Knowledge Management in Practice

Innovation and KM

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:16:46 GMT

Better and faster innovation is one of the benefits of having a good knowledge management system in place. When the guys who invent the new stuff have access to all existing knowledge and experience, they will do a better job.

In his book 'Group Genius', Keith Sawyer explains '...the unique power of collaboration to generate innovation ...'
He claims that inventions are the product of complex organizations and interacting teams.

I already commented on some benefits of a knowledge management system :
- reinventing the wheel
- knowledge walking out of the door
- if we only knew what we know

Better and faster innovation is number 4 in this shortlist of knowledge management benefits. (More efficient organizational learning is number 5)

I will add this book to my summer reading list.

How many networks are you in ?

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:52:25 GMT

Having friends and knowing people is a basic social activity (probably a basic human need !).
It is a very natural process, and without consciously realizing it, we join groups, connect to people ... we network.
Most of these networks are informal and invisible, some are deliberate (ex business clubs)

But the internet is changing this or ... is adding to this. Today, you need to use internet tools for your networking.

These are the online networks where you can find me :

LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/marnixcatteeuw)

75 connections - I manage 2 groups here : SuperCop - Exbev, and I am a member of 11 groups
My personal favourite, and a reco if you want to start using these online social tools.
It is very straightforward : create a profile with your personal information, search for people you know and make a connection
Downside is that it is rather static : not much interaction.
Can be troublesome to find and connect to someone you know if you do not have a mutual connection.
The only place where I keep my official profile fully updated.

Ecademy (http://www.ecademy.com/user/marnixcatteeuw )
8 connections ... but growing ;-)
I recently joined this network.
Ecademy is a business network, stimulating business interactions between it's members.
Local 'chapters' organize regular face-to-face meetings. This encourages connecting with 'new' people and enhances trust building.

XING (https://www.xing.com/profile/Marnix_Catteeuw)
9 connections
Similar to Ecademy, but less local activity here, a lot more activity in Germany.
I get a lot of job offers matching my profile (mostly in Germany) and found a friend I lost a couple of years ago.

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=577228473)
5 connections (friends) ... you get the picture
Probably the most famous networking tool around. Very informal. Not very usefull for me personally.
I think the greatest benefit of Facebook is that it educates people in using online social tools.

Plaxo (http://marnix.myplaxo.com)
26 connections
Somewhere between the serious LinkedIn and the informal Facebook.
Has a great news page of all the changes all the people in your network have made, including their blogposts.
Easy to connect and send messages across.
I do not use this network actively. I have a lot of open connections here, mostly doubles from other networks ... and since I do not like double work.

Hope to see you somewhere and ... let's connect

Web 2.0 at Work

Fri, 23 May 2008 09:41:34 GMT

When talking about the new Web 2.0 tools in an enterprise setting, I often refer to the new generation of employees. They will be used of having social networking, blogging and publishing tools available. They will not accept an IT department banning these from the workfloor.

Just look at the number of school and university groups in Facebook and the like. All of these will (very) soon evolve into professional work related groups, following the live path of the group members.

And today, I came across of this gem :

(http://www.slideshare.net/sachac/the-gen-y-guide-to-web-20-at-work)

| View | Upload your own

And this one, on how blogging and reading blogs spreads passion :

(http://www.slideshare.net/sachac/web20work-in-pursuit-of-passion)

| View | Upload your own

Super.

Weekly Knowledge Management blog by Stan Garfield

Mon, 19 May 2008 09:26:46 GMT

My weblog features in Stan Garfield's Weekly Knowledge Management blog by Stan Garfield. Look at 'Why start doing knowledge management'.

Great.

Time for a small celebration ;-)

Wikis not ideal for external customer collaboration « The Diving Board

Wed, 14 May 2008 13:02:28 GMT

This post (Wikis not ideal for external customer collaboration « The Diving Board) illustrates my previous blogpost : allways use the correct tool.

A wiki was created to '... to distribute information on their company and/or product ...' Use wiki's only for the collaborative editing of structured information (documents, web pages, meeting agendas, brain storm or idea lists, ...). The distribution functionality is not the core functionality of a wiki.

PS for the collaborative editing to work properly also some 'soft prerequisites' need to be in place : engagement of the editing group, mutual trust, common ground/language, ...

Using the correct tool

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 12:10:56 GMT

When introducing a knowledge management project, it is important to select the correct tool for each issue which needs to be resolved. This will be highly context specific, related to the specific needs of the company/department.

A few examples :

Use a document management system to manage (edit, approve, distribute) high amounts of documents.

Use a wiki for the collaborative editing of structured information.

Use a community of practice to connect a group of practice experts to exchange and create knowledge relevant to their practice.

Use a forum for capturing the question-answer interaction between experts and novices.

A weblog can be used for the social reflection by a group of experts on a specific topic, but also as a powerfull knowledge sharing tool, an easy project status communication tool, a profile/expertise builder.

Social tagging is ideally suited for the exploration and structuring of an unknown expertise area.

Use after action reviews to formalize the social learning process of a team, when they mainly learn from themselves, during the execution of their project activities

The list can go on ...

The lesson to remember :

To correctly solve an issue, the correct tools should be used.

So, always make sure you :

- analyse the problem or issue at hand

- choose the correct tool

- implement it properly

Characteristics of a wiki champion

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:13:01 GMT

This is a good post on the characteristics of a wiki champion.
To complete a succesfull implementation of a wiki in an organization, one needs these characteristics :

Be a Clear Communicator: It is important to keep things simple ...
Be A Coach: You will need to coach some of the early users ...
Be Patient: Be patient with your early adopters ...
Be Enthusiastic: People will react to your enthusiasm ...
Be Engaging: Be available to discuss or help ...
Have Fun!: This is one of the most important characteristics ...

It is a great set of characteristics. Not only applicable for a wiki implementation, but for any KM project ... or even any change project for that matter.

Read the full post !!

Why starting with knowledge management

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 13:15:23 GMT

A friend asked me the other day why he should look into knowledge management for his company.

This is the answer I distilled :

All knowledge management initiatives should focus on any or all to these issues :

- reinventing the wheel

A group is trying to solve a problem which has already been solved by another team.
Makes you lose money and time.

In a company this can be the innovation and corporate support groups, solving solved problems.

-> It is like buying a CD you already own … costs money but does not add to your musical experience

- knowledge walking out of the door

Every employee who retires takes his personal knowledge and experience home.
Everything not shared, documented or handed over; actually leaves the company on his last working day.

But not only the retiring work force, also the young people, being more flexible than ever before, not looking for lifelong employment in the same company.

-> Imagine your friends taking home one of your CD's every time they pay you a visit

- the great unknown

This is the “if we only knew what we know” - complaint.

A lot of knowledge is isolated, forgotten, not used; because it is not documented, not shared, not available

Often, a lot of the corporate experts are disconnected from the business, both in time and in subject. But also personally we forget a lot of things … ever tried to recover an e-mail from more than a year ago ??

-> These are all the CD’s you never listen to, because you actually forgot you once bought them, and now they sit in your collection, ... silently.

On each of these areas, specific actions can be taken to overcome the issues. What and how is influenced by your priorities, culture, focus, strategy, people.

An engineers view on knowledge management

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 09:22:59 GMT

Earlier this week,I attended a workshop on knowledge management, organised by the Flemish Engineers. Most people in the audience were new to knowledge management, or looking to start up a project. But all were interested and wanted to learn more. In small groups, we were asked to discuss about knowledge management : what knowledge is around in a department, is it available, how can it be shared, ...

Our group came up with this (the intention was to create a mind map, but we were more creative) :

We identified four areas :

- Information and information systems : libraries, procedures, repositories, taxonomies, ...
This is the domain of explicit knowledge, with formal structures to organise it.

- Knowledge : experience, insight, ...
This is the domain of tacit knowledge.

- Culture and processes : knowledge transfer, communities of practice, coaching, meetings, ...
Processes can become part of an organisation's culture when they happen naturally and unconsciously.

- Governance : knowledge matrix, CV of a company, ...
This is a holistic view on the knowledge management efforts, including strategy and helicopter view.

We did not go into all the details, but some of the intersections are interesting. I like to put 'rules of thumb' in the intersection explicit-tacit. One can codify a rule of thumb in a formula, but it should always be used by an experienced person only.

Networking was not on the radar screen, but it belongs in the 'Culture and Processes' bucket. It can be a company culture when networking is natural, or it can be stimulated and organised as a process. A simple 'Who is who' - directory can be a good starting point. My preference is to use a social networking tool like LinkedIn where all team members can keep an updated profile. A big advantage of using an external tool is that this network survives company reorganisations and personal career moves.

PS : I made the picture with my new tool (toy).

A new office ?

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:18:19 GMT

What will Web2.0 and Enterprise2.0 look like ?

Look at this amazing video, introducing Sun's virtual workplace.

Here you can meet your virtual team members in a virtual environment. Talk, chat, discuss and work together (collaborate) on a presentation.

It looks a lot like Second Life and similar virtual worlds, but what is wrong with using fun-entertainment tools in one's serious-professional life ?

Is there a future for scientific journals and publications ?

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 12:29:55 GMT

In my previous job, I also covered library services. This included online searches, notifications on scientific data sources; and journal subscriptions. Several known KM journals were on my list.

Since I am home, I haven't read a single journal ... and I don't feel I miss something. Currently, I read blogs and I find this a much better way to keep informed. My blog list (with 95 blogs) acts as my social filter with people I know / trust.

In Google Reader, there is a search function which searches all the blogs I subscribe to. Now my blog list has become a very powerful personal knowledge management tool.

Why should I pay for a journal subscription ??

The CoP toolkit : People - Place - Paper

Thu, 03 Jan 2008 10:17:23 GMT

Let's have a look now at the three other axis of the toolkit for analyzing Communities of Practice :

People
People, surely the most debated topic when it comes to communities of practice, and probably the most important too.

Key words here are trust and reputation. The building of trust and reputation between the members of a community is a slow, long process. Focused expertise exchange sessions and frequent informal communications help to better understand the other person and the world (s)he lives in.

The current social networking tools (Linkedin, Facebook, ...) can be a good help here, since they blurred the boundary between professional (serious) and personal (fun) life.

On this axis the number of interactions can be measured.

Place
The place to be is where the community feels at home. In a broader sense it is the systems and tools a community feels comfortable to use.

In a digital world, on-line work spaces with discussion forums and document libraries are used, maybe video conferencing tools, netmeetings, newsletters, blogs, …
How comfortable people feel with these tools determines their use and effectiveness. As such, this is an important parameter to measure the CoP's health and maturity.

Paper
Finally, paper stands for what we do not forget. It is the common memory of community member generated and valued content, documentation and learning history.

It includes the actual knowledge base of the community’s practices, the knowledge created and shared by the community members. But also stories (about successes and failures), because they enforce and sustain the community identity and the sense of belonging.

The number of artefacts and the processes in place to manage them can be measured.

Analyzing a community of practice on these five topics (purpose, processes, people, place and paper) is an easy process and quickly provides a community's fingerprint.

The CoP toolkit : Purpose - Processes

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:34:18 GMT

Let's look at the Purpose and Processes, two axes of the toolkit for analyzing Communities of Practice.

Purpose
Obviously, purpose is an important starting point. A community has to define what it wants to achieve. The purpose may change over time and can even vary for different groups in the community; but clarity and consensus are crucial.

Etienne Wenger (Communities of Practice. Learning, Meaning and Identity) talks about 'joint enterprise', resulting from a 'collective process of negotiation'.

Processes
Once it has been agreed what the community wants to achieve, the members have to define how they will achieve this : which processes and practices need to be in place. How will the communication be organised, how will the knowledge be shared and how will the community members learn from each other.

It is important that the community members realise that the responsibility to be successful is a group responsibility, not the unique responsibility of the community coordinator. They have to realise they have to make it happen, no one else will.

It is a good practice to create a community charter, preferably in a community launch work shop. The discussions among the members will create the necessary clarity and alignment in the group. The charter is the tool by excellence to introduce new members and align them quickly with the "old timers".

I used to make the comparison with a service club. If the intention is to create job opportunities for young graduates, the processes will be around social networking, probably between industry and schools. If charity is the main purpose, the processes will probably focus on fundraising.

In the end, several purposes can be aimed at simultaneously, but only those with the appropriate processes in place will ever be reached.

A toolkit for analyzing Communities of practice

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 10:38:45 GMT

When you are running a CoP it is a good practice (not a best practice !) to regularly measure the heart beat of the community.
For this purpose I developed a simple checklist, organised around 5 axes :

- Purpose (WHY)       … scope, objective, goal, mission
- Processes (HOW)    … practices, procedures, roles
- People (WHO)         … identity, trust, reputation
- Place (WHERE)        … systems, tools, technology
- Paper (WHAT)         … documentation, learning history

In a simple way, you can monitor a community's status (maturity) on each of these axes.
It is not rocket science and highly subjective, but it is a good framework to organize the action points around.
Both for starting up new Communities of practice or for doing a check up on an existing one.
The output can be represented in a single (simple again !!) spider chart like this :

Absolute accuracy is not the purpose, but the chart can be a great help to reveal issues and start actions. In this example, there was not a clear shared goal of the CoP and as a consequence, no clear processes were in place to achieve this.

One major principle to remember is that all 'P'- principles are equally important. Over-investing in one will not compensate for ignoring another.

In the next posts, I will deal with each of the 'P'-axes in some more detail.

CM Innovation 2007

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:13:39 GMT

I attended the CMS Innovation 2007 conference yesterday, organised by CMS Channel.

These trends struck me most :

- increased power shift from IT to the business users :
creating new websites, updating content and layout is becoming really really simple

- successfull websites will be about customer interaction (C2C) :
WCM is not about managing content anymore, but about managing interactions

- content management is going mainstream, not limited anymore to the 10% happy few, due to
     open source
     the seamless combination of web content and document management
     and last but not least the ease of use for business users to manage content

Business cards

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 10:35:36 GMT

I ordered business cards two days ago (vistaprint), which were delivered today by the way.
I know I don't have a business, but business cards are a step in the right direction I imagine.

On the backside, they have a list of keywords, which should describe who I am and what my interests are :

brewmaster cookbook Community of Practice MES intranet taxonomy NPOs blog SuperCop PAMS Speciale cactus learning connecting

Only 3 are missing on the list : Katrien, Joni, Maxine ... my girls.

How do you organize your personal knowledge ?

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 10:10:39 GMT

Some 6-7 years ago, I changed office for the first time in over 15 y. From all the files, papers and documents, a selection of about 10 boxes was moved to my new office.

Two years later we were moving into a new office block. Corporate strategy was to limit storage (both for physical documents and books and on the computer drives). This made me buy an external hard drive for my personal storage. I started using del.icio.us for tagging interesting information on the internet.

So when I finally left at my previous job, the only thing I took was my coffee mug (Blue Jays) and my grey cells. ;-)

On the use of technology

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 06:31:53 GMT

This is a wonderfull video, on how we learn new technologies.

I picked it up from Joitske's blog.

It shows how a new technology (a book) was introduced and how the users ask helpdesk (!!) how to use it.
And indeed, helpdesk demonstrates how to open and read a book.

But not how to use a book to transfer knowledge (manuals and cook books), imagination (novels), beauty (poetry), memories (photo books), ...

Looking at my previous job, this is exactly what I was doing : coaching people to use technology to maintain knowledge.
And I think this is what I would like to continue to do in some form in the future.
I guess Steven Warmoes would call it a 'Deep smart'.

No more knowledge management ?

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 07:54:17 GMT

I no longer work for InBev.
There is no more money to keep me on the organisation charts, so, no more knowledge management for me.
The things I developed and introduced work fine and didn't need much maintenance from me anymore. Also the current management sees what I was doing more as an IT job : "make the systems work". Whereas I was looking at the job as "are the systems being used properly".

Anyway, I'm looking forward what the future will bring.

If you know of a good project or a good book ... let me know.

Face to face versus online collaboration.

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:05:25 GMT

A project I am currently working in, has it's team geographically spread over several locations. We do weekly phone call conferences, but have probably met all together in one room only once.
Overall, I am not too happy with the project's progress. Think we have to some extend ignored the importance of face to face meetings. The building of trust is more difficult and slower using online communication tools, it is much harder to get to know some one. Also the level of involvement is different, if I look in your eyes and promise something, I will do it, but when I promise over the telephone ...

Kathy Sierra talks about it in this (long but interesting) blogpost.
But she managed to boil it all down to this simple picture.

Some magic happens when people meet face to face ...

Custom List: Custom List

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 10:46:59 GMT

My LinkedIn Profile

Custom List: Custom List

Tue, 30 May 2006 07:10:18 GMT

My news