TakingAIIM

KM and Benjamin Button - or - Why This Blog Site is Not as Active as it Once was

Remember when I would post to this blog at least monthly - usually weekly?  The reason for my decrease in posting is actually related to a very keen insight on knowledge management, and what it takes to be pirmary care giver to a KM system.

Blogging has taken back seat of late because I am busy. I am a new parent.

OK, those of you that know me personally, are thinking – “Wait, what .. he is almost ready to be a grandparent. Another kid?” – let me explain.

Often when I am asked “What makes a good knowledge leader?”,  I tell a story about a presentation I was once giving, when I was asked that very question. I began my response by listing attributes and qualities, such as: patient, nurturing, good at highlighting the skills and accomplishments of others, willing to accept the blame when things go wrong and put all the glory on the knowledge provider when things go right …”. In the middle of this description, a member of the audience shouted out “Hey, you are describing my mother.” From then on I have used this metaphor.  An effective KM leader is a mother: - selfless, promoting accomplishments of "the family", is in a support role ensuring the family matures in a healthy way.

While I have been using this metaphor for years, I never really appreciated how powerful it was until recently. (Recall that two years ago I gave up the role of KM consultant to become a KM practitioner at FSG.) Little had I realize that in my role as a consultant I was enjoying the role of grandparent.

The consultant gets drop in on “the family”, bestow sage good advice, nurture and encourage while they are there “visiting”, perhaps for extended periods of time, but always knowing they can leave - final responsibility rests with the parents. 

The in-house practitioner, the KM Leader, (i.e., the parent) must deal with the day-to-day trials and tribulations, keep things humming on all fronts at all times.They do not get to leave.

So, now as a knowledge leader, I find myself a (proud) parent, too busy to blog on a weekly or even monthly basis, as I could as a “grandparent.” But, nonetheless I am still very much steeped in content, process and knowledge management, just on a different, more granular level. I am posting this realization now, because this week my family “FSG” received the KMWorld KM Reality award. It was a proud moment for this parent, and the family.

Here I am as a parent - benefiting from my days as a grandparent (this is where the reference to Benjamin Button comes in - growing backwards). I seek my own strategic advice, if you will, while struggling with the day to day reality of budgets, differences of opinion, outgrowing functionality, stages of maturity, and potential dysfunctions in the family.

Its a tough job - but a rewarding job (as every parent knows). My point here is a simple one. I just wanted to salute all the KM consultants out there for the advice, wisdom and direction they provide, and all the practitioners for keeping KM fresh, impactful and relevant on a daily basis.

Take Knowledge Management with a Grain of Salt, else You’re better off Stoned

The purpose of knowledge management (KM) is to get people collaborating – to share and reuse know how and experience.  Note that this does not place any demand on technology.   Indeed, I often stress the best form of KM is talking to everyone who might know something about your focus du jour. The problem with this approach is, of course, scale and recall, and that is where technology provides value. 

The introduction of KM technologies, can provide unlimited knowledge capture and asynchronous discovery.  But technology is a double edged sword, and this is where remembering to approach technology-empowered KM with a grain of salt is important.

Imagine the ability to execute searches on any topic, any issue, and on people’s backgrounds  with near perfect total recall. Powerful – right? So where is the other edge of the sword?

A recent article published in Fast Company, highlights a study done by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists.   According to their study,  we can quickly become addicted to research to the point where it inhibits our ability to make a decision; to act. No really.

Not enough for you?  Seven years ago, an article ran in NewScientist.  It highlights a study done at  King's College London, that showed  in today’s business setting, marked by emails, smart phone connections,– the connected 24x7 reality of today, the average IQ of an individual drops by about 10 points.  The study went on to conclude, (and this is my favorite part), “Even smoking dope has less effect on your ability to concentrate on the task in hand.”

So, what’s my point?  KM is a balancing act. Unrestricted abilities to capture and retrieve  are very powerful,  and addicting.  Know when enough is enough. Asynchronous communication is a time saver, its scalable and powerful – but not to the exclusion of mentoring, discussing, and face-to-face group collaboration, and it should never go so far as to keep you from reaching a decision and taking action. 

Take KM with a grain of salt (else you might as well enjoy the salt on a margarita, or two.)

From the Trenches: Collaboration, even going viral takes a strategy

Every knowledge manager knows that collaboration is the ultimate goal of any knowledge management (KM) system. In my new role as the Director of KM at FSG (A professional services company dedicated to "Discovering better ways to solve social problems", I get to reaffirm this belief almost daily. Collaboration is also a linch for teh social chnage practitioner. Perhpas this is most evident in collective impact, which by definition is fundamentally about collaboration.  In my latest blog post on the FSG site (worth a read) I "re-explore' the challenge of collaboration and why strategy is so important. The post concludes  with a link to anarticle, recently published by Central Desktop, purveyors of collaboration software. Despite that fact, the article does not focus on technology, but rather the art and science of collaboration, and offers several REALLY interesting and powerful real world examples of what is possible when collaboration is addressed deliberately and strategically, including: SETI@home, the largest distributed-computer effort on earth using volunteers from around the world, collaboratively looking for evidence of intelligent life on other planets; ReCaptcha, a global collaboration project to digitize books that YOU – yes YOU have likely participated in, though you may not know it –collaboration can be sneaky; and a fun one, Stand-By-Me, part of the Playing for Change movement. I found these examples entertaining, enlightening and inspirational, and hope you do too.

"[Not so] Elementary My Dear Watson"

After 20+ years of  immersion in ECM and KM,  I still find myself in awe and amazed.  As I have commented before, ECM and KM are forever changing in ways that astonish.  Managing “stuff” that seems to defy management, and mimicking the human brain’s ability to infer meaning, spot associations and discover insights locked away in words and pictures, is not an easy thing to do. We have come light years from the 1960s when IDI’s BASIS and IBM’s STAIRS heralded the ability of software to mine content from a library of documents. But, excitingly so, we have a long way to go. Perhaps the greatest opportunity and challenge is associated with retrieval/search tools. Not only in how they work, but how they are leveraged.

My position as KM Director at FSG, juxtaposes this fascination of mine with an organization that focuses on issues even greater than “how to build the smartest search tool.”  The work of FSG, to put it succinctly, is to solve the world’s greatest problems (e.g., world hunger).  So I find myself in a perfect storm, awash in an invigorating monsoon of innovation and creativity -  great thinkers and creative problem solvers who can benefit from creative and powerful approaches to KM.  OK – I’ll get to the point, why am I so excited right now?

A few weeks back I saw a phenomenal show on Nova about the IBM project that led to the creation of Watson – the search engine that became famous when it was a challenger on the popular TV show Jeopardy.   If you are the least bit interested in how search, heuristic learning and lexical analysis/meaning inference and content mining work, I highly recommend you watch the Nova Watson special. It is AMAZING. (My family had to put up with me in the living room periodically murmuring “Wow”, “that’s so cool”, and “I knew it.”, (confirming in their minds what an ECM geek I am.)

What made the Nova show so fascinating was not watching Watson eventually win at Jeopardy, but the process the developers at IBM went through to bring the search engine to this state. It was a powerful example of  what it takes to fine tune a software system to interact with questions and a body of content in order to, not just retrieve content, but bubble up answers. FASCINATING.

Serendipitously, I am at a stage in the development of the FSG KM system, where we are revisiting the search function. As I have said time and again, search is pivotal to the value of an ECM/KM system, and search is not a one-size fits all technology. (Watson is but one example of the richness that can be embodied in “search”). So yes, we are “revisting” search, with eyes set at something that goes beyond our current word and phrase searching capability. Now, I readily admit that my talents and my arsenal are nowhere near those of the team at IBM that built Watson, but I drew great inspiration from them. They demonstrated how lexical analysis, clustering, word pattern recognition and heuristics executed at the speed of a computer, tailored to a particular situation, can provide impressive recall and precision, as well as inference and “discovery”.  (I cannot help but wax nostalgic a time when explanation of a search tool was met with blurred eyes. Now virtually everyone gets it; Google is a household word. We are fortunate to be living in a time when many “off the shelf” search tools provide rich functionality. We are planning on starting our re-visit with a trial of Vivisimo.)

Watson can beat the best of the best Jeopardy champions. It deciphers questions posed in natural language, and looks at possible answers based on experience, patterns and connections. It does not retrieve a collection of content, but pinpoints potential answers. My point is “search” has become increasingly powerful. I often recall conversations I had with Dr. Matthew Koll many years ago, who used to enjoy posing to audiences the question “What if you could obtain perfect precision and recall, what would you do with it?”.

Therein lies the real challenge -  right? Watson demonstrates the possibility of achieving Koll’s dream – perfect recall with instinctive precision.  But, then what?  It’s fun to watch Watson beat humans at answering trivia questions – but that is not the goal of this technology, is it?  FSG’s KM system is light years behind Watson, but, if it can achieve 1% the impact that Watson achieved,  it will matter. FSGers are faced not with answering challenging trivia questions, but finding solutions to much more complex issues – and they so with creative approaches and determination. ECMers such as myself, are faced with daunting challenges of a different sort. Together, there is that perfect storm I mentioned earlier; that mission that stokes my fire.  I will be sure to revisit this issue based on our experience. Stay tuned …

Lest We Forget

In the days leading to the 10th anniversary of what is now simply known as "9/11", it is difficult not to encounter media reliving that moment and/or looking back on its aftermath. The focus of this blog has never been political, and I will not start now. But, in today's Metro, I read an article that, while focused on 9/11 had a ECM undertone to it, perhaps only picked up by enterprise content management (ECM) geeks such as myself.  The article, "The US Lexicon: New Words for a Changed World", provides an interesting overview of the effects of 9/11 on the American vocabulary. 9/11: now not just a date or series of numbers, but a label that evokes a day in history; a turning point. "War on Terror" a phrase and concept that did not exist prior. "Ground Zero", no longer the area closest to a bomb explosion, but a specific place in lower Manhattan.

Some three to four decades ago when I spent much time enlightening business and technical audiences on the capabilities of search engines (then full-text retrieval; yes even ECM has an evolving lexicon), the ability for an engine to keep pace with a language over time, or to adapt to a lexicon belonging to a specific "Community of practice", was a critical concept to appreciate and leverage.

Text retrieval grew from simple word-based queries into various intelligent approaches to understanding the meaning contained in words and phrases, to not just search on exact text strings, but to intelligently process the written word, the language and expand retrieval to intelligent adaptive concept-based retrieval. Foundation to this is customizable and/or adaptive lexicon management.

Search technology has come a long long way. But still retrieval tools, especially some of the more powerful were acquired and bundled into larger ECM platforms - e.g. FAST acquisition by Microsoft. For the most part lexical capabilities, or intelligent adaptive search technology is only available inside of large ECM platforms. Six months ago I blogged about my experience with small-medium ECM platfomrs that bundle retrieval, but typically in the form of more simple tools, e.g., Lucene. These tools do not adapt, comprehend, morph or expand a search into its various permutations, to treat retrieval conceptually, and/or support customized lexicons.

For those who have never experienced an "intelligent search tool", it is easy to  be led to believe that simpler search engines such as Lucene are the state of the industry.  But, standalone search tools, such as Vivisimo, Coveo and Endeca still do exist, and it is prudent that every ECM manager or knowledge manager, who finds themselves using a ECM platform or KM platform that does not provide an "intelligent search engine"  to ask themslevs what value would be achieved by integrating such a tool.

In one of the last gigs I had as a knowledge management/ECM, we brought in just such a search tool, (Vivisimo) - in this case to a very large corporation, for whom "intellignet" search, for a variety of reasons had escaped them. In one demonstration of "effective" search, they were literally blown away. Prior to this, they had undertaken a handful of attempts, some costing in the millions of dollars to develop and train a search engine to provide concept clusters, heuristic taxonomies and conceptual searching. Here it was - "Out out ofthe box".  More importantly, seeing "it work", they readily appreciated the power od conpet-based, heuristic clustering as a way to effectivley mine intelligence from contyent - not just locate words and phrases in text.

In my current position, as I previously blogged about, we began with a simple search tool, embedded in an ECM platform.  But our plan is very much focused on expanding this to include high end search. Size of a community and corpus of content somewhat effects the need for "intelligent search", but more improtantly, in virtually every situation you will need it becasue, as the article in today's Metro that insppired this post pointed out, langauge is always changing, across communities, industries and subject matter.

It is a Happier New Year

If you are like me, there is a certain amount of depression that comes after the holiday season - its back to life as usual. What I miss most is the heightened focus on giving to others. This year I am happy to say that was not the case, as this marks my first new year with FSG. (My experience with FSG was first choronicled in a blog post a few months back.)

At FSG the focus on giving exists 365 days a year, and to my own personal delight in a way that surrounds me in the source of my passion – Knowledge Management. I am not only talking about my role as the Director of Knowledge Management at FSG – but the practice of FSG itself: we wallow in Knowledge Management.

That may seem like a strange statement to one that has not straddled the worlds of Knowledge Management and social problem solving, but to one who has, the overlap is significant – especially in the way FSG operates. At FSG Knowledge management is at teh foucndation of teh practice of social innovation.  Read more

A Great Big Dollop of Secret Sauce on My Face: Culture and ECM

I’m Back.  Yes,  I know it has been many weeks since I have blogged (and my Twitter activity has been a bit anemic as well.)  Dan and I are eyeball deep with a major, challenging and amazing ECM and KM consulting gig.  We are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel though. Much progress has been made, but the organization has a long way to go – at least concerning ECM and E2.0.

It’s as if they pulled a Rip Van Winkle and let the ECM and E2.0 technology world move on without them for the past 2 decades. But I am not throwing stones. To the contrary – in spite of this, the company is very successful, thriving, growing, and highly respected as a leader in its industry.  This fact is humbling, because it reminds the ECM and E2.0 zealot in me that there is so much more to success than technology.  Oh, I know that I, and many other industry analysts have said this many times – but here I am engaged in a textbook case of just how unimportant technology can be.

Their secret sauce- it’s no secret. I have talked about it before as well, it’s corporate culture, and the way this company permeates it all the way down the employee chain. It’s this organization’s greatest asset, IMHO, and it is so powerful that, as I said, it keeps the company successfully buzzing along despite a gap in ECM.  (I can only imagine how things will take off when the “lubrication” that ECM provides is injected into the wheels of business.- There's that ECM zealot again.)

Most of you are probably familiar with the graphic (below) that I often use to describe KM as the alignment of business strategy, people/culture, processes and technology. I know that I have said before that culture is the most important among these, In fact that was the focus of my presentation at this year's  E2.0 Conference.   But I think that I have never really appreciated just how powerful and important people/culture really is until now. And so, I just don’t say it again, but SHOUT it (and eat a bit of (ECM) humble pie) “Culture is far and away the most powerful of the components.”   My client has taught me that really great culture can more than adequately make up for a dearth of technology.

Oddly enough, this reawakening came at a time,when Dan Keldsen, among others, got involved in an online debate/dialogue with Susan Scrupski – of 2.0 Adoption Council fame.  The debate provided a mirror reflection on my awakening. Susan was lamenting that Apple and Trader Joe’s are examples of most successful companies, that do not practice the mantra of E.0 – transparency.  She stated “Truthfully, there are many, many successful companies that do not subscribe to a culture of openness and sharing, much less transparency....” Susan went so far as to label Trader Joe’s as  “anti-social.”(See why the debate ensued.)

Susan, the secret sauce is not your prescribed “E2.0 transparent culture.”  The secret sauce is "any" healthy corporate culture – and quit frankly you do not know what their corporate (i.e., internal) culture is. (Is that what is bugging you?) That is their secret sauce – and likely a smattering of technology in these cases as well. But just as I am sometimes too over zealous about technology –culture zealots sometimes miss the point as well. There is not one best way to “do culture”. Transparency and emergence are not the only traits of a healthy culture, nor do they necessarily guarantee success by themselves. Indeed, Scrupski’s 2.0 Adoption Council is a very much closed community. I am sure that within its firewall there is great collaboration and transparency, but they do not share all they know and discuss with “everyone”, nor do they allow just anyone into their community.

The 2.0 Adoption Council is likely the same as Trader Joe's and Apple. While I have had a chance to consult with Apple  – I have not had the opportunity to work with Trader Joe's – though I am a loyal customer.  Do not underestimate the value, and QUALITY of the internal culture of thee organizations. Are they "transparent and social” with the general public - maybe not, but they got it right nonetheless.

Ripe culture does not mean always open, transparent and fully customer driven. The secret sauce of internal culture sometimes is just that – a secret.

Context is King and ECM-based BI is the Keys to the Kingdom

Yesterday I tweeted (@carlfrappaolo) about a Boston Globe articleEndeca. I was going to let it go at that; congratulations Endeca for getting the attention of the Sunday Globe and for having the popular press cover the fact that search is more than just findability and Google, that search can be used as a form of business intelligence (BI).

But then this morning, serendipitously I heard a story on NPR about the dramatically changing world of television watching and the impact that is having on the services provided by Nielsen. For decades Nielsen has had a monopoly on this market; reporting on the “popularity” of television programs based on eyeballs on TV sets at a particular time. This data is extremely valuable because it provides potential advertisers with insight on how much a spot on a given program is worth, and to which audience.

But television watching just isn’t what it used to be (echo newspapers and magazines). Television content consumers have alternative ways to access content (e.g.TiVo and Hulu) via alternative viewing devices that include smart phones and laptops, to name just a few. (I know my kids are forever watching TV without the TV on.) The viewing audience, including the way they view is changing. Nielsen customers (i.e. advertisers) are demanding that Nielsen keep pace and monitor these viewing habits. The television ad market is not dying - it is morphing and as a result is potentially more valuable. Through ECM-based technologies, it is possible to compile BI on multiple consumer habits, at unprecedented levels of granularity. In the case of television viewing, for example, not only what viewers are watching, but also when, where, what was skipped, re-played and shared. As Nielsen's president Steve Hasker put it. ""We'll be able to tell what type of video they watch, what type of sites they go to, how they interact on those sites, what they buy on those sites, what types of news articles they're reading." That is BI at a far lower and wider level of granularity than Nielson provides today.

Now think this new proposition through. Advertisers, using more ECM-based technology (e.g. e-publishing and DAM) advertisers can deliver more personalized and granular messages, in a timely manner – ads in context. Yes, once again, CONTEXT is king, and BI is the keys to the kingdom. ECM is at the foundation of great new opportunities and challenges for organizations. I recently completed an article for Ron Miller in which I focus on the circle between ECM, KM and Innovation Management. This triumvirate will soon become a requisite to remaining competitive in virtually any market. The article discusses this concept in some detail, more than here. Here, I draw attention to the tie between Innovation Management and ECM (in that order). In a phrase: get innovative with ECM. As highlighted in this blog post, the integration of new content types and new means of content distribution and consumption, coupled with new approaches to BI creates amazing opportunities; truly personalized real-time publishing, contextual publishing and a constant loop of feed back (including web 2.0 emergence) that allows the content provider to continuously fine-tune the presentation and make-up of content. The future for advertising and marketing is ripe with positive change, and ECM is at the foundation of this.

Content Security and KM "D'oh"

OK, I admit it. I do not spend all my weekends sitting around thinking deep ECM and KM thoughts. I enjoy hanging out with the kids and indulging in some mindless TV watching. Its amazing though how the KM/ECM geek in me will sometimes connect the two – mindless TV and ECM/KM that is. Last night I was wrapping up the weekend watching The Simpsons with my 2 daughters. Sure, occasionally there is a poignant message or two – usually lost on the kids. But in last nights episode there was a strong and important message directed right to every KM, ECM and E2.0 manager. Intentional or not – it was there and you did not have to think to deeply to catch it. The Simpsons find themselves in Machu Pichu (don’t ask why – its not worth it). The narrator is explaining the significance of the site and states something along the lines of “This great civilization built a great wall around its people to protect it from the outside and keep their culture pure. But great walls also lock out knowledge, (Seriously that is the word he used.) and as a result the Incas were not adept at understanding the rest of the world or dealing with change. When the conquistadors appeared they were confused, ran and were destroyed.” OK – you all got it right? “But great walls also lock out knowledge.” (Yes, the historical accuracy is off here - but the tie to ECM, KM and E2.0 - nonetheless poignant and worth reiterating.) “But great walls also lock out knowledge.” I spared my kids the thought that popped into my mind, “EXACTLY and that is the mission of every KM, ECM and Enterprise 2.0 manager”, to manage the BALANCE between security and collaboration. It is a topic I have spoken, written and blogged about many times. IAI published a primer on this very subject. I am currently in the process of working with Susan Scrupski, and members of The 2.0 Adoption Council on this very issue. A group of the Council members who had to deal with strict privacy laws in Europe could have taken the “Machu Pichu” approach and erred on the side of security. But in the interest of collaboration to support agility and innovation, they worked a bit harder and used techniques and technologies to strike a clever balance between security and collaboration. Sure – some of us may look at such approaches and say “D’oh”, or even “Duh”, but far too many have yet to really embrace this balancing act as the primary focus of long term success in the world of Knowledge Management, ECM and E2.0. If you haven’t, I again invite you to read the primer on Content Security, and the 2.0 Adoption Council report when it is available next month.

Nothing Virtual About Virtual Distance

Today I had the great fortune to attend the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) program at Babson College. I almost didn’t go – having just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, I was feeling a bit “full” of talk on collaboration and technology. But luckily three things coerced me into attending.

1. The event was being produced by Kavin Moody of CIMS, who I had worked with a few weeks back on a similar symposium at Olin Innovation Lab (Olin College of Engineering), and was impressed with the group and his work.

2. The speaker, Karen Sobel Loeski was highly recommended by my colleague Joe Wehr, whose opinion I respect and value greatly.

3. The topic was just a bit left of center – Leading the Virtual Workforce. So I decided to go. WOW – OMG am I glad I did. Karen Sobel Loeski was not only a dynamic, engaging and entertaining speaker, but her message was fascinating. As those of you who follow my work know, when I address collaboration and knowledge management audits I utilize an 8-dimension model. Using a variety of techniques I measure the effectiveness of (and obstacles caused by) these 9 facets.

In performing these assessments leadership style is assessed - as part of team structure, communication and structure. But, Karen’s work focuses deeply on leadership. While I pontificate on the value of leadership and best practices in leading collaborative teams – and the need for a different approaches when teams are virtual – Karen actually has come up with something called the virtual distance, an approach by which one can measure the reach or gap that exists amongst a virtual team. I will not go into her talk and work in detail here. I recommend that you buy her 2 books – really. I will summarize my favorite points.

1. The need to address the issue of virtual distance is critical in this era of Enterprise 2.0. One of the biggest value propositions of E2.0 is the ability to support and facilitate effective team-based collaboration regardless of time and distance between team members. This is empowering, but as we migrate to a virtual workforce, we need to realize that the approach and role of team management needs to be adapted. All too often we hear that E2.0 is about collaboration without leadership, anarchy, and the destruction of business management. Karen (and I) averts that this simply is not so. Teams – virtually any team (no pun intended) - begs for leadership – of some sort. The leader of a virtual team faces different challenges and requires different sensitivities and skills but is as critical as a "traditional" team leader.

2. Although typically associated with geographically dispersed teams, virtual distance can occur between 2 people sitting in the same car (you had to be there to appreciate this comment). Virtual distance is a cognitive and psychological distance as well as a physical distance. Karen provides a 10-dimension model to assess the virtual distance of a team. The Virtual Distance Index^TM

3. Glocalization of our workforces has changed many issues for business – not just leadership style. We need to reexamine how we evaluate the value of our workers and the work they perform. ROI models steeped in “cost/time of widgets produced” models simply do not work any longer. Karen offered many great examples; one: Adobe Reader makes no money directly for Adobe, so it has no value right? – We all know the answer is “wrong” – it is “new value”. Although “its not about the technology” – technology is changing the economic models of the past.

Interestingly enough, I was speaking with Michael Idinopulos of SocialText the other day. SocialText provides a host of services (including assessments) along with their E2.0 technology, because (as a virtual company themselves) they appreciate that the value derived from technologies that enable virtual collaboration and teaming is only maximized if the culture AND LEADERSHIP associated with the technology usage are specifically adapted to leverage the technologies and the environments they create. Michael addresses the issue of "leaderless collaboration" very well in his post Transparency, not Anarchy. I think part of the reason we are having such a difficult time getting through this transition is partially based in our lexicon. Perhaps we need to think of another term for technology-enabled teams and collaboration that transcend time and distance. We call them virtual - but there is NOTHING virtual about them. They are very real, and they are very powerful. I'll wrap this somewhat lengthy post up by stealing a quote from Karen's presentation - she quoted Albert Einstein "We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive."

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