Blog Posts

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Community of Practice: Metrics and Health Check

This is my piece that was included in the Knoco spring newsletter, which can be accessed here: https://www.knoco.com/Knoco%20newsletter%20spring%2011.pdf

When a community program has been running for 1-2 years it is important to perform a health check on the individual communities and the program as a whole. Performing this type of review ensures that the individual communities and the program are both providing value to the participants and the organization.

Examples of metrics that assess the health of individual communities include calculations for number of problems solved by the community and related income increases or expense decreases. There are also usefulness surveys where users evaluate how useful the community has been in helping them accomplish their objectives. These surveys can include anecdotes from users describing (in quantitative terms) how the community has contributed to organizational objectives. The metrics used may change over time and may be customized for the length of time a community has been in operation.

Overall community metrics may take an aggregate of the individual community metrics, but there may also be calculations for the overall impact of the community program. Such things as decreases to learning curves, increases to customer satisfaction, reductions in rework, increases in innovation or decreases in attrition rates.

Collecting these types of metrics on an annual basis helps to remind staff of the value of the community program and ensure that it continues to add value to the organization.

 

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Upcoming Ark Group Report: Navigating the Knowledge Management Technology Maze

As those of you who have spoken to me in the last 6 months will know, I have been busy writing a report for Ark Group, it will be published later in the spring, here’s a sneak-peak of what I’ve been working on and why I haven’t posted anything on this blog for so many months.

Navigating the Knowledge Management Technology Maze

Knowledge Management may be a familiar term to many, but how many individuals actually understand the technology side of KM? What do all the platforms do, why one is better suited to particular business needs and objectives than another? The vendors aren’t going to tell you, they want you to buy their platform and customize it.

What are the benefits that choosing the right KM technology platform can bring to a business? Many will think of the selection process as strictly technology focused, but there are a plethora of human, organisational, leadership and process elements that must also be taken into account. Selecting the right technology and implementing it successfully are key to realising the true benefits of KM. In a climate of severe competition, limited resources and pressure on performance and profitability, organisations would do well to examine how choosing the right KM technology can help an organisation to counter these challenges.

This report is intended to help organisations understand KM technology and its benefits and will provide a ‘roadmap’ for organisations to follow to implement and maximise KM technology investments. Crucial aspects such as achieving executive sponsorship, nurturing the necessary conversations between business leaders and IT managers, and ensuring the project remains business-driven, will all be covered.

Target readership

Strategists, IT directors/managers, information architects, business analysts and project managers charged with exploring or implementing a KM strategy for their organisation. The report will also be of interest to chief executives, COOs, finance directors, CIOs and other senior managers wanting to find out more about KM technology and the logistics of its implementation.

Contents

What is Knowledge Management? Discussion of various aspects and facets of KM from tacit to explicit from Information Management to CRM and BI and the technologies that support them.

Recent trends: how the role of KM is evolving to include not just an organisation’s IT department but a broader range of key decision-makers. Shift in focus from either Technology or People and Process to Technology and People and Process.

Benefits for performance measurement/management, competitiveness, identifying new opportunities, improving efficiency, boosting productivity, resource planning, reducing risk, etc.

Risks and costs associated with KM technology and how to mitigate them.

The KM roadmap: from identifying aims to leveraging the output

Technology

  • What systems do you need for KM?
  • Integrating/migrating information sources
  • Interface design – how will the system be used, how do users need to be able to manipulate and interact with it
  • Business process alignment – allows organisations to model patterns in their own operations
  • Building in flexibility for future development

Communication

  • Gaining executive sponsorship and forming a taskforce that represents both business and IT sides, to ensure the project remains business driven
  • Enabling good communication between business leaders and the IT side
  • Communicating internally the purpose, need, value, etc
  • Building an internal KM culture: breaking down reluctance to share information, access and present it in a different way, etc.

Aligning KM initiatives with the business is vital.

Evaluating return on investment. How soon can you expect the investment to start paying off, and how can you maximise ongoing ROI?

Case studies

The report will include practical material in the form of case studies from a range of organisations who have successfully implemented KM technologies and reaped the benefits as well as tales of lessons learned from ineffectual implementations that have not brought the expected outcomes.

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A Howard Rheingold Workshop, Part 2

The second part of the workshop was brainstorming the questions that need to/should be asked in working with each aspect of the model. What follows is the output of that session.

Attention

  • How to get/keep attention
  • Is it required? Does it form new behaviour?
  • How does discipline fit in
  • How to increase
  • Distractions
  • Have we always been distracted
  • Is there an organizational tool that can be leveraged?
  • Have brains developed differently because of changes in technology and activities
  • Are there patterns that should be recognized/accommodated?

Collaboration

  • Have to be willing/allowing for failure
  • How to collaborate, what that means?
  • Different ways to collaborate
  • Is there an occupational hazard in collaborating?
  • Culturally determined?
  • Best when there’s a lack of ego
  • Needs to be reciprocity
  • How to address conflict in styles between command and control vs. open source
  • How to address competition: for an end, vs. for a purpose/value
  • Danger in consensus
  • Checks and balances, accountability, how are these determined/used?

Participation

  • Respect (presence)
  • What’s in it for me
  • Motivation
  • Types of participation: Active/passive, Named/anonymous, Public/private and when should they be allowed/used/permitted
  • Does an individual’s participation make a difference?
  • Are there monetary issues?
  • Inclusive/exclusive

Critical Consumption

  • What is the assessment of the platform the information comes from
  • What or who is the authority?
  • What about fairness with respect to SEO  and the manipulation of sites to be higher in the rankings because of how the search algorithm works
  • How to teach the tools of assessing authority/trustworthiness
  • What is the real hierarchy of validation
  • Can we change policy to ensure accuracy?

Network Awareness

  • Understanding how it all connects
  • How to do the care/feeding of your network
  • Random discovery, how to have more of it
  • How to address the issue of not knowing what you don’t know
  • How to address network drivers
  • Transitory nature
  • Relevance
  • What’s the reliance
  • Fear of exclusion
  • How do you find the experts
  • Inclusion/ask questions
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A Howard Rheingold Workshop

This is a little different blog post for me, I usually talk about some aspect of Knowledge Management, and while this is related to the work that I do, it may not be immediately obvious that it is KM-related. I had a request to post a blog about a workshop I attended on the weekend, so here are my thoughts and notes, let me know what you think.
“A Howard Rheingold Workshop, Harnessing Social Media and Smart Mob Thinking for the Enterprise” (September 25, 2010)
I attended the workshop named above, and enjoyed and learned from it, but the title doesn’t do it justice, what we learned was so much more valuable than the title might lead one to expect.
The session was in fact about digital literacy or literacy in the 21st century. Howard spoke to us about a model he has created, a model that describes what we need to survive in this digital, connected age we live in.
In previous centuries we needed to know how to read and write, but in current times we also need to know how to pay attention, participate, collaborate, consume critically, and be aware of our network. During the workshop we spoke about all of these components and what they mean.
Attention is about being mindful of where one applies his/her attention, e.g. am I choosing to purposefully spend time on Facebook or did I get “sucked-in” because of factors that are external to me? It’s about being aware of how we are thinking and what we are thinking.
Participation is about the difference between passive consumption and active participation, things happening to me versus me actively making a choice. We spoke about examples such as ohmynews.com and other citizen journalism websites, although that’s certainly not the only type of participation.
Collaboration is what you would expect, working together, communicating, sharing information; this touches on things I normally talk about in Knowledge Management.
Network Awareness is the combination of knowledge and know-how and recognizing the various types of networks. Here we spoke about our on-line identities, and motivations, and the different components that make up a network. We also spoke about how networks have changed and evolved, so that instead of being based on a subject/interest/cause/disease, they are now centred around people, i.e. I am the centre of my network, not the city I live in or the ethnic community I am part of or any other dimension. In discussing network awareness, Howard reinforced the importance of building a network, certainly something I can appreciate after being an independent consultant for almost 7 years.
The most important component of Howard’s 21st century literacy model, in my opinion, is Critical Consumption. There is so much information available, how does one determine its validity? We have to be detectives, there are sites out there on the web that are very professional looking but that are totally bogus: they appear to be one thing but are really something else. In some cases it’s fairly easy to figure out, we can use sites like Whois to determine the ownership of a site or we can Google someone’s name. We need to get over the “authority of text,” the idea that because something appears in text means that it’s true, that is a notation from a by-gone era when there was a much bigger barrier to getting something into print, now anyone can have a webpage and self-publishing books is much more affordable than it once was. We have to look for clues as to information’s trustworthiness; otherwise we will be victims of every scam going.
A couple of points from Howard’s summing-up were particularly valuable:
• Regulate the way people consume on-line rather than what goes on on-line
• Keep up with the literacies, not the technologies

That was the first part of the workshop, in the second part we discussed questions that need to/should be answered for each of the components of the model, but that’s going to have to be another blog post.

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Some Thoughts about Knowledge Assets

The term Knowledge Asset always takes me back to my first career after my undergraduate graduation: accountant. In addition to defining knowledge asset, and discussing how to manage them, which are secondary thoughts in my accounting mind, I think about valuation, after-all if something is an asset, it has a value.

How do we value knowledge assets? Is it the cost to acquire the knowledge? Things like the cost of courses and books, and experience gained over a period of time. Is it what someone else would pay to obtain the knowledge immediately instead of going through the learning curve? Is it the opportunity cost: the cost of lost business or productivity, the cost of a missed connection?

Some of these are more easily determined than others. It is relatively easy to determine the cost of a course or a book, or to determine the cost of a degree or certificate. How is the cost of a missed connection or opportunity to leverage a previous project determined? How do you know what the cost is if you didn’t know that the opportunity existed?
For example, if instead of creating a document management application for your organization, you find that your organization has already purchased one off-the-shelf that you can use, what’s the opportunity cost and do you get credit for saving the company the months of development and implementation time as well as the quicker time to become productive (because you can start using the system within a month instead of 18 months from now)?

The 2009 MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises) Report finds that “[t]he 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.” How do we take this and translate it into the business case for better management of knowledge assets, whether they are tacit or explicit?

All of these things fly around in my brain when I think about Knowledge Assets, I don’t have a quick answer, other than to say pick whichever valuation method makes sense in the situation and use it to build your business case.

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Business-IT Alignment

Okay, so this isn’t a post about Knowledge Management, but it’s an issue that reared it’s ugly head recently in a KM context, so I’m going to blog about it.

What happens when IT loses sight of the user? You might hear comments like, “it’s only one more click,” or “your configuration isn’t supported, and we won’t give you one that is (so suck it up and live with it).” Two things I have heard that have made my blood boil, because I was being asked to do something and IT, in my opinion, was making it as difficult as possible for me to do that.

IT, in my opinion, is supposed to support the business, enable users to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively, not make it so difficult that users don’t do what’s been asked of them.

This is why there is often such a combative relationship between business and IT. Business wants quick, efficient, effective ways of meeting the organization’s objectives, and IT wants to maximize standardization? reduce cost? do what’s easiest for them?

There has to be a middle ground where business needs are met and standards and costs are not disregarded, it just might take some effort and communication on both sides to make that happen.

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Collaboration

What does collaboration mean to you? Does it mean doing what you’re told? How about finding someone else to do the work? Telling someone else what to do?

I hope none of those are your definitions of collaboration, and I hope that your definition of collaboration looks nothing like any of those.

Wikipedia defines collaboration the following way:
“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group.” or at least it did the day I wrote this, April 5, 2010 at 9:14am EDT.

I like this definition of collaboration, but it does not always mirror my experience of collaboration. I like this definition because it talks about working together for common goals; sharing, which is a big part of Knowledge Management; building consensus; and that leadership comes through a decentralized and egalitarian group. I really, really, like this last part.

Leadership can come from anywhere and when I am working on a team that is collaborating effectively leadership does come from anywhere and everywhere, it is not hierarchical or command and control style. Everyone contributes, and everyone reaps the benefits. Everyone gets a chance to have a voice and contribute to the end product, diversity of opinion is valued and the end product is better than any one of us could have done on our own.

Unfortunately, I have also worked with groups/people that do not collaborate effectively. They wait for someone else to do the work, make things happen. Wonder why deadlines are missed, why communication is a challenge, or why the team doesn’t function effectively.

Things happen too quickly now, in this information age, with instant or near instant access to information. No one can know it all, if we don’t work together towards our goals, breaking down hierarchies, which only slow things down, we will be left behind, and no one wants that.

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Succeeding at Change in a Knowledge Worker World

The only thing that is certain is death and taxes…and change. Many organizations spend thousands of dollars on knowledge management technology solutions, focusing on the technology, because the technology is easy to focus on, it’s visible: buying the servers, installing the software, testing it, releasing it, those are activities that are very visible. Involving stakeholders in the software selection process, understanding what helps versus what hinders them in their performance, providing training, communicating, these are invisible, “soft” activities. Soft-skills/activities are often ignored, or down-played in organizations, sometimes it’s because of cost, sometimes it’s a lack of understanding of their importance, sometimes because there’s “no time.”

Projects fail because of this lack of attention to soft-skills, especially Knowledge Management projects. With Knowledge Management projects knowledge workers have already found a way to get their jobs done, it may not be the most efficient and effective way to get it done, but they get it done, that’s who they are. They may miss opportunities to share and leverage other people’s experience or create something new because they didn’t know there was a possibility to share/leverage/create, but they get their job done. In implementing a Knowledge Management project knowledge workers are being asked to do things differently, whether that’s share information in a repository or micro-blogging site, or participate in a Community of Practice; chances are it’s different than what they are doing now, and they will keep doing their “old way of doing things” unless they are given a reason to change.

Why/how do people change their behaviours? Because they have a reason to change, they understand the “what’s in it for me.” A good program manager will have included key stakeholders in the whole process from the strategy and requirements gathering stages to roll-out to the organization. Stakeholders, who include front-line employees who will be using the system, have contributed their needs and requirements to the selection of the technology, so the technology is actually supporting them, not causing more work. Connecting with stakeholders is critical, this helps them understand the change that is coming and to have influenced it so that they can feel proud of what’s being build and act as change agents with their peers, when the time comes to start using the technology.

Once the connection is made, communication has to maintain and inform the relationship. Tell the stakeholders the truth, own up to any changes in the plan or scope or functionality, the situation will only get worse if the organization tries to hide or sugar-coat changes that were not agreed to by the team.

Communication and training will drive the adoption and acceptance of the technology and process changes. The IT team can get the technology 100% right, and if they ignore the people and process side of the equation, they will fail. These people and process side often gets cut or short circuited when budgets tighten, this is short sighted. Better to reduce the scale of the project or extend a timeline than to skimp on training, communication, and involvement of stakeholders. If the organization has time to do it wrong and fail and fix it, then they have time to get it right the first time at a much lower cost than doing it wrong and then fixing it.

Involving stakeholders in all stages of the process, ensuring that the technology enables them and that they have the communication and training that they need to be successful, will ensure that the organization’s Knowledge Management investment will have an ROI to be proud of.

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Knoco.ca

Just a quick blog post to let everyone know that I am now the Canadian Franchisee for Knoco Ltd., www.knoco.com. Knoco is a Knowledge Management consultancy based in the U.K. and with franchises in South Africa, USA, India, and Indonesia, as well as training partners in Spain. They offer KM people and process consulting, and training. I am excited by the opportunities that this expansion in my network and services will bring. You will see some changes to my website over the next while, although my Missing Puzzle Piece Consulting branding will remain unchanged and I will continue to do the business-IT alignment work in the KM domain that I have always done.