Category: Knowledge Management

Posted on

Knowledge Management and Social Media

Is social media part of knowledge management? Unequivocally, “yes!” Knowledge management is all about finding the knowledge you need when you need it and learning from previous mistakes whether they are yours or someone else’s. Social media is about making connections to other people, and sharing knowledge. Now, granted some of the knowledge that gets shared on social media is more noise than knowledge, but noise can be knowledge if your colleague tweets that they are stuck in traffic, you know they are going to be late for that 9am meeting, so it’s all a matter of perspective and context, a classic knowledge issue.

I recently read a three social media books, and took a social media course  because social media often comes up in the KM consulting that I do and I wanted to have a better understanding of it and how it can be used, other than what I had figured out on my own. One of the books I read, “The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy,” by David B. Thomas and Mike Barlow,  identified that knowledge management has been given short shrift, but argued that social media was on the verge of revolutionizing and transforming KM because of the direct access that people have to each other through social media, this can be employees inside the organization or customers and business partners outside of the organization interacting with the organization; all as a means of getting their jobs done.

The books were great, very enlightening about how to use social media and the kinds of things to do or not do, like not putting a twenty-something in charge of your social media strategy just because they “use it all the time.” Social media is another channel for communicating and interacting with your staff, clients, business partners, other stakeholders, and in some cases the general public (if we’re talking about tools like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook), having someone with an understanding and appreciation of the magnitude of that responsibility is a good idea.

Better than the books was the course. It provided a model based on work done by Advanced Human Technologies. Their model, which is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License, allows for the creation of a comprehensive social media plan for an organization. The framework takes a thoughtful look at what an organization wants to achieve with social media, whether inside or outside the organization, and provides the questions that must be answered in order to engage the audience, develop capabilities, and measure success.

The activities and questions asked by the model are much like the questions we ask of knowledge management initiatives. In the end, I think, social media is just another way of finding out who knows what and asking them to share it or sharing what we know and hope that other’s learn from our experience, which is what knowledge management is all about.

Posted on

Benefits of Knowledge Management Consulting

Someone just asked me what the benefits of my consulting are, I liked my answer so much I had to put it someplace where other people would see it (okay, I’m patting myself on the back).

The benefits of the consulting that I do is the improvement of the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge workers through the alignment of supporting technology to their business processes.

Posted on

Since returning from Abu Dhabi

I have been back for a week and am getting over the jet-lag, I have been working on finishing up deliverables for my client in Abu Dhabi and doing a bit of marketing for my Ark Group report that was published last week 🙂 (they tell me it was selling well in the pre-publication period, so I am happy about that).

I need to review and update my marketing/business development activities based on things I have learned and done over the last 18 months.

The project in Abu Dhabi was good because I got to work with my Knoco (www.knoco.com) business partners and become more familiar with their KM model and get to know them better (thanks Nick Milton and Tom Young for the opportunity). I hope to work with them again soon.

What I learned in Abu Dhabi:

  • wear a hat if you’re going to be outside in the sun for very long;
  • after a few days of 40-42 degrees Celcius, 30 feels cool;
  • don’t walk unless you absolutely have to;
  • LuLu Hypermarket is a great place to go for groceries;
  • sand gets everywhere;
  • ask for suggestions of things to go out and do, and then go and do them;
  • learn the building names and landmarks, no one uses street addresses;
  • take a fleece for the hotel.
Posted on

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.

 

Posted on

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.