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Recently,
I presented yet another keynote on exploiting technology opportunities
to a group of senior executives, including both CIO’s and other
CXO’s (federal government types, this time). Two observations
Execs
Identify KM Applications In Two Areas Many
executives are concerned with the high cost of providing good,
knowledgeable customer support and the problem with finding, training,
and retaining the employees who will actually interface with customers
(government executives call their customers “citizens”). KM
offers two interesting possibilities: on-line knowledge bases can
provide appropriate information to support staff, allowing them to
handle more calls more quickly (cutting costs and increasing customer
satisfaction at the same time). It also permits support staff with
less training and experience in a subject area to provide support (since
they, in turn, are supported by the subject expertise of the Knowledge
Base). Because
of current age demographics (and high turnover rates in some
professional areas), the expertise which runs our business organizations
is threatened. As one executive said, ‘Our assets walk out the
door every night.” Some of this problem is solved through
good recruitment, training, apprenticeship, and mentoring programs, but
this can take years to successfully implement. A growth spurt –
internally or in an entirely new or different industry -- that
makes such trained people particularly desirable can stress scarce
resources quickly. KM
lets organizations preserve expertise inside a knowledge management
system and share that resource to train additional professionals as well
as to permit workers to access and apply information that is normally
outside of their field of competence. This can be invaluable in
saving time, avoiding reinventing solutions to already solved problems,
and, helping to start the next generation of experts. KM
comes up strongly in the polls of planned applications. In a
recent Information Week poll of 300 IT and Business Managers, for
example, 53% of those interviewed expect to implement KM in 2001
(the only hotter applications were Data Mining/OLAP tools at 63% and
Customer Relationship Management, tied with KM at 53%). Of
course, we’d like to know just what those firms plan to deploy.
Many surveys have found that both existing and planned KM
implementations stop at Document Management (or even think that KM and
Document Management are the same thing). That’s because Document
Management is a relatively mature application which is well understood.
There are lots of well-known vendors to buy from, consultants to plan
and manage implementations, and products which can be used nearly
out-of-the-box, adding only the organization’s list of users and
permission levels and their documents, with their indexing scheme.
It’s not trivial, but it is a (pardon the play on words)
well-documented process. That’s
too bad, since much of the value in KM comes from getting beyond
Document Management and understanding how to identify and employ the
knowledge and expertise within the organization (and its partners). Enter The Bloggers Recently,
as I was reading my email, I noticed how much more reliance I was
beginning to place on Bloggers whose expertise, topics, and point of
view I had grown to trust. Bloggers are those folks who have
decided to share their daily web tours with the world (or some part of
it) and who post a list of where they’ve been, usually with comments
on what they found, why they find it interesting, and perhaps an insight
into who the Blogger is (if it isn’t someone very well know with
established credentials). You
can, of course, sign up to receive these Blogs (alias Weblogs), or you
can go visit them on your own schedule at their website. You’ll
also find them in other ways. The
MIT Media Lab spiders (indexes) the content of 9,000+ weblogs and
features the ten most popular on its site at http://blogdex.media.mit.edu/
. This allows you to search across weblogs by content (most search
engines ignore weblogs). Many Blogs are gathered together into
groups via their own web sites, usually by topic, ethnicity or other
personal characteristics, or audience. Some Portals have groups of
Blogs and support discussion groups for the Bloggers (Yahoo, for
example). The Blogs themselves are typically hosted by a blogging
site which has the necessary software to make creating a daily
journal/diary/message to the world easy for someone who is not likely to
be a techie (although there are lots of techie Blogs, too). Such
hosting sites include Blogger (www.Blogger.com),
Diaryland (www.Diaryland.com),
Pitas (www.Pitas.com), Blogspot (www.Blogspot.com),
and Userland (our friend Dave Winer at www.Userland.com). Delightful as blogging can be, I’m
not suggesting you take up this addictive pastime (unless you want to).
I have another agenda in mind. Blogging and KM One of the tough tasks in KM is
getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who
has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating
its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest
of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with
others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a
career lifetime enhancing their value because they “know” something
others don’t are logically reluctant to give away their valuable
expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value. In fact, plans to implement knowledge
management often require prior exercises in changing corporate culture,
moving employees from a gatekeeper culture, where knowledge is kept
hidden and produced only when it can enhance the employee’s value, to
a sharing culture, where knowledge sharing is encouraged and rewarded.
It’s this kind of intermediate (and “squashy”) step
that makes many executives decide that KM is Document Management,
something that can be reduced to numbers and Return on Investment
dollars. But what if the two – blogging and
KM – got together? That is, what if we took the technology that
allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with
information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed
their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of
expertise? Consider: -- If experts could use
blogging software that was part of their normal work environment,
probably part of their browser, to note and annotate web sites they
wanted to share as part of their area of expertise (note the expert
decides what to share, avoiding privacy problems); -- If these weblogs were
collected by the KM system and then indexed by a spider against an
organizational taxonomy (list of categories) that was optimized for the
organization, its interests, and its experts; -- If organizational employees
could search for collections of expertise by topic (or, as they became
aware of their identity, by expert), assisted by the spidered weblogs All of this assumes that such weblogs
would be internal to the organization (or limited to authorized external
users such as contractors and business partners). Knowledge Management offers the
possibility of allowing organizations to tap into not just the documents
they’ve created, but the expertise of their employees, past and
present. Weblogging is interesting because it is a fairly
non-intrusive way of allowing workers to share the process by which they
seek, analysis, and select information. If we could then add to the process
some of the web-certified techniques for validating information and
expertise we could further enhance the KM process. For example, we
could (as popular “expert” sites on the web do) encourage users of
KM expertise to rate information and experts on their usefulness so that
others could pick based on high ratings. Or we could ask
experts’ peers to validate their information before it was posted (as
occurred in the Xerox Eureka experiment), so that each piece of
expertise carries more credibility. Users today nearly “live” on the web. If we can offer them tools that extend that experience and build on it, taking their web work and turning it into reusable information for their colleagues, perhaps KM is not so far away as some think and that 53% plan for implementation this year will be for far richer, more useful, and more interesting systems.
Comments or Questions: Send Email to
opinions@wohl.com
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