Category: Knoco

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Since returning from Abu Dhabi

I have been back for a week and am getting over the jet-lag, I have been working on finishing up deliverables for my client in Abu Dhabi and doing a bit of marketing for my Ark Group report that was published last week 🙂 (they tell me it was selling well in the pre-publication period, so I am happy about that).

I need to review and update my marketing/business development activities based on things I have learned and done over the last 18 months.

The project in Abu Dhabi was good because I got to work with my Knoco (www.knoco.com) business partners and become more familiar with their KM model and get to know them better (thanks Nick Milton and Tom Young for the opportunity). I hope to work with them again soon.

What I learned in Abu Dhabi:

  • wear a hat if you’re going to be outside in the sun for very long;
  • after a few days of 40-42 degrees Celcius, 30 feels cool;
  • don’t walk unless you absolutely have to;
  • LuLu Hypermarket is a great place to go for groceries;
  • sand gets everywhere;
  • ask for suggestions of things to go out and do, and then go and do them;
  • learn the building names and landmarks, no one uses street addresses;
  • take a fleece for the hotel.
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Community of Practice: Metrics and Health Check

This is my piece that was included in the Knoco spring newsletter, which can be accessed here: https://www.knoco.com/Knoco%20newsletter%20spring%2011.pdf

When a community program has been running for 1-2 years it is important to perform a health check on the individual communities and the program as a whole. Performing this type of review ensures that the individual communities and the program are both providing value to the participants and the organization.

Examples of metrics that assess the health of individual communities include calculations for number of problems solved by the community and related income increases or expense decreases. There are also usefulness surveys where users evaluate how useful the community has been in helping them accomplish their objectives. These surveys can include anecdotes from users describing (in quantitative terms) how the community has contributed to organizational objectives. The metrics used may change over time and may be customized for the length of time a community has been in operation.

Overall community metrics may take an aggregate of the individual community metrics, but there may also be calculations for the overall impact of the community program. Such things as decreases to learning curves, increases to customer satisfaction, reductions in rework, increases in innovation or decreases in attrition rates.

Collecting these types of metrics on an annual basis helps to remind staff of the value of the community program and ensure that it continues to add value to the organization.

 

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Some Thoughts about Knowledge Assets

The term Knowledge Asset always takes me back to my first career after my undergraduate graduation: accountant. In addition to defining knowledge asset, and discussing how to manage them, which are secondary thoughts in my accounting mind, I think about valuation, after-all if something is an asset, it has a value.

How do we value knowledge assets? Is it the cost to acquire the knowledge? Things like the cost of courses and books, and experience gained over a period of time. Is it what someone else would pay to obtain the knowledge immediately instead of going through the learning curve? Is it the opportunity cost: the cost of lost business or productivity, the cost of a missed connection?

Some of these are more easily determined than others. It is relatively easy to determine the cost of a course or a book, or to determine the cost of a degree or certificate. How is the cost of a missed connection or opportunity to leverage a previous project determined? How do you know what the cost is if you didn’t know that the opportunity existed?
For example, if instead of creating a document management application for your organization, you find that your organization has already purchased one off-the-shelf that you can use, what’s the opportunity cost and do you get credit for saving the company the months of development and implementation time as well as the quicker time to become productive (because you can start using the system within a month instead of 18 months from now)?

The 2009 MAKE (Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises) Report finds that “[t]he 2009 Global MAKE Winners trading on the NYSE/NASDAQ showed a Total Return to Shareholders (TRS) for the ten-year period 1999-2008 of 9.6% – over four times the average Fortune 500 company median.” How do we take this and translate it into the business case for better management of knowledge assets, whether they are tacit or explicit?

All of these things fly around in my brain when I think about Knowledge Assets, I don’t have a quick answer, other than to say pick whichever valuation method makes sense in the situation and use it to build your business case.

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Collaboration

What does collaboration mean to you? Does it mean doing what you’re told? How about finding someone else to do the work? Telling someone else what to do?

I hope none of those are your definitions of collaboration, and I hope that your definition of collaboration looks nothing like any of those.

Wikipedia defines collaboration the following way:
“Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus. Most collaboration requires leadership, although the form of leadership can be social within a decentralized and egalitarian group.” or at least it did the day I wrote this, April 5, 2010 at 9:14am EDT.

I like this definition of collaboration, but it does not always mirror my experience of collaboration. I like this definition because it talks about working together for common goals; sharing, which is a big part of Knowledge Management; building consensus; and that leadership comes through a decentralized and egalitarian group. I really, really, like this last part.

Leadership can come from anywhere and when I am working on a team that is collaborating effectively leadership does come from anywhere and everywhere, it is not hierarchical or command and control style. Everyone contributes, and everyone reaps the benefits. Everyone gets a chance to have a voice and contribute to the end product, diversity of opinion is valued and the end product is better than any one of us could have done on our own.

Unfortunately, I have also worked with groups/people that do not collaborate effectively. They wait for someone else to do the work, make things happen. Wonder why deadlines are missed, why communication is a challenge, or why the team doesn’t function effectively.

Things happen too quickly now, in this information age, with instant or near instant access to information. No one can know it all, if we don’t work together towards our goals, breaking down hierarchies, which only slow things down, we will be left behind, and no one wants that.

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Succeeding at Change in a Knowledge Worker World

The only thing that is certain is death and taxes…and change. Many organizations spend thousands of dollars on knowledge management technology solutions, focusing on the technology, because the technology is easy to focus on, it’s visible: buying the servers, installing the software, testing it, releasing it, those are activities that are very visible. Involving stakeholders in the software selection process, understanding what helps versus what hinders them in their performance, providing training, communicating, these are invisible, “soft” activities. Soft-skills/activities are often ignored, or down-played in organizations, sometimes it’s because of cost, sometimes it’s a lack of understanding of their importance, sometimes because there’s “no time.”

Projects fail because of this lack of attention to soft-skills, especially Knowledge Management projects. With Knowledge Management projects knowledge workers have already found a way to get their jobs done, it may not be the most efficient and effective way to get it done, but they get it done, that’s who they are. They may miss opportunities to share and leverage other people’s experience or create something new because they didn’t know there was a possibility to share/leverage/create, but they get their job done. In implementing a Knowledge Management project knowledge workers are being asked to do things differently, whether that’s share information in a repository or micro-blogging site, or participate in a Community of Practice; chances are it’s different than what they are doing now, and they will keep doing their “old way of doing things” unless they are given a reason to change.

Why/how do people change their behaviours? Because they have a reason to change, they understand the “what’s in it for me.” A good program manager will have included key stakeholders in the whole process from the strategy and requirements gathering stages to roll-out to the organization. Stakeholders, who include front-line employees who will be using the system, have contributed their needs and requirements to the selection of the technology, so the technology is actually supporting them, not causing more work. Connecting with stakeholders is critical, this helps them understand the change that is coming and to have influenced it so that they can feel proud of what’s being build and act as change agents with their peers, when the time comes to start using the technology.

Once the connection is made, communication has to maintain and inform the relationship. Tell the stakeholders the truth, own up to any changes in the plan or scope or functionality, the situation will only get worse if the organization tries to hide or sugar-coat changes that were not agreed to by the team.

Communication and training will drive the adoption and acceptance of the technology and process changes. The IT team can get the technology 100% right, and if they ignore the people and process side of the equation, they will fail. These people and process side often gets cut or short circuited when budgets tighten, this is short sighted. Better to reduce the scale of the project or extend a timeline than to skimp on training, communication, and involvement of stakeholders. If the organization has time to do it wrong and fail and fix it, then they have time to get it right the first time at a much lower cost than doing it wrong and then fixing it.

Involving stakeholders in all stages of the process, ensuring that the technology enables them and that they have the communication and training that they need to be successful, will ensure that the organization’s Knowledge Management investment will have an ROI to be proud of.

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Knoco.ca

Just a quick blog post to let everyone know that I am now the Canadian Franchisee for Knoco Ltd., www.knoco.com. Knoco is a Knowledge Management consultancy based in the U.K. and with franchises in South Africa, USA, India, and Indonesia, as well as training partners in Spain. They offer KM people and process consulting, and training. I am excited by the opportunities that this expansion in my network and services will bring. You will see some changes to my website over the next while, although my Missing Puzzle Piece Consulting branding will remain unchanged and I will continue to do the business-IT alignment work in the KM domain that I have always done.