5 questions every KM salesman must be able to answer

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Master Butcher and Salesman in Florence
Originally uploaded by Alaskan Dude

They say that every customer really only ever has 5 questions, and every salesman must know the answer to these off by heart. Whether you are selling Knowledge Management or Vacuum Cleaners, if you don't know the answer, then you won't close the sale.

These are the questions;

What’s this?
What will it do for me?
What will it cost me?
Why should I buy your model?
What’s the next step?

Now lets look at them as they apply to KM, and the answers I usually give when selling to an in-house sceptic, such as a project manager or plant manager (NB the answers to a CEO or senior manager would be different).

What’s this? It's knowledge management. It's a new management discipline, along the lines of risk management or safety management, but focused on the value of company know-how. It's a systematic way of ensuring that all decisions are made in the light of "what the company knows", in order to deliver improved performance.

What will it do for me? It will save you time in planning, by giving you access to knowledge you can trust; to good ideas, to practices worth repeating, and to documented pitfalls to avoid. It will save you the risk of repeating errors someone else has already made. It will help you bring your project in faster, better and cheaper, and will give you a way to feed your own discoveries and improvements back into the organisation. You will also be given the opportunity to join a community of practice - effectively a group of brains you can pick when you need instant help.

What will it cost me? It will cost you involvement in a few simple processes at key stages in your project - KM planning, peer assists, retrospects, after action reviews. These are quick and simple, and deliver value to you as well as to the project.

Why should I buy your model? This model is proven in practice. It's simple, and it works, There are other models out there, which often focus primarily on deploying new software, or on content management, but you won't get the same value.

What’s the next step? The answer to this one depends on where you are on your KM implementation journey. You may invite the manager to a seminar. You may look for the opportunity to try a KM process such as an AAR or Peer Assist. You may ask him or her to join a CoP. You may even ask them to support a pilot of the whole KM system.

The key is to understand these questions, to understand that you have to answer them in order and that the customer won't move on to the next until you have answered him or her effectively, and to have good answers prepared for each question.

Knowledge management - Money management - they both need a System

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Money
Originally uploaded by AMagill

This post expands on some of the points made in this video.

When you say the word "system" to a group of people, a good proportion of them will interpret the word as meaning an IT system. But a knowledge management system is far more than an IT solution. It is about a way of working; a way of working systematically, to deliver the value tied up in the knowledge of your staff, your teams, your suppliers and your customers. It’s also a way of being, it’s the core of your belief system.

Let's take an analogy for working systematically to deliver value, by looking at the management of one of your other assets. Lets look at money. Now I know money is not a strong analogy for knowledge. It is a lot more tangible for a start, and a lot more measurable, and everyone relates to it. But let's ignore for a moment the differences between the two, and instead compare the management systems that businesses apply. One reason that I pick money for the analogy is that you don’t mess about with it. My HR colleagues tell me money doesn’t motivate, but people still don’t take chances with it.

The systematic management of money requires a combination of people, processes, technology and culture (reinforced by governance). You will need people such as accountants, financial planners, commercial managers. You have a whole range of business processes like budgeting, financial tracking, auditing of accounts. No doubt you have software technology you use; from base-level spreadsheets to more elaborate enterprise-wide accounting solutions. You may be moving into ecommerce, and investing in technology to move money electronically. You need a money-savvy culture. Your people understand that "money counts", they "watch the bottom line", they look for "bang for the buck". They know the value of a dollar, and if times are tight, they watch what they spend. And that culture needs to be backed by governance. you don't get project approval unless you demonstrate you have budgeted correctly. Your managers want to see the way money is being spent against the plan. And every so often they will audit you, to see if you are in compliance. Your money management system works, because it is a holistic integration of people, process, technology and culture, backed up by governance. These things have been about for so long we sometimes don’t recognise them as being components in a Money Management System.

What about your knowledge management system? Do you have the people? Do you have knowledge accountants, knowledge planners, knowledge managers? Do you have processes for knowledge tracking, or knowledge auditing? Do you budget for knowledge at the start of a project, in the same way you budget for money? Do you have the technologies you need at a local and enterprise-wide scale? What about your culture? Do people keep as close an eye on knowledge as they do on money? They may know what they earn, but do they know what they learn? And finally, what about governance? Do people get project approval without demonstrating "learning before"? Do managers ask to see how you are managing your learning? Does anyone ever get audited for KM compliance?

Analogies can be pushed too far, but I think in this case a comparison of the two shows that a Knowledge Management system, if it is to succeed, needs to look at the holistic integration of people, process, technology and culture issues, backed up by governance. Part of the success of the BP KM program was the close attention we paid to this integration. We created knowledge roles, we introduced knowledge processes, and we brought in knowledge technology, and now (at least in drilling and in projects) there is governance as well. The result has been a deep and lasting change in the culture, and the delivery of real tangible business benefit. It didn’t happen by accident, but as a result of creating a system to manage our knowledge, in the same systematic fashion that we manage our money.

Two tribes - two communities - two jargons

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Wait, what are we?
Originally uploaded by Ingorrr

This blog post made me think about the nature of communities of practice in business, by thinking of them as tribes.

A tribe (according to wikipedia) is a social group of humans connected by a shared system of values and organized for mutual care, defense, and survival beyond that which could be attained by a lone individual or family. Tribes can often share a common language or dialect, can share common customs, and can share common ancestry.

In many ways, communities of practice in a business share some characteristics of tribes. Let me illustrate this with two tribes I know well from the Oil Industry - Drillers and Geologists (and the stereotypes I show here are exaggerated, and rather out of date!)

• They share different values. Traditionally, geologists are scientists - they are interested in hypotheses and theories. Drillers are engineers, they like to do stuff and build stuff. Geologists think in millions of years, Drillers think in feet per hour. Drillers say geologists have three hands - "If you ask a geologist for an answer, he says "on the one hand it could be this, on the other hand it could be that, and on the other hand it could be something else". Geologists think Drillers just want to "Make Hole".


• They speak a different language, and that language is a technical language. It is Jargon. Geologists speak of underthrust plays, of turbidite overbanks, of secondary calcite cement. Drillers talk of BHAs, top drive assemblies, packers, tubing and foam cement (this is not the same sort of cement the geologists talk about).


• They probably also have different customs, though here I am on less certain ground. Geologists like field trips, drillers like golf. Geologists draw maps, drillers draw graphs. I am sure there are others!
  

Both drillers and geologists have their communities of practice. These are self-organised voluntary support groups which exist for sharing knowledge. In may ways, to quote wikipedia, they are "organized for mutual care, defense, and survival beyond that which could be attained by a lone individual". The care, defence and survival are assured by pooling knowledge, to allow the individual access to the knowledge they need to take care of business, defend against problems and issues, and survive in a tough and highly paced business environment.

Triablism in communities is no problem provided it is constructive, and provided it focuses on care, defence and survival. It's only a problem when the tribalism turns into non-cooperation or even conflict with other tribes - something which may be a risk if the community "tribes" are reinforced by the wrong organisational structures. So what happens in business if two "tribes" go to war?

This can be highly damaging. When I started in the oil sector, geologists and drillers were in different departments. The communities therefore were strengthened by organisational silos. We communicated by exchanging reports (which were, of course, written in a different jargon). We blamed each other when things went wrong. We could hide behind our different values, different customs, different language.

This situation could not be allowed to continue. Geologists and drillers were put into multidisciplinary teams (along with the reservoir engineers and the petrophysicists). They had to develop a common language, which was greatly facilitated by teh development of 3D earth models, where the position of the rocks and the position of the drillbit could be visualised in 3D. They had to develop shared values, which meant a trade-off between "making hole" and "collecting data to test theories", in order to deliver the best business result to the organisation. They needed to start to share customs, share learning, and start to support and care for each other.

Communities in companies have a lot in common with tribes, and in many ways they are tribes united by a common jargon. These jargon-tribes - these communities of practice - intersect with the multidisciplinary teams at the level of the individual worker, and give him or her access to the specialist knowledge they need, in order to interact with all the members of all the other tribes who make up their team. These two structures - the team and the tribe - form the two dimensions of knowledge management within an organisation (for more detail, see the video on this page - its in the middle of the bottom row)

So some mechanism is needed to allow the communities to collaborate, and that mechanism is the team based approach. It is the team leaders job to recognise the tribes, and to build the shared values, shared language and shared customs that allow the two tribes to work together as one, and apply their knowledge in service of the business.

Lunch and learn? Not for me thanks, I'm trying to give it up.

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Veggie Burger Eating Competition, Slovakia
Originally uploaded by CxOxS

I’m going to have a little rant about the topic of "lunch and learn" as a knowledge management tool. Feel free to disagree!

I know this is quite a popular approach, and at first sight it makes a lot of sense. You can set up seminars where people talk about what they have been doing, and you can boost attendance by holding the seminars during lunchtime when people have "free time" and aren't doing work. Maybe you can offer free coffee and cookies as an inducement for them to turn up.

But what message are you giving? You are giving the message that learning and knowledge sharing is not something that should be a priority during working hours, and should be fitted into spare lunchtimes. You are giving the message that learning is not real work, to be done during work time. You are giving the message that learning is something you can do while eating, and that you don't need to give it full attention. You are making the tacit assumption that people will not turn up to learn something unless you bribe them with cookies.

If learning is important, don’t relegate it to lunchtime. How many other business activities would you hold at lunchtime, so people could eat as they participated? Would you have "lunch and budgeting?" "lunch and project planning?" lunch and personal appraisal?" "lunch and recruitment interviewing?" No you wouldn't, so why relegate learning to lunchtime?

Part of the problem, I think, is that "lunch and learn" sessions tend to be general seminars which people think might be of interest, rather than focused sessions addressing key business issues. They tend to be "show and tell" or "death by PowerPoint", rather than interactive working sessions. They tend to be knowledge push rather than knowledge pull. The amount of useful knowledge transferred at the sessions is generally minimal. OK, you can raise awareness of an issue, but you not going to change the way the people work. So the amount of real benefit you create is minimal, but the devaluation of the importance of learning is immense. The message you give, though subliminal, is damaging. However the topics are not always general awareness topics. I have been in an organisation where they held knowledge debriefs of experts coming in from intensive field visits to overseas countries, as "lunch and learn" sessions, to transfer key operational know-how. Here the topic was hugely valuable, and somehow they couldn't treat this as real work?

If learning is important to your organisation, treat it as if it as important. Focus it on the solution of business problems, hold it during business hours as a business practice, and don't feel you have to bribe people with cookies in order to get them to turn up.

Knowledge exchange, yes. Peer Assist, definitely. Lunch and learn? No thank you!

OPEC and knowledge culture

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Here's another way to think about Knowledge-friendly culture.

Think OPEC

OPEC is an acronym for the cultural elements that really support knowledge management.

• O is for Openness. Openness within an organisation is a great supporter for knowledge sharing - openness to new ideas, openness to learning, looking openly at mistakes and successes from the past.
• P is for Performance focus. A focus on delivery, and in using all available resources (including knowledge) to enable delivery. A drive to continually improve, will only be achieved through a focus on continually learning (see my blog post on knowledge and performance)
• E is for Empowerment. Staff need to be empowered to use the knowledge they find. Empowerment goes hand in hand with knowledge seeking - people need to be given their objectives, empowered to deliver, and provided with access to knowledge. Knowledge also empowers. Knowledge is power, knowledge management is empowerment.
• C is for Conversation. Steven Denning once said that a company's success in KM is related to it's ability to have good conversations. Conversations happen in teams, in projects, in networks, in peer assists and in community knowledge exchange. It is through conversation that knowledge is shared and exchanged.
  

OPEC companies (companies with an OPEC culture) will find KM a breeze, and an OPEC company has a real head start on the KM journey.

Tom and I were recently working with a non-OPEC company. There was no Openness - mistakes were hidden, reports were "sanitised", messages tweaked and wordsmithed away. There was no Performance focus. Focus was on looking good and going through the motions - whether there was any delivery at the end was not a driver. There was no Empowerment. Any report or finding had to go up through layers and layers of hierarchy before being approved. The one thing they were good at, was Conversation. They could talk forever. They aspire to KM, and they will greatly benefit from KM, but the process of culture change will be long, and will have to be tackled carefully, slowly, and in small steps

Motivation and the Peer Assist

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I received a comment on my Peer Assist post the other day, asking “what is the (motivation) basis for assisting … what is (the motivation) for those participants helping you in solving your problems?.is it on basis of pure knowledge and experience sharing?”

So I thought I would explain firstly the issues of motivation and reward, and secondly how you select people to assist you.

In my experience, people agree to turn up at a peer assist because they are flattered to be asked, or proud to be asked. It is quite a recognition of your value if you are asked to travel across the world, or across the country, to help another team. It feels good! Also there is a degree of curiosity involved. Peer assists can be very interesting events – you learn a lot about the other team!

In the event itself, there needs to be free and open sharing of knowledge, and provided the event is well structured, held at the right time in the project, well facilitated, and covering a discrete topic (with well defined scope and objectives) then free and open sharing usually results. The facilitator can help by doing some ice-breaking, maybe getting the assisters and the team together the previous evening for dinner, for example, in order to build a sense of common purpose. If the project team really want to be assisted, then the motivation for the assisters is in doing a good job, helping their fellow company employees, and solving an interesting and tricky business puzzle. Peer Assist is an enjoyable and creative process. I used to love being invited to peer assists, and to be able to concentrate for a couple of days on a real problem, to which I could bring my experience and knowledge. I was motivated by interest, curiosity, challenge, pride at being asked, and a desire to make a difference.

One thing to bear n mind about Peer Assist, is that it is one of the few truly two-way Knowledge Management processes. Both teams learn from the effort; the assisting team returns home with a broader knowledge base, and the inviting team is able to use the lessons and advice.

There are a number of ways in which peer assist can go wrong, such as when it falls into “attack and defend” behaviours, or when the project team doesn’t really want to be assisted, but are going through the motions to “tick the peer assist box”. Here you will need excellent facilitation to rescue the situation.

There should be no extrinsic reward to the peer assisters. They should not be paid to attend. Generally the best approach seems to be that the assisters give their time for free, but that the project team being assisted pay for travel and expenses.
When it comes to selecting people to attend the peer assist;

1. They should truly be PEERS. In other words, they need to be the same level of seniority as the members of the project team who will be at the peer assist. The CEO of BP, Lord Browne, pointed out in his article on KM that “"the politics accompanying hierarchies hampers the free exchange of knowledge. People are much more open with their peers. They are much more willing to share and to listen". So if you want a management review, ask managers to attend. If you want a peer assist, with free unhampered exchange of knowledge, ask peers. Don’t mix the two groups.
2. They should have diverse backgrounds, knowledge, and experience relevant to the objectives. Don’t just ask the “usual suspects” – look widely inside and outside the organization. I have been involved with some great peer assists where they invited partner companies, or non competing companies, in order to get some real “out of the box” ideas.
3. Ask your community coordinators, and search your company expertise locator, to find people you don’t know who have relevant expertise. Ask your network, ask widely, and you may be surprised who turns up and where the best ideas come from.

Social networking for business? Or business networking with a social edge?

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Paper Chain Men
Originally uploaded by ArtemFinland

Social networking is a topic on every one's lips. The explosion of social networking is exciting, dramatic, highly visible across the world wide web. The uptake and use of these tools has led many people to think that they could be valuable within the business world as well, as ways of connecting employees within a company. I have even heard one company reported as saying "Sharepoint isn't working for us, lets get Facebook instead"

Hang on a minute folks - lets step back a moment and think what we are trying to do here.

Knowledge management involves networking, and those networks need to have a culture of trust and relationships. They need a social edge - a social dimension. This has been recognised for a long time, and there is plenty of history from Buckman labs and from Shell and from many other about how to promote and encourage the social relationships which enable the networks. But these networks are not primarily social, they are primarily for business; for exchanging and re-using knowledge between practitioners within communities of practice. They are for doing better business, rather than acquiring more webfriends. Experience shows that communities need some coordination, and some facilitation, and some direction. Conoco Phillips, for example, have this down to a fine art, and know just how to nurture and support a community so that it delivers maximum value to the business, based on relationships of trust and interdependence. They have developed business networking tools tailored to these needs, which contain a social dimension but in a business networking context.

So if these communities are business networks with a social edge, then are social networking tools the tools that they need? I don't think they are. Social networking software is designed for social purposes; for finding friends, making new friends, building friendships though chatting and interaction, but not necessarily for building collective capability through knowledge sharing. Replacing the business networking tools of successful communities with the likes of Facebook could be a disaster. Facebook is great - I am on Facebook myself - but it's designed for a purely social purpose.

Knowledge management requires business networking which requires social relationships, but social relationships are not the totality of knowledge management (just as baking bread requires a supply of flour which can be supplied by access to a supermarket, but easy access to supermarkets does not make you a baker).

As always, before selecting software, you need a clear understanding of what you want it to do. If you want to build social networks in your business, then buy some social networking software. If you want to build business networks with a social edge, then get some business networking tools (and before you buy any software at all, ask yourself whether it's lack of software that's the issue that stops knowledge being shared and re-used. Very often it isn't).

There are elements of the social web that have huge value for KM within business , and these are the web 2.0 applications that facilitate user-generated content, which I see as different from the tools designed to facilitate social networks. More of these in a later post.

10 years old today!

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Birthday cake
Originally uploaded by kowitz

My company, ten years old today!

We hope you will join with us in celebrating Knoco's tenth birthday celebration today. It was June 19th, 1999 when four hopeful ex-members of the BP KM team confirmed the registration of a new consulting company, looking to offer to other clients the success that Knowledge Management had brought to BP.

At the time the company was known as Knowledge Transformation International, with four directors; Nick Milton, Tom Young, Walt Palen and Tony Kuhel. We started work with our first client, and began to build our market presence and offer.
Over time, our business grew, and we began to consolidate.

Tony left to join another start-up in the USA, Walt (for family reasons) concentrated solely on work for BP in Houston, and we changed the name from our original cumbersome title to the more memorable “Knoco”.

As the 00s continued, the Knoco family began to grow through franchise. First Ian joined us in South Africa, then Julian with a training franchise in Spain, Carol in New York, and Siva in India. More franchises are even now being discussed.
Most recently we have partnered with Douglas and Gary to for the Pikoli Partnership, offering private-sector practice to public-sector clients.

It has been an exciting ten years, and we look forward to new clients, new franchisees, new contracts and new learning opportunities. We hope you will join with us in saying “Happy Birthday Knoco”!

You can download our 10th Anniversary newsletter from the news page of the Knoco website

Motivating KM

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Laser 3.14 Work Love Motivation
Originally uploaded by Brianfit

An interesting blog post on KM and motivation got me thinking.

In terms of motivation for KM, I believe that once KM is fully embedded, you should address motivation as you do for any other management discipline. How do you motivate people to follow the company risk management approach for example, or to comply with diversity guidelines, or to do their budgeting and financial reporting? You do a number of things

1) you make the expectation for KM very clear, and you embed it in work structures. See for example the way BP have embedded KM within their common work frameworks

2) you make accountabilities very clear. The job description of the subject matter experts in Shell, for example, makes their KM roles, objectives and deliverables very clear. These are reviewed in the normal way, in their appraisals

3) you monitor activity, reward those who comply with work expectations through the ususal reward channels, and sanction those who are not complying. Look at the way Buckman labs operate - the notes that go out from the CEO saying "dear associate - you have not been sharing knowledge. How can I help you improve?" As Melissie Rumizen used to say - "we reward knowledge management. If you do it, we reward you by letting you keep your job". If your company is seriously committed to KM, then those who don't play the game - the knowledge hoarders, the wheel-reinventers - need to know that they are not working "the company way", and this needs to be visible in their rewards and recognition.

Motivating people to do KM should ultimately be done the same way as any other aspect of required working practice. Make it part of the job - part of expected working practice - part of "what it means to do my job well". People want to do a good job, so the message needs to be consistent - "doing a good job means fulfilling your KM accountabilities and expectations"

Are you putting a man on the moon? Or just trying out a new mop?

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Space shuttle liftoff from the
Kennedy Space Center: Merritt Island, Florida
Originally uploaded by
State Library and Archives of Florida

The story is told of how President John Kennedy once visited NASA. He came across a cleaner and asked him what his job was. The cleaner replied: ‘My job is to help to put a man on the moon.’

There is some discussion of whether this story is true or not, but what it illustrates is the cleaner's complete alignment with the aims of NASA, and the collective mission and strategy.

What if it had been the Knowledge Management lead that Kennedy had spoken to? What sort of answer would he have received?

I believe it is vital that KM efforts are linked to business outcome, and I am not the only on who believes this. I have a quote from a survey from the early 00s, that reads as follows

• “Most successful knowledge management applications
  addressed a ‘life or death’ business situation
  addressed an existing
  business issue
  
  Successful cases answered two questions at the outset -
  What business objective am I trying to achieve?
  How can I apply existing
  knowledge?”
  

Similarly Tom Davenport and co-authors, in the paper "Building successful Knowledge Management projects", conclude that "Link to economic performance or industry value" is the number one success factor for successful KM. I was reminded of this yesterday, at a presentation from Conoco Phillips, where they showed some of the portal pages for their Operational Excellence Communities of Practice, and there on the front page was the community goal to deliver X number of additional barrels of oil production to the organisation, plus the number of barrels delivered to date. They knew their role - to deliver additional oil to the bottom line.

Conoco Phillips aren't the only ones - Mars directed KM at delivering growth in emerging markets, De Beers at Block Caving, BP at cutting the cost of constructing retail stations, Ford at continuously decreasing manufacturing costs. In each case, this was their "man on the moon" - their business imperative that KM was serving, their "life and death" business issue. KM was being directed at solving real issues, and therefore gained a seat at the strategy table, and delivered successful programs as a result (at least for a while).

However a lot of KM professionals don't seem to have made this link with business value and business imperatives in their KM strategy. If you ask them what they are doing, they say "We're rolling out SharePoint", or "I am trialling MediaWiki". This would be the equivalent of the NASA cleaner saying "I'm trying out a new mop head". It doesn't have the same impact somehow!

Addressing urgent business issues is even more important during a recession, when management are looking to cut costs. I heard yesterday of another KM program closed, and another KM leader looking for a job, as the company sought to cut back on expenditure. If you're not seen to be addressing the crucial business issues*, then you could be seen as optional, and times are too tight for optional expenditure.

So if you were asked "What's your KM focus this year" - what would you answer? Could you point to a crucial business issue* you were helping to solve through application of KM? Could you say "We're helping put a man on the moon?" Or are you just mopping the floor?

*By the way, "reducing travel costs through enabling online collaboration" is not a critical business issue, nor is "reducing the time to find information". Your company is not a travel agent nor an information finder, and neither of these issues will keep your CEO awake at night.

Video - More on Peer Assist

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To complement my recent post where I claimed Peer Assist as "the killer application in knowledge management", here's a youtube video on the topic.




See more knowledge management video here


(Small milestone - this is my 100th blog post)

Patterns between web 2.0 and web 1.0

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Web
Originally uploaded by kurtxio

A very interesting blog post here from Andrew MacAfee, commented and elaborated on here by Jack Vinson.

From Jack and Andrew's blogs, here are some points of relevance to the flow of knowledge which I have picked out. Andrew proposes

1.0 Technology is used to generate or analyze information individually
2.0
Technology is used to share work and conclusions with others

1.0
Technology is used to transmit information privately to known people
2.0
Technology is used to broadcast information publicly to people both known and
unknown

1.0 Technology is used to ask questions and solicit information
and help from a small group of already-identified people
2.0 Technology is
used to ask questions and solicit information and help from people both known
and unknown

1.0 Online content is the end point of group-level work; it
is finished goods
2.0 Online content is the start of group-level work; it is
work in progress

1.0 Online content is generated by a few approved
sources
2.0 Online content is generated by many people

1.0 A person
finds new colleagues by asking around an looking through official directories
2.0 A person finds new colleagues by examining the online content they’ve
generated and assessing its quality

1.0 Technology is used to encode
previously-generated knowledge
2.0 Technology is used to create and diffuse
new knowledge

Jack adds

1.0: People find experts by asking their colleagues locally or
searching the company yellow pages.
2.0: People find experts through
discovery of what those experts have discussed online.

1.0: People
answer questions by asking people and then finding specific content buried in
the document management system.
2.0: People answer questions together by
posing questions of their colleagues locally and distributed across the network.

1.0: Experts are inside the company.
2.0: Experts are everywhere,
and people can find them.

I think that these are mostly great, and show the value of technology in supporting collaboration and knowledge-sharing through wide communities of people. However there are a couple that worry me.

I do a fair amount of work in large engineering companies, where the important interactions are mostly face to face, and face to face processes for knowledge sharing are widespread. I know of many experts who spread their expertise by working with teams - by coaching, by mentoring, by providing expert assistance or completing expert tasks. They are doers, rather than writers, and interact face to face rather than online. That is why the comparison below is, I think, misleading

1.0: People find experts by asking their colleagues locally or
searching the company yellow pages.
2.0: People find experts through
discovery of what those experts have discussed online.

I know several companies where, if you did this, you would find the talkers but not the doers. Online content is not always an accurate reflection of expertise. Remember that only 1 in 100 regularly contribute to wikis, for example, so looking at "wiki contributions" would find that 1% who like to write wikis, but not the 99% (though this balance will be redressed if "online contribution/publication" becomes part of the experts accountabilities). So I would rephrase this one to say

1.0: People find experts by asking their colleagues locally and using the white pages (phone book)
2.0: People find experts through asking the community of practice, and user-populated yellow pages

I shifted the reference to yellow pages - a self-populated yellow pages, with user generated content, IS web 2.0, and is a great way for individuals to create public profile.

Here's one that needs a bit of qualification

1.0 Online content is generated by a few approved
sources
2.0 Online content is generated by many people

In this case, it depends on the TYPE of online content. Let's imagine we are looking at online content in the form of practice guidance, to help people do their work. This comes in many types - it can be examples of work practices, it can be identified good practice, it can be the current best way that the community knows to do something, or it can be the mandated company approach. It could be "Have done", "Could do", "Should do" or "Must do". These levels of "knowledge" require different approvals, and different approval will be needed to move from level 1 though to level 4. The community can be the approved source for the "could do" and the "should do" but there will be a higher level of approval to move to the "must do" category. So you can have multiple source, and content created by many people, but the word "approval" may still apply. This is particularly true (at least until the law changes) for knowledge which has safety or legal implications, and where someone will be held accountable if wrong knowledge is applied.

And a third one that is fine, but needs a caveat

1.0: People answer questions by asking people and then finding
specific content buried* in the document management system.
2.0: People
answer questions together by posing questions of their colleagues locally and
distributed across the network.

*"Buried" sort of begs the question, surely?

Communities of practice are a great way to get questions answered, and it is really good to see how willing people are to answer questions and help their colleagues. What they get annoyed about, is answering the same question time and time again (or answering the "RTFM" questions). When this begins to happen, the community often gets together and builds an FAQ. So the knowledge gets codified, by the community, and is there as a port of call before you ask the community. So the comparison is more like

1.0: People answer questions by asking people they know or searching for
specific content in the document management system.
2.0: People answer
questions by asking their online community of practice, and through use of the
online community "knowledge base"

But that's just a few quibbles, and otherwise these two guys make a really good distinction between web 1.0 and web 2.0. And it's those disctinctions, I would say, that have been the hallmark of successful application of technology to KM since KM really took off, way before the term "web 2.0" was ever coined.

For overseas readers only

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This video is not available in the UK for copyright reasons, but for my overseas readers, it's the best video I know to illustrate how the knowledge we offer has to be tailored to the needs of those who will reuse it

Knowledge Management exercises and games

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Game Night
Originally uploaded by Randy Son Of Robert

I blogged last month about the Bird Island game, and what a fabulous exercise that is. Now, that's not really fair to all my blog readers, as we commercialise Bird Island through the sale of licences and not everyone has money to spend on this. So I thought I would offer you a couple of other exercises for free, which are also powerful in their own way (though nowhere near the power of Bird Island), and which we also use in our training programs.

Seekers

Seekers is a simple exercise, suitable for groups of 40 or 50 or more, and runs during the breaks or over lunch. It requires blank name badges, so either buy a supply of badges, or if you are in a badged event, ask people to turn their badges to the blank side. Ask them to write on the blank badge, in large clear letters, a question to which they would like an answer. It can be a work question, or a home-life question. Make sure it's a practical question! It should be "How do I plan a themed birthday party for my 5-year old" rather than "Is there a God?" Do this in the morning, then during the breaks and lunch, if people see a question they can help answer - either giving good advice, or pointing people to a source of advice - then they go and introduce themselves and offer help. After the afternoon break, ask for a show of hands for "Who has received an answer?". You should see between a third and half the people raise their hands. You can then lead a discussion on motivation (what motivated people to help? what would motivate you to ask questions at work?), on the power of Asking as a driver for knowledge transfer, on "how we can make our questions visible to others as part of our work", and on KM approaches such as community forums and peer assist.

Millionaire.

This is a variation of the TV game "who wants to be a Millionaire", suitable for groups which number from about 15 upwards. Buy the quiz book, and build yourself PowerPoint with two sets of questions (I have one with the graphics, the music and everything). Get two volunteers - I often look for one senior manager, and one very junior staff member. The senior manager has to answer the questions using his or her own knowledge. The junior staff member can "ask the audience" on every round. Guess who always wins! Then again, you have the same discussion on motivation (what motivated the audience to help), on how you could set up a system so people could "ask the audience" at work, on "who would the audience be" (leading on to the topic of communities", on incentives and disincentives to asking, and so on.

If anyone else has any good KM games, please share them using the comments button below!!

Thanks

There is a Killer Application in Knowledge Management – and it’s not what you think!

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We often hear about a “Killer App” for KM, whether it is Lotus Notes, SharePoint, Facebook, or some integrated Web 2.0 offering. Some people are dubious of such claims, some people are enthusiastic.

I believe there IS a killer application, it’s one that is proven in practice, and delivers results every time, if applied wisely. In some cases – multi-million dollar results. In fact, as I started compiling my list of value delivery through KM, I found that most of the success stories related to this one application. And it is not a software application at all. It is an application of minds.

It’s the Peer Assist.

Peer Assist is the simplest thing possible in KM. It is a process for bringing knowledge into a project, or piece of work, at the outset. It is a meeting, where a project team invite a number of people with relevant knowledge and experience, which they bring to bear on the issues of the project. They apply out-of-team knowledge to the team's context. The team take this knowledge away, and apply it to improve their project planning and delivery.

So what makes Peer Assist such a powerful tool in Knowledge Management?

1. It is as way of dressing up, or legitimizing, the practice of asking for help. People don’t like to say “I need help”; they don’t mind saying “Lets hold a peer assist”
2. It is focused on learning, or Pull of knowledge
3. It is focused on Doing, or application of knowledge (thus bridging the Knowing/Doing gap).
4. It brings knowledge to the point of need, at the time of need, when receptivity is greatest and the chance of that knowledge being reused is highest
5. It brings knowledge in its richest form – in the heads of people with experience
6. If structured and facilitated well, it transfers knowledge in the most effective way – through dialogue
7. It is the easiest most natural process in the world (assuming you involve the right people, at the right time, with the right structure)
8. Learning is two-way. Both the assisters and the assisted come away with new knowledge
9. Again, if facilitated well and held face-to-face, it builds strong trust which eliminates “not invented here”
10. The trust and relationships formed at the assist can form the core of a future community
11. It creates reciprocity. If you are helped, you will help others.
12. The results are often easily measurable, in a short time
13. You can implement Peer Assist as a stand-alone process (though it works best as part of a KM framework)
14. It results in an action list, which results in action

Let’s look at an example.

An oil company was looking for innovative ways to cut the cost of the construction of gas stations world-wide, in order for them to meet their financial targets. They had set a target of 20% cost reduction, which was a big challenge. They held a Peer Assist in the early stages of the project, and invited peers from around the organization, including other divisions of the company, to share knowledge and experience. One of the invitees came from the part of the company where they build oil rigs, and he explained the concept of Alliancing – of working in an alliance with the constructor, with strong performance targets and equitable sharing of risk and value. Although some at the peer assist were skeptical, they took the action to explore Alliancing as one of the options for the project. In fact, this turned out to be the best option, and an Alliance was started with a building contractor which was hugely successful, and ended up cutting the cost of construction in half. A 50% reduction. And without the peer assist, this would not have happened, as there was no other way of ensuring that knowledge of the alliancing possibility could reach the people who needed to know it, at the time when they needed it and they were open to learning about it, in a form where they could discuss it and understand the potential, and then take action.

So are you serious about knowledge management? Do you want a killer application, that is cheap, easy, can be applied tomorrow, and delivers benefit every time?

Try Peer Assist.

Senior Management buy-in, the Indonesian way

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I am currently in Malaysia, presenting at a KM conference. We had some really interesting presentations today, but the one image that really made me sit up was from a Medco Energi presentation, where they showed the top table at their KM launch conference, with every single president from every single Medco subsidiary, plus the company founder, sitting in front of a "Knowledge Management in Medco" banner.

What a picture of leadership endorsement! What a coup - to have the visible presence of the entire leadership team!

I asked the presenter how he had achieved this level of support. He told me that his KM team contained a representative from each subsidiary, and he had given each representative the goal of ensuring their president was at the launch. As a result the leadership team were there in full, their launch was spectacular, and Medco are now number 5 in the Indonesian MAKE awards.

Well done, guys!

New publications for download

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You can find two new publications from download on the Knoco Website publications section; an article by Tom on Knowledge Retention, and an article by both of us on the Bird Island exercise, following on from my own blog posts on the topic. Look for the Publications tab at the top of the website main page.

Quantified value case study 9

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Or more a "Quantified loss of value". A recent Basex study is entitled "Airbus Hits Turbulence: How Knowledge Sharing Failures Cost Airbus €4.8 Billion"

To buy the report costs $200, but the summary is below.

"(This report)is the first in-depth look at Airbus' woes, caused largely by
failures in knowledge sharing and collaboration.

In the coming decade,
as companies move from the industrial age into the knowledge economy, more and
more organizations will find that the cost of not knowing how to manage
knowledge work and knowledge workers will have a significant impact on the
bottom line.

The impact on the bottom line in Airbus' case was €4.8
billion ($7 billion).

Two years late and with significant cost overruns
due largely to software and IT issues, the first Airbus A380 superjumbo just
went into service with launch customer Singapore Airlines. The A380 is now the
world's largest commercial airliner, capable of seating 525 in a standard
three-class configuration. But the costs to Airbus were great: at a minimum,
it's €4.8 Billion. With delays in the newer A350 program, which will arrive five
years after Boeing's 787 Dreamliner, what will happen to Airbus next?

Far from being a unified company, Airbus' management and production
teams span many European companies. The company is first now taking steps to
unify these groups but is it a question of "too little, too late"?

Read
"Airbus Hits Turbulence" and find out what the future holds for Airbus"

Now I know that Airbus is doing excellent work in KM, but I also know that this work is struggling with low budgets and lack of management support, and is currently confined only to engineering. I have not read the full Basex report, but if the authors are correct, and that lack of wider knowledge sharing is to blame for the A380 overruns, than this is quantification of the value of KM, or rather of the cost of not doing it.

quantified success stories 8 etc

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The Kuwait Petroleum Company have published a series of case studies from the communities of practice we helped them to launch and build over the last year. Some of these case studies include early-stage estimates of value generated. All of them are interesting studies of young communities, in the Middle Eastern culture, beginning to deliver value through new ways of working (click on the poster to see the case studies).