Knowledge and the Cardinal

The messiness of freedom

2011-10-28T10:31:00.000Z

The future we face at the dawn of the twenty-first century is, like all futures left to themselves, “emergent, complex messiness.” Its “messiness” lies not in disorder, but in an order that is unpredictable, spontaneous, and ever shifting, a pattern created by millions of uncoordinated, independent decisions.

Virginia Postrel, The Future and Its Enemies.

As it is in politics so it is for organisations of the future in the demise of the command and control economy.(hat tip to the Adam Smith institute for posting this gem)

A brilliant tribute to one of my all-time heroes RIP Steve

2011-10-06T08:17:00.000Z

The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

2011-09-29T12:06:00.000Z

The forever recession (and the coming revolution):

It is interesting to read this article by Seth Godin and correlate it with a similar discussion that I had with Charles Leadbeater and David Smith of Global futures and Foresight.

One of the other elements that is coming through from other bloggers is the retreat from the factory age and the need for workers to collaborate from wherever they are and meet up only occasionally in a hotel style office on hot desks.

We have been here before and memory is like a winged host rising up to meet me as this has been said before.

I think what makes it a little more different this time is the improvement in technology that enables us to connect to the office and have video conferences with colleagues and share documents. in real time - make it platform agnostic - ie Apples can work with Dells and people can use what works best for them.

I can see companies developing alliances say with Starbucks to have set aside areas in their offices where people can drop in have a coffee pay a nominal amount to use their spare office facilities and meet colleagues and clients. It means that the offices are used and there is an extra revenue stream coming in and you never know where serendipity is going to take one.

One of the books that changed my life was the Age of Unreason by Charles Handy in the late 80's - his concept of the portfolio worker is slowly arising to reality.

Here is the article by Seth - is he right?

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There's plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of "good factory jobs" and systemic unemployment--I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created.

There's a race to the bottom, one where communities fight to suspend labor and environmental rules in order to become the world's cheapest supplier. The problem with the race to the bottom is that you might win...

Factories were at the center of the industrial age. Buildings where workers came together to efficiently craft cars, pottery, insurance policies and organ transplants--these are job-centric activities, places where local inefficiences are trumped by the gains from mass production and interchangeable parts. If local labor costs the industrialist more, he has to pay it, because what choice does he have?

No longer. If it can be systemized, it will be. If the pressured middleman can find a cheaper source, she will. If the unaffiliated consumer can save a nickel by clicking over here or over there, then that's what's going to happen.

It was the inefficiency caused by geography that permitted local workers to earn a better wage, and it was the inefficiency of imperfect communication that allowed companies to charge higher prices.

The industrial age, the one that started with the industrial revolution, is fading away. It is no longer the growth engine of the economy and it seems absurd to imagine that great pay for replaceable work is on the horizon.

This represents a significant discontinuity, a life-changing disappointment for hard-working people who are hoping for stability but are unlikely to get it. It's a recession, the recession of a hundred years of the growth of the industrial complex.

I'm not a pessimist, though, because the new revolution, the revolution of connection, creates all sorts of new productivity and new opportunities. Not for repetitive factory work, though, not for the sort of thing ADP measures. Most of the wealth created by this revolution doesn't look like a job, not a full time one anyway.

When everyone has a laptop and connection to the world, then everyone owns a factory. Instead of coming together physically, we have the ability to come together virtually, to earn attention, to connect labor and resources, to deliver value.

Stressful? Of course it is. No one is trained in how to do this, in how to initiate, to visualize, to solve interesting problems and then deliver. Some see the new work as a hodgepodge of little projects, a pale imitation of a 'real' job. Others realize that this is a platform for a kind of art, a far more level playing field in which owning a factory isn't a birthright for a tiny minority but something that hundreds of millions of people have the chance to do.

Gears are going to be shifted regardless. In one direction is lowered expectations and plenty of burger flipping. In the other is a race to the top, in which individuals who are awaiting instructions begin to give them instead.

The future feels a lot more like marketing--it's impromptu, it's based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people--and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

This means we may need to change our expecations, change our training and change how we engage with the future. Still, it's better than fighting for a status quo that is no longer. The good news is clear: every forever recession is followed by a lifetime of growth from the next thing...

Job creation is a false idol. The future is about gigs and assets and art and an ever-shifting series of partnerships and projects. It will change the fabric of our society along the way. No one is demanding that we like the change, but the sooner we see it and set out to become an irreplaceable linchpin, the faster the pain will fade, as we get down to the work that needs to be (and now can be) done.

This revolution is at least as big as the last one, and the last one changed everything.

Record Management on intranet's

2011-09-08T16:25:00.001Z

Conversation on Record Management during KM Singapore 2011:
Some thoughts on record management on intranets courtesy of roan young's blog and a meeting he had with Bill Proudfit from Hong Kong - I've just taken this key paragraph in this post and added my comments in italics

Bill gave Roan some valuable tips and ideas on managing contents/records in the intranet. Here are some takeaways that he got from our conversation

Don’t try to educate people on the difference between documents and records. He said, “differentiating between records and documents is a crazy concept.” I agree with Bill. At some point, people wonder when they should promote documents to become records. And they wouldn’t bother doing it. (Agreed)
All contents – including pages in your intranet – should be part of record management system. People often missed out this. Contents on pages can become obsolete too. That’s when you should archive the pages.

(Possibly on intranets there should be an auto archive feature if the records haven't been viewed fora period of time, then they should be archived but that the search can look at an archived section as most intranets do have that option.
Get people to validate the freshness of contents in the intranet. This means you need to have a robust publishing workflow, that could notify people when they should validate the contents. A good timeframe would be twelve months from the publishing date.

(This is very true in view of a conversation I had today - it is not only important to capture the knowledge but to use it and also to lose it - which can be quite difficult as some people can be knowledge jackdaws - see my comments above and perhaps if it isn't validated within a period of time then it is archived.)
Limit the use of fonts in your documents/records in the intranet. You wouldn’t want your intranet to contain various types of fonts in various sizes, would you? Your contents will look unorganised, unprofessional and unfocused.

Does this still occur?
Almost all contents in the old intranet are junk contents. This is the main reason why content migration is so darn difficult. If most contents in the old intranet are junk, then who is going to clean and rewrite the contents? The content owners wouldn’t bother. Besides, they may not know, how to write online contents. My advise is: Hire professional content writers to do the grunt work. Don’t waste your money to train the content-owners on content writing. It is not a skill that anyone can easily pick up.

(Always one of the problems to my mind - I suppose that I do this on my knowledge reviews but then I always go back to the interviewees to get their feedback before posting - sometimes you need to go back and weed out and filter down to get those one or two nuggets, but you do have to have some content there in the first place.

Disapproval and Knowledge sharing

2011-09-05T12:25:00.001Z

Disapproval:
The biggest single force holding back people's involvement in social media is fear of disapproval. Fear of what customers' reactions might be. Fear of what the boss might think. Fear of what friends might say. Even fear of the tacit disapproval of being ignored
Where did we learn to be so afraid? Why do allow our lives to be so limited by what others think? All of the famous figures who changed the world got over this fear. They invariably faced disapproval, disagreement and disdain. Many of them faced imprisonment and many lost their lives. They didn't let that stop them.

But we let ourselves go numb at the prospect of someone laughing at our first blog post. We don't state the obvious. We keep so much of ourselves to ourselves and don't rock the boat.
What a shame ...

I read this today and was ashamed at myself, because this is some of the thought processes that I go through when I see a great article.
Sometimes I hoard because of fear and my colleagues don't get the benefit of my research.

When I post a great article on the blog I make sure that it is credited to the originator - in this case Euan Semple, but a nagging thought at the back of my mind says don't attribute it people will find this source and then you will have lost some of your expertise. Why should people benefit from your research and if you do will they remember where they found the article and then use it to diminish your role.

Then I say to myself if we all in an organisation behaved like that, then it is like the beggar my neighbour policies that led to the great Depression of the 1930's and then the benefits of flows of knowledge would be lost which might benefit the organisation and help it not only survive but grow and thus create new jobs and even save others.
In another post, I'm attaching a great article by the people at Anecdote on story telling - it highlights the story of Brunelleschi and how he hoarded and only let out in bits his thoughts on the design for the dome of the iconic church and Duomo in Florence and his thought processes.

Perhaps Brunelleschi's fears are the same with innovation in a lot of organisations.
I was talking today about something that I thought would help people engage with a knowledge capture system through better tagging, but once again it is how hard you push when those nagging fears that Euan outlines play on your mind as well as your own demons, but also to recognise that people on the receiving end of ideas may perceive it as a threat to their visions and trigger their fears.

A great quote today from Marshall McLuhan (hat tip to JP Rangaswami)
The major advances in civilisation are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur”

Four story-based practices to foster insight

2011-09-05T12:03:00.001Z

See the post above relating to disapproval and knowledge sharing and then read this brilliant article from those great people from anecdote that are one of my inspirations, though the fears outlined in the post may be a reason why I don't circulate as much as I would like to.

What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution daddy

2011-08-21T09:40:00.000Z

This particular blog is writing some valedictory notes as it feels that it's work on Enterprise 2.0 is done. It has these notes on what it thinks where the social networking revolution has taken us.

Do you agree?

Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers. John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”

Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.

Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management. Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing. People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives. Good riddance, 9 to 5.

Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executivesfrom around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”

Is Gen Y the Next Baby Boomer Generation? « ChangingWinds

2011-08-20T12:14:00.000Z

Is Gen Y the Next Baby Boomer Generation? « ChangingWinds:

Interesting article on demographics and generations in the workplace echoes some of my earlier themes. One quote sticks out.

Gen Xers are rapidly assuming the levers of senior leadership, whether in business or government. More attention needs to be paid to how this age cohort will lead organizations and governments through the turbulence of an inter-connected world. A huge amount is at stake for Canada and the United States, two countries with a neurotic love-hate relationship, where escalating competition from newly industrialized countries and emerging economies is threatening our long-term standard of living.

Gen X will increasingly play a pivotal role in leading companies and government organizations towards what must be shared visions. And they’ll be doing this sandwiched between the Baby Boom Generation, as it slowly exits the labor market, and GenY, confused as heck over how their situation changed so drastically in just a few years.

So my advice to Gen Y is to get over it. Shit happens in life – a lot! Building change adaptability is the most important skill you can acquire. It’s time to get on with it.

Ron young on the importance of 80/20 time for knowledge sharing and reflective time.

2011-08-20T11:09:00.000Z

f | KM Consulting ★ 4: The great thing about doing this update, which I do religiously every year, is that this very process always triggers new creative and innovative thoughts. In fact, I get so excited by these new revelations that I sometimes forget the original purpose.

This makes me realise, once again, that the creative process of knowledge creation is often a function of time, to reflect, analyse, consolidate, synthesize, and update new thoughts and ideas with established thoughts and concepts.

Imagine how much more creative individuals and organisations could become, if only they gave more time and value to learning, reflecting, creating and applying knowledge?

I was told that Google demand that their employees spend 20% of their work time to learning, reflecting, creating and innovating. I am told that 3M were pioneers in doing this 80/20 time week.

I wonder how many of the really valuable, and maybe even radical,innovations come from this 20% usage of time for more effective knowledge working?

When will management understand and properly value knowledge creation against performance?

Meanwhile, another cafe latte? a glass of wine? 4 hours to go. I need some 80/20 time.

R&D strategies in emerging economies: Survey results - McKinsey Quarterly - Operations - and the use of knowledge management

2011-04-19T12:06:00.000Z

R&D strategies in emerging economies: Survey results - McKinsey Quarterly - Operations - Product Development

The interesting piece in this article by McKinsey is the following statements

Another area that respondents agree about is the difficulty of knowledge sharing: 64 percent say their companies are no better than “somewhat effective” at it. The most commonly used collaboration tools are relatively old-fashioned, such as frequent telephone and video conferences (65 percent) and travel for face-to-face meetings (62 percent).

Respondents at companies that are high-performing innovators are somewhat more likely to use central knowledge databases and global communities of practice to share information, in addition to telephones, video, and travel.

The key challenge is that companies in this area are struggling to share knowledge effectively within the organisation to meet the challenges of the new BRIC and other markets. The aim might be to help countries to maximise what they have and look at previous KM practices without social media etc and see what worked well there. The power of story would seem to be a good way of sharing knowledge.

Looking ahead

For companies contemplating a more global R&D footprint, the perceived differences in skills between R&D managers in emerging economies and developed ones should underscore the importance of not overlooking talent and organizational development at the expense of operational best practices during expansion. In our experience, the best innovators in emerging economies excel at both.

Why do we help each other out

2011-03-18T17:09:00.001Z

I am always interested in why people help each other out and have used the concept of reciprocal altruism in my talks on knowledge management.
I've been reading over my lunch today an article by Martin Nowak about co-operation. He views co-operation as interesting as it means that you help someone who is a possible competitor and that you reduce your own success in order to increase the success of someone else.

He highlights some types of reciprocity that knowledge managers might find interesting.

Direct reciprocity - individuals interact repeatedly - if I help now you may help me later.
Reputational (my phrase) Indirect reciprocity which takes place in groups - where people see you interact with another person and reach the conclusion that you are a helpful person.
Spatial selection - where neighbours help each other - they survive by being in clusters this could be of interest in communities of practice but also in organisations especially departments which consider themselves in danger.
Finally Group selection and he says' it maybe that our group of co-operators is better off than another group of defectors, here selection acts on two levels because in our group there is more co-operation

Got Hype? You need POST | Forrester Blogs

2011-03-18T14:08:00.001Z

POST applies extremely well to internal-facing collaboration and Information Workplace discussions, which he described in “POST: A Systematic Way To Define Your Collaboration Strategy.”
In the context of collaboration the four step POST methodology consists of:
1. People. Start by understanding what employees actually use and need today. Don’t guess and don’t rely on anecdotal interviews. Instead, start with a quantitative assessment.
2. Objectives. With that baseline of understanding in place, next decide what your business goals are. You will need to build a decision council that includes IT and business to help you do this.
3. Strategy. The strategy part of this planning process means mapping the business goals to specific collaboration scenarios that you can actually improve — no tools yet.
4. Technology. The last step is to figure out which technologies improve your most important collaboration scenarios. Choose cloud services if they make sense; on-premises if not.
IT struggles with a new form of hype. As one Content and Collaboration professional recently told us, “I used to hate constantly meeting with vendors trying to sell me stuff. But now the vendors go directly to the users, convince them they need the tools, and I end up with my own colleagues demanding I buy this “great” stuff that is “exactly what they need.” It’s even worse!”
POST deflects this kind of demand. “You think it’s just what you need? Ok, let’s run the POST methodology and see if this technology is appropriate for our people, objectives, and strategies.” If the answer is yes, you’ve cut through the hype and verified real business benefits. If the answer is no, you’ve demonstrated precisely why, rather than just refusing to give users what they want.
This is a helpful concept to utilise if someone wants you to use something new - run it past this concept and tweak as you need - say in re-designing your intranet to buying iPads for the business. I've been there and worn the T shirt from vendors in the past.

Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse? - Knowledge@Wharton

2011-03-16T13:13:00.001Z

Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse? - Knowledge@Wharton

An interesting article to read on the subject, as the jury is out on this one for a lot of companies. I hear a lot of claims for this and wonder if it is just part of the normal technological hype that you see from time to time or does it have a role in business helping people to go across silos.

Do we need this or could something like Instant Messenger which is part of most organisations capabilities as part of their office suite be just as effective as say Yammer.

It could be that it just becomes part of the plumbing to businesses as the Internet has become since it's introduction and that the technology will evolve into standard enterprise software and become standards.

I think for a lot of companies they will try it as an experiment so long as it is done on a reasonable scale and see how it impacts on peoples day to day performance and also how it has helped the business to deliver real value to the end client. (I can remember trying Google Wave as a test and we soon found out it's limitations)

Anyway, please read the article and post any comments you might like to.

Energy—our buildings are wasting it and a lesson for knowledge managers

2011-03-14T13:44:00.000Z

From a recent HBR panel meeting - talking about the need for change. What is interesting is that the lessons that they have learnt also relates to knowledge management - ie to show people the effects of the actions that they take on a monthly basis.

In a panel on energy entrepreneurship and demand management, moderated by Professor Forest Reinhardt, experts focused on two main problems: buildings in general are far too inefficient, and people in general are clueless about their individual electricity usage. The sole investor on the panel, Craig Huff (HBS MBA 1993), co-CEO and co-founder of Reservoir Capital Group, said that rather than focusing on brand-new energy sources, his firm often focuses on companies that make current energy sources more efficient.

Urban buildings consume 40 percent of the world's electricity, said Andreas Schierenbeck (HBS AMP 176, 2009), president of Siemens Industry's Building Technologies Division. Fortunately, for most of those buildings, there's the potential to cut down electricity usage by up to 75 percent via various readily available energy-saving measures, noted Philippe Delorme, EVP of strategy and innovation at Schneider Electric, which is based in France, but does a third of its business in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. Unfortunately, it's hard to persuade people to institute those energy-saving measures.

"Human beings don't like to change, and everything involving energy management does imply the need to change," Delorme said, adding that electricity demand will double in 20 years if we maintain status quo practices.
This raised an important question: "How do we connect the energy consumers with a value proposition that makes it worth their while?" asked Gregg Dixon, SVP of marketing at EnerNOC USA, which helps large organizations in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom track their electricity use.
Dixon noted that while many consumers would jump at the chance to save 25 percent on their monthly mortgages, even if it meant paying some financing fees up front, they seem less apt to invest in energy-saving measures that will save them money in the long run, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, air-sealing services, and tools that help customers measure energy expenditures.

Schierenbeck supposed that electricity customers might be more apt to conserve energy if their utility bills reflected exactly how they were using that energy from month to month—giving them a better idea of how and where they could save money. "Right now, people can't tell you where they're expending energy but they can tell you what their monthly bill is," he said

Delorme agreed. "We don't know how much we spend because it's not visible enough," he said.

UC Irvine Feature: Wang Feng

2011-01-14T16:41:00.000Z

UC Irvine Feature: Wang Feng

The number of Chinese workers in their twenties dropped by nearly 15% between 2000 and 2010, but the government's one-child policy isn't the main culprit. Declining fertility is a global trend, says Wang Feng of the University of California Irvine. In areas of China that are exempt from the government's one-child policy, population growth has been no faster than in areas where the rule is in effect, he says. For all knowledge managers an essential read as demographics will be one of the strategic drivers why knowledge management rises to the top of managers to do list. I also heard that KM is one of the growing trends in mainland China and maybe it is to cover this play.

Incredibly Dull: What Knowledge Management Can Learn from Small Groups

2011-01-11T17:58:00.000Z

Incredibly Dull: What Knowledge Management Can Learn from Small Groups

The Social Intranet - presentation by Oscar Berg.

2010-12-31T11:39:00.001Z

A useful presentation by Oscar Berg on the Social Intranet. I partcularly like the slide which shows that 71% of employees use the web rather than their internal systems. A good primer for managers to read and absorb as the new decade begins.

The Social Intranet

View more presentations from Acando Consulting.

The New Next: Social Media Influencers Predictions by TrendsSpotting

2010-12-30T16:45:00.001Z

Hat tip to Steve Dale - particularly like the one on citizen activism and Charlene Li's on interest based networks - maybe the next step for COP's

The New Next: Social Media Influencers Predictions by TrendsSpotting

View more presentations from Taly Weiss.

Bringing Open Innovation to Services - The Magazine - MIT Sloan Management Review

2010-12-30T12:13:00.000Z

Bringing Open Innovation to Services - The Magazine - MIT Sloan Management Review

RSA Animate – Drive - Something for all knowledge managers everywhere

2010-12-24T12:03:00.000Z

RSA Animate – Drive This is one of my favourite videos and having had the pleasure of seeing Dan Pink live as a fellow of the RSA, I can highly commend this to all knowledge managers everywhere in terms of thinking how to encourage people to share knowledge.

A thoughtful piece for people to watch over the Xmas break. If only for 10 minutes - got to be better than X factor meests strictly come dancing follow by a re run of some old movie.

On creativity - a Singapore perspective

2010-12-13T11:50:00.000Z

On a recent visit to Singapore I was browsing the Sunday papers and came upon this quote from Ngiam Tong Dow, who was closely involved in the development of the dynamic Singaporean economy for 40 years.

One quote stood out on creativity that I wanted to save and share.
"When a Chinese boy goes home after school, his mother asks him 'What did you learn from your teacher today?'
But when an American boy goes home after school his mother asks ' How many questions did you ask your teacher today'

He goes on to say ' Which boy do you think will grow up to be more creative? I think that in the contest for intellectual hegemony the Americans will win. Because the Chinese (tend) to think within the box. The American's are more open, they are encourage to think outside the box."

It is a bit broad brush and stereotypical, but I was reminded of that old quote that if you keep doing what you always have done you shouldn't be surprised that you get the same or worse results. The technology and the speed of its impact mean that the old dogmas of the quiet past are probably inefficient today.

30 years ago when I started work £1 million of output was produced by 100 people but today it can be delivered by 50 people. also the life of skills effectiveness is also being cut

So the only way to grow is by skilling up and constantly reviewing and improving our skills base, but also to improve creativity and innovation to enable organisations to not only merely to survive but also to grow in the world of increased competition.

Recent Findings from the GLOBAL MAKE Awards

2010-02-26T12:03:00.000Z

Key Findings

Business leaders, analysts and investors constantly ask: "What are the economic and competitive advantages of pursuing a business strategy based on knowledge leadership?" Based on the findings of the 2009 Global MAKE study, the benefits of this approach are tangible and significant.

Successfully managing enterprise knowledge yields big dividends. The 2009 Global MAKE Winners trading on the NYSE/NASDAQ showed a Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) for the ten-year period 1999-2008 of 9.6% - over four times the average Fortune 500 company median.

Other findings include:

- Enterprises with long-term knowledge-driven strategies are continuing to invest in innovation, knowledge sharing and collaboration, and human intellectual capital - especially skills and competencies development - and will emerge from the global recession in stronger positions.

- The global economic downturn is accelerating the consolidation of key business sectors, including airlines, automotives, computers, consulting, defense, energy, information technology, Internet, media and pharmaceuticals. By the year 2012, there will be 3-5 global companies in each of the major business sectors. Those companies with strong knowledge-driven strategies are most likely to survive and prosper.

- Organizations around the world are facing leadership challenges in developing knowledge workers. This MAKE knowledge performance dimension had the lowest average Winners' score. A combination of factors - the retirement of growing numbers of 'baby boomers' and difficulties in recruiting talented new knowledge workers from the small pool of 'Generation Y' individuals, is forcing organizations to devote significant resources to human intellectual capital management.

- A growing number of organizations are taking on 'Global' characteristics - especially consulting and professional services firms, financial services, energy and media companies. These 'Global' organizations tend to operate as 'independent' companies within a Federal structure and without the traditional corporate head office.

- While the number of European organizations adopting knowledge-driven approaches is expanding, the number of European-headquartered Global MAKE Finalists and Winners continues to decline. The top-tier of European companies is falling behind their Asian and North American competitors at the cutting-edge of the Knowledge Economy.

The Elevator Pitch for Enterprise 2.0 - ReadWriteEnterprise

2010-02-06T16:38:00.000Z

The Elevator Pitch for Enterprise 2.0 - ReadWriteEnterprise

Reorganise for resilience - lessons for KM

2010-02-03T13:18:00.001Z

Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Organization by Ranjay Gulati

In an era of raging commoditisation and eroding profit margins, survival depends on resilience: staying one step ahead of your customers.

Sure, most companies say they're "customer focused," but they don't deliver solutions to customers' thorniest problems.

Why? Because they're stymied by the rigid "silos" they're organized around.

In Reorganize for Resilience, Ranjay Gulati reveals how resilient companies prosper both in good times and bad, driving growth and increasing profitability by immersing themselves in the lives of their customers.

This book shows how resilient organizations cut through internal barriers that impede action, build bridges between warring divisions, and transform former competitors into collaborators.

Based on more than a decade of research in a variety of industries, and filled with examples from companies including Cisco Systems, La Farge, Starbucks, Best Buy, and Jones Lang LaSalle,

Gulati explores the five levers of resilience:

1) Coordination: connect, eradicate, or restructure silos to enable swift responses.

2) Cooperation: foster a culture that aligns all employees around the shared goals of customer solutions.

3) Clout: redistribute power to "bridge builders" and customer champions.

4) Capability: develop employees' skills at tackling changing customer needs.

5) Connection: blend partners' offerings with yours to provide unique customer solutions.
This is a piece of personal knowledge management but has a lot of relevance to knowledge management and the increase of collaborative software to tackle it.
We just need to convince managers and people that there is something in it for them.

Special Report by the Economist on Social Networking

2010-01-29T10:22:00.001Z

I picked this up last night on the early edition of the Economist which came out late evening, I want to sit down and read it this weekend and will post some comments but I thought that other people would like to look at it.

Hat tip also to Doug Cornelius who has posted his initial comments which pipped me to the post - note to self must do without sleep....

Out of this there are links to other articles that make up the report that are on a side bar.

Do read - the Economist is usually very good at puncturing technological bluster. Big technology slant this week as they also profile the new must have from Apple which I think will have a major effect in the work place as well as in our lives.

Intranet Themes for 2010

2010-01-15T13:41:00.000Z

Useful post from Toby Ward on the intranet themes that he sees for 2010.
I'm pointing this out so that it links in to my post on Enterprise 2.0 last week.

Ignorance is bliss how human beings are addicted to information

2010-01-15T13:35:00.000Z

Human beings at risk because we have always craved information. It's all evolutions fault according to a New Scientist Article (paper copy) that I picked up on today, in that evolution has hard wired our brain to rally want it as much as we want a chocolate bar (at my side as we speak)

Other people have talked about the dangers of information overload and whether it could bring dangers to man we haven't thought about. The article seems to think that we are automatons who have no sense of control. As my wife tells people, I'm an information junkie out of a sense of wanting to know. However even I know that there are limits so I decided last year that if my blogs unread count got over a certain figure, I wouldn't worry about it I'd just mark them all as read. I've found by experience that certain key articles come round again as new people find them.

What was interesting though is comments that the article makes when we suspect that people say in a corporate setting that people are withholding information from us and that this can lead to a breakdown in trust. - effectively an information hazard.for a variety of reasons - it might lead to where that lack of information dissemination means that we can't fully connect the dots. The article shows what happened in the UK over the MMR vaccine if there is a suspicion and a lack of trust that the authorities are withholding information. One scientists report was enough to generate a frenzy where a false idea was able to gain credence in peoples minds and caused havoc as people refused to have their kids vaccinated or if they were able to have the vaccine delivered in separate doses. It even got to the stage whete the PM at the time was asked repeatedly if his new son had had the MMR vaccine (he refused to answer - probably confirming peoples suspicions).

A final thought, the percentage of people with internet access in 1995 was 0 and the end of 2007 it had got to 24%. Global data traffic in petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) per month in 2008 was 10000 by 2010 it will be c 21000 and by 20103 it is likely to be 55000.

This isgood news for server makers but also for KM practictioners a question?

How do we help people to attend the KM equivalent of weight watchers and not overdose on information but get them focused and targeted informations?
Are the new technologies going to support or overwhelm people in a corporate setting - or
Do we accept that people won't be able to self regulate their information consumption effectively.

Review: Google Wave An Experimental Ride

2010-01-11T22:26:00.000Z

In view of my post yesterday, I thought that I would copy in this review of Google Wave from Tech web who abstracted it from Information Week - well worth a read in full.

To paraphrase Edwin Starr: Wave -- what is it good for?

The answer: A little of everything.

Almost nothing else Google has created has generated as much interest, and as much confusion, as Wave. Just describing it to others forces you to pick your words carefully -- it's not e-mail, or instant messaging, or a Web chat system, or a message board, or a collaborative-document system, but a hybrid of many features from all of those things.

"Experimental" is the most encompassing word for Wave, in the positive and negative senses of the word. Mitch Wagner believes Wave is one of Google's "concept car" creations -- a showcase for a slew of technologies that will eventually be repackaged in other forms. The most crucial being Wave's native protocol, which in theory can be implemented by anyone who wants to write a client or server for it.

In this article I'm going to walk through Wave as it embodies the aspects of a number of other things we should all be familiar with: e-mail, wikis, blogs, instant messaging, online collaboration apps, and many more. In some cases it substitutes quite ably for the item in question; sometimes, it's short of the mark (and not just because the other guy you want to involve in what you're doing doesn't yet have a Wave account).

E-mail

If Wave has been described as any one thing, it's as an e-mail killer -- a way to take the inbox/message/threaded-discussion metaphor and push it into an entirely new realm. In many ways, at first glance, Wave does resemble an e-mail client of sorts: there's an inbox, there are folders, and the messages resemble e-mail messages organized into discussion threads.

These design analogies are probably quite deliberate. Most people have trouble working with something that presents absolutely no parallels to what they know and worth with -- and if there's one environment that even most non-technical people are familiar with, it's an e-mail client (be it Outlook or Google's own Gmail). Others have superficially compared Wave to "Microsoft Outlook / Lotus Notes on steroids," since Outlook (especially in conjunction with Microsoft Exchange) sports a great deal more than just mail: contact management, calendaring, note-taking, etc.

Because Wave is an invitation-only protocol -- at least in its current incarnation -- that makes it a good deal more secure than e-mail. Conversations are only possible among trusted peers. What's not present is a sense that Wave can be transitional -- e.g., you can't take your existing e-mail and slurp it up into Wave. Maybe this isn't so bad, since it further underscores the difference between the two, and since Wave itself is not at this time intended to eclipse other, more broadly accepted things.

Perhaps Google's stance with such things is that they will provide just enough API-level functionality to allow other people to mortar over those gaps. Example: a third-party bot allows people to be automatically notified by e-mail when changes are made to a given conversation. A good idea, but it's something that belongs in Wave by default -- especially this early on in Wave's evolution.

Discussion Boards

Another commonplace metaphor Wave emulates is that of a threaded discussion board or USENET group. Unlike the former, though, all Wave discussions are inherently moderated to some degree: people can only participate in a discussion on your explicit invitation. Unlike the latter, though, simply having a Web browser isn't enough: the other person also needs to have a Wave account.

One thing Wave adds to the discussion-board metaphor that isn't available -- and which adds to many other aspects of using Wave, too -- is the "playback" command. With this, you can see how messages were added, changed, or deleted as if you were pressing the play / fast-forward / rewind buttons on a VCR or DVR. It's an interesting way to see how a given thread has evolved over time, and what directions the conversation may have taken.

Unfortunately, some other things common to message boards are just plain missing. You can't prune and graft message threads, for instance; the only thing remotely close to this is the ability to copy a given message into a whole new wave.

So, again, a lot of what Wave offers is a little too specific to its current incarnation to serve as a substitute for other services. But from what we've seen, the goal isn't so much to substitute for those things as to present analogs to them as ways to allow people to acclimate themselves to the Wave way of doing things.

Wikis / Note-Taking

Another example of this kind of analogous functionality: the way a wave can be used, sort of, as a wiki. Not in the sense that Wave supports wiki-style formatting, but in the more general sense: as a freeform repository for information that can be updated quickly by all participants.

The biggest downside of using Wave as a wiki is the lack of versioning as we have come to know it in Wiki-land. I mentioned how the "replay" function works with conversations, and it has the same function -- and the same limitations -- when dealing with a conversation that's being used as a generic information store. There's no diff function, as one might find in even the most rudimentary wiki tools. The only way around this right now is to rope in tools from the outside (e.g., a Web site where you can cut and paste to perform a UNIX-like diff on the texts in question), but that defeats the point of using Wave in the first place, where all the tools should be right in front of you.

One thing Wave's formatting does bring to wiki-style information management is an inherent sense of organization to conversations about a given piece of material. Anyone who's attempted to participate in the "Talk" page for a Wikipedia article quickly understands how difficult it can be to follow or keep track of discussions, as the format for such things is an ad-hoc creation that is not really enforced by the wiki software itself. Wave discussions fall into their native format automatically, so both document and discussion are consistent.

Wave also allows multimedia (at least, a subset of common multimedia types) to be inserted directly into conversations. This allows for that much greater a breadth of material to be included, not just plain text or HTML. Note that some document types may be interpreted strangely within the context of a wave: a "classic" Word 97-2003 document, for instance, shows up with the proper icon, but a .DOCX or .ODF document shows up as a .ZIP archive. Experiment before you embed.

Instant Messaging

Many people had plenty of experience with instant messaging even before things like Google Talk ever appeared, but between that and things like Facebook's chat function the concept of an in-browser instant messenger has become familiar territory. Wave isn't a substitute for other instant messaging apps -- e.g., AIM -- but more like a parallel venue for real-time discussion.

Like instant messaging, wave discussions are logged as they happen, and the other person's typing can register on your own screen in real time. Unlike instant messaging, though, you're not obliged to respond only to the last thing someone posted -- or, rather, you can comment contextually on previous posts without the conversation derailing itself. If you and your friends in the discussion have a habit of jumping around or engaging in several parallel discussions at once, using Wave to hold that kind of talk imposes order that would be next to impossible to find through a typical chat client.

...But What Is It, Really?

When Wave first premiered, it was widely rumored that it would replace or eclipse any number of other, existing systems and services. E-mail, mainly: Wave has a high degree of built-in security, while e-mail is natively about as secure as sending a postcard written in pencil.

The more people were able to work with it, however, the clearer it became that Wave wasn't intended as a replacement for many things -- and now it's clear that it might not even be intended as an adjunct to them, either. Instead, it's entirely possible that Wave is being used as one of two things.

The first is the "concept car" analogy I mentioned earlier: it's a demonstration of a whole group of different Web 2.0 (and possibly Web 3.0) technologies that could be broken out on their own and put to use in any number of contexts.

The second is a little trickier: Wave is an extended experiment in application interaction -- a way to take many common user interface metaphors (e-mail, discussion groups, IMs, etc.) and re-implement them in new ways. Most of us are so familiar with the concept of e-mail that any thinking about the way it's put together tends to stop right there: there's an inbox, a spam trap, a list of unread messages, etc. Wave's ingenuity is in taking the outward metaphors of many things we take for granted and combining functionality among things that, on first glance, might not seem to play well with each other.

A programmer friend of mine described Wave as "a research project in human-computer interaction." It makes sense: by creating something a great many people will want to try out in an enthusiastic if also provisional way, Google can figure out which parts of the protocol -- both on the backend and in the implementation -- are worth developing, and which parts are best left as add-ons by third parties or discarded entirely. And Google's long made a name for itself as a company that creates things that are experimental by their very nature, with their years-long beta cycles.

Because Wave is so amorphous, many things are missing, and many of those omissions are almost certainly by design. One is a way to migrate to Wave -- for instance, a tool that would let you take your existing e-mail store and convert it into a set of Wave conversations. No such thing exists right now. Not just because no one's written it, but because Wave itself is a moving target, and so migrating to it would be pointless. The protocol could be nothing like what it is now by the time people other than Google start using it. (In theory one could build Wave servers that run in parallel to one's existing e-mail system, create gateways between the two, and then incrementally migrate the functionality of the latter into the former -- but again, why do that when you don't know what you're really migrating to in the first place?)

Another and far bigger issue: Right now, the only version of Wave is Google's Wave. If Wave is meant to be an open protocol that can be implemented by any number of people, either on the client or server side, it'll have to exist in multiple independent implementations before it can be considered any kind of protocol or platform to use in a production sense.

The last word on Wave for now would seem to be that it's aptly named. It's a moving target, and whatever its final incarnation -- if there is one -- it's likely to only resemble what we have now in the most distant way.

For Further Reading

Is Wave A 'Concept Car' For Google?

Enterprise 2.0: Google Wave, A Solution Seeking A Problem?

Google Buys AppJet To Power Wave

The psychology of Google Wave and a sceptic won over

2010-01-10T14:27:00.001Z

Innovation: The psychology of Google Wave - tech - 09 October 2009 - New Scientist

I was reading this article and then tweeted an article by Chris Brogan on how he had started to like Google Wave and was using it to help him on managing a project that he is working on with a colleague.

I also think that it would be useful to do a brain storm style exercise when the team are distributed throughout the organisation or for example when bad weather sets in (as I type this it has started to snow again)
I think that this is probably what I'd want to use it for - however the major problem and I hope that Google sort it out is to allow people to use say their work e-mail addresses to use rather than if you aren't already signed up to a Google account.

It will be interesting to see if this forms part of the Google Apps Premier edition where as I see it you pay $50 a year or £33 in the UK. A colleague was telling me that her husbands company (Jaguar Land Rover and is advertised as a user on Googles site) has already signed up - a few teething difficulties but generally ok. Google Wave might be a useful add on as part of the collaborative element of the site especially for small businesses.

However what about the 600 pound gorilla companies with all their legacy systems - will they for example start to put pressure on Microsoft to develop something similar for Sharepoint 20XX. Or will frustrated people use skunk fund monies to sign up a few users because their IT department can't deliver. £33 isn't a lot.

I looked back through some of my old reader feeds and came upon the article in the New Scientist - not a publication given to hyperbole as I wondered how this might change the way we communicate if it was in wave format as I find that e-mail tends to be more formal an electronic version of memos that I used to send to my boss. My wife tends to say that some of my messages tend to be stream of consciousness which lends itself more to a Wave style conversation.

Two of the features of Wave that are likely to alter how people communicate are related to time: it allows users to see others typing live, even if they later delete that text; and a "replay" function plays back the complex tangle of interactions that produced a wave.
Past research has shown that the real-time, synchronous, nature of instant messaging (IM) encourages an informal tone, says Susan Herring, who researches the convergence of computer communication platforms at Indiana University in Bloomington. "It invokes face-to-face communication and encourages people to use conversational strategies," she explains.
Seeing live typing may accentuate that effect, but Wave can also be asynchronous, like email. "We won't see the difference between the two types of communication disappear," says Herring. "More elaborate messages are still possible, but when the other person is online you will be drawn to a more informal style." The pace and style of communicating with Wave will be more varied than with email.

The replay button I think can be useful as it gives you a way of seeing what the other correspondee was thinking about a little earlier and gives more of a sense of the conversation.

The problem that this article doesn't address is the culture of the organisation and whether it encourages more free wheeling conversation and whether in working in a project group you would address say the project leader in a more relaxed format. I consider that people will tend to use the more relaxed style amongst their peers. I've found by experience and across cultures that people express more individual opinions and brainstorm more openly when a senior member of the team isn't present. I'd also find this useful if I was in a small informal community of practice and wanted a quick tool to work on a dialogue on an issue if I didn't have any internal forums that could be quickly set up.

If you have a number of you in the organisation and you have access to Google Wave why not try it on a small and relatively unimportant project either to project management or to brainstorm an issue and see how you find it.

Creativity and thoughts on a post

2010-01-08T06:28:00.000Z

Seth's Blog: Why ask why?

A very brief but good post by Seth Godin, is the question of creativity and that the secret to it is curiosity. I'm just reading a book called the Red Rubber Ball at Work. It interviews people who are successful and the first view, I was struck by how much they played and created imaginary worlds in their mind.

I wonder how many of us still have that playful spirit or as the article goes stick to the status quo. The danger is that we can then end up in the land of commoditised knowledge and as Godin says we then stagnate individually and so does the company because it doesn't get the best out of its people who can say heres how we can improve this process or by seeing a potential pattern we can combine A to C and have a new product.

One of my new years resolutions is to try to read articles from outside of KM to see what I can mash up and gain new inspiration to bring back to my field. Maybe a bit of plorking might be called for one day...... to keep creating what if questions in my mind.

A Season for Giving

2010-01-06T14:59:00.000Z

A Season for Giving

A thoughtful post - I particularly liked this quote in full from the ever readable Mary Abraham - it reminded me of a nice comment from a colleague recently who stated that as the KM in my area of the business I was one of the few people who were able to help find the knowledge or the person he needed to help complete the project.

If we all gave one trinket of knowledge and you have a large organisation, then that is an awful lot of tacit knowledge. and then if you ally it to the network effect when because of one person you are inspired to add some knowledge then you can achieve a lot more in your day to day work.

The King Cake is a wonderful metaphor for pragmatic knowledge management. Just yesterday I thanked a colleague for his contribution to one of our knowledge management systems and in response he told me that his team had been able to complete their project in record time because another colleague had made an earlier helpful contribution to the same knowledge management system. In other words, the first contribution was the trinket in the King Cake. The lawyer who found it then stepped up to make a contribution of his own. When things work this way, knowledge sharing increases exponentially and knowledge managers have to spend less time helping skeptical lawyers understand “what’s in it for me.”

Enterprise 2.0 themes for 2010

2010-01-05T22:53:00.000Z

As is usual at this time of the year, we receive peoples predictions for 2010. In the world of Enterprise 2.0 this is no different. I picked up on this post whilst browsing from a guy called Hutch Carpenter who runs a company called spigit which aims to help communities to help with innovation. This is an interesting area for me as I've been trying to get people to see how communities of practice can add value and be less of a theoretical talking shop by asking them to deliver a value product to help the company move forward.

I was looking though at his comments about Sharepoint 2010 which is going to be released this year.

Features that are going to be included are slated to be

Social profiles
An actual wiki
Blogs
Activity streams
Status updates
Presence status
Social bookmarking
Tags
Ratings

Now I have had some problems looking at Sharepoint 2007 but have seen some recent examples at companies that have made me look at it a little less sceptically.

I think that for large companies that are using Microsoft already and are looking to take the plunge into Sharepoint and deal with the rising demand for social software in their organisations, then this could be the safe approach during 2010.

I also think that some vendors will be able to provide bolt ons for Sharepoint 2010 similar to the wiki enhancement that Atlassian provides to Sharepoint 2007.

I consider that the new E 2.0 software needs to support workers so that they don't have to switch applications and lose that sense of flow.

Intranets need to change and be less corporate document dumping grounds and an area that supports people in their day to day work and that they find as easy to post material as adding a book mark to delicious.

I'd like to see an intranet a bit like netvibes or iGoogle where you have pods that you select rather than what the organisation thinks that you need. so you have in one area what you need to do your job - but also with some element of prediction so that possible new pods that you might like to subscribe to are covered.

A failure of intelligence and knowledge management

2010-01-04T19:51:00.001Z

It is interesting to note that since the recent attempted bombing of the plane in the USA on how failures of intelligence organisations to share knowledge nearly led to tragedy. Since 9/11 the us intelligence agencies have tried to improve this through technology. There has been the well cited case of the use of wikis such as intellipedia as a means of capturing information. I suppose one of the problems is that you can have too much information and you return to the drinking from the fire hose - or as this article puts it sorting the wheat from the chaff.

I think that the article is useful but I think that it needed to look at the people and leadership issues within the intelligence agencies as well as the culture.

Interestingly one of my KM favourites Morten Hansen has a piece in HBR (Click here) he highlights the hoarding barrier where the organisation and its incentives penalised sharing and also the poor ability to search for relevant information. He proposes three areas for improvement and I agree with the one regarding incentives - probably through areas such as the appraisal system and other non monetary inducements - however job rotation may not work in some organisations because of specialisation and recruitment of new people both in public and private sector seems a bit of a no no in the current economic climate.

I've undertaken KM work in the past in that we can provide people with the tools that we think that they need but the problem is that the culture of the organisation needs to be a safe one where people can use the tools and that it is expected that they will use them and that there are no disincentives for people to use them.

We probably also need to look at what is going on in the working environment that the intelligence agencies are working in and the culture - if you are working in a organisation that deals in secrets maybe knowledge sharing amongst other secret organisations is a little more difficult.

I am convinced that a new wave of technology will support improved knowledge management however at best at present it is a marginal revolution with people carrying out work in this area in many cases under the radar - because the organisations that they work for haven't yet caught up or it isn't seen as an organisational imperative in a very competitive and threatening business environment.

It is very easy to snipe from the sidelines when there is a systemic failure - but what current articles fail to look at is the pressure that the intelligence agencies are under and sometimes people don't have the time to share that knowledge even if they wanted to.

Later.... Rosabeth Moss Kanter puts her two pennorth into the discussion - here which talks about the lessons leaders can learn from this - however, there are also lessons that knowledge managers can learn from this.

The power of three (or four) times three (or ‘how chief executives with too much time on their hands build sandcastles in the air’)

2010-01-01T11:41:00.000Z

The power of three (or four) times three (or ‘how chief executives with too much time on their hands build sandcastles in the air’)

KM in China - the shortage of Chinese Workers

2009-12-29T15:13:00.001Z

http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=7933596&story_id=15099009&fsrc=nwl

An interesting article in the online Economist - the shortage of chinese workers might be a reason for KM to be taking off in China. - a thought for the future.

Positively wrong

2009-12-29T10:40:00.001Z

Positively wrong
an interesting article by Matthew Taylor looking critically at positive psychology as set out by Martin Seligman. A post well worth reading.

A very large apology

2008-11-21T14:31:00.003Z

For those who have been following me on this blog and wondering where I've been - well a lot has happened over the last 5 months in my life and so blogging has had to take a very large back seat. In July we had an offer to move house which we couldn't turn down but to get the deal we had to complete by the end of August.

Then my wife went into hospital for her regular 6 monthly treatment at the end of July. Shortly following in August that she had a cancer scare which required treatment and another brief operation.

As you will appreciate, we then had limited time to arrange finance and organise the house move - but we managed to do so by the end of August. We then moved into the house and then went on a holiday for two weeks to the USA and also work related activities. We've basically been working on the house all the hours that we have had so time and energy have a limit. However I have still been reading and am keeping an eye on what is going on in the world of Enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management and will share my thoughts in due course.

The blog for me is a place where i can share articles and my thoughts on KM. I don't lay claim to being the most dazzlingly original (British understatement) but a place where I can access my thoughts and also practice what I preach in sharing knowledge.

An area that I was impressed in whilst I was in the US was a conversation I had with a couple of committed Obama fans as to how he was reaching out to people using Social media through his web site and how people and volunteers could help his campaign.

It's all a long way from Howard Dean's original effort in 2004 - but it will be interesting to consider the possible cross overs into business and how Obama uses this to get his message over once he is in power.

Here are some of the thoughts picked up today from the NY Times article in my inbox yesterday

E-mail RIP?

2008-07-08T20:04:00.002Z

Been away on holiday so not been blogging as much

Found in Fast Company today

Business email will eventually be replaced by more accessible forms of communication like Twitter and company wikis."
- Inspired by Alex Iskold, ReadWriteWeb.

Remember wikis aren't just for use in knowledge management, but they are also useful as a means of collaboration and then when the project is finished can remain a repository of information about that project and give you insights into the contextual knowledge that you need.

Improving your use of Google

2008-06-26T07:00:00.000Z

A good post by Dennis Kennedy via his writings on the ABA Web site. He has written a brief article on how to use Google effectively especially with searches.

So here is the article and if you use it in your blog be sure to reference Dennis Kennedy.

A Firefox add on you should have

2008-06-25T19:40:00.004Z

I've been out and about watching the 20/20 cricket over the last few days at Edgbaston so my time for blog posting has been a bit limited. However last week I downloaded Firefox 3 and I've been looking for some useful extensions. Well I've found one and although it is in beta it does enhance my use of Google Reader by a company called feedly.

This has provided me with a good reading platform and allows me to save articles in Google reader but also I can pass them on to other people who follow me on Twitter and can be advised instantly of a useful web site or web article. For me the good integration with Google Reader is excellent though I did have to delete some feeds that were saved to Google Reader from some of my other sites.

A nice piece of eye candy is the ability to create a screen saver of articles and then click on this to read. It would be great to have say on an intranet where new articles appear as a screen saver and then you click on the article that you want to read. A good attention grabber.

I should say that this is available on Firefox only and is still a work in progress and no doubt will improve over time. It is the one function, that would make me switch from using google reader as my standard blog reader and saver.

iPhone - a 3rd revolution?

2008-06-16T12:49:00.000Z

Now that it is one week since all the hoopla of the WWDC and the launch of the iPhone Version 2, I've been reflecting on this and also thinking whether this is the time for me to switch.

The new iPhone answers some of the questions that I had in terms of allowing 3 G and GPS and also for its future if it is going to really tackle the corporate market - dealing with CIO's queries about working with their systems.

The main point was the price point - numerous bloggers felt that iPhone 1 was really aimed at the first adopters and the price in the UK of £100 for the 8GB version is within peoples pain threshold especially as in the European market - most phones are free and subsidised by the supplier.

The main thing was that although some of Apple's work in this area is a slight sense of catch up technologically - what no one does better than Apple is in ist very high standards in terms of design (the wow factor) and more crucially the ease of use for people. Talking to users of the iPhone 1 they said that even with it's limited offering they found it easy to use a significant number of the functions as well as the music (remember this doubles as an iPod also).

A number of commentators highlighted that Steve Jobs looked unwell (even though he is 53 - he did have surgery 4 years ago for pancreatic cancer). He also delegated a lot more of the key note to other speakers than he has in the past.

Maybe the iPhone is Steve Jobs 3rd revolution in the field of technology in terms of computers. He 1st did this in 1984 with the original Macintosh by utilising the GUI we all use today. Then the 2nd revolution was the developmenht of the iPod and iTunes and now the iPhone with it's attendant app Store which makes it into a handheld computer with software.

Apple have always tried to make using the technology not only a triumph of design but also an easy to use for those of us who aren't computer geeks.

Simplicity uber alles would summarise the Apple technology for me and why I will continue to use it.

If the iPhone is to Steve Jobs last major contribution to consumer technology, then what a way to bow out - most of us never have the opportunity to be revolutionary - he may have achieved three revolutions in his career in consumer technology and interestingly bought them closer to what Bill Gates wanted in terms of a computer on everyones desk. Jobs may have liberated that to one in everyones hand.

2008-06-13T13:27:00.001Z

I was reading an interesting article last night from McKinsey's which was an interview with Marina Levinson the chief information officer of Net App in California.

I'm always interested in trends in this area as I have worked in organisations where the IT function seemed to take a perverse delight in hindering and not helping the business to develop or even automate certain functions or helping us to analyse information.

It was interesting, that for the major parts of the business that had say a global aspect, that there was a key decision maker in the IT department who was allocated to cover that business.

In these days where more organisations are covering a matrix style organisational structure and project teams that form and dissolve that a key IT person who can deliver IT that helps that business improve itself and understands the type of business and the work that it undertakes would be of benefit. The hope is that they would be a partner and not a stopper.

Based on that the concept of the IT link to a large part of the business would enable that person to answer two key questions in my mind:-

' How can IT help my division to be able to collaborate effectively, to assist innovation and to capture and share knowledge with a high level of systemic reliability'

' What are your business challenges and how can IT aid you in delivering on these challenges.'

The IT person attached to the business should look to see where the capability gaps are - ie does the IT support the divisions strategic delivery plans.

They should also consider whether they should buy in IT - or if the capability exists build the software them selves.

This week, there has been a major conference on Enterprise 2.0 and I find one particular question and response of interest in the light of that conference and also from a KM viewpoint.

Question

In the last decade, companies made major investments in automating structured processes and routine tasks. More recently, investment has supported knowledge workers who base decisions on a combination of structured and unstructured input and dialogue. How do you see this shift?

Answer:

There isn’t much innovation left in the structured world. If you want to innovate, you really need to look at collaboration and the creation of communities. Businesses are not as advanced as consumers in creating these communities, but I think there are a lot of opportunities for very interesting innovation that we haven’t seen yet.

We have some of this activity happening at the grassroots level in our company, such as deploying wikis for the engineering staff. But it will become necessary to develop a Web 2.0 strategy that benefits the entire company. You have to allow some chaos at first to get people to experiment. But at some point, you have to create a framework, some kind of order. And, of course, it’s impossible to quantify the benefits right now—you just need to believe that collaborative technologies help to improve employee productivity.

Amen to that and I also see the job of the IT person to ensure that projects are delivered - one post I read last week about how to kill enterprise 2.0 in the business had this quote.

They will grind down their early adopters until they give up. I'd like to add that this can be done through the bureaucracy within companies where a good idea is lost in some Kafkaesque procedure until either the idea is lost, or takes so long the technology is obsolete.

I've put a link to Euan Semple's article here and it is interesting to read as are the comments. It begs two questions.

whether the majority of organisations are like this and

are IT departments themselves agents of change or agents of reaction.

I'd also like to agree with a comment from Steve Dale who cross posted this article. I agree with him that in some organisations the phrase one size must fit all is used.

The beauty of Web 2.0 is in it's flexibility and ease to set up and if people within an organisation are frustrated by the lack of internal solutions then they will go and find workable external solutions that are cheap enough to sneak below the budgetary radar.

Knowledge workers require IT that helps them in their job and answers the top two questions. These tools can help and support a firms knowledge management process though it is always the people first and the technology second - you shouldn't start by looking at it through a technological prism.

In the end the IT is a tool that can help you move from being an island of knowledge to an army of people who see knowledge and its use as they key weapon in your businesses future survival thorough collaborative and connective technology and person to person communities.

As regular readers will know - KM in my eyes is the convergence of people, technology and process to help the organisation meet its strategic aims.

Finally

Many thanks to Doug Cornelius and all the others who have placed their thoughts on the E 2.0 conference during the course of the week. I wish I could have been there - despite the problems with the wifi - their posts have been excellent and I will no doubt post about this during the course of next week when I've reflected on it

Keynote Speech from WWDC - announcing iPhone

2008-06-10T06:12:00.002Z

Here is the link to the keynote speech at WWDC from last night. First reaction looks promising to the new version - presses most peoples buttons, though a few would want a better camera and the ability to MMS - though I think the second will be answered via App store - anyway enjoy the performance. Note also how Jobs crafts his message and does his presentations - very simple but very effective.

(PS - this will also be on iTunes as a vodcast - so that you can download)

iPhone 2.0 with 3 G announced today.

2008-06-09T20:49:00.004Z

Here is the video of the new iPhone for people to look at. I think that Apple have come up with an offering that every IT manager will be looking at over the next 12 months and may have a queue outside their door for tomorrow morning especially as major firms in the Fortune 500 have been using it and finding it completely satisfied with the way it integrates into their enterprise system.

Apple for me have answered every question that has been posed at it - in terms of price point etc and features that make it a no brainer for me - even the ability to post a blog entry and to twitter..

Just hope that o2 don't queer the pitch in the UK with the 3G option by poor pricing. No doubt this will all be sorted by launch date of 11th July in the UK.

For those of you interested and with pictures here is the link to Appleinsider

Web 2.0 - is it at a financially viable tipping point?

2008-06-06T08:48:00.002Z

I've been looking at Web 2.0 sites more following downloading the excellent Flock browser which is one of the best that I've seen for handling all my social media and RSS needs. Though I've been noticing some simialrities between Web 1.0 and 2.0 - in that there is a lot of money probably being put in by venture capitalists into these sites I didn't realise how many sites there where out there until I say the directory of web 2.0 sites that some one has compiled at go2web20.

I don't think even allowing for the incredible growth of this market, that all these sites are going to be taken over by Google/Microsoft et al - so some of these are going to either fold or consolidate over the next year or so especially as the credit crunch bites in the global economy. I've tended to stick with social media that I think is likely to make it through either because of it's connections with large players - or it's ability to stand on its own financially (in my unsophisticated opinion.

Just something for you to think about when using social media for something work related. Being cuatious I have both browser and social bookmarking for all my bookmarks just in case one of the SM sites folds.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference & WWDC - some pre-thoughts.

2008-06-05T23:26:00.002Z

This conference is in Boston next week and I wish I was there to listen to people like Andrew McAfee talk about it. He basically has given E 2.0 some academic kudos as well as being a thoughtful blogger.

From what I'm reading around in the blogosphere, there is some guerilla infiltration in to the enterprise of Web 2.0 softwarebut as of yet security conscious IT departments are trying to block usage.

Whereas new entrants when confronted by legacy systems are wondering why the companies they work for haven't got the tools they are using as students.

I think also that there is still the perception by senior management as there was in the early days of the Internet that having Twitter, Face book etc is a slackers charter.

So next week I will be looking at what is posted out of the conference and be making comment for people to view.

Also next week - is the WWDC (developers conference for Apple.

The big player here will be iPhone with the 2nd generation likely to be launched. I think that this will be big as Apple launched a development kit for people to develop extra applications for the iPhone.

A bit like enterprise 2.0 will we see people over the next 12 months using these rather than the ubiquitous blackberry - probably not but I wouldn't want to be like one dinosaur sounding IT manager who is quoted as saying we are a blackberry shop and that's the way we are going to stay.

Be interesting to see how and if that starts to change as more enterprise friendly applications are developed in the near future and what is announced at WWDC. Though I do realise that IT Managers do have a number of issues such as compatibility that they need to consider - I don't think that you can just write off the iPhone especially if the enterprise element is sketched out in more detail next week.

UPDATE - the quote in full which I referred to is as follows.

"I have nothing against iPhone. It's great," says Manjit Singh, CIO at Chiquita Brands International Inc. "But we're a BlackBerry shop, and I don't think iPhone brings anything new to the table. It has a great user experience, but that's all."

Knowledge Management Tools and Techniques

2008-06-03T12:50:00.002Z

My previous link about Tax freedom day shouldn't negate some of the excellent work being done by IDEA which is the improvement and development agency for local government. I often browse over to their site as I'm aware that they have an interest in knowledge management and one of my fellow bloggers Steve Dale does a lot of work with them - so this is a belated hat tip to him also. Anyway if you are just thinking about possible tools and techniques for knowledge management for your business, can I recommend their recent publication covering this (click on the title for access to the link)

It breaks the tools up into three key sectors namely

Connecting people to information and knowledge
Connecting people to people
organisation improvement.

It covers the time and tested classics in a informative and easy to digest format that would provide a good starting point especially when dealing with busy managers.

I'm very happy to passon this link to people and would recommend people to bookmark this site in their favourites.

Tax Freedom day

2008-06-02T19:16:00.004Z

For those of us in the UK, today as the Adam Smith Institute reminds us is Tax Freedom day. The day we actually start working for ourselves and finally finish paying for the government expenditure. As the ASI points out this day is steadily increasing and is now a week longer than it was in 1997. (It was April 27th in 1965).

Governments of all persuasions should remember Colbert's maxim on taxation. He said that the art of raising tax is to ensure that you pluck the feathers without the geese noticing.

Looking at recent headlines, - I think the geese have and they have a sharp bite.

If you'd like to read more, then click on the title to this post.

Jack Vinson's thoughts on Knowledge Management

2008-06-02T18:49:00.002Z

I've been reading a lot of Jack Vinson's blogs on knowledge management and always found him to be a pragmatic knowledge manager. I'm pleased to see he's been quoted by Stan Garfield over at Hewlett Packard - who asked him what words of wisdom he'd want to pass on.

Jack has two points that he makes that chime in closely with mine

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."

I've always believed that people are the most important element in knowledge management, but I am excited by the range of potential options that are available for firms to use - if they are brave and trust their staff. It reminds me of the conversations that I had when the Internet was in it's infancy and I campaigned with managers to allow it in. They felt that people would goof off and productivity would suffer. It didn't because people used it to access information that they recycled.

The second one is all too easy to get sucked into. The danger of a one size fits all paradigm - there are always some options and try to devise a system that is flexible and meets the internal communities needs. They may not always work first time out - but it is always a learning experience that we can use for version 2.

Social Media in plain English

2008-06-02T18:40:00.007Z

As many of you know - I'm a great fan of Common Crafts excellent videos as a way of explaining briefly - some of the new ideas going round.

(Picked it up via RSS feed but also thanks to Steve Dale for also picking it up- stops me missing things)

They've recently done a recent video on what social media is.

If you click on the video then it will play

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

A good use of analogy - using ice cream. I think that there is a lesson for any company which is looking to update its internet site in the near future. Start to get feedback from your fans known and unknown to comment on your site or products. Perhaps contact them with some exclusive products such as thought papers and ask them to comment in advance. Beta testing for thought papers.

Coming back

2008-06-01T19:04:00.000Z

I'm sorry if I haven't been posting for some time, but I've been busy dealing with some issues post conference in Hong Kong. Also about once a year, I try to take a break from posting, to stop myself going stale - but also to try to be a little more thoughtful in my blog posts.

I usually recognise the signs of staleness, and my wife who reads my posts is a very good judge of when I'm not writing at my best.

So I've stared posting tonight and I think that I will have some more interesting posts for people to view and hopefully learn from.

I write the blog mostly as an aide memoire to myself but if one person reads what I put and finds it helpful, then I feel I've helped a little to share knowledge.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Back and mea culpa

2008-05-20T21:30:00.002Z

Well I'm back after a tiring trip to Hong Kong which was eventful and also dealing with the aftermath of the event as well as dealing with a house move and so on and so forth. I will be now trying to do my weekly blog now that things are back to normal. Certainly after seeing the ease with which video is being used, I will be certainly looking at increasing the use of video to not only capture knowledge and other things but also as a means of communication. I think that looking at HD video is the way forward. Steve Jobs about two years ago said this was the year of High Def. I think he was two years early - certainly for the UK. Video camcorders can now be bought with high def for under a £1k mark and I can remember 3 years ago where a video camcorder cost roughly £800 and now it is down about £300. Credit crunch or not - I think that in about 2 years time technology will bring hi def to being the de facto standard. I'd certainly like to try that as an experiment at either a COP or another skills network.

Blog takes a rest

2008-04-25T21:53:00.000Z

Attended a conference on talent management - picked up some good tips and will blog on these after reflection. However off to a conference in Hong Kong tomorrow and will be gone for a week. Might try to capture some thoughts, but the blog might be a bit light next week.

Can I leave you with a great presentation called shift happens - it does bring the information age home to people. If you are complacent, then this video might give you the kick you need. I can remember when computers were the size of desks and I changed programmes with punched cards. We live in the knowledge age rather than the brawn/machine age.

Web 2.0 conference update

2008-04-24T06:40:00.003Z

This has kicked off and the twitter posts from some of the luminaries are keeping me up to date via Netvibes. As I'm helping to arrange a conference in Asia my updates will be a bit brief. However, there was an interesting talk given by Tim O' Reilly that was posted on CNEt which I attach the link to in the title bar. Interestingly a lot of the old big computer companies were there, maybe they can start to see gold in Web 2.0 for the enterprise and using their brand name to get on the ladder.

My tweetcloud

2008-04-21T21:19:00.000Z

I use twitter from time to time and a mac colleague pointed out this useful little idea, so that I could see what words were being used. It acts like a tag cloud on delicious. It would be useful in a work setting if you could aggregate a couple of feeds and see what people were talking about in the enterprise. My blogs will be a little light this week as I'm preparing an overseas conference in Hong Kong and it's getting down to the last few days - so it tends to be all hands to the pump with last minute adjustments.

Results of a Mac trail in IBM.

2008-04-20T15:42:00.002Z

Many thanks to Mac Rumors who have posted the results of trails carried out inside IBM to see whether they should try Mac within IBM. They've just carried out the first pilot and I thought that readers might be interested in the results which I've copied in full.

The first phase of the pilot program was conducted between October 2007 and January 2008. During this phase, 24 MacBook Pros were distributed to researchers and used as the primary notebook, with the employees' existing ThinkPads acting as backups if needed.

Of the 22 of 24 who responded, 18 said that the Mac offered a “better or best experience” compared to their existing computer, one rated it “equal or good,” and three said the Mac offered a “worse experience.”

Seven reported having no or marginal prior knowledge of using Macs, while 15 reported having moderate or expert knowledge of the platform.

Other highlights:
- 86% of pilot users requested to keep the Mac
- More new hires are requesting Macs
- Research and Academic clients have a growing Mac community
- IBM internal software made for Mac was easy to install
- Some key software was unavailable for Mac, including DB2 and Websphere Application Server, Rational Application Developer IDE for J2EE apps, WebSphere Integration Developer SOA development tool, and Microsoft Visio. (which can be got round either with boot camp or Parallels (my italics)

Some Comments:
- "When presenting at customer or external meetings, I have been greeted with the 'wow factor.' 'Where's the ThinkPad, IBM uses Apples now?'"
- "This can free us from the Windows stranglehold."
- "It has been easier learning the Mac than learning Vista."
- "The ability to run Windows XP in a VM under Parallels is a great feature."

Personally I know that I work about 10 to 15% faster using my Mac at home, though it is always getting the IT boys to go for a trail - though I do see a large Mac community at work and maybe it might be worth a trial other than in the ubiquitous graphics department being the only ones in a large corporation to use it.

Brad Bird talks on Innovation

2008-04-17T19:09:00.000Z

One of my favourite movies is the Incredibles - I think the animation and the dialogue are absolutely brilliant and also Pixar is owned by a certain Steve Jobs.

Interestingly there is a McKinsey article out today interviewing the director Brad Bird who has two Oscars - one for the I's and the other for Ratatouille( which wasn't too scruffy either)

He highlights that innovation can come from unexpected places - the Internet came out of the Defence Department originally to set up a communications network that would survive a nuclear attack.

Bird was hired because the owners feared that they were getting complacent after a run of success and hired him to 'shake things up' The owners including Jobs said that he could expect robust discussion but that if he could convince them, they would change the way they did things.

When they were talking about the I's people said that to do this would take ten years and $500 million to do.

He set out to look for the frustrated artists - the people who nobody was listening to because the company was doing well. He listened to these 'black sheep' and gave them the opportunity to run with their ideas and basically slashed the I's production time at a lesser cost.

He was asked whether black sheep make better innovators. Bird says he is looking for involved and engaged people, and they can range from being quiet to very loud and evangelical. A common thread was that they have a restless probing nature and want to get to the problem.

Team dynamic s are also important especially if you have cross functional ones and the managers job is be creative in a harmonious way - imagine a symphony orchestra.

The important thing is to allow people to put their head above the parapet without getting it shot off. If you are the sort of manager who jumps all over people when they disagree then you are not going to get innovation. Once people know that it is OK to challenge their managers thoughts because they have a better idea - then their learning curve in Bird's opinion goes up. Up to a point Lord Copper - at the end of the day, the manager can't abdicate responsibility to the team - he still has to be convinced.

Morale of the team is also important - he reckons that bad morale means that for every $1 you spend then you get 25c of value Vice versa - he thinks it is $1 spent = $3 value. He thinks that companies don't always pay as much attention to morale as they should. He had worked on a number of disaster projects and noted that these were where people didn't feel invested in their work and any efforts to bring up problems were rebuffed.

The interviewers ask him apart from engagement and morale what is important

He says 'The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. Going back to the complacent company scenario at Pixar. He challenged them and said that this company was founded on doing stuff that was too ambitious. He states in the article " You guys have had nothing but success. What do you do with it? You don't play it safe - you do something that scares you, that's at the edge of your capabilities where you might fail. That's what gets you up in the morning.

I particularly liked that quote as it was the thrust of what Frank Dick said at a talk I attended earlier this week. He referred to the fact that we are at our best working in areas of white water turbulence not calm seas.

One area that he mentions is the presence of a creative culture - and I think that the interesting comment is the creation of a big atrium area which is a central meeting area. However Steve Jobs put the cafeteria, post rooms ,meeting rooms and the bathrooms in the centre. Jobs realised what any good knowledge manager would tell him that when people meet with one another either by design or by serendipity then things happen - social networks are formed and you meet people who might help you make an introduction to a person who might help you.

Interestingly they have a Pixar University (which seems like something that Rover did - but was also used at Walt Disney). I've always believed that learning doesn't stop after university and that learning is life long. However as we grow older with additional responsibilities it does get more difficult and we can lose the ability to learn new things or undertake new challenges.

For me I'd like to learn more about how to do a movie and edit and post it on the Internet or even internally. Some people might want to learn about graphics. Like bird I believe that we have to learn things that are outside our own area makes us a more complete person and also gives them the confidence to move to learn in other areas.

He also challenges leaders to be subversives and occasionally to have a person who is not a yes man but challenges your way of thinking.

He also recognises that innovation can be undermined and it was nice to see my old friend the passive aggressive organisation getting a good run out again.

Bird doesn't like people who in public or in a management meeting are supportive but once they get back into the safety of their department peck away at the proposal. He soon gets rid of these people as soon as he spots them.

It is recognised that leaders can inhibit innovation and he goes back to his earlier point on complacency - he strongly believes that you should never be satisfied and that you should have the attitude of a student of your craft and keep working to improve.

The human condition I believe demands that we look to climb mountains instead of climbing into valleys. Only by climbing those mountains can we see new horizons, live on the edge and truly be human.

Occasionally we need to help pick our colleagues up if they have fallen over and coach them to climb this mountain but in time give them the confidence to climb their own mountains and to teach others the same knowledge.

The first owner at Coke once said that the world belongs to the discontented - Brad Bird seems to have picked up the same baton and is running with it.

Rail Crisis on the Horizon??

2008-04-14T21:59:00.004Z

An interesting article from the Adam Smith Institute posted today - that I've just captured for review later. You can read it here It would be interesting to read what experienced rail people have to say. It is interesting to read Dr B'Ching's columns in Private Eye on a weekly basis as well as other articles in Rail Magazines and blogs by Christian Wolmar to come to the conclusion that something is dysfunctional in the British Rail Industry.

Is the Adam Smith idea the way forward for the British Rail Industry or have we been witnessing re-nationalisation by stealth and that a second full re-privatisation is needed. I note that the ASI are holding a conference in early May so maybe this post is the start of a precursor to that. I'll be sure to post any blog posts on this conference into this area for others to pick up on.

Team Working and Lawyers - follow up to tonights earlier post

2008-04-13T19:15:00.003Z

Thank you to a Strategic Legal Technology post from Ron Friedman this evening.

One of the snippets posted covered recent comments by Jordan Furlong about law schools and team work (and the lack of it).

I'd always considered that it was law firms and their culture that tended to drum team working out of its trainees but it apparently happens earlier in the law schools. (I'm sure not all law firms are that way - though from reading some of the blawgs and reading Legal Week I'm not so sure now)

When I was studying some of my happiest times where when I was talking to fellow students from all over the world and gaining new insights that I would never have had in the first place - if they hadn't been so open and hopefully they felt that I contributed as well.

Knowledge sharing is an entree into the world of innovation if we have or are allowed to make time for it as well as having a good team working relationship.

Anyway click on the title of this post to read the article

The future challenge to knowledge management

2008-04-13T17:33:00.005Z

I've been catching up with some reading this weekend. The front cover of the Economist is titled "The Great American slowdown' and that they consider that the American economy has slipped into recession. and that the American consumer is in no fit state to start picking up the baton and start spending, in fact they are starting to re trench. I don't think that the recession will be deep but in America and for the world it might be long. However, I think that the concept of economic decoupling might mean that the recession is likely to be uneven in its impact especially in India and China.

I was then reading an article in Legal Week covering knowledge management - side by side with an interesting article by Bruce MacEwen over at Adam Smith who comments on the economics of law firms.

This has started to posit a thought in my mind regarding knowledge management in organisations as a whole. The thought is this - is a recession in the world economy going to help or hinder knowledge management in organisations.

One of the areas that I have studied is the lack of time that people have to share knowledge within their organisations - now you would argue that as a recession bites that a wise management would work with people and encourage them to replenish the organisations knowledge banks to make up for the reduction of work volumes and also start to develop both client and internal knowledge networks.

However if you have an economic model of business that charges according to time spent on a matter, and rigidly keep to it, then if those people don't hit the targets and you decide to lose them, then you take a double hit a loss of potential fee earning when the economy turns up as well as a loss of knowledge.

I'd be taking the hit in term of fee income but retaining people for the turn up and for those areas which aren't so busy ensure that they are updating their knowledge banks, more training, increased mentoring and those all important client and social networks so that they have got the reserves to draw upon to become better problem solvers both internally and externally.

Of course if you start to make people redundant , then you send a message that you keep working as hard as you did and that sharing knowledge still isn't on the managements agenda be it good times or bad times. This leeches into the organisations culture and then future knowledge sharing becomes more difficult because of the Hawthorne effect described by Roethlisberger and Mayo.

In a recession, because of the fear of redundancy, most people traditionally will decide to hoard knowledge, thinking that this is the way to stay safe by concentrating on their own work silo rather than helping colleagues by sharing knowledge. Will managers reward those who share knowledge or those who hoard - the decision is up to senior management to decide which side they choose to reward. People surely should not be measured in how many hours that they work in a week, but in how the solve a clients problems and work with their fellow colleagues both as people but also by sharing knowledge for the betterment of all.

At the end of the day people learn that sharing knowledge isn't a core concern of the organisation and because of this learn not to share knowledge within their organisation and that being homo economicus - the return on investment does not match the original investment.

However people are not wholly economic animals and even Adam Smith recognised this when he said 'that an individual stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes' He also states in Moral sentiments with a quote on which our well being in the future might depend " How selfish so ever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature which interest him in the fortune of others and render their happiness to him, though he derives nothing from it."

I talk about reciprocal altruism, and believe that people do share knowledge even though they might gain nothing from it now - they share it because of care for a fellow human being and for me the ability to look into a mirror and see the person my parents wished me to be and that ones active principles should be that of generosity.

Though I recognise that the temptation in troubled times must be immense not to share knowledge with a colleague who you suddenly see as a competitor and that you may have to fight figuratively speaking to save your job, your standard of living of you and possibly your family.

Does knowledge sharing go even more backward in your thoughts at this time or do you have enlightened management that supports knowledge management in tough times recognising it as an investment in the future of the organisation or do they see it as an easy target for budget cuts a nice to have rather than a core necessity. It is a long term change for senior management in any professional services environment and I don't think that any one management theorist has all the answers - but it is a challenge that we need to address to keep our organisations going in the future.

Our Nomadic future

2008-04-12T16:31:00.000Z

An interesting piece in about the rise of mobility with wireless communication. The article I'd like to read and reflect on and post a note next week, but it will be interesting to read how wireless technology will impact not only on our work places, but how it might impact on cities, work patterns and the way that we design our offices of the future. Would I like to be a permanently on nomad with the freedom to roam but also recognising that it will be easier for people to watch me though Twitter, Facebook Second Life etc etc.

The business value of Twitter

2008-04-10T21:43:00.000Z

On occasions I like to go over to CIO to see what Chief Information officers are talking about. Well following my recent posting on Twitter I have been interested in whether organisations will find a use for Twitter - any way here is an article by Abbie Lundberg that could act as a starting point for discussion. I have also seen comments from other bloggers on this point so - obviously it is a technology that may come into the work place and have a role though at present I want to consider it further.

I use Twitter and might try to find fellow like minds to try it out as an experiment to see where it leads. for example I saw it being used very effectively to monitor the progress of the Olympic torch through San Francisco this week and can imagine it being used especially useful with selected groups of people in a global setting.

The mighty Liverpool march on

2008-04-08T22:01:00.000Z

Even if you were a neutral (which I'm not) that was a great match full of entertainment and skill which was a (nervous) joy to watch. I thought that the gap between the two side was miniscule though Arsenal did outpass us. As in somethings in life it is looking after the small things that make the difference and it was the ability of Torres to turn and deliver a stunning goal and Arsenal having a slightly small man on the post that meant he wasn't able to deal with Hyppia's header was the difference between success and failure.

Anyway I'm going to bed a happy bunny.

RSS in three minutes

2008-04-07T18:29:00.000Z

A colleague asked me today about RSS and I gave him a quick description but directed him to this link from Commoncraft (once again thanks to Lee Lefever) and if you click on the title it will open the link.

This is a great three minute guide to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) with pictures and video.

Here is the link in the title to this blog so enjoy and maybe if you are trying to explain it to your boss or a fellow colleague it might help.

A wiki primer for people to use

2008-04-04T19:44:00.000Z

Blast from the past article from last year but still worth sharing

Business Week has a series about wikinomics which I'm posting here as a means of sharing it for people

The series is posted here and has a variety of topics covering

Innovation and getting ideas from outside the organisation and the Wiki Workplace that I would also commend to people interested in this area.

APRIL FOOL - Law firm to run sheep pilot scheme

2008-04-01T11:54:00.004Z

I like to look out for the best April Fools web ones over lunch and this one is one of the best on today's Lawyer - I think that the name of the person hired gives it away.

Click on the title of this post to see the link.

Upcoming articles

2008-03-31T22:31:00.000Z

I was reading an article over the weekend by Dan Roam covering the use of visual thinking to solve problems.

As a mind mapper I know how an image can be used instead of a memo to convey ideas. I use Mind Map on my Mac but not as yet at my current workplace.

I'll be interested to see if there are any insights that Dan has and be sure to post them in due course. I'm also reading an article on trust and as a knowledge manager, this is an area that I examined in my thesis and has been a subject of past blogs - if you click on the title of this post it will take you to one of my favourite posts.

Knowledge Management on the decline??

2008-03-31T22:06:00.000Z

There has been an interesting article from the Harvard Law school that I saved last year and from time to time I re-read old articles to see if they are still relevant and it is. Looking at this article a year later the debate has moved on, though companies still believe that giant databases of information will solve their problems. Knowledge management to my mind is still predicated on people processes and technology as well as organisational culture and norms (back to Hawthorne). But a bit like the bible the most important of these are people and giving them the ability to connect and share information be it over a coffee, doing an after action review, sharing a story about how to deal with a client. It is allowing people to meet and make that primitive connection that encourages you to share that tacit knowledge. However if you are in a large organisation you can't always meet everyone and so the rise of social web 2.0 technology that I ramble about on supports the social sharing of information.

Here is the article from March 2007.

Knowledge Management on the Decline?: The law of diminishing returns is affecting those firms that invested heavily in giant IT databases - because a lot of that information is becoming available on line and it’s quality is steadily improving. It does beg a question as to say in 5 years time will in house precedents (or at least the vast majority of them) be as quaint as a buggy and whip.

Therefore firms will need to look at the way that people share knowledge if they wish to maintain a competitve advantage over their rivals.

Competitive advantage comes from possessing some attribute that is valuable, rare and not easily substituted - the tacit or people knowledge in a firm is that advantage not as previously perceived what is held in a database.

Another article highlights the rise of Generation Y lawyers who want to have their own internal blogs as a way of advertising their expertise to other people in the firm, so that they can undertake work on interesting projects.

Firms have noted a significant rise in the number of requests for blogs especially and even Microsoft has noticed - putting a blogging facility into Sharepoint 2007.

Also they want to have a say in developing more flexible taxonomies than the ones that they feel are foisted on them by IT departments that aren’t lawyers and don’t always bear reality to what and how they work.

Always remember, the technology is there to help people with their day to day work and that without the people getting involved - you end up with an expensive white elephant.

E-mail Collaboration vs Wiki Collaboration.

2008-03-30T15:52:00.002Z

As many of my readers know, I am interested in how wikis can help us to collaborate and as a picture can say a thousand words, I thought that I’d share this diagram as used by Chris Rasmussen but picked up on via Jim McGee.

Serendipitously on the day that I picked this up a work colleague came and asked for my help in trying to pick through a wade of e-mails to try and ensure that he had not missed anything in respect of the requirements for a piece of work he was undertaking.

Well about 90 minutes later after reading through a blizzard of papers I had actually bottomed out the request. After about 30 minutes I was looking at this picture and wishing that someone had used a wiki in this instance. There have been a few times ie when working on a conference, that I have also thought about the wiki way.

However although the diagram makes it look easy, I think for a lot of senior managers it would take a leap of thought for them to move to using a wiki wedded as we are to e-mail.

Also a lot of firms don’t have RSS feeds as they are still using IE 6 and would have to put a specific watch on the page which means that you get an e-mail caught up in all the detritus of other e-mails – an interesting one would be if it linked up to something like Twitter in an enterprise setting so that the post would generate a twittergram. alternatively have a discussion with your IT department about using safari for Windows or Firefox - both excellent browsers with inbuilt RSS readers.

I'd also like to think that organisations might have two uses for wikis - one for collaboration and one for knowledge management - one to look at for the future.

Social Bookmarking - a easy to understand video

2008-03-24T20:19:00.000Z

From time to time in this blog I've used Lee Lefevers excellent animations at Commoncraft to get over to people some of the basic principles of social bookmarking. I've used it now for the best part of 24 months and use this instead of book marks on my own web browsers. If you were like me a novice at social bookmarking, then this is a very good primer.

For me I can definitely see this having a use within a Enterprise setting - imagine that you have a skills based community covering an issue. There are no doubt web sites that cover this issue and you can save these social bookmarks to a group using a tag. As an example I am a member of a Mac user group. A number of us have set up a group and lets call it WMUG. By using a tag called for:WMUG everyone who subscribes to that group can see what people have posted as a bookmark - how it has been tagged but of course you can also see what bookmarks they have as well as those that they are really interested in.

The tags are also useful as they utilise the language that people who are interested in a particular issue say macs will talk, such as Leopard, Finder, Dock, Stacks, Time Machine. This is what is known as a folksonomy and breaks away from a taxonomic structure and gets people to use the language of their issue or interest.

I'd like to see this tried to support a community of practice or whatever name your organisation calls it. once again it breaks through the rigidity of corporate intranets and allows people of a certain interest to share information that they have found on the net. I'm not decrying corporate intranets they do have a place within the organisation and maybe within the organisations own intranet, there are useful articles that can be tagged and shared within people within the organisation using a social bookmarking tool.

Enjoy the video and if you do share it, then ensure that you give Lee and Commoncraft the credit they deserve and consider how an easy social bookmarking might be used in your business

Innovation Insights - blast from the past.

2008-03-22T20:54:00.000Z

Over the weekend I was reading an article with Bill Campbell, who runs Intuit but prior to that was involved with Apple.

Two interviewers spoke to him recently for his thoughts on Innovation and as I’m on a bit of a roll here as I’m talking in a few weeks time on knowledge management and innovation in London so some additional quotes might be useful - but also it does chime in with what I’m talking about. Although the thrust of his discussion relates to Engineers some of his comments would cross boundaries. Quite a lot of his thoughts are already reflected in some of the work that I am looking to carry out in this firm.

With regard to innovation, he feels that it is important to provide people with time to work on things of their choosing that may be breakthrough thoughts that can replenish your business core. (I’ll be writing about core businesses another time.) These projects are then reviewed and evaluated and have the opportunity to become a mainstream product.

He acts iike a venture capitalist would act and wants people to come up with a basic business plan in terms of who is the product for, what do you think the market is likely to be. What will this do and how much of peoples behaviours will have to change. Effectively Campbell is operating what is known as a Schello screen with a Real/Win/Worth it bias - I have more details of this if people are interested.

He feels that it is important to give the’ crazy guys some stature and importance. He feels that if you start from that you have a better chance of maintaining a cutlture of innovation.

He also feels that it is important for a CEO to meet with people and have an open forum where people could highlight what was making life difficult for them with regasrd to their work or what they were struggling with and how projects that might be being balked could be bought forward. The important thing is that the innovation should be looking to solve the problems that consumers/clients want.

Campbell then goes out of his way to say that he is not an innovator - he sees his role as CEO to ensure that the right people are in the room and that the crazies have an opportunity to contribute. He sees empowered people having the opportunity to contribute is one of the single most important thing that you can have in a company.

He also expects that he needs to accept failure - if you demand perfection, then people are less likely to innovate because you cannot anticipate every nuance in a complex world.

As I learnt in my entrepreneurial studies most entrepreneurs deal with the imperfect idea and tweak it as they go along. Remember the great quote from Edison who spent ages trying to get the bulb to work and said to a friend who asked him why he had failed to develop the bulb.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.

He also feels that it is important to give people time off - especially if they have been working on a long or hard project to go and have some time off outside of their normal holiday and when they come back they are refreshed and can do the hard work. Also he feels that they can reflect on their experiences and pass those lessons on and use the break as a means of looking at a project with new eyes which means that they will do better work.

Campbell then goes on to say that in addition to innovation that he also pushes hard on best practices. He wants his employees to have a hunger to discover best practice so that in the absence of innovation there is the small tweak that will make the team/organisation more effective He gives high grades to people who know what is going on in their industry and can adapt quickly to meet the problems that clients have.

Effectively he is saying that technical excellence is a base but that it needs to be aligned with commercial knowledge - not only of the client but the industry drivers also.

It is an interesting article and is definitely going into my folder of articles covering innovation as it is one of my passions and one which knowledge management can help to deliver in a organisation.If you wish a copy, I will look to dig it out.

Dilbert and innovation

2008-03-18T07:25:00.001Z

One of the elements that brightens my day is looking at Dilbert. When I got home last night, there was a great cartoon for the day, which should be read in conjunction with my post of February 27th. How many times have you presented an idea to people in your team and then asked for feedback from them.

I have to admit I've been in a fair few meetings where this level of feedback shown to Dilbert has been given albeit in different words.

Maybe companies should impose the rule that Unilever did which was to encourage 'Build' i.e build on what people have said rather than looking at the negative.

My personal idea is that for every negative comment a person has to come up with three positives about an idea. A more positive approach to new ideas at least makes the person feel as if they have had a hearing rather than discover the soul sapping comments that make you feel thin inside.

I'm sure all of us can relate to Dilbert's experience at one time or another but wouldn't it be nice if it was the exception rather than the norm in an organisation.

Twitter and the enterprise

2008-03-15T19:45:00.003Z

As regular readers of the blog will be aware, I have a regular link to the people of Commoncraft and their useful videos/animations that explain wittily some of the products involved in Web 2.0.

Well they have now done a video on twitter which is a form of micro-blogging. It basically asks people what they are doing now in 140 words.

I have been using Twitter now for about 4 months and use it to update friends what I'm up to. I'm also interested in what it might do within an enterprise setting. Imagine, what it might do - telling people where you are - if you are available to be disturbed or not or even if you are out of the office. Of course it might be of use to help you to connect to a group of people.

Jevon McDonald has recently commented on Twitter in the Enterprise and I've got doubts that at present it will work in enterprises that have only just started to implement wikis and blogs.

At the end of the day it is about demonstrating how a tool helps productivity. I think that a variant of it will exist in the enterprise and will become ubiquitous and that the I'm out of office message via Outlook will be somewhat outdated. Here are some other benefits to my mind

If you state that you are working on a widget, then colleagues in your network may be able to help
You could post a help message to your network.
Awareness of others ongoing work
Very low barriers to entry
The system might be able to save these tweets and rank the questions and answers in a form of low tech knowledge management. I understand that IBM is developing an enterprise Twitter called Blue Twit which is getting some traction though it is in it's early days.

However, a bit like SMS and Novocaine the law of unintended consequences will apply and someone will think of a different but radical use that none of us who are keen on KM or E 2.0 have yet considered

Innovation is super fragile. It’s very easy to kill

2008-02-27T13:06:00.000Z

This is my 150th post in nearly two years of blogging - never thought I'd have so much to put down in this blog - but the world moves and I like to capture peoples ideas and add my own thoughts.

Reading through one of the blogs from Luke Naismith, he has asked people to come up with known innovation killers.

I do recognise that managers are busy people who have time and budgetary constraints to deal with and don’t always have the time to consider the good idea that some one in their team has worked on.

I’m fortunate as a lot of my ideas in my working life have been taken up though not always immediately, though I’ve been though my career all the stages in the cartoon above.

I was reading an interesting article by one of my old professors Michael West at Aston University in Birmingham.

He highlighted what Machiavelli wrote in ‘Il Principe’ that innovators face a perilous journey because they face opposition from those that have a vested interest in the status quo and only lukewarm support until it has been proved by people experiencing the innovation. The danger of being a pioneer sometimes is that you end up like in the Wild west with a lot of arrows in your back.

He also highlights research that there is a large body of research shows’ that individuals alone generate more ideas at least as good as groups working together. The best way rather than having a brainstorm session is 'to have individuals work silently on this for a few moment and then to have everyone share their ideas together – with the leader speaking last’ This avoids the leader framing the issue for the rest of the group especially subordinates.

Marshall McLuhan once said: “In big industry new ideas are invited to rear their heads so they can be clobbered at once. The idea department of a big firm is a sort of lab for isolating dangerous viruses.”

The usual idea killers that I’ve heard are

‘It’s an interesting idea but…… then with 5 compelling and plausible reasons why one should delay in a manner that would make Sir Humphrey of Yes Minister fame purr with pleasure.

We don’t think that our clients will think this is something our firm should be doing

and my personal favourite

‘Haven’t you got enough to do in the day’

Perhaps one day we can change the discipline when an innovation is discussed to say Yes and….. and build up the idea so that it is explored and developed before approval or rejection. Another useful technique is to use ‘ How to’ questions.

Ideas are fragile creatures and managers need to work to find ways to allow people to explore either individually (or if they feel the need a team) but also to provide a platform so that that idea can be exploited. People too are fragile and need to feel that if an idea has been rejected they need to know the rationale why, not to give up, and that future ideas are welcome.

Otherwise they tend not to use what you have employed them for – their brains, vision and skill and can become de-motivated individuals.

Facebook for the Enterprise

2008-02-21T19:47:00.001Z

One of the things that I've been interestingly watching for is a company that can deliver a Face book style system behind the enterprise firewall.

Well I was reading Macworld Uk on the net this evening - click on the title of the is post for the link to the article.

The article highlights work undertaken by a company called Work Light in the US in delivering this for a price of 10 Euros per user per month.

WorkLight said that the application would allow employees to use Facebook to find colleagues by name, location, department, project and area of expertise, while allowing them to collaborate securely with peers using familiar Facebook capabilities. According to the company, WorkBook would also allow users see general and personalised company news direct from a Facebook news feed, and lets users create groups around shared interest areas and work-related projects.

More importantly, WorkBook provides compliance with existing security policies - enterprise security integration authenticates WorkBook users via corporate authentication facilities, enforces access control policies and supports Single Sign-On (SSO).

From my experience a number of firms intranet sites offer a lot of these so it will be interesting to see what the USP apart from a Facebook style interface it can offer an organisation. If it allows people to create these very easily with one click and also get involved in a talent market like Linkedin for the Enterprise, then this could be very interesting. Something for me to browse over and have a look at to see whether there is anything of interest to take this issue forward.

I do think that intranets do need to change to match the flexibility of some Web 2.0 applications otherwise their end users will find other applications that help them do their work easier and with minimum set up time. My consideration is that widgets iGoogle and NetVibes will all leach into the organisation.

When I first started looking at the Internet in 1997 employers saw it as a danger - but in the end they saw the benefits - at the end of the day, this revolution will occur and the question is do you start to ride the wave now or wait until it overwhelms you.

Yes there will be internet goofing - but there will also be the opportunities to develop communities of interest that might coalesce people about a range of interests and bring them into the spheres of people they might never have talked to across the organisation be it UK based or global.

The 6 minute approach to Knowledge Management!!

2008-02-21T07:44:00.000Z

I knew that I needed a new approach to knowledge management and now German Scientists at the University of Dusseldorf have given me one - looking at the BBC web site this morning.

It highlights that a 6 minute cat nap can launch memory processing in the brain. Apparently they did a test on students to remember a set of words then given a hours break before testing – some were allowed to sleep for six minutes the rest kept awake.

So if you pass my desk and I’m sitting there with my eyes shut – just think I could be trying out a new form of knowledge management and not really asleep – but can you tell the difference……

The talent powered organisation

2008-02-20T23:13:00.000Z

This is quite a long post to make up for my recent lack of posting

An interesting little hand out by Accenture about the talent powered organisation which highlighted that the key to winning on talent is multiplication and not addition. I have been interested in this area of talent management hence my reading of posts that cover this subject.

Accenture like everyone else has recognised that talent in the future will become an organisations most important competitive asset.. They consider that companies who truly seek to become talent powered organisations will need to build a capability called talent multiplication.

I always love it when consulting firms consider that they have re-invented the wheel and sell an idea to companies at of course reasonable fees. If managers aren’t already doing this talent management and acting as T shaped managers i.e. driving the business forward and meeting their financial targets as well as acting as coaches of growth and learning, then I’d worry about the state of management development.

It highlights 4 specific capabilities

Defining talent

Defining your talent needs based on a clear understanding of key performance jobs and skills to meet the needs of the organisations future goals.

Leaders that articulate how talent creates value for the organisation

Then look to define these in to key competencies to help with either the development or recruitment of the talent needed.

Discovering talent

I do agree that companies need to be more innovative in the ways that they harness talent pools and may have to look outside their traditional local market to bring people in with the skills they have. Some people will look at the developing number of graduates being pumped out of especially India and China – but there has been some articles highlighting that further training is still required locally to bring them up to the required standard.

What is interesting is that HR departments (more on this later) should look at themselves as part of a value chain and look how they can improve their processes so that recruitment is a more speedy process.

Developing talent

Nothing new here – but the usual comment about the need to developing the capabilities of the employee linked in to the firms business needs. The interesting element is the speeding up of the process. I’ve been reading a paper last night by Chatti and Jarke on the future of e-learning and the failures of current learning management tools delivered via the PC or laptop – mainly because of the focus on content and technology. Though they consider that the use of Web 2.0 technologies might be the answer especially with the rise of social software which crucially as I’ve said for some time links people to people and especially through the use of wikis and blogs and the use of RSS allied to intelligent social search engines that build on user recommendations, reviews and filtering to locate quality resources.

I’d also like to see the option some time in the future to capture phone and video conferences so that these can be posted and utilised a la You Tube – basically little nuggets of information in a rich media format (something I was talking about in 1998 – but now a little closer to reality)

From having developed talent we move to

Deploying talent

No surprise here and it mentions the usual words about engaging the workforce to the organisations goals and it recognises as I have previously identified that these need to buy into peoples own personal & professional aspirations. Managers will have to become increasingly smart in the way that they develop systems that support talent markets. Line Managers and Supervisors will need to work harder in the appraisal process to ensure that agreed actions for improvement are followed through and ensuring that challenges that employees want to undertake are realised. I also consider that there will be a global internal organisational talent market where people identify projects they want to work on and will be rated on the skills experience and people management skills that they have bought to the team and receive ratings from the team leader on the spot rather than at an appraisal and even client comment.

Interestingly enough I was reading a post by Seth Godin on changing the name of Human Resources. A bit like Patrick McGoohan in ‘The Prisoner’ I am a man not a number and increasingly professional people will resent being known as a resource and some fungible commodity – I like to be seen as someone who is a professional and looks to add value to the process I’m not a natural resource like a tree.

He makes a suggestion that ties in with my earlier element of this post - i.e. Change the name of the department to Talent – some people might be cynical about this i.e. when this department went from personnel to HR.

However would the change of name to Talent change anything – possibly if you were the head of talent in your office, you understand that talent is becoming hard to find, difficult to manage and to retain. You may then look at the ways that you run your department and look at ways of reducing bureaucracy and liberating life for the talented knowledge workers that you have. As Godin concludes and I concur ‘Great companies want and need talent, but they have to work for it.’

Great questions at the end of a major project or bid

2008-02-11T19:41:00.000Z

Thank you to Matthew Homann at the non billable hour for capturing some of the great questions that you should try to capture at the end of every project.

I have made some alterations in respect of my own experiences but direct quotes via Matthew are in italics.

These are as follows:-

What was the outcome of this project?
What was good for our client about the outcome of this project?
What were the areas of improvement for myself and the team
What was the best part of the project?
What was the biggest pinch point in delivering this project?
What new abilities or knowledge have we learned from doing this project? (though see my point later in this post.)
What do we wish we had known when we started this project?
Briefly what were the 3 lessons of this project that other colleagues need to know? (I suggest taking 5 good lessons and 5 areas for improvement. - but don't make that an inflexible rule)

The important element to do is not to just file it away as part of some closed file but to share it - this could either be via a blog but ideally with a wiki style approach - so that people can add additional comments especially if you are doing a number of projects for the same client and want to capture points say about a clients preferences or key areas of concern or praise expressed on an issue.

I think though that it time is pressing then you can use these four steps which tries to cover all the points earlier - but still does not obviate the need to capture these in a electronically searchable format.

What were our intended results?
What were our actual results?
What caused our results?
What will we sustain/improve?

Interestingly though this article neglects the need for people to carry out a before taking action review which covers the following points that people should ideally carry out before carrying out a major project and to some extent a bid

This might then deliver an answer before the need to say - what things did we wish we had known before starting.

What are our intended results and measures?
What challenges can we anticipate?
What did we/others learn in similar situations? (hence searching a wiki)
What do we think will make the biggest difference to success ?

20 thoughts for a successful meeting

2008-02-08T14:20:00.000Z

I was reading the latest edition of Management Today last night and they had written down 10 ways to have a successful meeting.

I thought that I'd write down some of my thoughts just as a reminder to ensure that a meeting serves its purpose and runs smoothly.

Some of it is a bit Archangel Gabriel in desire - but if you aspire and do things in small chunks eventually you can eat an elephant......

Do your homework - read all position papers in advance of the meeting.
Write a bullet proof agenda. Don't be over ambitious - I've seen some agendas with 20 minutes to discuss a major strategic initiative. (See point 11 it may help) Stick to your agenda.
Know who your allies are.
Rehearse answers to awkward questions in advance.
Take the sado masochists approach to meetings - give everyone a fair crack of the whip.
If someone is quiet - ask them specifically for their view - especially if you know that they are an expert.
Keep your meeting moving.
Someone to take minutes.
Agree and be clear about the next steps
You are the ring meister - keep the lions in check.
Get people to do position papers and then invite comment - it tends to speed up the process.
When people come up with objections invite them to come up with two solutions.
Build on what people say - don't be an idea killer.
Leave people with a call to arms to take the matters forward.
Remember the curse of Yes - you may need to check in with people to ensure they are positively acting on decisions reached in the meeting.
People will agree a position in a meeting to conform to the will of the group - but all ready before they have walked out of the meeting they have already decided whether they will actively or passively support the initiative. (Have a look at my posts on the passive/aggressive organisation)
Be a person of character - execute what you have agreed to deliver on in the meetings - ensure you can pass the shaving mirror test every morning.
Ask what are we missing here - encourage people to take a deep dive at an issue.
In a teleconference - ask people to say their name first before starting a point or joining the discussion.
In a teleconference as for all meetings - people should be on time. (Punctuality is the politeness of princes my grandmother used to say).

One senior manager of my acquaintance allowed one minute for lateness and then locked the door and asked people to vote whether to let the late attendee enter. They tended to only do this once.

He felt that if they had to be at the Town Hall to collect a £1m cheque and had to be there by 10.00 they would break down doors - and felt that it was highly disrespectful to your work colleagues to keep them waiting more than a minute.

I think though that this is probably a bit draconian in terms of locking people out of a room even though it made the point somewhat vividly.

I'm sure that people have a number of tips that they might want to add to this post. Remember you may not be able to do these immediately - it is something to aspire to - remember Rome wasn't built in a day but it was built.

It's the end user!!

2008-02-04T19:36:00.000Z

I saw this post by Gaping Void (Image © Hugh McLeod - www.gapingvoid.com 2007.) and thought of this when talking about new technology and introducing into an enterprise.

The software has to help the user and it has to match what they want to help them achieve their day to day work. It is why I like to use wikis because they are easy to use and easy to set up as are blogs. However all the technology in the world is like Ozymandias's legs - useless unless people want to share with their colleagues which is a social and cultural way of life.

It’s about recognising that we now live in a world where we use knowledge and information on a daily basis and that sharing it should be front of mind — that is:

sharing ways of doing things
sharing best-practice and better practice
sharing information and where we found it
being collaborative rather than secretive

The main problem I've found is that most intranet's that I've seen are too top down and also aren't very easy to utilise on a day to day basis and from experience, if people want to use the technology, they will find a way to do it to help them achieve the four objectives above and will by pass technology that does not assist them.

Intranets as they are currently formulated don't seem to be the way forward to foster collaborative work especially if it is of a multi office approach.

When I was trialling an extranet back in 1999, it was sold to sceptical partners because it took me 45 minutes to set one up from scratch and it could be deployed in an emergency - quicker than going through an overly formal approach. At the end of the day any system should deliver on the following points to help the earlier 4 points be realised:-

serve the end user and deliver benefits to the business
be simple to set up.
take no more than 15 minutes to train someone to use the system.
be simple to use.
the ability to preview.
a three step process - write, preview and post.

Does your intranet or any other system that you are using in your enterprise deliver this and if not should you be working with your IT team to deliver systems that achieve this aim. Just some thoughts based on some experience.

Genchi Genbestsu Chinese Sages and Communities of practice

2008-02-01T22:06:00.000Z

A friend of mine sent in a piece that they picked up off another blog (sorry no link provided - but thank you Jim)

It relates to a chinese saying and as it approaches the Chinese new year, i thought that this was quite apposite.

Go to the People
Live with them
Learn from them,
Love them.

Start with what they know,
Build with what they have.
But with the best leaders
When the work is done
the task is accomplished
The people will say,
‘We have done this ourselves.’

This is a good thought to how an internal community of practice should work. Provide people with the tools either through a wiki or a blog, help them set it up provide them with a framework to capture knowledge, through storytelling etc, but also empower them to self explore and to come to realisations themselves and to internalise it.

I wass thinking about this and what I call the curious cat approach to management (yes I know what happens to curious cats) or as the Japanese call it genchi genbetsu which is to go and talk to people and go and observe the situation at first hand which helps you to define the problem and to hopefully refine the solution. It's not always possible but within COP's they are because they are closer to the problem and then able to design a solution.

i've always beleived that people when they have been involved and have a handle in designing the solution can reach that last line.

I'm planning to listen over the weekend to some recent downloads of podcasts from a few of the business schools so I plan to post some comments next week.

Gung Hei Fat Choy

Keeping experience in the organisation

2008-01-22T13:24:00.000Z

As highlighted on Friday's post

I was reading an article in the FT on how oil groups are scrambling around to retain experience within their organisation. Usually I put a link in to the article but as the FT is still subscription based tere doesn't seem much point.

It highlights work being undertaken at Chevron where it highlights that currently there aren't enough engineers to meet the needs of current work and a shortfall of 10- 15% by 2010.

It highlights that in the Energy industry - but I have from other conversations no doubt that it may affect other industries - that 50% of engineers there average age is 51 will be retiring around 2015. There will be some shortening of the knowledge gap by the influx of 5% of new entrants by 2010.

Firms are going to have to have a look at ways that they can retain these retiring engineers and more pertinently their experience - some firms are hiring them as consultants but other managers are looking at ways to retain these staff though phased retirement or offering flexible working hours or days.

We may be talking today about the credit crunch but as I have highlighted in other posts we ignore the retirement crunch at our peril.

Interestingly Herzbergs motivation theory has proved its efficacy in one quote in the article.

'Pay is not enough.. that alone is not going to get people to stay - employees want challenging jobs and a company that's culture is a large company with a small company feel.

My view is that companies need to be more innovative to distinguish itself from it's other competitors through rapid mentoring or by asking people to undertake work that will stretch them - not to breaking point but will rapidly develop their skills.

If you are an organisation with alumni are they utilised to help mentor people with some of the tricks of the trade. Or even more pertinently are you targeting other firms alumni who might be willing to sell their experience to you on a part time basis. However, the article does not highlight the probable need to ensure that they keep up to date and increase their experience levels with relevant knowledge.

Will your organisation have to look at other disciplines to fill in the jobs that need to be done.

It maybe that you will have to look to disaggregate your work using the new communications technolgy to let certain aspects of your work handled outside your organisation and then reviewed by yourselves as part of quality control. This is being done as most Lawyers know through Lovells innovation of using the 'Mexican Wave' to handle Prudential's property portfolio and this is probably spreading through other industries.

I have had a beleif for a long time that the manager of the future whilst being a strategist also needs to act as a coach of growth and learning - what Hansen calls a T shaped manager.

I conclude with a quote from Ross Dawson who says

' Almost all economic growth will come from talent. As the economy shifts to the intangible, everything that has value – knowledge, ideas, innovation, content, expertise, effective strategic positioning – comes from talented people.'

The Japanese have senseis but also for their top masters they are designated as living national treasures - so who are your people in your organisation who match that moniker.

Some up coming thoughts

2008-01-18T10:42:00.000Z

It's a bit slow on the blogging front as my wife is in hospital and in between work and visiting her has left me little time to post this week. However beeen reading some interesting articles from Ross Dawson and Sheila McNulty on talent within organisations throughout the generations that I may be able to post over the weekend.

Also been doing some work on wikis that I may post on and it will be interesting to see if the web 2.0 rhetoric matches the reality of wikis within the enterprise.

I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate

2008-01-15T13:19:00.000Z

Just from my browsing of other web sites - spotted a useful download courtesy of the International Institute for Communication and Development and a hat tip to Lucie Lamoureux for spotting it and making it available.

The download is available by clicking on the title of this post.

It is a collection of articles based on the experiences of non governmental organisations and howe they have used technology to encourage collaboration. They are using tools i have heard of such as delicious but also some tools like Moodle that I haven't.

If you do download, this please remember to give a hat tip to the person who found it first. Just remember that altruism as I have posted before is often reciprocated.

The War for Talent - an update (long post)

2008-01-10T20:01:00.000Z

In 1997 McKinseys undertook a study and released the findings called ‘The War for Talent’ Well, ten years later they have revisited the subject and I thought that it might be useful to summarise some of the findings. As in 1997 most of them are ‘unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.’

The problem hasn’t gone away, in fact it has got worse because of demographics and a question mark of the talent in some of the BRIC countries and other emerging markets. In addition globalisation and the rise of the knowledge worker have forced this issue up the managerial agenda.

A recent survey by McKinseys highlighted that for 50% of global business leaders this was likely to be the single most managerial preoccupation for the remainder of this decade.

Although some progress has been made, the article highlights that for too many organisations, ‘talent management is dismissed ‘as a short term tactical problem rather than an integral part of a long term business strategy’

One of the main reasons is that managers aren’t ‘rewarded’ for their efforts in developing this side of their business (just like knowledge management also) In a number of respects, as I have highlighted earlier, it is that sometimes talent management is seen as cultivating the ‘A’ players and not as DeLong et al in a HBR article in 2003 recommended, also looking to set up your B players.

(Interestingly De Long has a section in this months HBR on Leadership and Strategy covering how mentoring employees can also deliver success in developing talent - intriguingly he highlights that the same amount of time given to a B player as an A player goes just as far.) Once I have read the article, then I shall comment on it in more detail.

Top talent in a firm is not restricted to just you’re A players – you need to manage the vital many who can be alienated by an exclusive focus on high flyers. As McKinsey highlights it picks up on how the knowledge management use of internal networks can improve the effectiveness of top talent by being part of a vibrant internal network covering a range of skills and issues. As we have known since Hawthorne in the 1930’s, performance can suffer when social networks either constrict or are absent.

Interestingly HR professionals at multinational companies highlight that candidates for engineering and general management positions exhibit wide variations in suitability. Poor language skills esp in English, and doubts about the validity of educational qualifications were amongst two of the reasons most widely cited. Another concern is the lack of executives willing and able to work abroad but also talented local people with an international mind set but who can understand local ways and local consumers.

So what are the top 7 obstacles to good talent management by % of respondents?

Senior Managers don’t spend enough high quality of time on talent management 59%
Organisation is siloed and does not encourage constructive collaboration sharing of resources 48%
Line Managers are not sufficiently committed to development of people’s capabilities and careers. 45%

Line Managers are unwilling to differentiate their people as top, average and underperformers. 40%
CEO’s, senior leaders are not sufficiently involved in shaping talent management strategy. 39%
Senior Leaders do not align talent management strategy with business strategy. 37%

Line Managers do not address underperformance effectively even when chronic 37%

However I think that McKinsey’s biggest criticism is levelled at executives, the declining impact of HR departments leading to talented managers wanting to avoid working in this area of an enterprise; thus restricting the business knowledge in the HR team and that some HR managers are seen as administrators rather than aids in contemplating and producing proposals on this issue.

The biggest gap of 33% points between HR professional and line managers is ‘HR lacks capabilities to develop talent strategies aligned with business objectives. However the more interesting one to my mind is the 28% gap where HR is not held accountable for the success or failure of talent management initiatives.

Executives as mentioned earlier tend to have a short term view and ‘treat talent as a knee jerk manner hiring additional people ‘ say when a new product takes off.

Also from an accountancy view point investment in talent tends to be an expense rather than being capitalised – and therefore when say there is a downturn in the economy companies cut discretionary expenditure on training their people. As the article cites this can lead to a vicious spiral ‘a lack of talent blocks corporate growth, creating additional performance pressures that divert the attention and thinking of executives towards the short term’

So what does the article suggest as a remedy?

Develop a number of value propositions – currently a lot of companies do utilise a VP however it tends to be one only. Basically the writers recommend that as in marketing so the VP for different segments of the work force is different. As I have pointed out in earlier posts, the lifestyle choices of Gen Y is different from those of Generation X as well as different cultures and the article concludes that a one size fits all proposition won't work especially in global companies.

It also suggests bolstering HR and move it away from being an administrative backwater just developing and implementing standard processes i.e. recruitment, training and compensation. Some heads of HR are perceived as being distant from the shop floor and not knowing where the talent is.

I’m not sure that this is the best approach as I think that this is likely to be an abdication for senior management of one of their core roles. Larry Bossidy who worked at GE – feels that one of the core responsibilities of any manager is to develop the talent around them.

This needs to be a deep conviction amongst managers to avoid the lure of short term pressures and maybe look to spend 20 to 30% of their time developing the capabilities of their team and developing the leaders of the future. HR can help in developing this but at the end of the day managers need to commit to the future of their companies by developing the future.

However they could be supported by an HR team who were held accountable for helping devise and implement the success of talent management initiatives. Perhaps though companies need to consider whether as they do in Japan that a stint in the HR team should be part of a manager’s rotation so that both parties benefit from the input.

It’s a long post and one of my first of the New Year but I do believe that talent and knowledge management are two of the key managerial issues that will help organisations primarily survive but also as an engine of growth for their businesses.

Taking a break

2007-12-23T21:47:00.000Z

As it is coming up to Xmas, I'm planning to take a break from blogging - partly to have time for family and friends over the Xmas break but also because I want to just take a step back for the time being as I settle in to my new job. However I will be posting from around the 3rd week in January when I've taken some time to read up on a few things.

To all my readers both near and far - can I wish you all a happy Xmas and a happy 2008.

Imroving your system design

2007-12-17T20:41:00.000Z

The excellent Matt Hodgson has an excellent post over the weekend on system design. I’ve cut and pasted it in directly as an aide memoire to myself. A number of them such as Content is King I have highlighted and utilised in other organisations. I’d also like to combine this with McAfees SLATES mnemonic which he developed in terms of Web 2.0 applications. These two elements combined don’t make a bad framework to help increase the usability of a system and improve the satisfaction levels of the end user. At the end of the day – be it intranet, CRM internet site the system has to help the user do their job better and quicker and be a pleasurable experience – otherwise your users will slowly ebb away.

Here’s Matt’s Top 10 list.

1. Know your users: Take time to understand the people who are going to use the system, whether its a website or application.

2. Content is King: Design features and content specifically for your users, not for yourself.

3. Make it logical: The organisation of information and how the navigation works has to be logical to those who will use it.

4. Be consistent: Don’t make people constantly adapt to changes layout, language and navigation paradigms — it makes learning about and using the system very confusing.

5. Make it simple: Using systems should require as little mental effort as possible — there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to get the job done and having to work hard to remember how a system works at the same time.

6. Plain English please!: Do the terms and language used in the system make sense to the people who will use it? Don’t make them learn a whole new vocabulary with words that mean one thing to them but another thing when used in the system. Avoid legalese, bureaucratese and organisational jargon.

7. Make the information scanable: Information should be laid out on the screen so that it has a logical flow for the eye. Don’t make people have to remember that one piece of important information is here, while another piece is somewhere else. Similar pieces of information should be as closely associated as possible.

8. Navigation redundancy: People all think about information in different ways, mostly through association rather than categorisation. This means that you need to provide multiple ways of discovering information — and this doesn’t just mean browse and search. If you use taxonomy, make sure information can go in multiple categories, and complement it with a folksonomy.

9. Design by convention: People have an expectation of how systems and their components will work based on previous experience of other systems. This means you need to make your design comply with those design expectations — banners, navigation, search, login, and even cart features all need to appear according to existing design conventions. This doesn’t mean you can’t innovate — just know what your users expect and make it easy for them to learn your system.

10. Make the design clear: This will help people avoid making mistakes when they use your system. Help them recover from errors through providing consistent messaging in the interface itself.

Polling on your blog

2007-12-16T19:38:00.000Z

Thanks to Arjun Thomas for this useful link also need to take my mind over Liverpool's defeat to Manchester United this afternoon.

I believe that blogs will develop some increasing forms of connectivity during 2008 – rather than just people commenting on your posts. A company called Vizu has developed a way to insert a simple poll in to your blog – to answer say a simple question and range of answers.

However, I can see a number of possible internal applications as firms start to develop blogs internally. Imagine if you have a chief executive blog and want to get a feel for a situation directly from the floor, then you can do so using this tool.

I will be experimenting with this tool in the New Year just to get some feedback and to try it to increase the links that I have with subscribers and readers to this blog.

Here is the link Vizu Web Polls

It is interesting that in 2007 that blogs are 10 years old – however it is really only in the last 18 months that blogs have started to take off in an enterprise setting. I think that this is a trend that will accelerate during 2008.

I prefer blogs as I consider that for project based work that you find more useful work-related conversations on a single work blog than you do on the whole of Facebook and that increasingly you and your work colleagues both within the business and with your external clients will network and do business on blogs every day.

Blogging I consider is the most successful and relevant Web 2.0 network, more so than wikis because of its ease of use and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

A collection of Ideas in 2007

2007-12-13T13:12:00.000Z

As an on line subscriber, I read the New York Times to pick up ideas and trends from over the Atlantic

In my review on Tuesday night, I found the link to the annual New York times looking at the last year in terms of ideas.

Some of them are strange some of them thought provoking. If you click on the title of this blog - then it will take you right there.

If you want a good read for what might occur in 2008 - I can strongly recommend a publication by the Economist called "The World in 2008" I've got all the editions for the last 10 years - as occasionally I like to flick backwards and forwards to see if there is an idea that got lost whose time might have come.

Anyway enjoy.

Blogs made simple

2007-12-10T19:27:00.000Z

A question that I've been asked from time to time - is what is a blog and how can I use it.
Here is a useful You Tube video from the excellent Commoncraft (hat tip also to Doug Cornelius at KM Space - congrats on your new arrival).

A number of organisations now use blogs within the enterprise setting and as I posted last year the new Microsoft Sharepoint Server software 2007 has blogs as well as wikis inbuilt. I can imagine blogs being used for a variety of things - working on a project, working with a virtual team as well as utilising it for in house communities of practice. I've also discussed utilising them as a means of capturing lessons at the end of a project. I'm also placing a link in to a post I made last September on this subject so if you'd like to be encouraged then click on the link below

Thoughts on the uses for an internal blog

One firm that I worked with started to get experts in a particular field blogging and they enhanced their profile in the firm because they started to write a blog and the viral marketing effect took over and more people in their group subscribed to their blog as a source of knowledge that captured the human element.

It would be interesting to find out some innovative ways that blogs have been used within enterprises, but also for people to start to think laterally how this might be used in their enterprise.

Demographics in China

2007-12-09T18:02:00.000Z

Not always the best of writers last week or so, due to feeling a bit under the weather Xmas preparations, visitors etc etc, but back to my theme of demographics.

One area that is sometimes overlooked is China and the results of its one child policy that started in 1979. Well it is now over a quarter of a century old and this means that they will slowly be starting to leave the nest either to move to the cities. This means that the phenomenon of empty nesters that tends to kick in later in the UK as we tend to have the statistical 2.2 children is now starting to develop in China at a younger age - and more importantly at a younger working age.

So what does this mean to a rapidly developing country like China? Well according to the Economist, already there are 265 m Chinese aged between 40 to 64 with no dependent children. By the end of 2008 that will have risen by another 7m and by another 50 m over a ten year period.

This means that that for these empty nesters if mothers return to work will mean a large rise in disposable income. Already most of this group have basic household appliances washing machines fridges etc.

Some analysts believe (probably using Maslow’s hierarchy of needs no doubt) that there will be a rise in spending on premium products but also following on from the Japanese experience, they will want to travel a lot more probably initially in China but increasingly overseas. This of course is predicated that China’s economy continues to grow at the same pace and that there are jobs for everyone at the right level of expectations. There may also be cultural norms that the article doesn't consider that may also reduce the rate of growth.

This may mean more work designing hotels or increasing infrastructure investments to cope with some of these new migratory habits. It may also mean new cities that are environmentally neutral as the eco-city being built in Dongtan. Could we start to see China as we have in Dubai creating off shore islands close to cities for people to live in once their children have moved out?

An old article revisited on wikis

2007-12-05T21:47:00.000Z

I am a big fan of Commoncraft who do excellent small movies to explain technology to dummies like myself. I was browsing through some of my old posts and as I was asked about a wiki - thought that I would repost this useful video of what is a wiki.

I'm a big fan of wikis to use on small scale projects and feel that they can assist with the creation of a high performance workplace by improving communication and also because as I have cited before, these will be part of the IT plumbing. The main issue for me that it isn't that the plumbing is there people have to be shown how to use it but also understand some of the more advanced functionality to get the benefit.

I was talking to an old colleague the other day and he advised me that he was talking to an IT manager who had found by accident that younger employees where using a wiki that was hosted externally to the organisation because the firm had not allowed them to trial an in house wiki. By encouraging people to link people start networking internally and can aid each other as well as tapping in to and learning new knowledge.

Anyway I hope that if you haven't used a wiki, this will encourage you to try. If enough people reply then maybe there is someway we could trial a wiki on a KM subject or anything else that takes your fancy.

Which company goes there - Friend or Froe

2007-11-28T20:58:00.000Z

Last week I was reading an article in the FT who were interviewing Martin Sorrell CEO of WPP. He highlighted the potential growth of China - one statistic really stood out. The US produces 56k engineers per year whilst China produces 465k.

As Ive posited in a number of previous posts Sorrell identified a paradox - there is a vast oversupply of products, whilst because of demographics there is a distinct and worsening shortage of talent to provide companies with the brain force that they are likely to need.

Basically companies will be pressuring their governments in my opinion to be encouraging immigration of talented engineers for example from other countries to fill in the gaps in their talent base.

In a post from Bill Taylor from HBR highlights another interesting comment by Sorrell where he talks about the competitive dynamic between marketing firms such as WPP and digital giants like Google.

He has coined the concept of froes and frenemies. Sometimes firms need to be both friends and foes/enemies. Occasionally companies have to be nice to companies one minute in say another part of the world whilst being competitive enemies in another part of the world.

Taylor concludes by asking companies "who is their most valuable froe and who are your most worrisome frenemies. Have you figured out how to co-operate with and compete against the most important players in your field. "

Old certainties are breaking down and the business environment changes in the globalised world. It's a bit like 1984 where Winston Smith rewrites history so that Eastasia are now our friends and Eurasia are now our enemies in the world of friends and froes.

Thoughts on Gary Hamel (long post)

2007-11-28T07:55:00.000Z

I’ve recently been reading excerpts from Gary Hamel’s recent book on the future of Management Hamel is one of the leading guru’s on management and strategy his book Competing for the Future was a staple on a few MBA courses – mine included.

His star had waned a little recently as he lauded the Enron model to the skies. He is always a writer who is thought provoking and he argues his thesis well and he does so in this book.

His basic premise is that the current managerial practices were designed for companies that provided standardised, mass produced outputs and that they need a complete re jig rather than trying to reverse engineer them into today’s companies in an era of globalisation and increasing technological and generational change. I think that there is a role for both systems as not everything is bad and that there is an equilibrium position which balances both.

The new business environment needs to place a premium on collaboration and talent management and the old hierarchical system can be an impediment to innovation and creative strategy. I think that organisations will be challenged to deliver change for which we have imperfect knowledge. They will need to become nimble and mobilise the energy and imagination of every employee who works there.

I think that innovation can come from any employee and that individuals or even teams should look for opportunities to experiment with new ways of working and that progressive firms might want to provide not only time but some IT support and seed corn money to help employees develop the products that make a difference to the way that your organisation innovates.

I think also that using my knowledge management beliefs that social capital and utilising teams of practice might act as useful seedbeds to innovation either of the incremental but also of kaikaku – the radical leap forward..

I’m presuming that Hamel still however believes that organisations need to look outside their boundaries to see the future of their business and to ask themselves as do P & G

I also consider that employees need some basic framework to help them become a business innovator and that appraisals in the future might see a manager appraised as to how they encouraged intrapreneurship in their organisation but also how teams/individuals are appraised in this area also.

Hamel considers that managers in the future will have to ask themselves this question. ‘How do you build an organisation that merits the gifts of creativity, passion and initiative?’ These are things that employees bring to work and cannot be commanded to come forth by managerial diktat.

This follows the work of Tom Davenport who in ‘Thinking for a Living’ highlights that the knowledge worker of the future won’t put up with an overtly hierarchical management model as they don’t need it. This sounds very similar to the thoughts that came out around the concept of free agency and the work of Bill Jensen on Work 2.0 that disappeared as a concept when the internet boom turned to bust and P45’s and the need for a job punctured that particular bubble.

Perhaps as the credit crunch leads to recession this idea might die again as people look to hold on to their jobs – however the demographic issues that I’ve talked about in the past might mean that the knowledge worker will break free of the classic approach of hierarchical managers to oversee that work is done.

A problem with Hamel’s book is that the large proportion of his examples come from internet firms and as these do not have the legacy barnacles that a large organisation has there may be some scepticism that to do the plumbing needed in a large organisation to move his future forward would be more difficult..

For some organisations it might well take a crisis to provoke the change that is needed. However I do agree that this is unlikely to be overnight phenomena and that the need to be creative against the need to be organised might be one of the key managerial areas over the next 10 to 15 years.

It is an ambitious book but one that managers should read and consider in their Xmas stockings

The Gallivespians go live

2007-11-27T22:52:00.000Z

Didn’t post over the weekend – as I was busy not only with Xmas shopping, but also watching the Boks beat Wales up without slipping out of first gear.

I shall be interested to see how they play when it is an exhibition match – I think that people will be surprised how skilful they are in their back line.

Anyway I digress I was watching this evening the news about the launch of ‘The Golden Compass’ which is the film adaptation of Phillip Pullman’s book ‘Northern Lights’.

At the time I was browsing through an old copy of the Economist which highlighted work on unmanned automotive vehicles that are now the size of dragon flies and its eyes are effectively video cameras.

I was reminded of the Gallivespians who are a tiny race of people who appear in parts two and three of the trilogy and who ride dragon flies and act as spies for Lord Asriel.

Laboratories are developing these bug like devices with some as small as 60 milligrams.

I can imagine applications for this but also civil liberty concerns. Amazing how life imitates art. Or is it time to invest in a fly swat.

A longer post tomorrow on my readings on Gary Hamel.

Lessons from Japan and Generation Why

2007-11-19T19:00:00.000Z

As readers of this column will be aware, I am particularly interested in demographics and it's effect on the workforce of the future. I was browsing the BBC website at lunchtime and noticed a piece about Japan and it's demographic time bomb.

Here is the link to the full article

Effectively the Japanese are not producing enough babies to replace those people who die and this will have increasing economic effects for the population - the rise of grey power, and employers chasing fewer and fewer potential workers.

To show it graphically here is a diagram showing what has happened since 1950 and what is projected to happen by 2050

The problem has also been the same in Europe especially in Germany and Italy though not on the scale of Japan.

In my inbox tonight was an interesting piece from the US from Chris Resto about the rise of Generation Why. As I've highlighted in earlier posts they have a different view of the workplace and are more questioning and less deferential than the Baby Boom generation (1945 - 64 and Generation X (1964 - 1984).

This generation though as the article points out may be a blessing for organisations that require knowledge workers. I consider that organisations need people who question the status quo and increasingly innovative solutions are likely to become competitive differentiators.

In fact, as Resto highlights organisations should |" see questions from young employees as signs that they care about contributing to the organisation, and as opportunities to capitalise on the ambition, energy, and enthusiasm for which they hired young talent in the first place."

One of the areas that I learnt from my studies in KM was that management can learn from the process as they are exposed to new ideas and they consider and make redundant old ways of thinking.

I'm not saying that every thing that a senior manager has learnt should be unlearnt but that that junior who asks questions might provide you with some breakthrough thinking that gives you your next big market. You can also highlight to the junior employee some additional thinking that they might not have considered. At the end of the day knowledge sharing is a two way street.

It also shows that they care about your company and it's future to ask those questions and potentially out of a desire to do a good job (but then again I was always a Theory Y guy and the firm I work for certainly embodies those traits.)

Lack of postings started a new job

2007-11-12T19:18:00.000Z

I've not been blogging last week because I've been busy in my new job with a world class organisation called Arup working as their new Global Rail Business Manager.

For me this is a change from being involved purely in knowledge management but no doubt, I will be using some of the elements that I've learned on Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management to help them forward. Though already I have seen areas where knowledge management is being successfully being deployed working on the people, process technology triangle.

As usual I've been reading some of my blogs and especially note that Enterprise 2.0 is continuing to develop. Ross Dawson is speaking in Australia at the IIR conference covering why organisations need to be developing E 2.0 solutions. It is interesting to note that he considers as I do that e-mail is broken in terms of developing collaborative networks.

Here he gives a brief intro to E 2.0 which is useful for those mangers who may not be fully aware of this area.

I hope to be posting at least two times a week in the future but as you will appreciate with any new job it does take time to get up to speed and a lot of things to understand before starting your new role.

I'm particularly interested in a recent article by Andrew McAfee in which he resurrects the concept of Granovetters weak ties in terms of KM.

I quoted Granovetter in my thesis and worked to prove that this was the case in the professional services organisation I studied. However I believe that a weak tie in an organisational setting used to be a tie where there was trust and shared knowledge but in addition the people had met before.

If you take out that meeting element then I think that it is a weaker than weak tie.

They (WTW) do have their uses and some can deliver real value but only if you aspire more than to be a link in somebodies contact book. I consider that in KM you have to have had that stronger contact.

Anyway back to the reading.

Microsoft & Facebook - some thoughts

2007-11-01T10:10:00.000Z

This obviously has been one of the talks of the week - in terms of Microsoft buying a very small stake in Facebook (1.6%).

I think that in the next iteration of Sharepoint for enterprises, I won't be too surprised to see something I started advocating 2 years ago - ie a personal web site within an enterprise and for people within enterprises to set up their own communities of practice covering an area of interest be it work or socially related.

I read a quote in Doug Cornelius's blog from Stephen Collins who said

Through use of social media tools, people who work around the corner or across the world from each other are able to overcome the challenges around meeting and learning about someone (colleague, friend, someone who shares an interest, whatever) and jump straight in and do great work, share knowledge, have engaging conversations and build relationships to a deeper level more quickly."

I do have ideas how this could be used throughout the employees life from induction, to appraisals to when they depart the firm - as I feel that tracking alumni of a firm is important in terms of retaining their knowledge

It will be interesting to see though whether at some stage Googles new social software site will link in with it's Google Apps to give people a way to do the same without the clammy embrace of Microsoft all over it.

I was reading a report yesterday that people outside of the teenage/20's range that started to use social networking are now starting to use MySpace and Facebook - the so called "Saga Book" for those in their 60's and beyond. One of the problems that I have discovered with new technology is people's fear of using it either dismissing it as a fad or saying that it has no work relevance. I didn't grow up in the computer age but I discovered by setting up small limited experiments in a non fail setting helped people who were wary come to terms with the new technology at a speed that they feel comfortable with.

If you are working in a large global concern then social media can help in breaking down barriers in that first meeting because they have put some personal information about them selves - ie they like Apple Computers or share a sports interest that you can build on and start to understand their thought processes.

Harvard Business Review - November Edition

2007-10-29T09:58:00.000Z

Just received my normal monthly subscription and have noticed that Dave Snowdon from the Cognitive Edge Blog has had a major article published that highlights the Cynefin Decision making framework.

I have read the summary and think that this is a must read as and when the hard copy magazine arrives especially as most managers today are finally realising the fuzziness of decision making.

However there is for me a more interesting article by Gratton and Erickson on the eight ways to build collaborative teams which I will also be studying and will provide a summary of in due course as it not only impinges on the knowledge sharing environment but also the innovative company. - so watch this space for some more details.

Anyway more later.....

Just taking a break

2007-10-25T14:06:00.000Z

A lot going on in the life at the moment, mother in law's birthday and a few odds and sods to catch up on, so I may not be posting for a few days. Plan to resume normal service by Monday of next week.