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Gurteen Knowledge: 10 Years in KM - What I learnt about KM as czar 22 Jun 2010
From 1989 to 1992 I worked for Lotus Development in its then headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts as ‘international czar’. Yes that was my title. I still have some business cards to prove it. Funny thing was, though, even with such a grand title I had no authoritative power, yet I did get to build a small team.
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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 - Get specific 22 Jun 2010
Time and time again people ask me questions like ‘how do you make people share?’, or ‘how do we get buy-in from senior management?’, or even ‘how do we share all our knowledge more widely?’.
To me, these are meaningless, unanswerable questions. KM is extremely context dependent; the answer to any question depends on so many factors. Which people? What knowledge? What is the business purpose? What is the culture like? What are the barriers? Have you had a history of management adopting one fad and then another? All of these questions and more need to be answered before you can reply to what seems like a simple question.
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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 - 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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Supply and demand 22 Jun 2010
In the last edition, I wrote a flowery article about two cultural hindrances to the flow of knowledge. First we looked at ‘tall poppy syndrome’ where people are reluctant to share for fear of getting ‘cut down’ by their peers. Then we explored ‘shrinking violet syndrome’, where people are overcome by a sense of corporate humility, and don’t believe that they have anything worthwhile to share with others.
But what if we could nurture our organisational garden such that the poppies felt safe to grow and the violets stopped shrinking and started flourishing? Would that solve our knowledge-sharing problems?
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The power of struture 22 Jun 2010
My last article, ‘When two worlds collide’ identified the two principal characteristics of the emerging forms of knowledge – as flow rather than documents, and as user generated, and user ‘curated’ content, rather than professionally generated and ‘managed’ content.
The core assumption behind the design of software tools to help people to cope with these new forms of knowledge is that algorithms, typified by Google’s ‘relevance ranking’, are the best (indeed the only) means to deal with the unimaginable quantities of information available. Without these sorts of powerful algorithms and the immense processing power of vast server farms, people would drown in the torrent of information, or be lost forever in a huge and uncharted sea of data.
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KMUK Awards 2010 21 Jun 2010
Hosted by the change studio’s Dillon Dhanecha, Ark’s inaugural KMUK Awards provided an opportunity to celebrate the successes of those individuals and organisations that have made outstanding contributions to knowledge management (KM) in business.
The ceremony and drinks reception was held at the end of the first day of KMUK in London’s De Vere, Canary Wharf.
Introducing proceedings, Dhanecha paid tribute to some of the ‘fantastic’ names that had appeared in the nominations, saying that “KM has come on leaps and bounds”. The awards, therefore, would set the standard for future KM initiatives – inspiring others and providing a fitting memento to the category winners.
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Half-baked? 21 Jun 2010
Knowledge management (KM) began its life in the military and private sectors in the late 1990s and quickly developed a reputation as being a strong enabler for the development of an effective organisation. In the early 2000s, it took hold in the development sector, and since the mid 2000s, the private sector has taken an interest. In many ways, the private sector needs KM. The trend for reduced budgets and greater efficiencies calls for a way of developing and exchanging improved practices, and avoiding duplication of work through collaboration. The cuts in public spending will result in knowledge loss, as older public sector workers take early retirement, – unless KM can help stem the leak. The constant cycles of government and policy change require public sector bodies to become agile learning organisations. But how well is KM doing in the public sector?
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