Jan 25
KM and the Bigger Picture
Waltraut Ritter has a scathing and important critique of KM in general and the MAKE awards in particular, taking some pot shots at some of the participating case studies at KM Asia 2011 in the process (scroll down to the 22 Nov entry).
“Knowledge management practices are often narrowly focusing on internal operations and not addressing larger questions about the nature and sustainability of the knowledge driving the organization. There seems to be a separation of KM from the overall business strategy, a general neglect of addressing the larger questions about an organization’s knowledge and how such knowledge may create societal value beyond a company’s financial gains.” She gives an interesting example from Mars, referring to the ingredients in their product Skittles: “Few of these ingredients have anything to do with real food, and one might argue that the industrial food industry contributes to decreasing knowledge about nutrition and food in society rather than contributing to informed decision-making on food. Could the organization use KM to establish a serious dialogue with customers? Develop ideas and products for a global, sustainable food production?”
Important and difficult questions, connected to the earliest visions of KM back in the 1960s. In 1967 L.K. Caldwell wrote an article for the Public Administration Review in which he asked how knowledge management could help ensure that “all relevant knowledge is brought to bear upon the problems that society needs to solve [...] At the very least, the manager of knowledge needs to discover what science can tell respecting trends or objectives that would be socially harmful.”
Dec 16
How does your organisation think about and share failure?
This talk has so many compelling parallels with KM.
Dec 12
Driving User Adoption for Enterprise Applications
The other day, I talked to a cloud solution provider about their deployment and change management methodologies. From my side, I was curious to see what experiences we can exchange with them, as since 3 years I am strongly involved to drive user adoption for our knowledge sharing platform.
I would like to briefly introduce two methods they have presented. You will see, these are very generic and can be applied in environments of any solutions provider. The first method is looking at how to tackle change and address new user behaviours:
Nov 16
Life As A Knowledge Worker
I was searching for a photo of Peter Drucker when I came across this 14-year-old article by him on the experiences that had shaped him. The third experience, where he talked about learning a new subject every 3 years, resonates with me. It reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about learning calligraphy in college, something that had no practical application at that time but which proved useful later in his life. It seems that not being able to see the usefulness of something should not preclude one from learning it. Last week, a client told me that she was going to attend a change management course in the US. My first reaction was to ask her how the course would be useful in her work. Next time, I shall be asking “What next?”.
Nov 10
Knowledge Sharing Activities in People’s Daily Work
In my previous entries and at many other locations we discussed that it would be significantly beneficial if knowledge sharing activities of people are not an additional task but an integral part of their daily work. Many platforms - digital or not - require that people access another tool or step out of their daily routine. To achieve this, a good am of motivation and personal benefits is needed and we all agree this is not an easy task. Integrating knowledge sharing into people’s daily work would be without doubt a strong driver for user adoption.
How to integrate knowledge sharing in the daily routine? We have asked our users for ideas and I am happy to summarise here what they have came up with.
Nov 07
An Empirical Approach to Taxonomy Development
Last week I presented a session at Taxonomy Bootcamp in Washington DC on “Empirical Approaches to Taxonomy Development” – the session grew out of a realisation that taxonomy developers are often held hostage to multiple (often conflicting) opinions without any evidence base, or are forced to call on experts when this is not appropriate, or simply defend themselves by withdrawing into an opaque process to avoid being interfered with. My session described a rigourous, transparent process based on evidence from users and content bases, testing against realistic scenarios, and consultation on gaps and accuracy, NOT opinion! Here’s the slide deck.
Taxonomy_Bootcamp_Empirical_Approaches_full_slides.pdf
Oct 04
Social Media and a Changing China
Fascinating TED talk on how China is changing and the role social media plays in its evolution.
Oct 04
Knowledge Queen - Interview with a KM Practitioner
The Civil Service College of Singapore has just published an interview with Rosalind Gan, Head of Organisational Excellence at the Singapore Ministry of Manpower. The writer has got Rosalind down pat.
Such interviews are useful as they add a personal touch to the KM profession and foster understanding and fellowship in the community. They are hard to come by, however. It has been a long time wish of mine to see more of such interviews, never mind if I have to pen them myself. So if you are a KM practitioner and would like to be interviewed, do contact me.
Sep 06
Users Demands for Collaboration Tools
We recently asked a number of business users what they require from collaboration tools within the company. The scope reached from communication tools, documents sharing, collaboration in teams, social networking and a personalized portal. The survey should some interesting results I would like to share:
Sep 01
New Thoughtpiece: How and Why do Organisations Suppress Insight and Innovation?
Why do organisations seem to impose frictions on insights and ideas in ways that as individuals we find stupid and bureaucratic? Why do organisations fail to exploit the smarts and common sense of their people? In this paper, written for a Masterclass on Insight and Storytelling with Gary Klein and Shawn Callahan, I explore the idea that social collectives have cognitive behaviours that sit above our individual cognitive awareness, and that have strong and often unperceived influences on how we behave and feel.
