Sunday, April 10, 2005
Review : Extracts from "BLOGS IN BUSINESS: THE WEBLOG AS FILING CABINET"
Extracts from "BLOGS IN BUSINESS: THE WEBLOG AS FILING CABINET by Dave Pollard.
"We have all struggled with ways to capture tacit knowledge (mostly 'know-how') as effectively as we capture explicit knowledge (mostly 'know-what')."
It may also be argued that this conept can also be applied to explicit knowledge that we don't currently capture anyway. They may be used for the same or different purposes. It also depends on your definition of how such things are captured - or at least the value implied on the fact "something" has been captured "somewhere". So we may be able to say that an email is explicit knowledge and has been captured - however, if no-one can ever find it again, or it i is in a typical flat email structure, then it is easy to say that it really has no value and hasn't been captured (differentiating between "stored" and "captured"). A similar concept could apply to the metadata around meetings, decisions, chats and so on.
• Know-how is knowledge in the context of its application , so simply capturing the sales executive's rolodex contents, sales presentations and client visit schedule is not enough. We want to be able to capture what it is (the know-how) that enables him to leverage this 'know-what' so much more powerfully than others with the same 'know-what' at their disposal. Some of this know-how is process, some of it is style, some of it is existing relationships ('know-who') and some of it is interpersonal skills.
• Some know-how is not individual at all, but a team dynamic. This sales executive and the industry specialist with whom he normally works are far more effective as a team than they are individually or working as part of other teams. Why? Probably because each has know-how, know-what, and know-who that covers gaps in the other's knowledge set.
And sometimes these "teams" don't even know the are operating as such. Chains of decisions and points of view work their way around an organization and influence its decisions. You may catch something in an email that you learn from, or is related to something you are working on, but in general we won't know most of the things the organization does. Re-inventing the wheel is very, very common i'd argue. In summary, such teams can operate along a number of dimensions.
• Not only do we not know how to capture (or codify to use KM jargon) know-how, we don't know how to motivate or reward the sales executive to get him to codify his knowledge. He's so good at selling, why would he want (or we want him) to take time away from that to codify or blog what he knows?
This is in fact the key point. It's probably the reasons weblogs work. Bit clunky KM systems are great for your formal processes and knowledge and the stuff you find out later, but there is a gap where finding what knowledge is important to you is very very difficult. No-One would argue Google isn't a great technical company success, but fundamentally Google doesn't help me or my organization to understand any more, or even find anything other than a keyword hit.
But let's look at what a blog has to offer relative to the filing cabinet:
• It allows each worker to personally identify who he or she thinks actually belongs to and participates in his or her networks (using the blogroll - the blog equivalent of a rolodex), rather than who their manager thinks should be in those networks
Perhaps there is a middle gound - where we can suggest communities. These communities may be interest orientated, project orientated or something else. If you choose your own network, it's unlikely you move outside your good friends - we need to be gently told there are other networks out there we may can be a part of. I love social software - none of my friends do and i've got no idea how to find other people in the company who do!
• The blogroll consists entirely of active links to the blogs of the other community members, so knowledge is electronically and personally connected
• Knowledge can be simply and flexibly indexed (and sorted or filtered) by date and category (using each indiviual's personal taxonomy or 'filing system', not some standard taxonomy system imposed by management)
Again, we need some help here too. Personal taxonomies are great for our own very simple uses, but useless on a grander scale. Finding things on the internet alone is ridiculously difficuly and often you go back to Google. We need a base taxnonmy, but flexible dyanamic taxnomy that can sit underneath that and can be managed by the community.
• Instead of containing redundant copies of knowledge from other people like a filing cabinet, the blog simply hotlinks to the 'permalink' (the dynamically-generated URL for a particular piece of knowledge or 'knowledge object') in the other person's blog/filing cabinet
This falls down in cases such as this one. Rather than being able to comment on sub-conversations you have to resort to copying and pasting the original source. Ideally we should be able to annotate any piece of information we can find, without having to duplicate the data.
• The knowledge is enriched by dynamic links to URLs of relevant news, bibliographies and other external resources used in its compliation, thus greatly increasingly its shelf life by allowing it to be more easily updated
• The key external resources (journals, manuals etc.) that the worker uses frequently can be stored in a 'resources roll', consisting of the URLs of these resources; by copying and using an expert's 'resources roll', an apprentice could discover and mimic the 'continuous learning' process of the expert
• E-mails are the most valuable untapped codified knowledge resource in most companies, and blogs allow knowledge to be simultaneously posted to one or more e-mail addresses and to the owner's indexed blog/filing cabinet
• Workers can easily 'subscribe' to another worker's entire blog (or an individual category/folder subset of it), so they are immediately notified about new knowledge or news that their work teammates or mentors deem valuable
Sure - we also want to subscribe to unions and intersections of blogs. In reality these blogs may be tied to a project or other non-human end-point and so we often just want to know the data rather than know "about" the item it is applied to.
• Blogs do not require the learning of HTML or database management, though they perform both functions powerfully
• Blogs can easily be designed to either live within a company firewall or to transcend organizational boundaries, and to be accessible in whole or part to some or all other employees, as the trade off between security and value-of-sharing dictates.
Private CoP knowledge across an organization and its partners.
But they do represent a potential breakthrough in both personalization and democratization of the process of grass-roots, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of unfiltered knowledge, the paramount task according to Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century . They represent the best-yet compromise between the anarchy of personal websites on the intranet, and the straight-jacket of most 'corporate-owned' repositories.
"We have all struggled with ways to capture tacit knowledge (mostly 'know-how') as effectively as we capture explicit knowledge (mostly 'know-what')."
It may also be argued that this conept can also be applied to explicit knowledge that we don't currently capture anyway. They may be used for the same or different purposes. It also depends on your definition of how such things are captured - or at least the value implied on the fact "something" has been captured "somewhere". So we may be able to say that an email is explicit knowledge and has been captured - however, if no-one can ever find it again, or it i is in a typical flat email structure, then it is easy to say that it really has no value and hasn't been captured (differentiating between "stored" and "captured"). A similar concept could apply to the metadata around meetings, decisions, chats and so on.
• Know-how is knowledge in the context of its application , so simply capturing the sales executive's rolodex contents, sales presentations and client visit schedule is not enough. We want to be able to capture what it is (the know-how) that enables him to leverage this 'know-what' so much more powerfully than others with the same 'know-what' at their disposal. Some of this know-how is process, some of it is style, some of it is existing relationships ('know-who') and some of it is interpersonal skills.
• Some know-how is not individual at all, but a team dynamic. This sales executive and the industry specialist with whom he normally works are far more effective as a team than they are individually or working as part of other teams. Why? Probably because each has know-how, know-what, and know-who that covers gaps in the other's knowledge set.
And sometimes these "teams" don't even know the are operating as such. Chains of decisions and points of view work their way around an organization and influence its decisions. You may catch something in an email that you learn from, or is related to something you are working on, but in general we won't know most of the things the organization does. Re-inventing the wheel is very, very common i'd argue. In summary, such teams can operate along a number of dimensions.
• Not only do we not know how to capture (or codify to use KM jargon) know-how, we don't know how to motivate or reward the sales executive to get him to codify his knowledge. He's so good at selling, why would he want (or we want him) to take time away from that to codify or blog what he knows?
This is in fact the key point. It's probably the reasons weblogs work. Bit clunky KM systems are great for your formal processes and knowledge and the stuff you find out later, but there is a gap where finding what knowledge is important to you is very very difficult. No-One would argue Google isn't a great technical company success, but fundamentally Google doesn't help me or my organization to understand any more, or even find anything other than a keyword hit.
But let's look at what a blog has to offer relative to the filing cabinet:
• It allows each worker to personally identify who he or she thinks actually belongs to and participates in his or her networks (using the blogroll - the blog equivalent of a rolodex), rather than who their manager thinks should be in those networks
Perhaps there is a middle gound - where we can suggest communities. These communities may be interest orientated, project orientated or something else. If you choose your own network, it's unlikely you move outside your good friends - we need to be gently told there are other networks out there we may can be a part of. I love social software - none of my friends do and i've got no idea how to find other people in the company who do!
• The blogroll consists entirely of active links to the blogs of the other community members, so knowledge is electronically and personally connected
• Knowledge can be simply and flexibly indexed (and sorted or filtered) by date and category (using each indiviual's personal taxonomy or 'filing system', not some standard taxonomy system imposed by management)
Again, we need some help here too. Personal taxonomies are great for our own very simple uses, but useless on a grander scale. Finding things on the internet alone is ridiculously difficuly and often you go back to Google. We need a base taxnonmy, but flexible dyanamic taxnomy that can sit underneath that and can be managed by the community.
• Instead of containing redundant copies of knowledge from other people like a filing cabinet, the blog simply hotlinks to the 'permalink' (the dynamically-generated URL for a particular piece of knowledge or 'knowledge object') in the other person's blog/filing cabinet
This falls down in cases such as this one. Rather than being able to comment on sub-conversations you have to resort to copying and pasting the original source. Ideally we should be able to annotate any piece of information we can find, without having to duplicate the data.
• The knowledge is enriched by dynamic links to URLs of relevant news, bibliographies and other external resources used in its compliation, thus greatly increasingly its shelf life by allowing it to be more easily updated
• The key external resources (journals, manuals etc.) that the worker uses frequently can be stored in a 'resources roll', consisting of the URLs of these resources; by copying and using an expert's 'resources roll', an apprentice could discover and mimic the 'continuous learning' process of the expert
• E-mails are the most valuable untapped codified knowledge resource in most companies, and blogs allow knowledge to be simultaneously posted to one or more e-mail addresses and to the owner's indexed blog/filing cabinet
• Workers can easily 'subscribe' to another worker's entire blog (or an individual category/folder subset of it), so they are immediately notified about new knowledge or news that their work teammates or mentors deem valuable
Sure - we also want to subscribe to unions and intersections of blogs. In reality these blogs may be tied to a project or other non-human end-point and so we often just want to know the data rather than know "about" the item it is applied to.
• Blogs do not require the learning of HTML or database management, though they perform both functions powerfully
• Blogs can easily be designed to either live within a company firewall or to transcend organizational boundaries, and to be accessible in whole or part to some or all other employees, as the trade off between security and value-of-sharing dictates.
Private CoP knowledge across an organization and its partners.
But they do represent a potential breakthrough in both personalization and democratization of the process of grass-roots, peer-to-peer knowledge sharing of unfiltered knowledge, the paramount task according to Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century . They represent the best-yet compromise between the anarchy of personal websites on the intranet, and the straight-jacket of most 'corporate-owned' repositories.
