Knowledge Matters™

Two weeks ago I purchased a new computer, which came with Microsoft® Vista Business loaded. I haven't gotten used to Vista yet and I am not sure I really like it. That said I've always liked Excel, and Excel 2007 seems better than ever. One of the really nice add-ons is Microsoft .NetMap , which installs a template capable of doing some rudimentary network analysis. Consider the diagram below, which is my email traffic, displayed using a Fruchterman-Reingold force-directed spring algorithm.

The add-in analysed Outlook 2007 and identified all 532 unique vertices and the corresponding 994 unique edges that make up my e-mail network. It also identified the density of the network as 0.004, which is quite sparse given 1.000 is the possible score. Consider now the same network displayed in a spiral format. ...

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A simple model which I find useful is the “Six Knows Knowledge Model ” shown below. The model has its origins in the Rudyard Kipling poem “I Keep Six Honest Serving-Men ” , but no doubt I will be challenged on this assertion! That said it is a model that serves me well, except I would add ‘know how much’ as a node.

Now Dan Roam , quite independently of me, has enhanced the usefulness of the model by introducing a visual thinking element to it - he's also picked up on the how much dimension. Have a look at this presentation , but in particular slide seven (the preceding slides give some background and explanation). What I really like is the ability to add some discipline and consistency to my mind-mapping and rich pictures. ...

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Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because I am actually not so sure about their utility, and would welcome any feedback you might have. That said I do feel they elicit interesting management questions.

Consider the network diagram below. For a change it’s a different organisation to the one we have been looking at in previous blog-posts , but I have applied the same principles. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be critically dependent on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit. This organisation assigns risk to six categories, which are shown as the red squares. The categories are real things in the real world rather than budget and schedule. ...

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I am happy to enter into a discourse on “what is knowledge” but that is not the intent of this post. Rather I want to explore the idea that knowledge representation is becoming more visual. In his 1997 book ‘The Measure of Reality ’ Emeritus Professor Alfred Crosby suggested that visualisation and measurement were the two factors most responsible for the rapid development of all of modern science. Now this is an interesting proposition, and one I think I largely agree with.

The first attempts to represent knowledge were probably pictorial, and can be seen in the elegant cave paintings of our ancestors. Indeed some of these are still maintained by indigenous people today – see for example the Aboriginal rock art of the Gagudju people of Northern Australia, one of the oldest cultures on the planet. Numerals and text soon followed and have been the mainstay of knowledge representation for at least the last 6,000 years. But is this changing? ...

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Today I thought I would share with you two new diagrams from my doctorate, because they elicit interesting management questions. Consider the network diagram below. The graph shows a programme of projects, all of which are dependent on one another for one reason or another. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be critically dependent on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

The circles are projects coloured and grouped by business unit, and sized by value. The large light blue project at the bottom of the screen is obviously the project with the largest budget. The lines represent the dependency and are coloured by the importance of that dependency – red lines representing a critical dependency.

As a manager where would you give priority to resource allocation? I suggest if you subscribe to the dollars view of the world the bulk of your effort would be directed to the light blue business unit. Now consider the next diagram. ...

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The other day I was asked “who is the most important person in the network”? Now I don’t like this question because it is laden with all sorts of value judgements. Further there is no right answer because it depends on the subsequent actions and intent. To illustrate my point I will use data from my doctorate, and apply various centrality measures to a ‘problem-solving network’. Consider the map below. It is a directed spring graph produced in NetDraw . The actors in the centre highlighted as yellow nodes appear to be the most important, but are they?

Now consider the map below, which has been produced in NetMiner 3 . (Most of the other visualisations on this website have been produced in NetDraw, but I prefer the ‘target view’ of NetMiner 3 when examining centrality). ...

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Until I met my business partner Pat Byrne some seven years ago I wasn’t really a ‘visual person’ – I much preferred numbers and written explanation. Pat changed that because whenever he explains something he has a habit of drawing it, and I’ve developed the same habit. I still like numbers and the written word, but I find visualisations useful.

Take for example search engines that present information as cluster maps. TouchGraph is one engine, although the free version only searches Google. Similarly the free version of Grokker only searches Yahoo. Now it’s an interesting exercise to compare the output on the search term “network analysis”. Immediately below is the TouchGraph map.

This map is in the form of a force spring diagram. Now look at the Grokker map below. ...

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I discovered a company called TouchGraph today, which as far as I can work out is in the United States. Their founding CEO is Alex Shapiro who created the original visual browser for Google! TouchGraph specialise in visualisation software, hence my interest. They say their focus is on “creating tools that enable decision makers to display, navigate, and analyze complex data simply and intuitively”. I decided to play around with their free products , which can map links in Google, Amazon and FaceBook. This visualisation maps my url - http://www.durantlaw.info/ - on Google. It is the initial visualisation. ...

Apparently the underlying algorithm maps similar pages. Similar pages do not directly represent inbound or outbound hyperlinks, but rather pages with similar content.

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Why am I blogging on Christmas Day? Well a bit like David Snowden I find blogging addictive, and a useful way to record my thoughts and ideas as they occur. And if that’s not enough it provides a means for an offsite backup for some elements of my doctorate. I am really enjoying my doctorate at the moment, so I thought I would share some of the work I did yesterday.

I’ve called this blog Deconstructing Complexity because I think it succinctly describes the four diagrams below. (I thank Patrick Byrne for the title, which he suggested after reading my Visualising Collective Knowledge post.) Consider the network diagram below. The circles are projects coloured by project type, and sized by in-degree, that is the number of incoming links. The links show reliance by one project on another, and are directed. For example a project building an electricity distribution grid in a new town might be reliant on a project that is building a dam that will produce hydro-electricity.

Now at the moment I am sure you will agree the organisation in question is running a complex portfolio of projects. Paradoxically the detail in this diagram only allows for macro-decisions. ...

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A week ago I introduced “Tertius Gaudens ”. Today I want to introduce “Tertius Iungens” – the true knowledge broker. You may recall Tertius Gaudens means ‘the third who benefits’. Tertius Iungens means ‘the third who joins the two’, and is a brokerage theory developed by Professor David Obstfeld . Both Gaudens and Iungens draw benefit from brokering relationships between others. The difference between them is subtle, but important for knowledge management.

Consider the network diagram below, which is from my doctorate, and I used as the illustration in my “Who is Tertius Gaudens? ” blog. Recall the nodes are shaped and coloured by business unit and sized by ‘betweenness centrality’, which is a measure that signals an actor’s potential as a go-between for other actors in the network. The exception is Tertius Gaudens, who is shown as the yellow node. But is this node Tertius Gaudens or is it Tertius Iungens?

To answer this question we must first clearly understand the differences between Gaudens and Iungens. ...

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