| Received another email from a vendor claiming they have a new content management systems that will ease all knowledge management worries. In all my years in the browser world it always confused me why the two were related. Content was about storing, publishing, reviewing and most CMS systems are built for this purpose. Knowledge ‘capture’ or management used to concern storing and accessing and had to fit into a CMS system – quite clearly not designed for the production, collaboration and development of knowledge through connections and relations. Not sure we will ever get to a position where a systems does both. I await with interest if Sharepoint proves to be that system. |
Its all about people
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It’s almost a year since we started an intrenal blog about the work of our team. When we first did it was a way of sharing with a wider audience the discussions and thoughts we have internally, in our team meetings and across the intranet community. Although I write most of the posts, they actually reflect the discussions, ideas and thoughts that we have had right across the Intranet community. Sharing our thoughts on social media, online communities, content, training, intranets and everything related to it. If you’re new to our blog (or have just been a long-time reader) I thought it would be interesting to reflect on what’s been, and after the proliferation of word-clouds for Obama’s Inauguration Speech, I created the same for the Intranet blog. Four words were prominent: people social communities governance. We write about online communities and how they behave. We write social media and its potential in knowledge sharing. We write about the protocols that govern the behaviour. That’s what we know and what we do. But in doing so it’s important to remember that what we’re really writing about is people and how they interact in a social environment. It’s why we think that we need to focus on how we build and manage online communities. In a good online community, the technology should be invisible, it’s about the people and the way we work together in a social environment than makes the difference.
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Governance bootcamp
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We are currently building the requirements for a new community area on our intranet, including created a ‘trusted source’ for consultants, administrators etc. Having conducted both stakeholder and user research we find ourselves with uncontrolled content repositories, outdated and risky records stores and enormously complicated discovery challenges. This can cause great costs and distraction to the stream???and can be fatal. Part of the solution we hope to introduce is an information governance structure which will deal with the current model and create strategic value???looking ahead for the next move. This can be achieved through… strong governance process Good gatekeeping logical navigation structure improved taxonomy structure enhanced search When the site launches, towards the end of 2009, we will garner feedback from the stream to judge the success and value this has provided. |
Hurdles to collaboration
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At a recent forum with key knowledge/collaboration stakeholders within my organisation we talked abou the barriers/hurdles to sharing. Some of the hurdles were Culture KS not seen as a priority Lack of awareness of the potential role of KS Not aligned to processes Not essential for daily work Silos and rigid reporting lines To many firm bottlenecks and roadblocks that prevent holistic approaches to knowledge sharing No time invested in creating a passion for knowledge sharing No time spent in creating a “2.0” mindset Trust Technology Lack of or insufficient search solution for knowledge Little use of Wikis to empower employees to be active communicators on Insite – not just “listeners No engagement tools to rank and rate – “like minded” tools No opportunity to find ‘people who know people’ No emotional intelligence – tools to help me know myself and others Social media is all about participation – all content is collaborative. I have to search to collaborate Training Equip the workforce No slot on induction No reward for KS No code for KS (Timecard) Strategy Lack of ownership at a senior level Do we know where the knowledge sits? Do we have the big-picture thinkers? Little KM leadership |
Intranet ‘powering up’
| In the summer I gave an internal presentation on our intranet and asked what’s great about the intranet and should be retained, what’s broken and needs fixing and what needs delivering to keep Insite current and valuable.
My responses were
What’s Great
Retained
What’s Broken
Delivering
Governance
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This ‘knowledge’ stuff
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The term ‘knowledge sharing’ has been used more in the past few months than I have known during my tenure at my current organisation, however, if you asked people what exactly knowlege sharing is you will get many diffing answers. Here’s my stab at it. To me knowledge certainly has little to do with technology – it is mainly the IT stuff that puts knowledge sharing into practice. In my world there are 4 steps: Innovation (knowledge creation and impact throughout its whole lifecycle) Knowledge sharing Collaboration Reuse And itsrepresented in 3 spaces Physical space Social space (relationships, communities and social networks) Virtual space and mind space If someone is working on a database, they get knowledge from another place and apply it to the task at hand. They will gain knowledge from the application itself and could then share this knowledge and innovation with other people they know. However, 99% stop at this stage. Our role, and I believe the role of the Knowledge stakeholders throughout the organisation is to take the shared knowledge and see how it can be used to collaborate and build meaningful relationships. The need to establish systems, processes and a culture that helps continually build on intellectual capital. Its less prescriptive than old knowledge management approaches. We shouldn’t just aim to get more documents published or get explicit knowledge generated and submitted to the repository; it???s broader than that. Users have to be impacted by this and we have to create networks and relationships that are extensive, intense and extend throughout the firm as well. Why do we need to so this? Because the old style intranet of document and missives died some time ago. |
There???s no link back to the top
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An online knowledge community, or one that is clearly from a particular department must be connected into that same department. Community members will quickly lose interest if they think that nobody is listening to and feeding back on what they are saying. They will uncover a community manager who is unable to connect them into the hierarchy or represent the firm in the community. A real connection is needed to make the most of your online community and this can often mean enacting real change in your department. If you are using it to its full potential, an online community should be a way of getting the user voice deep inside your department. You should be talking about the online community in meetings right up to, and including, the top level meeting. This is the way your users are heard in the department, and the way your department can talk to its users. One of our top Partners never addresses a meeting without mentioning his community area on our intranet. No other site on our intranet can make that claim of such top level support?. Its no surprise its the most visited area on the intranet. |
How to stay in touch
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Our intranet is based on a distributed publishing model. In such a model the ‘central team’ is often not responsible for any pages, but merely facilitates other parts of the organization to publish. Its not an ideal model for external sites and can fail miserably internally unless close control/engagement is kept with the publishing community. Last year this publishing community was over 300 people! One of the constant challenges the intranet team (can a duo be called a team?) face is determining how many publishers throughout the firm we can professionally manage? 20? 50? 500? It is simply impossible for an editor to professionally manage 300 publishers. Managing 50 publishers and achieving basic quality standards is very demanding. We have a number of quality and compliance standards with various degrees of enforcment. With no budget for travel or training the challenge for us is to leverage relationships and find ways to engage on a regular basis with our publishing community. We do this through a number of techniques: getting sponsors for all our work conducting training via webinar intranet newsletter intranet blog News updates on our site section pages Insite/Knowledge meetings sponsored by streams. We’ve manage to achieve much with little. How sustainable this approach is as the demands on Insite grows is a question in our minds for 2010. |
The good and the bad of digital dependency
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Reading a lovely book at the moment called Cyburbia (James Harkin) who argues that humna social activity resembles an electronic network, equating organic social networks – cybernetics – to technical networks. Harkin charts the history of this field, how it was born in an obscure military experiement during the Second World War, was nurtured in the quasi-communist ideology of 1960s West Coast counterculture and then emerged as an intellectual orthodoxy for the digital age. There is lots of commentary on the effects of the internet etc but the aspect that fansinates me is the Harkin’s belief that something is happening at the cognotive level of our brains. He cites research showing a marked effect on the prefronted cortex (where memories are formed) as a result of constant switching between different data streams – check email; send text; surf web; change TV channel; chat on Instant Messenger; check Facebook; check email again. This generation will be better atholding many things in their heads at once, but worse at remembering them afterwards. One of Harkin’s most penetrating critiques is an account of how the US army’s reliance on computer tecnology hampered its counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq. GIs were all wired up to each other, constantly feding information back and forth across the battlefield. But they ended up paralysed by data overload. The network functioned brilliantly, but purely for its own sake. That is the danger Harkin sees in our ultra-networked society. Of the millions of communications that bind us together, few convey messages of any importance. Real human interaction risks being lost in a fog of self-sustaining, vacuous digital chatter. The danger for knowledge workers is that we don’t build roads just to fill them with cars but actually consider the reason for the journey before we even build the road. |
So what do you do?
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Been contacted and asked exactly what the Intranet team does. Well..here goes…. I would like to believe we offer a consultancy service in how to manage communities (both task and knowledge based). We also host workshops and lectures on the intranet concept, knowledge sharing and communication on the internal platform. This, among others, include the selection and implementation of a community ??? organizational and in terms of content. We also look to encourage use of collaboration, social media and other digital tools to meet the strategy/goals of the site. We are often involved when a site is dying and in need of revival, or when a department/group faces an implementation of a site for the first time. Knowledge sharing between the persons responsible for the community takes place in our various network groups and communications. We also have a ‘day job’ that includes Global and local governance implementation Site production Content Management Training Technical liaison Technical implementation Oversee the global community management of sites and make sure all the hosts and users are working well Oversee any growth, development, change in direction of any communities Oversee the launch of any new communities/closure of any others that are not working Troubleshoot any big editorial, legal, technical problems with our developers, coders, and management Work on the strategy and integration of the community areas Distribute any updates to any global guidelines Help the Content managers when they need it Monitor the value and quality of the communities Policing of content standards |
Mark Tilbury - digital workplace specialist 