Over today I've been digesting Knowledge Management Technology by A. D. Marwick

It was an interesting although in some ways unsatisfying read.  I found the earlier more general sections more interesting and useful than the later sections which actually analysed the technology.  That may be because I had more to learn from those earlier sections.

Some preliminary thoughts:

"Knowledge" in this context includes both the experience and understanding of the people in the organisation and the information artifacts, such as documents and reports available within the organisation and in the world outside.

» We value experience and tend to reward it commensurately.  In a down economy headcount reduction is often used to pair down expenditure but at the same time it tends to pair down experience.  Investment in knowledge management (particularly tacit->tacit and tacit->explicit) is a defensive tactic for dealing with this.  For the same reason it could be viewed as a hostile technology by staff who might see themselves as being "in the firing line."  

Tacit knowledge is actionable knowledge.

» Not sure I understand this point.  Is explicit knowledge not actionable?  I guess I'm going to have to understand the term 'actionable knowledge' a little better.

The key to knowledge creation lies in the mobilization and conversion of tacit knowledge.

» A key point from Nonaka.

Creation of new knowledge takes place through the processes of combination and internalization.

» An interesting point.  Ref Nonaka, Internalization is defined as:

explicit -> tacit (e.g. learn from a report)

Combation as:

explicit -> explicit (e.g. e-mail a report)

Need to think more on this.  I'm not quite there.

Knowledge sharing is often done without ever producing explicit knowledge and, to be most effective, should take place between people who have a common culture and can work together effectively.

» Follow up the Davenport & Prusak reference.

It would be interesting to study the cultural differences and similarities of groups of webloggers who are sharing knowledge successfully.  What are the interesting cultural segments in blogland?

Externalization (tacit->explicit): By it's nature, tacit knowledge is difficult to convert into explicit knowledge.  Through conceptualization, elicitation, and ultimately articulation, typically in collaboration with others, some proportion of a person's tacit knowledge may be captured in explicit form.  Typical activities in which the conversion takes place are dialog among team members, in responding to questions, or through the elicitation of stories.

» Key section.

We're in the meat of klogging here.  Attempting to convert our mental models into text the better to share and collaborate with others.

Note: elicitation of stories in this sense could just as well be capturing best practice,...

For example, knowledge creation results from interaction of persons and tacit and explicit knowledge.

» Seems to contradict the earlier point slightly.  This one makes more sense to me.

Through interaction with other, tacit knowledge is externalized and shared.

» A key goal must therefore to be to make sure that we are able to interact with the right people and that our information is in a form that is suitable for sharing.

Free text is obviously the most flexible but as many others have observed it may be useful to have templates that provide some form.  This might also be useful for introducing those who aren't comfortable with the idea of writing what they think.

Rick Klau made an interesting observation when we met up.  To get people into klogging provide them with the Radio aggregator and simply tell them to re-post any item they think is interesting.

This is sharing at it's simplest.  In my view once someone gets the hang of this they will make the next step - adding a simple commentary - themself.  Even if it is just one word here and there.

What will be required to get full engagement will be an issue that they feel the need to speak out on.  A weblog is not just a bunch of text, it is a voice.

the greatest value occurs from their (the 4 processes) combination since, as already noted, new knowledge is thereby created, disseminated, and internalized by other employees who can therefore act on it, and thus form new experiences and tacit knowledge that can in turn be shared with others and so on.

» I think in reading this I was again reminded of the question: What is the value of new knowledge, of a new idea.  This idea of creating new knowledge doesn't seem as if it will play well in the downturn "evolution not revolution" "fix the leaky pipes" mindset.

It's far more in tune with the Gary Hamel mindset: Coming up with discontinuities that create new markets.

In any case, automatic extraction of deep knowledge from documents is an elusive goal.

» True.  Although it will be interesting to see what tools like Cyc will be able to do as they mature.

However, the candidate pieces of extracted knowledge must still be presented to a human for review and final decision, so that the value of the system is in increasing the productivity of the human analysts.

» Yep

The greatest difficulty in knowledge management identified by the respondents in a survey was "changing peoples behaviour" and the current biggest impedement to knowledge transfer was "culture."

» Key point.

There is little technology can do about culture.  This maybe shouldn't worry us since because, as Seb pointed out in a recent post (regarding a Darwin article), "Natural selection will take care of those companies (and individuals) who can't or won't do it".

Technology can come to bear on behaviour though.  Two enablers will be:

• software that encourages & supports behavioural change
• software that requires less behavioural change

as appropriate.

Ackerman refers to this situation as a "social technical gap."

» This is the gap that good software must attempt to bridge.  Current paradigm weblog software is I think a step forwards and a step backwards.

Forwards in that it supports the right behaviour, but backwards in that the key to weblogging is writing and hence it smacks straight into the barriers discussed recently about "why won't people write."

 Shared experiences are in important basis for the formation and sharing of tacit knowledge.

» Again this relates back to the point about culture.  A shared culture implies a set of common experiences that form the culture.  Hence why storytelling is important.  So we need tools that support shared experience and, hence, the capturing of context.  (Again this relates to my recent reading on best practices)

A richer kind of shared experience can be provided by applications that support real-time on-line meetings (i.e. groupware)

» Yep.  I've just been musing on an IM client I would like to have to support richer online collaboration than "just text".  Also Marc Canter & co. have been working on the idea of multimedia conversations for some time.

For myself I would like to try experimenting with VideoBlogging.

More later...

From :Column Two: Death of keywords:

To me, this really highlights the challenges (futility?) of the so-called "semantic web", where everything describes itself, cross-linking happens automatically and accurately, and search engines only return useful results...

If we can't get even simple keywords tags to work in practice, what hope is there for RDF, and the rest?

My own opinion is that any acitivity or tool that requires consistent, similar, behaviors across the entire Web (such as accurate keywording of web pages) will not happen.

However, that doesn't mean the keyword metatag is dead. It can still be an effective tool for a collection of content whose authors/owners are willing to invest time and effort into for accurate searching and indexing. The Web might evolve into small, organized, clusters of content that create semantic islands in a chaotic sea.

[High Context]

» Interesting.  One of the ideas behind XFML 1.0 is to leverage the attempts made by others to index content without requiring a high degree of consistency between resources.

Specifically you can attach keywords to page (urls) in an XFML document and the <connect> your keywords to the keywords in other documents.

Over the last 4 or 5 months since I've begun interacting with people from all over the world on a daily basis Instant Messenger has become a very big part of my life.  At the moment I use Trillian 0.74 and it's nice to not care which IM network someone else is using.

But I'm ready to go beyond text and I was thinking about the kind of "multimedia realtime conversations" I would like to have.  I'm not sure how to describe this in text (and I'm no graphic artist so it's going to have to be text).

I've tried Video messaging using NetMeeting and Yahoo.  They aren't what I want (although they have their place).  I don't so much want a "video conversation" as video in my conversation.  In the same way I might want a graphic, or a sound or just about anything.

So what I have in mind is my standard IM with a media area and a timeline.  The timeline is on the side and keeps pace with "real time".  I have a drop-box window that contains a set of local objects I can work with (graphics, video, power point, sounds, etc...).  When I want to use one I drag it onto the timeline where I want it in the conversation.

Now at the appropriate time my new IM client will push that object to the media area of the other participants.  If it's a URL then the media area would load the page, a movie or sound would start streaming, a powerpoint slide would appear, whatever makes sense.

Some objects I might want the other person to be able to "drag off" their media area and save locally, others I might not.   That should be my choice.  I might also want to mark an "end-point" on the timeline so that something only plays for 'that long'.

Just musing...

If video-blogging and audio-blogging take off then metadata is going to become increasingly important. 

I deleted the post from my aggregator by accident, but I found this via Rick Klau's weblog.

1. Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.
2. Be candid with everyone.
3. Don't manage, lead.
4. Change before you have to.
5. If you don't have a competitive advantage, don't compete.
6. Control your own destiny, or someone else will.

TidBITS: Light Your Fire with Tinderbox. Quote: "Tinderbox is, as I hope I've implied, an inspired piece of work. With its Web capabilities, outliner hierarchy, hyperlinks, lightweight database abilities, and snippet keeping, Tinderbox will surely have something to intrigue you. It's small, it's easy, it's fascinating, and it's cool. I strongly recommend that you download the demo and see for yourself. You may not understand the program fully at first, but keep experimenting; this is a powerful program with many uses, and the possibilities will start to dawn on you as you work with it." [Serious Instructional Technology]

» You rotten swines keep on with this "Tinderbox is great" stuff even when you know I can't run it.  Damnit Eastgate where is that Windows port!

Any donations to the "buy Matt an iMac" fund greatfully received :)

(joking)

This Modern World. Fox's latest reality show: American Invasion! [Salon.com]

» great cartoon.