ingoblog: November 2005

November 25, 2005

The tyranny of publishing

Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, together with Don Cohen, started blogging some months ago on Babson Knowledge Blog and their inaugural post contains, among other reasons for blogging:

"there is a lot that doesn’t fit into a research paper format"

"Third, it’s a vehicle for getting some of our ideas into the world at large, without being subject to the tyranny of Harvard Business Review or Sloan Management Review editors."

I havent so far encountered anyone who blamed not being published on the tyranny of the journals. Also the tyranny must have taken over HBR and Sloan as recently as 2003 as Davenport and Prusak had quite a few articles in HBR and quite a few in Sloan as well between 1989 and 2002.

In the latest entry on Babson Knowledge Blog Tom Davenport describes the recent KM World conference:

... it was something of a “dog’s breakfast,” as Larry Prusak would say, in terms of content. There were sessions on intranets and blogging and streaming media and communities of practice—you name it, somebody was presenting on it. I suppose one could go all negative and say that this is evidence of a lack of focus for KM, but I think it’s actually pretty positive. We have an amazingly wide variety of tools today to work with. The key, of course, is to understand what tools correspond to what knowledge problems and issues, and to understand the work that your organization’s knowledge workers perform.

(Found via Jack Vinson and subsequently Steve Matthews)

November 24, 2005

RSS? RSSE? SSE? Yes, Microsoft.

Via Knowledge-at-work I found some interesting stuff on the possible future of RSS on Techcrunch (subtitled "Tracking Web 2.0") .

Microsoft is currently after introducing new standards for RSS, featuring interaction both ways, realtime collaboration and generally commercially more exploitable applications.

I thought of it as quite a leap in terms of information gathering when I first saw FeedDemon and I am looking forward to the next leap, even if it at the courtesy of Microsoft.

BTW Microsoft is doing this under Creative Commons license... I do not understand the full implications of the applicable laws but that certainly looks like a change in attitude or maybe desperation. (see Futurometer Google vs. Microsoft):

It comes as no big surprise that the wordcount of these two companies are so correlated, as they appear in nearly all articles together. Google, the Microsoftkiller or Microsoft taking Google out of business as it did with Netscape et al. Yes, exciting times ahead!

November 23, 2005

A man with a PhD :-)

I always considered the blog title "A man with a PhD - Richard Gayle's Weblog" to be quite funny. Now I am a man with a PhD. Yesterday afternoon my external examiner, Jillian MacBryde (click here for her list of publications) from Strathclyde University congratulated me on having earned my PhD after I had defended my thesis at Cranfield University. I passed with minor corrections and expect to be able to share my final document with interested readers within 6 weeks (minor corrections need to be signed off by the internal examiner, Tim Baines)

I am very grateful for this opportunity, grateful to more people and organisations than I could list here. Annette Leslie described my state after the viva in an email to my supervisor's PhD Group as "bright eyed and bushy tailed". Yes, I had to look up that phrase on urban dictionary, but I didnt find a satisfying answer there. I didnt find one via Google neither but I get the concept now...

My supervisor was Fiona Lettice, who recently moved on from Cranfield to University of East Anglia's School of Management, and my second supervisor was Mike Bourne from Cranfield School of Management. Both of them were great mentors and compagnions on this journey and their engagement and knowledge thoroughly impressed me throughout the programme.

I am a man with a PhD now and I quite like that.

Below a picture from after the viva showing my internal examiner Tim Baines and external examiner Jillian MacBryde, taken of course after the viva was over... (and yes, the white chunk of paper on the left is my thesis, the yellow stickers are post its for discussion points...)

November 17, 2005

90000 hits for "The nonsense of knowledge management"

I found this article by TD Wilson last week while preparing myself for discussions around KM for my viva. Even though the article is from 2002 I think it helps understanding some problematic issues around KM such as hyped up software and consultant's promises.

Wilson basically argues that KM is just another fad and his criticism boils down to one sentence "It can be seen that knowledge is being used as a synonym for information." There is also the term of "Search and replace marketing": Everything that was sold as e.g. information retrieval software prior to say 1999 was afterwards simply rebranded as knowledge management and sold under this term.

"Once upon a time the excellent business research site, http://www.brint.com/, had a large section devoted to information management but, in 1999, if I remember aright, I wanted to locate something I had previously found there and used my hot-link, with no result. Eventually, I found that everything that had previously been located under 'information management' was now identified as 'knowledge management' and brint.com was claiming to be the Web's best site for information on the subject."

Wilson classifies some other concepts as fads, among them the Balanced Scorecard, Benchmarking and CRM, a classification I find difficult to agree on as there are clear benefits coming from these "fads".

So what has changed since 2002? I personally think KM has grown beyond software promises and I have seen real world examples where it has delivered benefits that would have hardly been achievable with a pure information systems approach. The term KM may not be ideal, as Sveiby is quoted by Wilson:

I don't believe knowledge can be managed. Knowledge Management is a poor term, but we are stuck with it, I suppose. "Knowledge Focus" or "Knowledge Creation" (Nonaka) are better terms, because they describe a mindset, which sees knowledge as activity not an object. A knowledge focused approach is a human vision, not a technological one. (sveiby.com)

I think 3 years on from this article it is safe to say KM is not a fad, however it might be limited in applicability across industries. Law firms are certainly among the heavy investors and adopters as are pharmaceutical companies. My impression is that consultancies mainly consult on it and dont have a lot of it themselves (The last time I asked a consultant from one of the large consultancies about the KM "solution" they sell he could not find details about it on his system. (And that was at a KM conference :-)) From an other consultancy I found a statement stating BCG invests quite heavily in KM, which I would certainly like to know more about.

Ron Friedman recently blogged about the future of KM himself using the fad comparison similar to Wilson:

A dozen years ago, TQM and business process re-engineering were the rage.
You rarely hear these terms now, but elements of those disciplines have been
widely adopted. A dozen years from now, perhaps we will no longer talk of KM; it
just may be embedded in other practices and departments, with a scope broader in
some respects and narrower in others than today.

November 9, 2005

Legal IT Innovator of the Year goes to blogging initiative

Tom Baldwin celebrates his Legal IT Innovator of the Year award, received for Sheppard Mullin's blogging initiative.

From the award announcement: "The winner demonstrated a striking piece of lateral thinking by shifting away from standard e-newsletters to the world of Blogging. From an original readership of 10,000, the winner's blogged content has surpassed 1,000,000 hits and averages nearly 10,000 hits per day and consistently appears on the first 5 hits for relevant search terms in Google and Yahoo. The winner of Legal IT Innovator of the Year is Tom Baldwin, Chief Knowledge Officer at Sheppard Mullin Richter Hampton, LLP."

Yes, search engines love blogs, I realised that from analysing the referring websites to my blog as well :-)

According to Tom Baldwin, this is also a good example of successful collaboration with Marketing: "This project really was a classic example of IT and Marketing working together. Our Chief Marketing Officer, Vickie Spang, took this idea and ran with it. Without the collaborative efforts of her group and mine, this project would have never been the success it is."

I think it is impressive how quickly Sheppard Mullin managed to move to public blogging at a time when it was all but clear whether blogging was here to stay. By now I guess this question is answered...

Change in RSS address for this blog !

I have had some issues lately with publishing via the atom feed when using blockquotes and I have therefore set up a new feed using feedburner (Thank you Jill, for drawing my attention to a posting that only arrived with 50% of the content).

The new link to subscribe is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Ingoblawg

November 7, 2005

It is bad practice to try and improve your weaknesses

I re-read "First break all the rules" over the last week. This book (by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman) was recommended to me by one of my PhD supervisors, Mike Bourne and the key message (apart from the Q12 survey itself) is that the best managers select an employee for talent rather than for skills or experience and how they set expectations for him or her by defining the right outcomes rather than the right steps. Most important is how they motivate people by building on each person's unique strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses.

This reminded me of a recent edition of Brand Eins, a German economics magazine , which featured an interview with Fredmund Malik, professor in St. Gallen who also has interesting views on the subject (roughly translated by myself now):

"It is bad practice to try and improve your weaknesses, especially in management. In private life yes, it is alright to tell your kids to work on their weaknesses but not in a working environment. There one improves by recognizing his strengths and using them. And this is where people need feedback as sometimes they don't realize what their strength is."

"There is a correlation between not liking work and doing it badly - but this doesn't work vice versa. Just because you like doing something doesn't mean you are good at it. Being good at something sometimes leads to liking it, but only because you are good at it."

"The solution for this dilemma is observing yourself, looking at what you are good at and you will be better in that than others because it is easier for you."

It just doesnt seem logical to focus on improving petty weaknesses and ignore real talents staff have. If people so not fit to their job that they need to improve weaknesses to end up working on something they are or were not good at, then why are they there in the first place?

November 4, 2005

What is on a blogger's mind

I quite like the step by step thought process on creating a blog on thedefeatists.com:

People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

The world sure needs more of ME.
Maybe I'll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.
No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.
I know - I'll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.
If only there was a description for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.
What? It's called a blog? I'm there!
The blogger's philosophy goes something like this: Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head. The beauty of blogging, as compared to writing a book, is that no editor will be interfering with my random spelling and grammar, my complete disregard for the facts, and my wandering sentences that seem to go on and on and never end so that you feel like you need to take a breath and clear your head before you can even consider making it to the end of the sentence that probably didn't need to be written anyhow.

If that doesn't inspire you to read my blog, I don't know what will.

It certainly did inspire me to keep on reading the defeatists.com blog

Looks like quite a large amount of people are currently thinking "The world sure needs more of ME": The number of blogs on the internet is doubling every five months, according to Technorati and ever since I reentered the blogosphere I have come across the most diverse applications of blogging: Internal blogging seems to be taking off with many types of organisations including law firms, some people organise their social lives using blogs, a hindered journalist publishes what is not published elsewhere, a German woman in Saudi writes a great piece about the life of her and her cat and a student from the uni where I teach has started to use a weblog as an instrument to write about his life and the content of his KM & beyond studies. Their head of faculty, Sebastian Eschenbach told me that on his new MSc course everyone is required to keep a blog as an online diary as part of the course. I quite like that idea, too.

The rise of blogs has certainly changed the way I deal with information:

November 2, 2005

Web 2.0: Trust and critical mass

I finally properly understood the concept behind the term Web 2.0 beyond buzzwords, hyped up statements and the wikipedia explanation starting with "Web 2.0 means different things to different people." Via Weiterbildungsblog I found a very comprehensive presentation on Web 2.0 by George Siemens (published on the connectivism blog in an impressive webcast format), giving an overview on basic technology points and application (blogging, tagging, syndication, etc.) as well as the key concepts one needs to understand.

The two issues I got out of the webcast were around trust and personalisation. A risk for trust is that parts of the knowledge created through collaborative effort simply don't have the quality they would need. A term in relation to this, based on research by Downes and Surowiecki (sorry, I could not find the paper on ProQuest or Google Scholar) is the notion of "Aggregated perspective", explained by George Siemens as "we take our own perspective and our own concept and we throw it in the public pool of other perspectives and understandings and it is the aggregation of all these various opinions that actually results in an accurate image and picture of what is occurring"

If insufficient people provide their concepts or perspectives, the benefit of this exercise is limited. On the Wikipedia page on Web 2.0 a sentence on the top says: "This article may be confusing for some readers, and should be edited to enhance clarity. Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page." This is a result of insufficient people contributing their concepts and perspectives to this specific Wikipedia Web 2.0 page. In a situation like this (or also with any wikipedia entry where there is too much or too controversial information) the reader needs pattern recognition abilities to be able to pick either the relevant information or the most objective parts of it.

What does this mean for law firms? My interpretation is that everyone in legal KM needs to try harder to get lawyers to contribute themselves, not only somehow getting their documents in a know how system. Participation is key and can help in achieving critical mass, ultimately fostering trust. It should not be too hard to show the benefits of combined effort in knowledge creation and dissemination through direct constant feedback loops, but the critical mass among lawyers cannot be replaced by others doing it for them or technology doing the job...

ingoblog