Readings on “Knowledge Management 2.0 - Reality or Hype?”

As part of the Boston KM Forum Symposium on Knowledge Management 2.0, Lynda Moulton put together a list of additional resources for reading on the subject:

Half-Baked or Mashed: Is Mixing Enterprise IT And The Internet A Recipe For Disaster?
Andy Dornan.
Information Week 09/10/2007
“

Enterprise mashup tools are the long tail of SOA, letting ordinary employees build applications that aren’t on IT’s radar screen. But what about the risks?” A good summary of Mashups and issues related to the technologies involved.

World 2.0.
David Gurteen
The Gurteen Knowledge Website
03/21/2008.

“Most of us understand what Web 2.0 is all about as we move from a read-only web to a read-write or participatory web. And we are starting to come to grips with so called Enterprise 2.0 where the concept and technologies and social tools of Web 2.0 are moving from the open web into organizations.”

Academics butt heads over enterprise 2.0.
Chris Kanaracus.
InfoWorld (IDG News Service)
01/11/2008.

“Scholars from Harvard and Babson business schools spar over question of use of social networking and other Web 2.0 technologies in business environment.” Debate between Andrew McAfee of HBS and Tom Davenport of Babson on the spill-over and influence of Web 2.0 social tools into the enterprise to form a new paradigm, Enterprise 2.0.

Consumer Technology Poll: CIOs Still Fear Web 2.0 for the Enterprise
C. G. Lynch
CIO Magazine
03/14/2008.

“From blogs to wikis to hosted e-mail from Google, CIOs, on the whole, value command and control over user empowerment.” “The majority of CIOs didn’t seem enamored with Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis, RSS and social networks, either. Only 30 percent of IT decision makers said they offered wikis as a corporate application. A mere 23 percent offered blogs, while18 percent utilized RSS. Only 10 percent of respondents brought social networks into the enterprise.”

The Hype is Real; Social Media Invades the Inc. 500.
Eric Mattson, Nora Ganim Barnes, Ph.D.

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth's Center for Marketing Research conducted a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc. 500 list for 2006 under the direction of blog researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim Barnes. All interviews took place in November and December of 2006.

Andrew McAfee/Tom Davenport Discussion [on Enterprise 2.0]
Jim McGee
FastForward/KMworld
01/11/2008.

Commentary on the Webinar debate between McAfee and Davenport,

Knowledge Management Revitalized; KM in a Web 2.0 World
Mike Murphy

There are several factors contributing to the revitalized interest in KM, or KM 2.0. It is important to remember that Internet, HTML or audio/video content weren’t part of the equation when KM first entered the discussion - people were just getting comfortable with a relational database management system (RDBMS) and records-oriented content. It therefore wasn't obvious why you needed another content storage system. With the arrival of the Internet and its evolution leading up to today, unstructured data exists easily in so many forms that cannot be accommodated in an RDBMS.

Common Pitfalls of Building Social Web; Applications and How to
Avoid Them, Part II.
Joshua Porter
User Interface Engineering
07/31/2007

Web 2.0 pressures IT, shows benefits.
Robert Smallwood
KMWorld
11/01/2007

“Business today relies heavily on e-mail. Maybe too much so...So why haven.t KM and
collaboration tools that can organize and leverage this content caught on like wildfire?”
“A new report by Forrester, “Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up for Business,” supports the contention that although corporate IT departments have seen the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies, the vast majority have made limited investments in a formal implementation of them.” “The combination of the volume of e-mail and lack of user friendliness of collaboration tools has created an opportunity for a new wave of smaller, lighter and less expensive tools that leverage Web 2.0 technologies but are less obtrusive and demanding of users.”

Open-Door Policy, a Special Report.
Jimmy Wales.
Forbes
05/05/2007.
“

But the great lesson of the Web 2.0 era is that to control quality, you don’t lock things down; you open them up....Leave your doors unlocked and your windows open’ and creeps will sometimes come in. But the way to chase them out before they cause harm is to have plenty of friendly neighbors who are looking after your interests, which turn out to be remarkably similar to theirs.

”The 2.0 agenda: Get ready for transparency and collaboration.
Steve Wylie
Information Week
05/28/2007.

Describes Andrew McAfee’s six key attributes of Enterprise 2.0, which he shortens to SLATES: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions, and Signals.

Wrap-Up of Knowledge Management 2.0 Symposium

It was a great series of presentations at the Boston KM Forum Symposium: KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?.

All of presenters danced around the question of what is knowledge management 2.0 and the relationship between knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 . I expected that. There are so many different definitions for the two terms. (see Ray Sims collection of 57 Definitions of Knowledge Management). The relationship between the terms depends on how you define the terms.

As those of you have been reading my posts and publications know, I think Enterprise 2.0 and Knowledge Management belong together. (See Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0; Tom Davenport also thinks so: Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?) Knowledge Management and Enterprise 2.0 share similar goals, similar issues and similar tools.

Knowledge Management 2.0 is more personal focused. The tools are focused on helping the individual capture, find and categorize knowledge as part of their daily work. Knowledge management should not be about some central repository for you to deposit stuff for others to use. Knowledge management should be about a repository for you. That repository just happens to be easily accessible by others in the firm.

It was great to have some face-to-face time with Jessica Lipnack, Ray Sims, KellyPuffs, Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait. I also had a chance to meet some new people and hopefully grow some new connections. (Since a common theme from the symposium was connecting people with people.)

The agenda and links to my notes from each presentation:

Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management - Mark Frydenberg, Senior Lecturer, Computer Information Systems Department, Bentley College

KM and Web 2.0 - A User’s Perspective - Ray Sims, formerly Director of Knowledge Management at Novell

Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0? - Dan Keldsen, Director, Market Intelligence, AIIM

Case Study: The Siemens BeFirst Portal - Jeff Cram, Co-Founder and Managing Director, and David Aponovich, Content Management Strategist, ISITE Design

Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance - Jessica Lipnack, CEO and co-founder, NetAge Inc.

Wrap-up: KM 2.0 - Why We Should Care - Larry Chait, Chait & Associates

Wrap-up: KM 2.0 - Why We Should Care

Summary of Presentation
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Larry Chait, Chait & Associates

He thinks Web 2.0 is a catchall for a set of user-driven applications and the philosophy behind them. He hates the 1.0 , 2.0 and 3.0 labels, but since everyone is using the terms he does also.

Larry has seen KM move from technology-centric (capture store and access) to people-centric (after action reviews and peer assists) to social computing.

He thinks "2.0" is a cliche, but there really is a big change happening in the way people are communicating and there are big changes happening in the tools.

The issue he sees is trying to reconcile official taxonomies and user-generated folksonomies.

Larry points out that the use of collaboration tools is driven more by culture than technology. The tools will not do anything by themselves. He also points out that different tools do different things well. You need a suite of tools to get things done.

Larry raises five caveats: delivering business value, ensuring privacy, governing behavior, managing personal time, and overcoming cultural barriers. (I had to call Larry out on this. This caveats apply to all new technologies. He pointed out that the bad things are all now easy to find. I countered that the good stuff is also much easier to find.)

Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance

Summary of Presentation
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Jessica Lipnack, CEO and co-founder, NetAge Inc.

Twenty years ago, an aspiring social network analyst asked us for the names of everyone in our database. He had a program that could link them up, he said, help them find one another, spark new connections. How intrusive, I thought. Who’d want that? Years later, he would go on to design one of the major social networking sites. I resisted and resisted – and then something happened: someone I trusted explained blogging to me, someone else invited me onto Facebook…and the rest is what brings me to Boston KM Forum. This talk will be about resistance to Web 2.0, even among people like myself who’ve been online forever, and what happens when that resistance gives way to powerful experiences.

Jessica got a round of applause for not using any PowerPoint slides.

People have lots of fear of the unknown. That resistance is hard to overcome. It is hard to have people confront their fears. Change is happening fast and people need to adapt to change. But people are generally reluctant to change.

Jessica went on to share some of the changes that are being instigated by General Caldwell. He thinks the army's mission is changing and the soldiers tools need to change. General Caldwell is an advocate of soldiers using Web 2.0 tools. This flies in the face of other people in the armed forces who are looking to block soldiers access to blog sites and Web 2.0 sites.

Jessica got intrigued by blogging when Bill Ives explained to her that his blog had become his personal knowledge tool.

Surprisingly, for a person focusing on networks, Jessica was reluctant to join sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. The comment she heard that there are ways to stay connected without picking up the phone.

She asks that we be very sympathetic to those who are resistant to change and resistant to web 2.0. Bring them friends and ways to get connected.

Case Study: The Siemens BeFirst Portal

Summary of Presentation at
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge.
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Jeff Cram, Co-Founder and Managing Director, and David Aponovich, Content Management Strategist, ISITE Design

The Siemens BeFirst Portal provides solid lessons in Enterprise 2.0/KM 2.0. Recognized as one of the best examples of how a large enterprise uses Web 2.0 principles in a business context, the portal connects 2,000 sales and marketing staff to collaborate, create, search and find corporate “approved” information assets and previously untapped “tribal knowledge.” The project was recognized by AIIM for its 2008 Carl B. Nelson Best Practice Awards; it was one of only three large-company projects nominated for recognition.

Jeff and David put on a show and tell for the enterprise 2.0 deployment that ISITE Design created for Siemens Communications Systems. They also plan to point out the mistakes as well as the successes in the project.

The company had thousands of sales and marketing people and their knowledge spread across the world and seven different languages. They need a way to share and a way to find the best knowledge and assets.

In planning the deployment they gave a lot of thought to the participants in the company. IN particular they found Forrester's ladder of participation by Charlene Li on social media to be a useful model. Rather than a business-to-employee model, they envisioned an employee-to-employee model. The vision was to capture the tribal knowledge, allowing employees to easily contribute and organize information.

They based the technology on Sitecore web content management, plus a Google search appliance and microsoft.net custom programming.

The platform has some high level taxonomy, largely focused on product lines. At the document level, there is an ability to rate and comment on the document. They also allow tagging of documents and other content. They found the need to identify content as HQ authorized content to separate it from user generated content.

They did some custom programming on top of the Google search to provide for faceting search. (Apparently the company had already purchased the Google search appliance.)

They found these cultural barriers to Enterprise 2.0

• How can I maintain control of the content
• How to convince stakeholders to give up control
• How to deal with different countries and languages
• How to ensure quality

The multiple country and language site posed some big challenges. They decide to have local country sites within the global site.

The other challenge (and big challenge for Enterprise 2.0) is reconciling a taxonomy with the folksonomy of user-generated content.

The more radical part of the project was the creation of the communities area. Anyone could create a community, make it open or closed and pull users in. These small communities and they information stored in them lived inside the larger portal. Therefore, the community content was also indexed as part of the larger portal.

Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0?

My Summary of the Presentation
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Dan Keldsen, Director, Market Intelligence, AIIM (also of BizTechTalk)

AIIM’s first-quarter 2008 “Market IQ” on Enterprise 2.0 has just been completed, and a survey of 441 people revealed a subset who are having more success with Enterprise 2.0 than the general survey population. Does Enterprise 2.0 signify the birth of KM 2.0? We’ll examine some of the findings, and discuss the implications for new and old KM implementations.

Dan has threatened us with dozens of PowerPoint slides. (Dan plans to post his slides on SlideShare.) He also pitched his Enterprise 2.0 report from AIIM.

Dan used this definition of knowledge management: Leveraging the collective wisdom and experience to accelerate innovation and responsiveness. From Carl Frappalo, Executive Express Knowledge Management.

He notes that early knowledge management focused on technology and less on the culture and rewards. In some circles knowledge management has become a dirty word. But we are not quite dead yet. He also focused on the overuse of email and misuse of other technologies (and the money spent on them). Although knowledge management is not about technology. But knowledge management needs some technology to work well.

Dan proposes that we capture knowledge work as part of daily work, rather than capturing knowledge separately.

Dan shared some of the points from their Enterprise 2.0 Report. They found that knowledge management inclined group see the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 as more important to the success of the organization. The KM inclined are also early in the adoption and understanding of Enterprise 2.0.

Dan stopped short of stating whether he thought Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0. (I think it is! See Law Firm Knowledge Management 2.0) (Tom Davenport thinks so also:
Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?)

UPDATE: Dan posted about his presentation and published his slide deck: Enterprise 2.0 = Knowledge Management 2.0?

KM and Web 2.0 - A User’s Perspective

Presentation Summary From
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Ray Sims, formerly Director of Knowledge Management at Novell (now of Deloitte)

This presentation begins by summarizing what Web 2.0 means from a behavioral (not tools) perspective and what that implies for the future of knowledge management. It then connects these ideas via an exploration of the business-driven use cases related to KM that most benefit from Web 2.0 behaviors and software application approaches. The presentation concludes with some general observations of where we are collectively in this journey and provides some prescriptive guidance for those on the path to knowledge management and Enterprise 2.0.

Ray started with a timeline of his adoption of Web 2.0 technology. He moved onto his definition of knowledge management and his post on 43 knowledge management definitions. (Now up to 57 definitions). He also pointed out the analysis of these knowledge management definitions by Stephen Bounds.

One of the trains of thoughts are that knowledge management exists at different levels. One level is the personal level; organizing knowledge for your own use. Another is at a team level; organizing for a small group. Then there is the enterprise level of knowledge management.

Ray also talked about the differences between knowledge as a flow and as artifact. (I posted about this a few weeks ago: Knowledge is an Artifact and a Flow and Wikis as a Knowledge Artifact and a Knowledge Flow.)

Ray concludes that Web 2.0 is "ideally situated to personal knowledge management and a personal learning environment." He sees the benefits of personal knowledge management as increasing knowledge in a chosen field. Writing and thinking about field should increase your knowledge and expertise. Using Web 2.0 helps you build your external network. (For enterprise 2.0 is should help you build your internal network.)

Ray believes wikis should be the THE tool as a default text and management tool. He thinks blogs are a great way to manage projects and provide status reports. For the projects he manages, Ray intends to ban project email. (Also see Luis Suarez's journey on not using email).

Ray sees the four greatest opportunities for Web 2.0 / E 2.0 through the knowledge management lens:

• Increased social capital
• Increased innovation
• Improved decision making
• Improved efficiency

Why improved efficiency? The increased transparency and openness makes things more findable. You can also leverage the power of the network, getting input from more people. There is also the raw speed. It is much faster to edit a wiki and share changes than editing a document and emailing it around.

Ray also peppered his presentation with the virtues of Twitter (Twitter@dougcornelius) (Twitter@rsims). Twitter is "his girlfriend of the moment."

UPDATE: Ray posted about his presentation and published his slidedeck: KM2.0 Presentation - Boston KM Forum.

Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management

Presentation summary from
Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge
What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype?

Mark Frydenberg, Senior Lecturer, Computer Information Systems Department, Bentley College

Recent years have seen a shift in how people have used the World Wide Web as it evolved from a tool for disseminating information and conducting business to a platform facilitating new ways of information sharing, collaboration, and communication in a digital age. A new vocabulary has emerged, as mashups, flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, twitter, and WikiPedia have come to characterize the genre of interactive applications collectively known as Web 2.0. This session will provide an overview of Web 2.0 tools and concepts, and describe how they may be used to create, share, and manage knowledge.

Mark started off by showing a video, The Machine Is Using Us. Mark sees difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that Web 1.0 is about linking documents and Web 2.0 is about linking people. Web 2.0 is more about applications than webpages.

Most of his presentation was an introduction of Web 2.0 technologies and websites.

It was interesting to see what he was making his students do as part of his classes. One thing I notices was that his students did not take full advantage of the tools. For example, he made his students collaborate using Google Docs to write a research paper. In one example it was clear that the student wrote the paper somewhere else and just pasted into the Google Doc. In another example, one student did all of the writing. I think we may be overestimating how proficient college students are with Web 2.0.

Mark was very interested in Mashups. One of the features of Web 2.0 is the ability to easily pull information from different sources. My personal mashup is my transactions map. This turns a list of the real estate transactions I have closed and converts it into a visual map display. (I have not updated it in a while.) There is also the lifestream I created in Yahoo Pipes.

One of the things that strikes me is the ability to view and find information in different ways. In looking at the list of subscribers to this blog, Feedburner shows over 40 different ways the subscribers grab and view the content. I see one of the keys of KM 2.0 is giving people the way to find information in a variety of different ways and view the information in a variety of ways.

UPDATE: Mark has posted his slides. Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management

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Boston KM Forum Symposium: KM 2.0 – Real or Hype?

I am spending Wednesday at Bentley College for Boston Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Leveraging Knowledge.

What is KM 2.0? Is it real, or just vendor hype? How does it relate to Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0? And – the bottom line – how does KM 2.0 help us to leverage knowledge?

The Agenda:

Web 2.0 Tools for Knowledge Management - Mark Frydenberg, Senior Lecturer, Computer Information Systems Department, Bentley College

KM and Web 2.0 - A User’s Perspective - Ray Sims, formerly Director of Knowledge Management at Novell

Enterprise 2.0 = KM 2.0? - Dan Keldsen, Director, Market Intelligence, AIIM

Case Study: The Siemens BeFirst Portal - Jeff Cram, Co-Founder and Managing Director, and David Aponovich, Content Management Strategist, ISITE Design

Moving Beyond Web 2.0 Resistance - Jessica Lipnack, CEO and co-founder, NetAge Inc.

Wrap-up: KM 2.0 - Why We Should Care - Larry Chait, Chait & Associates

Reading List from the Boston KM Forum

I forgot to post the reading list from the symposium. Instead of duplicating efforts here, I am sending you over to Kelly Drahzal who posted the suggested reading on knowledge management on Kellypuffs.

Where Will Knowledge Management be in 5-10 years

Kathy Curley, Boston University, Panel Moderator, Eric Lesser of IBM Global Business Services, Dave Snowden , Mike Zack , Joe Horvath and Kate Ehrlich wrapped up the meeting by looking ahead.

They only thing they seemed to agree upon was that they disagreed about the future.

There was some commentary about the opening of systems, being more chaotic than controlled company networks. Dave thought that the concept of enterprise software would erode, while other panelists though that the enterprise systems would open (a little).

Another theme was what to do with the changing workforce dynamics. There is a demand to capture the knowledge of retiring baby-boomers. At the same time the younger workers are coming into the workforce expecting transparent information and the visibility of knowledge. Dave pointed out that baby-boomers will not fill out surveys and databases. They will tell stories and will continue to tell stories after they retire. Enterprises need to harness the power of the narrative to collect the retiring knowledge of baby-boomers.

They panel had some agreement on the increasingly common ability to form a network and form a community electronically. Mike was particularly forthright that he wrote his thesis on the importance of face-face contact for effective collaboration, but is not retreating from this position.

Eric put forth the idea of the enterprise creating a platform for its workers to succeed. It needs to give them the ability to collaborate, to provide flexibility to work when and where they want, to allow them to create a network of connections, and to improve their employ-ability. People no longer think that they are going to work at the same company forever.

Sense-Making and Knowledge Management

Dave Snowden, of Cognitive Edge, laid out the most thought-provoking session I have heard on knowledge management. (My head is still sore from trying to assimilate his presentation. ) He is posting his podcast of the session and the slides from his presentation.

Dave espoused his theory on naturalizing sense-making. We should focus on how we make sense of the world so we can act in it. Knowledge management should be about decision-making and innovation.

He takes the position that knowledge management lost the battle and is becoming a subset of IT. He is seeing a revival of knowledge management because of the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technologies. He thinks there will be much more success working on fragmented information rather than structured information. People like a mess. Put too much structure around information and people lose their place.

I have to agree with him. Whenever I hear someone talking about a KM system, I shudder. Knowledge management needs to be built into and latch onto a person's regular workflow. You can ask them to make some changes to what they do so that information is better captured. But you better offer them lots of concrete, easy to show benefits for changing their workflow.

Dave moved onto systems theory, talking about ordered systems, chaotic systems and complex systems. With an ordered system, the system constrains agent behavior so with a particular input, you can expect the output. With a chaotic system there is no agent constraints resulting in turbulent and unstable process. But, with the use of statistics and probabilities, it can give you a predicted outcome. In a complex system, the agent constrains the system and the system constrains the agent. These two-way constraints make it harder to handle than the chaotic system. It is also highly sensitive to starting conditions and cannot be broken into simpler subsystems.

He used planning a kid’s birthday party as a metaphor for various management theories and how they relate to these three different kinds of systems. First being uncontrolled management, which is just giving the kids a few bottles and let them run free until the house burns down. Second, he moved onto a structured management approach, starting with a PowerPoint presentation to the party-goers with a set of goals for each attendee to achieve and various incentives for them achieving the proscribed milestones of happiness. (Listen to the podcast; he’s much funnier than I am.) Lastly, we moved onto the complex system. You use a few strict ground rules to limit behavior, throw in a few activities and adjust activities to the behavior. This is easier to manage and how people actual act and react to their environment.

Dave moved onto a session about pattern recognition. The slides showed a sets of dots, the lines you can make with the dots and various patterns you can make from these various lines. As the number of dots increase the number of possible patterns increases by many magnitudes. The lesson was that hindsight can be 20/20, but is highly unreliable to predict future behavior. Seeing all the data points, with the outcome in front of you , it easy to see how the data showed the future behavior. But those data points could lead to a multitude of possible outcomes.

He also did an experiment with a group of people passing basketballs. Our assignment was to count how many times the people in the white shirts passed a basketball. The video had three people in white shirts and three people in black shirts moving around quickly passing several basketballs. Dave then asked the audience how many passes we saw from the white team. Then, to the surprise of most members of the audience, he asked who saw the gorilla. Replaying the video, someone in a black gorilla suit walks right through the group passing basketballs. In hindsight the gorilla was obvious, but the audience was focused on other data.

Humans are built for pattern recognition and pattern matching influence, not information processes. People do not remember the same thing twice, because we are never presented with exactly the same set of circumstances. People have fragmented memories, blending multiple patterns to reach decisions. People scan a small percentage of the information presented to them and match it to remembered patterns.

Failure leaves a stronger impression than success. People are more afraid of failure than they enjoy rewards of success. We need to be sure to capture the lessons from our failures as much as we capture the lessons from our successes.

Dave finds narratives to have more impact than databases or lengthy best-practices manuals. He finds that when people hear patterns this creates pattern recognition. Fragmenting information into narratives is better than the big bang approach of a full size manual.

Knowledge Management should embrace social computing. He finds the messiness of it along with the narrative and flow of knowledge as a more effective way of conveying knowledge to one big overarching database.

knowledge management

Raising the Strategic Profile of Knowledge Management

Mike Zack, an associate professor at Northeastern University, College of Business Administration, threw out the concept of knowledge strategy. We should not just focus on what we know, but also on what we should know.

Knowledge is a barrier to entry into new markets. An enterprise needs to know what it needs to know to be successful in a particular marketplace.

There are internal strategic gaps are the difference between what the enterprise knows and what is should know. The external strategic gaps are the difference between what the enterprise knows and what its competition knows. Knowledge management should align its knowledge and learning initiatives to close these gaps.

He is putting together an interesting study on how knowledge can be a competitive advantage. The challenge was finding an industry that could be analyze to determine the impact of knowledge. He stumbled upon the wheat industry. Everyone has the same tractors, the same land and the same tools, so knowledge of how to use them must be a major differentiating factor.

He pointed out that when selling knowledge, knowledge management becomes a core technology and strategy.

Convergence of Learning and Knowledge

Joe Horvath, of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, started off by pointing out how learning and knowledge management have been historically separate disciplines. With them converging, there are challenges and opportunities.

Knowledge management is designed for providing a future need for an indeterminate task and connecting the user directly with the content source.

Learning is designed to make a change in the learner to improve performance for a specified task, adding value to knowledge, beyond the source, to optimize instruction.

Knowledge management is moving to a task specific orientation and training is moving to direct learners to the source materials.

Joe pointed out some of the factors that are driving learning to KM, including the time crunch on employees, the long lead time in creating training materials and the low value learners associate with training. On the other side, compliance -related knowledge is driving KM to learning. You need to verify that employees have been to certain types of training (sexual harassment, SOX, etc.).

One theme that emerged from the talk is the move to more granular training in smaller bites. The enterprise should be looking to leverage more user-generated content in the learning process. The strategy should be to turn the training material into a hub for post-training reference. People will often better remember the event than the specific content information. People do not want to have to go to different systems to find information. The training repositories should be tied into the knowledge repositories and tied into the working environment of the user.

One challenge is keeping training content synchronized with related content. (This is always a problem. That binder of content given out at a training session quickly becomes out of date.) You need to reconcile quality and compliance standards with the need for speed and flexibility for effective support.

Finding Experts: Who you know matters more than what they know

Kate Ehrlich, IBM Research, presented on finding people.

Kate proposed that there are three directions for expertise search:

1. What you know
   -Skills
2. Who you know
   -social networks
3. What you do
   -Enterprise 2.0 tools

What you know
Pro
Need reliable valid information
In technical settings, expertise matters
In staffing, you want the right skills

Con
Hard to define expertise (varies by the person looking for it)
No single expert for everyone
Responsiveness - An expert cannot be reached has little value

Who you know
Pro
You typically get a better response from people you know
You are more likely to reach out to people who are trusted and whose knowledge is validated
It is easier and faster

Con
You might not get the right expert
Sometimes you just want the answer and not a person
You can spend extra time being redirected to another person

What you know
(This is the core of most location systems. They rely on some database of information to transform into expertise.)
Pro
People are judged by what they do rather than what they know
Participation in public venues builds a reputation

Con
Coverage -Not everyone uses the application
Reliability - You are not what you bookmark.

She went on to show how she developed these concepts into the Small Blue application at IBM. (Small Blue because it makes Bib Blue IBM feel smaller.) She took the approach of mining a system, instead of self designation, to create the analysis of expertise. In this case, she chose sent emails. Users need to opt-in to the system.

Personally, I am skeptical of a system that relies only on mining to generate expertise, especially for the transactional side of a law firm. I have found that they work well for the oddball requests, but miss core skills. In part this is because of the lack of rich language. For example, who is the expert on the UCC. I have hundreds of documents and emails with UCC in the text but I am not an expert in the UCC.

Small Blue Find delivers your search results of experts and shows how close the person is in your social network, up to three degrees (like LinkedIn). Small Blue Reach shows you how to reach through your network to that person. It also shows their recent blog posts, bookmarks and their community. Small Blue Net shows a visual representation of the network, color-coded by business unit with pictures of each person.

She had some interesting data on what caused someone to select someone from the list of experts presented to them. She found that page ranking had an impact, but the closer the person was in your community was the biggest factor. Participation in blogs was a big factor. The person blogging was advertising that they are willing to be contacted about the content of their blog.

She found a notion of expertise sufficiency. The expertise searcher gets to a point where expertise is sufficient and then other factors kick in.

She found that big users of the system are people interviewing for other positions within IBM. They use the system to find information about the person who is interviewing them and who they know that knows the person to find out background information.

Small Blue has been deployed for a year, with 2500 of the 300,000 employees opted in. Since each person in the system brings all of their contacts into the system they get great coverage.

knowledge management

Boston Knowledge Management Forum at Bentley College

Today's Bentley Event for the KM Forum was a great event.

I had planned to do some conference blogging, but ran into some technical problems. There was a shortage of plugs so I had to run on batteries. I sat near a wall, but still no plugs. Also, the room was so bright that I could not see the screen with the lower level lighting on battery mode. Lastly, I could not pickup the wifi connection.

I will post up my notes shortly. Here was the program:

Finding experts: Who you know matters more than what they know - Kate Ehrlich, IBM Research

Convergence of Learning and Knowledge - Joe Horvath, Millennium Pharmaceuticals

Raising the Strategic Profile of KM - Mike Zack, Northeastern University, College of Business Administration

The Case for Tacit Knowledge - Larry Chait, Chait & Associates, Moderator and Speaker

Sense-making and Knowledge Management - Dave Snowden, Cognitive Edge

Where KM will be in 5-10 years - Kathy Curley, Boston University, Panel Moderator, Eric Lesser of IBM Global Business Services and all speakers

knowledge management
KM forum