I discovered Stan Garfield’s list of knowledge management Twitterers recently. There were 47 at the time and I was pleased to be included. About a third were new ones for me and I decided to follow most of them after checking out their recent tweets. Stan also has an excellent list of knowledge management bloggers.

Stan links to several other lists of knowledge management Twitters including David Gurteen’s KM Twitter list and Patrick DiDomenico’s KM Twitter List.

Stan also provided other KM Twitter groups to join: Twitter Groups Knowledge Management (KM) Practitioners and Flocks/KM.

I also discovered an interesting Twitter app – WeFollow. You can add your Twiter feed and pick three tags. You can also search by these tags to help decide what to choose and see who else is using these tags. I tried the tag, KM, and found  10,355  Twitterers sorted by popularity. The others I tried are listed below with the Twitters at the time of discovery.  The numbers have jumped by several thousand in each in the last few days.

You seem to be able to go back and register again and add more tags. However, they wipe out the old tags so you are limited to three. I ended up picking KM, knowledgemanagement, and enterprise 20 on my third try.

e20 – 7,869 sorted by popularity

enterprise20 – 13,347

KM – 10,355

knowledgemanagement – 3,998

This is another way to find relevant KM and enterprise 2.0 twitters. There is also the enterprise 2.0 Twitter list started by Susan Scrupski.

Twitter on.

I finally met Jane Dysart at the recent FASTforward09 conference and she graciously asked if I would like to join the group of bloggers she’s assembled here for the conference blog. I’m immensely flattered to be included in this group.

i started blogging about KM at McGee’s Musings while I was teaching the subject at the Kellogg School at Northwestern in 2001. To the best of my knowledge, I was the first person to incorporate blogging into a KM course, although I wouldn’t say the experiment was an unqualified success. My involvement in the field goes back to the early 1990s when I was part of the group at Ernst & Young’s Center for Information Technology and Strategy along with Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak. We tried to take a balanced position about the then nascent field of knowledge management between technology and organization. The technophiles had bigger marketing budgets and were willing to make grander promises. That’s unfortunate.

I also spent time as the CKO for Diamond Management & Technology Consultants. Today I consult with organizations about issues that I think fall under the umbrella of knowledge work and knowledge management. i still think the organizational dimension ultimately is more powerful than the technological. Not surprisingly, I’m a fan of Dave Snowden’s work and thinking. The place where I start these days, and where I plan to start with my posts here, is a wise observation from John Gall in his wonderful book Systemantics (now available as The Systems Bible):

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works.
                                         John Gall

Enterprise search is an integrated part of KMWorld 2009, especially  in Information Today‘s Enterprise Search West 2009.  But if you can’t wait until fall for great info about enterprise search, check out Enterprise Search Summit in New York City, May 12-13.

I attended the FASTForward ’09 conference last month  [my post, more info, Charlene Li, next gen & the enterprise].  It focused on enterprise search and Microsoft’s new releases. Here’s my FASTForward ’09 article for EContent.   And now Micorsoft  has a new white paper about enterprise search.  Here’s the note received from KMWorld magazine.

“Over the course of the last two years, Microsoft has recognized the strategic importance of Enterprise Search and has moved rapidly to develop / acquire search capabilities:

* November 6th 2007 – Microsoft releases MS Search Server
* January 8th 2008 – Microsoft acquires FAST
* SharePoint, with over 100 Million users, has an embedded engine

Download this free white paper to learn about each of Microsoft’s search offerings, and which one is right for your organization.”

Check out consultant and blogger Euan Semples latest post, Why HR, Comms & IT should be really excited about the social web.

A past speaker at KMWorld, Euan hits on a theme for KMWorld 2009 — People, Talent & Knowledge.   He says, “People are starting to do it for themselves. Increasingly staff are using web-based tools to perform some of the functions that have ostensibly been the responsibility of these departments. They are writing CV’s and finding jobs for themselves, even within the existing organisations, using Linkedin; they are using social sites like Facebook or blogs of to communicate with each other; and they are increasingly using flexible tools such as Google Documents and calendar to provide basic platforms for working together. They are showing imagination, energy and a willingness to do with it takes to get their job is done. These are qualities that organisations keep telling us they want their staff to have.”

Enterprise 2.0, or web 2.0 technology for the enterprise, is a major theme of KMWorld 2009, Nov 17-19.  It is interesting how lots of enterprises are just now beginning to test the waters.  Jet Blue Airways has rolled out a portal to share best practices for training and hopes that this pilot’s success with allow for enterprise-wide adoption of internal wikis and blogs.  CORT Business Services has adopted wikis and blogs to help foster internal collaboration across different departments to manage the workflow for its e-commerce site, which rents out home and office furniture and helps companies relocate employees to new locations.  Got more examples?  Please share them.

Bringing the Twitter-like Experience to the Enterprise, is a recent article about “Lisa Bertero Palmer, senior vice president of Davies, a public affairs firm, [who]  is in the process of rolling out an internal, Twitter-like experience for approximately 50 employees in geographically dispersed locations throughtout the country.”  She says, “it as a way to vastly increase efficiency while cutting down on e-mail….People will share pieces of knowledge or key actions they’ve taken throughout the day.”  The article talks about suppliers of this type enterprise 2.0 platform and analyst reaction.

I like the theme of this article about finding better solutions — 16 strategies for doing less with less, but I’m not so sure about some of the suggested strategies!

1. Lay it out in black & white
2. Focus on short-term wins
3. Slay your service level agreements
4. Max out your storage
5. Go open source
6. Consider refurbished equipment
7. Get virtual, but pick your spots
8. Clean out cobwebbed apps
9. Revoke unused licenses
10. Join the cloud crowd
11. Cover your SaaS (software as a service)
12. Slash your development cycles
13. Curb your email addiction
14. Reward your employees with vendor freebies (like training)
15. Give your staff a virtual raise (casual dress, more telecommuting)
16. Buy bagels (for staff)

Interesting that the last three strategies have to do with people, employees (why are they at the end?) — and I like them!   Our KMWorld 2009 theme is Resetting the Enterprise: Focusing on People, Talent & Knowledge. People are important to strategies, new ways of doing things, creativity, productivity, and so much more.  I say focus on the people first — involve them in creating better solutions.

If you want to learn about how the use of information is changing, you owe it to yourself to check out the videos of KSU Prof. Michael Wesch. Especially recommended:

The Information R/evolution

A Vision of Students Today

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Just read a post by web strategist, Len Devanna, where he talks about the EMC intranet.  He discusses how it went from an HR-driven project to a web team-driven success able to retire 32 home grown intranet sites in the 37,000 person organization.  His tips:  good design, infrastructure, enable people to do it themselves.  Read more and hopefully hear him speak at KMWorld 2009, Nov 17-19, San Jose.  And if you have a great intranet story from your organization, please consider sending us a proposal to speak at KMWorld 2009.

McKinsey recently issued a useful report on six ways to make Web 2.0 work. They are covering Web 2.0 inside the enterprise so I rename their topic enterprise 2.0 for clarity in my own mind.  They studied more than 50 early adopters to garner insights into successful efforts to use Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation surveyed, independently, a range of executives on Web 2.0 adoption.  They found that unless a number of success factors are present, Web 2.0 efforts often fail to launch or to reach expected heights of usage. They also said that enterprise 2.0 might end up having a greater impact that such recent enterprise approaches as ERP and CRM.  So far I agree with them.

Then I looked at their six success factors. Not only did I agree with them, but these six were some of the exact same success factors we found for process centric KM in the early 90s, at least at the headline level. Now some of the details are a little different to no surprise but the essence is the same. I am not saying that KM and enterprise 2.0 are the same but I think their success factors are similar so we can learn from the past. In addition, there is an historic continuity of the early process-centric KM and enterprise 2.0 when it is applied to business processes. I touched on these factors a bit in this series on early KM (see KM Stories: Lessons from Six Implementations).

Here are the six success factors McKinsey found for enterprise 2.0 and why they were essential for process-centric KM, and still are. I will let you go to the McKinsey report for the details of what they provide to enterprise 2.0.

One: The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.  I called this: Gain and Enlist Top Down Support to Overcome Turf Issues. I could have subtitled it in the early 90s as creating a culture of knowledge sharing from the bottom up. I also think that with process-oriented enterprise 2.0 you also need to overcome turf issues and top down support is needed for this effort.

Two: The best uses come from users but they require help to scale. Our research shows the applications that drive the most value through participatory technologies often aren?t those that management expects. I referred to this factor as Listen to the Users. Success is usually directly proportionate to the amount of user involvement. We turned to the process experts to build the KM supported need for these processes. In the past many firms had enterprise software that dictated process steps imposed on the users. Many of the users resisted this top down approach. So the involvement of users not only got the software right, it helped with adoption.

Three: What?s in the workflow is what gets used. For KM this was called – Align Knowledge Applications to Key Business Goals and Process as well as Design Measures Aligned to Business Processes. I have long thought that process centric KM is much more valuable than library centric KM. The later was what gave KM a bad name. The process centric approach was my introduction to KM and the better tools in enterprise 2.0 are a way to realize this approach.

Four: Appeal to the participants? egos and needs not just their wallets – traditional methods tend to fall short when applied to unlocking participation.  One way to do this is to address the daily business needs of the users or Design Performance Measures Aligned to Business Processes.  If you put the tools into the workflow you will generally achieve this objective. Financial incentives that are for things that do not directly support work are domed to failure or gaming or both.

Five: The right solution comes from the right participants select users who will help drive a self-sustaining effort (often enthusiastic early technology adopters who have rich personal networks and will thus share knowledge and exchange ideas).  We always looked to the evangelists to aid in the spread of KM. It is no different here.

Six: Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. Numerous executives we interviewed said that participatory initiatives had been stalled by legal and HR concerns.  One way to avoid these obstacles is to involve all the key stakeholders from the start, another KM best practice.  I remember when the legal department at one firm said they wanted to review everything that went into the KM system before it was placed there.  That bottleneck would have killed the system. The legal department had not been involved from the start, a lesson learned. We were able to negotiate a compromise approach that allowed the project to move forward.

In summary, when you attempting to get people to embrace a new technology and business approach such as enterprise 2.0 that involved greater participation, lessons can be learned from the relevant past. I also think the similarity helps validate the six factors that McKinsey found.