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

Do You Hear the People Sing? - Les Mis as a lesson for SM

I have always been reassured to discover that I am not the only person to have little benchmarks that we use to assess new acquaintances. Stuart Maconie revealed in the magnificent Cider with Roadies that he doesn’t really trust anyone that doesn’t dance. I read with glee how David Niven was tested at helm of Humphrey Bogart’s boat in The Moon's a Balloon, and my dad’s gruff maxim “Never trust a man in white shoes.” has never let me down. But last night I was reminded of one of my own unconscious bell weathers when Matt Lucas revealed his love of Les Miserable when he performed in the anniversary show at the O2 in Les Mis at 25: Mat Lucas Dreams the Dream

And that measure is? "Be wary if anyone that doesn’t find Les Mis moving – as they are probably already dead."

I have had the pleasure of seeing the stage show many many times and I remember well when it arrived in Melbourne when I lived there in the late eighties. The blokeish culture of Australia might not seem to be the most fertile location for such a show to thrive, and my evangelism of the merits of teh production I had already seen several times in London first fell on deaf ears. But I shouldnt have worried. The trams were duly plastered with a smart advertising slogan – “Les Mis – moves more people than the Met.” The Met being the colloquial term for the metropolitan transport system. The show was a sell out

But at the risk of sounding like I am trying to twist this into something relevant there is another reason why I love Les Mis. To me it is an excellent example of two very powerful lessons. These are firstly that gatekeepers are often wrong, and secondly that it is possible to overcome them. Today the internet and social media tools give us extremely powerful mechanisms to do that.

They provide us with a mechanism to burst open many of the gates so firmly closed by gatekeepers in the past, and they allow for popular feeling to not go unheard, to connect and find its voice. The democratising potential of these tools has application in so many fields and we have seen many barriers fall as a result of their invention.

How does the analogy work? Well Les Mis was not a success when it opened. I remember it well when it was at the Barbican and last nights programme had stark reminders of how cruelly dismissive the critics were of its initial opening. But these self appointed gatekeepers were wrong – evidenced by the fact that the show is now the worlds longest running musical. People loved it and its success was driven by word of mouth recommendation generated by the passion and emotion of the production. Of course simple popularity is not the only metric of success but I think you would have a hard time convincing me that Les Mis is not a success on other levels as well.

Of course this happened before the web and twitter, my point is that the principles apply and this type of viral success is so much more accessible and possible now with tools available to us.

So all together now “Do you hear the people sing…..?”

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.

Emergent Reporting

Maybe it is the ghastly weather in Glasgow that makes me cast my mind back to that lovely balmy evening in Matera that I mentioned in my Blog after the IFKAD 2010 conference. I had a conversation with Rob McLean of Matrix Links on what we described as “emergent reporting” and promised to elaborate on it. Well better late than never here it is.

Rob is a leading thinker on financial reporting and valuation of intangibles and we were considering how the use of Social Media (SM) could influence financial reporting as it has already affected Marketing and Communications. One of the most profound impacts of SM is how it changes the dynamic in communications. Traditionally Communications has been a case of establishing the message and then managing the channels that carry that consistent message to the eager and waiting public. The theory being that if you manage it enough and are consistent enough the message will eventually get home.

The rise of SM and its viral power and emergent nature means that it is simply not possible to manage it in the traditional way. It is by definition unmanageable. Communications are democratised to the extent that it has become essential for communicators to listen and then respond to the emerging view and in this way the exchange becomes a conversation and the dynamic of the relationship is completely changed. The benefit is that by listening to this complex environment previously invisible insight can be made visible, and in so doing it can open up new possibilities and opportunities that would otherwise have remained hidden.

How might this effect financial reporting? Well Rob and I considered and agreed that reporting is, in its current mode, a communications exercise. It has an agenda to present a particular view of the financial position of an organisation to a variety of stakeholder groups.

Now this leads to debate and varied interpretations. In some cases it has implications in markets, and brand value from a CSR perspective. Part of the challenge is that these different stakeholders have different needs and interests, and will be looking at different things in the figures. It is difficult to prepare a statement that will please all parties.

So, our idea was how about putting raw data out there and let the various parties derive their own reports. So the deal is, you can have the data as long as you provide us with the report back. We can then analyse your reports. The dynamic is entirely changed and as a result the organisation would gain deep insight into what each group was looking for by the way it used the raw data, and be able to respond directly to each groups concerns. This type of emergent reporting would be underpinned by social media tools and create a completely new reporting model.

I don’t expect it to happen in the short term, but it is, in my view, an interesting idea. And for those that say it will never happen, I say that I recall people saying how communications and marketing weren’t going to be changed by SM.

IFKAD 2010

Back from Italy and reflecting on what was a terrific IFKAD Conference, which seems to get better year on year. Seeing old friends and meeting new ones, fantastic conversations and presentations, all set in the beautiful town of Matera – what more could you ask for? Well the beautiful full moon over the Sassi at the reception at Baccanti was a bonus, the thought provoking key notes (who could believe accounting could be so enthralling), and that sensational pecorino cheese also helped. Staying in a cave as a hotel room adds a little something, and the fascinating creative contributions of the MAP consortium cascading through the events all combine to make it a memorable trip. Tampere has a challenge on its hands to top that next year.

On a more specific note I had a series of particularly interesting conversation with Rob McLean about the similarities of the challenge with CSR reporting and IA reporting and the possibility of using his Value Stream concepts as an alternative to Elkington’s Triple Bottom Line. We also considered the application of Social Media tools to introduce a concept of what we described as “emergent reporting”, a method not only of satisfying reporting demands through genuine transparency but also a method of generating fantastically deep insight to stakeholder issues. More on all of this in some later bloggs.

It was interesting to hear talk in one of the plenary sessions around the progressively constrained publishing of academics and it strikes me as an interesting bifurcation with the potential opportunities for mavericks in business made possible by what are increasingly described as “portfolio” careers. The tension in this it seems to me is that if academics are not supplying some innovation to transfer into business will they be progressively compelled to take a passive reporting stance as opposed to a proactive or initiating stance on business innovation?

As always JC Spender was one of the most thought provoking speakers and conversationalists. As someone who very early on saw the limitations of the generally applied information bound KM paradigm you can always rely on JC to push the debate forward. I was particularly pleased to find that we have a shared interest in the historical perspective of business and particularly in the origins of trading companies, and what can be learned from their experience, which have many contemporary parallels. Again some more bloggs to come on this over the next week or so.

The Stream of papers I co chaired with my colleague Daniela Castrataro of the IA Centre on the implications of Social Media on IA/IC and KM had some fascinating papers and, as we expected, proved to be a very fertile field for study.

So thanks to Giovanni and the team from University Basilicata for hosting us so well, and we look forward to next year.

Barcamp Glasgow June 2010

On Friday my colleague Daniela Castrataro, of the IA Centre, and I made a brief presentation of the preliminary findings of our Social Media Usage in the Workplace survey. The slide pack for that is available here.

We will be presenting more detailed findings at both the IFKAD 2010 Conference in Matera, Italy 24-25 June and at ECKM in Famalicão, Portugal 2-3 September 2010