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Grow Your Wiki Consultancy Services.

Stewart Mader, Wiki Evangelist for Confluence, has decided to go his own way and formally do what he does best, and be a full-time wiki consultant.

There are lots of enterprise 2.0 type consultancies, but a non-vendor consulting specifically about wikis must be a first.

Stewart’s blog is an education hub for enterprise wiki adoption.

If you want a quick fix check out Stewart’s series 21 days of wiki adoption, and for the more indepth know-how check out his book WikiPatterns, that also has a accompanying wiki website.

Congratulations to Stewart for being a pioneer in his field, and best wishes for spreading the word.

Roundup : Monittor, Phweet, TwitStamp, Roomatic, TwitHire.

Monitter - a Twitter search engine that shows results from three searches in three columns, it has a widget for your blog sidebar, and also limits searches within a km radius.

Phweet - talk to Twitter friends over the browser or mobile phone without having to reveal phone numbers. Type in your friends username and a message, and a Phweet URL will be sent, it will call you and you await for your friend to join in, you can invite others as well…see more.

TwitStamp - Create a widget of a users latest tweet or create a widget from a particular tweet by entering the ID number in the tweet URL. For more ways to create tweet embed code, see more.

twitstamp.com

Roomatic - a Twitter chatroom, join a room and enter a tweet, it will automatically live in this room. If you don’t include the word of the room in your tweet it will add it for you with a hashtag.
If you are participating via Twitter your tweet will only appear in the room if it has the term in the tweet that the room is based on eg. Gmail.
It’s like you are on a Twitter keyword search results page that auto-refreshes and you can tweet into that page.

TwitHire - a Twitter job board

BONUS
140 Char

Roundup : Tweetake, Twitly, FLOATwitter, ToAnswer, Twit-it.

Tweetake - get an excel file back up of your tweets, followers, people you follow or all of it.

Twitly - organise people you follow in Twitter into group streams, also see TweetParty and more…also checkout the Tweetdeck desktop widget. aks.

FLOATwitter - the icons of the people you follow on Twitter are all floating around, hover over them to see the latest tweet

ToAnswer - Q&A on Twitter…follow both the Twiter users “ToAsk”, “ToAnswer”
eg. @ToAsk Are there any good pizza joints in downtown Los Angeles?
eg. @ToAnswer [question id] No, there’s no such thing as good pizza outside of NYC.
A similar service is AnswerMe.

Twit-it - a bookmarklet to tweet the page you are on, also comes as a footer button for your blog posts…others are TwitThis and TweetMyPage.

BONUS LINK
twictionary

7 seconds to knowledge share.

Gordon from Inforvark has a piece on why KM didn’t work, due to it’s non-humanistic processes:

“Who was the guy we talked to about that thing?” Enterprise 1.0 tried to address this by mandating a central repository and hierarchical classification system. It forced employees to tell some computer system what they knew and how they knew it. Only after a lot of manual data entry would the system be able to tell them something in return.

This approach failed because knowledge workers couldn’t be bothered. There was too much up-front work to make the search results useful. Without useful search results, nobody wanted to use the system. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem. Instead, knowledge workers would just ask someone who knew rather than working with a difficult computer and move on. You simply can’t turn your workforce into programmers, historians or archivists. There’s work to be done.”

The Diving Board blog in on the same plane:

“As we all know, collecting knowledge (if it happens at all) usually involves a person or organization monitoring knowledge as it is created, and then capturing and categorizing it after the fact. This could either be the knowledge worker as they create it or someone else charged with this mission. This process is both inefficient and inherently flawed. Typically, the expert or the users themselves know what the best knowledge is, not some third party who is one step removed from the actual work. However, the experts and users lack the tools, time and incentive to carry out this critical task.”

I’ve also got a quote along the same lines from Andrew Gent in an earlier blog post.

And this is what my posts, Adapting to change with enterprise 2.0, Why km 1.0 failed in a nutshell, KM : Round 2.0, and Conversations, Connections and Context are all about.

Gordon then goes on to ponder whether enterprise 2.0 will fix this. His idea of a contribution engine is, “a tool that automatically captures an employee’s output, indexes it for later retrieval, and shares it with others in the group”

I think we need to define 2 types of knowledge sharing

1. knowledge sharing can take place as it happens as a result of doing work (capturing information as it happens)
eg. making your work visible on a wiki, using a forum to get answers, using a blog for directed communications
- others get the benefit of your participation
- you are sharing by default of doing your work

2. you may discover something, have some insight, have an experience…but then you have to choose whether you will let others know
eg. found a solution to a problem you were having, and if you share it others may benefit

In a past post I have covered that the difference here is In-the-flow (Directed) vs Above-the-flow (Volunteered)

So perhaps Gordon is talking about this second aspect (Above-the-flow), as I believe an In-the-flow approach is submitting to the “contribution engine” as it’s happening…he says:

“When I was working in ECM, I used to joke about the “seven-second window.” That’s the period of time between a user finishing a piece of work and moving on to the next task. That window is the length of time users will devote to figuring out where to put content and how to share it. Do I send an email? What folder on the share drive do I use? If you can’t capture the necessary metadata within that seven seconds of “Hmmm. Where should I put this?” then you lose. The system won’t work. People are too busy.”

At work our support team use a support database where users log calls. You can see the progress trail of any given call, and the final solution…then you close the call, and it goes into the ether.

You may have closed a call before any other support worker knew it even existed. Being based in Perth, I only choose to look at calls in my location anyway, so I don’t see the calls from around the world.

At the moment if the call we just closed is unique we add it to our group blog….this is our “seven seconds”.

But this doesn’t always happen.

So an ultimate contribution engine would be if our written solution in the support database posted to the blog as we hit the close call button.

I really think blogs and the like need to be features of existing products.
(You would think our document management system would have an item comment stream (like Google Docs), instead for every document we have chosen to have a forum topic. This is one step better than using email, but the conversation is still separated from the actual document).

Blur the line of above and in the flow

The other day at a staff meeting our new Quality guy spoke about his new role and how his focus is on working with other teams to ensure workers adhere to processes, procedures, culture of working, etc…and that he is writing a plan and report.

If he wrote this report in a wiki, others with permissions, especially cross-unit leads could eavesdrop on this progress, and add insight that he doesn’t know about, because he cannot possibly know the politics, norms, and domestics of each business unit.

NOTE: Please don’t say a survey…the idea of KM 2.0 is no extra effort to share and mingle, it happens as part of doing work.

This report, I assume, would take months to write, why not blog about; progress, feedback, ideas, musings, snippets to showcase, as you go along. By doing this others are in the loop, and they may leave comments to give you ideas and answers. Especially for this type of report, other leads could leave comments on blog posts, or even a dedicated wikipage, on the blockages they have with their team using current procedures, etc..

I bet when the report is finished it would be more relevant, and not just another report about you must work like this for the sake of quality
Instead, the writing of the report has incorporated the existing attitudes, which has helped shape it, now the procedures and processes may work as we are accomodating for the reality of the culture of work.

In fact it would be more true to “quality” if the report was more realistic in its research, being flexible to how people naturally work rather than rigid…in fact it may be realised that the proceses and procedures themselves are the problem as they are not in tune with human behaviour.

Why do I think this blurs the line?

Using a blog to share your insights and musings along the way is “Above-the-flow”, but using the same blog for progress updates and communications could be “In-the-flow” (as you would use email for this anyway).
Whichever method it increases a chance for others to contribute their know how as comments. In a nutshell working in a visible way may encourage more “Above-the-flow” participation.

Using a wiki to draft your document is “In-the-flow” (I don’t really like the descriptor “knowledge sharing” here as it’s just doing work). The benefit of doing this in a visible way, is others can see your progress without you having to update them, and they can add value using the comments. So what is happening, depending on the nature of their comment, is they may be choosing to share some “Above-the-flow” (personal know-how) to your wiki.

The idea is that an “In-the-flow” approach using participative tools, will encourage “Above-the-flow” sharing. You would hope in the long run that people would not only share know-how in a reactionary way, like using comments, but would also initiate original content using blog posts, wiki pages, etc…

We know comments is where the conversation is, and this is where all the know-how exchanges happen, as people share what they know and they discuss to clarify, etc… The object is dynamic, perpetual, and as smart as a crowd.
The existence of comments itself is our first step in an “Above-the-flow” culture, as they are less effort than initiating original content, and they almost always share opinion…it’s an effective way to get people in the swing of working open (transparent) and socially.

Anyway…

The premise is to capture thoughts and interactions as they happen, email is good but closed, and physical conversations have all the know-how, but can only be documented after the fact (which loses all its richness). So the idea is to complement the offline world with online social tools that mimic how we work offline, but have the benefit of capturing (documenting) as we interact, and including others in the converation, that don’t have the privilege of being in the same location of a meeting or 1-to1 conversation.

Without blogs and wikis, this would be the approach:
- Meetings, emails, IM, phone, physical conversations.

The problem here is there is no sense of place, if I am a new comer, how do I catch up on the progress of this initiative and the progress of the report.

Meetings are essential, but you can only say so much in a alotted timeframe, social tools allow to extend the meeting discussions in an asynchronous way, and to lots more eyeballs, that is much more open and conversational than email…others not in the meeting may have something valuable to say.

The phone and physical conversations are also essential, but blogs and wikis allow others to interact without having to engage in 1-on-1 conversation.
Sometimes I don’t want to engage in a phone call, I may have an idea and quickly add it as a comment to someone’s blog. I could email my idea, but then this clogs up their inbox, and who do I put in the to: field so lots of people see it. Actually maybe I feel a bit “pushy” and shy disturbing everyone with an email about a flash of insight, so I won’t send it after all. Whereas a blog comment doesn’t feel “pushy” at all, and you have more confidence sharing your ideas as you haven’t pushed them into people faces, instead they choose to “pull” your comment to themselves (you’re not quite sure who is going to see it, but it’s there for all to see).

I could give a quick IM, which isn’t as committed as a phone call, but then that comment is not attached to the object and the receiver has to write it down somewhere so they don’t forget.

To extend this post it’s essential to organically permeate the right culture by creating conditions for knowledge sharing, such as socially connected and unstructured tools with low barriers to entry, trust circles, roles models, senior support, job evaluation, and facilitation.

Related
The context of blogs
KM 2.0 : doing your job or giving back to the organisation
Knowledge and its facilitators

Google Reader friends.

Not long ago I posted about Google Reader Shared Items, and was looking for a way to shop for people’s shared items and manually subscribe to them.
I was hoping when I subscribed to them it would appear in the “Friends’ Shared Items” section, but this isn’t the case, this only happens if they are your Gmail Contacts, you cannot manually subscribe to someone into this folder.

This is still the case, but the latest from the Google Reader blog is that you can now choose who of those Gmail contacts are allowed to see your Shared Items in their “Friends’ Shared Items” section. Even if I do prevent a few people from seeing my Shared Items, they could somehow still find my “Shared Items” webpage and subscribe from there…as I mentioned it would just be a regular feed subscription, they would not be able to organise that feed into their “Friends’ Shared Items” section.

How it happens is you can leave your setting on “Share with all my Chat contacts”, or you can now select “Share with Friends”.
This allows you to select particular people from your chat contacts into a more selective friends list.

If you do select a few people to see your “Shared Items”, they will be sent an email, where they can accept, and offer to share their “Shared Items” with you…at any time either of you can disable each other.

The more exciting news is that you can also add email addresses of people you want to add to your friends list, if they don’t have a Google Account, you will have to wait till they create one, if they do have a Google account, they will immediately be available for selection for your friends list (I guess this means they become a Gmail contact). Actually this isn’t exciting at all, only more convenient, because beforehand all I would have to do from Gmail is give them an invite and they would become one of my contacts, consequently they would then become available as my Google Reader contacts.

Read about it in the help section.

What I don’t get is why does someone have to be a Gmail contact first before I can add them to my friends list, or if I do invite a person and they do register with Gmail, then they automatically become a Gmail contact.

As I said in my previous post I simply want to roam around a Google Reader Social Network and simply add someone as a friend, and they have to friend me back.
Then I have the OK to subscribe to their Shared Items, and it will appear in my “Friends’ Shared Items” section…they can always disable me.
The beauty of this is we could also check out each others subscription pane’s…feed shopping.

Now that we have friended each other we could attack another issue in my previous post, and that is if I want to share an item with a particular friend instead of clicking the email footer button I could click a share with friend button, and select some friends I want to send this item to…and it would land in their Google Reader inbox.

I’m thinking of Google Reader looking like Facebook, but when I think of it like this maybe it does make sense to only have one friends list across all Google products. In a Google Reader social network the private message feature would be Gmail, and the chat section would be Gtalk….can’t remember if you can organise your contacts into friends lists.

When I think of it making a Google Reader friends list from my Gmail contacts, is similar to just making a selective contact list in Gmail and then pushing that to appear in Google Reader, only it’s more convenient to do it from within Google Reader.

I wonder if we could make multiple friends lists.

At the moment, as explained in my previous post, the manual way is to create a tag, and make that tag page public, and tell your friends about it so they can subscribe to that page as a regular Google Reader subscription (or they could subscribe in any RSS Reader, it doesn’t matter). Whenever you add an item to that tag, your friends that are subscribed to it will see the new content.

Google Reader group Shared Items webpages.

It seems some special type of Google Reader users are allowed to list their subscriptions or a selected type of reading list (or blogroll) on their “Shared Items” webpage.

Compare my “Shared Items” webpage to Barack Obama.

Now check out this promo page where you can choose from a list of Google Reader Users “Shared Items” webpages.

This is coming into the newsmastering territory, because we also get merged streams of “Shared Items” pages.

For example on this promo page it offers a link to the “Shared Items” webpages of both Barack Obama and John McCain, but it also shows a merged stream of content from both these pages, and a merged feed.
Also on this promo page are links to the “Shared Items” webpages of several journalists, and it also shows a merged stream of content from all these journalists, and a merged feed.

Both of these merged streams have webpages of their own, here’s Barack Obama and John McCain, and here’s the journalists.

So imagine…

…making your own “Shared Items” group pages, I think this will be available soon.

Get ten of your friends and create a group “Shared Items” webpage…list a link to each person’s “Shared Items” webpage, and display a mixed stream of content from all ten “Shared Items” webpages, and to be able to subscribe to one spliced feed from all these pages.

I wonder if it would delete duplicates, and if the duplicate had a “note” it would also appear on the original item.
It would also be good to click on a person from the list and limit the stream to just their “Shared Items”, rather than only having the option to launch to a new window.

Actually this kind of reminds me of a FriendFeed Room, but these rooms don’t just re-syndicate content, you can also manually post right into the page, and on top of that also have discussions.

I also wonder whether the stream will do the FriendFeed type of thing or TechMeme where you can have a popular filter.

Links for 2008-08-20 [del.icio.us].

140 characters to knowledge share.

In regards to a support team or customer service I’m thinking a micro-blogging network (like Twitter) behind the firewall is a good idea. Some options are ReVou, SocialCast, and other Open Source offerings.

Using wikis and blogs are a great idea for support staff to inform each other of findings, experiences, workarounds, solutions as they happen.
This is called social learning where we learn from each other, which is essential as whoever wrote the procedures is not going to know the context of every unique situation upfront (the procedures may sometimes be a “dead-end”, and errors occur anyway), so leveraging user captured informal nuggets in blogs and wikis enables you to go “through the wall”.

But from my experience, not everyone could be bothered sharing, or has time before they move onto their next task.

The idea is we use blogs and wikis rather than an email list, but what about those people who didn’t even share using the email list.

There are many times when colleagues at work discover something in our office, but are too busy to blog about it, this is when micro-blogs comes into the picture.
People may find blog posting takes up too much time because they treat it as formal publishing, and fair enough (I covered this in my KM 2.0 Culture post). We have tried to overcome this with posting to a blog by email, making it feel very informal, now you can “flick a blog post”, just like you “flick an email”.

Anyway I feel that people will indeed post to a micro-blog as the content is the length of an SMS, ie. a max of 140 characters. This is not hard at all, and the format encourages a type of informalness.
Another low barrier is posting via email or some sort of app that’s real easy to get to and post, perhaps via the browser or a desktop widget. Actually micro-blog posting via IM feels right, it feels more casual and something people may be inclined to do, unlike a blog they are not fearing that lot’s of people will see their published post, in fact micro-blog streams fall off the radar quite quickly.

This is not a mirror replacement for typical blog content, using micro-blogs we also tend to share stuff we wouldn’t blog, more akin to IM…so this makes blogs and micro-blogs (or presence networks) very complementary.

eg. word 2003 is giving me grief with editing documents in our DMS…arghh
eg. server 3 is down, hmmm
eg.@colleagueA what dates will you be away again?
eg. wondering why personA can’t create a project
eg. it seems we don’t communicate enough to groupA, they need to be in the loop
eg. does anyone know where pluginA lives?
eg. hmm, we need a new drop down menu reason for supporting CoP issues in our database
eg. @colleagueB how did you go with getting that a user an external login?

None of the above examples suit a regular blog post, some resemble quick emails and IM, but some don’t even suit IM eg. word 2003 is giving me grief with editing documents in our DMS…arghh
- this is not a blog post, it’s more what you are experiencing now, but still you are publishing like a blog post
- it’s not email or IM as you are not directing this at anyone, you are just thinking out loud

Some of the other examples could be an email or IM, but micro-blogging allows more of an open conversation, anyone listening could jump in.

Essentially micro-blogs are very effortless and more chatty and I feel the format and social experience we have will lend it to being used more, I elaborated on this in another post:

“…I think Twitter is more prone, easier, less commited than blogs to express tacit know-how, and to offer help which also shares tacit know-how. Actually conversation is where it’s at, and an internal Twitter marketed the right way will be the optimal example of what we want out of KM 2.0 (conversation exchange).”

I expressed this in my Tumblr a little while ago:

“Twitters value contribution to the knowledge flow-spontaneous, unpolished, work in progress, thinking out loud-lends itself to this type or quality of participation due to its brief, immediate, and intimate publishing format…let’s hope internal blogs generate the same calibre of tacit value without being hindered by their format.””

Links for 2008-08-21 [del.icio.us].

A Facilitators responsibility in forums.

It’s really important to get closure on communications and discussions when they are done out in the open.

Email

- Someone emails a question
- A person phones you with a solution

What you have here is an unanswered email, as the answer was via the phone

But who cares, you know the answer, and on-one else can see that email

Forum

This scenario changes when the interaction is out in the open

- Someone posts a forum topic
- A person phones you with a solution

What you have here is an unanswered forum topic, as the answer was via the phone

A who cares approach is unwise

- others may be interested in an answer
- they may think these forums don’t work every time as there are lots of unanswered topics
- someone searching the forum in the future will see a topic without an answer when indeed an answer did result, but they weren’t physically there to be part of it.

My word of good practice is always answer that forum topic if an answer exists
- even if all members of the forum know the answer as it was discussed in a meeting, still document an answer, so future people will also be informed (and also to remind ourselves, as we are often forgetful)

The forum or community Facilitator can convey this recommended behaviour to members, but in the end it’s up to them to pick up the pieces or reinforce the correct behaviour

What if no-one answers the forum topic?

Well, so be it. But it’s also good practice if the Facilitator tries to source an answer for their member, or at least contact them individually to let them know they are not being ignored.
- this is more for new communities as people are finding their feet…and wouldn’t be practical for communities with large numbers

What about forum topics that are off-topic?

Thankfully in the forums we use we can move a forum topic (with its replies) to the correct forum

What about forum replies that are off-topic?

Now this is something we can’t do anything about.
Often our forum topics are long threads and people do their best to rename the subject line when the topic veers off a little, but sometimes a reply becomes so off topic that I would like to move it or rather make it into a new topic.
That is, I would like the ability to convert a reply into a topic

In a past post I wrote about this as the gardening aspects of a Facilitators role.

Distilling Conversations

Another gardening task is to take the cream of the conversations and reference them elsewhere, otherwise they just fall off the radar, and you have to rely on search. I posted about this as distilling conversations, which kind of reminds me of those review type blog posts. Some might think that structuring this information in a MSWord document or a wiki, may lose it’s value or become too narrow and focused, but I think it’s important that you include the forum URL’s, the raw conversations that led to this document.

Links for 2008-08-24 [del.icio.us].

Social tools are not immune to being used the wrong way.

In a few posts I have talked about a support team using blogs (micro-blogs), forums, and wikis to get work done.

In regards to blogs the idea is to that we have an unstructured, low barrier to entry type tool to quickly publish fragments about experiences, tips, solutions, ideas…in fact we can publish by email, so this blends in with current rountines.
BTW - this isn’t just altruistic, I often do it as a way to remember what I know, but at least I’m keeping notes in the open for all to see.

Can blogs be harmful? I think it’s how you use them.

I think it’s of absolute importance that people understand that blogs are based on a currency format, they are similar to a newspaper or a journal.
A blog entry that was true last month may no longer be true anymore or correct, or there may be a better way to do the same thing.

So even though a blog is technically a database, I feel that it shouldn’t be a solutions database, especially when it’s a massive group blog.

eg.
POST 1
2 months ago someone may of posted about a feature in the software that has an error with editing a file
- someone may leave a comment saying we are working on it, and here is a workaround

POST 2
2 months later what could happen is that someone else (different to the person who created the comment) may post that the problem with editing will be fixed in the next release and we won’t be getting this till next year. Plus we have made some patches to our software and the workaround that people were using to edit files no longer works

Now someone searching a blog may come across the first post, try the workaround and it fails.

What should of happened?

The person who made post 2 should have also left a comment on Post 1.
- but 2 months have past, are they going to remember, especially when they didn’t participate in the first post

Or perhaps the person searching could of browsed the tag “edit”, and would’ve found the most recent post about “editing”
- this wouldn’t be viable if 20 posts since then have been made about “editing”
- plus we have to assume the authors are using the correct tags

What would be good practice is that the URL of Post 2, be included in Post 1, this way Post 1 will have a trackback link, that takes you to the new post.
- even better, is something I have posted called “Sparklines” which rather than add a trackback link to Post 1, will automatically edit Post 1 and put the trackback link in the post itself.

But regardless of all this, we are relying on people to follow all these subtle rules.

The point I’m trying to make is, just because blog content is visible, it doesn’t mean it’s all correct, it’s not a website that is re-edited and updated, rather it’s a blog, where you write a new post as an update…old posts may be incorrect as time goes on.

Another example…

I made a blog post describing a particular functionality of a piece of software.

We now have a new release of this software and this month old blog post is now outdated.

What’s good practice?

I need to make a new post about how this feature now works.
Then re-edit the old post to point to the new post or a leave comment on the old post
- but what happens 5 releases later, will I have to update each past post?

What are your views?

Do we have to retro edit or comment on all blog posts to keep things neat and tidy?

Wikis for solutions

I’m much more inclined to use a wiki for a solution database, as the concept is more about going back to “the entry” and re-editing it.

In this instance the blog post is not the solution, but the messenger.

eg.
1. This wikipage is solutionA for errorA
2. Write blog postA to tell people about it, include perhaps some casual (personal) and contextual content
- also include the link of the blog post in the wikipage

So far this makes sense, but it has a high process barrier to entry as you have to share twice
- write the wikipage (perhaps via email), then write the blog post (perhaps via email)

A new patch on your software means that solutionA for errorA no longer applies
3. you re-edit the wikipage
4. Write blog postB to tell people about it, include perhaps some casual (personal) and contextual content
- also include the link of the blog post in the wikipage

In this example the wiki is the solution database that gets corrected and updated, where the blog is just the messenger, and old message become out-dated, but that’s OK, because we know the blog is currency based. This doesn’t matter too much anyway because if someone visits blog postA it will still link to the same wikipage, so they will land on the correct solution.

NOTE: it would be good to re-edit blog postA and include a link to blogpostB, or use trackbacks to link them together, or perhaps grouping them with the same tag is enough…either way re-editing blog posts is higher maintenance, or not as common as old posts fall off the radar, and people may be aware they are date-stamped and may be outdated.

A blog is a blog and a wiki is a wiki

The case I’m making is that I don’t think it’s safe or good practice to use a blog as a solutions database, it’s more for sharing current happenings, where posts do not get re-edited, rather a new post is made (just like newspapers).
The blog post is not limited to just pointing to the solution, it can involve some personal context and peripheral information, or workings out (experience) that led to the solution, whereas the wikipage is a more focused formal and official solution.

The scenario comes to mind of someone following what is said in a blog post causing some kind of error or disaster. It’s essential people understand the nature of blog posts, and that they are not official…perhaps a message could be reinforced in the banner, and people can leave comments to clarify before acting on information in a blog post

Whereas a wiki is generally not a newspaper, it’s moreso a book that never goes out of date as it’s pages are continually re-edited.

In saying this it seems, you could always trust the support wiki, and you can trust recent blog posts, but how recent?
Do you trust a blog post 2 weeks old, a week old…who knows that could now be old news.

I think as long as a blog post points to the wikipage solution, then whether you click on an old or new blog post about the same solution you will always land on the correct wikipage.

What about wiki comments?

I suppose an alternative is to subscribe to wiki comments
- if a wikipage is updated, a comment can be left to let everyone know
- in this respect the wiki comments double up as a notifications feature of current happenings (which is what a blog does best)
- it doesn’t make wiki comments a blog, but the comments can be used for a blog-like way of updating people

This post is the reversal perspective on the flexibility and visibility of social tools. That is these tools are so unstructured and flexible that we can use them for unique purposes (as Ross Mayfield says, we, the users, put the complexity into the software).

I don’t think blogs are harmful, but I think they are so unstructured that people may decide to use them for inappropriate purposes. The problem is that it may work at the input stage, but it may not work at the seeking stage. I have demonstrated a scenario above where it’s so easy to post solutions in a blog, but people seeking a solution may find an old entry of that solution…this is not friendly and may have consequences. Instead a wiki is a more official solution as only one page always represents the solution, and even better is combining its use with a blog so we can explain how we came to the solution.

Just consulting a wiki solution page we get a focused error and solution, but reading a companion blog post we get what happened at the time and thought processes involved. This blog post may give away clues or trigger a thought to solving another solution that the wikipage didn’t reveal, as the blog post is more diffuse, not as focused on the endpoint.

Unstructured tools like email have been used for purposes that just don’t stretch, eg chain conversations and announcements, problem being that it’s too closed and messy.

Social tools are not immune to being used the wrong way either.

Links for 2008-08-26 [del.icio.us].

Links for 2008-08-27 [del.icio.us].

ROI for the knowledge worker is ROI for all, and how KM took an ironic approach.

I perpetually point out the difference to the old and new KM in this blog, but I’ve never thought of it in terms of ROI for the knowledge worker. I have only thought of this in terms of the incentive and motiviation for knowledge sharing. When you think of the big picture of the need for a return in knowledge sharing, we can say this is the ROI for the knowledge worker.

My thought are if the ROI for the knowledge worker is high, ie. high reciprocation of value for participating, then in aggregate the enterprise ROI from a social computing ecosystem will be high.

The old KM was not about people, it went for the knowledge as a separate thing, and knowledge as a separate act approach, where the participants really had no return on their contributions, and no self motiviation to want to participate. In essence this process didn’t blend with human nature at all. Plus there is the other end of naturally seeking know-how off people, that’s just it, you were meant to seek it from a database (not people), and what you find, if you do find something relevant is meant to be context objective so it will suit all needs.

Whereas the new KM is not really KM at all (considering the key to KM is sharing what’s in our heads), it’s not a separate act, it’s embedded into our regular routines. In an ecosystem where we are networked to people and we participate as we do our work, as well as the finished product of our work, there is no conscious effort to make sure you are sharing your know-how, it’s just happening from being, just like in the offline world. In the offline world I don’t make sure I’m sharing know-how, it’s just blended into how I am as a person, it comes out when I act and speak whether I like it or not.

Quite simply when my wife is on Facebook, she doesn’t feel that she is being altruistic and sharing know-how, she is just using Facebook, and that’s that. As a result of being connected everyone wins and learns off each other continuously, just like we do in the offline world.

Anyway, this post all started from a great post on the AppGap group blog by Matthew Hodgson. For some of my similar posts see KM round 2.0 and KM 2.0 culture, read on:

“…our misplaced trust that the newly emerging web technology would somehow deliver something that is essentially a people process, because collaboration and knowledge management is about people, not technology. The other failure is in our management practices and a missunderstanding about how people work — that information is somehow a product, a Word document for example, that, like an engine in a car factory, is produced by the end of a hard days work. There’s no return on investment to be had in this paradigm.”

“…it reflects a very Tayloristic view of the world, where efficiency is to be had by motivating workers to behave in more efficient ways, rather than to think smarter. Certainly, you can offer better tools like large intranet repositories with a wealth of information inside, but the synthesis of information into knowledge is a difficult task when the person who created a piece of information, or a similarly empowered individual, is not there to help you know where to look, understand what you find, and then assimilate it.”

“The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.”

Knowledge Worker

The concept of the knowledge worker is that workers have unique (and welcomed) talent that they can apply to their job and beyond, and in the knowledge era this is not only recognised but it’s a requirement in these fast changing conditions, and where a lot of work is becoming specialised…less micro-managing (local experts know best).

This differs from the extreme top-down industrial era (scientifc management) where a worker was seen in a de-humanised role as a cog in a wheel. A person’s job was like a piece of machinery (a replaceable part), they were programmed to do one thing, they didn’t need to bring any of their knoow-how to the table, they were to do as told…the big picture of this is a fetish for efficiency or hedonistic productivity.

With our fast paced, specialised and global workforce the new model is more about “effectiveness”, and people need to go beyond org charts to get work done, favouring a networked ecosystem. The old system doesn’t lend to innovation or invention at all, as it lacks the notion (or doesn’t care) that a worker has expertise or thoughts about and beyond their immediate task at hand.
Each person has become valued not just for their output, but what we can all learn from their input (knowledge creation). Jim McGee says it so well:

“The challenge is that we have been trained and conditioned by the industrial economy to strive for uniformity and to see uniqueness as undesirable variation instead of the essential quality it has become.”

“Our inappropriate habits stem from assumptions about industrial work. With industrial thinking, once you’ve created a new product the goal becomes how to replicate it predictably. You specify the characteristics of the output precisely, lock down the process, or, ideally, do both. That works if you need to manufacture cars or calculate every employee’s pay stub correctly. It doesn’t when the goal is to create the new product. The primary challenge here is to shift focus away from the issue of replication and toward creation. The question becomes “how do we manage to create this?” instead of “how do we create the same thing all over again?””

If knowledge workers take a more bottom-up (and autonomous) approach, and the unique talent and responsibility is given to workers to run some of the business, what happens when they are absent or leave the company?

It was easy in the past, you just replace the cog, whereas now you can’t replace a brain, as brains are unique, and you have to deal (learn) with what that brain has left behind, ie. the momentum, processes, procedures, workarounds…the unique effective style of doing work. I think this is what Jim McGee means by “invisibility”:

“…one unintended consequence has been to make the execution of knowledge work essentially invisible, making it harder to manage and improve such work. Attacking that invisibility opens an important path to making knowledge work manageable and improvable.”

As a result of the knowledge worker concept (or due to this invisibility) there has been a reaction to capture what’s inside their heads, otherwise they are harder to replace, and it’s harder to know the method and thinking behind their output and processes.

If so much reponsibility is placed on workers to run the business all together, we have to know how they went about it once they leave or move position, we have to know how to fill the gap, if we don’t know this (in time) business can start to drop.

Hence the reaction and creation of the notion of knowledge management…well, I think anyway.

And here’s the irony!

We now understand that a person has unique talent and know-how to bring to the business, and we rely on them exercising that know-how…compared to the machine-like view of industrial man (like they were a spare part that could be replaced).

But our original concept of knowledge management was still treating the knowledge worker as if they were a machine…old KM is industrial in it’s process.

To recap:

- Industrial era (people are told what to do and to do it efficiently)
- Knowledge era (we need people to have autonomy, we need their talent to survive and be effective)
- New problem is people that move on leave a gap of how things are done (invisibility), this can be deterimental
- Reaction (knowledge management), treat people like machines, command them to log what they know into the central databank, for the good of the business as a whole. And when they need information the worker is to rub the databank and ask the “km genie” their wish and it will be granted.

So what resulted, I think, is KM as a top-down (mandated) process to a bottom-up knowledge worker…this just ain’t gonna work.

In comes visiblity

In comes social computing, and we now have an even more augmented way for the knowledge worker to network and perform work, spread their talent, learn off others, etc…what an ideal system for the needs of a knowledge worker.

Plus it becomes the new KM, as now people are sharing know-how as a part of doing work, and because there is a return on investment for the individual, in the big picture is an ROI as a whole.

The talent is documented in the open, it is visible. When someone moves on we know how to fill their gap, we don’t have to always ask them (and they wouldn’t be able to remember everything they know anyway), as they have already told us indirectly, we can read their visible workings out of how they did their job as a result of their participation using social computing tools.

The worker gets work done, and the business gets to know their know-how all within the same motion.

Links for 2008-08-28 [del.icio.us].

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