October 2004 Archives

In a great post, Metadata for the masses (via Many-to-Many), Peter Merholz advocates free tagging of documents as opposed to choosing tags from inflexible top-down classification systems, which often force users to view the world in potentially unfamiliar ways. I tend to agree with that from my experience of taxonomies, which often become obsolete within two years. Then Peter writes about the limitations of free tagging:

Clearly, such tagging systems are not a panacea; they present many potential drawbacks. With no one controlling the vocabulary, users develop multiple terms for identical concepts. For example, if you want to find all references to New York City on Del.icio.us, you’ll have to look through “nyc,” “newyork,” and “newyorkcity.”

That's were ontologies come in handy. They give a community of people the ability to develop a common meta-classification model that sits on top of existing ones and bridges them together. An ontology can define "nyc", "newyork" and "newyorkcity" as synonyms, define "Time Square" as included in "nyc" etc. See for example Arisem, who are doing a good job there. In a sense, ontologies allow communities to build a common language from the ground up, which is essential in knowledge creating environment. Top-down norms can be introduced later, when language can be "industrialized" for larger communities.

I found this quote from motivational speaker Susan RoAne in Guy Kawazaki's latest book, "The Art of the Start":

It's not what you know or who you know, but who knows you

Heard at the KM Forum two days ago from a KM consultant:

Teams should not make recommendations to the management but propose alternatives

I am amazed by the number of people who think that knowledge management is about being nice to one another by sharing experiences and building consensus. It is, but only within communities, not between communities. The knowledge economy is no place for whimps.

"If only we knew what we know…" When top managers become concerned by their lack of visibility of the company’s collective knowledge, they start a «corporate yellow pages» project to improve the online corporate directory, which usually only gives business card informations. In a typical top-down approach, taxonomies of expertise are created, on line résumé forms are designed and sent to all employees to fill, and some search engine is put on top.

Back in the mid to late 90s, some companies like BP and Schlumberger have been successful with this top-down approach, others much less. Actually, it proved to be more expensive than anticipated. Those who ran the show had to provide incentives and rewards to solve two key quality problems:
- making sure that the taxonomy of expertise was actually simple enough to be filled by users and yet useful enough to locate experts
- making sure that the data were regularly updated

Many other approaches have been experimented afterwards, but I haven't read anything that looks like a white paper of good practices regarding Corporate Yellow Pages.

Here's how mine would go. Anyone to write it with me?

Ron from Prism Legal writes

knowledge management is in choppy waters (...) however, I do not think KM is in any fundamental danger. But we may be in a period of consolidation and more realistic expectations.

For almost two years now, I have been struggling with this nagging question: Can the knowledge economy create new business models? And I think I will also finally end up with a negative conclusion.

The advent of the knowledge age is undoubtedly transforming our lives very deeply. Organized web-enabled social networks that span across the planet change the way we communicate, the way we do business, the way we learn, the way we relate to one another... Our societies will necessarily end up transformed. John Chambers of Cisco was quoted saying back in the dot-com years "Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail look like a rounding error." It looked like a revolution was coming.

But after four years it looks like the new business opportunities look quite traditional: Universities and business schools educate students about "knowledge management" (or any new name when this one starts to smell foul), combining Computer Science and Sociology. Consultants continue selling "change programs" to CEOs, and Software Editors create new apps and sell licenses. They might do it differently, with more emphasis on markets, like Open Source, and less on bureaucracies, but it looks like it will be more or less the same business models as those we have today.

Why is that? I think just because the pace of change of a human society is extremely sllllooooowwwww. In corporate life, knowledge sharing programs need to engage three levels of constituencies to be successful:

1- The CEO must be ready to sponsor the development of a new networking culture and assign one of his most trusted managers to run some kind of corporate change program,

2- The "Knowledge Officers" assigned to run the various change initiatives must be very well trained and educated to understand the methods, techniques and tools of social networking,

3- The participants must be "web litterate", which means proficiency in the use of technology and in the new writing habits that they impose on us all.

But the reality is that

1- Only those CEOs who are confident in their long lasting tenure, and have nothing to prove to investors truly support these sort of long-term change programs. The others are just pretending.

2- Very few people are actually educated enough to be good "knowledge officers". Most managers assigned to such positions are those left without a seat at the last reorg. They have very few credentials if any whatsoever.

3- Most employees only use e-mail and are reluctant to learn anything new. And they hate to write anyway.

Slow pace of change, same business models. Cry with me, all ye Knowledge Managers. Your salaries will not increase any time soon...

I made a big mistake this morning. I was asked by my boss to present the progress of knowledge networking initiatives to senior VPs of my company (some of which I am involved in as a project member or advisor), and I actually did it.

The audience was composed of ten managers. During my presentation, two of them turned out to be supporting the idea of building knowledge networks in the company, two were opposed to it as being theoretical and unrealistic and six just stood by.

I was of course challenged during my presentation, sometimes a little aggressively, as if I was some sort of unwanted sales rep trying to sell snake oil. Some remarks were so strange that I made the mistake of entering into a discussion to prove my point. The discussion was quite messy from there.

My advice to all of you: Never ever do that. When a subordinate is invited to talk to an assembly of superiors, he is expected to behave like a subordinate, and report on his actions and projects. No more, no less. He is not expected to argue, even if -which was not the case ;)- he is challenged to do so and even scorned if he doesn't.

If you want to argue and persuade, find other business settings (very large audiences including clients for example), or have a guest speaker do the talking to you. This guest speaker should be perceived as a peer of or a superior to the guys in your audience. If you get caught into discussion where you are expected to the justify the plan and start giving factual evidence of the wealth that it created until today, you are doomed. Somebody else should do it for you, because you cannot be both the actor and the referee.

I was naive! Well, the point is taken, and that's the good news.

Wew! I just published the first two chapters of the book I am writing. They're on a new dedicated site bearing the title of the book "Le prix de la confiance", which could be translated by "In search of trust" or something along those lines.

It's going to take a loooong time before I complete this.