Social Knowledge

One of the ongoing debates in the world of KM is the ever controversial “collection or connection” classification. It neatly defines the two most common wings of the discipline, one emphasising an information or artefact driven approach, the other endorsing the essential role of the human context or, as I would say it, the application of the Mk1 Brain. As someone who describes knowledge as a verb not a noun in order to break with the information managers of this world and to reinforce the necessity of action to create value I think you can guess where I sit on this one.

However the argument neatly highlights the problem with KM. KM is hard. Its hard to define, hard to demonstrate ROI, counter cultural, long term, and yet it promises so much. Because it is hard it is easier to characterise it as information on steroids because people can “get” that and can task someone to go away and do it – problem solved. It gives management the secure warm feeling that they are “doing KM” because they have neatly pigeon-holed it under something that is somehow familiar. The problem is that this isn't KM and it is in fact something of a dead end.

In a way the the debate has found an echo in the Social Media domain. Creating value from Social Media is much more complicated than simply starting a Facebook page. There is familiar debate about the value of curation as opposed to creation, a debate about ROI, and we have an over emphasis of seeing Social Media through the lens of Marketing because once again people can “get” that and task someone to do it. But again that really isn't the whole story by any means and again is something of a dead end.

But curiously enough there is an area where we can find some progress and value by bringing the two together. Social Media is underpinned by a mindset rooted in collaboration and sharing, iteration, evolution and tearing down barriers to participation. This mindset is coming from outside the boundaries of the organisation and shaking the traditional structures and practises as it permeates its way in. The challenge is for organisations to embrace that and create value from it through new approaches, new business models and new thinking – in a word innovation.

KM is rooted in the same insight but has come from the other end of the telescope in that it has sought to to create that environment within organisations and push it outwards.

We can now go beyond this and by bringing these insights together and we can create tremendously rich possibilities for organisations by bringing together the elements of curation, collection, connection and most importantly applications that can operationalise these elements in to action and value generation. We call this Social Knowledge.

Of course it takes planning, analysis, and a strategy but it can be done and a good deal of my work at twintangibles is taken up with this

Bannatyne, Budgets and Public Sector Bodies

Duncan Bannatyne (@DuncanBannatyne) started a bit of a Twitter trend today when he asked, in a sense of outrage, if Sir Andrew Cahn should repay £1million pounds to the tax payer. But I would say this Duncan, whilst I have sympathy with the sentiment the revelation that Cahn instructed staff to spend £1million because of a budget underspend at UK Trade and Investment comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever held budgetary responsibility in the public sector or has worked with the public sector. Its common practice.

I remember my astonishment at encountering this type of mind set when working with and for public sector bodies. The argument advanced is generally termed – use it or lose it – and you are generally regarded as completely bonkers for not spending every penny of an annual budget

Having private sector experience of budget building and management I had become accustomed to being given a pat on the back for underspending, smart procurement, driving down costs through innovation. Being informed that such things were not only unnecessary but actually unwelcome was a bit of a shock

It does make one wonder why this is the case.

Well I offer two fundamental problems that I believe underpin it. One is the typical budget building approach in many public sector bodies. In essence the starting point for your budget is essentially determined by what has gone before as a starting point. Hence the “use it or lose it” idea. There is almost an assumption that these costs are somehow fixed costs. A major failure of knowledge management in my view. Such rigid formulaic or unquestioning of assumptions demonstrate a lack of Knowledge Aware Management.

This can in part be addressed by introducing different budget strategies in an environment where trying different approaches is encouraged, where no numbers are sacrosanct and assumptions underpinning figures are reexamined. Zero Based Budgeting as some of my counting friends might have it. Of course Social Knowledge principles have a role to play here as drawing on the collective insight and wisdom of the organization and its partners can surface opportunities to innovate and reduce costs.

Another contributory factor is the culture that suggests size of budget is one of the most important benchmarks and confers status in an environment where status is of greatest import rather than effectiveness.

Of course this is challenging issue to overcome, but again Social Knowledge approaches have a role in helping to reveal the true metrics of success of the client group, and for exposing them to the organization as part of an effort to break that inwardly focused and rigid mindset.

However in the meantime should he repay it – of course – but he wont.

Snow, Disruption and Social Knowledge. Do you know the connection?

Knowledge is not information. Never has been, never will be. But information is often one of a number of inputs to a knowledge activity, and finding ways of making that information resource as good as it can be is challenging, particularly in complex environments. Many KM projects fail because of too much emphasis on information management, and that part itself often fails because the technical tools they use to underpin that aspect of the project are much to rigid, mechanistic and rules based to be of use to knowledge activities in complex environments. Lets not get into the failure to recognize when we are in complex environments!

This has been very apparent in the recent snow falls in the UK. The disruption caused by the snow is immense and very very costly and all the usual debates about lack of preparedness begin again. The debate typically runs along the lines of why we don't have enough gritt, snowploughs, why do we fail where other more climatically challenged countries cope etc etc etc.

These are all important considerations but for me the biggest problem is the collapse of information provision. So many of the journeys we take are regular ones and we are lured into the sense that this is a simple environment where routes are known, timings set routines established. The number of knowledge activities are typically decreased, there are not so many decisions to be made when all is well. But, as soon as there is disruption, caused on this occasion by snow, the complexity of the situation is revealed. Knowledge activities, decision points, are legion and in order to make those activities as effective as possible one of the resources that is needed is accurate timely information. Wherever you look people want information, and the usual sources are in utter disarray. In fact they are usually very misleading, so our ability to complete knowledge activities, that is make decisions and judgements, is seriously reduced. This is applicable to all but as a public transport user a typical example is the utter collapse of train information. Indicator boards show trains on time that never arrive, announce cancellations when the train roles though and no one from the train staff seems to know anything. This scenario can be replayed in almost any travel environment. Staff are not empowered to undertake knowledge activities – regulations the other brake to knowledge effectiveness – and if and when they do the information about that is often hidden, not shared, or shrouded in secrecy.

The fascinating thing in the last few days is to watch the twitter traffic. People reach out to these mechanisms to self organize and share real time insight from multiple parties. People ask questions, anyone on this train, anyone know if this road is open and often the answer is from someone on the ground, on the train looking at the scene. Its is not perfect by any means but the information available is generally far more accurate than the rubbish on offer from, in this case the train operating companies.

This emergent, community generated and, importantly, live and timely information sharing is just one example of how Social Media tools have such great application in knowledge intensive and complex environments, and why Social Knowledge is in fact the only game in town from a KM perspective at present.

If there is to be a government led review of the disruption caused by this latest cold snap I hope that whoever leads it takes note of this insight and looks at establishing very simple cost effective flexible information sharing techniques that are open to all as one part of a more complete approach to dealing with extreme weather. It would not be difficult or costly but the pay off would be immense.

A Path a way from Linked In

I am a great advocate of Social Media and its power to unleash what I refer to as Social Knowledge. I am also constantly reminded of how you can count on its emergent properties to evolve ever new, rapid and exciting developments, even if it road there can be a bit bumpy sometimes. A fantastic example of that has come to my attention just today with the news of a new service called Path a service that sounds like it might go some way to overcoming the limitations of some of the SM tools that have grown out of their usefulness for some specific purposes.

I also thought Linked In would be as good. I loved it at first, thinking that the way people to open their key networks up for sharing seemed a superb tool. Technology was underpinning and expanding a well used tried and tested idea of personal recommendation. Personal recommendation works on the basis of trust tagging – that is to say if you trust the person that is making the recommendation a bit of that trust is handed on to the person they are recommending. There is judgement there is a knowledge activity involved.

Great ideas. But for me Linked In was scuppered as a knowledge tools when it became apparent that some felt that a public demonstration of huge numbers of links was a metric of success thereby launching a to my mind ridiculous expansion where people linked to pretty much anyone they met meaning that their ability to judge trust and tag was useless. Similarly the mutual recommendation became viral and so, from a knowledge perspective, in the way I imagined it to be used, Linked In became useless. A number of SM tools have gone this way where their success means that there is too much noise for them to be useful in the way I originally envisioned them. However must I confess that meeting the highly insightful Adam Gordon of Winning Work really was an eye opener where he demonstrated tremendous knowledge value from Linked in – but in a quiet different application of the tool from the way ion which I had originally welcomed it.

But for my original wants it remained useless and I argues that Linked In needed to introduce a new service that reflected Dunbar's Numbers and allowed you to express a real trusted core of links that was constrained and validated.

As is the way with Social Media – wait a little while and something comes along and Path it is. Sounds brilliant, not least because it is based on Dunbar’s thinking. Only problem is it requires an iphone, something I don’t have or want. Ah well wait a while and an Android equivalent will come along – it’s just the way of things! You can read more about it here.