Wikis in Knowledge Management Presentation

This is the presentation I gave at the Dublin Institute of Technology on 08/11/09. There were 2 masters classes in attendance (Knowledge Management & IT).

Wikis In Knowledge Management Enabling Effective Collaboration

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Internal Blogging at BT

Another great post by Richard Dennison called Blogging Inside BT in which he describes how "BT management is prepared to allow its employees to express themselves and their opinions on ‘unregulated’, self-publishing platforms". It is a great read and another example of how to link the use of Web 2.0 tools to providing value internally behind the firewall.

I also like a response he has added to a comment on the post, relating to how blogs can have a longer life span than traditional discussion forums as "the owner feels responsible for keeping it going because it is part of their personal brand." I like this enterprise blogging idea, as it allows all employees to become experts in their own area, and makes individual knowledge more available to the wider internal community.

I have linked to Richard before, relating to his post on Web 2.0 adoption at BT. It seems that they have a clear vision of what they can achieve by empowering their employees with information and knowledge resources.

Anyone interested in real examples of how to formulate Web 2.0 strategy and learn from the BT examples should subscribe to Richard's blog Inside Out.

Social Communication in the Enterprise

Creating a knowledge sharing culture in the enterprise is a difficult task. There are many benefits to be gained from an environment where employees can freely exchange knowledge and expertise, which otherwise may be lost when they leave the organisation or switch roles within it. This element is known as knowledge retention.

The following table shows the scenarios in relation to the tools or methods used for capturing and sharing knowledge in the enterprise. The green cell (social - tacit) is the one which is most coveted and is probably most difficult to establish as part of the organisational culture.

This social - tacit communication is what I am exploring in my dissertation. I want to investigate whether the use of an enterprise wiki platform will result in employees participating in a community environment where they can contribute and search for content which previously they would have to either request it or know where to find it in the unorganised shared folders.

I would classify each of the cells as follows:

Individual-Explicit: The creation of knowledge by individuals in documents or in eMails as part of their day-to-day tasks. This type of knowledge is often not shared or made available to others for re-use. In this context, it is often "lost" to the organisation. An example of this is a "How-To" document created by an expert on how they do their job and often stored on their own PC or printed in the form of a document.

Individual-Tacit: From the definition of tacit knowledge..."is knowledge that people carry in their minds and is, therefore, difficult to access. Often, people are not aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences". Freeing this knowledge can lead to improved collaboration and communication in the enterprise.

Social-Explicit: Meetings, Workshops, Internal Communications (Magazines etc.) and Intranet Content. This type of knowledge is created by many and requires some collaboration during it's creation or compilation. Organisations have been using Intranets for years now to allow many to access explicit information in relation to procedures, organisational structure, FAQ's etc.

Social-Tacit: A culture of knowledge sharing and open communication is required for social - tacit interactions to freely occur. The use of discussion forums and FAQ/best practice intranet pages have been tried for this type of communication in the past. The use of Wiki's in the enterprise is an emerging trend in this area, which tries to build on the success of wikipedia as a mass-collaboration and participative platform and bring this behind the firewall to solve real business problems. There are also many elements of social-computing which have been demonstrated by YouTube, FaceBook, Flickr and many others which can bring an element of personalisation to these portals.

The creation of communities of practice or adapting current communications methods to enable employees to participate in a wiki portal may help them to contribute to the greater organisational knowledge, however, it must be noted that the creation of documents and management of information strategies must be an important part of any collaboration strategy.

RaboDirect sharing financial advice via RSS & Podcasts

Online bank RaboBank, has launched a new RSS & Podcast service for sharing financial advice such as investment tips and money management at RaboDirect.ie. According to SiliconRepublic.com, they are the first Irish bank to provide podcasts to customers. Early signs are that this scheme is proving popular, as it is the #1 business podcast on iTunes Ireland today (30/08/2007)

To start, they have setup a library of Podcasts by financial experts with titles including:

• The Basics of Investing.
• Secrets to becoming a successful investor.
• Factors to consider when choosing investment funds.
• How to learn from the mistakes of others?

The RSS channel has small summary type posts with the post titles linking to press releases and relevant pages of the RaboDirect site. Examples include:

• Product Announcements
• Events (Investment Seminar)
• Web Links (Notifying Customers of Information on RadoDirect Site)

This is a great example of business adopting the power of web 2.0 tools to capture customer attention and promote content on their site. RSS and Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular and this method of marketing will surely grow as more and more people move to Feed Readers for information consumption.

RaboBank said the scheme "empowers customers to maximize their savings and investment opportunities through immediate access to a bank of knowledge from independent financial experts".

Customer facing sites are often powerful on design at the home page, but often lack the content to support this. With RSS, organisations can target customers with topical and timely alerts to new content on their site. Coupled with the links to the product pages they can "pull" customers to the product rather than "push" an advertisement to them.

KM - Creating the learning environment

I love to learn, but in my own way. I prefer the practical - learning by doing, rather than classroom training courses with a "comedian" instructor.

I like to learn from others in a master and apprentice situation. I like working closely with an experienced colleague to watch how they complete tasks, analyse problems, communicate and deliver solutions.

However, the working environment within an organisation often doesn't allow sufficient time for such learning. The "master" may be so busy, that they have no time for an "apprentice".

JP Rangaswami makes some interesting points in his post entitled Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 5: Knowledge Management on his blog confused of calcutta.

Knowledge management is not really about the content, it is about creating an environment where learning takes place. Maybe we spend too much time trying to create an environment where teaching takes place, rather than focus on the learning.

He continues by noting 3 primary reasons why organisations would want to "manage knowledge" to share learning:

1. So that same mistakes are not repeated.
2. To speed up tasks.
3. To encourage teaching and learning.

I described above what my favourite learning traits are, and JP puts it very nicely:

a “let me show you” session, is worth a thousand “let me tell you” sessions.

Lost in Translation - Knowledge Sharing

I spent the last 10 days in Spain, and while I was there I realised how difficult it is to implement a global KM program trying to encourage knowledge sharing.

What I am referring to is the language barrier. I cannot speak Spanish, and I was thought that maybe the most important concept is to define the key elements of the KM strategy and allow others in your global offices around the world to access the content.

If the employees in the Spanish office complete a successful project, and subsequently wish to share their experiences with others within the organisation - will employees in the New York office be less likely to read this content if it is in Spanish?

Now I know that many organisations have invested in translation services (a friend of mine working for SAP has mentioned that they have a number of employees based in Galway, Ireland translating documents from English to German, Spanish and other Languages).

Would this investment be better spent on a KM program that enables content to be digested by all, providing a platform for publishing?

At the end of the day, making this information available to others in the organisation must be an improvement on the siloed operation of the past. Translation may be the next step.

For more on this concept, see the Globally Local - Locally Global blog, which is an excellent resource on global enterprise portals and intranets.

Organising a workshop using a Wiki

Following from my recent post, 15 productive uses for a Wiki, I have been thinking about how wiki's can help improve collaborative working - No. 16, Organising a workshop using a wiki .

Workshops are used to gather small groups of people over a short period of time to concentrate on a defined area of concern. They are used to brainstorm, discuss ideas, help in decision making, and to plan a course of action.

Usually a workshop is organised by a facilitator, who will invite participants to attend via email. This email will include the title of the workshop, date & venue, a brief description of what is to be discussed (background, progress-to-date) and the list of invitees.

At this stage, the facilitator will probably field a number of questions in relation to the workshop from invitees requesting further information. So, when the facilitator responds to each individual question, we are in a situation where the workshop has already been siloed into a number of individual channels - before it has already begun!

This is where I see the opportunity for improvement. I think it would be useful for the facilitator to setup a wiki for the workshop. The wiki would include:

• Workshop Wiki Homepage - (Title, Brief description, Aims & Objectives) This page sets the scope of the workshop, and is the entry point to the wiki.
• Admin Details - (Date, Time, Venue, Contact details, List of Attendees etc.) This would help eliminate the standard phone calls and other queries in relation to the basic information for the workshop.
• Agenda Page - (List of items for discussion, Presenters, Workshop Structure) This page will allow invitees to remind themselves of what will be discussed. This can be updated/altered in accordance with comments/suggestions in the time leading to the workshop.
• Background Information - (Documents, Intranet Pages, Presentations, and other related material) This would help invitees to prepare themselves for the workshop by having quick access to all relevant material which will support the workshop on the day.
• Workshop Discussion Page - (Facilitators' answers to pre-workshop queries) This would allow all invitees to keep up to date with any queries, additions to the agenda, and comments/suggestions by all involved.

The main challenges to managing the communication via email, and keeping invitees up-to-speed in the time leading to the workshop are well presented by Jeff Oxenford in his post Death by e-mail. Jeff points out that:

While e-mail is a wonderful thing, it's not designed as a discussion tool for the following reasons:

• E-mail is one-way communication, not discussion.
• Written words and tone often get misinterpreted - 90% of communication is non-verbal.
• Messages often cross in cyberspace, so you're commenting on proposal 1 while others are commenting on proposal 3.
• It's much easier to be negative when talking to a computer screen
• People don't read every word of an e-mail message.
• Many important decision makers tune out when the flow of e-mails get too great.

Like Jeffs' guidelines for email, I would say that:

• Send out the Invitation by e-mail (in the form of an invitation to the new workshop wiki).
• Accept comments/queries, responding with an acknowledgement, and a link to the page on the workshop wiki where the comment has been noted/addressed/been posted for collaborative reaction.

So the advantages are:

1. Capture Knowledge - Gather all the relevant background documentation and information required for the workshop.
2. Organise Knowledge - Setup the workshop wiki, with areas for confirmation, collaboration, and communication. Avoid crippling delays and irrelevant discussion on the day by allowing attendees to contribute ideas and suggestions before the workshop takes place.
3. Target Knowledge - Allow all of the attendees to get up-to-speed before the workshop. The wiki also allows for those unable to attend to contribute in some way.
4. Transfer Knowledge - Document action plans and outcomes of the workshop for all attendees to see. This allows all involved to keep up-to-date with the "What next?".
5. Maintain Knowledge - Allow future reference to the work carried out in this process so as to help in other projects and prevent re-work.

Please let me know what you think. I may consider exploring collaboration-enabling topics such as this one for my KM dissertation.

Related:

Application of Wiki's (wikipedia)

Supporting Community Through ICT (Rountable Workshop)

What is Knowledge Management?

This was one of the questions on my Case Studies in Knowledge Management exam in May.

Here is what I wrote:

There are many definitions for Knowledge Management (KM). Many of these focus on the capturing, organising and storing knowledge and experiences of individuals and groups and making this information available (sharing) to others in the organisation.

For me, the most important aspect of this is the sharing of information. Communication, collaboration and accessibility of the information are key to successful KM. I believe that the “freeing” of information, be it explicit (in documents, folders, intranets etc) or tacit (experts, experiences), to make it visible and accessible to all, allows an organisation to make best use of its intellectual capital.

Enterprise Search, Wiki’s, Document Management Systems, Web 2.0 Intranets, & Communities of Practice are some of the buzzwords associated with KM. All of these contribute towards the “learning organisation”, one which can learn from past success and failures to better its’ future performance. We have seen many examples of these implementations in the case studies during this module and throughout previous modules.

There is also KM at a personal level (PKM), organising ones’ own knowledge. For example, I intend to store documents, papers and conversations with my supervisor on a personal Wiki to enable me to chart my thoughts and progress during my KM dissertation. This will also allow me to implement my 3 key factors above – communication, collaboration and sharing of information.

Extacifying Knowledge - Putting Learning into Practice

I had a chat with an old school friend on my daily commute home this evening, introducing him to knowledge management.

He is currently completing an MBS in Human Resource Management at the UCD Michael Smurfit School of Business in Dublin, Ireland.

He is preparing a presentation next week on how to provide a strategy that allows individuals to practically apply what they learn in training courses.

This is when I started describing the explicit - tacit conundrum, which I based this blog on. He was not familiar with KM, and this surprised me, as I feel there are many applications of KM in the domain of HR, and specifically in the usage of Web 2.0 technologies in collaborative learning.

I have experienced this myself in my short career. I have completed training that I have not since used in my job role. This may be frustrating, but is there a solution?

Individuals should be able to track and choose the "learning path" which best suits them. Of course, there are always exceptions when trying to roll out an enterprise strategy of this kind (e.g. Technical, compliance & regulatory training).

In the future, it will be interesting to see the learning traits and needs of the "bebo" generation. Will HR learning staff have to evolve the delivery methods of such training to meet the expectations of young professionals born post 1990?

For instance, I thought the experiment with the delivery of education using iPods and iTunes at Stanford University was particularly interesting.

I think that m-learning (mobile learning) will have a big part to play in the future of education, considering the popularity of You-Tube and iTunes etc.

Extacit - What's in a name?

The aim of this blog is to "extacify" what I learn during my MSc study and to gather my thoughts on all things KM

So where did "Extacit" come from? - Well, it comes from explicit and tacit knowledge.

Explicit knowledge - "is knowledge that has been or can be articulated, codified, and stored in certain media. It can be readily transmitted to others. The most common forms of explicit knowledge are manuals, documents and procedures." - wikipedia

Tacit Knowledge - "is knowledge that people carry in their minds and is, therefore, difficult to access. Often, people are not aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Tacit knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for people, places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust." - wikipedia

So, I want to turn all that is taught to me, explicit knowledge, into something that I can pass on to others, tacit knowledge, therefore "extacifying" the content?