Mar 05
KM Treats in Hong Kong
The end of this month sees a tasty KM smorgasbord in Hong Kong, with KM greats Karl Wiig, Max Boisot and Dave Snowden among others (see the leaflet below). I’ll be helping to facilitate an interactive session on the early history of knowledge management (which apparently goes back to the mid 1960s and warrants a separate post). For more on the conference contact les.hales-at-knowledgeworks.com.hk . If you’re an iKMS member, ask for the HKKMS member rate.
Mar 04
KM Volunteers Needed!
The inaugural Youth Olympic Games will be held in Singapore 14-26 August 2010. You may not know, but there’s a lot of knowledge management involved in running major games like this – a country might host the games once in a generation, so won’t get the chance to build up experience. Learning and knowledge transfer between host countries is critical.
Even between events and venues in a single Games, learning has to be very fast. There’s only one chance to get things right. Any mistake should be made no more than once. This process starts on the ground itself, at every event that’s held. During August, every venue and every event will be conducting immediate after action reviews and collecting lessons learned for collation and analysis. So here’s an appeal for help to the Singapore KM community from Doreen Tan, Head of Knowledge Management for the Singapore Youth Olympic Games Organising Committee (SYOGOC):
“We are currently recruiting volunteers for our Games-Time KM Programme. This programme aims to collect and disseminate lessons learnt to workforce on a daily basis during Games Time (14 to 26 Aug 2010) so that there is continuous / just-in-time learning during the entire period. In order for the Programme to work, we would need to deploy volunteers to both competition and non-competition venues to help in the consolidation and ad-hoc facilitation of the AARs. It would be ideal if the volunteers had some knowledge of KM or are professionally involved in KM to some degree.”
Here are more details. Do help if you can! SYOGOC_KM_Volunteers.doc
Feb 11
Delightful MOMster
Exactly a week ago, the Ministry of Manpower‘s (MOM) intranet team jointly organised a session with the Information and Knowledge Management Society (iKMS) to share the former’s experience in revamping their corporate intranet. Here are my notes:
Feb 10
Knowledge Management Explained in Five Disciplines
We welcome Tim Wieringa as a guest blogger to Green Chameleon.
Since 1999, my work has been related to Knowledge Management (KM). Already then, KM was a term that was not well recognised; at the time, we did not label our KM-related consulting services with Knowledge Management. Today I am holding an official position in Knowledge Management, still many people do not grasp the term and have a clear understanding of it. “Knowledge Management” seems to be fuzzy and not specific enough; it does not refer to daily (work) life topics.
Feb 05
From Data, with Love
That most hallowed of mental models and glib explanations, the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom hierarchy has taken a bit of a beating this week. It started in an innocent enough way when, in a discussion about knowledge sharing and generation on the KM4Dev listserve, somebody cited the DIKW model as a way of describing how knowledge is generated in organisations. This provoked Dave Snowden into some sharp but illuminating posts (by the way, if you ever get bored and feel like doing some Dave-baiting, get yourself a false identity, sign up to one of the listserves he frequents, and make an enthusiastic post about DIKW, wisdom management, Six Sigma, Ayn Rand or KM certification - or any combination thereof):
“I would reject the DIKW pyramid, aside from the fact it’s just plain wrong, it’s difficult to explain and leads to bad labels. Better to think that KNOWLEDGE is the way we create INFORMATION from DATA. If we share knowledge then we can understand information.”
“Aside from being linked to a particular period of systems thinking approaches, which we are hopefully moving on from, its very culturally specific. It fails entirely to account of shamanistic knowledge, or the narrative traditions of Sufi philosophy and others. I could go on, but the you get the point; the DIKW pyramid is a culturally limited and inadequate model which has done more harm than good. The SECI model with its de facto focus on codification comes a close second, as I said the other day it’s the model that launched a thousand failed knowledge management initiatives. The main problem is its tendency to get people to think of knowledge as a thing rather than as a flow.”
Dave has posted in the past at greater length on DIKW here and here, and so have I.
However, one worried comment from a listserve member that DIKW was a “well-understood idea within the community” struck me, and prompted a further reply from me - because indeed this hierarchy is extremely well entrenched in the KM (and information science) literature. It’s about as sacred as a sacred cow can get. Why? And should that make it immune to attack posts?
Here’s my reply, slightly modified for a wider audience:
Feb 04
Well I’ll Be…..
What do you call a conference on Data Analysis, Data Quality and Metadata Management? Not the most obvious of acronyms… are they trying to communicate something? Find out here!
Feb 03
KM Method Cards in Good Company!
Nancy White has a great post sharing the different types of card decks she uses in facilitation. Our KM Method Cards are included, as are the IDEO Method Cards (come unexpected insights on how to use them), Arthur Shelley’s Organisational Zoo Cards the Corban & Blair story cards and others.
Jan 29
Where are the People in KM/IA?
Forrester have just put out an overview report on the challenges facing enterprise Information Architecture (it’s free, bless them, but you’ll need to have an account or register for a free one to get it). Quite apart from the solid way that they establish IA as part of a rigourous information management approach, it also casts surprising light on the world of knowledge management and why it’s so difficult: if you do a cut-and-replace between “IA” and “KM” you will get some engagingly good insights and ideas:
“It’s a political quagmire. [KM]IA discussions require a horizontal approach to traditionally vertically managed resources. On top of this, business areas tend to feel a strong sense of ownership of the data in their mission-critical applications, and they’re suspicious that any discussions about data usage with “outsiders” could lead to a loss of control.
A very good relationship between IT and the business is a prerequisite for [KM]IA. Overcoming the political difficulties is challenging enough; succeeding when there is a poor track record of communication and trust between IT and the business is even more unlikely.
[KM]IA can look like a boil-the-ocean effort. The data and content mess facing most large organizations is enormous, and any architects who consider getting the enterprise in order quickly recognizes that they will retire before the task can be completed — no matter how young they are.”
Read on in the report for some insightful advice about “street-level-strategy” building to address these challenges – just as good advice for KM as for IA.
There’s one big gap which is not addressed: take a look at the high level view of the enterprise information architecture (shown below) from the report.
What struck me was what was missing: where are the human beings in the framework? “Real” architects never show their models or visualisations without putting in stick figures to show how it works with people in them. Why don’t we? Apparently, this report, unabashedly technical in orientation, has ruffled a few feathers in the more human-oriented IA camps, not least for quoting a reference to them as “Web weenies”.
There’s a reason why user experience folks call themselves information architects, and they’re not going to be expelled from the academy because they don’t fit within a logical array. The parallels with KM sharpen this question for us as well: where does the interface with people’s desires, aspirations, frustrations and needs come into what we do? Where does it fit within our KM frameworks?
Thanks to Nick Berry for highlighting this via the TaxoCop forum.
Jan 22
Information Visualisation
I can’t remember how I happened across this post by Robert Kosara on “The State of Information Visualization” but it’s a good one – and here’s an interesting prediction:
“2010 might be the year of visualization theory. While our field is certainly an applied one, we still need a much deeper understanding of how it works and how to build better tools. There is some existing work, but much of that is old (Bertin’s work was published in the 1960s, Mackinlay’s almost 25 years ago, Shneiderman’s 13 years ago, Chi’s taxonomy almost ten years ago). The field is progressing and we are developing new tools that do not always fit the old molds. We are also gaining a better understanding of how things work, and we are seeing interesting new concepts from other fields. So an update of our theoretical foundations is really overdue now, and this year will hopefully be when it happens.”
Jan 21
Metadata for Movies
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the people who give out the Oscars) recently held a symposium on metadata for digital movies. It has an impressive array of speakers and should be required viewing for anyone grappling with metadata for broader digital asset management, not just movies. Appropriately, the video files are available as well as the presentations (though the videos will not hosted there forever, so download them while you can – why they don’t use a video hosting site where you can review the videos, I don’t know). Thanks to Seth via TaxoCop for this link.
