Information is like water - Part II

I completed the second presentation in my "Information is like water" presentation series yesterday. Just as the first presentation, "Information is like water", it is now a featured presentation at slideshare.net.

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I'm glad to see that the first presentation has (as I write this) been viewed 1591 times, downloaded 229 times and embedded 15 times after just five days. I haven't done any benchmarking against other presentations, but I am happy for these figures.

Information is like water

Here's a Powerpoint presentation that I uploaded to slideshare.net:

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If you have missed out on these reports...

...then you find them here:

The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe
"In this EMC-sponsored white paper, IDC calibrates the size (bigger than first thought) and the growth (faster than expected) of the digital universe through 2011."

AIIM Market IQ on Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent, and Integrated
"This study of 441 end users (performed in January 2008) found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is. This 80+ page report, which contains over 70 figures, covers Enterprise 2.0 from all perspectives including technology, business drivers and market dynamics."

Lost & Found: A Smart-Practice Guide to Managing Organizational Memory
Found via Bill Ives, who describes it as follows: "...the Canada School of the Public Service has crafted a good overview of knowledge management (in the context of organizational demographic changes) and has some useful examples of common approaches/techniques...//...The focus is on public but the report provides a good introduction for fairly broad consumption."

Future of Media Report 2007
This report describes the evolving convergence media landscape. Michael Pick and Robin Good provides you with a short overview.

Open Source Web Content Management in Java
"...provides an in depth analysis of seven of the leading open source Java web content management platforms. Written for technical decision makers, the report breaks down the open source marketplace and describes various categories of open source software and where they are most effectively used. The report also provides a framework for understanding the cost and risk implications of selecting an open source platform over commercial software"

...and here are some online readings:

IBM Social Computing Guidelines
"In the spring of 2005, IBMers used a wiki to create a set of guidelines for all IBMers who wanted to blog. These guidelines aimed to provide helpful, practical advice—and also to protect both IBM bloggers and IBM itself, as the company sought to embrace the blogosphere. Since then, many new forms of social media have emerged. So we turned to IBMers again to re-examine our guidelines and determine what needed to be modified. The effort has broadened the scope of the existing guidelines to include all forms of social computing."

Sun Guidelines on Public Discourse
"Many of us at Sun are doing work that could change the world. Contributing to online communities by blogging, wiki posting, participating in forums, etc., is a good way to do this. You are encouraged to tell the world about your work, without asking permission first, but we expect you to read and follow the advice in this note."

Increasing collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation

In "Questions to Ask Before Replacing Corporate Email", Dennis D. McDonald addresses the problem of using e-mail as "the one and only" collaboration tool:

"For me a bottom line issue is understanding the costs of introducing new technology and replacing old technology, given that the old technology — email — is not going to disappear (nor should it)...//...How long these extra costs will need to be incurred will depend upon the organization and the speed of adoption, and complete adoption won’t occur overnight ...//...These additional costs need to be weighed against the savings of time that emerge when it is found that efficient use of collaboration software actually reduces not only the number of (inefficient) emails associated with certain types of activities but also the meetings associated with certain types of tasks."

In "Build It (and they won't come)", Marc Solomon debunks some myths about "knowledge hubs" and shares his insights about how to get your users engaged as participants (to make them share their knowledge).

"The perennial, time-tested truth is that people who love to learn don't share that love for what they learn (or care to share). How do we make it worth their while?...//...Turning users into contributors requires that we architect searches that highlight who the contributors are along with the volume and nature of what they're contributing."

"No 12 step program can move forward until the addict admits that they have an addiction -- in this case relying on email to provide a dashboard-like visibility into what's fresh and noteworthy on an organizational level. How can the addict be weaned from the isolation of 1:1 asynchronous communication so that their comfort zone includes RSS readers, search alerts, and subscription feeds for staying on top of their priorities and moving targets."

"Enterprise systems are saddled with the tags we force on them to label their content baggage. But the more control we exert on our metadata the more pressure we put on our producers to execute our elaborate coding schemes. At what point can we introduce commonly accepted web 2.0 fare as folksonomies, tag clouds, and ability to aggregate these terms by their popularity?"

"One of the self-fulfilling failures of expert-finding deep dives is that when you ask for volunteers your most sought-after domain leaders are already snowed under -- why would they volunteer their protected time to be officially pegged for all to see on your corporate radar? One of the many benefits of connecting metadata to search is that the engine can quantify thought leadership based on business need -- not based on who volunteers for guru status in a given topic."

In an article in BusinessWeek, "Life on the Edge: Learning from Facebook", authors John Hagel and John Seely Brown argue that "social network provides important lessons for executives—and a key forum for innovation and experimentation":

"Dismissing Facebook as irrelevant to business would be dangerously shortsighted. Yes, it is on the edge of traditional business activity, but it is an edge where new approaches to business are being tested and refined. Like most edges in the business world, it may look marginal at the outset, but has the potential to redefine business more broadly over time...//...So what lessons should more traditional companies take away from the early Facebook and SocialMedia experience?"

• "Create more edges. The decision by Facebook to open up its platform to third-party developers unleashed a torrent of innovation that continues to expand...//...By offering application developers easy access to millions of potential users, Facebook spurred broad innovation in a short period of time."
  
• "Provide better ways to connect at the edge. Brokers like SocialMedia attract diverse participants at the edge and provide mechanisms to catalyze new insight and share knowledge. "
  
• "Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation...//...Younger generations can be important catalysts for business innovation, both because they often uncover unmet needs earlier than older customers and because they are more willing to try a new product or service."
  
• "Experiment and iterate rapidly. The power of Facebook as an innovation platform is that it costs so little for an application developer to introduce an application and generate quick market feedback. This environment encourages lots of experimentation and accelerates learning."
  
• "Social, technologic, and economic are inextricably intertwined. Facebook succeeds because it satisfies profound social needs to connect and be acknowledged via an easy-to-use technology platform. It also carefully manages the economics of its business to avoid upsetting the social order."

This week in links - week 15, 2008

"Most Users Are Unhappy With Enterprise Search" By W. David Gardner:

"Separate U.S. and U.K. surveys released this week found that search engines are failing workers."

"...keyword searches don't work for most employee searches and the search 'monster' is becoming a growing problem for businesses and organizations."

"In its report, Sinequa said many employees in the London study are struggling to find even the most basic information, and their travails are negatively impacting their productivity. Just 8% of the workers have a tool that permits them to search across their own company using key search terms, Sinequa said."

"A world without Enterprise RSS" by James Dellow:

"Enterprise users are lacking some of the tools and features available through the Web 2.0 consumer RSS ecosystem. And Enterprise RSS users want their RSS "when and where they want it" too!"

"The problem is that without Enterprise RSS this is hard to achieve, as most basic enterprise approaches to RSS use a simple Web content publishing approach - i.e. RSS content is published like any other Web content but consumed through an existing application or a desktop reader. However, the RSS content has no idea if anyone has actually read it and if a user wants to consume RSS feeds on different devices or even from different reading applications on the same device, well... bad luck."

"Enterprise Twitter – or how to tap social networks for expertise without using email" by Ross Dawson:

"In organizational network analysis circles, an MIT study on how people find information is often cited. The research showed that in an organization, people were five times more likely to go to people than to databases to get answers to their questions. So knowledge workers’ productivity is strongly related to their social networks, in terms of who they know who can help them, and whether there is sufficient trust and reciprocal value in the relationship that they get a response."

"Effective professionals are already tapping their external networks using Twitter and other tools to do their work better. They should also be able to use the same tools inside the organization."

"Building relevant social ties based on trust and mutual understanding that enable focused, efficient questions and knowledge sharing will always be far higher value than broadcast mechansims. However there is definitely a role for light-touch queries inside organizations, and I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of that in the coming year or two. "

"Tips for Social Computing in the Enterprise" by Chris Howard, vice president and director of the Executive Advisory Program at the Burton Group:

"People form communities based on shared interests. Once the community is in place, it becomes a greenhouse for the development of ideas and the distribution of information, attracting all those who wish to participate."

"Chris Zook recommends searching for "undeveloped adjacencies," or unexploited capabilities in the organization that can be developed into new, repeatable processes. Successful corporate innovation capitalizes on existing assets and ideas combined in new ways. Use of social computing creates a new stage for innovation, where ideas are more easily exposed and patterns spotted. As communities work out the kinks of new ideas in public forums, innovative thinking coalesces and ownership/leadership emerges."

"The collective intelligence of the community leads to answers more quickly. As more questions are answered, repeatability increases. As new workers enter the company, there is a baseline of knowledge to get them ramped up more effectively. Much of that knowledge is available as content within the social computing infrastructure."

The DNA of Enterprise 2.0

The need to be able to communicate and collaborate over time and space increases for most enterprises. To get this communication and collaboration in place, we need to have means to easily exchange our key resources - information, knowledge and experiences - with each other. Web 2.0 technologies and solutions such as wikis, blogs, RSS and social software have are certainly making this exchange easier than ever before. However, Web 2.0 technologies and solutions are still quite unproven when it comes to enterprise use (Enterprise 2.0) and their value for enterprises is sometimes not clear. Many enterprises seem reluctant to adopt them and might not even have assessed their potential uses. They might even see them as something that will worsen their content management problems and the information overload employees are struggling with. But they couldn’t be more wrong. To quote blogger David Weinberger:

“The cure to information overload is more information - the way to manage information overload is more information. That's what the doomsayers of the 90's — Information Anxiety! Information Tidal Wave! — didn't foresee.”

Yes, the solution to deal with information overload is absolutely not to stop creating and sharing information. It is rather to create more; information about information (metadata).

Traditionally (in the IT world), metadata has been more or less synonymous with file properties; file name, location, date created, and so forth. These metadata have been hidden and hence remained unknown to most users. They have also been of technical character, making them hard to understand for users. In other words, they have not been usable for the wider public. They have not really helped people to find what they are looking for.

The point with metadata is to create usable metadata. Users must simply not be forced to spend their time and energy on trying to understand detailed metadata or weird terms with complex syntax. The metadata must be easy to read, interpret and understand. To create good metadata, you need to have knowledge about both the content and its intended uses. This is also why there usually is a need for different metadata for the same thing; the same metadata might not be usable for all intended uses and users.

To me, the most revolutionary thing about Web 2.0 is how creating metadata has become a natural thing to do - it has almost become a life-style. The value of describing things for other people has become evident to us since simple tags and descriptions have made it so much easier to find and share these things with others. Metadata is now being created by the people, for the people.

The key to make efficient communication and collaboration happen within enterprises is to make it easier for users to create and share metadata. This way, they allow not only themselves but also other people to easily find what they are looking for – be it virtual resources such as information, experiences and knowledge or physical resources such as people, locations and objects. This is where Web 2.0 technologies and solutions have an important part to play for enterprises, but only if they are coupled by a culture of trust, participation and openness. The old ommand and control style will not do it.

Enterprise 2.0 vs KM 2.0

Andrew McAfee first coined the term Enterprise 2.0 and defines is as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” Other definitions have popped up here and there after that, such as that Enterprise 2.0 is the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies within enterprises or like a recent definition by Carl Frappalo which defines it as "a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise".

What strikes me about Andrew McAfee’s definition is that it is very technology-oriented. It does not say anything about the purpose and potential value of emergent social platforms for companies. However, Tom Davenport reports that Andrew McAfee said that “the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better 'knowledge capture and sharing,' and more effective 'collective intelligence' at his talk at the FastForward conference in Orlando last week. Tom Davenport draws the conclusion that Andrew is in essence talking about knowledge management.

I must admit to that KM and Enterprise 2.0 have their similarities when you look at what they ultimately aim to achieve. But does this mean Enterprise 2.0 simply is the next major version of KM? Should we in fact call it KM 2.0 instead? No, I don't believe so. Sometimes you need to make a fresh start., to get rid of old definitions and conceptions and start over with a blank sheet to get things happening. A vitamin injection to an existing term might not just be enough to get it alive and kicking again. The term Enterprise 2.0 as defined by Andrew McAfee has provided us with that fresh start (although it would be nice with an extended definition which includes something about the ultimate value of Enterprise 2.0 as stated by Andrew McAfee). The term Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that we are leaving something and going someplace new and that it has to do with how enterprises are managed and operated. Saying that we are just leaving KM for KM 2.0 would be too delimiting. And it would prbably not make anyone more than – possibly - raise an eyebrow. Calling the place we are leaving Enterprise 1.0 instead gives us the opportunity and mandate to define what we are leaving from how we define the future. It is much more powerful and opens up for new perspectives and innovative thinking. New people with new ideas are allowed to enter the arena.

Instead of having a KM 2.0 versus Enterprise 2.0 debate which essentially will be about how to label the same message, it is important that we all focus on getting the message out there, trying to change existing attitudes and behaviors of people within enterprises who do not realize the value in getting better at communicating, collaborating and exchanging information and knowledge with each other. The value should be apparent for enterprises which have a distributed workforce and compete on a global market where the fierce competition is forcing them to constantly get smarter, more efficient and more innovative at the same time.

One way to do create this change in peoples attitudes and behaviors is to demonstrate the possibilities we have at hand, such as social software. Technology can be used as a vehicle for change, as tools to change attitudes and behaviors. Let us get the message out there by demonstrating how Enterprise 2.0 technologies can be used to create value and help enterprises to be successful.

This week in links - week 8, 2008

"Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management?" by Tom Davenport:

"Still, that E2.0 is the new KM didn’t hit me for a while. But when Andy said the ultimate value of E2.0 initiatives consists of greater responsiveness, better “knowledge capture and sharing,” and more effective “collective intelligence,” there wasn’t much doubt. When he talked about the need for a willingness to share and a helpful attitude, I remembered all the times over the past 15 years I’d heard that about KM."

"I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway."

Excepts from notes from a table talk about social networks inside organisations at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum Blog:

"Social networks a good way to see who has the expertise in the organisation and to find mentors and connections across the globe, which helps with developing innovation."

"Social networking makes it easier to work from home and feel part of the business."

"Encourages people to be more innovative and put ideas forward but that depends on the organisation's culture"

"Very few people in organisations are aware and or positive about social networking"

In "Enterprise 2.0 should be harnessed as a strategic asset" from internalcommshub.com, the CTO from banking group Westpac argues that Enterprise 2.0 tools such as wikis and blogs needs to be “harnessed as a strategic asset”. He stresses the importance of getting to know the audiences:

“'One of the most important things for Westpac is to understand who works for us and who our customers are', said Backley. 'We have to have the technology and solutions that transcend three generational groups, and each demographic has a different experience with technology and what it can do.'"

"'Each demographic has a different experience with technology and what it can do. What’s important is to have technology that gives more power to the end user to do their jobs,' Backley said. "

Finally, an insight about BI from Doug Henschen in "TDWI Insight: Guiding BI From the Top":

"BI is not implementing tools and it's not an IT initiative. IT does not have the empowerment to make end users turn information into strategic actions."

Now, enjoy the weekend!

Security 2.0 - protecting us from stupidity?

From wonderwebby by Jasmin Tragas:

"People are moving more frequently from job to job, within a company or between them, in the same city or moving to the other side of the globe. Employers not considering how employees can transfer their knowledge and continue their personal learning and development between jobs and companies, are failing to meet the real needs of their employees personal development. This restricts the potential influence of new knowledge, social knowledge networks and innovation into the company culture."

From "Sensitive data 'impossible' to protect" by Robert Jaques:

"No matter how sophisticated a company's IT system is it is impossible completely to protect sensitive information, UK researchers warned today. The research was led by Professor Gerard Hodgkinson, director of the Centre for Organisational Strategy, Learning and Change at Leeds University."

"'Our research shows that organisations will never be able to remove all latent risks in the protection and security of data held on IT systems, because our brains are wired to work on automatic pilot in everyday life,' he said...//... If we considered and analysed the risks involved in every permutation of every situation we would never get anything done...//...If I make a cup of tea, I do not stop to weigh up the probability of spilling boiling water on myself or choking on the drink."

Knowledge exchange key to IKEA's success

A recently presented doctoral thesis at Lund University School of Economics and Management in Sweden, "Knowledge across borders - a study in the IKEA world" by Anna Jonsson, concludes that employees willingness to exchange knowledge is the main success factor behind IKEA's global expansion (for Swedes, here's an article in Dagens Nyheter).

Anna Jonsson says that she got access to the world of IKEA to study the knowledge exchange when IKEA establishes themselves in new markets. Her main conclusion is that knowledge exchange within IKEA is the single most important factor behind their global expansion, and that the participation of the employees is crucial to their success.

To make the knowledge exchange work, the employees must be willing to share their experiences with each other. Anna Jonsson points out that many companies have a hard time getting their employees to share what they know since it is often not benefiting them to do so: “Within IKEA you learn that it is necessary to share knowledge and to be willing to learn new things – it can give you good career possibilities.”

Anna Jonsson has noted how important it is for information to flow easily throughout the IKEA organization and says that there are open channels between different organizational levels and units within IKEA.

I have worked at IKEA as a consultant and I believe I can sign to this. The clear IKEA vision and values which are communicated everywhere - even in the toilets! - and the open atmosphere with open-minded people certainly makes you more willing to share what you know with others. You are always sure that you will get something back when giving away what you have. Furthermore, at IKEA there is a reverse dress code – you dont see corporate suits, especially not accompanied by a tie. This way, management does not distinguish themselves from other employees. And everybody at IKEA, even the top management, have to work in one of the IKEA stores for a few days every year.

It don't think it is that hard to copy the IKEA business concept. In fact, they talk openly about it in their marketing communication. But, what would be really hard to copy is their culture. Then, why try to copy? If other companies would just allow themselves to get inspired by the IKEA culture, they would probably get much better at collaborating and exchanging knowledge.

Speaking of knowledge, a recent Swedish study concluded that the most commonly used phrase in Sweden is "I don't know", followed by "Where are you?" and "What's for dinner?". I am not all that surprised. At work, most of us are struggling with trying to find information or people that can help us do things we don't know how to do. That's how my day looks like before and after lunch. At lunch time, the big questions pop up; "Lunch anybody?", "Where shall we go?" and "What shall I eat?". My own standard answer to all of these questions is "I don't know" (or "I'm just goint to...").

I assume that if we all get better at answering these questions faster, productivity will explode.

The impact of Web 2.0 and social software on KM

Here's a presentation from a series of workshops that David Gurteen held for IBM in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok the last month. The reason for these workshops was "to help IBM's customers better understand Social Tools and their impact on traditional KM and the enterprise". The presentation illustrates what kind of impact web 2.0 and social software has had on knowledge management, a key point being that KM has changed from being techno-centric to people-centric. I personally think that summarizes the whole "2.0" thing quite well.

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Using blogs and RSS-feeds for better decision making

Here's a train of thought and I hope you will be able to follow it.

On a high level, business intelligence can be defined as initiatives that use various forms of IT-resources to support better business decision making. But the most commonly definition narrows it down to using facts (= data) to support decisions, a fact being "something that is the case, something that actually exists, or something that can be verified according to an established standard of evaluation". (Wikipedia)

Facts can be good, especially aggregated facts that provide a highly informative context for decision making. However, I would argue that most business decisions are based on some kind of intuition and that this is not necessarily something bad. A decision might be the right decision even if it is is made in a split second and not based on facts or a rational process. Sometimes (often?) intuitive decisions are even better than fact based. Personal experiences and implicit and subjective information and knowledge might be just as important for decision making as hard explicit facts represented as data.

Intuition is about your previous experiences and lessons learned. It is about passive consuming and digesting information, information which is then processed by your sub-consciousness. It puts the active process of trying to figure out an answer aside and is based on effortless awarenesses. These awarenesses can create insights and solutions to problems that you are directly or indirectly working with.

In my mind, Enterprise 2.0 is not about creating gigantic data warehouses with numbers and figures from which management can get aggregated reports about how the enterprise performs from a hard fact-based perspective. No, Enterprise 2.0 has much more to do with enabling information to flow between people and making it easy to passively tap into these information flows to support intuitive decision making. This requires creating and fostering an environment where employees readily share their information and knowledge. In such an environment, tools such as blogs and wikis have their natural uses. When the information that is locked into departmental information silos and peoples' heads is eventually unlocked, we can all tap into relevant blogs, wikis and other tools and information sources with the use of push technologies such as RSS and passively and almost effortlessly consume and digest information. We will know a lot more about what is happening in the business and we will, as our sub-consciousness is constantly processing this information, become better at making intuitive decisions that actually turn out to be the right ones.

That's enough of thinking for today.

E2.0 - A renaissance for collaboration and knowledge management

Almost as a follow-up on my post "Rules are meant to be broken" and Henrik Gustafssons post "Will Web 2.0 Drive Knowledge Management?", here's a quote from Mike Gotta who blogs about the new report "Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Management Renaissance" that he has authored for Burton Group:

Enterprise strategists have long been aware that the “informal organization” has tremendous influence on business success or failure. A vibrant culture with a strong sense of community and cross-functional network of employee relationships can significantly augment traditional management methods and processes structures. Hierarchy and formal controls can inadvertently result in compliance policies, decision-making roles, and work handing rules that constrain the ability of people to effectively communicate, share information, and collaborate. In many cases, these “gating mechanisms” are necessary business constructs that serve valid purposes (e.g., security), but they have unintended consequences: communication may not be timely, relevant knowledge might not be shared, and collaboration may not occur across departmental boundaries.

Breakdowns in information sharing and collaboration and a poor sense of community within an enterprise can impact a worker's willingness to share insight and pass along experiences. Catalyzing the informal organization is becoming a more complex challenge for business and information technology (IT) strategists as shifting employee demographics crystallize concerns regarding aging workforce trends and expectations of younger employees (e.g., new work models).

“E2.0” as a catch phrase has merit and deserves attention from business and IT strategists. Beyond the meme, however, E2.0 represents new packaging for strategic collaboration and KM. Organizations often rely on collaboration and KM initiatives to attain innovation, growth, productivity, and performance goals. Collaboration and KM efforts can also help address needs of the informal organization when these efforts are properly linked to human capital management programs that improve HR and employee talent strategies.

John Newton has written "A Manifesto for Social Computing in the Enterprise", listing what capabilities are needed in a social computing platform for helping to "empower people to collaborate at any time or place". Here's a few quotes from the post:

The balance is shifting from contained and controlled companies to engaged and empowered collaborative enterprises driven by Web 2.0-inspired social computing. At the center of the shift from old models of computing in the enterprise to new social models are companies that are inspired to innovate or to engage more with their customers...//...Those using social computing are interested in engaging people, such as customers, employees or partners. They are using new people-centric tools and facilitate creating or extending existing social networks.

This does not mean that the need for traditional enterprise content technologies such as document and records management goes away. They are still repositories of the truth and verifiable information and thus play an important role in sharing knowledge within social networks. However, these traditional technologies lack the usability, empowerment, and breadth of reach that Web 2.0 sites provide. They lack the collaborative nature that invites in people without barriers and restrictions to contribute to the sharing of knowledge and information.

Finally, here's the finale in Andrew McAfee's post "Enterprise 2.0 May be Fine for the Business, But What About the IT Department?", commenting on a recent article in InformationWeek ("Growing Pains: Can Web 2.0 Evolve Into An Enterprise Technology?"):

Among the least kind terms I hear used to describe IT organizations are ‘priesthood’ and ‘empire.’ These words imply a belief that corporate IT departments consciously exclude outsiders and outside influences, and are concerned primarily with expanding themselves. If this is the case, then Enterprise 2.0 will certainly be resisted by IT; its tools are cheap, often housed outside the firewall, and require relatively little configuration, support, and maintenance. Enterprise 2.0 comes from outside the priesthood, in other words, and doesn’t expand the empire. As the article says in its opening sentence, "forget outsourcing. the real threat to IT pros could be Web 2.0." I think a larger threat to the continued health and relevance of corporate IT departments might be the worldview underlying that sentence.

Will Web 2.0 Drive Knowledge Management?

Knowledge Management has a history. I wrote my first report on this subject back in 1996. Knowledge Management was then defined as a systematic approach to manage corporate knowledge to achieve business value. It is a general definition that still has merits. Some research and practices back then focused on managing knowledge assets with information technology and others on the dynamics of organizational collaboration.

Common practices to create, manage and transfer knowledge have been:

• Communities: Collaborative groups that span across organizational boundaries.
• Best-practice: Reusing knowledge via work descriptions, offerings and similar.
• Knowledge maps: Map knowledge to specific work processes or situations.
• Knowledge profiles: Describing knowledge workers’ roles and resources.

The above practices have often been enabled by means of content and collaboration technologies such as messaging, e-mail, document management, portals, enterprise content management, search and the like.

Content can be seen as a seed of knowledge. But extracting the knowledge and acting upon it require first, that people need to interpret the content to understand the intended information and second, people need to ponder the information for knowledge to emerge. As argued in a former post:

“Content can be managed with the means of (information) technology, but we cannot manage information and knowledge with technology alone since information and knowledge are created and exist only in the heads of humans.” (Back to Basics - Defining Data, Content, Experience, Information And Knowledge)

For Knowledge Management to succeed in an Enterprise it is, for the above reason, essential that appropriate roles, cultures, incentives etc are in place. This will encourage a knowledge sharing environment (knowledge market) necessary for better innovation, smarter services, increased learning, higher productivity etc.

So, what can Web 2.0 technologies and practices add to Knowledge Management?

Web 2.0 is fostered in an agile, open and distributed atmosphere. Recent social trends embrace more open collaboration where content is created and shared in self-organizing networks and communities. This attitude may be what is missing in many failed Knowledge Management initiatives, where company workers have been reluctant to join forces and share what they know.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) will simplify the production and consumption of content. Other technologies such as feeds, mashups, web services, ajax etc will have a role in developing a more flexible and richer web user experience more suitable to the needs and preferences of knowledge workers.

Social interaction (e.g. profiles and social networks) has possibly the largest potential in adding something innovative to Knowledge Management. Knowledge workers may market their knowledge and interests and passively or actively strengthen their relationships across company borders.

I think it is safe to conclude that Web 2.0 will drive Knowledge Management to another level.

Basic Content Services And Web 2.0

Consumers today are the first to get cutting-edge technology. Therefore enterprise technology adoption is increasingly driven by people from outside of the IT department. Changes in social practices also require a more agile way of exploiting new technology.

Basic Content Services (BCS) and Web 2.0 technologies follow these trends. They are both responses to a general call for improved communication and collaboration but are at the same time simpler in functionality, easier to deploy and available at lower cost. But where do they differ?

Seen from an enterprise perspective they target slightly different types of workers, namely:

• The information worker : Characterized by ad-hoc or semi-structured team collaboration
• The social worker : Characterized by personal relationships, knowledge transfer and participatory communities

BCS meets the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Document Management, meaning support for creation, management (library services) and sharing of office documents for information workers. The produced documents are often relatively static and long-lived intended for consumption within a controlled context.

Web 2.0 technologies for user generated content (e.g. wikis and blogs) and metadata (e.g. social tagging and bookmarks) along with social interaction ( e.g. profiles and social networks) meet the needs of low-end and enterprise-wide Content and Knowledge Management, meaning creation, management (aggregation) and sharing of content snippets for social workers. The content being produced is relatively more interactive and short-lived intended for consumption and reuse in an open context.

These two areas will be integrated within a near future and their combined service offerings will be a threat for established monolithic and top-down oriented Enterprise Content Management systems.

The Enterprise 2.0-generation and the future

What can we expect from the future corporations whose leaders and information workers all grew up in a world where internet already was labelled “2.0”? When I grew up, in the early seventies, e.g. young girls all had diaries with little heart shaped padlocks on. No one was allowed in to their secret thoughts. Today, young girls are publishing their diaries on blogs, open for the entire world to read and reply to. When me and my friends did something really stupid, we tried to keep it to ourselves. Today the film is on Youtube within seconds after the situation. The drive to share and take part of other peoples “business” is enormous.

Now, take this collaborative force into the future corporate world. When we, and every other generation grew up, knowledge was power in the sense that you should keep valuable information to yourself and act on it when the best opportunity came along. Hence, even though the wind is changing slowly, today’s business mostly depends on few people who know a lot. Tomorrow the business will depend on many people who each have specific knowledge. Tomorrow, knowledge is a fresh fruit that should be consumed fast or it will be useless. Knowledge will be power in the sense that you can use it to broaden you network and collaborate with even more communities and so on.

So, what about the future corporations then? Given a continuing technical evolution, we will have the possibility to seek and find relevant knowledge for an existing or upcoming situation within our organisations in a way we never had before. The leaders should be able to get more relevant and fresh information to act upon then ever seen before. The key to this is of course the power of the learning communities, the social operating systems and the networks. The leaders and information workers of tomorrow will have this power built in from kindergarten and they will know of no other way to conduct their business than to cooperate with others, share ideas, keep discussions going and making it all public within the organisation. Business Intelligence will move its focus to tracking and monitoring these communities and seek out the relevant information instead of aggregating and analysing already distorted data from legacy systems, and creating charts that are out of date even before they are compiled. The good part is that as long as the climate for starting and running the communities is healthy, the communities will almost take care of themselves. They will define their own set of rules, the do’s and the dont’s, and they will find the best channels for them to publish themselves within the organisations.

More About Content, Experiences and Information

Here is a short follow-up on Henrik’s post "Back to Basics..."

Acknowledging that information and knowledge cannot be managed with technology is important. The main reason is that it allows us to put our focus and efforts on what we actually can manage with technology; how knowledge and information is encoded into various forms of content and how that content is then managed and delivered to the right user in an efficient way.

Why then even bother to make this separation between content and information, between what can exists in the outside world and what can exist only in the minds of humans? Well, because it will hopefully make the content creator - the sender of the message - more aware of that a content product can be misinterpreted and not understood in the correct way by individuals who come across and use it. Some individuals might think that the information that they are able to extract from a content product is incomplete and feel a need to get more detailed information. Others might think there is too much and irrelevant information in the same content product.

Content producers have come to realize that their content products need to be tailor-made for a specific audience, sometimes even for specific individuals. And that they are delivering experiences, not only satisfying rational needs. We are in fact moving from an era where physical products where mass-produced for the masses to satisfy "objective" and rational needs, to a new era where consumers expect to get great experiences when interacting with digital or physical products. And experiences are subjective and emotional, not objective and rational. To satisfy the expectations of their consumers, content producers simply must put more care in to how they create and deliver content. Technology cannot do this part for them.