Companies everywhere pay for Microsoft's collaboration and document management service SharePoint, but research and anecdote both indicate that a lot of people dislike using it. What if using SharePoint was fun, though? Imagine all the money invested that would feel more worthwhile and all the collaborative work that could be done.
That's the theory behind a new product announced tonight from Mindjet, a nearly two decade old company that is best known for its mind mapping software but is extending itself into a larger corporate collaboration market. The company's new product, Mindjet SP, is a Mindjet plug-in for SharePoint - it takes SharePoint document trees and collaboration and displays them in mind map format. As mind maps go, Mindjet looks good (the company's free iPad app is a joy to use) - but not everyone loves mind maps in general. Can Mindjet save your company's SharePoint investment?
Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.
The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.
The intelligence community is inputting data to the Web at an amazing rate. That mountain of data can be overwhelming to mere humans who are trying to read through pages and pages of information to pinpoint exactly what they're after. Mark Rutherford of CNET News reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has hired a tech company to develop a reader that will scour the Web and render certain information and knowledge into a form that is more easily digested and usable.
The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit entity behind the immensely popular Wikipedia, just announced a new project that is meant to make it a lot easier for inexperienced authors to contribute articles and edits to the project. To do this, the Wikimedia Foundation just received a $890,000 grant from the Stanton Foundation. The project will focus on making the user interface for editing and writing Wikipedia articles easier to use for less tech-savvy contributors.
Most people quickly answer this question in the affirmative. I certainly do. However, there are people out there who aren't sure. They look at the monthly cost of a SaaS application and compare it to the equivalent licensed product over an extended period of time. Given enough time, you will eventually hit a point when the SaaS product appears to be more expensive. Let's look at it from the perspective of the total cost of ownership (TCO).
The break-up of behemoth, vertically integrated enterprises commenced in the 1970's, got a boost from junk bond financing in the 1980's, and accelerated in the 1990's with globalization. Now, late in the 2000's, Social Media (aka Web 2.0) is adding another gear that will accelerate the fundamental restructuring of the enterprise.
This is a big story. That is why ReadWriteWeb is dedicating a new "channel" to Enterprise 2.0. I will be editing this channel and we are looking for part time writers to contribute. More on that later.
I recently did a dump of content from my PDA to my linkblog - things I'd been reading offline and not yet recorded in my 'Ideas Database' (aka my linkblog). One batch of links is from a single person, Bill Ives. So I thought I'd dump them into one R/WW post - more for my benefit than anything else.
All these links are from his Trends: KM/Portals category, which I read specifically for the posts on KM storytelling:
a) From Stories and Organizational Learning:
(quoting Steve Denning) "Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds, and is ideally suited to communicating change and stimulating innovation."
b) On KM success:
"I have found the key differentiator in KM success to be the quality of leadership and not the quality of KM solution design or technology. I have seen implementations with acceptable designs flourish under the right leadership and brilliant "next generation" KM designs flounder under poor leadership."
c) From History of KM Part 6: Digital Age Offers Scalability with New Possibilities for Dialogue. Bill finishes his excellent "History of KM" series (which I thoroughly enjoyed reading) with this sentence:
"Now blogs have entered the picture to make content more personal."
What an excellent way to conclude a history of KM - it's saying that we're in the middle of making history right now, with blogging.
d) Another series of posts I enjoyed was "Storytelling and Knowledge Management" - another 6-parter. In Part 4, Documenting and Sharing Organizational Knowledge, Bill says:
"To make knowledge collection and knowledge sharing more effective, one must go beyond simply abstracting documents from explicit knowledge sources. It is necessary to provide a story of the document."
Which again, is where blogs come in according to Bill.
e) In Part 5, Enhancing Learning, Bill explains the benefits of stories as a learning device:
"The story contains much more than a series of basic procedural steps. It can contain the rationale, the strategy and the cultural values implicit within the actions taken by the story teller."
f) In a later series called "KM Stories", Bill writes about specific case studies. In Part Two he says:
"For knowledge management to be successful, IT, HR, and the business units need to work together to achieve success."
g) In his postscript to that series, Bill lists the factors for successful KM projects. I won't re-list them all here, but suffice to say (for me) that the first two are people-related factors:
"Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues
Provide Strong Leadership for the Knowledge Function"
I suspect that's why KM projects are so wont to fail. When you require the support of lots of different people and a strong leader, well that's Politics - not technology. And we all know how contentious politics can be!
Thanks to Bill Ives for writing so much valuable content on the subject of KM and storytelling. I hope to read more soon.
After my Dave Snowden grokking last week, I've been reading up on storytelling in KM. Bill Ives has some fantastic reading on this subject and I intend to read Steve Denning too. I was thinking this morning about how people have different niches and specialist talents. For example, I'm a better writer than I am a programmer or designer. And there are a lot of people who are better programmers or designers than writers. Or better talkers than writers. Or better artists than talkers.
I've always maintained that blogging isn't for everyone and that applies inside corporate walls too. Blogs and wikis are not going to suit everyone in an organisation, so they're not the perfect KM solution by any means. One way around this is to look for those 1 or 2 people in a team or group who are natural writers or have an interest in Web writing - and encourage those people to take responsibility for their team's content. This is also the approach most companies take when running their Content Management Systems.
But I was thinking about an alternative approach. What if organisations hired a specialist writer, whose job it is to go around the different teams and elicit stories from people. That person would be a kind of journalist (but forget about the whole "are bloggers journalists" debate, that's not important). The person I'm describing would interview team members and coax stories from them. Those stories would then be transcribed onto a team weblog - with all team members encouraged to comment on or add to the stories. The point is that there needs to be at least one person who knows how to spin a narrativeÖ write compelling content.
Once that narrative is "up there" on the blog - it acts as a springboard for the non-writers to contribute bits of content, eventually adding up to a store of knowledge about the organisation. Think of the writer's narrative as a star, with the resulting contributions being planets that are created around the gravitational pull and life-giving energy of the star.
Just as there are specialist programmers and designers on Web teams, I think there is a need for specialist writers or storytellers to act as a Knowledge Management nexus for organisations. This is an idea I'm exploring for a business - where I set myself up as a consultant KM StoryWriter.
And yes it uses the same skillset that I'd need to write a biography of Web 2.0. I guess I'm exploring ways to fulfil my ambition to write stories for a living. The future of fiction is non-fiction - there's very little market for novelists these days. I think there is a market for non-fiction stories - for example in the form of non-fiction books, or as a Knowledge Management tool in organisations. I feel I'm getting closer to finding my nicheÖ
This post could be sub-titled "Grokking Dave Snowden", because that's how I felt after reading this PDF file from AOK (Association of Knowledgework). The PDF features extracts from a proposed AOK book entitled Stars Of The New Order: What They're Telling Business Leaders. The chapter that got my attention was chapter 13: Third Generation Knowledge Management. I think it's based on a series of conversations with Dave Snowden back in January 2002, but the content is just as relevant now.
Snowden is like the Jakob Nielsen of Knowledge Management - he's a very influential figure in the community. In these conversations, he held sway with other KM practitioners like Jack Vinson and James Robertson. This discussion format brought out the best in Snowden I believe. Here are some of the highlights I picked out and my thoughts based on them.
In recent years, it's been difficult to pin down a definition of what Knowledge Management is. What it appeared to be in the 90's was Information Management in wolf's clothing. Or is that: mutton dressed as lamb? :-) Either way, what was being 'managed' in the 90's by so-called Knowledge Management Systems was not in fact knowledge - but information. There was, as T.D. Wilson put it:
"A tendency to elide the distinction between 'knowledge' (what I know) and 'information' (what I am able to convey about what I know)."
In the conversations, Dave Snowden put it like this:
"As we move into the third millennium we see a new approach emerging in which we focus not on the management of knowledge as a 'thing' which can be identified and cataloged, but on the management of the ecology of knowledge." (pg 21)
I love that term: ecology of knowledge. It emphasizes that knowledge is a fluid, almost living, thing; and that it's closely related to its environment - or put another way, its context (a word which Snowden uses a lot).
Snowden went on to explain a basic principle of KM in this 'ecology' view of it:
"The process of moving from my head, to my mouth to my hands inevitably involves some loss of content, and frequently involves a massive loss of context." (pg 21)
Which is to say: during the act of speaking and then writing what is in your head, you will probably lose some content and a lot of context.
To extrapolate from what Snowden said, this is how I think his body metaphor works out:
Head = Context
Mouth = Narrative
Hands = Content Management
Snowden uses narrative (storytelling) to add context to information. He said:
"...as for strategy, I use narrative techniques to contextualize the model for a company so the heuristics and boundary conditions are defined not in some abstract language, but are rooted in the defining stories of that organization." (pg 24)
This is of great interest to me. As a writer, narrative is one of my skillsets. So I'm thinking this could be a way for me to leverage my skills as a writer in the world of KM (see, I'm even using the word 'leverage' with gay abandon now - I'm drinking the KM Kool-Aid!).
You know what it also reminds me of? My two favourite contemporary literary writers, Michael Lewis and Tom Wolfe. They are both pioneers of writing non-fiction using literary techniques. I was thinking about this the other day (in another context!) and wrote down this as a note to myself: The future of fiction is non-fiction.
To relate this to KM, I think there's room for a literary sensibility in business too.
Snowden talked about rejecting "generic models" of knowledge management - typified by KM Consultants who speak in buzz words and cliches. He explained:
"If a model is rooted in the stories of an organization’s histories and its possible futures (narrative techniques) then the model has meaning to that group. My approach is to get the organization to tell stories and then to populate a framework with those stories, draw boundaries between spaces and then move forward to action." (pg 26)
He hates "consultants who just roll out their model regardless of context".
The approach Snowden prefers is what he labels a "heuristic" one - heuristic meaning to discover or find out. He has a lovely metaphor to explain this:
"Here we have the chef, not the recipe book user, with all the differences in quality that metaphor implies." (pg 27)
The best chefs are artists, so this view of KM plays to my artsy-fartsy nature :-)
So after all that, what is KM? Well Snowden defined it as "the creation of shared context". He said knowledge must be volunteered (not conscripted), which is where the narrative techniques come in. When people tell their own stories, they naturally put information into the context of their lives.
Not coincidentally that is also the pattern of blogging, which encourages people to tell their stories on the Web and "share context" with their particular community. The blogging communities for Web Design and Knowledge Management itself best illustrate this to me - they both have strong communities where bloggers constantly comment on each others sites or trackback one another.
Snowden's own KM model is called Cynefin and he described it like this:
"...the contextualization takes the form of gathering anecdotes (naturally told stories, around the water cooler etc.) from that organization’s own history, and using those stories to create the [KM] model." (pg 29)
He later referred to this as mapping what people know, using narrative techniques (pg 33).
As yet, I'm not sure what role literary techniques might play in this. I'll read some more on Snowden's theories, plus other peoples, and see what I can come up with.
I'd like to think that a skilled writer has a lot to offer in the KM process of transcribing peoples stories into a compelling narrative. Just as Michael Lewis wrote an amazing narrative based on the stories of the Oakland A's baseball team in his book Moneyball (which I've just finished reading). The stories came from the Oakland A's people, particularly Billy Beane. But it was Lewis' skill that stitched it all together to produce a very insightful book - chock full of knowledge, in fact.
Lastly, Snowden defined the generations of Knowledge Management as he sees them:
"In Generation 3, we acknowledge Gen 2 (content management) but also see knowledge is simultaneously a flow and a thing—so for the flows we manage channels." (pg 37)
A flow and a thing... I love that definition, because I've blogged about 'flow' before.
To wrap up the chef metaphor, Snowden said:
"We are chefs using prior knowledge, experience and natural talent to create original solutions, not recipe book users." (pg 37/38)
I like to think that describes the art of writing too. And originality is something I place a high premium on, so I have a feeling Dave Snowden's theories on Knowledge Management are going to serve me very well.
There's an interesting meme doing the rounds about using pens as a metaphor for weblogs. Of course I can't resist adding my 2 cents when it comes to that topic :-) Lilia began with a post that explored the 'weblog as a pen' metaphor in relation to how weblogs serve many purposes - like pens do. This was as a reaction to the 'weblog as genre' discussion going on elsewhere. She ended up concluding that a weblog is not like a pen, "but blogging software is." That is, a pen is a tool - just like blogging software. Dina picked up on that theme and took the following path:
'weblog as a pen' ---> pen as a genre ---> pen as the creative potential in relationships ---> pen as a metaphor ---> (metaphors in general) ---> the future of the pen with Gen Y.
My contribution to this meme, like Dina's, takes a detour from Lilia's main point (but then that is what's fun about the social aspect of blogging - people pick up a post from someone else and use it as a springboard for their own ideas). So here's my riff on the 'pen as metaphor' theme.
I have an image in the top-left of my homepage, borrowed from a photo of a John Baldessari artwork called Read/Write/Think/Dream - in which he transformed the facade and interior foyer of the Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego, into a colourful and interactive work of art. (nb: I wrote about it a month and a half ago). The whole artwork resonated deeply with me, but that sliver of an image you see in the top-left of your screen (you have to get out of your RSS Reader to see it!) seemed to 'fit' with the themes of my weblog. I hadn't really analysed why, until today.
It's a photo-mural of pens and pencils and it's just one part of the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork. The image shows two people looking at the pencils and pens - one has stopped to look, the other is about to walk past it. Those people (and the ones who will follow) are just as much a part of the artwork as the pencils/pens.
Baldessari said about the work: "The whole concept of the piece deals with the obvious: students are central to the university." To relate this to how I used that one image on my weblog: my readers (people) are just as much a part of my blog as my writing. To extend that even further: people are central to the blogosphere.
What's not immediately obvious in the Read/Write/Think/Dream artwork is that the pens and pencils are ordered according to the color spectrum of the rainbow. Here is one explanation of this:
"On one interior side wall is a photo-mural of pens and pencils in a neat row, each a different color, aligned according to their sequence in the color spectrum. These tools, neatly ordered, and the students, gathered in a row like carefully collected types, reflect Baldessari's deep-seated interest in sorting and systems of organization." (emphasis mine)
Once again, I can apply this meaning to my blog. These days I style myself as an Analyst, which is my way of saying that in this weblog I strive to examine and organize information - and from that create new ideas.
Baldessari also said that "the pens and pencils represent the tools of the students' trade". This gives me an opportunity to return to Lilia's original point that pens - and weblog authoring systems - are just tools. We can use them how we like, but it comes back to the sum of: Person + Tool = Self-Expression OR Creativity OR Knowledge OR Blogosphere OR Etc.
My point here is: we need both people and tools in the equation. And thankfully, I think this is where the current Knowledge Management theories are heading. As Mike Gotta put it - "Knowledge Management: It Was Always About People".
The problem with KM during the 90's was that everyone thought of Knowledge Management as being Technology-driven. Companies tried to implement Knowledge Management systems and tools. Well actually that theory wasn't total nonsense, because the reality is KM is about both People and Tools. If you look at Dave Pollard's principles of KM (which I found very inspirational), you'll see that it's a mix of tools and people-oriented principles that he advocates.
I have a new catchphrase to express this: People are Central, but Tools are Crucial.
So that's my take on the 'pen as metaphor' meme. Heh, I took a big segue! but I think I learned something along the way ;-) However I didn't get to address Dina's point about "the future of the pen with Gen Y" - which is a fascinating question. I'll think about that some more and address it in a later post.
