams who struggle with proving the value of the investments they are making in both the concepts of KM and the tools, technologies, and processes in which they’ve invested to actually do it and get some meaningful results."

KM Blog of the Week

Principles of KM, Leadership and Life by Kathy Hagen

The principles of managing knowledge do not deviate from the principles of good leadership.

Many organizations (and people) want a quick fix to their KM issues. What the following demonstrates is that without these basic principles, we will fail or at the very least falter, at our efforts in managing knowledge, leading people, and building solid and authentic relationships.

The Leadership Center of Franklin University lists three principles of leadership they think to be critical: Passion, Communication and Integrity. These three principles apply also to Knowledge Management and to those who practice it.

It takes passion for us to identify the opportunities to apply KM, to hold the torch as we facilitate behavioral and organizational change, and to continue onward through long term implementation.

Communication can make or break the effectiveness of KM as we build awareness, drive toward acceptance and finally motivate the organization to take action.

The principle of integrity is what I find most intriguing today. We often don't discuss integrity as a key component to managing knowledge. Integrity is a key component to all we do, especially as we affect the lives of others. It is integrity, and the consistent practice of it, that allows people the freedom to take what they perceive as professional and personal risks in sharing knowledge, and sharing themselves.

KM Link of the Week

Knowledge Management and the 800 Pound Gorilla by Peter Dorfman

Oh, and have you noticed the 800-pound gorilla in the room? His name is Web 2.0.

You've heard of Web 2.0. What you may or may not have gathered is that it isn't a new generation of technology. It's a mindset. What it signifies is that the value to the business that your applications generate comes not from the designed-in features, but from the contributions of the end users - especially the content, but to an increasing degree the user-modifiable attributes of the software.

In fact, users are generating some of today's most interesting software. The Open Source Community, driven by a geeky but grand ethic that software ingenuity is meant to be shared for little or no cost, has spawned thousands of useful applications, including many that look and act a lot like KM systems.

What is a knowledge management tool, really? It has three fundamental components:

A repository for "solutions" - essentially a document management system;
A means for retrieving solutions based on specific queries --generally some variant on search; and
A workflow engine to manage the authoring, review, approval, publishing and eventual retirement of solutions.

KM Book of the Week

(From Johannes Schunter in km4dev)

Introduction to social network methods by Robert A. Hanneman and Mark Riddle

This on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks. The text relies heavily on the work of Freeman, Borgatti, and Everett (the authors of the UCINET software package). The materials here, and their organization, were also very strongly influenced by the text of Wasserman and Faust, and by a graduate seminar conducted by Professor Phillip Bonacich at UCLA. Many other users have also made very helpful comments and suggestions based on the first version. Errors and omissions, of course, are the responsibility of the authors.

You are invited to use and redistribute this text freely - but please acknowledge the source.

Table of contents

Preface
1.       Social network data
2.       Why formal methods?
3.       Using graphs to represent social relations
4.       Working with Netdraw to visualize graphs
5.       Using matrices to represent social relations
6.       Working with network data
7.       Connection
8.       Embedding
9.       Ego networks
10.    Centrality and power
11.    Cliques and sub-groups
12.    Positions and roles: The idea of equivalence
13.    Measures of similarity and structural equivalence
14.    Automorphic equivalence
15.    Regular equivalence
16.    Multiplex networks
17.    Two-mode networks
18.    Some statistical tools
After word
Bibliography

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Social Networking Tools at HP, Jack Vinson, Matt Moore in America, Prediction Markets, Building Enterprise Taxonomies

Stan Garfield — Wed, 21 May 2008 15:48:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

Special Notice

HP blogs will be migrating to a new platform over the next week. As of May 23, 2008, I won't be posting to my blog and won't be able to receive any comments submitted. The new site will be live on June 1, 2008.

KM Question of the Week

Q: Has HP implemented any social networking tools within the company?

A: Yes. Four recent articles discuss some of the examples.

Ragan.com

Battling over control of social networking sites - HP & Web 2.0
Hewlett Packard’s internal social network engages employees - Social networks like the one at HP allow employees to connect instantly
Text of both articles

APQC

The Growing Popularity of Social Networking and Expertise Location - HP uses an internally developed application called me@hp as its primary social networking tool. Representatives from HP's KM team compare this application to external sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.

BusinessWeek

Mining the Office Chatter - What if managers and employees could listen in on any gripe fests and hallway brainstorms taking place at the office, all at one time? That's the concept, in digital form, behind Hewlett-Packard's WaterCooler, a new tool from its research labs that indexes what employees say on their internal and external blogs.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I posed the following question to many KM thought leaders. "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?" This week's answer is from Jack Vinson.

"Words of wisdom on KM:

It's not about the knowledge, it's about connecting people who have useful information to those who need it - whether you connect them face-to-face, or it is mediated via technology (and time).
It is very easy to get locked into one method of doing knowledge management. Be curious about options for KM. Test things out, ask your colleagues. Then make your decisions as they work in your environment."

KM Blog of the Week

Today I will be hosting Matt Moore for his visit to Detroit. Tomorrow we will both attend the Midwest KM Community Meeting. Matt has been blogging about his visit to America in Engineers without Fears.

Toronto - funky cold spadina
Boston
Chicago - swings & roundabouts
Chicago - KM & exhaustion
Washington - storytelling weekend - golden fleece
Washington - storytelling weekend
America

KM Link of the Week

The promise of prediction markets: A roundtable by Renée Dye

Although they draw together widely dispersed information, prediction markets face organizational and legal challenges.

Prediction markets, which aggregate information dispersed across organizations, produce forecasts that are usually at least as accurate as those of experts.
In this roundtable, practitioners from Best Buy and Google, the author of a book about collective intelligence, and a professor of law discuss the potential of prediction markets and the main obstacles they must surmount to become a more widely used tool for making strategic decisions.
One obstacle is that prediction markets challenge basic assumptions about expertise, power, and the way organizations should work. The other is uncertainty about the impact of securities and gambling laws on these markets.

KM Book of the Week

Building Enterprise Taxonomies by Darin L. Stewart, Ph.D., Director, Web Strategies and Research Information Services, Oregon Health & Science University

From TaxoCoP

My book "Building Enterprise Taxonomies" has just been published and is now available from Amazon.com or your favorite bookseller. I'm discovering that the "product description" information on the Amazon listing is pretty thin so I wanted to give a bit of additional information to this group (I'm told "search inside the book" will be available in a few weeks). The book 238 pages and is intended as a primer on creating, applying and maintaining managed vocabularies.

The chapters include:

Findability
Metadata
Taxonomy
Preparations
Terms
Structure
Interoperability
Ontology
Folksonomy

In addition to the basics of taxonomy and thesauri, I also cover ontologies and folksonomies. I believe this is the only book currently available that specifically discusses the application of XML-based technologies and standards (including XSLT, RDF, Zthes, SKOS, etc.) to managed vocabularies.

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

KM and Sports Part 2, Disciplined KM, Why start doing KM, Does KM pay off, Living Networks

Stan Garfield — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:45:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

In a previous post, I answered the question "Can the world of sports teach us anything about knowledge management?" using an example from basketball. This was also recently featured by KnowledgeBoard in Scoring points in the knowledge game.

Here are additional examples of analysis and KM in sports.

Baseball

Whiteyball is a style of playing baseball that was developed by former MLB manager Whitey Herzog. The origins of the term stem from the 1982 World Series Championship Herzog's St. Louis Cardinals won. Shocked by the team's success without having even one typical power hitter in the lineup, members of the press started using "Whiteyball" to describe a style of play based on speed on the base paths, excellent defense, and an emphasis on line drive base hits.

Herzog used the squeeze play often, choosing just the right count on the batter to surprise the opposition. Jim Leyland, another World Series champion manager, hates the squeeze bunt, claiming that whenever he calls for the play, it fails. His aversion to using it has left many a runner stranded on third base after arriving there with fewer than two outs. Leyland can increase his team's scoring by taking advantage of what others have used successfully, in this case, Herzog's squeeze play strategy.

In 1985 World Series Game 6, Herzog suffered from a bad call by the first-base umpire. He could have survived this bad break by having made a defensive change in the ninth inning or having kept a valuable pinch hitter on his roster instead of selling the player's contract to the opposing team. In the fateful ninth inning, the Cardinals' Jack Clark couldn't reel in Steve Balboni's popup in front of the Royals' dugout. Given a second chance, Balboni singled through the hole on the left side. Pinch-hitter Dane Iorg later looped a two-run single to right, forcing Game 7.

At first base, Herzog could have replaced Jack Clark, a good hitter but weak fielder, with Mike Jorgensen, a former Gold Glove winner. Had he done this, Jorgensen most likely would have caught Balboni's popup. Dane Iorg was the Cardinals' designated hitter in their 1982 World Series championship, and led the team with a .529 batting average with 9 hits in 17 at bats. In 1984 the Cardinals sold his contract to the Royals. Had the Cardinals kept him, he would not have been able to deliver the game-winning hit against them.

Gil Hodges was unusually innovative as the manager of the New York Mets. He used platoon players at every position except shortstop, left field, and center field. He used Rod Gaspar as a defensive replacement in right field every time the Mets had a late-inning lead to protect. He moved an outfielder into the infield in obvious bunting situations. He moved the third baseman to provide a fourth outfielder and shifted his infield around to the right when facing Willie McCovey.

These strategies helped the Mets win the 1969 World Series over the heavily-favored Baltimore Orioles, a team with greater talent. In the final game, Cleon Jones was hit by a pitch in the famous shoe polish incident, when manager Gil Hodges came out to argue the original call that Jones had not been hit. Hodges retrieved the ball and showed it to the umpire, who saw the polish mark, and awarded Jones first base. Donn Clendenon followed with a two-run homer, and the Mets were on their way to winning their first World Series.

KM for Marketing, Bill Ives, 4 Paradoxes of KM, Tools for Communities Wiki, Pleased but Not Satisfied

Stan Garfield — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:25:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What can knowledge management processes and tools do for corporate marketing?

A: Traditional marketing communications methods include:

Direct mail, email, and voicemail messages
Web sites
Links from other web sites
Conference calls and virtual meeting rooms
Periodicals and publications
Meetings, events, tradeshows, conferences, seminars, and training sessions
Audience surveys and focus groups
Advertising
Public relations and analyst relations
Interviews, news stories, and published articles

Using Web 2.0 technologies often associated with knowledge management, corporate marketing can better engage with both employees and customers. Here are ten ways to do so:

Threaded discussions: forums for carrying on discussions among subscribers on a specific subject, including online and email posts and replies, searchable archives, and discussions grouped by threads to show the complete history on each topic

Internal: Allow employees to collaborate with one another, ask and answer questions, and share information.
External: Encourage customers to help one another, suggest products and services, and engage with each other. Example: HP IT resource center forums

Social software: a range of tools which facilitate social networking, typically personal web pages including bios, photos, interests, audio and video, links to friends, messages from friends, and personal networks; often referred to as Web 2.0 to include a broad range of tools such as blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds

Internal: Allow employees to have similar functionality to what they are used to externally. Encourage them to gain experience in using these tools.
External: Encourage customers to build networks built on products and services, interests, preferences, etc. Examples: Facebook, Digg, Technorati

Bookmarks and tags: information about information – data fields added to documents, web sites, files, or lists which allow related items to be listed, searched for, navigated to, syndicated, and collected

Internal: Allow employees to bookmark their favorite sites.
External: Encourage customers to tag their favorite company-related sites. Example: del.icio.us

Community spaces: Collaboration sites to share files, hold meetings, conduct polls, and maintain lists

Internal: Allow employees to collaborate on topics of interest.
External: Encourage customers to collaborate on company-related topics. Example: Yahoo! Groups

Portals: Unified user access interfaces and repositories of documents and information

Internal: Allow employees to interact with a single site which integrates content from multiple sources.
External: Encourage customers to visit a single site for all of their support needs. Example: HP IT Resource Center

Wikis: Web pages which can be edited by any user for interactive content development by multiple people

Internal: Allow employees to create and collaboratively edit their own content pages.
External: Encourage customers to collaboratively edit community pages. Example: IBM wikis

Webcasts and webinars: Web-based broadcasts of video, audio, and slides; allow questions to be entered anonymously

Internal: Communicate useful marketing information to employees to help them better do their jobs.
External: Communicate useful marketing information to customers to help them better understand company offerings. Example: HP webcasts

Blogs: Web logs to post news updates, solicit comments, and take advantage of RSS syndication capability

Internal: Give employees a voice, solicit their inputs and suggestions, and make executives more approachable and real.
External: Communicate useful information to customers with a personal face to build credibility and increase engagement. Example: HP blogs

Podcasts: Recorded broadcasts available on demand or by subscription for those who prefer audio, like to listen while performing other tasks, or who are not usually connected to the network and subscribe for automatic downloads of the broadcasts through RSS syndication

Internal: Allow employees to receive communications in a way which is more convenient for them.
External: Encourage customers to subscribe to receive audio communications on a regular basis. Example: HP podcasts

Videos: Recorded videos available on demand for those who prefer video, when there is important visual content, or for special occasions

Internal: Allow employees to record and upload their own videos to share information, create excitement, and emulate YouTube.
External: Encourage customers to view product and service videos to learn more about offerings in an appealing way. Example: HP videos

KM Thought Leader of the Week

"I would say that some principles still hold after 15 years. Align your KM efforts with business processes and measure them by the impact on these processes. Do not create disconnected document libraries. I would add now to explore the opportunities that Web 2.0 brings to the table. There is the potential for creating searchable knowledge bases as a byproduct of working in the new transparency offered by these tools.

However, I would not abandon the first two principles as you explore these tools. Some of the newest generation Web 2.0 tools for business use behind the firewall have gone beyond blogs and wikis to create workflow applications that incorporate this new transparency. This allows for better teamwork AND a searchable, archived window into to what the organization is doing for all who need to know, should know, and can benefit from this knowledge.

Now, when I say workflow or work process, I do not mean the static inflexible workflow of old-style content management or project management tools. The advantage of these new tools is that they allow work processes that are more organic and dynamic. They allow the users to control the workflow or process, build it up from tasks and make changes as needed. And, to repeat, they allow for transparency and archiving, and thus KM, to be a byproduct of work, rather than an added requirement."

KM Blog of the Week

Due to a recent reorganization, I need to find new positions for members of my KM team. Here are links to more information:

Marcus Funke – KM Process Designer, Project Manager, and SharePoint Expert
Andrew Gent – Knowledge Architect, SharePoint Expert, and KM Technologist

If you would like more information, please contact me and I will be glad to provide it. Here are two recent examples of Andrew's insights on KM.

The Four Paradoxes of KM

The four paradoxes of KM are the following:

Tacit vs. Explicit
Local vs. Global
Open vs. Closed
Quantity vs. Quality

Enterprise 2.0, Revisited

The two basic facts that need to be accepted are:

A business is not a democracy. It cannot be run by the wisdom of the crowd. You can delegate responsibility, but ultimately management is responsible (legally and financially) and will dictate the direction of the company.
Employees are individuals and will decide for themselves whether they believe a decision, a direction, or an activity is good or bad.

So, very pragmatically, the following actions are needed at specific points of intersection:

Search & User-Generated Content
Employee Directory & Social Networking
Corporate Intranet Banner & Tagging, Bookmarks, Etc.

KM Link of the Week

Tools for Communities Wiki

This wiki is a companion piece to a forthcoming book Stewarding Technologies for Communities of Practice by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White and John D. Smith. The report gives a great deal more context to the information in this wiki, but it is our hope that this wiki can be useful by itself, especially with contributions from you.

Like all Wikis, this is a work in progress. It collects knowledge about how Communities of Practice use different tools. The vision is to provide a community perspective on these tools and their key features. By "community perspective," we hope this means that you will add your perspective to ours!

KM Book of the Week

I attended the 2008 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting on May 3 in Omaha, Nebraska. It was an enlightening experience to hear Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger answer questions for hours on end.

Some of the most challenging questions were answered by David Sokol, whose book was on sale at the meeting and is featured this week.

Pleased, but Not Satisfied by David Sokol

The chairman of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company explains that Pleased, but Not Satisfied is a state of mind and that running a business is a journey never finished. He emphasizes that business basics are fundamental to creating long-term value in any enterprise. Conservative economic analysis and disciplined, detailed management practices may not be flashy, but they consistently deliver high quality results.

Table of Contents

Preface by Walter Scott, Jr.

Foreword by Warren E. Buffett

Background – Good Judgment Comes from Bad Experiences
Core Principles – The Six Commandments of Business

Customer Commitment
Employee Commitment
Financial Strength
Integrity
Environmental Respect
Operational Excellence

Goal Setting and Budgeting – Simple Concepts That Create Uncommon Outcomes
Plan, Execute, Measure and Correct – The Four Steps to Achievement
Acquisitions/Business Expansion – A Pro Forma Is Not a Business
Individual Improvement – How to Get Noticed the Right Way
Balance in Business and Personal Life – A Successful Life's Journey Must Be Individualized
Conclusion – Get the Basics Right and Success Will Follow

Addendum – The Power of Brands – A Speech by Kenneth I. Chenault

Sokol's book sees brisk sales by John Keenan and Steve Jordon of the Omaha World-Herald

David Sokol may no longer be chief executive of MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co., but the Omaha businessman has a new title: published author. "Pleased But Not Satisfied," a slim business volume published by Sokol's company, has been selling briskly at the Bookworm at Countryside Village.

Manager Diana Abbott said she expects the book to be a huge seller at this year's Berkshire Hathaway shareholders meeting. Sokol said his book stemmed from an internal training program at MidAmerican that is part of the company's overall succession plan.

"I saw it as an opportunity to put down our general business philosophy," he said. "I wrote it last spring, just to have it for our internal use."

All proceeds from the bookstore sales are going to the MidAmerican Charitable Foundation.

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

SHAM Discussion Group, Fred Nickols, Creatively Encouraging User Adoption, Government KM Community, KAM, Levity Effect

Stan Garfield — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:22:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: How can you start a discussion group where people talk about subjects of some depth in a thoughtful manner?

A: Discussion groups have been called by a variety of names, including salons. The Algonquin Round Table was a group of journalists, editors, actors and press agents that met on a regular basis at the Algonquin Hotel in New York. The group began lunching together in June 1919 and continued on a regular basis for about eight years.

John Smith sent me an example of how Robert Textor sends out invitations to his local community called Thirsters. Anybody who passes through Portland, Oregon gets button-holed and he has perfected the art of tagging people in interesting ways.

Dave Pollard pointed out that March 24-30 was Conversation Week:

Its founders encourage people to get together with others for conversation on things that matter, particularly these questions:

How can we best prepare our children for the future?
What does sustainability look like and how do we get there?
How do humans need to adapt to survive in the 21st century?
How do we shift from 'me' to 'we' to solve our problems?
How can we 'be the change' we want to see in the world?
What kind of economy supports sustainable living?
How do we reinvent politics so people have a real voice?
What kind of leadership does the world need now?
How can we balance personal needs with those of the community and world?
How can we end violence everywhere?
What is the most important question in the world today, to you?

Every month, starting in September 2007, a group of friends interested in stimulating conversation gather for dinner and discussion in the metro Detroit area. We call it SHAM (Society for Hot Air Meetings). As Woody Allen's character Fielding Mellish said in Bananas, "It's a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham."

I serve as the moderator for the discussion. I started by sending an email to my friends whom I thought might be interested in participating, asking them to reply with the following information:

What topics are you interested in discussing?
Are there others whom you would like me to invite?
Do you have other ideas and suggestions for how to make this succeed?

Here are the ground rules we set for our discussions:

Everyone will get their turn to speak, and should do so uninhibitedly.
We will actively listen to each other, consider the merits of our different views, and try to learn from one another.
If we disagree on something, we will do so in a good-natured and pleasant way.

Here are the topics we have discussed so far.

September 2007

Think of three turning points in your life.
Be prepared to talk about what they were, when they occurred, and their impact.

October 2007

Who are three people whom you admire, and why?
Tell stories about each one.
You might choose relatives, friends, or public figures (hero, survivor, performer, artist, writer, leader, athlete, etc.).

November 2007

When you started college, what career did you have in mind?
As you approached graduation, what did you want to do?
What are your thoughts about your life since you graduated?
What alternative careers might have been interesting to pursue?
What would you like to do next?

December 15, 2007

You have just been appointed as the leader of the United States.
You will be able to implement three major policies without having to get Congressional approval or Supreme Court review.
What three policies would you implement?
What are your reasons for choosing these three?
What positive outcomes do you expect as a result?
What are the possible negative consequences, and how will you deal with them?

December 31, 2007

What are your hopes for 2008?
Think about three types:

Personal – what do you plan to achieve?
Serious – what do you wish for the world?
Frivolous – what will make you happy if it happens?

January 2008

What are your core values, principles, and insights?
Think about three types:

The ones your parents exemplified and tried to impart to you.
The ones you have tried to live by.
The ones your children have learned from you.

February 2008

What are your three most memorable dinners of the past?

The occasion
The setting
The people
The menu
Why it is memorable

March 2008

What political topics would you like the group to discuss?
For each topic, address:

Why is the topic of interest to you?
What is your position on it?
What are the pros and cons of the different positions?

April 2008

You have been awarded a grant which will allow you to purchase three different homes anywhere in the world at no cost to you, with no limit on the cost of each one.
Where would the homes be located?
Describe the features of each one.
When would you stay at each one?

We rotate the host every month. Twice we have dined out and then returned to our home for the discussion.

We are planning to go on the road for a SHAMROCK (SHAM Raucous Overnight Conversation Klatch) this summer. This will allow for longer and more varied discussions.

And we have had two Fam SHAMs with my family. Over the holiday season we reviewed personal highlights of 2007, and at my sister's 60th birthday party we shared stories about why we appreciate her.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

"It seems to me that KM, like lots of other things (e.g., reengineering, change management, and communities of practice to name three) has been hijacked by the information technology (IT) folks. Abraham Maslow is often credited with saying that “If your only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.” To paraphrase him, when your only tool is a computer, then every problem reduces to the bits and bytes of data. For me, people should be front and center in any true KM effort and, as far as I can tell, they are not. As a consequence, neither is the most important form of knowledge: the kind that resides in human beings.

I typically don’t quibble about definitions of knowledge but, when asked, I generally point to some different forms it can take. There is, of course, the explicit form found in books and manuals and even in help screens on your computer. This is the kind of knowledge that can be articulated. Then, too, there is the tacit kind about which Polanyi wrote – the kind that can’t be articulated and thus can’t be documented. And there is a third form: the implicit, which is knowledge that resides in people and can be articulated but hasn’t yet been articulated. This is the kind of knowledge that can be teased out by a skilled observer/analyst. Explicit, tacit and implicit – these are the three forms of knowledge that I find useful to contemplate. Computer-centric KM efforts can cope only with the first kind, leaving the other two to go begging hat in hand.

It further seems to me that the really important meaning of knowledge – that is, a state of being in a human being that provides that individual with the capability for effective action – has gotten lost in the shuffle. As a consequence, we have huge databases and huge piles of documented practices, etc., etc., but we are no closer to being able to manage knowledge (i.e., concentrate and channel the capability for action along productive lines) than when the KM movement began. Many others will no doubt argue otherwise, but they have a huge investment to protect and I don’t.

So, we have these huge investments in KM and, as far as I can tell, not a great deal in the way of demonstrable returns to show for them. And, at the same time, managing human capability for effective action – what for me should be the true focal point for KM – goes largely unattended and unaddressed. Moreover, were it to receive attention, those doing so would quickly encounter a requirement to shed much of what is believed about managing people in the workplace. Why? Because people – especially knowledge workers – aren’t programmable machines, or even compliant servants; they are autonomous, living control systems and they must be viewed and dealt with as agents acting on their employer’s behalf. As Peter Drucker said of knowledge workers a long time ago, they can’t be managed; they must manage themselves.

The net of all this is that I have largely lost interest in most of what now passes for KM. I’m still interested in communities of practice – the kind that center on people and practices – and I’m still intensely interested in knowledge as the capability for effective action but I don’t pay much attention to the rest of what bears the label KM."

KM Blog of the Week

Encouraging User Adoption – Get Creative! by Susan Hanley

Several of the really interesting discussions I had at the SharePoint Summit in Montreal were about encouraging user adoption of new SharePoint collaboration sites. You need to choose creative adoption techniques that work for the culture of your organization, but here are a few ideas we’ve tried in the past:

“Get Sharp on SharePoint”
“Stall” Stories
Scavenger
Birth Announcement
Web Cam Window

KM Link of the Week

In km4dev from Giora Hadar, Knowledge Architect, Federal Aviation Administration: The new Federal Knowledge Management Working Group (KMWG) site km.gov collaborative environment is now ready for use. The site includes a Wiki and a Forum for threaded discussions. Get Started Using The KMWG Site has a link to contact the Site Administrator to request a user account.

In km4dev from Lina Salazar, Ph.D., Knowledge and Learning Department, Inter-American Development Bank: The World Bank's Knowledge Assessment Methodology - The KAM is an interactive benchmarking tool created by the Knowledge for Development Program to help countries identify the challenges and opportunities they face in making the transition to the knowledge-based economy.

KM Book of the Week

From Reading for Leading by Dan Mulhern

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher

If you think work is no laughing matter, the joke's on you. The Levity Effect uses serious science to reveal the remarkable power of fun and humor in building a productive, engaged, and loyal workforce...and a more successful you.

If you doubt levity is good for business, consider this: lighthearted leaders earn more on average than their more dour peers; entertaining workplaces breed more loyal employees and happier customers; and employees who are considered humorous are vastly more likely to get promoted - especially to senior positions.

The benefits of the levity effect are built on extensive research and case studies from some of the world's most successful organizations. Bestselling author Adrian Gostick and humorist Scott Christopher provide powerful examples of leaders from Boeing, Nike, KPMG, Yamaha, Enterprise, Zappos, and dozens of others, all of which prove that lightening up leads to real business results.

The Levity Effect also presents extensive research into the subject - including compelling data from the Great Place to Work Institute's one million-member database - that cuts against the grain of traditional business thinking to reveal that great companies consistently earn significantly higher marks for fun.

The Levity Effect is for anyone who wants to build an engaging, productive work culture and a more successful career. With interviews, extensive research, and lighthearted insight, The Levity Effect turns traditional business thinking on its head to prove again and again that a fun and engaging workplace leads to better business, more focused employees, and satisfied customers.

Table of Contents

PART I: The Case for Levity

Chapter One: Levity Is a Funny Thing: If They’re Busting a Gut, They’ll Bust Their Butts
Chapter Two: Levity Effect - Communication: If They’re Laughing, They’re Listening
Chapter Three: Levity Effect - Innovation: With Comedy, There’s Creativity
Chapter Four: Levity Effect - Respect: In You They Trust
Chapter Five: Levity Effect - Health: Good for What Ails You
Chapter Six: Levity Effect - Wealth: Laughing All the Way to the Bank

PART II: Getting Lighter

Chapter Seven: 142 Ways to Have Fun at Work: How to Bring the Levity Effect to Work
Chapter Eight: Overcoming Objections to Levity: So What if I’m a Brow Knitter?
Chapter Nine: Levity for Life: Bringing Home the Fun

Conclusion: Your Levity IQ

Authors' Site

Did you know? Levity-minded individuals:

climb the corporate ladder faster
make more money than their peers
are more creative
close more sales
have more trusting relationships
and live long, full lives (though accidents can and will happen... you can't just step in front of a subway or bus)

-END-

[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Internal Communications, Fluor CEO Letter, Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, Long Live The Platform, Outsmart

Stan Garfield — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:36:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: What are the differences between internal communications and knowledge management?

A: Internal communications uses many of the same components as knowledge management, and plays a key role in supporting a KM program. KM includes many other components, and has many other applications.

Internal communications includes:

Email and voicemail messages: Communications sent to broad or narrow distribution lists
Web sites: Intranet pages
Team spaces: Collaboration sites to share files, hold meetings, conduct polls, and maintain lists
Portals: Unified user access interfaces and repositories of documents and information
Wikis: Intranet pages which can be edited by any user for interactive content development by multiple people
Conference calls: Regular telephone calls for two-way communications, status updates, and learning
Webcasts and webinars: Web-based broadcasts of video, audio, and slides; allow questions to be entered anonymously
Virtual meeting rooms: online, real-time tools designed to allow teams to share presentations, applications, and white boards during meetings
Blogs: Web logs to post news updates, solicit comments, and take advantage of RSS syndication capability
Newsletters: Periodicals sent to subscribers to provide regular updates, stories, and useful content to interested parties
Podcasts: Recorded broadcasts available on demand or by subscription for those who prefer audio, like to listen while performing other tasks, or who are not usually connected to the network and subscribe for automatic downloads of the broadcasts through RSS syndication
Videos: Recorded videos available on demand for those who prefer video, when there is important visual content, or for special occasions
Distribution lists: Lists of email addresses used to send email messages
Progress reports: Details for communicating status to interested parties
Articles: Articles submitted to newsletters and web sites to inform those who may currently be unaware and point them to other available communications vehicles
Links: Descriptive titles with associated URLs which appear on other web sites to attract visitors from other high-traffic web sites
Meetings: Face-to-face gatherings to build trust, establish direction, and solicit inputs
Coffee talks and town hall meetings: Informal chats at local offices to allow a leader to converse with employees
Training sessions: Live or on-demand presentations and interactive e-learning to increase awareness, influence behavior, and educate
Audience surveys and focus groups: Ways to solicit inputs from target audiences to determine users' likes and dislikes, desired changes, and suggested improvements

Knowledge Management includes:

Internal communications supports KM, and KM components can be used as part of internal communications. There is a symbiotic relationship between the two functions.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

Larry Prusak wrote to me "I recently received the 2007 Annual Report from Fluor and was very pleased to see that their KM efforts were highlighted in the President's letter - a very, very rare event for KM in my experience. I thought your blog readers might find it interesting."

I asked John McQuary, Vice President of Knowledge Management and Technology Strategies at Fluor, to comment on the 2007 Annual Report. Here are the highlights John selected from the CEO's letter.

"Over the years, we have made investments to ensure our execution platform is consistent and scalable, which is why we are able to meet the tremendous demands in today’s marketplace. We use information technology to harness the company’s considerable intellectual property and leverage our award-winning, knowledge-management system to solve complex problems other companies cannot. To sum up, Fluor is uniquely able to bring together the best combination of our regional, industry and technical expertise, as well as our project management, financial, risk management, health, safety and environmental and business strengths to serve our clients’ needs.

While our systems, procedures and technologies are indeed world class, the primary reason for Fluor’s record achievements is fittingly symbolized in the photos of this annual report - our employees. In today’s rapidly changing business environment, the most potent competitive weapon any company can have is skilled, dedicated people working hard to ensure its success. At Fluor, we are blessed with a community of outstanding individuals who come together to accomplish things that no one else can. Each of our global employees brings a unique set of assets to the job, collectively resulting in greater knowledge, better decisions and premium quality and value."

Also on PDF page 26 / annual report page 23:

"Fluor’s investments in training and strong culture of knowledge sharing enable individuals to learn and grow, and those who show strong technical, business and teamwork skills are progressively moved into roles of greater responsibility and advancement."

KM Blog of the Week

Knowledge Sharing Toolkit by Mary Abraham

The ICT-KM program of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research has created a Knowledge Sharing Toolkit that provides guidance and resources for organizations interested in developing knowledge sharing among their employees and constituents. Nancy White at Full Circle Associates asks that readers take a look at the Toolkit and send in their feedback.

They are particularly interested in feedback from nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations and international development organizations. But even if you work outside those areas, it would be well worth your time to consider the materials provided by the Toolkit. You're sure to find information on tools and methods you haven't yet tried in your organization.

KM Link of the Week

The Long Live The Platform Conference: A Collective Report by Sue Wolff, John D. Smith, and Lynn M. Tveskov for the CPsquare Community

This paper describes the method of organizing the conference, the sustaining motivations driving participant roles, and some of the memorable learning gained by the CPsquare community.

Reflecting on the LLP Conference in com-prac

As part of the process Lynn Tveskov interviewed John Smith about what went on behind the scenes. He got into telling her the story, even going a bit overboard. After she wrote up the notes, he came up with a more analytical description of what he did as a conference organizer.

KM Book of the Week

Outsmart! - How to Do What Your Competitors Can't by Jim Champy

Jim Champy revolutionized business with Reengineering the Corporation. Now, in Outsmart! he’s doing it again. This concise, fast-paced book shows how you can achieve breakthrough growth by consistently outsmarting your competition. Champy reveals the surprising, counterintuitive lessons learned by companies that have achieved super-high growth for at least three straight years. Drawing on the strategies of some of today’s best “high velocity” companies, he identifies eight powerful ways to compete in even the roughest marketplace. You’ll discover how to find distinctive market positions and sustainable advantages in products, services, delivery methods, and unexpected customers with unexpected needs.

How to reignite growth by:

Seeing what others don’t
Using all you know
Changing your frame of reference
Thinking outside the bubble, not the box
Tapping others’ successes
Creating order out of chaos
Simplifying complexity
Doing everything yourself

Table of Contents

It's a Smart, Smart, Smart, Smart World 2
Compete by Seeing What Others Don't: How Sonicbids Spotted a $15 Billion Market 20
Compete by Thinking Outside the Bubble: MinuteClinic Delivers Healthcare Retail 38
Compete by Using All You Know: Basics Are Blazing at Smith & Wesson 58
Compete by Changing Your Frame of Reference: How Shutterfly Saw the Bigger Picture 80
Compete by Doing Everything Yourself: S.A. Robotics-Reaching Into Every Detail 96
Compete by Tapping the Success of Others: Jibbitz Wins by Riding a Croc 114
Compete by Creating Order Out of Chaos: Partsearch Finds the Item You Need 130
Compete by Simplifying Complexity: SmartPak Brings Stability to the Stables 146

Articles, Video, and Audio

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[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]

Smartest Person, 7 KM Lessons, Build It and they won't come, Managing Organizational Memory, The Social Atom

Stan Garfield — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:27:00 GMT

Weekly Knowledge Management Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question, Blog, Link, and Book of the Week

[Blogroll - KM Home Page - Send a Question - Implementing a successful KM programme]

KM Question of the Week

Q: Who is the world's smartest person?

A: Here are some candidates

Marilyn vos Savant

My good friend Bill Sterling, a classmate of mine at Northwestern University, is from Oak Park, Illinois, where I was born. There he knew Ed Zotti, "editor and confidant" of Cecil Adams, author of The Straight Dope: Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 (It's Taking Longer Than We Thought).

From FAQ Or Fiction? (You Be The Judge): "Cecil Adams is the world's most intelligent human being. We know this because: (1) he knows everything, and (2) he is never wrong."

Cecil's take on Why did William Sidis, the world's (2nd) smartest human, achieve so little in life?

Bill does not claim to be the world's smartest man, only that he knows him. He does write a very insightful World Report about the world of finance and investments. Check out his review of a recent book of the week: The Black Swan Says We’re Birdbrains.

KM Thought Leader of the Week

I posed the following question to many KM thought leaders and will be featuring their answers in this section. "If you were invited to give a keynote speech on knowledge management, what words of wisdom or lessons learned would you impart?"

This week's answer is from Carla O'Dell, President of APQC.

KM Overview

Lesson 1 - Secure Senior Management Support for KM by building a strong business case
Lesson 2 - Move beyond "Knowledge for Knowledge's Sake"
Lesson 3 - Determine What Knowledge is Critical
Lesson 4 - Knowledge is sticky
Lesson 5 - If You Build It, They Will Not Necessarily Come
Lesson 6 - Focus on breaking down structural barriers to the flow of knowledge between people who have it and those who need it - not changing the "culture"
Lesson 7 - Measure

KM Blog of the Week

Build It (and they won't come) by Marc Solomon

Call them ECMs or KM Hubs or Knowledge Nets or enterprise portals. Yesterday's sand castles? Meet tomorrow's ivory towers without the sustaining investment of your content producers. Here are five KM construction fictions and the corrections necessary to debunk the myths and get your users engaged as participants.

Myth #1: Increased traffic to your site(s) means that users feel compelled to share their own experiences.
Myth #2: Producing content is its own reward -- Users are inspired by altruism, team play, and a sense of community.
Myth #3: Users want to stay in-the-loop and feel compelled to check in by using a central KM system to stay up-to-date.
Myth #4: Your search engine is revving like never before. Everyone is using it. So content submissions should be edging up too, right?
Myth #5: The case of network effects has sold itself. Your executives all agree: we've got to let our people use KM to find each other, not just documentation. How do you re-deploy an internal resource as a social network?

KM Link of the Week

Recommended by Dale Arseneault in the SIKM Leaders Community

Lost & Found: A Smart-Practice Guide to Managing Organizational Memory

The Management of Memory
Diagnosing the Workplace
Taking Action

General Approaches
Specific Approaches

After-Action Reviews 31
Exit Interviews 32
Learning Histories 34
Lessons-Learned Inventories 35
Communities of Practice 37
Guided Experience 38
Learning Events 40
Job Overlap and Knowledge Zones 41
Phased Retirement and Succession 42
Network-based Solutions 44
Document Repositories and Portals 45
Automation and Self-Serve 47
Knowledge Centres 48

KM Book of the Week

The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You by Mark Buchanan

Synopsis

The idiosyncrasies of human decision-making have confounded economists and social theorists for years. If each person makes choices for personal (and often irrational) reasons, how can people’s choices be predicted by a single theory? How can any economic, social, or political theory be valid? The truth is, none of them really are.

Mark Buchanan makes the fascinating argument that the science of physics is beginning to provide a new picture of the human or “social atom,” and help us understand the surprising, and often predictable, patterns that emerge when they get together. Look at patterns, not people, Buchanan argues, and rules emerge that can explain how movements form, how interest groups operate, and even why ethnic hatred persists. Using similar observations, social physicists can predict whether neighborhoods will integrate, whether stock markets will crash, and whether crime waves will continue or abate.

Brimming with mind games and provocative experiments, The Social Atom is an incisive, accessible, and comprehensive argument for a whole new way to look at human social behavior.

Recommended by Steve Denning in the SIKM Leaders Community

It's a slim, well-written book, which is always a plus for me. And it's one of the best short diagnoses I've read of what's fundamentally wrong with traditional economics. It also deals with the basic issues of group vs. individual, and cooperation vs. competition. It explains how evolutionary processes can explain something that seems incompatible with Darwin: why do people collaborate, when collaboration is against their self-interest?

Fundamentally, collaboration is irrational. Attempts by economists to rationalize collaboration as indirect self-interest don't really work: there are many phenomena that can't be explained away like this. So why do people collaborate, against their self-interest? Why do some organizations while others die? What's the underlying dynamic? The book suggests that the strength of the collaborative culture is one of the key determinants of long-term organizational survival. It may not explain the demise of any individual organization. But viewing numbers of organizations over time, organizations with hard-working collaborative cultures will tend to win out over organizations marked by internal competition.

The hypothesis is that at the center of the modern firm, it is the same precious resource of energized collaboration than enabled our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive, one hundred thousand years ago.

Reviews

Links

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[The contents of this KM blog are my personal comments and do not reflect the official views of Hewlett-Packard Company.]