Idea Ripples

The combination of hyperconnectivity and hybrid thinking has resulted in disruptive operating models for businesses. These in turn have implications for the trifecta of Knowledge, Learning and Innovation, young corporate disciplines that are critical success enablers in Professional Services Firms. Idea Ripples emerged from the recognition that good ideas shared through enabling technologies create a force multiplier effect in an evolving ecosystem, which we are all consuming, contributing to, capitalizing on and constantly calibrating against. Knowledge Management practitioners recreate some of this phenomenon within their firms. My professional life, as a KM practitioner and consultant, has been a vibrant confluence of its various aspects including research, ideation, and knowledge technology implementation and adoption. By the time I was 26, I had lived and worked in 4 countries across 3 continents, cultivating a diversity of thought and a life-long love of learning. My name is Vishal Agnihotri and these are my recent observations, experiences and readings (all comments welcome). The photos on this blog are the creative endeavors of my husband (except for a few, which are mine).

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Lessons from a social experiment

In my new role as the first CKO of a law firm, the focus of my Knowledge strategy hovered over a couple of large initiatives - social KM, the first forms library, improved Search and the redesign of the Intranet. Of these the social KM initiative was what most peers said couldn’t succeed, that only made it even more attractive as a challenge.  Here are the highlights of my advice to anyone embarking on a similar program.

Vendor Selection

For any new KM tool that is being considered, review demos of various vendors. Outside of the demos, conduct research about the performance of the vendors through discussion with their former and current clients. In some cases, you might be their first major client and if that is the case, ask questions like, ‘What is your process for building a roadmap?’, ‘How large is your development team and what level of custom modifications can it provide?’, ‘What is the turnaround speed of troubleshooting after the system is piloted or deployed and bugs discovered?’. 

Ensure both parties have clarity around the SLAs before signing the contract.

Plan a launch campaign 

A strong campaign should be planned as part of the roll out and if a new program is branded, with a visual and text identifier it should be heavily used to create both brand recognition and future recall with the user base.  Employees are usually dealing with electronic fatigue, and another tool in the toolbox has to stand out enough to grab and keep their attention. The Marketing Rule of 7 states that a prospect needs to ‘hear’ the advertiser’s message at least 7 times before they’ll take action to buy that product or service. This same rule should be applied to the adoption strategy for new programs.

The launch campaign should include a range of training materials - one page cheat sheets and multi-page instructions to cater to different kinds of learners, as well as a short training video (created on Captivate or another similar training tool) for the audio visual learners. Ideally the launch message should go out company wide from someone in leadership to give it the weight it deserves.

Secure Leadership Engagement

Your first evangelists for the program are the leaders of your organization. Define the business problem you are trying to solve. Generate a considerable amount of curiosity and interest in the new tool but respect the intelligence, time and attention of Leadership and have ready talking points to explain how this new tool would benefit their day to day work and improve efficiencies for their group.

Train till ... (you exhaust all excuses for not using the new tool)

The training sessions can and should be offered in various ways from in person group sessions to webinars and even one-on-one coaching. If the user base is a group that is technology resistant, factor in a longer adoption cycle. However the principle of ‘social proof’ (as explained by Robert Cialdini, author of ‘The Power of Persuasion’) is a strong enabler in faster adoption. When people are uncertain of what they should do, they look around to their peers and let that influence their action.

Use examples

Using the ‘social proof’ principle, show people how social KM helps connect people and helps connect the dots. It is messy and the opposite of the classic KM approaches like formally capturing after-action reviews or best practices for knowledge transfer or building a methodology for process efficiencies. However it is virtually impossible that every bit of information that employees could possibly need has been neatly captured and cataloged for easy retrieval. Social KM has its place for seeking and finding timely nuggets of internal information that are tacit among the employees of the organization. 

Ask for feedback

Actively ask for feedback and don’t get defensive of your enabling technology. Critical and complimentary feedback help you customize the tool, the training materials and your talking points. A formal survey would be ideal but run it by a few friendly users first. There is plenty of proof that researchers often create surveys that make perfect sense to them, but fall short of covering every kind of interpretation at the respondent’s end.

Monitor usage and report back

It’s easier to let the numbers do the talking if anecdotes of success fail to make the point with the program sponsors, senior stakeholders and even users in the company. Monthly reports of usage can start to reveal patterns and answer questions about changing and desired behaviors - Are the employees changing the way they seek and find information? Do they feel more connected with everyone else in the company? Do they feel more engaged as employees? Do they feel more productive? Do they feel more relieved about knowing where to go for certain information?

The picture above is of the lovely komorebi effect. Knowledge is like light, and like light it can filter through in many ways  - scattered like komorebi, or blinding like a floodlight or focused like a laser pointer. Social KM looks more like the komorebi.

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Unloading and Reloading in Boston

A good professional conference always reminds me why I like what I do for a living, but more importantly it offers an opportunity to intersect, interact and inform. Intranet Reloaded Boston 2016 did just that last week. Set in a venue on the Boston Harbor, it brought together cross-disciplinarian practitioners from Communications, HR, Knowledge Management, and IT to share their war stories and lessons learned. Speakers included seasoned KM and Comms professionals like Katrina Pugh, Laura Grover, Giovanni Piazza, Harry Tobin, Bob Libbey, Mary Ellen Tetnowski and others, I was honored to be counted among them.

Several talks shared the novel, engaging, or just simply brave efforts of Intranet Managers across businesses, non-profits and even government agencies, from small banks with less than 400 employees, to large multinational firms with upwards of 200,000 staff. Neal McCarthy and Hannen Malallah spoke of their global efforts on a shoestring budget at the non-profit organization, Oxfam. Pamela Stewart and David Moore described the huge endeavor they are taking on to roll out and integrate Knowledge tools across the Government of Canada, complete with promo videos and treating their geographically dispersed employee base as an enterprise. They attributed the investment to the interest of their new forward looking Prime Minister. Ben Wallace of Orrstown Bank, spoke of his efforts to improve old processes and usher his 300+ employee community bank into a modern way of working. Rachel Butts of the Children’s Hospital in Texas had the best examples of shadowing, a highly recommended approach in KM to understand the end user workflow in order to predict behavior towards a future solution. From shadowing in the ER to flying on an airlift, she observed her field nurses close enough to understand their workflow before she built her hospital wide communications portal. Kudos.

My favorite Knowledge Cafe sessions were by Pinkal Gandhi of AIG and Laura Grover of Qunitiles. Pinkal used a demonstration to remind us what a good idea it is to bring representatives of various groups to the table before, during and after the roadmapping, implementation and ongoing adoption of your KM programs. A developer, an HR executive, an end-user, a trainer, a Comms executive and a Knowledge Manager sharing their own objectives for the Intranet and providing input on behalf of their departments.

In their talks, Laura Grover spoke of her experience of rolling out an Intranet on Office 365 at her company Quintiles, and Mary Ellen Tetnowski shared lessons learned from her recent portal relaunch. Microsoft has maintained a stronghold on internal enterprise communications largely due to its dominance of email software. Now that internal comms have matured beyond email and into the realm of controlled publishing (by formal Internal Comms departments) and self-publishing (user generated content), there is room for others and other tech vendors are definitely trying to jump in.  Microsoft's SharePoint platform dominates the internal enterprise publishing space largely because of first mover advantage and the resulting ubiquity. And although it is expected that the company understands the security concerns of their clients, there was some dissatisfaction with the shortfall in that understanding with its recent push for Office 365. Intranet Managers have been encouraged to switch to an OoTB model where they are given very limited options to customize, the latter leading to some frustration among Intranet Managers. The IT departments might be relieved initially with the promise of lesser ongoing maintenance, but issues like reduced download speeds and an uncontrolled document publishing system could pose newer challenges. Smaller vendors are rushing to get in, some offering slicker UI, some better search, or at least a different search. 

A brief note on a couple of vendors at the conference. Adenin showcased its very nascent voice-enabled NLP search, and announced that it was looking for early adopters to test out their technology. Another vendor, Oblong Industries took us for a demo and dinner at their downtown Boston office, allowing us a closer view of their immersive visual collaboration software and spatial operating environment, Mezzanine. Very slick, think Minority Report. Hang on, that’s where we saw it first. The tech trade press has happily covered Mezzanine since then, including their demo videos. It looks very impressive and if you believe Kevin Kelly’s recent article in the Wired magazine (and why would you not), the quest for Virtual Reality and Mixed Reality is heating up, and technologies like Mezzanine might be the first in the line of accessible immersive experiences.

The picture above depicts the historic Boston Tea Party, also at the Boston Harbor in 1773.

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Legal KM Conferences - Part 2

The Ark Group’s KM in the Legal Profession Conference in October was an excellent after conference, after the high octane ILTACON. Comfortably stretched over two days, the sessions, sans the noise from vendor demos and parties, it brought together a tightly knit group of about 150-200 Legal Knowledge Management professionals for informative presentations and interactive discussions on topics like the intersection of Risk and KM, Marketing and KM, Legal PM, Pricing Management and how KM addressed business problems but without first stopping to label them. The panel I was on with my peers Ginevra Saylor (Dentons) and Silvia LeBlanc (Morgan Lewis) described how Knowledge Management was critical during large acquisitions, mergers and with the integration of laterals in law firms. 

The LexMundi KM Roundtable in January in Nashville, another conference, one even smaller than Ark, involved many mid-sized firms that grappled with several issues common to big law firms - cybersecurity, collaboration, keeping innovative in the face of rapid market changes and client demands, updating information systems and a continuous need to educate their lawyers on new technologies. There were also a few discussions on the day to day infrastructure and upkeep of information systems.

Ross Intelligence made a presentation although it was a very brief one in partnership with IBM Watson, that was my third Watson presentation at a conference within a year. Ross Intelligence is bolting Watson’s formidable cognitive computing horsepower to tomes of primary case law to bring something practical and user friendly to the marketplace. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) capability which is largely based on ‘key word in context’ or synonyms at the most. This is an exponential leap for legal research and reminds me of the leap in business and legal research databases when most of them moved from rigid command language to the web interface in the late 90s. Ross has done all its work in the space of Bankruptcy Law with a handful of law firms so far, including its founding firm Dentons (NextLaw Labs). A winner of an IDEO competition, Ross Intelligence is definitely doing interesting things and has the potential to upend the galvanizing efforts of traditional players like Lexis Nexis and Westlaw (Thomson Reuters) who are similarly adding analytic and search capabilities to their knowledge base.

One of the pictures above is of the sight that greeted me at Nashville Airport, the capital of country music.

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Legal KM Conferences - Part 1

ILTACON 2015 in Las Vegas was a spectacular and overwhelming show bringing together legal tech vendors, big and small, under one roof to connect with a wide variety of needs in law firms and corporate legal departments. Seasoned bloggers like V. Mary Abraham covered the conference adequately and several vendors also provided commentary on various sessions. 

The attendee and panel discussions were a mix of topics covering information management, information governance, cloud storage, knowledge management, technology adoption, new tools, new client services, Most of the attendees were still grappling with a range of familiar topics though the questions are now morphing : 

Does the resistance of moving to the cloud stem out of loyalty to the old system or fear of the unknown?

Are the tools that are meant to provide a seamless knowledge flow finally here?

Law firm leadership realizes that they need to operate differently, but are they bold enough to invest in new ways of working?

I was interested in knowing more about how firms felt about internal Social Collaboration, as that was my first proposed KM project in my firm, but observed that most firms didn’t openly discuss the need to introduce a new, and ubiquitous way of communicating and knowledge sharing.

I also didn’t find a counterbalance in the discussions covering the very real business risks that CIOs discuss in terms of cybersecurity threats, infrastructure costs, information governance, topics I have seen on the agenda at Legal Tech.

IBM Watson, determined to make strong inroads into the legal cognitive computing space, with the alluring promise of cutting down inefficient time, made a dramatic presentation and attracted the largest audience compared to any session that I attended.

There were a few practitioners whose efforts caught my attention and interest. Baker Donelson’s Innovation Steering Group consisting of senior Partners and the CKO oversaw the management of a $1 million fund allocated to the Project Management of about 100 projects, of which half are efficiency improvement projects (internal only). At any point, about 80 lawyers are involved in these projects. Lawyers are assigned to work on potential future technologies and services for clients and get 75% working attorney credit, and are entitled to the royalties from the sale/licensing of the product to the client. A percentage of the sales is invested back into the Venture Fund. For every project, a Firm Engagement Letter is generated along with assigned codes and treated like a client project. The lawyers get 100% working attorney credit not administrative credit for working on Internal Efficiency projects. Australian firm, Corrs Chambers Westgate built a client app called Crisis Covered, with a third party vendor, Whispr and packaged free as part of their legal advice for crisis/incidence response largely in a client base in the Oil & Gas industry. Bryan Cave maps out every lawyer’s performance metrics on an octagon. The performance metrics are Bill speed, Collect speed, Margin percent, Responsible Collections, Relationship Collections, Originating Collections and Billable Hours. Different shapes are considered ideal for different roles and the lawyers are coached to achieve the ideal parameters for their roles. At Cisco Systems’ Legal Department, the VP and Deputy General Counsel has implemented a new system to incentivize the capture of learnings from complex cases for the Knowledge repository. Lawyers apply a complexity ranking to their matters. If a matter is rated high on the Complexity scale, the company has an expectation that learnings from the matter will be recorded. These matters are considered unique enough to learn from. In case, the lawyer marks their matters as low on the Complexity scale (a level 1), the companyhas an expectation that the matters are commoditized and should be higher in volume/throughput.

The shot above is from the Grand Canyon helicopter tour that one of the vendors at the conference organized for a bunch of us.

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The Crown Jewels of Critical Knowledge

The basis of sound Knowledge Management is the ability to identify the critical knowledge within a firm, the Crown Jewels of knowledge within a firm and then leveraging them to serve up at the right time for the right purpose. Individually, each lawyer has a tremendous amount of knowledge in their practice area and industry, which is usually only surpassed by their tacit knowledge of ‘who knows what/whom’. The classic KM approach of instituting a labor intensive process of gathering and disseminating that kind of knowledge for the greater good is hard to sustain and is giving way to an alternative approach that uses both technology and adaptive behavior to manage knowledge that is internal to a firm. This infographic by APQC contrasts the classic and cutting edge approaches to KM.

In a law firm, the ‘critical knowledge’ is tied to client service. Knowledge Management is working well if in the life-cycle of a legal matter, nuggets of vital information that need to surface at the right time do. A foundational infrastructure that has the following (in a perfect world, seamlessly connected) is a starting point :

a searchable/editable library of expertise, experience and interests within the firm

a library of experiences with external lawyers, a Yelp-like system of reviewing/referring/recommending lawyers  

internal communities within the firm using social technology to collaborate, ask questions, share quick notes, discuss new rulings, client news, firm news, office level news, opinions, and articles

an intranet that is useful to connect to the standard Q&A of the firm (standard content like company policies, floor plans, subscription sources) and a gateway to connect to other enterprise apps (conference room scheduler, self-service HR)

a content library of Q&As, collateral and credentials that feeds into a proposal generation wizard

a training hub that guides lawyers formally and informally on legal, technology and resources related questions

a searchable repository of all custom reports created on client, industry and competitor trends  

Since the last post on this blog, I have spent time learning about the Legal Tech space, specifically Legal KM through product demos and conversations with Legal KM peers. As a newcomer to this industry vertical, I have also interviewed the lawyers of my own firm to understand their business needs as well as their appetite to adopt and adapt to new ways of seeking and finding information. Even if all of the issues that were discussed don’t fall neatly in what is typically associated with Legal KM, managing their day-to-day processes in what is a heavily judgment-based profession can make a significant improvement. 

Ideally, the lifecycle of matters should serve as the foundation for the KM infrastructure. It is the natural way that work progresses in a law firm and therefore a logical way to chart and manage the flow of knowledge. Flow of work = Flow of knowledge. I believe it was David Snowden who said, “Knowledge isn’t only a thing, but an ephemeral, active process of relating. We need to transfer to new members in both society and the organization, knowledge that has been painfully created at cost over previous generations”. However it doesn’t seem like the legal vendor tech space has evolved to support this ideal way to manage flow. It is understandable, most business needs grow amorphously. However the next generation of vendors would find it beneficial to build their product suite based on flow.

Legal Tech vendors have built out applications to address various business needs of professional services firms from the broad processes like billing management, proposal generation, credential management, and project management to the niche, like fee benchmarking, email contact harvesting and document drafting. Some vendors have focused on eDiscovery and Search, given that a document intensive industry like Legal could quickly identify cost savings most easily in time intensive tasks like ‘looking through documents’. Behemoth vendors like Thomson Reuters (Westlaw) and Lexis Nexis have added to their traditional repertoire of legal research, software for billing management, drafting, and search features that span their research databases and the firm’s own documents. Others like Microsoft have largely allowed their partner ecosystem do most of the work of enhancing SharePoint in myriad functional ways. Most vendors in the legal tech space have created a good solution that caters to one need. Almost all of them offer integration with SharePoint, as it still manages to be the almost ubiquitous content platform for the intranet at most firms. 

As most law firms opt for a best-of-breed approach for their enterprise applications infrastructure, legal tech vendors are astutely forming alliances and partnerships among themselves in an attempt to improve their chances in the vendor selection process. This is a win win situation because to ensure long term success, integration with current systems is an attractive criteria in a space that is proliferated with stand alone products. I am looking forward to attending my first ILTACON in a few weeks. My KM peers tell me it is a fantastic show and a comprehensive showcase of legal tech vendors, I look forward to learning more.

This post focuses on the technology that aids Knowledge Management, however the marker of successful Knowledge Management is the full adoption of that technology. As KM professionals, our role should never be limited to the roll-out of yet another tool, but expansive enough to cover a broader commitment to influencing behavior. As mentioned earlier, adaptive behavior is a key ingredient in the mix. 

The picture above was taken at the Tower of London, on a family vacation last month.

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Terra Incognita

Law firms make excellent cases (no pun intended) for the application of Knowledge Management. The richness of knowledge that is learned, built upon, interpreted and managed on a regular basis grows exponentially over time within a firm. Some of it is lost to turnover, some wasted in the absence of any systematic capture and re-use, and some will always be impossible to codify and share. As David Snowden says, "We always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down". Law firms are not exactly terra incognita for the KM function. The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) has been playing the role of connecting legal technology and KM functions across law firms and bringing peers together to compare notes and share ideas. Law firm functions have cultivated their own community of practice by organizing themselves into peer groups, creating a broad pool of peer resources to tap into for advice and ideastorming. The Heads of Knowledge of Big Law firms get together in New York on a regular basis and convene over an annual invite-only private KM summit with peers from across the country and even Canada and Europe, to coincide with the end of the Legal Tech Week. Legal Tech Week 2015 in New York, a first for me this year, was a good show with keynotes and panel sessions and exhibitors on the floor covering the bases with document collaboration, cloud based solutions, e-discovery, litigation support,e-billing, matter management and knowledge management. The Big Law KM Summit, also a first for me this year, was a useful day spent with peers sharing experiences around their KM programs.

Many of my peers from the KM functions of law firms have been curious about how law firms compare to accounting firms in terms of KM. Both Big 4 accounting firms and law firms are professional services firms that are facing pressures of changing market dynamics. In a world that is becoming increasingly complex and where it is critical that businesses are able to turn to professional advisors on critical issues, the breakneck speed of today's marketplace has forced some of the same businesses to do more with less, negotiating for lower fees or even skinnier processes. This market force is good as long as it pushes for productivity gains, but at times also leads to short cuts and risk taking that could have dangerous long-term results. Professionals who have spent a lifetime perfecting their craft, and getting either very specialized in it or gathering vast breadth on it, are challenged to find better ways to deliver effective client service.The biggest distinctions between the Big 4 accounting firms and law firms are the scale and leverage models. 

What does this mean for KM efforts? In Big 4 accounting firms, the pyramid shaped organizational structure means that there are many more early adopters (at the junior and mid-management level) of self-service KM tools like people finders/expertise locators, collaboration tools, intranets, and subscription-based research databases. Usually a substantial team is devoted to the design, roll-out and adoption of those tools. The story of adoption of self-service tools is largely limited to certain levels within the organization, rarely bubbling up to senior levels. Senior management begins to wonder if KM is defined by technology tool roll-outs. That can sell Knowledge Management short, because the approach doesn't even begin to address the more critical and mature elements of a KM strategy - a) encouraging a knowledge sharing culture, b) learning from client engagements and experience to build out a customer-centric focus for the business and, c) based on leading indicators drawing inferences on market conditions in advance to stay ahead. In law firms, the smaller scale can prove to be an advantage as KM efforts (and all efforts) are closer to senior management. All KM practitioners know how vital leadership buy-in is to their programs. But even in law firms, it is critical that we start with a logical point of addressing a business need. Technology is necessary to scale up knowledge sharing, but it should never be implemented because it is new and shiny, or worse, available. A better starting point is to have the understanding of what qualifies as critical knowledge in a firm before implementing a KM strategy, the associated change management and tool (where necessary) by asking and answering questions like - 

What is the most critical knowledge that a firm has within its walls?  Is that being shared widely? Is it easily available at the point of need? What do the Partners, Associates, Paralegals need to do their day-to-day work? Could a tool help with the routine workflow or would it impede it?   How can the lawyers be coached on Personal Knowledge Management? How can they be helped to build out complementary skills and a T-shaped learning profile?  Would sharing collective knowledge help serve the clients better? Would it affect the bottom line and the firm's marketplace reputation?

Professional Firms are conditioned to serving clients and naturally more adept at being externally focused. Building out a KM program instills the discipline of turning some of that focus inwards.

The picture above was taken at the Discoveries Monument in Lisbon, October 2014 during a speaking engagement in Portugal.

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Learning for a Living

This month I joined a law firm, Akerman LLP as their first Chief Knowledge Officer. I am very excited about this opportunity as I believe that Knowledge Management is a must-have in an information-rich and document-heavy vertical like the legal industry, which like many other professional services firms, is facing market pressures and disruption of its own. I also believe KM as a discipline has not come into its own just yet. There is a lot of good work yet to be explored in holistically tying together emerging enterprise knowledge needs with technology, revising outdated business practices to keep up with the changing nature of work and opening up honest dialog with clients regarding information governance (more on this in a later post). As soon as my LinkedIn profile reflected my job change, I received a number of congratulatory notes and calls from former colleagues and friends. A few of my former colleagues and mentees asked me for career advice and professional development tips. I don't have a list of Do's and Don'ts because everyone's approach will be different, but will share some personal knowledge management efforts that have helped with my professional development.

Stay connected with peers

Earlier in my career, networking was synonymous with a way of having a 'hook' in various companies. This would help with future recommendations or during job hunting to find out the real story behind a company that you were interviewing with. If you were in sales, networking was a no-brainer. Not many thought of it as a way to stay in touch with colleagues over the course of our entire careers, as a way to learn and grow, as a way to expand our mind's horizons and as a way to build our own cheerleading team. Today professional social networks have enabled that and help in much deeper and meaningful ways, in a large part because they are online - taking away the work out of staying connected.

I am connected to many in the KM world and already familiar with the work of bloggers who focus on Knowledge Management, Workplace Learning, Community Building and Enterprise Social Collaboration. But law firms have their own very established KM community of practitioners. My LinkedIn network has provided me a number of former colleagues who now work in law KM or know others who do. One of my former colleagues offered to connect me to someone she knew in law KM, someone as it turns out is an annual conference committee member in ILTA, the largest trade association in the legal technology and KM world. Each contact, old and new, has offered helpful advice, ideas, suggestions on bloggers, books, associations and conferences. I wouldn't expect this kind of a ramp up even a few years ago, in a pre-LinkedIn era. 

Build a personal library

Digital Notebook : Create a digital notebook of interesting facts that you learn through your social updates, blogs, and other readings and that would be useful for reference at some point in your career, whether it is for presentations, business cases or even blogging. I use Evernote which is a handy tool for web clipping as well (there are others like Microsoft's OneNote, although it wasn't mobile ready till recently). I have used social bookmarking tools like Delicious before, but found Evernote to be more versatile.

Curated Magazine : With the volume of information out there on any topic, consuming content by creating a personal customized magazine, is a healthy and sustainable habit. Start with a collection of practitioner and consultant blogs, books, sites, trade publications, vendors, association discussion forums. It's easy to follow bloggers and domain specific publications on Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+. More viewpoints add to a diversity of thought and can spark creative ideas in your own projects. However social feeds can get overwhelming very quickly, even with nifty features like the Twitter 'lists' and searching by hashtags. To make sure I was not missing any of the good stuff and not drowning in the feeds, I have set up my own curated magazines through FlipBoard and Paper.li (these have filters of their own and will describe those in detail in another post). I use these for my personal knowledge management, but could possibly publish them in the future. Robin Good's guides to content curation tools are the best ones I have seen yet.

Digital Identity Protection : One of the best things I did for myself (finally) in 2014 was set up all my passwords with a Password Manager, an essential step in protecting my digital identity and footprint. The Wall Street Journal had a good overview of online password managers that can be a good starting point to learn more.

Challenge yourself to think differently

Change is a good thing and challenging the way we think or have thought all along is a very good thing. Change may be painful, but like a good workout, it ends up exercising muscles you never knew you had. This goes beyond changing jobs or roles. Changing or at the least, challenging personal viewpoints qualifies for significant character building as well. In my earlier post titled, Cultivate Networked Knowledge, I had referred to the the danger of only listening in on echo chambers (as David Weinberger calls them) and being plugged into an internet that is too personalized. In the same vein, it's an enriching habit to tap into new disciplines, authors and bloggers as exposure to different viewpoints.

Blog

My first anniversary post last year explained how blogging about work had helped me to learn, grow and connect. For a much more evolved viewpoint on blogging, please read the venerable Om Malik's anniversary post (celebrating 12 years of blogging!). Blogging is something that most consultants do, it can be a great sales channel, but I would recommend non-consultants to do it as well. Even as a practitioner, one has a lot to share and if anything, we are all (especially KM practitioners) internal consultants to our organizations. Dan Pink's 'To Sell is Human' is a great read if someone needs convincing.

If possible, meet up

An interesting chapter in Simon Kuper's book 'Soccernomics' posits a theory of 'Why England loses and others (in Western Europe) win' in soccer games. I am paraphrasing, but he attributes it to the power of networks and geographical proximity. He likens the enthusiastic spread of soccer in continental Europe to what happened during the scientific revolution when interconnected scientists exchanged ideas faster in a shared language (Latin) and built on each other's ideas. Copernicus (Poland) wrote that the earth circled the sun, Galileo (Italy) confirmed the idea through his telescope observations and so on.

Working in a city with a concentration of firms similar to yours means you are working mere blocks away from peers, who face, struggle with and solve similar professional challenges. When connected through online networks, meeting in person may seem unnecessary. I would argue that it is still worth the investment in time and effort. If you work in a big city, take full advantage and meet your industry peers in person to exchange ideas and war stories. 

Finally, know thyself

As we go through our careers, what we learn on the job, from our peers or through our formal education pales in comparison to what we learn about ourselves. Developing a sound understanding of how we tick-and-thrive is critical to our own success in business. 

I have used this line before in my blog (the last time I took on a new job), 'We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.' (Mary Catherine Bateson). My advice in 4 words - LEARN FOR A LIVING.

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The greatest enemy of Knowledge is not Ignorance. It is the illusion of Knowledge.

Stephen Hawking

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Templosion

Last week, Edie Weiner, President of a futurist consulting group fired up her session organized by the Financial Women's Association here in New York City, by running through a quick demonstration of 'Pick a Number' to show how even large trends can sometimes come with minor outliers based on cultural differences and varied experiences. She got the audience going with provocative questions like : 

What is the biggest currency after the US Dollar and Reward points?

Is cybersecurity a myth? (Hint : the answer is in the semantics)

Is an Audit Committee structurally sound? (This one was for the rhetoric that no one and not even a defined group of people can know it all)

Is anyone building businesses while keeping time and technology templosion in mind? (This one piqued my interest the most and have explored it a little here)

Have  we conquered virtual reality? Is it still virtual if we 'think' it is real?

Are we ready for flip generation leadership which is upon us because for the first time a number of CEOs will be moving up the ranks and supervising people 20 to 30 years older than them?

Have you recently practiced collaborative consumption?

Ever wonder if everything is going in the direction of nanotechnology and how?

Weiner claims there are two main indicators that can tell us where the future is headed - Where disposable income is spent? and Where the jobs are going? She referred back to her book Future Think and explained how her shop has recently coined the phrase 'Metaspace Economy' which includes inner space, outer space, micro space, cyber space, storage, inter space, design space, time space, play space and green to blue.

She goes into detail at the Big Think site here and at her 2012 TED talk. Weiner's smooth and engaging delivery was evidence of a rehearsed portfolio of facts that she and her colleagues had gathered, studied and extrapolated over the years. Most of these facts are known and discussed by other futurists as well, but there was a term that Weiner added to my vocabulary - Templosion, which she described as the compression of Time into smaller and smaller chunks. She played with the notion of Time being a luxury, being leveraged in novel ways these days, compressing learning, operational and new product development cycles. This made me think of how the term could also be used to describe the lifespan phenomenon that businesses have been facing in the last century. Corporations in the S&P 500 in 1958 lasted in the index for 61 years, on average. By 1980, the average tenure had shrunk to about 25 years. Today, it stands at just 18 years based on seven year rolling averages. I would say this would have all kinds of interesting implications even on an individual level, all the way from investment strategies to career choices.

On the topic of future trends, I would recommend anyone tracking them to subscribe to the Big Think newsletter, which is a compilation of well written multi-disciplinary articles on potential disruptors that might still be on the fringes or in research/experimental stages, but seem to be strong candidates for adoption and scaling up. And for more on templosion, here is an article that someone from Weiner's group wrote up for the NJSCPA. And the famous Sunni Brown doodled up one of the talks Weiner gave here. 

The picture above was taken at the pier in Portland, Maine during a family vacation this summer.

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Tribal knowledge through peer-to-peer networks

One of the summary notes covering the Sibos conference on cybersecurity this month advised that leaders could navigate through sea change by strengthening discernment, building strong networks and ensuring a more robust toggle between local and global.  Peter Hinssen, co-founder of the A-cross Group, says, there is too much to know and individuals can no longer be single point sources. Those who will have the best sense of reality are those who live and foster relationships in robust networks. So many people like to be with individuals that are similar in lifestyle and expression. Yet, navigating complexity requires people to be more interested in what they have to learn from one another than what it is that they have in common. Nice piece of advice and resonates on many levels with what Knowledge Management is all about.

I lean on socials channels like Google +,  LinkedIn, and Twitter to stay abreast of trending business topics both between peer circles and outside of them, but I am always more excited by the opportunity to meet with peers in a live setting, and so even though many conferences are now captured through live streaming and on Twitter, I attend/present at a few conferences every year. The best outcomes of being in the live sessions are the questions that I come away with. Questions challenge our assumptions, and in some case when we have an answer, can help validate them as well. The tribal knowledge that is exchanged in such settings is vital to stretching our horizons because conversations touch topics that might still be on the edges (as John Hagel would call them).

The Pivot Conference in New York this month, had an impressive lineup of many big name consultants and thinkers in the space of disruptive business trends, including John Hagel, Brian Solis, and Jim Lecinski.  John Hagel, currently the Director and Chairman of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, is perhaps best known for his works ‘Power of Pull’ and ‘Shifting Edges’.  Brian Solis, a Principal at the Altimeter Group is an increasingly popular voice in the world of social marketing and Jim Lecinski, of Google is famous for his Zero Moment of Truth marketing philosophy which flipped the traditional funnel on its head. 

Professor Arun Sundarajan, NYU Stern

Professor Arun Sundarajan (@digitalarun) delivered a provocative opening keynote at PivotCon on digital economics and went beyond outlining examples of several companies that have disrupted incumbents in various categories, because of novel ways to coordinate service delivery, or manage the supply chain, or raise funds or recruit employees.  He cut through the current ‘ooh aah’ effect of all this disruption, raising the specter of possible regulations that could dampen the tide, something that is already being talked about. Sundarajan highlighted the possibility of possible labor issues, even anti-trust monopolies when a company like Uber grows beyond a certain size.  He maintained that overall, these collaborative and peer-to-peer economies bode well for the macro economy, because they added to the diversification of services, created new jobs where none existed and improved productivity and societal contributions.

Several speakers explained the possibilities of peer-to-peer networks increasing the level of awareness, connectivity and fertility of new ideas, but most importantly, in today’s changing business landscape, changing the currency of the commercial transaction. These networks cultivate and operate with the currency of trust, which moves the needle from something being just transactional to being emotional. AirBnB’s entire model is predicated on the currency of trust, but the same currency is also cultivated by larger established organizations. This applies to large and small organizations. The other talks that stood out for me was one from Cavan Canavan, founder of Focus Motion, who took us for an exciting futuristic ride in the world of biometrics and ofcourse, John Hagel (the only one who did a powerpoint-less presentation) on his take of the rapidly changing expectations of consumers and the resulting performance pressure on companies. Hagel spoke of yet another dimension of trust, where companies could be courageous enough to invite customers to work with them on solutions, transcending the typical customer-provider relationship in the interest of a better outcome for everyone. 

At the Intranet Global Forum earlier in the month, our panel was asked interesting questions around policies and processes that are still forming in the new world of enterprise social networks – how do you archive conversations and threads that happened on the enterprise social networks? Every country has its own laws around employee privacy, how do you reconcile those with the need and desire to connect all employees on one social network through conversations? This was an audience of CKOs, Intranet Managers and CIOs and made for a good discussion.

Intranet Global Forum Panel (L-R : Shel Holtz (Holtz Communications), Gloria Burke (Unisys), John Santoro (Pfizer), Michael Rudnick (Logical Design Solutions), Vishal Agnihotri (EY))

Similar questions came up at the EY Human Capital Conference in Lisbon yesterday, where I was co-presenting a session on ‘Building communities in the enterprise’  to an audience made up of decision makers in HR, Tax and Global Mobility. Most appreciated the possibilities around employee engagement and breaking down silos in a socially connected organization, but still brought up concerns around privacy, approval chains and control. During the talk, we showcased Cisco's show-and-share initiative, where employees are empowered with a video production capability, which they use to make short videos for tutorials, sharing highlights of projects, engaging their team around new efforts and even giving a voice to their summer interns. Katherine Marrufo, the head of Cisco's Talent Business Services called it a low-effort, high reward video production capability. Companies like Cisco, that are embracing this inviting medium for employee generated content, are sending a strong signal about trust and confidence in their employees by encouraging them to share their tribal knowledge through nano-learning moments that provide just-in-time (rather than just-in-case) knowledge. 

Sounds like good old fashioned 'trust' then is the best transactional currency, be it with consumers or employees.

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"In times of change, learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists."

Eric Hoffer

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The Big Data that is Enterprise Content

Yeah - it's not the Big Data that everyone else is talking about. It's not the one that clues a company in on the preferences of its customers based on their consumption habits, so it could go from offering suggestions for new purchases (poster child: Amazon) to confidently green lighting original programming, as it challenges its own identity as a pure-play distribution channel (poster child: Netflix on House of Cards). Last year, an inspiring Kevin Spacey (star of House of Cards) delivered a gripping speech at the Edinburgh Television Festival on (of all things) - 'Content'. We, nerdy Knowledge Management professionals love that word! . The speech was such a hit, that earlier this month, he was the keynote speaker at the Content Marketing World 2014 conference where he delivered a very similar message - platforms are not as important as the content, and in the case of creatives, the story trumps all. The speech is worth listening, and my one line doesn't do justice to the prescience of this artist.

In its June 2014 issue, the publication CIO warned that by 2020, digital information managed by enterprises will grow 14x. The magnitude of that sounds unbelievable for those of us who started our corporate careers when the office memo was still something that was typed or printed and pinned to a bulletin board or shoved in assigned cubbies. We’ve since moved away from filing cabinets to digital bulletin boards and server storage. I am currently involved in an exciting migration from a legacy enterprise content management (ECM) platform to SharePoint 2013 and can see CIO magazine's numbers are not hyperbole.

Knowledge workers in the modern enterprise create a large volume of digital content on a daily basis. Although we’ve gotten sophisticated about how we manage enterprise data and made the move to secure file storage in organized libraries, with the kind of exponential increase in enterprise content, companies face new challenges around scalable ECM. To Mr. Spacey's point, it's also easy for us to get swept up by the platforms that we use and promote within our organizations. However companies grapple with deeper issues like new storage options, data security, mobile access, social sharing, balancing easy findability with data privacy and information governance. There are some broad themes that emerge in enterprise content management.

#1 Information Governance:  As the volume of content grows , the scale and complexity of interactions between people, business and content leads to increased business risk. Employees will need to consider the usefulness of sharing specific content against its sensitivity. Companies need to ensure that they have a thorough retention system in place for their enterprise content, so that they are in compliance with e-discovery needs, when those arise for operational audits or litigation. Whereas retention and data archival is necessary in some cases, retirement cycles are equally important in others.

#2 Diversity in content : We create, curate and share digital information in many more forms today than a decade ago. The range crosses the spectrum from humble Word documents and Powerpoint presentations to employee generated videos and social content. Each has its own raison d'etre and each new content form comes with its own possibilities and responsibilities. David Weinberger's interesting commentary on Content in a recent issue of KM World is here.

#3 User generated content : Many companies have empowered their employees with video generation and sharing software which makes it easier for them to share their own nano-learnings, experiences, tips or in somes cases, just good old enthusiasm about something. This kind of user generated content is unchartered territory and compels ECM professionals to address questions on shelf life, findability, usage guidance and company policies around internal communications.  

#4 Data Hosting and Security : Companies are adopting cloud and hybrid cloud hosting solutions for their data storage. They do this for all the right reasons and the promises made by vendors, like cost savings, improved infrastructure and security from cyberattacks. Although at most times, the latest cloud storage capabilities are more secure than the crumbling legacy infrastructure that most large established companies are saddled with, there is still a trepidation surrounding the adoption of cloud in professional services firms. Most IT departments appreciate the benefits of cloud hosted applications. However the firms' legal and risk departments find they need to incorporate changes in policies and client master services agreements to clarify their position on managing enterprise content storage on the cloud vs. on premise servers. Although these discussions are often reluctant, if the firms initiate the dialogue with the intent of transparency, they will raises overall awareness of the security available with the different storage options.

#5 Easy Findability : The best lesson we could pick from the internet is that a strong Search function solves many problems (including lazy user behavior). Employees come to expect the same kind of ease of findability that they experience with the Internet. Easy findability of content is reliant on tagging and although early ECM systems started with the idea of manually tagging documents, the exponential volume of data tests the feasibility of that approach. Companies like ConceptSearching are promoting the concept of auto-tagging to remove the burden of manual tagging on users or Knowledge Managers. There is another concern connected to easy findability. How do we balance the need to find certain content that can be (and some would argue even needs to be) shared with the need to lock down other content because of its sensitivity.

So how do we charge through each of these challenges? Knowledge Management plays a big and unique role in evangelizing the use of technology for better content management but it has an even higher purpose in helping with the transformation of processes in companies that might be using practices from a couple of decades ago. The good news is that with the current enterprise content management technology, companies can leapfrog the systems from the last two decades. However success depends on planning and planting a few fundamentals as the technology is going into place, it is vital that organizations plan to run the associated change management, employee training and policy revisions in tandem. To do this well, the Knowledge Management group should engage the Information Technology, HR, Internal Communications and Risk Management and General Counsel so that it better understands and responds to the user behavior and culture within the organization.

Enterprise Content may not be the Big Data that is popularized at the moment, but it is certainly getting bigger and more complex every day.

The above photo is of the Love Locks bridge on the Seine, taken on an afternoon after business meetings in Paris.

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Knowledge Algorithms in Professional Services

In his prescience, Peter Drucker had predicted the rise of knowledge workers several decades ago. Almost on cue, companies have increasingly added to their ranks of knowledge workers in the last few decades. The Dow Jones 30 has always represented American big business and over the last 40 years has seen a shift in aggregate spending on SG&A (usually a good indicator of costs in service organizations) and COGS (Cost of Goods Sold, and a strong indicator of costs in manufacturing organizations). In 1972, the DJ30 aggregate spending on COGS was 72% of revenue and on SG&A was 13%. By 2012, COGS was down to 51% and SG&A up to 24% of revenues. Even manufacturing companies know that when replacing labor intensive plants with newer technology and less labor-intensive equipment, they are substituting the direct costs of labor with a newer and more expensive set of knowledge workers. After all they will need others (usually) more expensive white collar workers who can maintain sophisticated systems and state-of-the-art computers - leading to a rise of knowledge workers in their enterprise. As the numbers of knowledge workers have swollen over time, this shift has forced companies to understand the final work product of a knowledge worker. This need to understand the product and productivity of a knowledge worker balloons to an exaggerated proportion in a professional services firm (PSF), where practically everyone is a knowledge worker. It is performance review time in my firm, one of the world’s largest PSFs and this annual exercise forced me to think about how we measure the productivity of a knowledge worker.

Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an 'executive' if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results. – Peter Drucker (The Effective Executive, 1966)

What would be the common work unit of productivity for all knowledge workers? Decisions. This was a notion proposed by Roger Martin and I agree. We make decisions at meetings, sometimes after several meetings, at the end of a brainstorming session, whiteboarding or a roundtable discussion  - and we make lots of them - big and small, strategic and tactical, relational and educational and so on. We also experience ebbs and flows in our decision making intensity and reach. In the case of PSFs, an organization’s velocity depends on the speed of decisions (considering Ram Charan’s Customer-Cash-Margin-Growth-Velocity model in assessing the true health of a company that he elaborated in his book What the CEO wants you to know). Operating in a consulting environment where success is hinged on the decisions that are made in a rapidly changing and flexing business landscape propels professional organizations to operate in high gear in all three stages of knowledge development. Professional firms apply design thinking in a very similar way to how Roger Martin describes it in The Design of Business. Martin explains that knowledge development happens when something moves from the initial stage of mystery (something we can’t explain/codify) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us towards solution) and to the final stage of algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer). Knowledge workers who are constantly cracking the code and building the heursitics and moving to the algorithm stage are materially contributing to the success of the organization. The decisions they make along the way are critical to how quickly and wisely they move from one stage to the other.

In a large professional firm, it is useful to get to the algorithm stage as soon as possible, but in doing so we accomplish two diametrically opposing results.

Result #1 – we industrialize a solution and in doing so (and as a natural consequence of the process) simplify it to the denominator that can be applied to a generic circumstance. This works successfully to a certain degree with scaling up and effectively addressing a broad customer base. However, an algorithm is also something that can be replicated by new entrants and endanger an incumbent's position.

Result #2 – we realize that although the algorithm works, there is an even greater effort required to customize a solution to a client’s specific need and claim a unique value-add and the premium that goes with it. The algorithm works but needs to be modified considerably to tailor to a client's unique needs.

While the firms are busy consciously and deliberately getting in and out of these cycles, it is the speed and richness of the decisions of its knowledge workers that decides their success in the marketplace.

The picture above was taken on a family vacation to the Taj Mahal where a marble artisan adroitly created his work.

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Learning on the job

'We are not what we know, but what we are willing to learn.' - Mary Catherine Bateson (Cultural anthropologist)

This line never gets old and feels very apropos for this post on the cycles of learning and personal knowledge management, especially when someone takes on a new role. When someone switches jobs, they are suddenly placing themselves in a position of learning more and learning new things. This situation is exponentially exaggerated when someone moves to a new organization, now soaking in the tacit and explicit knowledge in the new outfit, including the culture of the organization and a new network of colleagues. A person is thrust into a personal knowledge management overdrive. This is all good and necessary for professional growth and new learnings, but does require a re-aligned focus. The frequency of my posts on this blog have dwindled in the recent months, as I have been focused on growing my personal knowledge in a new space. In addition to a new Knowledge Management role in a new firm, I have also been studying up on a new industry sector.

A few years ago, when I read Michael Lewis’ books ‘Panic: the story of modern financial insanity’, ‘The Big Short’, and ‘Boomerang: travels in the new Third World’, I caught my first glimpse into the world of financial institutions from the very personal accounts of a former insider. I would still recommend Lewis’ books as entertaining primers that were dangerously accurate about the problems in the world of finance in the years he covered. Right after the 2008 financial crisis, the papers pored over details into how this sector operates and what government intervention was necessary to save it from itself, but for me it was Andrew Ross Sorkin’s book ‘Too Big To Fail’ that brought color to the stories and the main players in the entire drama. It is one thing to read up on the commentaries and stories, but quite a different matter to start understanding how the inside of the industry works. In my current role, I have the fantastic opportunity to learn more about this industry from a close range. The large banks, for example, face pressures from many angles, some of them are regulatory compliance, capital risk, constantly keeping up with technology platforms, volatility in capital markets, deep costs of their massive and sensitive international operations, new and unexpected competitors no matter how small (peer-to-peer lending and online currency like bitcoin), macroeconomic and microeconomic anomalies, and ofcourse their own discerning customer base. If these pressures existed prior to 2008, they have increased many fold since then.

All these pressures may not be all bad news. After all, some of these pressures will leave these companies more nimble, better prepared to respond to an unexpected breakdown in the system and ofcourse hold their stand in a world that is getting more complex and competitive everyday. Almost all financial companies are being forced to take a hard look at their internal operations and market facing plans. In his latest book, Antifragile, Nicholas Nassim Taleb claims that long standing institutions and established paradigms benefit when put under stress, because the result is inevitably a more resilient system.  The obvious disclaimer being that the institutions brace themselves better for volatility or breakdowns that they have seen before. Although that is a good start,  the real challenge is for these institutions to prepare for future scenarios that haven’t been anticipated yet. Taleb, like Nilofer Merchant (HBR post on Our obsession with scale) also believes in the diseconomies of scale emphasizing that large organizations are not as open or ready for innovation.

That is the kind of space that Knowledge Management can help by piecing together the entire picture. Most large organizations that struggle with the pressures I mention above, need help bridging internally and connecting the dots. Professional services firms, like mine provide that kind of connective tissue. The big picture that our teams can draw are a vital ingredient for many of these organizations to forge ahead in a way that helps them take advantage of their inherent strengths, mitigate weaknesses and solidify their play in the marketplace. For a KM professional, this is extremely rewarding because in doing so, Knowledge Management moves out from behind the shadows of organizational training and KM technology and instead partners with the front office to impact the future of our clients’ businesses. 

This photo of the London Bridge was taken on a business trip, a nice reminder of all the bridges of Knowledge we have built and will continue to do so.

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Knowledge Flows

We always know more than we can say, and we always say more than we can write down.  – David Snowden

Formal Knowledge Management frameworks usually categorize Knowledge into tacit and explicit and that helps to classify  knowledge into what is codifiable versus what can’t be codified in the context of an enterprise. KM has tried to codify what is possible and claim victory over explicit knowledge. To gain access to tacit knowledge, KM has also resorted to personal networks through communities of interest and communities of practice. 

In the information age, when we are constantly subsumed by needing and wanting to know more and bombarded with more than we can usually handle, we develop curious habits of dealing with it. We have also evolved in the ways we ‘handle’ information outside of our organizations, but that’s not the subject of this post. Within the enterprise, the KM group usually has remit and responsibility over the management of some of the Knowledge assets, but rarely all. The KM groups buy or create the best possible knowledge management solutions, sources, storage systems and publishing platforms. But not many KM teams engage in training the company's staff on what good personal knowledge management would look like. This should be considered important - let me explain why. Let's start with some categories of Enterprise Knowledge :

What we know we know – this is the universe of documents that we know exists. We have usually created these documents, contributed to their creation or know we will need them for future reference. For this need,  enterprises will offer varied methods of personal, restricted and unrestricted storage options in the form of hard drives,  shared servers, team spaces/sites and the enterprise portal and ofcourse, the trusted email.

What we need to know (and should) – this is the universe of memos and guidelines and any other material that is deemed as both necessary and appropriate for the enterprise to ‘push’ to employees in order to get them as synced together as possible, think performance review reminders, compliance guidelines,  policies, company news, required or recommended training and the list goes on. Enterprises will usually ‘push’ this kind of information via emails, or the enterprise portal or the enterprise social network (depending on the sophistication of its systems and the adoption rate of each). This too is a challenge in larger organizations that need to push a lot of information to their employees for all sorts of reasons including informational, compliance, employee engagement, and mandatory action.

What we want to know – this is the kind of information that we are looking for in specific circumstances. For example, we are working on a report and are missing the data point on a public company’s annual revenues. We know exactly what we are looking for, but need to get connected to the source of the information. In some cases, it is simple codified information like a client company’s revenue numbers, but many times it might be something like the sales strategies of a privately-held company (the kind of information which is sometimes codified and sometimes not – in either case, it is usually hard to find largely because it is sensitive or proprietary or both).  For this kind of need, we will often also rely on sources that are external to the enterprise, largely because the search engine Google has contracted the world of information to a few clicks (yes, they have spoiled us forever) and, zealous sharing of knowledge, even the proprietary kind, happens more often than not. Knowledge workers will also turn to formal and reputed sources of information like Factiva, Lexis Nexis and many others that offer the benefit of indexed information that is easy to search and more credible to cite.

What we don’t know we don’t know – this is the kind of information that we run into through an enterprise social network. The chances that you will come across both people and information that will teach you something that you don’t know (but could benefit from knowing) are exponentially higher than any other source of information that you would have been given access to within the enterprise.  This is largely because serendipity plays a huge factor in the discovery of such information. Typically, an individual turns to his or her personal networks and communities of practice to connect with tacit knowledge that was not codified. The KM department of today helps in that area as well through enterprise social networks, which amplify knowledge sharing through a community of practice and beyond. In the long run, this is also where we can distinguish ourselves both at the individual level and the organizational level because we could learn of new ways of thinking about something or in fact discover something sooner – in both cases, accelerating our personal learning curve and expanding the horizons of our mind. 

The organizational management of Knowledge within an enterprise is an ever increasing challenge for the many reasons I have listed in earlier posts.  The increasing tide of knowledge assets within an organization, both in volume and by variety, makes their sharing, cataloging, retention and even disposal a daunting task. Throw in the complexities of legal requirements to retain and/or dispose knowledge assets and navigating the intersection of securing confidential information and granting comfortable transparency in terms of sharing information, and you've got something that requires discernment and continual governance. Recently I have been considering the line between organizational knowledge management and personal knowledge management. How much of it is the responsibility of the organization to enable and manage and when does the burden start shifting to an individual? How far are most organizations from fully supporting knowledge management needs at both the enterprise level and the individual level (after all, many organizations don't even have a robust KM group)? Does the plan include better training for staff on personal knowledge management? Your opinions welcome.

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The many shades of KM

Knowledge Management  takes on so many different shades in organizations. That doesn’t help a KM professional when they are trying to explain to someone what Knowledge Management is or how it can help the company. KM professionals don the role of building capabilities and suggesting improvements,  they are also expected to work on end deliverables and project outcomes and they are expected to present innovative ideas and implement them. Most KM professionals would identify themselves with one or more of these areas - business research and analysis, KM technology rollout and adoption, learning and development, building up and running communities of practice, or enabling knowledge sharing through better practices and tools.

Knowledge Management is a discipline that lies somewhere between organizational development and change management and that doesn’t necessarily always get recognized as such – hence its practitioners always find themselves explaining their raison d’etre, swaying between deep conceptual possibilities and downright administrative practicalities. Many organizations don’t recognize that managing their own internal knowledge is far more challenging in a world where we are increasingly surrounded by more information and yet feel we are not sufficiently informed. 

Knowledge professionals know that when knowledge sharing becomes an automatic part of everyone’s workflow and hence ingrained in the DNA of an organization, they have accomplished their mission. It is true that it is difficult to always link the success of a business to how well its people share and manage Knowledge, but the corollary to that is also true where a lot of employees not knowing what they don’t know are wasting their time and resources finding bits of information. At the EY Human Capital Conference two weeks ago in Miami, I had a lively discussion with a group that represented HR professionals focused on Global Mobility. These professionals were genuinely interested in ways that their expatriate and inpatriate staff could ease into their new host countries, have a band of friendly colleagues they could quickly tap into when they moved and had a quick way to learn up on the new country that they temporarily called home. We heard stories of diligent efforts around assigned buddies and coaches, but what impressed me was the way social KM in the form of enterprise social networks, opened so many doors for these migratory employees and helped their way into a new country or role where they might otherwise feel alienated. Certainly these examples were strong enough to seed good behavior and something people found worthy of continuing as a practice.

So what would it take to help to make Knowledge Management more relevant within an Enterprise. Where do we start then – how do we motivate the organization to share more and more of the right stuff - by making knowledge sharing a measurable goal that is evaluated at performance reviews? Celebrating collaborative working and knowledge sharing in visible ways? Illustrating instances of good knowledge management versus not-so-good and the impact on the bottom line? There is a fair degree of change management involved in this endeavor. I was inspired by the notion of using the cue-routine-reward for changing and setting up desirable habits in Charles Duhigg's book The Power of Habit – something that works even at the organizational intelligence level. So we need to understand why people will not share knowledge in the first place, in order to devise a way to change that. Is it the lack of time? or lack of incentives? or a habit of hoarding information? or a need for self-importance?

 Photo : EY Human Capital Conference 2013, Miami

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When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive

'When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive', is how James Gleick articulated the current day information overload scenario. Many others have commented on the Attention Economy. When I started my career in the world of Knowledge Management a decade and a half ago, our biggest challenge was making sure we could find all the information we needed in order to build out a sound analysis. We relied on expensive subscription databases in order to get the best and most current information sources.  We commissioned original primary research in order to get the story right from the source, unbiased and uncut. The game changed substantially within the enterprise when basic research became commoditized, as most of the big subscription databases started moving to an online platform and opened up access to the entire enterprise. Intranets made it easier to disseminate and store curated and original content. In the public space, Wikipedia and Google changed the way people thought of information. Information became easily accessible and either cheap or free and easy to navigate through. The challenge soon after and since then, has been wading through reams of information - authoritative, opinionated and everything in between. There is too much content being generated and although Google’s search engine can keep up with it, most search technologies and metadata practices within the enterprise can't. The solution? Within the enterprise, KM professionals have started touting the concept of networked knowledge and the benefits of connectivity through collaborative technologies, as a means to the discovery of relevant information and context.  The idea of a connected company that becomes a more intelligent entity as a result of being well-connected, from the likes of John Hagel and Dave Gray, is very appealing.

The promise of public social networks like Google+ and private social networks within an enterprise is to bring like-minded people with similar interests or views together. However the real power of social networks is obviously in bringing diverse views together. David Weinberger of the Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society has warned of getting locked in our own echo chambers (my earlier post); echo chambers can ultimately result in narrower views based on ultra-filtered streams of information. It is the serendipity of finding information in circles outside your own that will likely lead to innovative ideas and novel approaches.  On the public internet, personalization through advanced algorithms and automated filters have helped us sift through increasing volumes of information. However filtering done excessively can have consequences too. Eli Pariser's book, The Filter Bubble explores this theme in detail (my earlier post on this). What degree of filtering is good enough and at what point does it cross the line where our experiences with information are too tailored.

In a zealous attempt to help with filtering, Google Mail now includes their tabbed Inbox feature (it’s a matter of time when other email providers will follow), a feature that automatically sorts your email out into separate tabs (this obviously doesn’t include just spam, but things like social notifications).  Ofcourse eventually people will start treating their primary ‘tab’ as their real Inbox. This could be viewed as a fabulous feature in terms of clearing clutter and contextual sorting, but it makes me wonder if the filtering means you will miss out on something that could have helped precisely because it was out of line with what the algorithm thinks should be your context. I should clarify that the email is not deleted, it is simply sorted in different tabs.

Filtering algorithms are programmed to pick up on our contextual usage and browsing histories. A few online companies have decided not to use that conventional basis to lure its users. Duck Duck Go  (a fledgling search engine that I had blogged about in my very first post) chooses not to store our search data. It actually touts that feature as something that makes it different from Google. Another interesting player, Snapchat has created a social platform with impermanence built in, where messages self-destruct after a certain amount of time, thus wiping out any record of our communication - making it impossible to store or search (reminds me of an untapped phone conversation or a real conversation). I should mention that Snapchat has been viewed with some skepticism in some circles, precisely because of its promise of a no-records communications platform. Are these players onto something? We became hyperconnected at a very rapid pace and were promised the benefits of mining all that information that we created and curated (think Big Data). Are we rethinking  our online presence and personal branding by recalibrating against it. The emergence of these players would indicate that there seems to be a counter force developing in the system, where people have started realizing that they want or need to have more control over what they see and what they don’t, as well as what they reveal of themselves as part of their own browsing histories. Duck Duck Go is no threat to Google by any stretch at this time, but the shifting consumer sentiment could have very interesting implications on how we ultimately filter out information and more importantly, how we filter it in.

This photo was taken on a family vacation to DC at the United States Botanic Garden.