We encounter four major forms of knowledge risk in organizations:

• Knowledge continuity risks
• Knowledge acquisition risks
• Knowledge outsourcing risks
• Knowledge articulation risks

To read more about these risks, download the article here

Patrick’s taxonomy development infographic has sparked off a little friendly competition in the office. The infographic you see above is my attempt at explaining the different pieces of an intranet puzzle that KM practitioners may have to deal with, and how they all fit together.

This is the link to the pdf version – Intranet_Poster.pdf. Note that it is formatted for A2 size and you will need to set your printer to print within paper size for smaller sizes.

I would like to commend Patrick for his sportsmanship, for even though my poster is evidently better than his, it did not hold him back from providing some of the explanations that you see on the poster.

Nancy Dixon has a terrific post on how NASA went about creating a knowledge continuity strategy to ensure that all the knowledge created in the cancelled Constellation Program can be sustained within the organisation. I’d love to learn more about the knowledge mapping techniques they used, but the centrepiece was a knowledge cafe, used to develop the key focus areas for the strategy moving forward (They have only a year to complete this).

As Nancy points out “Dave Lengyel [head of heads NASA’s Risk and Knowledge Management Program] could certainly have sat at his desk at NASA headquarters and drawn up a knowledge capture strategy, but that plan would not have been able to take into account the unique aspects of each of the Center’s needs. It would not have been as rich nor as comprehensive as the plan the group was able to develop together. Moreover, had Lengyel constructed it on his own, he would then have had the job of selling the plan to those who would implement it – never an easy task with a plan conceived at headquarters! The Knowledge Café gave everyone the opportunity to fully express their thinking and needs and to understand the needs and thinking of their colleagues.”

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.”

Bill Proudfit has done a very nice riff on our “wheel of knowledge” (which is based on Dave Snowden’s ASHEN framework). Visit his post for his commentary on how it works in practice!

OK, it’s been a bit of a video tinkering period, partly stimulated by the launch of some new public workshops on knowledge audits, taxonomy development and this month, building a KM strategy. Not to mention a new version of iMovie with some cool effects. So here’s an introduction to some of our most important lessons learned over the years in how to approach a KM strategy exercise with some chance of it moving off the page of the consultant’s report and into some form of reality. Enjoy!

Go to the show page on vimeo by clicking here

Here’s another in our series of video tutorials to different practical knowledge management techniques. It’s taken from a workshop we conducted last week on knowledge audits and knowledge mapping. For ease of use it’s split into three short parts:

PART ONE: DIFFERENT TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE

Go to the show page on vimeo here

PART TWO: DIFFERENT STRATEGIES FOR DIFFERENT KNOWLEDGE TYPES

Go to the show page on vimeo here

PART THREE: CONDUCTING A KNOWLEDGE AUDIT AND BUILDING KNOWLEDGE MAPS

Go to the show page on vimeo here

This remarkable image (original here) shows the actual passages of scientists and researchers as they move between articles in scholarly journals. A team at the Los Alamos National laboratory got the idea that mapping scientific research via citation links might be a tad awry because (shock horror) citations have political correctness built into them. So they procured clickstream data covering almost a billion transactions on scholarly journal portals over two years, and produced this elegant map, showing that social sciences and some humanities sit at the densely connected centre of a cartwheel of suspiciously silo-looking scientific disciplines.

The full story is here, including how they mapped two science taxonomies to the Getty AAT in order to show an aggregate map of the relationships between sciences, humanities and the social sciences.

Oh, and the original suspicion about citation mapping? The JCR citation database gives a heavy bias towards natural sciences (92.8%) and a passing nod to social sciences (7.2%). What scholars actually read? Natural sciences 41%, social sciences 47%, humanities 8%, interdisciplinary fields 3%.

Thanks to Jack Vinson for this lead.

I’ve always been wary of KPIs in knowledge management, because they appeal to a tangible measurement mindset that is easily distracted from the intangible and hard-to-pin down outcomes of KM efforts. I can’t tell you how may implementations I’ve seen where the measurements are diligently gathered and presented as tokens of success (number of documents, number of contributions, number of sharing sessions) when behind the metrics facade, the KM culture and rich sharing habits are as dead as a doornail.

But KPIs, used intelligently alongside “softer” evaluation techniques, do enable you to monitor progress and health in relation to your expectations as you move along your KM journey. And changes or spikes in activity or output trends can signal a need to investigate deeper. So if you take the KPIs with a big pinch of salt and remember you always have to interpret them, they can be a perfectly legitimate tool. So I sat down and wrote this guide to using KPIs.

The paper is in three sections: the first sets out some guidelines for how to use KPIs smartly. The second section gives ideas for sample sets of KPIs covering KM activities and tools as diverse as communities of practice, KM roles, and use of wikis and blogs. The third section is a template for drawing up your own sets of KPIs. The document is in Word format so you can cut and paste whatever takes your fancy (please acknowledge your source). A last word of caution: if you take the whole set of KPIs in this document, you’re taking too many! Leave some time and effort to actually do the work you’re trying to monitor.

Read the guide

Knowledge retention and the problems of knowledge loss from an aging workforce have been in the air recently. Matt Moore has a good summary of the discussion on actKM and some other useful links, including the very public spirited exposure of the knowledge retention strategy of Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). The astute Matt concludes that the panicky “Oh my God, they’re leaving next week, let’s interview everyone” approach is probably ineffective, but an opportunity to start something more sustainable and long term. Hence the value of the TVA link.

Kim Sbarcea blogged in the same week on quite a different form of knowledge retention problem, the loss of records from NASA’s moon landing – tapes of the original video recording of the first moonwalk, which apparently were never broadcast in their full quality, and have now disappeared in a poor recordkeeping chain of control. NASA, it seems, is a good punching bag for knowledge retention advocates: a high profile public agency that has been around for long enough to lose both tacit and explicit knowledge assets in noticeable numbers. David DeLong’s must-read book on this topic Lost Knowledge starts with NASA’s inability to recreate the technology that originally got them to the moon, because they’d lost the expertise of the people who originally built it.

Knowledge loss interests me particularly because it’s one source of organisational ignorance. But I’m beginning to think that “knowledge retention” is not the best descriptor to use – because it’s essentially backward looking and conservative, and assumes that keeping all your knowledge is necessarily a good thing. I recall from a previous discussion on this topic on actKM, Matt Moore cheekily remarked (paraphrasing from memory), “sometimes you want that experience to walk out the door, it frees you up to innovate”.

So “knowledge assurance” seems to me a better phrase to use, because it’s forward looking, looks at anticipated knowledge needs, is open to new knowledge needs, identifies both risks and opportunities, directs us to think about how critical knowledge gets regenerated in new people as well as slowing down the departure of knowledge-holding employees or simplistically focusing us on “documenting” what they know before they go.

This broader perspective makes it much clearer that we need to put in place a portfolio of strategies to strengthen the internal web of knowledge – eg through both targeted and diffuse knowledge transfer interventions, sharing processes and platforms, communities, mentoring and coaching, talent attraction and recruitment, training, storytelling, apprenticeships and experimentation, succession planning, planned experience building, embedding expertise into process and yes (sorry Dave) even writing recipes. Some of it is about ensuring the flow of knowledge is sufficiently active to maintain a healthy “knowledge reservoir” within the social group; some about creating more easily transferred knowledge assets.

Even in the “harder” domain of records management, the overwhelming bulge of digital information that organisations now create must compel a triage of sorts: and this triage must be as much about prioritising based on our (and our successors’ ) anticipated future need for a document, as about whether it illuminates an important event. As Shawn Callahan says (in my personal blog quote of the week) “time is a continuum not a category”. Looking after our knowledge is not just about keeping the stuff we have or the stuff from the past. It’s also about seeing ourselves as responsible for our future.