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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - What's the problem? 22 Jun 2010
Clearly identifying and articulating the business issue or problem that you wish to respond to is the first and most fundamental step in any project but strangely it is one that is often skipped. People jump far too readily to the solution they already have in mind.
‘Doing’ KM, social networking, Enterprise 2.0 or undertaking a project to ‘improve knowledge sharing’, ‘create a learning organisation’ or ‘create a knowledge-driven organisation’ as a starting point is not only meaningless, but dumb! You need to identify the business issue first.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Twittering 22 Jun 2010
Do you have a problem understanding what all the fuss is about Twitter? Do you think it is about telling strangers what you had for breakfast or that the cat has been sick? Do you still wonder why anyone would want to know these sorts of things and why you would waste your time telling them?
Well, Twitter is actually a powerful business tool. Let me explain.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Open and transparent 22 Jun 2010
When considering knowledge sharing or creating a more collaborative culture, we often talk about the need for people to be open and for more transparency. These two concepts are usually used interchangeably and often without too much thought as to what they really mean.
For a long time, in my mind, I have made a clear distinction between the two. Recently though, I was interviewed about knowledge sharing and the interviewer asked me what the difference was, as she though they meant the same thing. I gave her what I felt was a simple answer at the time, but thought I’d try to articulate a more detailed view of the differences as I see them here.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Learning to share 22 Jun 2010
I gave a talk recently on knowledge sharing entitled the rather tongue-in-cheek, ‘How do you make people share their knowledge?’ as clearly you cannot make people share their knowledge.
At the end of the talk a woman from the audience approached me and said “David, I loved your talk but I am still unsure why people won’t share their knowledge and how you make them”.
Now I suspect she asked this because I had not made things clear enough (or she was not listening!) so here is an answer to her question.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - KM 2.0 goes social 22 Jun 2010
With the advent of social tools, KM is poised to undergo a transformation. I’d like to take a brief look at what is going on.
In the early days, KM was primarily about capturing all the messy unstructured information in an organisation; making it searchable and easily accessible to employees. It’s still what most companies mean when they talk about KM – so much so, that many IT managers think this is all there is to KM.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Enabling conversation 22 Jun 2010
One of the reasons I started to run my knowledge cafés was in reaction to ‘death by PowerPoint’ presentations, ‘chalk and talk’ or ‘sit and git’ style talks!
These sorts of presentations are endemic in conferences. The speaker has a fixed-time allocation to present, plus a short time for Q&A. He or she presents; they run over and eat into the Q&A; a few questions are asked and answered and everyone goes home. Often only one or two questions are taken as in answering a question the speaker will give a monologue for several minutes, effectively destroying the Q&A time and ensuring no further questions are asked.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Café culture 22 Jun 2010
I was recently in Jakarta, Indonesia, where I ran a two-day knowledge-sharing workshop for a client, which included a knowledge café. And, as I often do when abroad, I ran an open Gurteen knowledge café on one of the evenings.
I have a little experience of Asian culture, having run knowledge cafés in Singapore and Hong Kong, so understand people’s reluctance at times to talk or ask questions. Therefore, I was expecting some learning on my part.
We ran the open knowledge café in a beautiful building that was part of the Dutch Embassy and about 60 people participated. The problem with this many people is that you need microphones and this can be intimidating.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Profile 22 Jun 2010
The architect of one of the world’s most friendly knowledge website; host to online discussion forums; and author of a monthly newsletter, now in its tenth year, with a subscription list of 17,000 people in 168 countries. He is one of the world’s most respected knowledge experts. Yet he is unassuming, not ‘authoritative’ and always open to other points of view.
Before David Gurteen became all that, he logged 40 years in high technology industries as a professional software development manager. In the late 1980s he worked for Lotus Development as ‘international czar,’ responsible for ensuring that Lotus products were designed for the global marketplace.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Implementing a knowledge café 22 Jun 2010
As organisations have responded to the tough times imposed by the global recession it would not be unrealistic to suggest that conversation has been firmly at the bottom of the business agenda. Times of financial instability, where management seek to streamline operating processes and tighten purse strings, do not create the optimal atmosphere for a quick chin wag at the water cooler, or some relaxed yet insightful discussion at a colleague’s desk. The onus is very much on getting things done as efficiently as possible and now, more than ever, is not the time for ‘fluffy bunny’ approaches to knowledge sharing and collaboration.
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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - Retrospective feature 22 Jun 2010
In a 2009 blog post1 Nancy Dixon discussed the different ways in which people conceptualise ‘knowledge’ and the subsequent impact on how knowledge professionals approach their work, including the premise of the strategies that they design and implement. Within this overview of conceptualisation, she touched upon examples such as ‘who in the organisation has useful knowledge?’, ‘how stable is knowledge over time?’, and ‘how can we tell if the knowledge is valid or trustworthy?’.
Dixon concluded that if the goal of KM was to leverage the collective knowledge of an organisation, then we have been ‘doing KM’ since the 1990s. “It has been a steep learning curve and we still have a steep curve head of us, but we are learning as evidenced by how our thinking about our strategies for dealing with organisational knowledge has changed and evolved,” she wrote.
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