Stuart helped out with the blogging at the just-ended KMWorld and also gave a presentation on the last day about how people are beginning to use Twitter to connect, stimulate, catalyze and coordinate flows of information.

I thought he did a great job of outlining interesting possibilities .. but it seems he made some people nervous and some people stretch their minds.  That may be because he has been immersed in the world of constant micro-flows of information and mobility for the last half-year while many of those at KMWorld are just now beginning to come to terms with blogging, using wikis and social computing.  There may be one of those classic mismatches, the kind that lead to phrases like “You can always recognize the pioneers, they’re the ones walking around with arrows sticking out of their backs“.

.

Accelerating Innovation, Knowledge Innovation

Social Media or KM / KM or Social Media

 

I sat in earlier on a session on the Future of KM. There are three very different people on the panel. I’ve been listening with half an ear. This means what I write may have nothing to do with the context of the session. However, part of the reason we come to events like this is to spark other thoughts and tangents.

So far today I’ve not heard the word “flows”, I don’t hear “lifestreaming” I still feel what I am hearing is that knowledge is to be managed, moved, manipulated. Plus I just heard Dave Pollard say that SARS, 9/11, Katrina etc were all failures of classic knowledge management. I can’t quite put my finger on why KM isn’t learning and moving forward more quickly. It suggests to me that there remains a bigger problem.

Individuals are increasingly using personal tools, blogs, wikis, social networks, mobile phone, etc. As they move into this realm publicly they create more information about themselves. I’m increasingly seeing these tools being put to use by marketing / PR. KM seems to be missing these social media implications. Thus adoption of these tools is not being driven by the need to manage knowledge. Rather it’s driven by responding faster, being more adaptive, building on what others do, opening up systems so they can find that they need just in time. It’s a learning centric approach. I see it when I go to blogging sessions and talk to people there. The difference is they are believers.

[ Snip ... ]

I’m thinking more and more that the social media experts are likely to usurp or overturn many KM practices in time. The fact that SAP, Oracle and IBM are today all working with Twitter like updates is at least encouraging.

Maybe they can still sell a knowledge platform?

.

At this very same conference one year ago Stuart wrote a post with which I agree 100% … while people in companies and business everywhere are looking for business case or ROI justification for using social media tools (while understanding semi-consciously that of course useful knowledge gets built in social interaction) they have to work (and experiment) at overcoming a lifetime of working in environments that divide and separate problems, responsibilities and challenges into discrete and divided bundles of tasks that are supposed to fit together like an orderly paint-by-numbers-like template (by which I mean an organizational chart).

To understand how using social media to increase effectiveness, responsiveness and innovation in an environment characterized by constant flows of information, you have to Use the Tools First; Then Talk To Me.

Read the whole post on a possible future for KM here .. 

You can see his presentation online here.

Taxonomy impacts search in four key areas:  query pipeline, results pipeline, user/interaction analytics, indexing pipeline.

Evaluating search vendors against taxonomy criteria shows leaders including Endeca, Fast.

Information access sytems are complex and heterogeneous and include: interface, search system, content.  Enterprise search is used to crawl content, or federate to it, or leave some behind.  Not all content is equal or valuable.  Scope matters and communicating it is tricky — do you want multiple search boxes on one portal page?

So where should you invest your taxonomy effort?  With content — controlled vocabularies, browsing structures, social tagging and user profiling.  In the search system — entity extraction, custom intelligence, clustering/classification.  In the interface — navigation, facets, social tagging, user profiling.

Taxonomy coupling with search and enterprise content management (ECM) — align your taxonomy efforts with both ECM and search to fast forward your efforts.

Suggestions:  Align taxonomy initiatives with business objectives and technology investments — and show something so understanding will come.  Accept and influence your dynamic ecosystem.  Be perceptive and pertinent to the needs of your audience.  Dig in and deliver results.

Great visuals and slides here.

.

Introduction of Dave Snowden - Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge - KM for many years, co-founder of IBM Centre for Organisational Complexity, leading thinker about advances in the use and “management” of knowledge

Focus on effective system design and project management - a look at existing methods and also emerging methods

Forecasting systems - often require high degrees of human intervention

Cadbury Schweppes forecasting - Two-Bin Replenishment (not so long ago)

Case study - depot managers … wary of “perfect” black box systems that forecast perfectly … have and hold secret stocks that can be pulled out to replenish in emergencies

Co-creation of human intervention and functioning-of-systems to arrive at optimal overall functioning

Dave moves into a story (he often conveys his messages via stories that demonstrate extremes of poor sense / logic countered by good sense (and vice-versa)).  The story is about the “good ole days” of It and linear thing .. to set up his core message today about cvo-evolution

The brain and language have co-evolved (brain structures have changed and evolved over time as a function of language .. and of course language changes and grows over time).

No deep structures in language … The brain does not have a grammar gene.  And brain chemistry has also shown us that we never remember things quite the same way twice

Key concepts

- “everything”" is fragmented (summaries often made too shallow and general)

- RSS feeds are fragmented raw material

- Why in KM are we trying to put more and more summarized material into portals

Pattern-based decisions (humans are pattern-recognition animals)

- only machine like, linear and logical humans that process information in linear, logical ways are autistic

- most of us are “messy” .. in the ways we do things, the ways we navigate and use information

- most of us work in cycles between mess and order (which Snowden suggest is a very effective way to structure one’s life .. provides the means of refreshing to meet current context and conditions)

- example of choosing a new RSS reader to match current way of thinking and working (rather than being forced to use what IT thinks it is best for you to use)

Complexity & constraint

Children’s party story … (Summary here from last year’s Snowden keynote blogged by Stuart Henshall … “Looking at a children’s party story. Imagine organizing a party for 12 year old boys. My notes are a little cryptic on the description here. First how will you manage? A chaotic approach buy drugs and alcohol so they can go on a journey and so what if the house is destroyed. A social approach will have a mission statement, a project plan for the party , and clear milestones.. and the senior adults should start the party with a video and then use ppt to demonstrate their personal commitment etc. so it will conclude with an after action review and mandate future….

Let’s approach it as if we create an environment that we know has both good attractors and bad attractors. We can create an environment and see what they play. Then we have to have a scanning capability to see what happens. If you manage an ecology you can amplify and disturb but you most stand aside from the system and watch. You cannot have a fail-safe design approach. You must take a safe-fail approach. This is very similar to serious play and prototype to action and beta type approaches.”

      ………………………………………….

Boundaries and safe-fail systems, amplify what works and manage for emergence, dampen what doesn’t work or is offering negative outcomes … manage the emergence.

Another example of daughter’s 16th birthday party … setting of boundaries and design constraints (Dave used on-loan British government-supplied electronic surveillance system)

Scanning is critical in complex environments … need to be able to see the patterns emerging

Move from fail-safe design to safe-fail experimentation

Distributed cognition (add layers of meaning to existing content) 

Natural Numbers (5, 15, & 150)

- 5 … natural limit of what someone can remember (actually, 5 plus-or-minus 2)

- 15 … maximum number of people who can trust each other simultaneously (correlated with size of nuclear family in society in which you grow up) … dave introduces age-stages of neuro-plasticity

- 150 … Dunbar’s number - maximum size of social grooming effectiveness (number of people you can have some kind of effective relationship with)

Existing Methods

Narrative-based capture methods 

- after two or three interviews, massive problem with cognitive bias from those first interviews

- meaning not contained in the content, but in the metadata associated to the content

- Dave mentions “fitness landscapes”, a key capability of his Sensemaker suite of software

Cross silo self-forming teams 

Managing Emergence

Emerging methods

Crews

- establishing clear roles based on patterned behaviours, in order to set, manage and work from expectations

- crews can delegate authority without loss of status

Coherence Mapping

- capture user requirements in narrative capture form, and then go and capture all capabilities in existent software, and the merge / compare / contrast to identify patterns that suggest where there are matches and coherence.

Cynefin model

Formal - waterfall, time and resource -based project management (nothing wromg with this in complicated but known situations )>150

Expert - expert-based research, prototyping, testing and modelling, <150

Informal (complex) - SNS, reward to solve problem, parallel working (approx. 15)

Crisis - rapid assembly of SWOT teams (< 5, Crews can be used here)

Lincoln - “We need to think and act anew”

.

Opening slide:

“Knowledge management was a theory or rather a Weltanschaung supported by dysfunctional technology, while social computing represents an increasingly functional technology utilising dysfunctional & outmoded theory”