Disqus - Latest Comments for mg13

Re: Why does Knowledge Management exist?

Mark Gould — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:39:52 -0000

I take the view that organisational knowledge management has become necessary because of the way that organisations have developed and especially because of the ways that they use technology.

Technology (from mass production onwards) has allowed organisations to become massive and widely distributed. Size and spread lead to people being disconnected from each other, and that introduces inefficiencies. They can't learn from each other as well as was possible when apprentices worked alongside master craftsmen. Many examples of good KM are technology-enabled rediscoveries of well-tested ways of working.

I keep coming back to an analogy with farming. A well-run farm needs constant attention. Plants might grow and animals might breed without management, but they will do so inefficiently. With careful management of things like breeding cycles, fertilisation, sowing, harvesting, and so on, the farmer can extract maximum value from the land. Good KM creates an environment in which organisations can extract maximum value from the knowledge of their employees.

Re: Should public authorities be able to sue for libel?

Mark Gould — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:52:50 -0000

The advice in para 17 is even more amazing. It amounts to a suggestion that the police should be asked to 'pay a visit' to the council's critics, even though a prosecution under the Protection from Harassment Act is unlikely. How much alarm or distress might be caused by such a visit, I wonder?

Re: full of ‘satiable curtiosity! - Cognitive Edge Network Blog

Mark Gould — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 07:55:00 -0000

Thank you for this series, Dave, and especially for the reminder of David Davis's beautiful voice -- one of the sounds of my childhood too. I managed to find him reading The Elephant's Child on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watc....

Re: The Salmon effect - Cognitive Edge Network Blog

Mark Gould — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 09:58:09 -0000

Coincidentally, as a link from something else I read this morning, I came across the following thought from David Hume on miracles:

...it is a general maxim worthy of our attention, 'That no testimony is sufficient
to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its
falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to
establish....'

That feels similar to Feynman's approach. The challenge they set us is to present compelling, non-miraculous views of the world that will convince the credulous. Not easy...

Re: KM and The Future of the Legal Profession

Mark Gould — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 04:25:51 -0000

Mary,

Harriet Creamer wrote an article on this very topic a year ago (http://www.thelawyer.com/op.... Harriet was one of the first PSLs, and her article compares the law firm KM landscape as it was when she started in the 1980s with the current position:

At many firms, the basic organisational tasks took longer than expected, and eventually became so time-consuming that many KM lawyers remained almost wholly focused on them. In some cases management of the KM function was poor and priorities were commonly set by client partners who misunderstood the ultimate goal or who had particular axes to grind. The vision of the KM function as the efficiency engine of the firm, constantly streamlining working practices and driving forward proprietary knowhow, became blurred. Now is the time to clarify it.

To do this it is critical that KM lawyers engage proactively with the business. Their central focus should be on profitability. They will need a clear understanding, at both the financial and technical levels, of the work undertaken and the systems adopted in the different practice areas.

Re: Wasting Time with Social Media

Mark Gould — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 02:46:31 -0000

In that case, we are absolutely in agreement. I am relieved!

Re: Wasting Time with Social Media

Mark Gould — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:54:48 -0000

I don't think I understand your penultimate paragraph. Are you saying that policies predicated on technology use are good and those reflecting productivity concerns are bad? If so, I would disagree, and I think it would also contradict your last paragraph.

Re: Drinking Champagne

Mark Gould — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:50:39 -0000

In the abstract, I agree -- allocating responsibility is not a black/white question. The point I meant was that it is only by testing the concoction that one can tell if it is champagne or something noxious, but we should always be conscious that poison is just as likely as pleasure. (It always amuses me that for Germans, Gift is poison. I wonder if the Trojans felt similarly about the gift they were presented with.)

Re: Drinking Champagne

Mark Gould — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:29:57 -0000

I can empathise with your description of the 'pity party'. The one that puzzles me is how few KM people share their own knowledge and insights by blogging.

Anyway... There is another thing to bear in mind when the drinks start to flow at that party. How does the champagne taste? Is it actually more like dog food? When I experience a setback in the form of poor attendance at a training session, inattention at meetings, or lack of use of the latest snazzy system, my second thought (after "lazy ingrates") is that something was wrong with what was on offer. More often than not, if people don't make use of what is on offer it is because it isn't very attractive, not that it is attractive but something else gets in the way.

Re: Wasting Your Life

Mark Gould — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 09:31:06 -0000

There is more to the ROI calculation than billable time. In principle, KM activities can have an impact on all of the elements of Arendt's RULES maxim (http://www.abanet.org/lpm/l....

Realisation can be improved by reducing write-offs when billed time is unrecoverable because the fee-earner has plainly reinvented the wheel. (This is linked to your point about fixed fees.)

Utilisation can be improved is we use knowledge about the firm's activities to ensure that resourcing is as good as possible. Without that insight, we run the risk of over-provision of fee-earners at the wrong levels.

Which links to Leverage, which will change as a result of effective use of knowledge in the firm -- work can be done at a more junior level with good KM, so that drives more value from the least expensive people in the firm.

Expense control can also be improved by better use of knowledge resources in the support areas of the firm. Just as we need to improve legal knowledge behaviours, so must we ensure that our support colleagues are working as effectively as possible.

Work on Speed of reimbursement is a responsibility that typically falls to law firm finance teams, but the tools they use are akin to knowledge tools -- they just call them management information systems. The practices that build up around good working capital management are very similar to good knowledge practices. If our partners can get working capital right, they should be able to see how they can use similar skills in improving knowledge capital across the firm.

Re: The Dark Side of Collaboration

Mark Gould — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:42:37 -0000

Mary -- your McKinsey link needs fixing.

In a sense none of this is new. Organisations have wasted time on meetings, travelling, poorly designed projects and political struggles within teams for decades. One of the side-effects of focusing on technology-facilitated collaboration is that the "value question" should be asked of all collaboration -- not just that which takes place in blogs and wikis.

Re: Pretentious KM?

Mark Gould — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 16:35:26 -0000

I'm afraid you are right in your assessment of so-called KM activity. My best guess as to why this is so is that there is a longer tradition of information management, it is readily explained to and understood by businesses, and people go with that flow.

I think real KM is different from IM because it is forward looking. It isn't concerned with archiving but with exploring new mechanisms for creating value for the organisation from the collective knowledge of its people. That value comes (as Nonaka recognised) from actually tapping into people's tacit knowledge to create something tangible (not freezing the knowledge into a document, but making something of value). (I explored this back in July: http://blog.tarn.org/2009/0...

Dave Snowden's recent blogpost about the CKO role also has something to offer here: http://www.cognitive-edge.c...

Re: Pretentious KM?

Mark Gould — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:56:25 -0000

I think there is a bit of confusion here between outcomes and actions. For example, a wide range of business activities result in risk mitigation or cost reductions. Those would include financial management and risk management, as well as knowledge, information or learning activities. The difference, though, is in what is actually done. Financial managers actively identify ways of reducing working capital, for example, and risk managers maintain detailed risk registers. Learning professionals, or information/knowledge managers do not do those things.

All business activities are dedicated to improving the health of the organisation in their own way. Defining what those activities are turns on the meaning of "in their own way." The fact is that information managers work with different stuff in a different way from knowledge managers. This video from Nick Milton makes the distinction really clear for me: http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Re: True Productivity

Mark Gould — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:44:45 -0000

I think the question that needs answering is: what is the productivity that you are seeking? Doing the right things in the right way, as you describe here (and in your later post), requires a balance between a range of competing variables: the harm that a decision will prevent versus the harm that absence of action might cause; the need for speed versus time for consideration, and so on.

I recently bookmarked a couple of interesting posts on this question, both of which mention marathon runners. One (Peter Bregman, "To Get More Done, Slow Down") compares the need not to overtrain when preparing for a marathon with our apparent desire to fill a working day with continuous work. The other (Craig Roth, "Those Lazy Marathon Runners") highlights the difference between the performance of a marathon runner and a sprinter, showing the need to strike the correct pace for the task in hand. We can learn from both of these insights.

Re: Do They Give You Eggs for E2.0?

Mark Gould — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 12:20:12 -0000

Great story, Mary!

Of course, one of the leading lights in KM, Steve Denning, used story (and an African one at that) as a way of communicating the important of KM at the World Bank.

The story was a simple one. In June 1995, a health worker in a tiny village in Zambia logged onto the website of the Centre for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, and found the answer to a question on treating malaria. As Denning says, this was June 1995, not June 2015; this was not the capital of Zambia, this was a tiny village some 600KM away; and Zambia is not a rich country, it is one of the poorest in the world. “I’d tell the story and then ask, ‘Do you know what the most important part of this picture is for the World Bank? The World Bank isn’t in this picture. The World Bank doesn’t have its know-how organised to share with the millions of people that make decisions about poverty. But just imagine if it did; imagine what an organisation we could become.’” The story began to resonate, and on 1 October 1996, the World Bank held its annual meeting; the president, in front of 170 finance ministers, announced that the bank was going to become the ‘knowledge bank’.

(http://www.ikmagazine.com/x...

Re: Different types of content

Mark Gould — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 02:34:42 -0000

Many thanks for that pointer James.

Re: Different types of content

Mark Gould — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 11:32:06 -0000

I liked Mark Morrell's post too. I don't know if he is aware of James Robertson's work in Australia, but it is very similar. James identifies four basic purposes for an intranet: content, communication, collaboration and activity (http://www.slideshare.net/j.... The first two of these use the intranet as a static platform, whilst the latter two use it as a dynamic channel.

Your information types only refer to the content and communication roles for an intranet, although there is real scope for projects to be run through them using collaboration tools.

Re: Release the Enterprise 2!

Mark Gould — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:40:30 -0000

Coincidentally, I was reading your original MIT Sloan article today, and have written about it on my blog. Doubtless a trackback will appear here in the fullness of time, but I have some comments on how the model has fared with the passage of time, which are worth highlighting here.

As I see it, the promise of Enterprise 2.0 is to blend the channel with the platform: to use the content of the communication channel to create (almost without users knowing it) a content-rich platform.

What interests me your original article is (a) how little has changed in the intervening three years (which slightly undermines the call to the Harvard Business Press to rush the book to press), and (b) which of the SLATES elements still persist as critical issues in organisations. Effective search will always be a challenge for organisational information bases — the algorithms that underpin Google are effectively unavailable, and so something else needs to be simulated. Tagging is still clearly at the heart of any worthwhile Enterprise 2.0 implementation, but it is not clear to me with experience that users understand the importance of this at the outset (or even at all). The bit that is often missing is “extensions” — I think few applications yet deliver the smartness that you described.

However, the real challenge is to work out the extent to which organisations have really blurred the channel/platform distinction by using Enterprise 2.0 tools. Two things suggest to me that this will not be a slow process: e-mail overload is still a significant complaint; and the 90-9-1 rule of participation inequality seems not to be significantly diluted inside the firewall.

Your thoughts on these (and related) issues in a new article would be very welcome.

Re: Try One Frightening Thing

Mark Gould — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:49:50 -0000

Inevitably, of course, one can also learn from other people's frightening things. With that in mind, I should share the results of a cooking experiment some time ago.

Cod in red wine: don't do it. It is a very bad idea (and taste). A waste of good fish and good wine.

Re: Social Media’s Tower of Babel

Mark Gould — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:33:31 -0000

Mary,

You are right to emphasise neutrality. One of the important risks in asessing socially-driven signals is that groupthink develops extremely quickly, and powerfully. I see this sometimes in our own groups. We tend to follow the same people on Twitter, read similar blogs, and so on. (The 'we' here is universal, not just personal.) As a result, we often need someone to come from outside the circle to challenge the group view. "Tastes and circumstances" change, and people may not realise that they have changed (even their own) until they are shown a different view that is equally, or more, acceptable.

Re: Social Media’s Tower of Babel

Mark Gould — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:25:18 -0000

There is an additional problem, which is that one person's noise is another person's signal. Nick is right to give up on Facebook if the ratio is wrong for him and the purposes for which he wants to put it. The same could be said of Twitter. However, I can control the ratio on Twitter because I can choose who to listen to (and it is not necessarily the same group of people who listen to me).

I agree more with Doug, that we need to accept that there is more information than we need, and develop the tools to allow us to filter the flow in a way that suits us, rather than trying to limit the information made available in the first place. (This is Weinberger's "filtering on the way out.")

Re: Off-Route, Recalculate

Mark Gould — Thu, 07 May 2009 03:48:09 -0000

I have embellished my thoughts in a separate blog post: http://blog.tarn.org/2009/0...

Re: Off-Route, Recalculate

Mark Gould — Wed, 06 May 2009 03:33:39 -0000

Very interesting. Mary. I have one of those people in my car as well, but my interpretation of her behaviour is slightly different from yours.

For me, she is very good at applying all the information that she has (and I don't) about the road network (and some other points of interest) to help me get to the destination I specify. Occasionally I make a detour along the agreed route, but she is very amenable to finding a new way to get to the final destination. She also has an array of different ways to show the key information that I need, but she doesn't force me to choose any particular one of them (I can even see two different views at once if I want). Ultimately, her goal and mine are the same -- to reach the specified destination. Otherwise, she is happy to respect the decisions I make about the position of the steering wheel.

Sometimes, I need to change the intended destination. That is easily done, and all previous instructions are put aside without rancour. Her role, after all, is to support me in achieving my objectives.

I must confess, I find her a very useful companion. I certainly couldn't have driven all the way to Italy without her help -- no other navigator was available.

Re: Are These Social Media Relationships Real?

Mark Gould — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 14:20:34 -0000

That's an interesting example, James. I used to be a member of CIX, the UK equivalent of the WELL (it even used the same software). I know that some people on CIX developed the kind of relationships that are often associated with the WELL, but I didn't.

I think there is an appreciable difference between the collection of tools/means of expression/websites that make up Web2.0 and the old BBSs. If nothing else, it is possible to get a much more nuanced picture of someone from their blog plus twitter plus last.fm plus friendfeed etc, than it ever was from what people chose to show in short plain-text messages. As a result, although the human dimension doesn't change, it may now be closer to what you see online than before.

Re: What’s Your KM Priority?

Mark Gould — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 05:56:51 -0000

Very important point, Jason. When defining what KM is for, we often forget to explain why a particular activity is knowledge management, rather than general management. If we fail to do that, we fail to persuade people that KM is actually a distinct function, adding value to the firm in a way that no other function can.