Smoke on the water

The river, as it meanders through the plains gathers momentum, and then falls from great heights crashing down on the rocks below creating a misty spray; this process effectively transforms a small part of the gushing river to its almost elemental state of water droplets. They soon gather themselves and continue their journey downstream.

Observing this phenomenon at Hogenakkal, I was reminded of a question someone asked me recently, on how tacit knowledge becomes explicit in an organization? In other words, when does personal knowledge of an individual become organizational knowledge? In his magnum opus, Personal KnowledgePolanyi talks about the 'knowledge continuum' between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge.

Knowledge can be categorized into three broad categories based on how it impacts business:

• Process-related
• Organization and Culture-related
• Tools (Information technology)

Broadly speaking, all business performance is streamlined into tasks, procedures, processes with measures to determine how it is impacting the business. For example, revenue v/s target is an indication of how close the business is towards achieving its sales objectives. The underlying processes provide the mechanism to achieve that, which in today's world, for the most part is executed through tools (CRM / ERP, etc). So, we also measure process performance to assess the efficiency or effectiveness of the process. The productivity of the personnel who execute these processes are also measured to enable improvement in their performance.

The second aspect relating to organization and culture is largely defined by:

• Skills and level of mastery
• Work environment
• Training and Development
• Motivation factors

Post-industrial era has seen a large change in the work environment, and the behavioral characteristics of the workforce. A recent Gallup report described the current workforce to consist of more than 40% of knowledge workers, which is growing every year. The standard motivational factors that motivated industrial era workers do not work in this environment any longer. Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, talks of the death of Management principles that were based on Taylor's measurement techniques, largely because there is less and less work that is monotonous and requires just a pair or arms or legs.

As we have seen, culture has also been significantly influenced by Technology and tools that have helped in breaking silos and bridging chasms - creating the ability to collaborate across boundaries. Tools come with integral collaboration capability and workflows that support seamless involvement of people across tasks. 

So, how can the impact of KM be measured on the organization?

• The impact of Knowledge on the business process, as measured by metrics which determine underlying causes for the change in business measures
• The inter-relation of these underlying causes which can be attributed to change in skills, work environment, learning and motivation factors
• The impact of tools in enabling change in culture - creating a collaborative and connected community

In the absence of clear metrics that link business performance to changes in process, the impact of implementing Knowledge Management in an organization on creating greater cohesion, collaboration and ability to reach out to a larger community will have to be used as an indirect measure on the overall improvement in the business.

For example:

• How can we relate activities at the two ends of the knowledge spectrum - a user accessing a procedure document or content in the knowledge repository to tacit knowledge which is measured as conversations that occur in the collaborative work-space;
• Or the ability of the Knowledge environment to bridge the transition from personal knowledge to organizational knowledge by connecting a seeker of knowledge to an expert on the subject
• measuring the decibel levels in a community or discussion forum to associated change in processes - which result from the community making innovative changes in the way the business process is executed

These by themselves will have no direct impact on business performance. However, they are the cogs in the wheels which turn bigger wheels which result in generating huge momentum and force. Viewed in isolation, it may not be possible to determine their end impact, but recognizing the role in the overall work environment will definitely help in ensuring that organizations organize themselves towards a knowledge-driven strategy for growth and sustainability.

So back to my original question: at what point does personal knowledge become organizational knowledge? I think the SECI model proposed by Nonaka provides a framework in which to understand this transformation. Technology and the rapid adoption of social media tools in the work-place has enabled us understand this phenomenon better.

What do you think?

It’s (knowledge about) the Customer, Stupid!

 

"Salesforce CEO admits 'social enterprise' pitch didn't work. Apparently no one knew what 'social enterprise' meant – not even the guys who coined the term." (http://www.zdnet.com/salesforce-ceo-admits-social-enterprise-pitch-didnt-work-7000023336/)

This article by Rachel King for Between the Lines
caught my attention for its validation of a fundamental premise – that the much-hyped term would do little to push the case for business unless it could deliver value in tangible terms. A tool's value would be determined by whether it was fit-for-purpose. The problem with most "me"-centric terms is that they get caught up in the narcissistic web of looking at how they become the centre of attention. And in the process fail to meet their raison d'être – to serve the customer.

Marc Benioff has moved on to a new term – the Internet of Customers. And at least this time, the focus is on the customer – and hopefully, this coinage will probably have a longer and more useful lifespan than the declaration at Dreamforce 2011. It has become quite clear that collaboration and social media tools without any specific purpose do not really end up being very useful knowledge tools. While there may be traction in terms of getting people to create some chatter, the real value that one gets from providing direction to the conversation is missing.

I think it is this perspective that Marc Benioff seems to have gotten right the second time around, with the launch Salesforce One, and the "Internet of Customers" pitch. Here, clearly, the focus is away from product-centric statements that highlight messaging prowess, and instead focuses on what it can do for the customer. This was highlighted during a recent conversation with my good friend Sukumar Rajagopal, when he spoke about bringing "purpose" into the equation when implementing KM initiatives at Cognizant. From the initial thrust of generating a buzz – primarily through getting people to participate in social media, the focus shifted towards innovation as the reason for KM activities. This clearly ups the ante in terms of engaging people in conversations that have a clear purpose. What also becomes apparent is that it is not about the tool or the employee – it is about his participation in making a difference to the customer. The interesting aspect is that this also enables performance measurement. We are able to clearly identify if the KM initiative is headed in the right direction.

How well-defined is the purpose of your KM initiative? Share your feedback.

 

Making Organizational Learning stick

This post has been stuck for a while in the space between the keyboard and the fingers…more out of inertial than anything else.

How can a learning organization ensure that its organization learning methodologies are being put to good use? In an organization that is steadily climbing up the knowledge maturity curve, chances are that they will have a very structured knowledge repository and processes that enable this knowledge repository to get populated with content periodically. It is also highly likely that they have the tools and mechanisms in place for knowledge exchange on a social platform. And most definitely, they will have a formal learning program in place that enables employees continuously upgrade their skills and competencies.

How does one put all of this in perspective, such that each of the programs feeds the other, and there is tangible evidence of social learning that is occurring in the organization?

When enterprises are able to integrate formal e-learning methodologies with social collaboration, a social learning platform emerges. What this means is that the e-learning tool becomes an integral part of the social collaboration environment. For example, if it were possible for me:

1. to follow up a post with a short quiz
   
2. or conduct a survey
   

It would enable the organization get a sense of the level of understanding of the context and concepts underlying the article.

In a dynamic learning environment, I would be able to :

• Discover similar stories and notes
  
• Manage an ordered list of similar topics
  
• Test my understanding by taking tests or quizzes
  
• Look up a hint or follow a link in response to a question that I got wrong
  
• Read up content for more insight into a particular topic
  
• Identify an expert on the subject and get into a private conversation
  
• Join a discussion forum or a Community of practice in this domain
  

From an organization perspective, this kind of a learning environment would enable the organization:

• To go beyond structured learning methodologies
  
• Discover topics and subjects that are of interest to a larger section of the organization
  
• Identify niche subjects where expertise is scarce and develop a Community of Practice around that
  
• Discover experts in the organization and make them available to a larger group of people
  

Such a tool would have the following capabilities:

• Provide the capability to frame questions around a topic
  
• Enable objective and subjective responses to a question
  
• Provide the capability to conduct a survey or a poll
  
• Allow users to discover related topics to a response
  
• Provide valuable insights into organizational learning capabilities based on the responses
  

NEPHILA, integrated with marksplus has the ability to integrate Organizational learning to Knowledge Management thus enabling the enterprise become a learning organization.

 

Camel or horse: Wisdom of the crowds

"A Camel is a horse designed by a committee" – so goes the old saying. However, Gen Y believes differently; with online communities becoming a powerful way of sourcing information, collaboration and co-creation is becoming the preferred way of working. In 2005, the word "Crowdsourcing" was coined – a portmanteau word originating from "Crowd" and "Outsourcing".
"Crowdsourcing is the process of obtaining needed services, ideas or content, by soliciting from a large group of people, and especially from an online community."
~Source: Wikipedia
In his book, Crowdsourcing, Brabham classified crowdsourcing into the following types:

• Knowledge Discovery and Management: Where an online community is tasked with the responsibility of collecting and collating information relating to a particular topic. For example, when I put out an online question asking people of a Knowledge community for their definition of knowledge management, I am collating the different responses from group members, identifying key words used in the definition, the frequency of occurrence of specific key words, to come up with a definition that best expresses Knowledge Management.
  Interdisciplinary annotations and trends are yet another example of using the crowdsourcing approach to emergent semantic networks (a network that represents relationships between two concepts – for example, ontology and taxonomy, knowledge and intelligence)
• Distributed Human Intelligence Tasking: This is actually more of micro-task management. A large task is split up into smaller components and distributed across several people. This is then assembled to arrive at the final objective. Analysis of large data sets is usually carried out this way. Large projects which can be deconstructed into micro-projects are also usually crowd-sourced, with people bidding for the smaller projects. Organizations which have formal tie-ups with Universities as part of their University-Industry Linkage, have been known to adopt this approach.
• Broadcast Search: Ideation problems typically fall into this category. This is also what we usually find in online communities and forums. When people have a specific problem, they broadcast their question to the online community, for example, StackOverFlow, and then review the results to decide on the best result. This kind of problem usually has a definite answer – for example, "Why does 'Tour De Flex' show I am not connected to the internet, although I am online".
• Creative Production: The most famous example is possibly Threadless (https://www.threadless.com/make/submit/). This company encourages you to submit designs for t-shirts, and you get paid whenever a t-shirt manufacturing company selects your design for mass production. This is usually done when we need a creative design, not necessarily a single correct answer, and we end up asking the community for ideas. When Lays reached a plateau in sales, they turned to crowdsourcing ideas for new flavors – a competition resulted in several ideas for new flavors coming up from amateur flavor experts – housewives and children – reviving flagging sales by introduction of new flavors.

So, is all social collaboration Crowdsourcing. In a very loose manner of speaking, any collaboration that involves people outside a formally defined team can be called crowdsourcing. However, where the results cannot be quantified or substantiated as having been derived specifically as a result of participation of external resources, it cannot be called Crowdsourcing.
What are the characteristics of a Social Collaboration tool that supports Crowdsourcing?

• Online participation: The most fundamental aspect of course, is that the participation happens beyond the borders of an organization (or a business unit, in the case of very large organizations).
• Context: Crowdsourcing is most effective when there is a definite context in which participation occurs. Examples are:
  • A problem or issue that requires resolution, and internal sources may not have the requisite experience or know-how to address the issue
  • Data or Content Collection and collation: Used for obtaining data from a large group of people, which is collated. For example, research citations and profiling
  • Survey: Polls or surveys conducted to obtain data from a large source of people which is then used for research and analysis
• Platform: Ideation or Innovation platforms – this is usually organized around a domain or topic – where idea generation is the objective. The idea generation can take many forms – suggestion box, prototype presentations, contests – the platform usually supports reward and recognition mechanisms
• Micro-tasking – This is usually a specific configuration of generic crowd-sourcing tools – where the key functionality of project or task management will exist. However, the focus is on being able to generate participation externally, and the task is of a nature where it can be distributed.

Managing knowledge through Communities of Practice

A Community is defined as a social or other group sharing common characteristics or interests, and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists. In the organizational context, a Community of Practice (CoP) is a group sharing common interests or profession in a particular domain. The community evolves through the sharing of knowledge and experiences, learning from each other, and building tight bonds as a community on account of such shared interests. Of course, some organizations create these communities (as a task force) with a specific objective of gaining knowledge in a specific domain.

The key characteristics of a Community of Practice are:

• The domain in which the CoP situates itself
  
• The members of the community
  
• The practice
  

Domain is defined by who participates and who is a member; participation evolves over time through engagement and is further refined by alignment to a common shared vision. Some communities are self-organizing – it evolves based on the level of engagement and participation, the relationships it develops, and the shared experiences that become part of the way it works over a period of time. In some cases, they work within a framework or structure, and build their network of relationships along the way. A central organizing body usually formed from among the community members itself, defines the broad framework within which they operate, and define the vision for the community.

The practice itself defines what the community does, the value it creates, the actual practice it sustains and develops, and how it grows through the development of these practices. A community distinguishes itself from the larger society within which they operate by the boundaries they create – usually defined by relationships, connections and artefacts that they develop. It therefore stands to reason that for a Community of Practice to be successful, it has to develop around a common agenda, be able to engage and participate through shared experiences, and members need to develop a sense of accountability towards the community. Each community develops its own mechanism and process for knowledge creation and transfer; a community lacking foundational knowledge in its domain is likely to be able to sustain itself, since the concept of shared knowledge or experiences will be minimal or non-existent.

How can organizations empower strong and meaningful communities of practice that will be sustainable and create value?

• A Community of practice is based on shared experiences. This will essentially come from participation of its members. Recognition of member's participation will encourage active involvement which eventually will help build relationships across the community. An active community is able to draw in more members to its fold, enhance the level of participation, capture and build its repository of shared experiences, which eventually becomes the knowledge that the community shares with the rest of the organization.
  
• A community that has greater locality – not necessarily geographically, but in terms of shared interests, is more likely to sustain itself because of the sharper focus of the mutuality of their engagement. The commonality of beliefs and values, and the knowledge thus generated will carry more meaning for the community which set itself on a self-sustaining cycle.
  
• Learning and passing on common memories is essential to the power of practice. Community members become invested in other members through this common learning activity. Some examples of such learning are:
  
  • Codified knowledge in the form of user manuals, processes and written procedures
    
  • Rituals and shared beliefs which may even be part of the culture. For example, Friday 'brown-bag lunches' is a common ritual carried out in some organizations where members of the community get together, away from the work environment, to share their experiences and learn from each other.
    
  • Teaching and structured content which is prepared and delivered to members. In the technology-driven world, webinars are a means of engaging the community through structured presentations.
    
  • Everyday practice by the members – Members of the community develop a strong sense of bonding by actively engaging themselves in the code they have formed within themselves. For example, a CoP that prides itself on developing clear coding standards, diligently applies the learning and rules evolved by the community. This eventually leads to organizational level standards – sometimes extending to an international standard itself.
    
  • Enterprise activity that engages the members on a daily basis – this is usually driven by the enterprise itself to engage the members in an active manner. It could mean creation of surveys, polls, quizzes and other activities that will draw out participation and make the community a vibrant organism that is able to interact and contribute to the larger society in which it exists in a very dynamic environment.
    

  While the core principles that drive a Community of Practice are very much culture oriented, technology can play an important role in making it sustainable and available beyond geographic limitations. Active participation, however, will depend on how dynamic and participatory the individual members are.
  

  
   

  How do Communities of Practice operate in your organization? How effective are they in driving strategy?
  

Meaningful measures for managing knowledge

"Peter Brand: Billy, this is Chad Bradford. He's a relief pitcher. He is one of the most undervalued players in baseball. His defect is that he throws funny. Nobody in the big leagues cares about him because he looks funny. This guy could be not just the best pitcher in our bullpen, but one of the most effective relief pitchers in all of baseball."

~From the movie "Moneyball" (2011)

I was reminded of the movie during a recent conversation when someone asked me "Will a CEO be happy implementing a large scale solution to know that "nn" documents were shared in a group"? Measurement myopia leads us quickly to the maxim "What you can measure you can manage". However, as Einstein said" Not everything you count, counts; not everything that counts is counted". In knowledge management especially, establishing a relationship between business growth (and profitability) and organizational knowledge, is at best tenuous. While there are several research papers to establish that knowledge leadership has a definite impact on sustainable competitive advantage, growth, profitability, innovation and several other business performance attributes, it would be foolhardy to attempt to establish a formulaic method to arrive at this conclusion. Study of several organizations that have implemented knowledge management systems, and have progressed along the knowledge maturity path demonstrate empirically, that an organization that is able to leverage its intellectual capital is definitely better off than an organization that is struggling to get its thoughts organized. Enterprises with a higher level of knowledge management maturity have a higher potentiality to strategize and innovate. (Hagel et al, 2002)

That said, meaningful measures of knowledge management definitely have their place under the sun. It allows the organization insight into behavioural, cultural and aspects of organizational dynamics that facilitate or hinder collaboration, sharing of knowledge and therefore the capability to innovate. More importantly, it provides an anchor to correlate organizational performance to knowledge management, thereby enhancing the ability of the organization to improve business performance, by enhancing its capability to organize its knowledge management competencies. What then are some of the measures
^(*) that will eventually help link up to business performance?

• Number of sharing relationships resulting from exchange of knowledge (especially when it is across boundaries) – an indicator of innovation
  
• Re-use rate of frequently accessed content – an indicator for improvement in efficiency and quality
  
• Competency enhancement – A measurement of conversion of tacit to explicit knowledge evidenced from the conversion of online content into process / knowledge repository
  
• Lessons learned and Best practices implemented
  

At higher levels of maturity, organizations even go on to discover the accuracy of knowledge dissemination – the number of times a knowledge nugget reached / or was discovered by the right person at the right time. This along with other metrics like number of new ideas that translated into innovative products, practices or services, and so on provide valuable clues to the organization on the impact of knowledge on the organization's ability to lead them on a path of growth and sustainable competitive advantage.

Personally, I don't believe it is possible, as yet, to establish with any level of accuracy that sharing "nn" documents resulted in a $yy savings to the company. However, I think it will be possible to empirically show that such a relationship does exist. Knowledge Management is no longer that "leap of faith". In fact, with an ageing population, rapid change in technology and various other parameters, it is fast becoming a resource that no organization can do without.

How did your organization take its decision to implement a KM system? Write in with your feedback and comments.

^{(*) –} Adapted from the Knowledge Management Handbook – Edited by Jay Liebowitz.

Making sense of everyday chatter

"Benioff explained on Monday's call that Salesforce reps took the social enterprise mantra to customers, but "couldn't find the buyers," suggesting even Salesforce.com didn't exactly understand what it meant." After all the hype during the launch of the "Social Enterprise" in 2011, it was time for a new mantra "The Internet of customers". And as we hop from one jargon to another, customers are left pondering on what exactly they wanted when they bought what they did! (http://www.zdnet.com/salesforce-ceo-admits-social-enterprise-pitch-didnt-work-7000023336/)

Recent articles point to the growing disenchantment with social media tools as a powerful way of capturing knowledge. While they still may be a good medium to stay connected within the enterprise, there is growing realization that they do not exactly contribute to enterprise knowledge 
(http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/tech-decision-maker/how-yammer-is-killing-enterprise-social-networking/). One of the reasons for this has been the absence of a definitive context – one of the key strands in the DNA of a Knowledge Management System. While most social collaboration tools advertise themselves as KM tools, the ability to transform chatter to tacit knowledge (one that gets embedded in the DNA of the enterprise) is still some distance away. It is just not sufficient to say that it has been captured in the knowledge repository of the organization, and therefore the knowledge now exists in an explicit form.

Why is this so? Knowledge is an active process of knowing, the processes and results of participation in organizational practices. At one end of the spectrum we have technical knowledge – knowledge relating to skills and expertise required to perform tasks. At the other end of the spectrum, is the knowledge required for strategy and innovation – the translation of experience and expertise into actions that promote sustainable competitive advantage and growth. While to a large extent the knowledge required to perform tasks can be codified, stored and retrieved, the other kind of knowledge is mostly tacit. The success of any knowledge initiative will depend on how well this tacit knowledge is elicited and used. Such knowledge in action results in new products and processes which are then institutionalized and become new explicit knowledge.

So, if we were to consider an oft-quoted statement "Knowledge walks out when your employee leaves the organization"… it is true only to the extent of social collective practices that the organization engages in. So, the real question that the organization needs to deal with is on how to create the context in which social engagement takes place. Social media cannot do this…it is only a facilitator for recording the process. Social tools can enable this process effectively if they are grounded in the context where participation results in exploiting the weak ties and enabling greater collaboration, outside the circle of influence. For example, induction programs in many organizations is merely a set of PowerPoint presentations and canned lectures that purportedly gives the new hires a bird's eye view of the organization. However, engaging the new hires in conversations that relate to real-world problems exposes them to the organization in a manner that no induction program can achieve; more importantly, the organization gets to benefit from the experience of the new hires from day one. How can a social collaboration tool enable this? This, I believe is the challenge that social media tools need to surmount.

Conversations need to connect people to people, people to content, or content to content, for it to be actionable. When this happens the tacit nature of knowledge lends itself to transformation – to becoming assimilated by others in the enterprise, and thereon to getting embedded in the organization's way of working. This sharing of experience that occurs results in higher forms of learning – those that can impact more than just transaction-level activities; resulting in the manner in which an organization innovates and strategizes.

Collaboration goes beyond just working together on a project; in today's world, where technology has made the world smaller, it means a whole lot more. Social learning, Communities of Practice, and the good old chatter we see on social media all contribute to some form of collaboration. In fact, social media has almost become synonymous with social collaboration in the enterprise. Yet, how much of this actually adds up to enterprise knowledge is anybody's guess.
What has been your experience with the use of social media tools in your organization?