One Size Fits All?

This is a question which i have been thinking about for some time. Mst of the organizations i interact with have KM programs which are standardized across the organization. There is one portal, there is one set of guidelines and processes which are applied across the organization when it comes to engagement of the business with KM. The assumption is that if you put all the tools out there, people across teams can find the tools which they find useful, and use them as they require.

The assumption behind this approach is that KM is not an initiative which is meant to solve specific problems. In other words, KM is seen as an initiative which is loosely linked to business processes, and as such, the adoption of KM is seen as the logical thing to do, by itself, without any other reason to do it. And this leads to the scenario where the different functions in the organization see KM as an external entity, or at least, external their line of business, leading to a scenario where KM is seen as an initiative which is running on their own with not much engagement either required or existing with the business teams. And this, in turn, leads to far lower engagement, and so, far lower adoption of KM initiatives.

A lot has been written about how KM needs to be linked to business processes. Some folks talk about baking KM into business processes (baking ... not something i want to talk about ... am off sweets!), and as i have written before, this relationship between KM technology and the business processes of the organization is quite important. An important part of this is to keep knowledge-sharing simple, so that it is a part of the day-to-day work of people, rather than additional work, as i have written before. The important aspect of this, however, is that instead of being trying to be one thing which can meet all the requirements of different sets of people across the organization, KM can move to a scenario where it becomes a set of tools, practices, and processes, which are tailored to solve the business requirements of different people at different parts of the organization. In other words, what this means is that different people in different parts of the organization have different requirements, and different problems, which need to be solved by KM. Came across this interesting paper about Social Computing at Intel ... and this talks about something on similar lines.

Any thoughts? I am trying to refine this idea, looking forward to inputs from you.

Social Computing ... Concern?

A lot has been written about how social computing, and some of the web 2.0 tools have changed the entire paradigm of content creation, and how today, anyone, in any part of the organization can create content, and discuss things with anyone else, and contribute ideas, and so on. One of the applications of this is what is termed as crowdsourcing.

There is a question which comes, though. And this is probably something which is not too well discussed. The scenario i am talking about is within the organization, and it is in this context that this scenario comes up ... the thing is that today, organizations are using social computing tools for getting people to connect with each, and in the process, the organization can listen in, and identify topics, thoughts, ideas, which could create value for the organization. However, and this is what we probably are not discussing ... when people are writing their thoughts (lets say a blog), they have a specific set of things which are their priority, which probably align with their performance appraisal criteria. What does this mean? This means that if you are trying to crowdsource ideas, for example, the ideas, or thoughts that you would come up with would be closely aligned to the interests of the people participating in this sourcing activity. To this extent, this implies that, at the end of this kind of process, some form of evaluation, whether by a set of people or by a community, is something which may be quite important before these can be taken forward. This is not just the idea of getting approval for specific ideas, for example, but rather, of sieving the ideas that do come up in this activity, and identifying the interests which those ideas serve, if at all, and then, build on those ideas keeping this in mind.

Is this something which you think should be discussed on a broader level?

KM Today ...

Nancy Dixon has written a very interesting, three-part series on the journey KM has been through till now, and the direction she thinks it is taking. Part 1 refers to Leveraging Explicit Knowledge (all those document repositories), part 2 refers to Leveraring Experiential Knowledge (tacit knowledge?), while part 3 refers to Leveraging Collective Knowledge.

Part 1 is something most of us would be comfortable with, and probably define as the cornerstone of any KM initiative. Part 2, on the other hand, is probably where a lot of us are now. This is the place where the idea that expertise is not necessarily focused with a few people, but rather, everyone has a certain level of expertise on specific things, and an organization can benefit by surfacing this. This can be seen in the idea of blogs, wikis, social networks, and so on. As Nancy says, this difference is like the difference between a warehouse, and a network. I put the difference as being one between a reservoir of water, and a stream.

The part where Nancy talks about leveraging collective knowledge is illuminating. First of all, it is quite a tricky thing to try and define collective knowledge. I agree with Nancy that this cannot be the way it has been ... a summation of all knowledge available. Rather, collective knowledge must be about the creation of new knowledge from existing components. As i have written before, i think new knowledge is created at the intersection of existing knowledge. So what are we talking about with collective knowledge? An important aspect here is to get these different knowledge "sets" together, so that the intersection could be leveraged to generate new knowledge. What gets generated could be quite different from any of the sources from which it got created, and this is where the power of collective knowledge is.

The example i would like to give for the value of collective knowledge is that it is similar to the way colours can be combined to create different colours. Like, how, yellow and blue can be combined to create white. In this example, the result of the combination of the components gives us something which is different from either of them, and yet, contains the inherent characteristics of those. Why is this valuable? In the business scenario of today, where the dynamics of the world of business are such that most of the variables keep changing on a regular basis, an organization cannot simply look at existing knowledge to manage the business. Existing knowledge cannot be totally relied upon to solve problems which the organization probably hasnt faced before. In other words, continually changing problems need continually changing solutions. Question is, why do we assume that the tools of leveraging experiential knowledge, tools which the web 2.0 toolkit has brought, like blogs, networks, may not work in this direction? Actually, thats not what we are assuming. The network is going to continue to be vital to the surfacing of existing knowledge, as well as to the creation of new knowledge. As will blogs, wikis, and the web 2.0 toolkit. Having said that, however, we need components which can bring the thoughts which emerge using some of these tools together, in a way that their direction can be merged to build a direction for creating new knowledge. For example, as i have written before, tools which can help us search for opinions rather than keywords.

Another aspect which comes out of the line of thought, is that rather than being facilitators, going forward, KM has to be more active in terms of achieving business goals. Today, most organizations look at KM as the facilitator for knowledge sharing in the organization, while what Nancy talks about is KM as a tool which can be leveraged to achieve specific business objectives, and solve specific business problems, rather than a facilitator, maybe passive, as a lot of organizations seem to think.

Would like to have a discussion about what you think the nature of collective knowledge should be. Do write back, never know, it could create something something.

Positive ...

You must have read a wonderful book The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. Yes, i can hear you saying the book came so long back, that by now, it has also spawned a whole new genre of literature. Skeptics refer to this as feel-good literature. But those who know better ... Well, this post is describing their views. Or at least, the views of someone who believes that this is more than merely feel-good.


Ok, so what am i writing about? Nothing much ... Just a perspective on the law of attraction Rhonda Byrne talks about. It is said that matter is an illusion. That matter is basically energy. Relativity, and Quantum ... These are the two ideas which have influenced this world view. Relativity has established the equivalence of mass and energy, describing how much energy is locked up in mass. Quantum has established that 90% of you and me is empty space. So much of something ''solid'' is actually empty. These are ideas which, if we evaluate them, are quite radical, even though they have been around for almost a century. That there are huge holes in the body structures of people ... Or the holes in the chair you are sitting on ... Unbelievable? Well, we might as well believe it.

Now, if matter be a manifestation of energy, it stands to reason that the manifestations of matter, the things people own, the amount of money they have, the circumstances they see in their lives are a manifestation of energy. This is mathematical ... If B can be derived from A, and C can be derived from B, the B can also be derived from A.

Once we think this sounds logical, the question this arises is where does this energy come from. And this is something people don't understand. Out thoughts have energy associated with them. How, you may ask. Have you ever been around someone who whines and complains all the time? Have you spent an hour with someone like that, and come away from there feeling elevated? Or been arround someone bouncy and positive, and come away feeling low? I wouldn't think so. Have you ever paused to wonder why this is so? If you read The Secret, you would be able to understand. So let me not try to explain that.

Suffice it to say ... I learnt something ... Something simple, and yet profound ...

Run towards the positive things, and you will find yourself going away from the negative things.

Let me explain ... Lot of people spend a lot of time trying to stay away from thing they don't like. I would admit that i have been one of them, though this is something i am changing. But what would you rather have them do? It's simple to describe, but not so to do. Rather than running away from the negative things, if only people could focus on the positive things, everything would be so much better.

As Swami Kriyananda says in Raj Yoga, that energy withheld from one channel, must find another channel down which it can flow. And that's the point i am trying to make. That if we think of running away from negative things, that doesn't necessarily mean we are running towards positive things. There are two different channels, and we need to ensure that we redirct our energies from the negative channel, to the positive channel. And the disused negative channel shall wither away for want of use.

Conversations, Networks, Measurement

This is a question i have been thinking about for some time. The question of ROI ... and, how this impacts the way we look at KM. The question is simply this ... how does one measure the impact of KM initiatives on the financial health of the organization. This question can be answered depending on how you understand the question. Simply put, anything that has a financial impact, has an impact either on the revenues, or on the cost, whether directly or indirectly. Suresh Nair posted a commend over at the post where he refers to the whole discussion from the perspective of need. Do we need something? If yes, and it would have an impact on the performance of the organization, go for it. But then, another aspect to look for is, whether it is worth it, if you go for it. And that is probably the trickier question to answer. How does the CFO decide that its worth it investing in a Social Networking tool, for example.

This question can be looked at in two parts. One, content, and other, collaboration. Lets look at content first. This is a little simpler to address. To begin with, if you have a document, you could always look at the document, and look at how much effort this document would save. So, for example, if a document reduces rework, or reduces cyclc-time by, say, 10%, thats 10% reduction in cost for that particular process. Its a different matter that this kind of determination is by itself not something which is completely accurate, but if you get the opinion of enough people, you could come up with a number which is reasonably accurate, at least in theory.

This brings us to the second point about conversations. And this is where it gets tricky. How do you measure the impact of conversations? Here, lets look at it in two parts. One, when taking a decision to invest in a tool to enable conversation, how does the organization even know how, and in what form conversations are actually going to happen? There is probably no way to determine this, given one of the key factors is the adoption rate, and even once you move past that, the nature of the conversation, according to the basic paradigm, is something you cannot regulate. The other aspect, if you already have such a platform, is how to actually determine what value conversations are adding. This is where it seems the paradigm of ROI faces some resistance.

There was a recent post by John Husband about assessing productivity, where he describes some of the aspects of networks, and hence, conversations, which make measuring them tricky. To quote:

• They multiply rapidly because the value of a network increases exponentially with each additional connection.

• They become faster and faster because the denser the interconnections, the faster the cycle time.
• They subvert (unnecessary) hierarchy because previously scarce resources such as information are available to all.
• Network interactions yield volatile results because echo effects amplify signals.
• Networks connect with other networks to form complex adaptive systems whose outcomes are inherently unpredictable.

The interesting to see from these is that networks can open up ways of working which are new, which we havent yet seen in organizations. For example, the idea of bypassing hierarchies. This is something which is enabled by the network. Does this lead to quicker decision making? Probably, it does. What is the financial impact of quicker decision making? We dont know. Can this be measured in the context of specific decisions? I think so. An organization i was interacting with a few years ago, had a servicing scenario, where the service engineer, if facing a problem which he could not solve, would travel back to the office, consult his manager, who would tell him the solution to the problem, and then he would go back to the customer site, check if the spares required for solving the problem are there or not, and if not there, would come back to the office, order the spares, and when they are available, repair the product. With handheld devices, the engineer could interact directly with their counterparts across the country, and quickly get a solution, either through a Knowledgde Base, or through interactions with service engineers, and reduce the time taken to repair. At the same time, if the spares werent available, the engineer could broadcast a request for spares to other engineers who could provide them if they had stock which they didnt require. There is value in these conversations.

But, these are specific examples, and on the whole, it is not so simple to determine this kind of value from conversations, or from networks. But can at least define scenarios in which conversations can create value, in a specific context? As i have written before, measurements or possible improvements make sense more in a specific context, rather than being broad-based. And, if you can take this to the context of the business process, you can at least begin to understand the applicability. And, within this context, it is rather easy to identify how conversations could create value. Not that this exercise is feasible, especially if you try to do this across the organization, but it at least illustrates the value of conversations in the context of the organization.

Another thing that John mentions:

Continuous flows of information are the raw material of an organization’s value creation and overall performance.

This is the idea on which the concept of ERP was based, too. Of making the relevant information available to the relevant people, so they could take effective decisions, and processes could be streamlined. Only thing, ERPs focus on transaction processing, where data is made available across organization silos or departments, while we are talking about ideas and experiences being made available in a similar manner. It is a little easier to quantify the impact of data sharing (production planning cycle time reduced by 20%).

To take an example, i am having a conversation with Nirmala about something which we realized we were both thinking about. The whole interaction was sparked by a comment on twitter (and also on facebook), and brought out a conversation which could lead to ideas coming out of it. These ideas could have some form of value. Even so, it would be impossible to quantify this to begin with. And even then, if it is a new idea, then its easier to quantify the value, while if its just sharing of ideas, making people more effective in their work, then it is tricky to measure this, too. Add to this, that if nothing comes out of this idea, i would have at least learnt something, which again is very difficult to quantify.

Any thoughts, please feel free to comment.

Innovation ... Asia Or America ...

Interesting article over at McKinsey ... about whether Asis, or America will lead innovation in the 21st century. There has been a lot written about the 21st century being the Asian century, and so on ... but, taking this debate in perspective, there are some interesting ideas that come out of it.

To begin with, innovation has always happened, even when management thinkers werent looking for it. I feel the way Asia and America look at innovation is quite different. And, there are a number of reasons for this.

The most important aspect of innovation in Asia, however, is that the contours of Asia, in terms of society, economics, politics and trade, are very different from that of America. While much has been written about the market mechanisms of America, at the micro level, Asia has thriving markets. Its just that the idea of the market is quite different in Asia and in America. This is something i have blogged about before ... and this idea makes a bit of a difference. First of all, things in Asia are not as organized, or as large-scale as in America. Neither are markets, nor is entrepreneurship. Rather, Asia has found these things largely at the micro level.

Another aspect we need to understand, which, as Iqbal points out is that in Asia, resources are scarce. Actually, not really scarce, but given the population, they seem to be scarce. And, scarce resources lead to a scenario where innovation can be the means for survival, not necessarily improvement. Let us look at some examples ...

The first example that comes to mind ... Grameen Bank ... an innovation that by itself has redefined banking for a large number of people. Microfinance as a concept has taken root in Asia ... India, too, is doing remarkably in this respect. Other examples come to mind, too ... the Simputer, for example.

As you can see, none of these are the big-ticket innovations. Rather, these are smaller in nature, but have immense impact. The important thing to udnerstand is, that in Asia, the potential for a small, simple innovation to touch lives is massive, given that it is so much easier for simple innovations to reach out to people, and to reach out to a large number of people, which makes the reach, and the impact these innovations can have huge.

So, what am i trying to say? Simple ... That the way innovation is seen in Asia (or, at least in India), is very different from the way it is seen in America, and the impact of these two perspectives on innovation, and the innovation process is large, which means that the path to innovation for these two different parts of the world could be different from each other.

Function Or Tool ...

I had posted a poll at blog ... asking what you think most describes KM. Or, at least, the way we see KM today. The question comes from a thought about whether KM is becoming a hygiene criterion? I dont think so, but wanted to get opinion. Why i dont think this is because of two reasons. One, there is plenty to do in organizations to take KM to a level where it can deliver on its potential, and two, the changes that KM is seeing, with the evolution of technology, and the evolution of organizational concepts arount it, means that KM as a discipline itself is evolving into something which is creating even greater potential for creating value for organizations. For example, the power of conversations is something which is now being understood outside the organizational context, and this is something which managers are beginning to realize, too, as being applicable to within the organizational context, too.

The question i had asked was what you feel KM is ... whether a tool, or a function, or something else. There were 14 votes (ok, not too many), out of which 12 people thought that KM is a function. What this implies is that we feel that KM is not just a set of tools which can be used to solve specific business problems, but rather, a discipline or function by itself, which forms a part of the strategic framework of the organization.

To begin with, KM as an idea doesnt lend itself well to point intervention ... something i have written about ... rather, KM requires a continuum of activities, which can build up the environment for value-add. This is essentially because KM is basically about people, and so, cant be just used as a tool which is used to solve a particular problem, and kept back to the toolkit. Another is that KM, the idea of harnessing knowledge for solving problems, developing products, creating and sustaining excellence, or for a large number of other things, has to align with the strategic imperatives of the organization. What this implies is that there must be more understanding of how KM needs to align with business objectives, and to this extent, there must be greater connections between KM and the business functions.

This is a question i had blogged about earlier ... and the response i am getting is quite different from what i was asking then. There is also the point to see that KM by itself is not an end in itself, and so, rather than being an output in itself, it is the facilitator for creating certain outputs. And what follows is that since KM is the facilitator, there must be some level of blending which KM has with other functions in the organization, which it is enabling. This overlap is actually a good thing, because this ensures that KM is indeed blended with the business functions, ensuring that the objectives of KM and the organizations are aligned.

Keeping Knowledge-Sharing Simple

This is a topic which keeps coming up from time to time ... i have blogged about this, and recently, there was an interesting post by Andrew Gent about this. There idea is simple ... its about keeping the entire gamut of knowledge-sharing activities simple. My friend, Sujit Sahu, has an interesting phrase for this ... Sarudemo Wakaru ... which, i am told, means make it so simple that even monkeys should understand it. Now, this is not to build any comparisons whatsoever, so if you are thinking something, that is purely a product of your mind. But this does make a point.

The idea, again, is to make knowledge-sharing a part of day-to-day work for people, rather than having it as a separate set of activities that they need to do. Because, it these are to be separate activities, then people tend to treat them as line items on a check-list, and while it may get done, you are probably not getting the most out of it.

One way of doing this is to make knowledge-sharing a part of the business processes of an organization. Now, this entails a number of things. To begin with, it requires some platform which enables this. Given that in most organizations, business processes are carried out on some technology platform, the idea here could be to blend the KM platform into this platform itself. While this may be feasible from the technology perspective, this doesnt seem to be so simple to do. Another thing, which is probably more important, is to actually get people to do it. And that, to my understanding, is going to be the challenge that it is today.

Coming to the other aspect of the complexity of knowledge-sharing, the idea of taxonomy comes in. Taxonomy, as we know, is meant to classify information, so that it is easy to find. The question that probably needs to be answered here is how much taxonomy is too much? And to what extent can we rely on search as an alternative to taxonomy? Something i have blogged about. However, this becomes simpler, for example, if we look at the paradigm of blogs, for instance. Here, tags suffice to describe the content of the conversation. Or, if we look at social networking, the network itself could be the source for information, as i have blogged about. So, there is taxonomy, search, and networks (or shall we say conversations) which could be combined to build a mechanism which is simpler, in a way that it enables people to discover knowledge more easily.

Stream Computing ...

Even before the cloud had settled on the computing scenario, the stream is flowing. One wonders ... is this being back to nature? While earlier there was grid computing, now its cloud, followed by streams ...

I came across this interesting post by Swathi Dharshana Naidu about Stream Computing ... You could actually get details here, and if you are technologically challenged, you could read this. One thing i liked about Swathi's blog is that she explains this quite simply.

What i could gather from this is that stream computing picks up large streams of data, and is able to analyze and correlate this. The question that this brings up is ... can this concept be used for making sense of the blogosphere? Given, that the blogosphere usually contains voices which usually dont agree with each other, and that there is a lot of content which is getting generated out there, could this technology not be used for analyzig, for example, the ideas that are coming out of twitter, or from your facebook feeds? I know, overkill, but if you take twitter, and combine it with an organization the size of, say IBM, or GE, certainly there could be large chunks of data that would be generated. And, something to make sense of this ...

The idea that i am basically talking about here is that as more and more opinions are coming online, in the form of blogs, tweets, social networks, there must be a way for making sense of these. You will see that the sense sort of emerges on its own in few scenarios, but in others, this is not necessarily so. And, if you look at this in the organizational context, with organizations more and more understanding that value is to be generated from conversations, the sense emerging from these conversations becomes something which is important. Something i have written about before ... Probably where something like sentiment analysis could play a part? Though, from what i can understand, sentiment analysis is about whether you like something or not. At least thats what i got on wikipedia ... or, if you look at this overview from a site from IBM, though looking through some more search results i got for this from google, you may find this to be interesting reading. This is not to say that search would replace human thinking (at least not as of now), but this could give a better sense of the thoughts which are coming out from different parts of the organization.

Its Cyclical ...

One thing to be said about people in India ... everyone has a theory about everything. Now, this is not to say that this is a localized phenomenon, pnly thing is, this is the only country which i could try to write about. So here goes ... My neighbour probably has an opinion about Salman Khan's neighbour's dog's dietician's hairstyle! Phew!

No, thats not what i am writing about. But, the point is, i have an opinion about something ... a theory, if you may. And thats what i am going to write about. And, the theory is simply this:

Civilizations face cycles of something or the other.

OK, so i havent quite refined this theory, but it is a theory nevertheless. The way i see it, time is cyclical, not a straight time ... if it exists at all. No, lets not get too theoretical here, but without doing so, i cant seem to be able to make a point ... i am writing about a theory after all, remember? And the theory is simply this ... That everything seems to be going round in cycles.

For example, take human civilization. The earliest points of history where we know of human beings as social creatures record the idea of a community ... a tribe, maybe, for want of a better word? Anthropologists may be able to identify some of them in the tribes of today. And what did man do after that? Somehow got into his head the idea that big is beautiful. No, no ... no snickering, please! As a mechanism of protection from rivals, and for hunting/gathering, probably the tribe structure and size was the most suited one. But then, agriculture came, and man settled down, and the village came up as a social unit. This social unit, to cut a long story short, over a period of time, metamorphosed into the kingdom, which later metamorphosed into the nation-state, which now has gone and converted into trading blocks. Along with this, there was also the evolution of human beings from sical creatures into asocial elements. Where the individual began to gain more importance than the collective. I am not saying whats right or wrong (i have no reason to do anything of the kind), the point is, things have changed over a period of time.

Having said that, today, as we must have seen, given the wave of technology, man is moving again towards the mode of community. We are, today, more and more, parts of networks, parts of groups or a circle of some form of connected people ... connected by shared tastes or interests, but whatever be the connection parameter, more and more, people are becoming part of a community, and more and more, we are seeing this community creating value, and driving change in a world which is today seeing this transition with some sort of helplessness. There are people who are convinced that the new things which are coming wont help in any way (though probably they wont say it in so many words), but who understand that there isnt much which can be done about it. Today, new products are created by communities, problems are solved by communities, new markets explored, existing markets expanded by communities ... communities are even driving public opinion ... the world saw that at Iran! To summarize, today, more and more, it is communities ... communities which bring together people, invidivuals who share something (akin to the tribe?), which are coming more and more into their own.