November 2004 Archives

From Cyril Connolly ...

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
- New Statesman 1933

[thanks Piers]

I realized a few weeks ago that as soon as you adopt a publish-subscribe model for information feeds, the Information Management model for a "knowledge cell" (individual or community) becomes very simple.

The process goes like this:

1- The "knowledge cell" subscribes to the relevant information sources (feeds) it has been given access to by their owners,
2- It uses those information feeds to create new information,
3- It then fires new processed information in several different community-specific warehouses (again as feeds) each one characterized by its access rights for individuals or groups to subscribe to.

Step 2, Processing information, can consist of simply enhancing the quality of an existing information by adding metadata. It can involve more complex operations like summarizing, translating or categorizing it in a different way. Finally, it can also consist in writing something completely new from scratch using the information and knowledge available within the "cell".

This very simple diagram which I made two weeks ago epitomizes for me the basic social cell of knowledge management. I made this slide thinking about communities of practice, but it works the same if the "cell" is limited to one individual. That's exactly how blogs work.
Put all those cells (aka neurons) in a worldwide network, and it starts looking like a huge brain of collective intelligence.

I am currently reading From Knowledge to Intelligence of Helen N. Rothberg and G. Scott Erickson. The intent of the book is to explore a common framework for competitive intelligence and knowledge management. I jumped on it because I believe this is a much needed research topic. CI appeals to managers, KM to field practitioners. Reconciling the two would certainly give us valuable insights on corporate governance.

The book is well documented but, though I am ony half way through, I may reach the conclusion that it misses the point. Helen and Scott present CI and KM as very different practices and argue that they can work hand in hand within a common strategic framework. Right. But they do not dig into the social fabric of CI and KM to demonstrate that they are basically the same thing, only with different viewpoints and expectations.

Anyway, the authors concur with Gilad (1994) and suggest

creating the "Office of the President" for managing the flow of intelligence. The intelligence facilitator or team would be part of the Office and have direct access to senior executives. It would enable the development of relationships so that intelligence is woven into the fabric of strategic decision making

And maybe this contracting agreement should be made explicit, as Olivier Zara suggests in his new and excellent book "Managing Colective Intelligece" to be published and which can be downloaded here. But that's for another post.

Anyway, that's how I would like KM to be managed in my company.

From Elmina

The weblog, or blog, is a webpage on which the author publishes pieces with the intention to start conversation

Reflecting later upon the Personal KM workshop at KM Europe, maybe the transportation industry could be a good metaphor for KM.

In the early days of the industrial revolution, the railway was the only industrial transportation system, and of course, it belonged to railway companies, each one having its own infrastructure standards, and thus could not interoperate. There was nothing personal there. And that's how early KM systems were: one size fits all, company-owned and proprietary. Then cars, busses and motorcycles were invented, and they adopted a very simple international infrastructure standard: the paved road and the tire, basically (aka messenging + http protocols, RSS/XML etc.). Some of these vehicles were personal bicycles, motorcycles, or cars (aka e-mail, IM, Mindmapping, Weblogs), some were leased like taxis (aka ASPs), and some were collective busses or coaches (aka collaborative spaces). The road became diverse too, so there came a need for rules and signs(aka metadata). Four lane highways were built and maintained at the national level (aka corporate glossaries, thesauri, ontologies), others like streets at the community level
(aka community taxonomies) and other like driveways at the personal level (aka categories + files). And then came the airlines (aka Wifi), but let's keep it simple. The point is that nowadays, if you want to go from one place to another, you can choose your personal car, the train or the bus and, whatever vehicle you choose can take you there using a wide variety of road systems, although the user experience varies tremendously.

This is to show that the one-size-fits-all of corporate KM is no longer the rule of the knowledge sharing game. Personal tools can indeed blend quite nicely with corporate tools, as long as they do complement each other. It also shows that interoperability standards don't need to be very complicated to work.

This metaphor of course needs to be worked on. This is very messy.

KM Europe this year was not very busy, and the atmosphere was rather relaxed(left). I found the trade show itself somewhat disappointing. There was nothing really new since last year, with the exception of Google, and a short conversation with Disk@d, a dutch e-publishing company confimed my impression: Today KM is a bear market, if it is a market after all.

But I had a great time anyway because of a couple of interesting conferences and workshops. I still have to figure out some of the messages conveyed by those conferences though (right ;-))
Also there were great people around. I knew many of them, such as Anne Jubert, Richard McDermott, Lilia Efimova, Joël Frigière, Martin Röll etc. I also met new ones such as Peter Heisig, of the Fraunhofer Institute, currently researching on approaches to integrate KM into business processes, Dr Herwig Rollett, head of research cooperation for the know-center in Austria and a couple of others.

Many people as for the "business model" behind blogging or behind whatever social activity on the web. It seems like such a waste of time! I just read a partial answer from BloggerCon News (impossible name in France!)

I myself have been offered jobs, have been asked to edit books, have been asked to dinner with interesting people that I didn't know but who read my blogs, have been asked on dates, and have generally been treated very differently and much more invitingly in a wide variety of situations because of my blogs, than if I didn't have them.

Today was a great day for CoP-1 the community of corporate knowledge officers I co-founded two years ago in Paris when I came back from the US. Twenty community members and twenty guests, most of them senior executives from big French companies joined for a continental "petit-déjeuner" on the Champs-Elysées, hosted by Ogilvy to talk about how to make KM projects successful. Our guests were given a handbook prepared by Benedikt Benenati of Danone in which all our corporate KM projects were described (One page of text and one page of screenshots). Then there was a one hour presentation by Christophe Binot of Total, Eric Clermontet of Ogilvy Aurélie Dudézert of Centrale Paris and myself about lessons learned those from those twenty odd KM projects.

This was really an achievement. Too bad I cannot post the presentation and the handbook here. If you want one, ask me anyway. You never know. BTW, it's written in French

From Peter Drucker:

Ninety percent of what we call 'management' consists of making it difficult for people to get things done