Category: Knowledge Management

Sharing vs. hoarding knowledge

Several items over the past few weeks all suggesting that sharing knowledge pays off far better than hoarding does. Handy to have around if you’re fighting arguments that investing in knowledge management has to overcome hoarding.

Napsterize Your Knowledge: Give To Receive. The primary lesson: “The more that a company shares its knowledge, the more valuable it becomes.” It’s astonishing how many people still don’t believe this. But when I look back at the success my website and OLDaily have brought me – despite my lack of any obvious qualifications in the field – it is self evidently true. When you share your knowledge, you share your ability, and this is what makes you or your company more valuable. People prefer to hire or contract for services based on proven ability nearly every time. Moreoever, the more you share, the more people share in return (many of the items in OLDaily are the result of submissions from readers), which increases your personal or corporate knowledge base. Anyhow, this article discusses some of the benefits of sharing knowledge and then offers some advice on how to do it. (This and the next two items via elearningpost.) By Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, MarketingProfs, January 21, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]

Cluetrainish MDs.

Communities of Practice – The real thing!. Here is an excellent example of a medical team building their own Community of Practice using Radio so that they can serve their own Community better. [Robert Paterson’s Radio Weblog]

This looks like it kicks serious ass. From their “What we’re doing” document:

It seems very likely that the needed essential innovation in healthcare is sociological, more than technological innovation, more than economic innovation. We have more advanced medical technology than we can currently deliver to patients. We spend abut twice as much per person on healthcare delivery in the US as is spent in Great Britain and there is little to indicate our patients have better health or higher satisfaction as a result. The sociological innovation will be discovering how to cooperate. Some community will discover how they can cooperate among providers and with patients. That is the highly leveraged innovation. That community will change everything for the rest. The sciences of complex adaptive systems and social networks need to come together. To these we need to add the art of community conversations. [Seb’s Open Research ]

Hoarding is for the weak. Xerox has apparently proven what all knowledge workers intrinsically knew anyway; that knowledge hoarding is detrimental. Via Column Two

A recent Xerox research report has found that high-performing employees don’t tend to hoard information. According to the news summary: The idea that knowledge is power has been knocked on the head by researchers who claim that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues.

My own experience agrees 100%. I am personally more powerful in what I do when I collaborate and openly share with others. They provide essential critique, support and grounding for my thoughts. [thought?horizon]

b-blogs = k-logs

b-Blogs: The Next Level of Collaboration.

Clickz; Meet the B-Blog

Kathleen Goodwin discusses the implications of weblogs as business tools. From a marketing perspective she points out the business benefits such as customer dialog forums, positioning those within your company as niche industry experts, and providing open communication with business partners. The beauty of the weblog is that it is extremely cheap compared to any toher form of collaboration. But, does it have enough features to do the job?

[MarketingFix]

Useful overview, although Goodwin’s b-blog seems little different from the k-log (knowledge log) concept developed by John Robb over a year ago. Not sure what we gain by introducing yet another ugly neologism. Here’s Goodwin’s key definition:

B-blogs can offer organizations a platform where information, data, and opinion can be shared and traded among employees, customers, partners, and prospects in a way previously impossible: a two-way, open exchange. Companies can (and should) encourage self-publishing from all corners of the organization. Employees who want to post information should no longer have to go through the corporate site’s marketing gatekeepers to post. Suddenly, the best thinkers in a company will have a digital voice they can manage and control themselves.

Sounds like a k-log to me. Of course, that’s the usual challenge in a new and rapidly developing area. Everybody’s trying to figure out what’s going on and trying to get their vocabulary to stick.

Managing for shared awareness

Enterprise Effectiveness. Combat Power and Enterprise Effectiveness Quote: “Companies such as GE that do have it (distributed information for shared awareness) are… [elearnspace blog]

Interesting thinking about what lessons are to be learned from the military about sharing information in real-time or near real-time:

Shared information inside a corporation and with its allies and customers provides greater information richness and reach, and produces shared awareness. Shared awareness in turn enables faster operational tempo and sustainable competitive advantage. This all spells increased competitiveness

An interesting transition from “need to know” to “shared awareness” Hierarchical organizations spend inordinate time and effort trying to work out precise boundaries on who needs to know what and when. Ostensibly about minimizing demands on people throughout the organization, it’s really about the exercise of power and control.

If, on the other hand, your focus is on the external mission, i.e. getting the job done for customers, the issue shifts to how best to let everyone have access to and know what is going on that might be relevant. In part this has to be founded on a deeper sense of trust in all the members of the organization. Trust both in their judgment to make good and appropriate use of information and knowledge and, more importantly, in their capacity to manage the torrent of bits on their own. No need to be paternalistic about it.

Research study on weblogs and community building

Lessons in Community-Building: An Inquiry into Role of Weblogs in Online Communities.

Both my aggregator and Knowledge Board discussion bring new “blog research” name: Nurul Asyikin needs help in her study: 

Tentatively entitled Lessons in Community-Building: An Inquiry into Role of Weblogs in Online Communities, my thesis will focus on two matters: how webloggers perceive the concept of virtual community, and the effects of technical and design factors on the development of virtual communities.

[…]I am mainly in need of webloggers to interview. If you maintain a weblog and are interested in contributing to the ongoing dialog concerning the issues of online human behaviour in general, and virtual communities specifically, please contact me. I can be reached via ICQ (UIN: 115135696) and email.

[Mathemagenic]

Good to see more people focusing their research on the weblog phenomenon.

Proxemics and knowledge management

[Point of clarification. The resources listed here were pulled together and organized by Joy London on her excellent blog – Excited Utterances. Although it’s cited below, some readers missed that, meaning Joy isn’t getting the credit she deserves.

I continue to struggle with how best to reference material here. My preference is to post all the material that comes through my aggregator and then to add my commentary. I typically indent/blockquote the posted material and add my comments at the end. Once I have some more time to figure out CSS and stylesheets I can probably figure out a more visual way of setting off quoted material from my own stuff. Anyway, Joy did the heavy lifting here. I just used it as a launching pad for a few observations. I also wanted to make sure that I had all these excellent materials ready to hand as part of my use of this weblog as my backup brain.]

Proxemics and Law Firm Workspace. I’ve always been fascinated by “proxemics“—man’s appreciation and use of physical space. The significance of proxemics in law firms is readily apparent as we consider ways to form communities of practice. A number of law firms have rethought their physical spaces to achieve more innovative and flexible knowledge sharing environments.

Doug Zucker and Christopher Murray, at Gensler, an international architectural and design firm, have consulted with a number of law firms on the use of its physical space.

McDermott, Will & Emory (Washington, DC) clustered its associate offices around partner secretarial staff.

Cooley Godward (Reston, VA) provides visitor lounges as part of its conference center. With full voice/data capability and soft seating designed for work as well as conversation, it’s an ideal flex space that can also support teamwork and breakout sessions.

Gunderson, Dettmar (Menlo Park, CA) sets its paralegal/administrative workspace at the center of a converted warehouse to create a sense of openness and community. (See a virtual tour of Gunderson’s Menlo Park, Boston and New York offices).

Other Gensler law firm clients include San Francisco firms Bingham McCutchen, Brobeck, Heller Ehrman, and Graham & James (now merged with Squire Sanders).

For further reading:

(1) Law Firms: Design for Flexibility by Christopher Murray, III

(2) Law Firms: Trends & Implications by Doug Zucker

(3) Law Office Design by Doug Zucker

(4) It’s Not Your Father’s Law Firm Any More by Deborah Elliott: a profile of Morrison & Foerster’s San Diego office (full article available via subscription)

(5) A Different Kind of Sandbox by Janet Wiens: a profile of Greenberg Traurig’s, Tysons Corner office

(6) Flexibility is In, Rigidity Out as Law Firm Offices Evolve by Andrea Vanecko

(7) Benchmarking the Law Office by Margo Grant Walsh

(8) The Shape of the Legal Office Today (a breakfast seminar held by architects Pringle Brandon with speakers from Allen & Overy, Linklaters, Nabarro Nathanson and Slaughter and May)

(9) KnowledgeBoard’s Space special interest group’s (SIG) news and documents

Architectural firms:

(1) Gensler [additional clients: King & Spalding (New York office)

(2) Calloway Johnson Moore & West [client: Blanco Tackabery’s office in Winston-Salem]

(3) Swanke Hayden Connell [clients: Dibb Lupton Alsop (Leeds office) and Greenberg Traurig (Tysons Corner office)]

(4) Callison Architects [clients: Latham & Watkins (Orange County office) and Orrick, Herrington]

(5) Pringle Brandon [clients: Allen & Overy’s and Linklater’s open-plan office spaces]

Workspace Design Consultants

Sparknow, a KM consultancy. Read some of their excellent publications (21 papers which can be downloaded beginning on this page) Notable mentions:

Designing Spaces for Knowledge Work—Can the Use of Fiction Help Construct New Realities?

The Role of Private and Public Spaces in Knowledge Management

Physical Space—the Most Neglected Resource in Contemporary Knowledge Management? [excited utterances]

An Excellent collection of resources.

The issues of proxemics extend well beyond law firms. When we designed our first office space for Diamond in the Hancock building, we made a couple of interesting decisions with the help of Perkins & Will , our architects. For example, we turned all the corners of the floor into team rooms where project teams could work. That left no corner offices to fight over among the partners. The Hancock has great views and we were on the 30th floor. We designed the partner offices with glass partitions separating them from the inner areas so that those views were available. A couple of partners wanted to restrict use of partner offices, but that lasted about 15 minutes. Partners are on the road most of the time, so partner offices rapidly became yet another meeting room for small teams.

One little lesson we learned and applied when we added space. The first offices had lots of power and network connections but they required crawling under credenzas to get to. In the second stage build out, the offices had all power and network connections available at desktop height at the back of the desks.

Strategies for implementing knowledge management

ad hoc knowledge management tools. In a follow-up to my quick look at Ideagraph I spent a little time going though my bookmarks for similar… [Way.Nu]

Slowly catching up with stuff that came through my aggregator over the holidays. This is some excellent thinking on the right frame of reference for thinking about knowledge management. Some key excerpts:

…while a batch of VC dollars have been spent on intranets and portal creation software, the whole concept of centralized knowledge management feels wrong to me…

What’s more the knowledge that workers create must be portable, for no matter how much companies wish to lock up employees’ ideas as intellectual property, the cross-pollination that occurs when people move from company to company is critical to innovation. We should be building tools to encourage innovation and collaboration, not constrain and control it….

The integration of personal and published web content, content and concept sharing, RSS aggregation and publishing, blogging, email filtering/storage/extraction and powerful collaborative searching is bringing a real revolution in knowledge working productivity into view.

There’s a marketing challenge here. While the answer is decentralized, solutions typically get sold to someone who’s been put in charge of the problem. Until you’ve thought long and hard about knowledge management from an operational point of view, the centralized solutions promoted by technology vendors are certainly going to sound like a faster and easier solution to your (i.e. newly appointed chief knowledge officer or equivalent) problem.  That they aren’t won’t be immediately apparent and won’t easily be traced to adopting a centralized approach.

Making knowledge management work requires a delicate blend of technology tools, organizational sensitivity, patience, and persistence. A difficult message to get across in a technology marketing environment addicted to peddling instant miracle cures.

OODA Loops and point of view

Boyd and The American Way of War. It’s one of the apparent paradoxes of conflict that technologies can change the nature of battle, but not win wars. Col. John Boyd’s insights into that conundrum produced some important thinking, and led to the concept of 4th Generation Warfare (4GW)…. [Blogcritics]

This leads into a whole series of fascinating items that link into strategy and knowledge management as well as food for thought about the broader environment we now operate in. A rich vein of material to mine and think about.

Boyd developed the notion of the OODA loop which has begun to gain currency in dynamic strategy thinking. The Fast Company article on The Strategy of the Fighter Pilot” looks to be a good starting point.

OODA is an acronym for Observe-Orient-Decide-Act. Conventionally this is depicted as a loop, but I think is might better be represented as a mini-web with Orient at the center. Something like the following:

That would link this to another of my favorite Alan Kay observations that “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”

Does knowledge management imply digital?

KM Irony. I find this ironic: I’m sitting next to a woman who is writing copius notes on letterhead with the title: “Office of Knowledge Management.” I wonder if she meticulously files those notes in a government issue SteelCase filing cabinet? [Windley’s Enterprise Computing Weblog]

I don’t find this terribly ironic. I find that taking notes by hand is still the most effective way for me to take in information in meetings and interviews. I’ve tried taping but that just leaves me with the problem of transcribing or of listening to the interview twice. Even with a good outliner, I can’t really pay attention and type and the same time (although I am essentially a touch typist). There is something about the mechanical act of keying that takes enough more brain cells than scribbling notes by hand that it interferes too much.

My practice is to keep a spiral-bound notebook with me for notetaking in interviews and meetings. I also use those notebooks (I have a collection going back to 1986) to sketch out diagrams and mindmaps. In the early stages of noodling around with new ideas I still prefer pen and paper.

Back in my Ph.D. research days I started a habit of writing up interviews and notes as trip reports. I have Jim Cash to thank for that.  They used to be done as Word documents. Later I started filing them as entries in a private weblog that I maintain on my laptop (using “Radio” and “Manila”). Diagrams generally turn into Visio documents. Recently I’ve started using MindManager to create machine-readable versions of the mindmaps I draw.

I’ve experimented with scanning my handwritten notes so that they are potentially easily at hand when I travel. I haven’t gotten as diligent about it as Gordon Bell has however.

For times when I can’t carry a notebook with me, I generally have a collection of blank notecards (about the size of a business card) and a pen in my pocket. But I’m not above jotting ideas down on the back of a program or agenda or on hotel notepads. This habit has gotten me in trouble from time to time.

More often than note, the first glimmerings of ideas from me take analog form. They soon get transformed into bits. Maybe Scoble’s peans to the Tablet PC will convince me to start the bit collection one step earlier.

 

Forward motion and self-organizing networks

Technicolor Blogmap.

An update to the Blogmap Project. Using the same Friendship links data from the Blog Tribe on Ryze, Valdis developed two new maps. The first map shows the Tribe’s network within Ryze with Tribe Members colored in magenta and non-members in blue. This differentiation makes clearer the size and linkages of the actual tribe.

…

Maps are great at revealing where you are. Combined with the whitepaper’s framework, it reveals that while the network has gained some strength through the centralized communication facilitated, it lacks redundancy and wider contribution. Recall that the community is only 2 months old and it is one without a specific organizing principle except the common interest of blogging, and one could say the progress has been fantastic, when measured by membership growth and linkage structures. But that image still disturbs me.

[Ross Mayfield’s Weblog]

More interesting data and analysis from Ross and Valdis. Ross expersses a bit of concern at his central positioning but none of this would be happening without his energy and commitment to the experiment. Something to remember in all this talk about networks and self-organizing systems.

There may not be a visible hierarchy but the energy still has to come from somewhere. Someone has to be the spark and put enough energy into the system for it to become self-sustaining and self-organizing. Here it’s started with Ross. He’s doing it in a way that is engaging the rest of us (witness his recent effort to promote a blog-buddy system at Ryze).

So, don’t just take a look at what Ross is up to, but get involved! Add to the forward motion .