Knowledge Management - A Practitioners View

Return on Networking

2011-01-14T15:58:00.000+05:30

An interesting incident happened couple of months back. Before I describe that, let me tell you about our social networking site we use in our organization namely Yammer. Yammer has a free version and can be adopted by any organization which wants to have an internal social networking site for its employees. Once a site for an organization is created, employees of an organization can join in using their official email id. What Yammer allows us to do is provide an environment to post what we want to share / ask with our fellow employees and in no time you get different perspectives / answers to your queries etc. Of course what you post is there for everyone to see, search and respond to. Users can also create a room or a group for a discussing specific interest area, etc. I hope by know you have a brief idea on how Yammer works. We have more than 18,000 people on Yammer currently and it has turned out to be the go to place for our employees if you do not know who can help you with some information on a specific subject.

Let me now describe the incident. A colleague of mine who was also a member of Yammer but who was relatively new to the organization and also who wasn't actively involved in social interactions using this tool approached me and asked to help him by asking a specific question on his behalf. I was initially a bit surprised to hear the request because I knew he was on Yammer and he could ask the question himself. When I asked him why he wanted me to ask the question instead of he doing it himself. His reply was that I might get more responses to the question than he would if he posted the query. That made me think. Yes I too had noticed the fact that some people get better response from a network than others would. Even when the network is exactly same (for e.g. in an organization) some people tend to get better response than others. Who are these people? And why do people respond to them and not as much to others? When I looked at the interactions happening in the yammer community, I noticed some specific charateristics of these people:

1) They are accepted Thought Leaders in the organization. So when they ask something, you can be assured they are closely tracked and people who respond to get noticed too.

2) They are senior people in the management. Many of us like to help someone senior in the organization when they are looking for something, don't we! :-) Again this is a way to make yourself more visible to the top management. Well on this point, I did notice that not all senior people get the same level of response. Social networks also have been noticed to break down hierachies in organizations.The ones who were active contributors in the network tend to get better responses.

3) They are regular contributors to queries, so helping these people will be useful as they might respond back when you post a query for something you are looking for. These are well-networked individuals who have the knack to be in present when things happen! This is a point that needs to be noted. The response one gets from a social network is very much linked to how much one contributes to it!

4) Anyone with an interesting profile! - Cases where they are not the above but have an interesting profile - content, photo, etc. But then to sustain the attention that networks pays to you, this individual needs continuously be creative!

5) Anyone who asks an interesting question which many in the network find interesting or can contribute to (broader scope). In this case even if you don't know the person, you don't might helping out as he/she is talking about a space that you are interested in knowing more or can contribute in greater extent.

I guess the writing on the wall is clearer now. If you really need to benefit from a social network in an organization, you need to contribute too! There are of course one of exceptions but for sustained benefits from the network, get involved as much as possible. We all can try to become thought leaders and become senior too, but this does take time if you aren't one already! Interesting profiles etc may help bring initial interactions but later its all of about the content and the network you bring to your followers!

Making sense of Storing Knowledge – Part 1 – Thinking Through

2010-07-25T23:15:00.018+05:30

What is knowledge and can it be stored?
Before we talk about storing it, let’s quickly define what knowledge is? A topic if discussed can go on and on but for my benefit, I will go with what the Oxford dictionary and define it as – expertise, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Another question that comes to our mind at this point is 'Can knowledge me stored?' It is not easy certainly but let’s assume that someone spends a good amount of time and effort and captures what he or she knows on a particular subject / topics into a document / ppt or any other available media. The person might have obtained this knowledge by a combination of reading, learning from personal experience or experience of others who interact with him, etc.
Why does someone want to store knowledge?
Well for start, although our brains are extremely powerful systems that can store and retrieve a huge amount of information, we prefer to have some support mechanisms in place to help us store our knowledge in external media for easy sharing and quick ‘guaranteed’ retrieval when required (why guaranteed? Well sometimes we forget what we know and our memory kind of plays tricks…If I may put it that way. An external medium from that extent doesn’t lose what it has captured unless someone wants it to or there is some an accident or physical damage to that medium).
Storing knowledge in these external media also helps in easy sharing. With time limitations and effort required in sharing something you know to another person or a group of people, it is easier to send them what you know in the form of a document or file that you have build up over a period of time. This also saves you from repeating what you said to multiple people who may not interact with you at the same time.
Where does one keep this stored knowledge?
Well if it is not much then you can keep it is as documents and file it for future reference (Considering the future, I suggest you not print these documents but keep it in a folder in your computer). In an organization, we may not want our employees to keep the knowledge that they have all in their computers. For the benefit of organization as a whole the knowledge in a replicable form is kept in a database – let’s call it a ‘knowledge base’ distinguishing them from the various databases that we have in the org.
So far so good - Knowledge obtained by individual --> converted into a shareable format --> store in central repository for public access --> knowledge seekers go to this database, search and find what they are looking for --> Use the knowledge from the database and submit back the new knowledge that they have / generate to the database and the cycle continues. Simple – Well not really. Organizations of course are working on making this cycle happen and it would not be understatement to say that most KMs in various organizations work towards manually running this cycle. The ideal situation is for this cycle to run on its own (A situation of knowledge continuously is being generated, captured, stored, re-used, re-vitalized and re-captured).
Who uses this stored knowledge?
Now that we have the knowledge stored in the database, let’s try to find who uses this knowledge. Assumption here is that it is getting used (A major challenge organizations face it to be able to measure this usage. I am not going talk about that now in this article). Well who uses it? 1) People who are looking for this knowledge hmmm…..why are they looking for it? ….maybe because they have a need that is immediate….so immediate that they can’t wait to learn / experience on their own so therefore better for them to learn from someone else’s experience / education. Also my experience from school days tells me, the fastest way to learn something is to learn it from someone who has taken the longer way of learning it by reading / experiencing it!! In this way you get the essence without actually getting involved in the extraction process!! From an examination perspective, this approach was pretty effective – a short term fix for the requirements of a faulty system of evaluations in schools.
Does knowledge age?
To be more descriptive - Does the knowledge captured in a database remain as valid some time after it was captured or recorded or does time have an impact on the usefulness of knowledge? I feel it does have an impact. Let me explain this point using an example. Let’s assume we try to capture how we can get from Mumbai to Dubai and imagine we are doing this in 1850. Well at that period the known modes of travel from Mumbai to Dubai might be by road, rail or sea. Well if in 2010 someone where to find this knowledge object (any capturable form of this knowledge) and try using this to get from Mumbai to Dubai again how successful will he be? Well the same three modes of travel still exists (road, rail and sea) but they all have changed a lot since 1850. Also they have been joined by another mode which is the most used mode currently and that is air travel. In fact there are other developments which might even eliminate the requirement for travel in the first place like telephones, e-mails and video conferences, etc. Now what is the problem here? Why is knowledge captured in 1850 not useful to us currently in 2010? Is it because it was captured the wrong way in the first place or if Mumbai or Dubai changed their places in the world map? Of course not, but what had happened is that over a period of time technological and political changes and developments have resulted in the evolution of much better solutions to travelling between these two locations. What I am trying to bring out here is that knowledge of today might not still be relevant sometime in future. Every knowledge object that we try to capture has a life period of validity.
In the above example, I took this large difference in time period to make the point of knowledge being impacted by time pretty obvious but if one were to apply this to ones everyday life then it obviously applicable here too.
What’s wrong with stored knowledge?
Well if knowledge ages and shows all signs of it - applicability reduces; situations change; new and more improved approaches and technologies emerge, etc then storing knowledge in a database may not be all that useful. What if we were able to constantly update the knowledge in database with recent experiences, developments etc? In this case, any piece of knowledge in the database will more useful to the seeker that it was if not regularly updated. The problem organizations face when they store knowledge in a database is that they assume that a further build on this knowledge gets uploaded in the database too. My experience has basically told me that using something from the knowledge base, assuming it is the latest piece of information that that organization has generated internally is a mistake. Employees do not upload the latest piece of knowledge that they generate in the knowledge base immediately if not ever.
Now take a look at your knowledge base. How many knowledge objects do you have in it and how many can be used as-is in a typical issue or situation that you face at your workplace with complete confidence that it is the best available answer or latest piece of knowledge that could come from your colleagues at that point in time. Well I seriously doubt if you find any that meet that criteria. Even if it is the latest content that has been captured in an organization, it always makes sense to check if there is a different perspective or solution that might exist in someone’s desktop or head that hasn’t got its way into the knowledge base. Also there is the fact that only a very small percentage of the knowledge that an organization generates gets into the knowledge base anyway. The rest remain with the employees either in their desktops or in their heads. Of course we are only talking about knowledge that can actually be captured in a format to be stored in databases! There is so much we don’t know we know and that’s outside the preview of this article!!
The question that emerges next is if the knowledge base in your organization is not really useful because it doesn’t really get updated / have useful content then why have it at all? Many organizations refuse to accept the existence of this question because unfortunately the number of the knowledge objects in the knowledge base seems to be one of the ways they try to quantify the amount of knowledge that exists in their organization and thus justify the existence of their KM practice in the organization. More the content in the knowledge base more KMs required to ‘manage’ them?! …You are the getting the drift right! I am sure you would have reports that tell you that we have captured ‘X’ number of documents / presentations / videos this year which have been accessed ‘N’ number of times and therefore ‘All’s well’ wrt to knowledge management!! The problem here is accessing a document in your knowledge base doesn’t mean that it is useful or that it be used in any form as such. Nowadays we have options to also place a comment but again usage of this feature hasn’t been very positive at least internally. Rating works better as its easier to do but it still doesn’t mean that highest rated document in the knowledge base on the topic you are looking for is the best content available in your company.

And there’s a lot more we do as we diverge further from the right track. More on that and what we should do to set things right soon in my follow-up article. Coming soon!!

Have you folks had similar experiences and if yes, how are you handling these situations? Love to hear from you all!

Short learning cycles - Are students prepared to handle the dynamicity!?

2010-04-23T18:43:00.003+05:30

An ex-colleague Hal Harz who is currently with Booz and Company had this up on his linkedin status 'Kettering-Emory Mulling: % of knowledge you need to do your job that is stored in your brain- 1986/75%, 1997/10-20%, 2008/8-10%' and this has made me think ever since. I did try to find the exact source of this statement but haven't been successful so far. Also I am not sure if the percentages gives here are correct but one thing for certain I do agree that dependency of the knowledge in our brain to do our work has been falling rapidly. With the coming of internet and the so called read-only web or Web 1.0 as we now know it, there were about 250,000 websites in 1996. With the advent of web 2.0 and the so called read-write web the number of websites have increase to around 186 million in Dec 2008 and if you include the number of blogs to this number then it increases by another 133 million (as tracked by Technorati). With so much of information / knowledge available for one to search through it is not surprising that we tend to be less dependent on individual memory and processing power to do specific tasks at our work place. Memory I am sure you agree but processing? The reason I included processing is because to a large extent many processed and semi processed information is already available for you to take a decision or do further work on. By processed I mean, I mean information that has been worked on, developed with experience and shared by people who have used it in situations that could be similar to yours. I was just taking a look at the work I do currently which can be categorized under sales support and knowledge management . When I started my career in sales support side of an IT organization in 2001, there wasn't much available online. You might get some books that could be bought but nothing on public domain that would talk about real life experiences, best practices, etc. The way I learned my job was purely by interactions with my seniors in my organization and my personal experience. For me to independently handle a bid, it took me atleast 6 to 12 months and that too was dependent on the number of propsals I was exposed to. Well looking at the situation now, the new comer to this job is exposed to a huge wealth of content available on the internet, blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc along with robust knowledge management systems that capture the internal experiences and knowledge of the organization. This bascially means a newbie will be able to come up to speed in relatively lesser time period. That's the good part of the story. The downside is that everyone knows this and expects you to be ready to take on the big bad world as soon as possible. Nothing wrong with it but then time to succeed and tendency to take risks for a newcomer is relatively lower as the pressure to succeed is extremely high overall.

Now coming to the point about usage of memory and the evaluation system in India. The older or to some extent existing education mode require a large amount of memorizing skills. Memorize what you read in books and vomit these into your answer sheets. More the exact match between the content on your text books and your answer sheets, more the chance of you scoring high in your examinations. This made sense earlier because the work you did later when you started working required the same type of memorization and replication with set patterns and processes. The current work environment has become extremely dynamic. No longer can you draw a clear boundary of the scope of your activities at your work. Exceptions to processes are becoming more and more evident, the better word here would be 'required' as the environment that we work in is becoming extremely dynamic and unpredictable. It is becoming humanly impossible for us to memorize all that is required at the same time with so much of content available for free access, the question is why memorize at all as long as you know where to find what you are looking for.

The education system of the future in India needs to take this into consideration and needs to make our students ready for this new world. There is not of literature available online stating why US is losing out to China and India because of lower number of students there taking up science and engineering. But what is important in addition to quantity is the quality of the students that we produce through our educational systems - those who are ready to handle the complexity of the world we live in. Earlier observation of students with better ability to memorize doing well in examinations maybe true still (depends upon how quickly our education system changes) but certainly expecting these same students to do well in their jobs just because they scored high in their examinations may not be a right. The expectations from today's students are changing rapidly but the question we face is - Are our education systems changing fast enough?!!

Increasing the responsiveness of an organization using enterprise 2.0?

2009-05-30T20:56:00.007+05:30

Faced this situation before? A propsective customer of yours wants to know some specific details of your company before taking the decision on whether your company is the right one to give the order to and you are the one they reach out. You do not have the necessary information and are not sure whom to contact to get the right information in this short period of time. Well I am sure many of us can relate to this situation. The main problem we face is that the information that is required is not available on your sales portal / website and therefore you are typically lost on where to go and whom to contact to get the right answer. You know someone one in management team will have this information but it not easy to identify who the right person is quickly and then get the response considering he/she might be travelling or attending a seminar or in a meeting or busy with some of other work. I am sure many of us in sales have faced this situation. Its situations like these where one really feels the requirement for a good KM system. A KM environment which is 24x7 and will give you the information you require in the shortest time possible. The surpise here is that most of the organizations have some KM systems in place but even then a sales person finds it difficult to get the specific information that he/she is looking for. The content at a high level might be available but if you are looking at specific details then you could be disappointed. The next option here is to start contacting the person / people who might be the designated point of contact for the information you are require. But again the probability that one gets the answer quickly is dependent on whether this person sees your e-mail or picks up your call. In some cases this person may not be in the organization and then its the information roadblock that we all dread so much. Well things are changing now. Web 2.0 tools are helping us break that barrier. The various social networking tools are increasing the channels through which one can try source the information that one requires so basically increasing the probability of finding it. So what was earlier dependent on personal connections, ability to search databases, Forums, telephone calls or even face to face meetings has more options in the form of enterprise and external web 2.0 tools, advanced video conferencing facilities, etc. This of course does not discount the need for having an overall Knowledge Management framework in place. The point that I would like to make here is that Web 2.0 tools does not replace KM in a organization but only helps improve the ways in which employees can share knowledge, increase the probability of finding what one is looking for and collaborate better. Organizations now have to take a re-look at their KM strategy and ensure they include enterprise 2.0 as an important component of this strategy. This blog post is just the beginning. Although in this blog entry, I have looked at only one problem that organizations face, I will be blogging more on how organizations can be more effective and responsive overall by implementing Entperise 2.0 technologies.

Do Knowledge Managers do what they preach - Share Knowledge?

2008-02-11T00:14:00.000+05:30

Well a dumb question you might say. But then if you were to take a deeper look at this question you may not find it all that stupid. Well I am aware of a lot of Knowledge Managers who share their experiences to the larger world. Recently I have come across a lot of Knowledge Managers in India who I don't find in any forums or on social collaboration sites. Yes of course India is relatively a late entrant to the KM Universe but then let me tell you though it is late it surely is making up for the lost time. Organizations have a shorter learning curve here and are quickly catching up with organizations globally. There are some active forums like the KM-forums from Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore and Mumbai (recently) but really not much participation from the Practitioners. Of course the participation has been more theoretical than experience sharing. I am one of the culprits too. I haven't been active either in this forum. But then I do try to share my thoughts through this blog. This is not just an India thing. The more I explore sites like linkedin, Xing, etc the more I come across people who do KM though they don't really call it that. (Sometime makes me think is KM a dirty word!!). It is pretty ironical that as KM we work towards ensuring that knowledge is shared in our respective organizations but if we were to look at ourselves, we might be at fault of not doing it!! I do understand that it a competitive world out there and some of out cutting edge initiatives some of us don't really want to share with our competitors lest they get ahead (if there anyway to prove that in the first place). But then wouldn't it be better if we all benefit together than remain in the dark ages for a day longer!! KM as a discipline some say is on the decline. Well our not working together is not going to help improve this situation any bit. Awake my fellow Knowledge Managers, its time that we worked closely together to collectively more forward.

Exploring YouTube and being impressed!!

2007-10-13T23:31:00.000+05:30

I had visited YouTube before but never really explored it in detail. Always thought it contained videos from people who love to shoot themselves do stupid things in life but I surely was surprised when I explored it in detail this weekend. I was searching for videos on Knowledge Management and CRM and saw some very interesting stuff. I also tried searching for videos from technology companies like IBM, Accenture and Capgemini and noticed that there were some good content there which described what these companies were doing the Consulting and Technology space, though the hits they were getting on this wasn't much. But then one thing is for sure the traffic to these links are bound to increase and before long YouTube has a potential to be a major venue for advertising an organizations services and capabilities. The advantage is that these kind of ads will be viewed by people interested in viewing it. Maybe YouTube can open-up a new revenue stream by promoting such ads and get paid on the basis of how many hits a video gets. I am sure this could be case in MySpace and Facebook too. Considering successful work with Google adwords it won't be long before Google taps into this potential (Well Google might have already done by now). Back to presence of technology and consulting companies in YouTube, I was also surprised with the absence of India companies like Infosys, Wipro, TCS and Satyam here. No organization can afford to not be in YouTube for long. I am sure these organizations will be looking at website like YouTube carefully. It's no brainer if someone were to say there would be an explosion of corporate presence in YouTube very soon. Keep buying Google stocks people!!

AMR's recent report on Knowledge Management spending by U.S. companies in 2007 - Interestingly KM ain't dead yet?

2007-10-03T00:48:00.000+05:30

AMR recently came out with the report - AMR Research Finds Spending on Knowledge Management Will Hit $73B in 2007. There will always be debates on the definition of knowledge management, whether knowledge management initiatives provides value or not. I have even read of opinions from people saying that knowledge management is dead. Well if it is dead then what are these companies that AMR has surveyed doing spending so much money on these technologies. I am sure we all agree that this is not restricted to just spending on technologies but also on the KM processes and people too so the actual spending would be lot more than $73B. The point is not how much spending is done but that organizations are still looking for the benefits that they get from knowledge management. I haven't seen the full report but I am sure I would see a shift in these spending from portals and content/document management systems, which have been the so called only technology components of KM for sometime, to enterprise search and collaborative systems and tools. Also this report brings out the emergence of SaaS and Open source technologies in KM implementations. Remains to be seen how much of impetus does this provide to the Open source movement.

Buying the Knowledge Management Operations of a firm?

2007-08-04T23:50:00.000+05:30

Read the article Jeulin to pay Telekurs 137.9 mln eur for Fininfo's knowledge management ops. Financiere Jeulin will pay 137.9 mln euros to buy Fininfo's knowledge management operations. The interesting part here is Jeulin who have 52 percent stake actually sell the whole business to Telekurs and buy back the knowledge management division plus two other small divisions for the 137.9 mln euros. Of course this shows the importance that orgnaizations are giving to knowledge management but at the same time something I would love to know is how the valuation of this knowledge management division was done? Anyone who can throw some light on this?

Knowledge Management the solution to ageing work force!

2007-07-29T15:04:00.000+05:30

I recently read an article called 'Commentary: Knowledge management for a graying work force'. Of course much of what was said there was something we all know already. Although the article takes a look at the situations in government organizations and bodies, the observations and solutions given here is applicable for any industry. I specially liked the solutions provided here and notice that better HR practices combined with a robust KM system goes a long way providing a solution for an ageing workforce. The article explains how replacement employee pipeline, retirement options, succession plans and knowledge management systems help mitigate the risk of employee attrition. All this sounds great but how many organizations have their KM team talking and working closely with their HR department? Hmmm...love to hear from anyone on this if this happens in their organizations.

Using Blogs for Better Customer Service

2007-05-13T22:57:00.000+05:30

I had first read about blogs being used as a window for customers to interact with officials of a firm back in 2003. The blog of a firm that I first visited was of General Motors (http://fastlane.gmblogs.com). Currently I see this blog has become a very active place with customers interacting with GM officials on a regular manner. Well talking about GM's blogging story it surely is a double edged sword I would say. GM is having problems - we all know that. It is losing it's market to more competitive players in the automobile sector and customer dissatisfaction has to do a lot with this. Blog has been a good and cheap media by which GM can connect with its customers. But unlike earlier customer complaint avenues, this is one media which is open for anyone to take a peep into what customers are telling of an organizations product or services. If customers are saying good things then it is an excellent marketing media but if they are not then it is an accelerated rumor/bad news spreader. In fact some of GM's competitors would be using this blog as an excellent source of anti-GM marketing.

If I were to go today to General Motors blog and read the customers comments on various GM vehicles and how GM responds to customers then personally one thing is sure, I would never buy a GM vehicle. And I am sure there are lot of people who would feel the same. But then if I know that GM is trying it's best to solve these issues and are successful in doing so then I will take a look at GM again. GM really needs to show it's customers what it is doing to solve their complaints. Of course it not just GM that is having customer problems. Many companies are taking the blog approach to better customer service but though I appreciate the openness of organizations in putting their customer's words open on the internet but then I guess the companies really don't have an option here. You better have a single place for your customers to interact with you than have numerous sites propping up which is impossible to track and respond to. But then once you have the blog, organizations should understand that their job hasn't ended but has just begun. They really have to pull up their socks and listen closely to their customers if they want to remain competitive in the market.

Just having a full writing pad is not enough, someone has to make sense of these writing and take some actions on it. I basically feel that collaborative Web 2.0 tools like blogs are truly making customer the king.

How businesses are using Web 2.0?

2007-04-25T14:10:00.000+05:30

I came across a recent report from the McKinsey stables called 'How businesses are using Web 2.0'. I guess the point that McKinsey comes out with a report on the topic Web 2.0 is worth giving it a read. There are some findings on the report that I found very interesting like;

- three-fourths of executives who responded to the survey say they plan to maintain or increase their investments in technology trends that encourage user collaboration, such as peer-tp-peer networking, social networks and Web services.

- Another interesting finding is that many executives in emerging markets such as India and Latin America intend to move more quickly to capture the perceived benefits of these technologies

- Also with respect to technology investments the companies that acted quickly in the previous wave of investment are more satisfies than late movers. Of those who rate themselves are very satisfied, 46 percent are 'early adopters' and 44 percent 'fast followers'

- A survey result that I personally got excited on seeing was the response to question 'Is your company investing in any of the following Web 2.0 technologies or tools'. 80% said they were using or planning to use Web Services. This was followed by 48% for Collective Intelligence and 47% for Peer-to-peer networking. Social networking (37%), RSS (35%) and rest followed. The interest in the executives surveyed for investments in Web services, Collective intelligence, Peer-to-peer networking will be something that us knowledge managers will be closely watching.

I am aware of many organizations looking at Web 2.0 as the next phase of development in their pursuit to increase knowledge sharing. The survey in a way is a stamp by the business community accepting that Web 2.0 does seems to have a promise of actually providing them with a quantifiable benefit than just a internet fad that would fade away with time. Well of course how much we have learned from internet bubble is debatable.

One more thing that I can see happening in the near future is Web 2.0 becoming a more integral part of the future enterprise systems both CRM from a customer side, SCM from a supplier and partner side and ERP from a internal collaboration perspective. The day is not far when Web 2.0 will more from something good to have to something critical for organizations day to day functioning.

Quintura - Search & Find couldn’t get any more interesting?!

2007-04-22T21:06:00.000+05:30

How can anyone not write about this search engine? It's user experience really stands apart if you ask me personally. Nope I am not starting any Google bashing session here. To tell you the truth, I still use Google the most. But then something inside all of us always wants to test out the new search engine out there. Well it is this urge that led me to this russian aritifical intelligence based search engine Quintura. What I find interesting about Quintura is it's visual representation of search results. Searching hasn't been so much fun before. Quintura basically displays your search results in two ways. On the left side you see a visual cloud with your search keyword in the middle surrounded by other terms related to your keyword in the some way or the other. And on the right you will see the search results as any other search engine gives us. Now for the stuff that really stands out. To describe that better I would like to do a search on the Quintura and show you.

For example, on typing 'Knowledge Management' on the visual cloud you will various words like information, strategies, portal, technology, knowledge, management etc as separate terms but one has an option to cancel a term from this cloud and this ensures the search results also change accordingly. I can also add a term in this cloud by double clicking anywhere on the cloud and typing in what I want and see the cloud and search results change accordingly. Does this sound cool or what? Also one can narrow down the results by cancelling out terms which one feels is not important for the information he is seeking.

On the whole it is a great search engine, both when an information seeker is looking for exhaustive and specific information. When exhaustive, one can look at all the related terms on cloud and when specific cancel out not so related terms to narrow down your search.

Everyone wants to do the strategy!!

2007-03-29T23:10:00.000+05:30

Well why not! Who doesn't want to work on building a successful Knowledge Management strategy for their organization? The emphasis here is on the word 'successful'. No strategy can be called successful unless it gives the right results. In most of the organizations it is always easier to get senior management involvement in chalking out a strategy and creating plans and not on actually leading the implementation of these plans. When it finally comes to implementing this great strategy or plan, there is a dilution as far as involvement from the top management is concerned. Therefore one major reason that knowledge management hasn't been implemented properly in many organizations is because of lack of top management involvement in actual implementation of a KM strategy. KM strategy roll-out in an organization has to rolled out as any project with detail project plan. Many a times this roll out only happens for the technology part of the entire exercise and the change management and process part are conveniently avoided. Why does this happen? Is it because it is tough to justify the effort that would go in or that results beyond a point are not quantifiable in an KM initiative in an organization?

Knowledge Management in organizations - Expectation too high!

2007-03-04T00:39:00.000+05:30

Well most of the organizations have some kind of knowledge management system in place. It extends from a simple portal based to system to very complex content management system with web 2.0 extensions. We also have industry accepted knowledge management awards like MAKE which provides us with a list of companies who they consider as KM Leaders. Many of these companies have been accepted as success stories as far as knowledge management is concerned. I have interacted with employees in these MAKE award winner organizations and have found that employees generally are not happy with knowledge management systems and processes in a organizations. Of course everyone does point out to some shinning jewels in their organizations but if asked to rate their experience with KM systems in their organizations on the whole; it really doesn't exactly rock them all the way. Almost every time I hear the answer 'KM in my organization is good but many a times I still don't find what I am looking'. That brings us to the question, are the expectations from employees on what knowledge management systems in an organization should do really too high or are Knowledge managers really not listening to their employees to the extent required? Is there an expectation mismatch? Or will a crystal ball do instead? Hmmm....

Can the miracle enterprise search engine please stand up?

2007-01-27T11:41:00.000+05:30

The success of search engines on the internet in helping one find information makes us wish for similar results inside the enterprise too. This need has been understood by the search engine companies and they have all tried coming out with their perfect solution for enterprise search. Many organizations have taken the plunge in implementing enterprise search engines expecting a substantial improvement in the getting the knowledge that their employees are looking for. But then the results haven't been all that impressive. One reason that I could think of us is that a Google or any search engine on the internet is not the same as Google or any search engine inside the enterprise. In the internet the search engine actually has access to a huge amount of content from which the chances that its crawlers or bots will find the information that a searcher is looking for is quiet high. While at the same time in the enterprise, the search engine on traditional KM systems which basically consists of a content management system with portals on them, the search results pulled up basically are dependent on the content captured in the CMS in the first place. Of course I agree I have been guilty of simplifying the description of a KM system in an enterprise to a alarming strip bare level. But what I want to bring out here is that search engine results are only as good as the quality of content captured in our databases. Also with the emergence of newer collaboration tools in an organization, it is not longer the CMS system that is the only database for knowledge. The enterprise search has to search through chats, forums, blogs, traditional databases and multiple other systems to bring out the iformation that a user is looking for. But I agree the importance of a well tuned enterprise search in an organization cannot be undermined. The complexity of the information being generated and used in an organization is very high. The expectations therefore, from the search engine, are certainly steep. But it would be grossly unfair from our side to judge the performance of enterprise search only through its achievements so far. There is still a long way to go in this area. The good part of this of course is that big players are looking at enterprise space as an important area of growth in the near future. Investments by these large players on this space will finally help the consumer of this development, which is basically the employee of an organization, benefit from the output of this search by being able to better find what he is looking for in an organization. All this will bring us back to the question of whether organizations should only focus its efforts in identifying the right search engine, implement it and tune it better or shouldn't it also look at what kind of knowledge is being created in an organization and ensure proper processes are in place to better help create quality knowledge objects and have better content management in place. The thin line between quantity and quality of knowledge is sometime too thin to be noticed!

Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management

2006-12-26T00:43:00.000+05:30

Though Web 2.0 was first coined by O'Reilly Media way back in 2004, it is in 2006 that we can see a lot of possiblities of Web 2.0 actually becoming more enterprise ready. Organizations have seen the potential of web 2.0 since it's inception but I guess have been waiting for the clouds of uncertainity to clear away. I guess for us knowledge managers Web 2.0 provides us an opportunity to use these developments to address the inherent weaknesses that organizations have faced with how Knowledge Management has been implemented in enterprises. Second generation of Internet-based services - such social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users are basically going to transform how knowledge management is going to look in enterprises in the near future if not already. Let's face it, knowledge management has long been a glorified content management exercise in many organizations. The true value of knowledge sharing is yet to be realized in organizations. People go back to using efficient, direct conversations - through meetings, or phone calls, or emails, or instant messages to exhange useful knowledge. Organizations have realized this as can be seen by the various initiatives being carried to tap the potential on Web 2.0. But then I also see a potential for organizations to actually get carried away with implementing collaborative tools made available through Web 2.0. Launching thousands of blogs and shot gunning information all over the intranet will not lead to benefits that we envisage from Web 2.0. The best way to benefit from all these blogs and provide knowledge is to aggregate it. Combining posts from different people on similar topics and grouping them in adhoc manner. One excellent example of such aggregation is the wikipedia, though it is more than a aggregation of isolated blogs. It would be great to have a enterprise wikipedia which captures knowledge in an organized manner with the ability to link to individual blogs of employees. Organizations do have to keep in mind to have a strong business case for Web 2.0 before jumping into the implementation steps. The Web 2.0 truly has a potential to launch a KM 2.0 - A move to focus on practices and outputs of employees than on capturing knowledge itself. New challenges will arise ofcourse with newer ways of knowledge sharing. I will cover some these in forthcoming articles. For now 'Goodbye 2006' - you have done enough - now let's see what 2007 brings us!

Human touch in Knowledge Management

2006-07-05T19:22:00.000+05:30

I recently read a very interesting blog entry Please put the human back in knowledge management by Jurgens Pieterse. The entire article is a gem of a read. A particular section that I found particulary thought provoking is 'The purpose of knowledge management must be to increase the decision making competence of individuals within the organizations. If we do not improve the competency of our employees then knowledge management is on the wrong track.' This does make a lot of sense, but ensuring that the knowledge management in the organization directly transforms into the improvement of competence in an organization is a huge responsibility on the shoulders of us knowledge managers!

Also the point that some of the issues of knowledge management that are presently existing in organizations are the same that existed years back. Questions like :-

- "How do I get people to want to share their knowledge?"

- "How do I get people to capture their knowledge into a place where it can be referenced?"

- "How do we define the business case for knowledge management?"

- "How do we measure knowledge management?"

- "What are the implementation steps of knowledge management?"

Why is that so? Knowledge Management is no longer a new field. But some questions I guess die hard. Any suggestions?

Anyway do read the article by Jurgens Pieterse. It surely is worth your precious time!!

Some Issues with Traditional Knowledge Management Systems

2006-06-01T22:11:00.000+05:30

A friend of mine shared a very interesting discussion in the knowledge managment team in his organization. It was on a situation that organizations typically face when a function in an organization is operating in a steady state and suddenly comes face to face with a change agent. Well not exactly sudden but something that did shake them a little and made them take account of. Presently at this organization, they have a so called conventional KM system. A Centralized KM database, various portals controlled by designated stakeholders and knowledge managers.

They have pretty matured processes in place but not closely integrated with the business to extent that they would like to see. On further discussion with my friend I found that the issue was that this kind of setup was actually working against the primary reason for which it was setup and that was for sharing of organizational knowledge. Well let's look at why this system is not working as it should be.

The control over sharing knowledge is restricted in the hands of so called business stakeholders, knowledge managers and users to an extent. What basically I felt was not right here was that any kind of control on knowledge sharing reduces the effectiveness of this process which as we all know requires the involvement of as many people as possible in an organization.
The above mode of knowledge sharing encouraged only the top-down sharing of knowledge, that is from the senior management to the employees. The need was to ensure a two way flow of information.
The existing mode of operations also made the knowledge sharing process in an organization dependent on the hands a few rather than get a overall involvement from the employees of the organization. Though the existing mode did ensure a level of responsbility on the owners but it also at the same time resulted in a kind of dependency on these people for knowledge in the organization.
The knowledge contribution from the employees in the form of artifacts was found to be not to the extent that was expected. Something was stopping or preventing the employees from sharing knowledge. The reasons were not very clear. Closer examination found that each employee maintained a close network by he/she used to fulfil his/her knowledge requirements. Using the KM system was found to be painful and more time consuming than contacting the network by email and asking for help.

Well having realized what the issues are, the team is presently looking for a way to revive the KM here. One development in the internet that kind of startled and at the same time excited the team was the success of the collaborative knowledge repositories - wikis and blogs. The team was faced with the question whether this model will work for internal use in an organization. Can this be more effective way of knowledge sharing not just in the internet but also in an organization with fixed domains of access and usage? The team is actively looking at examples were organizations were able to use this model. Will this be able to replace the existing system or will the combination of existing and new model be the right way to go ahead? Freely editable wikis model for knowledge sharing and restricted ownership and control offered by the old system for information that the management was control and distribute to the employees (like facts and figures generated in the organization, etc).

Evolving COP in an organization

2006-05-28T23:00:00.000+05:30

We have all attended seminars, conferences and workshops on various topics, issues, that we are interested in, where we want to share our viewpoints and share our experiences in dealing with a issue. In most of these sessions that we attend, we in most cases expect the main benefit from the key speakers and presenters. After every such event when we try to reflect back on what was the key learning and point of views which you find most beneficial or which helps you achieve the objective of your attending the same, you make a startling realization. This being that many times the key benefits that one derives is not from the event presenters or facilitators but from your fellow attendees.

This realization was the reason behind we at knowledge management team felt we need to find a way by which we can better utilize these interactions for the benefit of the respective group/practice and the organization on the whole. We thought that if we could ask a few questions to the attendees of a seminar before they actually attended it, on what were the reasons that made them attend this seminar, we could actually provide them better value. The reason of course helps us better our presentations and prepare the presenters accordingly so they are prepared to address these issues better. The questions remained that how we could actually go ahead and do this, what were the questions to ask, what we could do once we get answers to these questions. It was during this time that we got an opportunity to try out what we had briefly thought of. The Supply Chain Management Academy was due to be held in April first week and we thought if we could come out with a plan and a clear set of benefits for the attendees and practice in general, we will get the Leadership buy in to go ahead with this exercise. After a little of brainstorming, we decided that we need to ask a few focused questions. Answers to these questions from each participant should be something valuable for other participants to know. But at the same time the questionnaire should not be too long so as to discourage the participants form filling it up.

The questions that we finally decided on were:

- Name, Contact Details (E-Mail, Phone and Region), Role in the organization (Service Offer and Industry vertical)
- What engagements are you currently pursuing or involved in (Customer Name, Brief Description)
- Engagements completed (Client Name and Brief Description)
- Key Challenges that you faced in these engagements
- Area of Interest
- Any Major Accomplishments that you would like to share
- Any other personal details you may like to share

This was organized into a small questionnaire and sent out to all the participants and instructors who had registered 2 weeks in advance of the actual start of the one week event. The questionnaire was also sent out to the instructors to get their response for these questions. All the participants were told to respond back with their filled up questionnaire a week before the academy so that it gave us enough time for us to go through and do a detail analysis on the responses.

On startling discovery that we made in first 20 minutes of our analysis that biggest challenge that the consultants felt in their delivery of project was a topic which wasn’t actually covered in the academy. This challenge being – change management in a client organization. When we brought this out to the Leadership, everyone without any doubt felt that from the next academy onwards should have a dedicated change management workshop/session for all the participants. The other universal challenge that majority of responses contained was linked something all global organization faced that of overcoming Cultural Barriers. The final collation of all these responses which went out to all the participants 3 days before the start of the academy contained all the responses in one spread sheet. The benefits one derives from this spreadsheet are:

1) Identify people with similar project experiences as the one you are presently involved in
2) Identify other members who faced the same challenges that you have faced or facing presently.
3) Interact with people with similar interest areas
4) Share your success with a wider audience.

Infact this exercise doesn't end here. We have decided to pursue this further and track the interactions happening in these groups. We are presently looking at providing avenues for the respective groups to interact more easily. Will keep you updated on how this evolves.

Can knowledge management fail?

2006-04-18T22:56:00.000+05:30

There has been lot written about the success of Knowledge Management initiatives in organizations. Many organizations have taken the plunge by starting a knowledge management initiative, what they face now is a situation where the efforts haven't delivered the expected returns. These organizations have made the investments and the last think they want is to see their investments going down the drain. I have observed that even for the so called failed KM efforts, there are always certain sections in the organization that have benefited from KM. The reasons of failure are something we hear very often:

- Lack of clear business objectives
- No clear accountability for people using KM
- KM does integrate fully with Business processes
- Lack of clear goals and metrics to measure performance of KM initiatives

Once the reasons for failure are identified, the organization has to ensure that there is proper documentation of the issues and reasons why the KM initiative wasn't a success and ensure the relaunch inititiave results in quick wins through which they can win back the confidence of the users and then extend the scope to wider variety of projects.

Knowledge Management and Innovation in Organizations

2006-04-09T21:49:00.000+05:30

I have read a lot about the importance of knowledge management and innovation in organizations. But what I would love to read and hear about is how organizations have actually managed to ensure that knowledge that they manage actually leads to increase in innovation. Is their any study conducted that actually measures how knowledge management increase in innovation in organizations. I have seen organizations do try identifying what the best practices are in their respective organizations but do organiations have any model by which they monitor whether these best practices are reused. Also do organizations have a so called an inovations board which keeps a track of innovations generated in a organization, helps register IPs etc. I would love to hear how organizations like Canon, IBM, 3M encourgage innovation. Is the presence of a strong knowledge management practice in these organizations the actual reason why these organizations register the maximum amount IPs every year?

An Interesting book that I am presently reading!

2006-03-30T23:02:00.000+05:30

I am presently reading a very interesting book called "Expertise Locator Systems - Finding the Answers" by The American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC). To find best practices APQC identified more than 40 potential partners, screened seven who met the criteria of having an integrated Exterprise Locator System, conducted phone interviews with this group, and selected five best-practice organizations for site visits. Bascially they have identified 3 different models by which organizations position an ELS. Suggest anyone who is interested in knowing more about expertise locator systems and best practices in leading organizations, read this book from APQC.

Locating Expertise in Organizations

2006-03-26T12:03:00.000+05:30

It might sound simple but this is as complex as it gets. First of all who can be called an expert in a particular organization. Even if an organization does identify a person as an expert, are you indirectly saying that someone else is not an expert. Does this cause friction in a team for example? Well what do you do create more experts in your organization. Shouldn't your Learning and Development division work towards this? Does an expert remain an expert? How do you measure the expertise level of an expert? How do you ensure an expert continuously improves his expertise. Even if you do all the above, how do you ensure an expert shares his expertise for the maximum benefit for the organization. I am sure organizations have already thought of these points and have designed a system which can quantify expertise based on the output provided by each expert. I would very much be interested in knowing how systems in organizations are able to combine KM systems and Learning systems together.

Knowledge and Analogy of Water flowing in Pipes

2006-03-22T01:38:00.000+05:30

Well it all started when.......I was sitting in my office reflecting on the my job of being a knowledge manager. How great it would be if we had a system which basically followed the same principle which is used to distribute water in pipes. Imagine knowledge as water flowing in pipes. You have a pump, which basically stands for a KM system, as any normal pump takes water from a tank or a repository and pumps the water into the pipes (connectivity). Now when anyone wants to use the water he switches on the pipe leading to a low pressure at the outlet resulting in water flowing out to the area which requires it. Thus water flows from area of high pressure to an area of low pressure. In KM perspective the KM system (pump) pushes knowledge from an area where knowledge is required from an area where it is created or processed.

Taking this one step ahead, imagine we have along with the pump, a purification system which basically helps clean up the water, in this case the knowledge on a regular manner. So you have a source for water which can be looked as knowledge created continuously in an organization and then you have a pump and you have a purifier which helps clean the knowledge captured and remove the impurities or the knowledge which is not useful. Hmm this analogy is getting more and more complex. Do I see a clearer light at the end of tunnel by continuing with this analogy? Will add to this soon. Love to hear comments from the readers on this..........

Issue of KM ROI in Organizations

2006-03-19T19:08:00.000+05:30

One of the major issues Knowledge Management practice in an organization face today are the constant requirement to convince the Management that they are creating value. They are constantly faced with the issue of showing the so called ROI. Of course looking for ROI in any investment is a very good thing but what should be remembered is that ROI in systems like KM cannot be clearly quantified and takes a longer time as its scope extends to the entire organizations and cannot be classified as only front-end or back-end systems. I would love to hear about KM ROI models in various organizations. Ideally if the KM processes are well defined and systems in place ROI calculations should be pretty direct atleast to some extent but as KM processes definiton in organizations vary from each other, it is not very easy to replicate a model of one organization in another.

Knowledge Management - A Definition

2006-03-16T23:42:00.000+05:30

An interesting definiton by Davenport and Prusak

Knowledge is a fluid mix of framed experience, values, contextual information, expert insight and grounded intuition that provides an environment and framework for evaluating and incorporating new experiences and information. It originates and is applied in the minds of knowers. In organizations it often becomes embedded not only in documents or repositories but also in organizational routines, processes, practices and norms.