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From the keyboard of Stuart Henshall, one of the most advanced thinkers about the “flows” of information combined with usability and innovation.
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“.
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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.
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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?
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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 ..
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Hot on the heels of a KMWorld conference that was more interactive, more Web 2.0 savvy and more open to new ideas than what I have experience ion the past, here’s a post by the ReadWriteWeb blog (one of the leading tech industry Web 2.0 blogs) reporting on the latest Pew internet research about the use of blogs in / at the workplace:
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It’s really a shame that more people aren’t reading blogs at work, and we don’t just say that because we’d like the increased readership. If you’re not reading blogs at work, you may not be doing your job as well as you could be. Below we discuss three advantages to reading blogs on the job and offer examples of the kinds of blogs that people could benefit from reading in three different non-tech professions.
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We recognize that the single biggest barrier to feeling justified in reading blogs on the clock may be that most people simply don’t know how to find the best blogs that are relevant to their work. For that we refer you to our recent post Comparing Six Ways to Find the Best Blogs on Any Topicand we discuss specific tactics you can use below.
Think there’s not blogs you should be reading on your particular job? We tested our theory in the second half of this post by finding the top blogs for Human Resources professionals, Physical Therapists and Fire Inspectors. We found good work blogs for them all!
Advantages
- Staying Up to the Moment on News
- Knowing What People Are Talking About
- Reference Resources
- But I Work In Field XYZ – Are There Blogs I Should Be Reading ?
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Each section has a concluding paragraph on pertinent and useful tools.
The blog post is well worth reading for all KM Professionals .. you can read the whole post here.
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Weltanschaung – definition: “wide worldview”
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.”
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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”
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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”
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Stuart Henshall – Founder & head of Mosoci (a US / India joint venture for marketing consulting)
Stuart wants to offer examples of leading edge tools and service to support working with knowledge flows.
From “what are you doing” (the question that Twitter uses to instantiate a flow of information .. to “Can you talk ?”
How do we escalate and manage “conversations” online?
Pew Internet research … 10% of 68% of Internet users read blogs at work.
Use of Twitter . who and why ?
Go outside of the organization, listen and learn, bring it back into the organization.
In twitter, the customers are “learning faster” than the organizations.
Important from a marketing point of view: If you’re not in the stream of conversation (as a company) you’re always going to be behind your customers.
Elements of knowledge flows today: Names, Numbers, Coordinates
No bridge between a world increasingly made up of names and the world of telephony (phone numbers).
“What will be the bridges be at the intersection of organizations, social media, communications and location?”
Skype – level of usage within organizations (not so great)
Other forms – there but mnot majority
Skype on a web page – 5 years, maybe three calls
People reluctant to interrupt other people (my interpretation)
Twitter – has become Stuart’s primary means of communication
What about following numbers – are you scared of following too many people ..
I respond “yes” .. because I think most people believe they are supposed to be paying attention to everyone they follow.
There are easy-to-use tools to allow us to capture nuggets (bookmarking) … to delicious or Diigo
Rather than that, people have started saving and posting URL’s to Twitter .. through Twurl (Twitter URL).
It is important to recognize that there are existing social networks underneath the Twitterverse, and it is also important to recognize that you must go about building up networks through sharing and developing trust .. without that interaction / feedback possibility there are risks that Twitter and similar services can be arid.
Twitter well suited to iPhone / mobile environment .. allows ongoing contact and exchange with followers (people ostensibly in your social networks) almost in real-time, all the time, wherever you are.
Zappos.com … everyone of their 100+ employees are on Twitter .. each and evryone is customer-facing and engaged with the outside world.
Conversation with the audience re: Twitter, ways of communicating
iPhone as a platform
Average kid has over 100 iPhone apps
iPhone as a platform
Revenue from iPhone Apps store expected to exceed revenue for iTunes platform by the end of next year (?) .. That’s amazing !
Facebook on the iPhone – screenshots showing presence and pictures
Interesting audience conversation abou the degrees and utility of being open and transparent, showing how much of you you want to let other people know ..
There are varying degrees of openness to how much information we should or want to share with others ..
Ongoing conversation about risks and opportunities of being identifiable and exposed online.
On to Mashups
How do they work ?
Mashups are useful in many ways, for many reasons
Problem – escalating communications has been (to date) clumsy
Demand is growing for seamless communications
Bringing things together, eg Lifestreaming, context / status updates, helplines / relief efforts
Phweet – smart links calling
Permission-based message requesting voice communications via SMS
http://phweet.com/6MPa
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From the keyboard and blog of dave Snowden:
Creating bigger needles
Coming in late to the keynote this morning, one I have been looking forward to on the links between search and knowledge. Peter Morville is the speaker. I’m late in part due to some editing duties on WIkipedia (trying to get support to rehabilitate a hopefully reformed sock puppet). So its a bit of surprise to sit down and hear the links between Wikipedia and Google being talked about. Good point made that we use Google to search for something, which then often leads us to a Wikipedia page on the subject. Wikipedia editors are in the main motivated by creating good content, so you have a symbiosis between content creation and search, something that the speaker advocates should be part of any organisational solution. Ten minutes in and this is good stuff. Have ordered his book while he speaks; this is what you come to conferences for.
There is a lot here so I am going to share my notes with the odd comment.
Talking about how top down architecture works with portals, controlled vocabularies etc. but won’t work in a modern environment where we need to look at what curent works in web 2.0. Key concept (and the title of his book) is Ambient Findability. His thesis is that finding your way around and finding things are beging to merge which is a good point.
Raises two major questions
- Practical - its hard to get attention, so should we be doing everything we can to make our ingormation findable moving from push to pull
- Philosophical - what is this doing to why we learn and the way we make decisions, is the quality of our decisions getting better
Illustrates the convergence of mobile devices with ambient awareness by referencing a watch that you lock onto your kid’s wrist and you can track where they go! I’m not sure I want to know to be honest and the ethics are a real issue. He makes this point, saying that customer reviews of the device did not say anything about privacy or child care, just complained about how the product worked. Big question – now we have the techology have we got the ethical understanding to hadle the consequences?
Talking now about tracking items, lovely idea of Googling to find out where you left your socks while lying on your bed! Back to privacy with a reference to David Brin’s The Transparent Society. I read the reviews of that and it seemed a bit libertarian but maybe I will look it up again.
Another wonderful image to make a question real: In a world where creating more and bigger haystacks how do we create bigger needles. Question is how do we describe the unique aboutness of our object so it could be found. Pleased to hear that he is sceptical about AI and agents but I’m not sure I agree with him on visualisation. Yes, lots of people have done things look good but aren’t useful. But we are only just touching the surface here. He argues that the librarians will help us! The internet will turn everyone into a librarian! Metadata and Librarians are sexy (this is going down well).
Good constructive criticism of everyone tagging with whatever they want. He says that most intelligent people have realised that there is too much hype around this and we need to strike a balance to be found in the middle. Agree fully here, its the idea behind the self-contrained signifier structures on SenseMaker™. I disagree with him here though. He says that in 5-10 years from now we will still be starting with a key word search box. I don’t see that and think it shows a lack of imagination.
Now it starts to get a bit frustrating. He says this is all a complex adaptive system. Great, agree, but that is it, no exploration of what that means. I can pick up in my closing keynote however. He moves to futures with lots and lots of examples which is useful (will get his slide set and study it). but we are now a bit light on praxis. You get the feeling that he should have spent more time on this. Great link here of design examples which he expands. I stop taking notes, this is great stuff but best to look at the slides.
Summarises that search is a wicked problem, highly uncertain etc. I agree, this guy has a lot more to say, but its over.
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Who are “we” ?
PwC … Three main service areas:
Assurance, Advisory, Tax
100 years old in Canada
One of Canada’s Ten Best Companies to work for
Part of a global network of member firms
In other words, a knowledge-services firm
So, for PwC employees …
When you go to work, the question is always “What is the problem?”
So, in effect, KM = idea generation and problem resolution = $$$’s
Gordon then introduces one of those consulting quadrant / matrix thingys, upon which he outlines that there are problems and issues that along the Y-axis (Decision Frequency) are defined as from routine through regular to unique, and along the X-axis (Decision Complexity) from simple through complicated to complex.
Lower-left – simple routine decisions involve repetition
Upper-middle / right – complicated to complex but unique involve innovation
Lower-left / center – regular and complicated, requires content management, information presentations
Upper-right – complex and unique, takes longer to resolve, demands networked collaboration, locating pertinent expertise, etc.
What Is networking ?
networking is: “Finding others and conversing with them”
Collaboration is: “Teams working together on tasks”
Some key characteristics of enterprise networks:
They already exist
They are personal, individual-based
Geography and history matter
Their value is hard to measure
Networking the Enterprise – some key questions
Who? Needs to network . . .
With whom?
Why?
What would help them?
Finding people – PwC uses PeopleFind (Gordon shows screen shot and discusses)
Context provided to employees through “leader messaging”
Rewards and recognition support the ongoing application of context and expertise to business problems.
Finding useful content: “How do I . . . . “ and acronym dictionary – wiki-esque
RSS readers employed to help employees stay up-to-date
For more on PwC Canada: www.pwc.com/ca
For more on our award-winning portal and collaboration tools see Microsoft Canada case study: http://www.microsoft.com/canada/casestudies/pricewaterhousecoopers.mspx
Intranets for improved decision-making (KMWorld 2006) http://www.kmworld.com/KMW06/presentations/IB302_Vala-Webb.pps
“Communication, Collaboration, and Content: Compelling Convergence” by Peter O’Kelly http://www.burtongroup.com/
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Peter Morville introduces the hexagram honeycomb of Findability …
Can users find our web site ?
Can users find their way around our web site ?
Are our web sites useful ?
Are our web aitws desirable ? Do we want them to be found ?
Are our web sites accessible ?
Is what we put on our web sites credible ?
Finally, is what is on our web sites valuable, to those who comne to our web sites and to us ?
Key words – the web’s equivalent of “location, location, location”
People tend to trust search results high up on search listsings
“Google defines your brand” ?
Case Study #1 .. National Institute of Cancer Research
They wanted to improve ability of users to get from home page to relevant content.
Vast majority of users not doctors or researchers, but members of the public who have an experience with cancer and want to know more about something.
PM – how did people get here in the first place ?
Cancer was the single most common query, but many searches on specific tyopes of cancer.
PM’s argument … not your mission to build a great web site, but to make content finable and useful.
Won a range of awards …
Good things can happen when you focus on findability
Case Study #2 – Enterprise Findability
Fortune 500 company – horrible, circa 1995
Enterprise Findability = IA + KM + Search (Information architecture + Knowledge management + search)
The Future
Any architect – physical or digital – needs to have one foot in the past and one foot in the future.
Bigger picture, longer-term trends – positioning to take advantage of trends
Findability (noun):
The qusality of being locatable or navigable
The degree to which an object is easy to discover or locate
The degree to which a system or environment supports wayfinding, navigation, etc.
Ambient (adj): encircling, surrounding, enveloping
In the past – the good old days (Librarians had power)
Chained Libraries in the past
Today drowning in increasing amounts of information
“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”
What is this doing to our ability to think, make decisions, etc.
Vast amounts of metadata, more interconnected and networked devices, etc.
“We ain’t seen nothing yet”
Convergence of mobile devices with location awareness ..
Example of GPS kid-locator
Morville – interesting to note that in reviews and comments very little about invasion of privacy, issues of control … mostly about the fact that the device did not work well enough.
Cisco wireless application … tag-and-track high-value objects (eg hospitals always losing wheelchairs, spend amazing amounts of staff time looking for wheelchairs).
Once you create infrastructure for this kind of technology, you can address the issues of wayfinding.
In a world where we are creating more and bigger information haystacks, how can we create bigger needles ?
People cannot shut up about metadata .. it’s become “sexy” (this is not your mother’s metadata).
Folksonomies (let people tag whatever / however they want) … Morville is stretching the point of ridicule about this simplicity, but on purpose)
Of course we still need to think about structure and order, we also need to acknowledge some of the useful and asy, user-friendly aspects of what Web 2.0 and social software has offered us to date.
Queries can evolve over the course of a serach .. iterative, interactive and supportive of learning
Therefore absolutely critical to whatever KM becomes .. search is a complex adaptive system (cue Dave Snowden’s work on sensemaking).
“How do we provide people with an intelligent useful “next step” ?
Behaviour Patterns (Narrow, Search & Browse & Ask, Pearl Grow)
Design Patterns (Best Bets, Query Disambiguation, Federated Search, Faceted Navigation, Auto-Suggest (Queries, Auto-Suggest (Results), Structured Queries, Social Search, Integrating Web 2.0 into Enterprise Search, Media Search, Making Interfaces Actionable, Drag-and-Drop, Infinite Scroll (anti-pattern), Colour and Shape Patterns, Spime Search (queries using RFID capabilities), Redefining what is meant by Search).
Other Emerging Issues – linking physical with virtual
He displayed a chart outlining ways to explore possible futures, and miscellaneous tools and services that can be explored
Search is a wicked problem, no definitive method, wide (infinite) range of user issues, problems never fully resolved, only way forward is to share and explore together.
Share, share, share .. he is building a pattern library.
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From the keyboard of Rebecca Jones over at the Dysart-Jones blog:
I’m delighted I’ve finally been able to hear and meet Jon Husband of wirearchy.com. Jon is one of the few, very few, people working with organizations to help them evolve their organization structures to support the collaborative technologies and resulting work behaviours. In most organizations there is this horrible disconnect between the hoopla about “working collaboratively” with “social networking tools” and the management practices, reporting relationships and performance expectations. As Husband says, the fundamentals about how we design work (& I add here, how organizations design themselves) hasn’t changed in 50 years. 50 years. Shesh. Organizations can talk the talk about “collaboration”, but to effectively implement collaborative tools and work behaviours they have to walk the walk of new organization structures, management practices and employment expectations and compensation.The hierarchical structure has been based on the belief that knowledge is arranged vertically. But this is no longer the case — now knowledge flows horizontally and chaotically (he didn’t use that term, but I think that’s an apt term — chaos isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all — out of chaos can come new thinking.)
Ok, so what does this mean for organizations? Well, it means that they will work “ok” for the time being, but until this issue is really addressed, the true benefits of all these technologies and people working collaboratively will not be realized. Husband says he’s bored with this. Me too. He also says that this issue will be addressed during the next ten years. I agree. He also talked about the fact that organizations have to choose different structures depending on what they need to accomplish. Yep – I agree there too. Kind of a blended structure approach. One structure sure doesn’t fit all.
 Husband also pointed to some other sources to explore on this topic, including Gary Hamel’s Future of Management , fredcavazza.net, Clay Shirky, and Canadians Don Tapscott and Dave Pollard. (Jon is also from Canada. Great, eh?) He
also referred to Malone’s Future of Work which I’ve used many, many times. But Malone’s work is now 4 years old, and I’m not as travelled as Jon is, but I just don’t see the organizations evolving their structures. So…. the next ten years will be interesting. But if organizations don’t get on with the changes required to their structures and management, then it could be even MORE interesting. I’m hoping to talk with Jon later today, and one of the issues I want to talk with him about is the impact of this on unionized environments — or maybe, to reframe that — the impact of the unionized environments on this…
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Jon Husband —
September 28, 2008 @ 1:18 am 
