Traveling in circles

Published on 12 April, 2008 in knowledge management, methods and reflection. 1 Comment

I’ve been seeing circles lately, in a positive way.

As I mentioned in earlier posts this month and at the Boston KM Forum KM 2.0 symposium, I’ve been putting some time into reading Joseph Firestone and Mark McElroy’s knowledge management writing. Highly recommended, although occasionally challenging reading. Seeing their Decision Execution Cycle, in Doing Knowledge Management (29 page PDF, Firestone and McElroy, 2004), and also in On Doing Knowledge Management, (Firestone, 2008), got me to thinking about other circular models that have seen. From page 6 in the first paper:

Firestone McElroy - Decision Execution Cycle

Perhaps the most well known circular model is the similar Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (PDCA) from Walter Shewhart; frequently credited to W. Edwards Deming, who popularized its use. The American Society for Quality describes the cycle as:

  1. Plan. Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
  2. Do. Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
  3. Study. Review the test, analyze the results and identify what you’ve learned.
  4. Act. Take action based on what you learned in the study step: If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.

At the Boston KM Forum symposium, in his presentation, Dan Keldsen referenced another circular model, the Observe-Orient-Detect-Act (OODA) loop from John “40 second” Boyd, United States Air Force, as described by Vicki Bell in her 2003 article: A different battlefield, the same strategy: How the OODA Loop applies to business:

Lastly, Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell propose several circular models in their book Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations. The first is a learning cycle represented as follows (p.21):

Learning to Fly - Learning Cycle #1

The second is double-loop model “relates learning processes, and the capture and transfer of knowledge to day-to-day business.” (p.33):

Learning to Fly - Learning Cycle #2

Now the work is to learn how to intentionally travel in, not just see, these circles.

Related Post:

KM2.0 Presentation - Boston KM Forum

Published on 9 April, 2008 in conferences, enterprise 2.0, knowledge management, personal KM, personal learning environments, strategy and wiki. 6 Comments

This morning I presented a slightly condensed version of these slides at the Boston KM Forum’s KM 2.0 – Real or Hype? quarterly event at Bentley College:

What’s emerging?

Published on 5 April, 2008 in enterprise 2.0 and wiki. 1 Comment

Rose BudLately I’m finding myself thinking frequently, if not deeply, about emergence. Two recent triggers for this ongoing reflection were:

  • Without much thought, labeling one of my what 2.0 memes to me top-level categories this (with bullets under the heading being closer to things that help fuel emergence, contrast to examples of emergence),
  • the number of mentions of emergence in AIIM’s Market IQ enterprise 2.0 report (31 per Adobe Search) and feeling that the examples given were fine, but somehow not the entire story.

So, once again I start an exploration with a brainstorm list, this time for the question “In the context of enterprise 2.0, what items potentially demonstrate emergent behavior?”…

  1. Use cases for new collaboration and social software applications. I think back to my experience with wiki four+ years ago prior to having benefit of the seeds in wikipatterns.com. Then, we openly didn’t know what we were going to use the wiki for, but overtime, some “standard” use cases emerged. Now I see the same with some of the newer social software applications like Twitter, where not only use cases but syntax conventions (for @username and #hashtags) emerge.
  2. Shifts in company culture, including towards more openness and more innovation
  3. Shifts in the macro way that employees work
  4. Organizational networks, including new ties facilitated by social software applications, shifting demographics, and changing culture
  5. Folksonomy, emerging from content categories
  6. Increased visibility to the most valuable content, derived both from explicit ratings and from behavior (e.g. tagging, subscriptions, linking, and page views)
  7. Wiki page structures
  8. Definitions and terminology, including definitions of web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and knowledge management beyond the original coinage — see for example the enterprise 2.0 definition exchange documented in the AIIM report
  9. Collective intelligence. I’m still sorting out in my own mind to what extent this term works for me, but I at least think it is better than AIIM’s “collective wisdom” — although the report also uses “collective intelligence”
  10. Perhaps software applications, or at least mash-ups. Is it valid to claim emergence here? Although in a common-language sense they are emerging, it really isn’t emergence in the sense of complexity theory.

What did I miss? What are additional emergence examples that apply to enterprise 2.0?

Further Reading:

  • Jim McGee’s The problem of emergence (published at FASTForward blog, October 2007), where he writes:

    The attraction of emergence is twofold. One is the realization that conventionally structured approaches have generally failed when tackling knowledge intensive problems. Knowledge work and knowledge workers don’t mesh well with the structuring techniques appropriate to industrial work. The second [attraction] is the perceived success of emergent approaches behind current Web 2.0 success stories on the Internet.

  • Jordan Frank’s Pros and Cons of Emergence (also October 2007)
  • Andrew McAfee’s Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content (March 2008) that includes a nice discussion of implicit (derived) information per #6 in the above list
  • Mike Gotta’s Enterprise 2.0: Culture Required? (April 2008)
  • Kevin Kelly’s fascinating and well illustrated The Bottom is Not Enough (February 2008), where he writes:

    I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

    and

    What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations.

  • Wikipedia’s Emergence page
  • del.icio.us emergence tag

Lots more yet for me to explore on this topic. Please leave a comment with your recommended resources.
Photo credit: Ann-Kathrin Rehse

Tiring of collaboration - the word

Published on 1 April, 2008 in collaboration, communications, enterprise 2.0 and wiki. 1 Comment

Yesterday I lamented in a Tweet: “Is the collaboration word overused? Sometimes it really is just communication, or even just presence-ing. And that is OK.” Then in a Twitter connection moment, Thomas Vander Wal (@vanderwal) pointed me to his recent blog post Getting to Know Collective and Collaborative and Jack Vinson (@jackvinson) similarly pointed both of us to his earlier Just what do you mean by ‘collaboration’. Both gents nailed exactly what I’ve been feeling.

Jack’s post, in turn, pointed to Shawn Callahan’s Collaboration’s Resurgence, which provides historical context for what I was observing…both a legitimate increased need for collaboration, along with the unfortunate increased abuse of the word as if to mean any interaction involving more than one person.

For me, it isn’t collaboration unless we are working on a common deliverable or problem, all party’s inputs effect the result, and we have the opportunity and expectation to influence each other during the creative process. In this regard the use of blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking, RSS, and email are rarely truly collaborative. Even wiki, the most collaborative tool of the new lot, often reverts back to just self-publishing…not because of limited permissions, but because the page is published as if it were final and nobody cares or dares to edit it.

The AIIM Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0, Figure 8, p.27, identifies “increase collaboration” as the respondents number one objective for enterprise 2.0. I wonder what those who answered in this fashion really meant and how they intend to use web 2.0 tools (beyond wiki, which I ‘get’) to accomplish collaboration? Perhaps what they really meant was increased visibility, interaction, connections, and shared meaning; i.e. an increase in social capital, which in turn can facilitate productive collaboration…including the old-fashioned kind of, for example, getting on the real or virtual white-board together to thrash out the next breakthrough idea.

Further Reading:

Wish-list: aggregate outbound social media experience

Published on 28 March, 2008 in enterprise 2.0. 0 Comments

As I prepare to move back into corporate employment, I’m again reminded of a “simple but not easy” user interface dream I’ve had for some time: a single user interface / user experience for all my outbound communications, regardless of audience.

What I envision is a single application that provides a front-end for the actual sending applications. This “composer” would have check-boxes for “Who can see?”, where the selections would be something like:

  • Project team ‘x’
  • Company (i.e. intranet)
  • Trusted partners and/or clients (i.e. extranet)
  • Public (i.e. internet)

Additionally it would bring together Twitter, instant messaging, email(? not sure if I’d really want this), and blogging into closer to a single user interface…allowing the user to somehow select writing length (Twitter = short, blogging = long) and the immediacy of communication (instant messaging = instant, mailing lists = middle ground, blogging = most asynchronous) that then defines where this front-end “composer” application would ultimately feed.

Combine all this with one of the attempts now underway with inbound aggregation…all moving closer to a single “online conversation central” — both inbound and outbound, both behind the firewall and outside the firewall.

Related Post:

What 2.0 memes to me

Published on 25 March, 2008 in enterprise 2.0 and networks and communities. 9 Comments

In pulling together content for an upcoming presentation, I did a card sort (well, actually a Post-It Note sort) to group my too many “what is 2.0?” bullet-points into a handful of over-arching themes. Then, to further aid memory, and for the visual interest, I selected iconic photos for each theme.

This started as just a Web 2.0 behavior and impact scan (trying to stay away from a tools focus); however, as I got further into this it began to blur into the 2.0 meme in general. More about that in the Further Reading below.

Same with my compilation of Knowledge Management definitions, this is not about creating yet another definition for Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, or 2.0 in general, but rather a sharing of my own process and result for getting my head around some of the existing content.

My five groupings ended up as follows:

It’s All About Me,Makeup

and My Networks.Network SNA

  • Connections
  • Communities
  • Ecosystems
  • Interaction
  • Sharing
  • Collaboration
  • Reputation and Trust

Side Observation: the first three bullets are a definition and two examples of networks, the next three are what is occurring within the network, and the last bullet (reputation and trust) are both outcomes and enablers of that doing.

It’s Open,Philip Johnson - glass house

Emergent,Rose bud

  • Innovative
  • Perpetual beta –> never complete and frequently changes
  • Light weight
  • Right-brain
  • Complexity
  • Leadership, contrast to management
  • Fun and exciting

Fast…

(added 28 March)Lamborghani

  • …to get up and running
  • …and easy to use
  • …to find and make connections with others
  • …response to questions from social network
  • …time to value
  • …to appear and (sometimes also) fast to become irrelevant

and Always On.Late night at computer

  • Global
  • 24 x 7 x 365 1/4
  • Mobile devices and upcoming ubiquitous wireless connectivity
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) [oops, slipping into technology; but it is hard not to for this point]
  • Virtual

Further Reading:

An historical classic and a sample of more recent writing across topics within the topic…

Related Posts:

Photo Credits: Janelle Siegrist (makeup), José Luis Molina (network), Ann-Kathrin Rehse (rose bud), Steven (glass house), Samuel Herrman (car), Reed (at computer)

Does Twitter fill a communication void?

Published on 24 March, 2008 in communications, enterprise 2.0, methods and networks and communities. 2 Comments

Twitter Logo

Since writing my first post regarding Twitter, I continue to refine my own usage pattern and think about “why Twitter?” — what is it exactly that makes it so addictive, or perhaps even so useful? Including within the enterprise?

First, I thought about communication alternatives: (with a loose attempt at some clustering within the list)

  • Face-to-face, one-to-one, unscheduled — the “water cooler”
  • Face-to-face, one-to-one or small group, scheduled (e.g. the typical physical meeting)
  • Audio or web-conference, small group (e.g. for a virtual team meeting)
  • Face-to-face, large group, scheduled (e.g. presentation or lecture)
  • Virtual, large group, scheduled (e.g. webcast)
  • Land line phone, one-to-one
  • Mobile phone, one-to-one
  • Voicemail, one-to-one
  • Voicemail, broadcast, one-to-many
  • Instant message, one-to-one
  • Instant message, broadcast
  • Micro-blog (e.g. Twitter)
  • email
  • Mailing list (e.g. listserver)
  • Discussion functionality within collaborative workspace (e.g. SharePoint)
  • Traditional blog
  • Traditional print mass media (newspapers, magazines, white papers, journal articles, direct marketing, books, etc. — many variations, with various degrees of the parameters outlined below)
  • Intra or inter-company print media (e.g. the design document, the marketing plan)
  • Wikis
  • Traditional web pages (static, or essentially static, internet or intranet)
  • The good ol’ fashion snailmail letter

Next I thought about communication parameters (as with the previous list, I imagine that I’ve left off at least a few critical points…please use comments to suggest important additions):

  • How much fidelity? (in the sense of the likelihood of the intended meaning being in-fact the meaning absorbed)
  • To what degree personal or personalized?
  • How formal or informal?
  • Synchronous or asynchronous? With some shades in between, e.g. for text (SMS) and instant messaging, depending on the particular usage scenario.
  • Mobility? (e.g. can I do it during a cab ride?)
  • Supports non-verbal communication?
  • Is there a potential network effect? (i.e. does the value likely increase as more join the communication?)
  • Opportunity for feedback? (e.g. replies, or opportunities for questions and clarification)
  • Likelihood of building new connections? (echo to network effect)
  • Facilitates multi-tasking? (i.e. can it be done during a meeting or conference call? — the crackberry under the conference room table.)
  • How much overhead? (i.e. is it quick to do? Natural and easy to learn?)
  • How much information volume? (i.e. War and Peace at 1000+ pages, or?)
  • Is there a recording, is there a way to review the communication later?

Applying these parameters to Twitter:

  • Surprisingly the fidelity is pretty good. Unlike with email, with only 140 characters available, there isn’t a whole lot of room to get yourself in trouble. Plus, it is highly public, which also contributes to keeping the flaming down.
  • Surprisingly personal via author pictures, personal information (e.g. “having dinner with my daughter”), and at some fashion personalized to my current of potential Followers (e.g. in the sense of “if you are Following me, then you might be interested in this link”)
  • Very informal (in general, a good thing in my world view)
  • Asynchronous, while still being fast-moving, e.g. for breaking news
  • Highly mobile and cross-platform
  • Gets a zero for non-verbal (hmm, a micro-video-blogging parallel to Twitter?)
  • Has a network effect, both at scale of the application overall and for an individual’s Followers
  • Limited opportunity for feedback, although does support “@ replies” and also via links handing off to blogs where more extensive feedback is possible
  • Strong likelihood of building new connections. Your mileage might differ; however, I have “discovered” and started to connect with interesting people that to date I had missed via my blog and social networks.
  • Facilitates multi-tasking? — yes, primarily due to the next point
  • Twitter is quick and light-weight, low overhead
  • Low information volume; however, high link density…leading to increased information volume
  • Twitter is recorded in the sense of being able to search and find prior tweets (hmm, a good thing or bad?)

For now, I’ll leave it to the reader to pick other communication methods and compare. Still, even without the rigor of a full spreadsheet, I’ll go out on the limb and claim that Twitter (and other micro-blogging applications) do fill a unique niche untouched by other channels — a niche worth exploring within forward looking enterprises — while still very thankfully not being the be-all to communications.

Further Reading:

From Babson CIMS Enterprise 2.0 presentation

Published on 20 March, 2008 in enterprise 2.0. 2 Comments

This morning I attended Babson College’s Center for Information Management Studies‘ From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0 event. The first half of the three hour program was an entertaining talk hosted by Thornton May (PDF bio). I write ‘hosted’ as a good portion was audience participation — consistent with web 2.0’s user generated content. The second half was a case study of MITRE’s journey as an earlier adopter of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and social network analysis (SNA).

Highlights from my notes — written as the ideas I collected, contrast to a transcription of what was spoken…

From Part-1

  • Class lecture is so Web 1.0
  • Train has already left station. Enterprise 2.0 is hyped, but not hype. It is real and happening.
  • Drivers for Web 2.0 adoption in workplace include: shifting demographics (Gen-Y), open innovation — recognizing that all good ideas can’t come from within the company, and move towards networks contrast to hierarchies (chicken-and-egg on the last one?)
  • Open up the firewall (makes me think of Ronald Reagan’s famous Brandenburg gate speech)
  • Diversity of content, richness
  • The death of the expert, everyone is the expert. A good and bad thing.
  • Lot of noise on the ‘channel’. Need better ways to improve signal/noise ratio.
  • Trust becomes a key driver
  • Web 2.0 is to 2000-10’s as PC and then internet was to the 1980-90’s. No less disruptive. Will full integration take as many years?
  • [added 21 March] It isn’t “all or nothing” to move into enterprise 2.0. In this way, it is a very different decision and implementation process than (say) for ERP. Unlike with some other life-changing events, it is possible to be “just a bit” enterprise 2.0.

From Part-2

  • Not enough to just do good technical work, must be able to bring the corporation to bear on issues of national importance. Can you leverage the entire company?
  • MITRE was an earlier adopter of intranet personalization and customization, wikis, blogs, and social bookmarking. The custom bookmarking application, called onomi (5 page PDF description of the pilot), is built from open source Scuttle
  • Long history of experimenting on selves. “Preach what we practice.” Start with the practice, then go out with the message.
  • Productivity improves (e.g. from using tags), but the real value comes in with the connections in the network
  • Traditional IT view is a repository of documents. The value is more with connecting with the thought-leaders. Enabling the people-to-people connections to gain more context and deeper understanding.
  • Regarding people that are deeply connected at the center of a network: good and bad. Can reduce overhead via brokering (reducing the individual one-to-one connections to maintain), but also is fragile, single point of failure.
  • No Human Resources (HR) incentives provided to contribute to Listserv. Employees do it because it is how things work
  • Training issue is significant. Too many tools to learn.
  • Shouldn’t try to follow MITRE’s adoption path details as they were earlier adopter. They illustrate some of what is possible, not necessarily the path. For example, for tools, using functionality from an existing suite wasn’t possible as it didn’t exist there. Early majority adopters now have a different toolset to select from. Also different culture as earlier adopter.
  • Doing SNA based on surveys (e.g. who do you depend on for ‘x’?) and from technology (e.g. who replies to whom on listserv mailing lists). Now in the middle of a study to then compare person’s network characteristics to their productivity. Can the value of network be “proven” empirically. (Ray’s mind is ringing with all sorts of caveats; along with the interest in seeing the ultimate results.)
  • Part of onboarding is to assign new employee to first project that will require building connections.

Analysis of 53 knowledge management definitions

Published on 19 March, 2008 in knowledge management. 13 Comments

Continuing from Sunday’s 43 knowledge management definitions. In this initial spreadsheet analysis (18 page PDF) I categorized each of the now 53 definitions by the following attributes. The numbers within [ ] are the number and percentage of definitions that mention this attribute. Within a major heading, a definition may be categorized more than once, or not at all.

What is the thing being described?

  • Process, activities, efforts, method, and/or techniques [29, 55%]
  • Tools and technology [2, 4%]
  • Strategy [5, 9%]
  • System [2, 4%]
  • Framework [1, 2%]
  • Concept, philosophy, or art [4, 8%]
  • Discipline, Practice, or Principles [6, 11%]

What does it do? (Part-1)

  • Manages or governs (and if so, what does it manage or govern? — covered in the spreadsheet) [12, 23%]
  • Facilitates, helps, or promotes [4, 8%]
  • Eliminate ignorance & inability [1, 4%]

What are its characteristics?

  • Explicit, Deliberate, Conscious, or Active [8, 15%]
  • Systematic [7, 13%]
  • Comprehensive [1, 2%]
  • Formal [1, 2%]
  • Collaborative or Integrative [6, 11%]
  • Difficult to achieve [4, 8%]

What is the scope?

  • The organization [36, 68%]
  • The individual [13, 25%]
  • Customers [1, 2%]
  • Partners [1, 2%]
  • Decisions [1, 2%]
  • Data [4, 8%]
  • Information [14, 26%]
  • Knowledge [18, 34%]
  • Wisdom [1, 2%]
  • Ideas [1, 2%]
  • Expertise or experience [7, 13%]
  • Intellectual Capital, Intellectual Assets, or Intangible Assets [6, 11%]

What does it do? (Part-2)

  • Analyze, identify, locate, or define (information or knowledge) [9, 17%]
  • Define communities or networks [3, 6%]
  • Implement technology [3, 6%]
  • Implement organizational structures [1, 2%]
  • Implement processes [1, 2%]
  • Create proper environment [2, 4%]
  • Create context [1, 2%]
  • Train, coach, and/or mentor [2, 4%]
  • Create learning cycles or reflection [2, 4%]
  • Create or generate (information or knowledge) [11, 21%]
  • Gather, collect, accumulate, or capture (information or knowledge) [8, 15%]
  • Grow, adapt, evolve, or expand (information or knowledge) [3, 6%]
  • Represent, change format, codify, transform, or manipulate (information or knowledge) [7, 13%]
  • Combine or Integrate (information or knowledge) [2, 4%]
  • Organize (information or knowledge) [9, 17%]
  • Retain, save, or store (information or knowledge) [7, 13%]
  • Cultivate (information or knowledge) [1, 2%]
  • Access, find, or retrieve (information or knowledge) [13, 25%]
  • Distribute, deliver, or disseminate (information or knowledge) [7, 13%]
  • Share, transfer, exchange, diffusion, or flow (information or knowledge) [16, 30%]
  • Collaborate [1, 2%]
  • Leverage or exploit (information or knowledge) [9, 17%]
  • Use or apply (information or knowledge) [13, 25%]
  • Improve (information or knowledge) [1, 2%]
  • Influence company strategy, policy, and practice [1, 2%]
  • Guard [1, 2%]

Why?

  • Includes a “why” in the definition [21, 40%]

General observation: this again illustrates the definition diversity. It is not like these are 53 definitions with slightly different word choice. These are substantially different. There are only five attributes that are seen in 30% or more of the definitions: KM is a process, it is targeted at the organization (company), it deals with knowledge, sharing is part of the story, and the definition includes a “why.”

Still more exploring and digesting for me to do; however, unlike the text clouds, I’m finding this analysis immediately helpful to me to more clearly see the range of possibilities and to also facilitate forming my own opinion on what is deficient, versus just different (in a further update I might fill in the NOTES column more for this; but for now, I make little comment and am more interested in just absorbing the possibilities.) The spreadsheet more clearly illustrates distinctions, whereas the text clouds illustrate the commonality.

I’m still not interested in creating the one new proposed definition from all of this, but I can see perhaps a handful of composite definitions that illustrate different knowledge management orientations — in the spirit of what Jack Vinson suggested this morning:

Ray or another enterprising individual might want to stack these definitions into buckets about how “knowledge” is perceived by the people using the definition. Process-centric definitions would look at knowledge-as-verb. Storage-centric definitions might think of knowledge as a thing to be controlled. People-connection definitions might think of knowledge as appearing via interaction. etc.

Comment, email, or tweet if you would like the source spreadsheet for your own manipulation. I use OpenOffice.org with ods format; however, can also export to xls if desired.

[26 March Update] Now also available as HTML and CSV from Google Docs.

I’ll now likely take a break from this for at least a few days to focus on other work and do further reading to increase my understanding of some of the KM fundamentals beyond what I had in my last tour of duty in the (yes, I still call it a) discipline.

[25 March Update] For further analysis, see:

  1. Matthias Melcher’s topic map from the definitions
  2. Stephen Bounds‘ Critique of 43 definitions of Knowledge Management, which takes the analysis to evaluation (what is deficient, what is good) and some grouping by “type.” Stephen announced to the actKM list.

Thanks Matthias and Stephen for the nice pieces of work!

Text clouds for 43 knowledge management defintions

Published on 17 March, 2008 in knowledge management and visualization. 9 Comments

Two text cloud representations of the 43 knowledge management definitions.

Before processing I removed the phrase ‘knowledge management’ when used as “knowledge management is…” and I merged British and American spelling variations for organization (’s’ versus ‘z’).

I’m still digesting and also thinking about the other analysis ideas mentioned in the original post. What do you make of these?

From TagCrowd:

access activities application approach assets best business collective company creating creation data documents effective efforts employees enterprise experience explicit gathers human identifying improve individual information innovative intellectual km knowledge leveraging making management objectives organization organizational people practices process retrieval sharing strategy system systematic tacit technology terms transfer used value workers

created at TagCrowd.com

From IBM’s Many Eyes, an interactive tag cloud: