So for the longest while, Google has been the boogie bear of taxonomists, with senior executives lying in wait to pounce on innocent taxonomy projects with the battle cry “why do we need a taxonomy, let’s just get Google!”.

We’ve known for years that Google uses classification in its search algorithms and in its ancillary services but today Google finally came clean with its new Knowledge Graph service “With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries.” Is that taxonomy work or is that taxonomy work?

Sitting behind Knowledge Graph is a 500 million entity ontology, with 3.5 billion defined relationships and attributes – though the words ontology or taxonomy are never used. Exciting in itself, as it evidently exploits the growing maturity of the semantic web and linked data, and the intelligence you can extract from billions of search patterns, to enhance taxonomy work in unprecedented ways. But also a major vindication for the faithful few who have remained steadfast in their belief in taxonomy over magic. BTW, I’m hoping to explore some of these “taxonomy beyond the enterprise” themes in a keynote at Taxonomy Bootcamp later this year. The times they are a changing!

So for the longest while, Google has been the boogie bear of taxonomists, with senior executives lying in wait to pounce on innocent taxonomy projects with the battle cry “why do we need a taxonomy, let’s just get Google!”.

We’ve known for years that Google uses classification in its search algorithms and in its ancillary services but today Google finally came clean with its new Knowledge Graph service “With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries.” Is that taxonomy work or is that taxonomy work?

Sitting behind Knowledge Graph is a 500 million entity ontology, with 3.5 billion defined relationships and attributes – though the words ontology or taxonomy are never used. Exciting in itself, as it evidently exploits the growing maturity of the semantic web and linked data, and the intelligence you can extract from billions of search patterns, to enhance taxonomy work in unprecedented ways. But also a major vindication for the faithful few who have remained steadfast in their belief in taxonomy over magic. BTW, I’m hoping to explore some of these “taxonomy beyond the enterprise” themes in a keynote at Taxonomy Bootcamp later this year. The times they are a changing!

Patrick’s taxonomy development infographic has sparked off a little friendly competition in the office. The infographic you see above is my attempt at explaining the different pieces of an intranet puzzle that KM practitioners may have to deal with, and how they all fit together.

This is the link to the pdf version – Intranet_Poster.pdf. Note that it is formatted for A2 size and you will need to set your printer to print within paper size for smaller sizes.

I would like to commend Patrick for his sportsmanship, for even though my poster is evidently better than his, it did not hold him back from providing some of the explanations that you see on the poster.

Here’s an interactive version of the Taxonomy Development Poster I posted yesterday:

.prezi-player { width: 500px; } .prezi-player-links { text-align: center; }

How to Build a Taxonomy on Prezi

Here is a poster design I’ve been working on for a while – it summarises the empirical, evidence based taxonomy development process we recommend.

This is the link to an A4 pdf version.
This is the link to an A3 pdf version.

We’re going to look at costs/prices for printing this on high quality poster paper and shipping it if there’s a demand. Let us know!

Here is a poster design I’ve been working on for a while – it summarises the empirical, evidence based taxonomy development process we recommend.

This is the link to an A4 pdf version.
This is the link to an A3 pdf version.

We’re going to look at costs/prices for printing this on high quality poster paper and shipping it if there’s a demand. Let us know!

Since a few months there is a big trend on the web: visualisation of data and information. It is definitely not a new trend, though it is accelerating fast; new tools like visua.ly have been launched and Pinterest has developed to the third most popular social sharing tool in 2012. Why is this the trend happening, and what can we learn from it in the context of knowledge sharing and social collaboration?

In our current world two things are happening: we are exposed to much more data and information; and we are overwhelmed with these with an increasing speed. Pictures, photos, illustrations, visualisations are not only eye-catching but also help us to grasp the content much faster. In the past, overviews of news have been a simple list of headlines. Illustrations help readers to make quick (not necessarily right) decisions to jump to an article or not. Many tools take advantage of that and two show-cases are Pulse News and Google Currents.

What does this mean for knowledge management and social collaboration?

Myself, I have started using Stacks on delicious.com; I chose this tool mainly because I already use Delicious for managing my bookmarks and it’s neatly integrated. The stacks display the links in two columns with a paragraph of text plus a photo if available; actually, it looks more like a newspaper than a boring list of links. Please find here an example I have created: the User Adoption stack. This design is much more attractive for our target audience and they will be more willing to continue reading; that is the reason why we should create collections in this way.

Some time back Maish wrote and article about designing collections for the web and I really like the four objectives of collections mentioned: make it easy to contribute, easy to find items; allow grouping of existing and the discovery of new items. Illustrations help especially with the finding and the discovery of news. The people’s visual eye will quickly respond to the items they are most interested in; even before they start reading the headline itself. On the other hand, categorisation help to achieve the other two objectives, contributing and grouping.

Via the status updates, users of social collaboration tools can quickly share links to interesting articles, documents and other resources. This is great sharing and a source of a wealth of interesting information. Though, just a few weeks later it is surprisingly difficult to retrieve these links which could be for example very valuable for people joining a team. Next to the news feed, we should also focus on creating collections of links that are relevant for a certain topic; these collections could be “wiki pages” of links; “wiki” in the sense that a group of people are curating the content and maintaining the links. The links in these collections can be anything from intranet pages, policies, discussion threads, manuals, presentations, people profiles and additional resources from the public web like articles, online tools, etc. To make these link collections attractive, we should use tools that present them in a useful design and make (re-)discovery simple and fast.

In which scenarios could we use these visual link collections? Here some ideas:

• at the start of a project to collect benchmarks and lessons learnt
• when doing research for a new concept or a presentation; and these collections could be shared with the target audience
• company and team introductions referring to to the most important resources
• collections supporting training curricula for specific roles
• publishing of news which is aggregated from various resources
• collections of content for a specific topic which can be shared with customers and employees

Try out one of the mentioned tools and let me know how you would use visual collections.

Venkatesh Rao over at Forbes has a perceptive article on the recent trend of the enthusiasm for “big data” resulting in everybody laying claim to the title “Data Scientist”. But his comments have strong resonances with all sorts of hype-responses – KM suffered from this in the early years and every claim for a replacement therapy/technology for KM ever since has done so too. Here’s the relevant section of Venkatesh’s post – sound familiar?

“At any given technology conference, you will find the following types:

• People with chips on their shoulders about being marginalized by the new trend.
• Long-ignored people who suddenly find that they’ve turned into stars, blinking in the spotlight.
• People who feel under-appreciated and powerless.
• People who cannot believe how much power they suddenly have.
• People who secretly feel like fakes and are feeling either gleeful or ashamed about it.
• People who are cleverly switching out their titles from the last hyped fad for the closest one they can find in the new one.
• People upset that other people are taking credit for their old wine by putting it into new bottles.
• Older people insisting nothing has changed (read: “therefore I am still the expert” ).
• Younger people insisting everything has changed (read “the old fogeys know nothing; hire me instead” ).
• People excited by anything new and shiny, whether or not they understand it.
• Jaded people on paid-for junkets.
• Uber-sociable types for whom it is all one big party.”

In this TED talk, filmwriter Andrew Stanton has an interesting turn of phrase about what makes stories compelling: “A well organized absence of information draws us in.”

I had a fantastic time at the AIIM conference in San Francisco last week, and Clay Shirky’s keynote was one of the highlights. This video of a TEDx talk by Ben Heywood of social media sharing site Patientslikeme.com gives a moving example, quoted by Shirky, of the power of social media as a platform for gathering data, and with a research back-end, creating near real-time insight into treatment possibilities as well as empowering patients to deal more effectively with their own conditions. What I think nobody has noticed is the powerful role that a faceted taxonomy plays in this story. Visit the site and see if you can spot what facets are being used to pull data together for deep analysis as well as sharing and self-empowerment.

Underneath this is another emerging trend. We know that social media is being leveraged as a source of data for marketing and market analysis. This case illustrates how powerful it can be in the use of large scale data for new knowledge creation. Crucially, it cannot do this on its own – the formal world of research and the informal world of social media exchanges need to connect. Helping to span these boundaries is where knowledge organization tools like taxonomies play an essential role.

I’m honoured to be on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Management published by National-Louis University in Poland. There’s a call for papers now out for three special issues in 2012 – on Technology Entrepreneurship, New Concepts of Management (including KM) and Innovations. If you have some interesting work on the boil, take a look and consider submitting!

With great interest I have read Roan Yong’s “Knowledge Management in 2012? Probably Dead”. And yes, I agree to what he has stated: KM got too academic - or always was? And the social web will be what will replace it. Roan’s article triggered more thoughts which are too long to just pack in the article’s comments: there are more problems of today’s KM than to be blown up; and why the social web is KM at it’s core.

Knowledge Management as it started was focused on activities and tools which are additional tasks outside people’s daily work. In the book ‘The New Edge in Knowledge’ this is referred to as “Above the Flow”. This book also mentions that we should focus more on “In the Flow” activities; things we know for long as personal KM or simply knowledge management embedded in people’s daily work. In my own field, I have been pushing for this integration and slowly our company starts to understand it’s value and we start to embark on this journey. What has enabled this move? First, we have realized that it’s very difficult to ask for additional efforts in times of a economic downturn; though, the value of knowledge sharing is still understood. The other driver for embedding KM in the flow is technology:

• consumerisation of business applications has led to a faster user adoption
• cloud-based solution drive people to store their information in a central location which makes sharing and collaboration easier
• mobile applications allow continuous, ubiquitous use of business tools
• social business applications have matured and are now available for large vendors

Roan argues that morphing KM into Social Business; and yes, I agree. But wait? Isn’t social business at it’s core and we just avoid to say The Word? Classic business applications did focus information transactions: send an e-mail, read a report, record a client visit, buy a new gadget, etc. The social web adds a new layer to these transactions: context! And isn’t information plus context equal to knowledge? At least I would argue that. Before we make the decision to buy the latest tablet we check our social context for feedback; when we summarise the client visit we add in the client’s twitter feed; when I receive an e-mail I see which documents, discussions, friends I share with the sender, etc.

For me, Social Web means that Knowledge Management has finally arrived.

Photo credit: Jordanhill School D&T Dept

I will be speaking to a group of HR professionals on the confluence of KM and HR (webpage). I am interested in the intersections of both business disciplines, and how one might support the other in better managing their organisation’s human capital. The choice of topic is motivated by a frequent realisation in KM projects that success is often dependent on engaging - and having engaged - HR colleagues. There are several areas where I think HR and KM can work together.

In job interviews they identify candidates who demonstrate a propensity to share rather than hoard what they know. They look for candidates who maintain strong external professional networks that can be tapped into for knowledge and information.

In onboarding, they provide a map of what knowledge is critical to their business and where they can be found. Where tacit knowledge is concerned, they broker the necessary connections. They emphasise the employees’ role in updating staff profile and directory. By the same token they also stress “quality in, quality out” for information repositories.

That knowledge management is a line manager’s responsibility is promulgated through job descriptions. That knowledge sharing is an important competency is reinforced through competency frameworks.

In succession planning they help identify what knowledge the next cadre of leaders should possess, and figure out ways to bridge the knowledge gaps. They do this by reducing the responsibilities of would-be retirees and by tasking them to be mentors or coaches to their successors – with the blessing of top management of course.

How else do you think HR and KM can work together?