Knowledge Matters™

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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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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Yesterday my theme was corporate amnesia - the loss of collective organisational memory resulting from physical and psychological organisational trauma associated with change. Today my theme is the antithesis of corporate amnesia - the inability to move forwards or backwards because of hyper-analysis, which leads to decision paralysis and ultimately learned helplessness .

Hyper-analysis is the propensity to seek detailed data on almost every aspect of something before making a decision. Some people call this analysis paralysis but I don't think this term is correct - it mixes cause with effect. The result of hyper-analysis is often, but not always, decision paralysis. Hyper-analysis has its roots in any or all of the following: ...

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Yesterday was my last day working on the TARDIS knowledge management system and for HolisTech® Pty Ltd . It was both a sad day and a relief. It's a relief because for the past fortnight I've been somewhat schizophrenic. I've been schizophrenic because despite my best efforts I've found myself thinking and working (albeit unpaid) for my new organisation, and at the same time working in TARDIS and for HolisTech®. The net effect has been very long hours where I've been burning the candle at both ends, and is my defence for failing to blog in recent days! But I digress. I thought today (to stay with the medical theme) we would look at corporate amnesia.

Amnesia is a devastating disorder, which results in short or long-term loss of memory, and sometimes an inability to imagine the future . Amnesia is sometimes the result of a disease, but more commonly occurs from physical or psychological trauma. Now it seems to me corporate amnesia - the loss of collective organisational memory - is endemic these days, and is the result of both physical and psychological organisational trauma. ...

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I've been head-hunted to be the principal change champion in a large health services organisation, and to work up the information/knowledge management requirements for what will be potentially a multi-million dollar initiative. Whilst I am very excited I am also quite sad because this means I will be leaving HolisTech® Pty Ltd and TARDIS .

TARDIS is a joint venture between HolisTech® and the Australian Department of Defence to build and maintain a knowledge management system. I believe it to be one of the most significant attempts at knowledge management within the Australian public sector: an attempt that truly has tried to integrate people, process, technology and content. I'm very proud to have been associated with TARDIS, so today I thought I would share with you some of the lessons I will take away.

Just over four years ago Pat Byrne and I began to put the TARDIS dream into reality. We began with an interesting set of high-level requirements and constraints, with the constraints largely setting the direction of TARDIS. The two most important constraints were:

• only existing software and hardware were to be used, and
• software coding was to be absolutely minimised and kept to the application level.

Now with the benefit of hindsight I think these two constraints were truly inspired. ...

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All knowledge workers have an implicit psychological contract with their employer, colleagues, and customers. The contract is about unspoken expectations and values. It is often not well understood, but it is one of the foundations of organisational effectiveness because it is a trust or distrust transaction. Breach of these expectations rapidly results in disillusionment, dissatisfaction, and ultimately permanent disengagement.

Knowledge workers are educated thinking people. They expect their efforts to be acknowledged and rewarded appropriately. They expect some variety in their work, as well as a degree of autonomy. They expect the loyalty they show to be reciprocated and to be treated with respect. They expect task assignment to be realistic. A lot of this comes down to perception management.

There is clear evidence in the management literature that the implicit psychological contract is breached when knowledge workers perceive that others have broken promises, or failed to deliver on commitments, or have completely unrealistic work output expectations. Why then do so many senior managers, who are knowledge workers themselves and also have implicit psychological contracts, set unrealistic goals and tasks? ...

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Yesterday I blogged about time and knowledge management, so I suppose it was fate that much of my time was wasted today dealing with a “Help Desk”. Quite frankly I felt like I was the character Yossarian in Catch-22 , as I was constantly directed through never ending pointless process that was self-defeating and at times circular. It all began harmlessly enough with a simple request to fix a problem accessing the corporate Intranet. The same problem is also causing e-mail formatting errors, but at least e-mails can get through after displaying four error messages, which is merely frustrating.

The first mistake I made was assuming the “Help Desk” would actually be helpful, and the second was trying to be helpful myself. Foolishly I spent ten minutes getting screen captures of the errors and compiling a PowerPoint complete with commentary. I then looked up the e-mail address for the “Help Desk”, but found six possibilities! Politely I compiled an e-mail, apologised for sending it to all six addresses, and four error messages later it was in the system. And then the comedy, or should I say farce, began! ...

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30 odd years ago I went to the cinema to watch Monty Python’s Life of Brian – I still get a laugh from this movie, but not as big a laugh as I get from the prelude which was called “Away From It All ”. Away From It All was a travelogue with a voice over by John Cleese. When I saw it every person in the theatre was sucked in for 10 minutes or so, and almost to the famous line “and now back to Venice, Queen of the Adriatic. Here certainly we have peace and tranquillity, and also more of those f***ing gondolas!” At the time this was a shocking thing, but it had the theatre audience in raptures. ...

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For a long time now I have thought knowledge management is all about individual, group and enterprise productivity. I feel so strongly about this that I use the term knowledge productivity™ in favour of knowledge management. Why? Well knowledge management at the moment can mean whatever one wants it to mean! Indeed this was the key finding of a bunch of so-called knowledge management practitioners at one of the major knowledge management conferences of 2007 – see my Black Art Definitions post for a rant on this finding! Apparently juggling is also an essential skill for knowledge management, but I digress. In conjunction with Pat Byrne I have been writing and presenting on knowledge productivity™ since 2003. It was heartening therefore to discover Christiaan Stam's PhD thesis - 'Knowledge productivity: designing and testing a method to diagnose knowledge productivity and plan for enhancement '.

Stam says knowledge productivity™ “is the process of converting knowledge into something of value” and later defines it as “management ability to generate knowledge-based results”. Patrick Byrne and I have defined knowledge productivity™ elsewhere, and a bit more expansively, as being:

“… a trans-disciplinary approach that integrates tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, organise, share, analyse, improve, and apply business expertise. It is a disciplined, deliberate, purposeful, and conscious method to manufacture knowledge from data, information and experience. Of necessity it involves the design, implementation and review of processes to improve knowledge creation and sharing behaviours. Ultimately knowledge productivity™ relies on individual and collective discipline to follow organisational process to achieve business objectives”. ...

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