Knowledge Jolt with Jack

No one will share with an idiot

2008-07-18T20:33:02Z

Victor Newman has started blogging with Knowledgeworks. I've always appreciated his unconventional take on knowledge management, so I was happy to see that he hasn't changed his approach in this piece, Don't Share -Build. From the summary (and to see he take on the world):

Reduce the number of idiots in the organisation to the bare minimum necessary. No-one will share anything with an idiot.

Employ the tactic of using language with real meaning. Deliberately stop talking about Knowledge Sharing: it only confuses people with its altruism and its implicit democratic message. Start defining aspirational knowledge frameworks within which new knowledge can be built that meets the need of delivering competitive advantage.

Create crises to focus knowledge contribution from those who can, and remove investment from the aimless sharing of everything.

Use 30/70 until they notice, then do something else.

One of Victor's early comments is that knowledge follows the laws of supply and demand: knowledge available to many people has less value than knowledge available to the few. The more common claim is that knowledge isn't like commodities in that is not limited supply: you can share an idea with one person or 100 people. These statements aren't opposed to one another, they just expose different philosophies about knowledge sharing. Victor seems to be onto something, though.

Oh, and be prepared. These aren't short little blog posts.

We were both employees of Pfizer, though I never had the opportunity to work directly with him before deciding to do other stuff.

Lessons learned only matter when

2008-07-15T16:45:55Z

Lessons learned only matter when someone else takes the results and does something with it! My former LOC students would be thrilled to hear this.

At today's SIKM Leaders monthly discussion, Steve Wieneke of GM talked about Lessons Learned. I really liked his methodical approach to the topic and the difficulties organizations have had with turning the idea of lessons learned into something useful for the organization. He differentiates between lessons learned which result from failure and the correction, and learnings which result from things gone well and valued for the success. Both things need to be part of the process for benefit of the organization.

And for the organization, lessons can only be useful when someone other than the person or team who had the experience can take that experience and do something with it in their situation.

Steve advocates moving away from the typical lessons learned database (unused, focused on failures) to a more transparent "visible learning process" that supports both learning from failures and successes. It is focused on discussions, rather than a database of incidents. He didn't talk about how this would be implemented, but it could work in standard discussion forums, or it could work in the more current technologies of web2.0.

Steve Wieneke has documented some of this in a chapter of Tom Young's Knowledge Management for Services, Operations and Manufacturing.

Due to the seemingly-unconventional approach to lessons learned, I was reminded of Dave Snowden's recent article in the July/August 2008 KM World, Everything is fragmented - Building CoPs for knowledge flow. In this one, he recommends tossing out the typical view of the Community of Practice (discussion groups) for blogging which will help the real knowledge flow blossom.

Update: Fixed the spelling of Steve's last name. It's Wieneke.

Weasels and Bloodmobiles

2008-07-09T15:08:43Z

To prove that I haven't vanished into complete thin air, I provide two items of entertainment. Oh, and I've moved to Boston, for those that haven't been following me on Twitter.

I just finished Scott Adams' Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel. It's loaded will silly and entertaining observations about the weasels we encounter everywhere in our lives -- even our own weasel selves. If you take Adams' writing too seriously, the book is bound to make you feel cynical about everyone you meet. But then, if you take Dilbert seriously, I am worried.

The other fun thing was a discovery by my family while I was off working. They went to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. My wife's favorite exhibit was always the walk-through heart. It's been updated to include some music from They Might Be Giants, a song and video called The Bloodmobile. It's available for download from the Franklin Institute website. You might also want to check out the Dave Logan flash version (the song's producer). Here is the video that's used at the Franklin Institute.

KM program at Kent State

2008-07-04T21:20:20Z

Thanks to a note at the KM Forum blog I see that there is a virtual open house at Kent State's information architecture and knowledge management (IAKM) program.

Online Open House on Knowledge Management Online Options in IAKM

Online Open House
Online KM Masters Degree and Certificate Program
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Beginning at 6:00pm

The presentation includes options for students to ask questions live. Any questions received during the presentation should be addressed at the end of the session.

The presentation has two segments:

Dr. Thomas J. Froehlich, Director of the Masters Program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management, will provide an overview of the program and its online options in the area of Knowledge Management.

Dr. Denise Bedford will speak about her background, experience and expertise in knowledge management and will provide an overview of the two courses she will be teaching for the IAKM program in the fall, Foundational Principles of Knowledge Management and the Economics of Information.

Inherent Simplicity preview

2008-06-29T03:01:29Z

Eli Goldratt is in the process of writing another book, this one entitled Inherent Simplicity. Rather than a fiction, it is a monograph set up as a (fictional) discussion between Goldratt and his daughter, Efrat. I received a galley proof on the arrangement that I would tell people about it and offer to pass the same offer to more people. So, if you would like to get a copy (free!), have a read and pass along your information to me.

For people who have been following Goldratt, the material in the book should sound very familiar, particularly the interspersed chapters of "letters to the community" that Goldratt uses in the book as examples of various elements of the discussion. I felt that these were the weakest part of the monograph. I much preferred the discussion format of the book, but I also see how the letters moved things forward in the discussion.

So, what is Inherent Simplicity? It's what Goldratt has been professing throughout his business consulting career: It's a deep understanding that is always a simple explanation to any seemingly intractable problem. This leads one to use their intuition to find the core of the problem and develop a solution which both solves the immediate problem and doesn't create additional problems along the way.

Okay, but what did Goldratt spend 176 pages talking about? Well, that was the nature of the conversation between Efrat and him. Efrat doesn't get it, and the book is a means for helping her and the readers make the connections. And in what I see as his classic style, he leads readers (and Efrat) through a series of discoveries about how people normally interact with problems. Where does the discussion start? With a particular application of the TOC principles to business? Nope. With the statement that people want meaningful lives.

But there are some barriers, and this is the setup for the entire book. What are the barriers and why are they either not barriers - or how can they be removed.

First, people assume the solution must be complex, because they feel the problem is complex. But simplicity is not the opposite of complexity, in Goldratt's definition, rather it is a measure of how much difficulty is involved. In a scientist's view, this is the degrees of freedom in the system.

Second, conflicts and obstacles are a fact of life, but people assume the best solution is a compromise - a compromise where someone comes out with less than they'd hoped. Goldratt suggests that there are no real contradictions - that nature doesn't allow them. "Nature is exceedingly simple." He had an interesting discussion about how people tend to get so ingrained with their assumptions that they find it difficult to see them when they are in a conflict situation. As a result, they see no option other than compromise.

There was an interesting item within this discussion that talked about why people and businesses tend to go for the easy solutions that have nothing to do with the core problems. The difficulty of examining these assumptions is often so difficult that it leads people to believe problems cannot be solved. As a result, they just go after the small things that have very little impact on the overall.

Third, along with being exceedingly simple, nature is harmonious with itself. This leads Goldratt to the third barrier - that people have a tendency to blame one another for problems. This builds on the previous two, but adds this other twist of our inclination to jump to the conclusion that a bad situation must be someone else's fault, rather than the natural reaction to various stimuli. It's easier to assign blame than put in the effort to understand why people and the systems they operate behave the way they do.

There may be a fourth element / barrier for people reaching a full life, but I think this covers my current understanding of the book. And it is one where the more I think and talk about it, the more (or less) I will admit to understanding it. There are several other discussion elements of the book that I found interesting, but they all revolve around this idea of how to move from whatever the current reality to something bigger and brighter through the belief in Inherent Simplicity.

[Update minutes after posting] And if you are interested in talking with other people about the book, a discussion group has been created to do just that. Just walk on over to the Inherent Simplicity group at Yahoo. They've already started discussing the first couple chapters.

Welcome to TOC.tv

2008-06-27T13:07:03Z

Goldratt Consulting have created a place to share a variety of videos that relate to Theory of Constraints, from Eli Goldratt talking about various aspects of the TOC concepts to other demonstrations of successful implementations of the principles. And yes, they do own TOC.tv. Here's the overview page with a list of current videos. I think some are shifting to for-pay after a few weeks.

Welcome to TOC.tv! Click on any of the main sections shown on the top left, or use the menu below to learn about any specific title. Details are shown on the left. The PLAY button takes you directly to view the video. Please do do not hesitate to Contact us if you need any assistance.

Featuring

The TOC way to an ever-flourishing company

Introduction to TOC - How to cause the change?

Viable Vision

The Difference between Theory and Practice Implementing TOC

The Goldratt Webcast Program on Project Management - an extract

US Marine Corps Logistics Base

The fastest House in the World

Realization Customer Conference 2007

Delta Airlines: The Change and Challenge in Engine Maintenance - a Case Study.

Make to Availability and Beyond

The reason for Technology

GSP Session 7 - Managing People

Free Access (there are many videos under this section)

Testimonials

Excerpts

Goldratt Presents

Q&A

Memberships and Subscriptions (there are many videos under this section)

TOCICO Conference Presentations

Goldratt Explains

Pay Per View (there are many videos under this section)

The Goldratt Satellite Program

The Goal Movie

N&S Series

The Goldratt Webcast Series

Blogging for keeping track of stuff

2008-06-26T19:10:05Z

My friend, Lilia Efimova is wrapping up her PhD thesis work on the subject of blogging and has a nice summary of a number of Reasons for using weblog to keep information bits. I see these as all elements of personal knowledge management where weblogs provide lots of assistance.

Portability / Number of access points.
Preservation of information in its current state / Currency of information.
Context (remembering why it was saved) / Reminding.
Ease of integration into existing structures.
Communication and information sharing.
Ease of maintenance.

Do you find it interesting that Communication and Information Sharing is in that list? I am convinced that a major element of "personal knowledge management" and personal effectiveness in general is the ability to exchange information and ideas with others.

Don't confuse technology with a solution

2008-06-26T01:08:26Z

Just for fun, I am attempting to post while on the rail - Amtrak that is.

It's a familiar refrain, once you get into the business world far enough. The business needs a solution, but the IT team delivers a technology that doesn't match. Or reversing the blame, the business asks for a technology (and IT delivers), but that technology doesn't actually "solve" the problems the business confronts.

The June 2008 Communications of the ACM has a teaser of a longer article on the topic, Give Me Information Not Technology by Arik Ragowsky, Paul S. Licker and David Gefen.

Don't confuse technology with business solutions, focusing instead on what users value most - information.

Interesting what they are saying here. I'll have to pay attention to their upcoming case study that suggests other differences between what IT does and what the business needs.

The contemplated action contains the seed of its result

2008-06-17T16:38:58Z

A friend forwarded an interesting quote this morning. My curiosity was roused and I hunted down the rest of the quote. Turns out it is from the Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living (bottom of p. 313 on Google Books scan).

Mistakes are a natural part of growing up, and there is no need to brood over them. As my grandmother used to tell the young girls in my ancestral home when they began to work in the kitchen, we can all expect to do a little spilling and burning in order to learn to cook.
Even though we have a certain margin for error, the sooner we can learn from our mistakes, the less suffering we will have to undergo in life. The consequences of a mistake may last for many years, and in making a major decision, many of us are prone to over-calculate the satisfaction we are going to get out of it and overlook the suffering involved for ourselves as well as others. We often forget that the action we are contemplating contains the seed of its result.

I am particularly intrigued by the last sentence. I often see fear preventing me (and people in general) from doing something because I think something bad will result. The contemplated action contains the seed of its result. Along with the previous text, I know what has happened in the past - the mistakes I've made - and sometimes that prevents me from moving forward.

Instead of focusing on the mistakes and the possible bad effect, why not focus on what you might learn and what your past experiences bring to the current activity.

As I like to say when I go mountain biking, if I don't come back with a few scrapes, I am not trying hard enough.

There's a research group on information overload?

2008-06-17T03:13:02Z

Imagine my surprise to see Andrew McAfee mention the newly-formed IORG - Information Overload Research Group.

We work together to build awareness of the world's greatest challenge to productivity, conduct research, help define best practices, contribute to the creation of solutions, share information and resources, offer guidance and facilitation, and help make the business case for fighting information overload.

Given the resources, these are people doing research on the topics of information overload, email overload, distraction & interruptions, and other related topics. I've mentioned a number of them in various commentaries on CACM articles.

Can someone let me know when they start their blog? (It's coming soon.)

Webinar: Ten Tips for Driving Better Project Outcomes

2008-06-12T21:24:54Z

I sat in on a Catalyze Community webinar today, given by Carey Schwaber, a Sr. Analyst at Forrester Research. The topic was "Ten Tips for Driving Better Project Outcomes" and was directed at the Business Analyst role, which is one way to view the Product Management role. (A recording of the webinar will be posted in a couple days.) The abstract given was:

It’s no secret that in the battle to bring effective business software to market on time and on budget, business analysts are on the front lines. What can business analysts do to improve requirements definition practices and make a difference in project outcomes? Join us as Forrester Senior Analyst, Carey Schwaber, shares a set of 10 practical tips that you can immediately put into action in your organization.

The discussion was centered around the idea of developing requirements for a new product (software typically). The tips were fairly obvious for people who spend any time thinking about project management and communication, but it was useful to hear the discussion about how these ideas play (or don't play) in practice.

Here are the tips as discussed in the webinar were done in reverse order. My favorite is #2, as this is such an important aspect of getting people to play and think about how the product is really supposed to work.

Define the business-IT division of labor.

Requirements need to be put together jointly.
Joint activities frequently vanish or lose the story.

Be part of the team.

All roles have to be part of the team for all activities: meetings, communications.
The team must deliver a single product, not many products delivered together.
The alternative is too much time creating artifacts without involvement, particularly for the product manager / business analyst.

Assess the true impact of change.

I loved this one: "Avoid swivel-chair integration" - integration that involves entering data in one place, spinning your swivel chair to enter data on another panel.
The drive for efficiency often takes you down the integration path.

Understand future as well as the current business needs.

Business changes, so requirements change, so software must be flexible.

Remember non-functional requirements.

This is more of the how and why of the needs, rather than the what.
i.e. Security and Usability and Performance

Make requirements painless for the business.

Measure project progress in terms of requirements.

I'm not completely sure I agree with this, since I would rather see a project network a progress measured against the critical chain. But the requirements can be a proxy for the project completion.

Don't rely solely on text (text-based requirements).
Maximize feedback on requirements

Don't let misunderstandings become defects to correct.
Invite people to requirement reviews.
Frequent demos to likely users.
Deliver working software incrementally!

Invest in future project outcomes too.

This project will impact future projects.
Look for opportunities to fix the relevant processes.

The observer's impression of Enterprise 2.0

2008-06-12T17:32:27Z

The Enterprise 2.0 conference was in Boston again this year. It barely crossed my radar screen last year, since I lived in Chicago. But this year, I thought it might be a nice time to see my KM and Friends2.0 that I don't normally get to see because they live on the other side of the globe - people like Luis Suarez and Stephen Collins. And there were plenty of people who live nearby, but who I just hadn't met yet. Plus the do-you-know-so-and-so meetings that are the hallmark of any conference. The list of friends at the event is just too long to post here.

I decided not to go for the full conference, picking up the Demo Pavilion pass instead. I went in for the afternoon Demo sessions and stuck around for hallway meetings. As I expected, there were plenty of people milling about around the vendor booths and around the sitting area outside of the actual conference sessions.

Even though I wasn't _in_ the conference, I certainly heard a lot about the conference. It doesn't hurt that a bunch of my Twitter friends have been Tweeting their heads off about the good and the bad of the conference. Some obvious items from these sources:

Wi-fi at the conference has been very unstable. Will someone please get this right already?
Some people know how to do demonstrations and some don't.
The Wachovia presentation this morning appears to have opened some people's eyes on how things could happen.
MS SharePoint 2007 appears to be moving in the right direction, but is heavily dependent on their partners to make it really sing 2.0. And SharePoint's wiki application sends update notifications that contain the entire page: there is no way to get the diff in the notifications. D'oh!
The CIA seems to understand 2.0 and how it applies for them (and the rest of Homeland Security?)
There are a bunch of vendors who really seem to fit the sweet spot for Enterprise 2.0. They get the holistic idea of using their groovy technology to support human processes within the enterprise. Sometimes I go to conferences, and it seems like the vendors don't get
People get ticked off at twittering and live-blogging during an Enterprise 2.0 conference, just like they do at other events. Hello!

Work Literacy launched

2008-06-11T03:32:51Z

Okay, three items in one evening is tops after weeks of relatively low activity. It's the move to Boston (yes, I've picked up the family and moved from Chicago to Boston) and the new job that have left me little time to read and think about blogging. Even my Twitter activity has died off.

Here is something of relevance to anyone interested in making work better, both personally and collectively. Work Literacy Launched

June 1, 2008 - Tony Karrer and Michele Martin are pleased to announce the founding of Work Literacy...

"The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st Century is to increase the productivity of the knowledge worker.” - Drucker

"Being adaptable in a flat world, knowing how to 'learn how to learn,' will be one of the most important assets any worker can have, because job churn will come faster, because innovation will happen faster." - Friedman

Work Literacy is a network of individuals, companies and organizations who are interested in learning, defining, mentoring, teaching and consulting on the frameworks, skills, methods and tools of modern knowledge work.

Looking for thoughts on feedback forums

2008-06-11T02:05:52Z

Here's something entertaining. In a set of planning meetings last week, someone suggested looking into setting up some sort of feedback mechanism for our field sales to "enhance communication" with product marketing. I immediately though of something along the lines of a community or forum - something more than a basic email box that was suggested in the discussion.

The entertaining part? I am not sure where to start. (And I think of myself as somewhat of an expert in this general area.) The company has some of the technical capabilities. But I am not sure the organization is ready to try something like a discussion group or a blog or wiki. So... any bright ideas?

In addition, I came across this piece in the AMA Moving Ahead newsletter, So You Want to Launch an Online Forum about Patrick O'Keefe's book on Managing Online Forums.

Every day, millions of users log on to their favorite online forums to share advice and discuss everything from their favorite (or least favorite) products to world news and politics. In his new book Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards (AMACOM, 2008), Patrick O’Keefe (who manages seven communities), outlines the basics to get your online forum up and running.

The article is a high-level excerpt from the book. An even higher-level excerpt is the headlines from the article:

Laying the Groundwork
Fundamental Decisions
What Will Your Community Cover?
Whom Do You Want to Attract?
What Will the Benefits of Your Community Be?
How Will You Support the Community Financially?
What Skills and Characteristics Do You Need to Have?

I like the last section, since my experience with forums large and small make it very clear that the leader / owner / advocate are what make or break the community.

Understanding Quality by Design

2008-06-11T01:18:15Z

During my last week in Chicago I attended the iBio event on Understanding Quality by Design - a panel discussion between Venkat Venkatasubramanian (Purdue), Dan Heighway (Eli Lilly), and Sam Venugopal (Conformia).

The goal of the FDA's Quality by Design initiative is to create a "maximally efficient, agile, flexible manufacturing sector that reliably produces high-quality products without extensive regulatory oversight." QbD is part of the FDA's Process Analytical Technologies (PAT) effort. Another way to describe this is that if a company can demonstrate its understanding of the science behind its processes, the FDA will reduce the amount of regulatory oversight on the company. There are some huge implications here, both for the company and for the FDA.

For the company, they must demonstrate a history of being in control of their processes. Not just one process for one new drug, but all the processes that support the drug. Depending on how you read things, this also implies that the company understand any similar processes. What is "understand?" The panelists all seemed to agree that this is model-based understanding: statistical models and first-principles models. This is as opposed to the current methods which are experiment-based and do a lot of "quality by testing." One of the elements of discussion was referencing "prior art" (other scientific research) in submissions to the FDA. In 2007, there were only 27 references to prior knowledge in regulatory filings - this has to change significantly if companies are going to get anywhere near the capability to demonstrate that they are relying on demonstrated knowledge and experience.

Along with this statistic was a discussion of the cultural implications of doing this right. The low references to prior art is a demonstration of the way things have always been done, and of the not-invented-here syndrome common to knowledge management efforts. There is also a simple time element: it takes time to build internal and external access to that prior art. And it will take a long time before the pharma company will see the benefit of these efforts. That said, the expected benefits in process development (less rework, developing a platform of knowledge), manufacturing (optimal processes, lower costs) and ultimately for the patient (higher quality) are quite high.

There were some discussions of the information technology implications of QbD as well. Accessing prior art and making the connection to your current research is going to be supported through efforts around semantic analysis and automated text analysis. There are challenges around communicated what the organization (the pharma company) has learned about their process from other sources, when the traditional mechanism is to show experiment after experiment that supports their claims. I also heard suggestions of expert systems and companies that might be savvy enough to sell their intellectual property around this kind of design knowledge.

And for the FDA? There are big changes in how it might review submissions and how it will need to process information about prior art - either previously submitted or other widely-accepted scientific research. And the question that Venugopal repeated: will the FDA accept prior art arguments and reduce the regulatory burden, as the Quality by Design initiative suggests.