Knowledge Matters™

"Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the cat.
"I don't much care where," said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the cat.

This quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sums up knowledge management for me - it's a frustrating discipline! It's frustrating because as a discipline it seems to be directionless. It's frustrating because some practitioners claim almost anything to be managing knowledge. I often liken these practitioners to Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty who said in a rather scornful tone, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." It is precisely a lack of shared understanding and common meaning that causes so many problems.

So what's the solution? One way of solving this problem might be to position oneself in a ‘school of knowledge management'. But what are the schools? Yesterday I came across an article by Professor Michael Earl which answers this question. It's titled ‘Knowledge management strategies: towards a taxonomy', and was published in the Journal of Management Information. Despite being published in 2001 it's well worth a read.

Earl says knowledge management approaches can be positioned into three primary schools - the technocratic, economic, and behavioural. Each of these schools has distinct attributes, philosophies, focuses and units of analysis. I don't agree his attribute and philosophy rows, which I think should be reversed. My take, which is otherwise true to his article, reverses the attribute and philosophy rows and substitutes the term attribute for approach. It is shown in the table below.

Earl does not privilege one school or attribute over another, nor does he say they are mutually exclusive, but he does say one is dominate. ...

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Next week I am attending KM Sinagapore 2008 . I am presenting a seminar and workshop called Using BNA™ Techniques in Project Management .

I am also participating in the knowledge café as a presenter. I will be presenting Applying the RAAAKERS™ Diagnostic to Understand Management Stress Points and Assure Project Delivery in a Large Health Organisation . The RAAAKERS™ framework (Responsibility, Authority, Accountability, Awareness, Knowledge, Experience, Resources and Systems) was used as an analysis tool to assist in understanding the main management stress points, and data was presented as a visual analysis . This work, co-authoured with Doctor Mark Burnett, will be published in the coming months in the Journal of Military and Veteran's Health .

If you are in Singapore next week do look me up.

Regards, Graham

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As a junior officer in the Australian Army I was taught many principles. These included the 10 principles of warfare, the six principles of administration, and the seven principles of medical support. These principles were supposed to be enduring, and used as guides against which plans were tested. Now it seems we have 12 principles of knowledge management , or at least the US Army does. Their principles are:

• Principle 1. Train and educate KM leaders, managers, and champions.
• Principle 2. Reward knowledge sharing and make knowledge management career rewarding.
• Principle 3. Establish a doctrine of collaboration.
• Principle 4. Use every interaction whether face-to-face or virtual as an opportunity to acquire and share knowledge.
• Principle 5. Prevent knowledge loss.
• Principle 6. Protect and secure information and knowledge assets.
• Principle 7. Embed knowledge assets (links, podcasts, videos, documents, simulations, wikis...) in standard business processes and provide access to those who need to know.
• Principle 8. Use legal and standard business rules and processes across the enterprise.
• Principle 9. Use standardized collaborative tool sets.
• Principle 10. Use Open Architectures to permit access and searching across boundaries.
• Principle 11. Use a robust search capability to access contextual knowledge and store content for discovery.
• Principle 12. Use portals that permit single sign-on and authentication across the global enterprise including partners.

Now this is a pretty interesting list, especially when I compare them to the TARDIS principles used in one part of the Australia Defence Force, and developed five years ago. The TARDIS principles were: ...

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In the coming weeks I am presenting to diverse groups on topics ranging from Business Network Analysis™, to ethics and leadership, and the RAAAKERS™ framework. In keeping with my open sharing practice I will post all papers and presentations to this website, if I haven't already done so.

This week I am presenting to the Australian Medical Students Association (AMSA) on leadership and ethics. AMSA is the peak representative body for medical students in Australia. I expect them to be a challenging group, but in turn I intend to challenge them by using the 1994 Rwandan genocide as my case study. My presentation will build on the theme that ethical dilemmas create leadership challenges and poor decisions create ethical dilemmas.

The following week I will be giving two presentations to the Defence Operations Research Symposium, which will be attended by Defence scientists from ...

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Although Pat Byrne and I have gone our separate ways we still do a good deal of collaboration. Pat recently presented our Defence BNA™ case study at the 5th Annual Project Management Australia Conference in Melbourne, Victoria. (We are indebted to Mark Blackburn who has allowed us to put this case-study into the public domain). You can view the presentation at this link , and his commentary on the conference at this link . It is substantially the same as our presentations earlier in the year to the Project Management Institute in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, and our presentation to the Australian Institute of Management.

Last week I co-presented it with Cheryl Durrant (no relation in case you're wondering) to the Knowledge Management Roundtable in Melbourne. We modified the presentation a little, but it is substantially the same - the differences in the slides being at the start and finish.

Now it is interesting the reactions we get from our audiences. So far it has been mostly positive. The project managers tend to see it as another tool in their armoury, but ...

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I've not blogged for almost a month for several reasons. First my current employer has some restrictions concerning blog topics, and I've been working out just what this means. Second I'm so connected that I'm paralysed!

My employer has provided me with a laptop and token that allows secure access to two corporate intranets. I have a Blackberry so if I'm not on, or monitoring, the Intranets then I receive the e-mails any way. And of course I'm still contactable by telephone of which I have four numbers - my office number, a secure mobile, my personal mobile, and my home number. I have two work e-mails and one semi-private address, as well as the address on this site. If people still can't find me my wife has an office number and mobile. In short I am so connected that I can find few ways of escaping, short of turning everything off and answering nothing. Why would I want Twitter, Doppler or any other social connectivity tool?

I've written before about connectivity enabling Pavlovian work-practices . By this I mean one stops doing what they are doing and responds to the electronic stimuli immediately and often uncritically. If we assume an eight hour day, ...

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Just of late I've encountered a number of capability maturity models aimed at knowledge management. Capability maturity models have been around for a while in other disciplines, most notably in software development projects. Almost all of the models owe their origins to the collaboration between the US Department of Defense and the Software Engineering Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. The Capability Maturity Model was originally a tool to assess processes - in particular the processes of a contracted third party. In that sense its intent was to reduce risk.

Capability models now abound and even have been internationally standardised as part of ISO 15504 . ISO 15504 sets six levels of capability maturity as follows:

• Level 5 - Optimising Process,
• Level 4 - Predictable Process,
• Level 3 - Established Process,
• Level 2 - Managed Process,
• Level 1 - Performed Process, and
• Level 0 - Incomplete Process.

Notice anything here? It's all about process. Putting aside definitional issues, last time I looked knowledge management was about people, process, technology, and content. Capability maturity models are about process, so it begs the question "Does knowledge management really need a maturity model"? ...

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The United States Air Force lost a B2 Stealth Bomber valued at $US 1.4 billion because of a failure to transfer knowledge between pilots and maintenance technicians. The bomber crashed earlier this year at Andersen Air Force Base on the island of Guam. Apparently water distorted pre-flight readings in three of the plane's 24 sensors, making the aircraft's control computer force the B-2 to pitch up on takeoff, resulting in a stall and subsequent crash.

The official accident investigation found that the crash probably could have been avoided if knowledge of a technique to evaporate the moisture had been disseminated throughout the B-2 command. This technique was: ...

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I recently came across this blog-post by Marc Aafjes on what he calls the Shadow Organisation. Marc says:

"By connecting various participants across the company around the execution of our knowledge strategy we're cultivating a meta network - the shadow organisation - that enables the company to enhance the value we derive from the knowledge we have. Framing knowledge management in economic terms, the shadow organisation in effect is ‘making the market for knowledge' by connecting otherwise disparate parts of the company around knowledge needs. This shadow organisation consists of the change agents that help us execute the knowledge strategy and embed sustainable change in all parts of the company".

Now what Marc is doing is by no means new - he's weaving a network to build a community of practice! What he has done is come up with a clever name that markets his network weaving initiative. ...

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Coming up with good business performance indicators is not easy, and too often we get it wrong. I use a simple question to help me decide if the indictor is relevant - "Is the indicator a measure of how many children had a bath, or is it a measure of how many children had a bath and came out clean!?" I suggest you probably want a mix, but with a definite bias to "had a bath and came out clean"!

Coming up with business performance indicators for a knowledge management initiative is particularly difficult, but it is key to knowledge productivity™. Frankly it's too easy to report activity rates - how many children had a bath - because these are tangible and relatively easy to measure. Measuring and reporting the true impact of the initiative on the organisation - had a bath and came out clean - is much more difficult; if only because the impact will be variable, and not everyone will agree the strength of the outcome. ...

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