Category: Knowledge Management

Those that belong to the emperor. UUIDs in Python. In defense of Fahrner Image Replacement. That famous quote from Jorge Luis Borges. New writing from Leslie, Michael, Michael, stavros, and JD. (589 words) [dive into mark]

A short catch-all post from Mark Pilgrim illustrates the wonderful serendipities of the blog world. In amongst his brief snippets is this quote from Borges:

These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
— Essay: “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” [Borges Quotations]

The challenges of knowledge work and knowledge management have been on my mind the past few days. Watching how people react to this particular quote offers interesting insights into their tacit assumptions about the nature of knowledge management.

I see this as the essence of good knowledge management; understanding and acknowledging that classification schemes are all arbitrary and should be judged in terms of their usefulness not their truth. I suspect there are at least two other relevant reactions to consider. First are those who are upset by the apparent flippancy of this scheme and expend energy in trying to find the right scheme. These are dangerous and unpleasant people to deal with. Second are those who don’t get the joke. Not dangerous, but boring, or perhaps simply na ve. Try to keep both well away from any serious roles in knowledge management initiatives.

Some resources worth taking a look at in this context would include Sorting Things Out : Classification and Its Consequences, Wurman’s Information Anxiety : What to Do When Information Doesn’t Tell You What You Need to Know, and Rosenfeld’s Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (2nd Edition).

Shaw summed it up well with this observation:

“Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of organized life.”

Web logs as KM (Con’t). I’ve been struggling with this whole “what is going to make Web logs use successful” question for a while as the idea is getting more an more interest here. The bottom line, I believe is acceptance by classroom teachers as a useful technology. To me, it all starts from there. I think potential users need to know the technology is easy to use, works as advertised, and enhances the educational experience of their students. Absent widespread adoption, it’s a tough sell to try something new on a district level for “managing our knowledge.” But I think there are enough models out there to at least whet their appetites and pilot some uses. From a KM standpoint, Jim McGee finishes off a nice wrapup of Web logs as KM with this:

Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex, which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work backwards from the answer – weblogs – to the problem – what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management. We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident.

As usual, this has me thinking. I’ve just been appointed to “champion” the KM/Internal Communications topic at our annual “Critical Issues” gathering next month. That’s when the administrative team sits down to talk about the solutions to the issues that we feel are most important (and this came in at the top of the list.) As such, I need to develop a problem statement, so Jim’s observations are once again distinctly relevant. What exactly are our needs in KM?

• We have two dozen committees that never “speak” to one another.
• We have parents interested in our work that can’t access it.
• We have teachers who could use materials and ideas and opportunities for collaboration.
• We have students creating a whole heckuva lot of knowledge that gets lost when the day ends.
• We have data.
• We have results.
• We have a lot more situations like this throughout our organization. [emphasis added]

And right now, it’s so hard to get to any of that “knowledge” that it is resulting in a real lack of communication and growing frustration with that fact. I think here it’s almost a question of communicating knowledge more than managing it (although I realize they are the same thing on some levels.) Web logs allow for inexpensive, easy creation and storage or publication of information (or knowledge) that is accessible, archivable, and searchable. Also, Web logs are flexible in terms of access and security. They are at first (and second) blush a viable solution to what is a growing problem. But only, and this is the big one, only if people use them. What I need to keep in mind is to grow into the solution instead of implementing it. I can see the end result in my brain, but I need the patience to nurture it into fruition. [weblogged News]

A nice list of examples of the kinds of simple things that weblogs enable that matter.

The simplicity of weblogs is the central reason for their success and their promise as a tool for making knowledge work easier. That same simplicity also makes weblogs (and wikis for that matter) a hard sell into organizational settings.

Technology vendors do not make money by demonstrating easy solutions to problems. Managerial wisdom in organizations is about learning to apply the 80/20 rule ruthlessly. Technology developers love to solve the tricky problems and handle the edge cases. Technology vendors have all learned to sell against one another through feature wars. No one wants to invest the time to learn how to use the tools at hand to solve the problems at hand.

knowledge workers have limited capacity to absorb new ideas and practices into their already overfull lives. You can suck up that limited capacity in learning the ins and outs of some fancy new knowledge management tool or you can use that capacity for examining individual and group work practices and adapting them. Weblogs and wikis let you dial in that  balance in a different, and potentially better, place than more complex tools.

Here’s a bit of design wisdom that is particularly important now as we seriously begin to think about how to blend technology and organizational practice to get to better knowledge work:

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Part of successful knowledge management in organizations will revolve around how good a job we do at drawing “maps” that help explain and represent this new territory. Dane Carlson offers pointers to some resources we can adapt to that task.

You Are Here: Maps 101. How to create a good map. I’ll remember this for the next Talk Like a Pirate Day. via The Map Room: A weblog about maps, a good read itself…. [Dane Carlson’s Weblog]

In the wonderful serendipity that using a news aggregator offers, Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance weblog (a great resource on project management brings the following tidbit:

A Clarification on Maps and Plans. A Clarification on Maps and Plans — I recently quoted Alford Korzybski, using his often cited statement,

“A map is not the territory.”

Upon researching it, I didn’t go far enough. The complete statement from is actually…

“A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.”

Puts a whole ‘nother spin on it, doesn’t it?

Project plans and schedules can be made to model a “similar structure” to the project itself, sufficiently reflecting reasonable expectations of the future as well as uncertainty to be useful. (I think someone — who was it? — once said that “all models are wrong, but some models are useful.” If that’s so, then I’m comfortable with the idea that some models are more useful than others.) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

If those of us talking about knowledge management are exploring new territory, one of our responsibilities is to draw the maps that will encourage those who stayed behind to follow us and show them paths that are safe and interesting to travel.

Why PhDs should start blogging.

Things New PhDs Should Start Doing [via José Luis Orihuela]

1. Keep a Research Diary
2. Maintain an Electronic Bibliography
3. Know Your Search Engines
4. An Archiving System for Useful Info
5. Learn The Composition of your Research Community
6. Document Useful Learning Experiences
7. Keep a Professional Home Page
8. Maintain an Updated CV
9. Get Involved Early On
10. Develop Research Meta-awareness

This article provide a good reference to justify why PhDs should start blogging 🙂

[Mathemagenic]

This is a much richer post than its title might suggest. What it really offers is a nicely thought out and articulated mini-case about what any aspiring knowledge worker ought to be doing to get more leverage out of their work.

While it’s never too late to start these kinds of strategies for yourself, the earlier you do, the sooner you’ll start building and refining your own private, custom-designed and organized knowledge base. Youe specifics may vary, but this provides a good road map to what you ought to be thinking about. And if you can’t generalize and abstract from the world of a Ph.D. student to your own world of knowledge work, then perhaps you ought to start looking for one of those nice 1950s assembly line jobs that don’t exist anymore.

It’s just like compound interest, the sooner you start the better.

Site Redesign.

Wherever I go, CIO’s and other business leaders tell me they are in the process of a “Web site redesign.” Site redesign is a good thing but it may obfuscate more important issues. The motivation behind site redesign is typically a desire to increase traffic, make things easier to find, provide better organization of information, or improve the visual attractiveness of the site. These are all good things to do but my experience has been that the reason the traffic is less than desired is not because of the design of the site. It is not the look and feel, nor is it the lack of sophisticated information retrieval. I believe that the most important drivers of traffic are the availability of on demand, integrated, useful transactions and, secondly, the availability of access to expertise. (read more)

[via John Patrick’s weblog]

Some interesting commentary from John Patrick about corporate websites, both public and intranets. He has some very on point observations about the opportunity that blogs present as part of knowledge sharing inside companies.

Blogging is revolutionizing how information gets published and shared. A good blogger loves to communicate and uses blogging tools to write a “column” full of links to experts and sources of information. The blogger may or may not be the expert in a particular area but if not she knows who the expert is and acts as an intermediary and translator, thereby leveraging the available knowledge and expertise. A good enterprise blogger knows everything going on in a particular domain — the key people, the key projects, the key resources, etc. Blogging is not an index of information or a database — it is a living breathing dynamic “diary” of the blogger’s conscious. A blog can include comments from readers, moderated discussion, or an open discussion forum but for enterprise purposes, the simpler the better. The idea is not to reproduce the “bulletin boards” and “news groups” of the past. Blogging is more of a way to get to the experts than to have a free-for-all discussion group.

[via John Patrick’s weblog]

As many have observed with Marketing driving external websites and HR driving most intranets you’re not likely to have people who grasp the impact of dynamic content and voice. You’re also not likely to find the sorts of people comfortable with giving up control to allow the company’s voice to emerge from the harmony of its individuals’ voices.

CXO Bloggers , such as those tracked by Jon Udell, will help legitimize blogging as a knowledge sharing tool. So too will the use of blogs in IT and Project Management settings as Frank Patrick, Phil Windley, and Jonathan Peterson have recently been discussing. Some of their key observations:

Sharing of learnings, surprises and mistakes, is what collaboration for successful project work requires — not just within a particular team, but across programs and portfolios that might benefit. The first is about exploiting immediate opportunities. The latter is about assuring the future does not have to depend on relearning the same lessons [Frank Patrick]

Ex-CIO Phil Windley offers lots of insight into the challenges and potential of blogs in IT management and clearly recognizes the organizational challenges of getting blogs to take root:

One of the things I’ve noticed is that blogging requires an abundance mentality. I’ve also noted that blogs encourage a culture of candor. How do you develop a culture that supports sharing? Are the cultural properties that support blogging the same ones that support building a first rate IT organization

Peterson also has a series of excellent observations about blogs in project management, well summarized by Frank Patrick. One tidbit that I find intriguing is that “the beauty of RSS is the potential for extensibility to a ‘good enough’ level which still leverages all the tools and code that has already been created.” [Jonathan Peterson]

Buried in this is the subtle promise of blogs and RSS aggregation as a tool for knowledge sharing in organizations. The simplicity of the tools allows them to be gently grafted on to existing processes and practices with minimal disruption. The challenge is to let this simplicity work its course. The tempation will be to over-design, over-engineer, and over-control. Resisting that temptation will depend on a strong sensitivity to the dynamics of organizations. We do live in interesting times for helping organizations and knowledge workers make better use of knowledge.