Knowledge Matters™

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: ...

read more ...

actKM 08 will be held on the 14th and 15th of October 2008 at University House, the Australian National University, Canberra. The theme is 'Managing Knowledge for Competitive Advantage', which is hardly original, but the organising committee promise it will be highly participative and interactive. They are seeking submissions at the moment with a preference for interactive or experiential activities that engage conference participants in a learning or competitive environment.

I haven't made up my mind if I will attend actKM 08 because I've been asked to present a paper on network analysis to the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers (AIPIO) annual conference . This conference is at the Holiday Inn, Adelaide from the 14th to 16th of October 2008 inclusive, and the theme is ‘Improving Tradecraft'. At the moment I think I'll write a paper that compares the various network analysis tools on the market, highlights their strengths and weaknesses, and assesses their suitability for intelligence work. Even if I don't attend AIPIO 2008 the paper can be published in their peer-reviewed journal.

Assuming I attend the AIPIO conference I will head off to Hobart to attend the Australian Military Medicine Association's annual conference . ...

read more ...

The organisation I am working for at the moment is under considerable pressure to restructure. Now I've been through lots of restructures in the past, and few if any restructures have achieved what they were supposed to. One of the reasons for this, in my opinion, is the failure to recognise the realities of how people work.

Structure provides the skeleton an organisation requires to meet its goals and support its people, or least that is what it is supposed to do. Formal structures are planned, deliberate attempts to establish ordered relationships between the component parts of the organisation. They are supposed to:

• define tasks and job roles, thus determining the division of labour;
• establish management patterns, thereby controlling how work is planned, organised and directed; and
• determine the relationship and communication patterns between component parts of the organisation, thus limiting individual variation. ...

read more ...

Just over a month ago, and before the current debate on wisdom management began in earnest on actKM, I had a brief exchange with Professor Bruce Lloyd on the relationship between knowledge and wisdom. Bruce kindly pointed me to a number of his papers. I've reproduced them below, some with hyperlinks. ...

read more ...

The Prime Minister of Australia wanted to,
seize the future with both hands.
To build a new Australia -
to build a better land!

He called for "Australia's Best and Brightest",
though he wouldn't pay them a pound.
He just wanted them to assemble,
in old Canberra town.

To engage in a talk fest,
the likes you've never seen.
Where each delegate speaks for just four minutes,
and never again is seen. ...

read more ...

A colleague has completed an analysis, using my RAAKERS™ framework, of two organisations which are located on different continents from the parent organisation. The results are very interesting. Just to refresh your memory RAAKERS™ is an acronym for responsibility, authority, accountability, knowledge, experience, resources and systems. RAAKERS™ is a risk and knowledge management framework to assess where an organisation’s weaknesses might be. Consider the graph below.

The dark green bars are the possible scores for RAAKERS™ components in this order – responsibility, authority, accountability, knowledge, experience, resources and systems. The coloured bars indicate the strength of the component. Red bars are a score of less than four. Orange bars are a score between four and nine. Light green bars are a score greater than nine. ...

read more ...

I was tempted to call this post “Desperately Seeking Knowledge”, but that would have been unkind. When I first set up this website and blog my intent was to provide a resource that would be useful to people interested in knowledge management and network analysis. I make deductions about usefulness from site traffic, repeat site visits, down-loads, cross site links and so on. I do this using a combination of Clicky Web Analytics and Google Analytics. Clicky in particular provides me with a rich picture about you. So what do I know about you and how you use Knowledge Matters™? ...

read more ...

I was tempted to call this post “A Poverty of Honesty”, but on reflection it has more to do with the adage of “Do More With Less”. I don’t usually make political statements, but this time I will make an exception. Here in Australia a change of government has seen a rationalisation and tightening of belts of various public service departments. Almost every department has been told to achieve savings of between 5% and 12% annually. In most cases these departments are supposed to achieve recurring savings of this magnitude every year for the next ten years. Now at the practical level I have a few problems with this.

Let’s use the example of one of the larger departments. I know for this department 5% of budget is about a billion dollars. So there is no confusion that translates to one thousand million dollars - $1,000,000,000 – that has to be found every year for 10 years. To put it another way that is almost three million dollars every day for ten years! (It’s $2,732,240 to be exact, but why quibble over a quarter of million?) One of the smaller departments has to find 12% every year. For them 12% is in the order 80 million dollars, or about two hundred thousand dollars a day, every day for 10 years! So how are these astronomical numbers going to be found?

Well according to the senior leadership of these departments some savings will be achieved through the natural attrition of staff. ...

read more ...

It’s no secret that I am not a fan of archetypes and that I am not convinced of their utility in business. In my original post on this subject – “Archetypes Don't Matter!” – I said:

“Patrick [Lambe] has one set of archetypes and Katie Altham has some 100 archetypes which are quite different. Her archetypes use names from mythology, like Apollo, Zeus, Dionysus, Hermes and Aphrodite. Now this is all well and good as an attention grabbing exercise and even as a bit of fun, but does it have a grounded evidence base? Both Patrick and Katie claim it does however before I am convinced I would like to see the underlying data. It all seems too simplistic to me. Further it appears to me to be at best an extension and simplification of Carl Jung’s work, and at worst little better than pop psychology or even horoscopy”.

My position hasn’t changed, particularly when I discover on the actKM Knowledge-Base these two gems – “Star Types ” by Professor Han van Loon, and “'I' is for Insect ” by Arthur Shelley. Now it seems we can have insects, bumble bees and lions if we don’t like Greek gods. If Greek gods, animals, or Patrick Lambe’s habits like lust and avarice don’t appeal, then we can substitute blue stars, orange stars, red giants, and even brown dwarfs! But wait, there’s more. ...

read more ...

If I follow the writing principle of bottom line and idea first then I would have to say Patrick Lambe’s “Organising Knowledge: Taxonomies, Knowledge and Organisational Effectiveness” is a five-star publication. Using the four-point scale Study, Read, Skim, Bin as a guide to the effort that might be invested, this book definitely warrants a Study rating. So what’s so good about the book?

Well judging by my margin scribbles and underlining lots! First it is an entertaining, coherent and easy read. Patrick’s assertion that - “If taxonomies classify, describe and map knowledge domains, then taxonomy work is made up of the things we must do to achieve that outcome: listing, creating and modifying categories, standardising, mapping, representing, discovering native vocabularies and categories, negotiating common terms” (p. 11) – resonates with me and is an example of the practical flavour of the book. Similarly I found Patrick’s taxonomy forms - lists, trees, hierarchies, poly-hierarchies, matrices, facets, and system maps – to be a useful classification and a guide to why some taxonomies fail and others succeed. ...

read more ...