Mapping out the KM landscape

Chris Collison presents lessons learnt from a recent Twitter chat

In my last column, inspired by air travel and those mobile-free minutes during take-off, I wrote about after-action reviews. This month, I’m actually writing at 30,000 feet (on my way to Geneva, in seat 29A). I really don’t mind being at the back of the plane when the view is this good - stunning, varied scenery from an ever-changing landscape. Last month I moderated my first ever Twitter chat with #KMers. If you’re new to Twitter chat, I guess it’s Twitter’s equivalent of a knowledge café. It’s a lightly facilitated hour of tweeting, with one person leading the discussion. That individual proposes a topic to set the context, then introduces a series of questions at regular intervals. Participants all include a hashtag (#KMers) and for an hour every Tuesday, at 17:00GMT, there’s a flurry of tweets from somewhere between 20 and 50 participants.

The slightly delayed nature of Twitter and the relative speed of people typing means that people meander a bit between topics. There were moments where I was reminded of a classic Two Ronnies ?Mastermind’ sketch, where the specialist subject was ‘answering the question before last’.

Anyway, I’m digressing. Here’s a synopsis of my Twitter chat, together with a summary of the responses – which explored the ever-changing KM landscape. I set the context with the following statement:

“I’m providing a keynote presentation to 600 law librarians in the summer – and for many of them, I suspect their experience of KM will be the ‘straight and narrow’ information-centric route. I’ve promised to take them off road to explore some other parts of the KM landscape. Can you help me to map out the different areas?”

Next, I followed up with my five questions.

Question one: The highway
Which KM tools and techniques would we describe as completely middle-of-the-road and a given in most organisations? The answers to question one came in a flurry (see Figure 1):

Blogs;
Wikis;
SharePoint;
Document and content management;
Taxonomies;
Communities of practice;
Enterprise search;
Google sites; and
Portals.

Almost without exception, the answers referred to KM technologies – something which did not go unnoticed by @KMSkunkworks, who commented: “#KMers - we seem to lean towards discussing technology, when, for me, it is about people first.”

We moved onto the next question, hoping that it would offer a broader perspective:

Question two: The winding country roads
Which approaches have you found which have been unexpected, a little off the beaten track, but fairly easy to take people to if they're starting with regular KM?

This did yield an interesting mixture of techniques, and with far less emphasis on technology, which perhaps bears out the old adage: ?It’s the soft stuff which is the hard stuff’. The answers included:

Expertise systems;
Social analytics;
Appreciative inquiry;
Positive deviance;
Recognition schemes;
Storytelling;
Team blogs; and
Mind-mapping.

Question three: The spectacular views
What about the more surprising techniques that are well off-the beaten track for many people, but well worth the effort to get there?

This question pushed the boundaries further and generated some more interesting ideas and examples.These were:

Cartoons;
Animation;
Folksonomies;
Semantic web;
Scenario simulation;
Incentive points;
Wordle;
ManyEyes; and
Meeting Pictures.

Question four: The parallel routes
What are the canals and railways which are going in the same direction as the KM road – our alternative routes if we get a flat tyre?

My penultimate question was intended to identify allies in the organisation, broadly aligned with most KM strategies. And there was no shortage of these:

Change management;
Complexity science;
Social media;
Business excellence;
Continuous improvement;
Innovation management;
IT;
Human capital management;
Communications and internal marketing;
Education, training and development;
Lean;
Kanban and Kaizen; and
Internal benchmarking.

Question five: The swamps, quicksand and deadends
Which approaches have you seen which have turned out to be a drain on resources, sucking in effort and money with insufficient return? The things you wished you’d never gotten into...

Finally, we had some fun reminding ourselves of some stops on the KM tour, which we’d wished we’d sped past.These were:

Big KM audits;
Mandated communities;
Ghost-written blogs;
Under-resourced wikis;
Collecting all documents;
Trying to turn all tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and putting it into a big database;
Outdated, overloaded information; and
Death by IT.

And with that, our hour was up. The KM landscape was certainly well-trampled, if not yet mapped out, but thanks to this exercise, I had a number of new co-ordinates to offer my 600 law librarians in this summer, which I hope they enjoy. For that I’m grateful to my fellow #KMers.

Perhaps our challenge as KM professionals is to resist the temptation (or corporate pressure) to follow the crowds down the highways of question one. Or at least to first check out whether the windy roads and spectacular views could actually be short cuts to the real business value.

Chris Collison is an experienced KM consultant, owner of Knowledgeable Ltd and a member of the Inside Knowledge editorial board. He can be contacted via his website at www.chriscollison.com

For more on regular Tuesday KMers Twitter chats, visit kmers.org