A high-energy leader with successful record in product development and transformation. Brings deep experience in designing, selling and driving complex programs using disciplines of strategy, design, business development, leadership/team effectiveness, and workforce planning.
Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where It Is Going- Part One
KM has changed in many ways since its beginning some fifteen years ago, with new tools and new strategies. But what is most interesting to me is the profound change in the way we conceptualize knowledge and the implications of that conceptualization for how we do our work as knowledge professionals. What I mean when I say, "how we conceptualize knowledge" are issues like, "Who in the organization has useful knowledge;" "How stable >is knowledge over time;" "How we can tell if knowledge is valid or trustworthy." Picture 1 These are not trivial issues because how we conceptualize knowledge greatly impacts the way we design our KM systems and strategies.
Knowledge Management: Where We've Been and Where We're Going - Part Two
In this series I've classified the evolving landscape of knowledge management into three categories. The first category is leveraging explicit knowledge and is about capturing documented knowledge and building it into a collection - connecting people to content. The second category is about leveraging experiential knowledge and it gave rise to communities of practice and reflection processes. It is primarily focused on connecting people to people. The third category is leveraging collective knowledge and it is about integrating ideas from multiple perspectives. Its medium is conversation in both its virtual and face-to-face forms.
"The Center for Open Innovation, a unit of the Institute of Management, Innovation, and Organization at UC-Berkeley, conducts scholarly research and engages corporate leadership in three key areas:
Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. With knowledge now widely distributed, companies cannot rely entirely on their own research, but should acquire inventions or intellectual property from other companies when it advances the business model.
Open Business Models create value by leveraging many more ideas, due to their inclusion of a variety of external concepts, and can also enable greater value capture, by using a key asset, resource, or position not only in the company's own business model but also in other companies' businesses.
Services Science, Management and Engineering integrates management, social and cognitive sciences, computer science, operations research, and engineering to drive innovation, competition, and quality of life through service systems."
Where Knowledge Management Has Been and Where It Is Going- Part Three
In this three part series I've classified the evolving landscape of knowledge management into three categories. The first category is Leveraging Explicit Knowledge and is about capturing documented knowledge and building it into a collection - connecting people to content. The second category is about Leveraging Experiential Knowledge and it gave rise to communities of practice and reflection processes. It is primarily focused on connecting people to people. The third category is Leveraging Collective Knowledge and Picture 2it is about integrating ideas from multiple perspectives. Its medium is conversation in both its virtual and face-to-face forms.
Kate Pugh of Intel and Nancy Dixon of Common Knowledge discuss Knowledge Harvesting
Knowledge "harvesting" programs -- such as post-mortems, Action-in-Reviews, and Lessons Learned - have three major objectives. 1.) Real-time team and individual insight; 2.) Improve team's processes; and 3.) Reuse by the larger organization. Many organizations fail to achieve these objectives, or feel they don't get a return on their knowledge capture and reuse efforts.
Knowledge Harvesting
Wed, 05/23/2007 - 9:53am - Informant
By Jan Sykes, Principal, Information Management Services Inc.
Knowledge harvesting is a new trend in the established field of knowledge management. It can be viewed as an effort to create some recommended practices for the field. Where knowledge management identifies best performers and captures an organization's intellectual output for access by those who need to exploit it, knowledge harvesting raises the value of that body of information and the way it is used.
KM-Chicago, the organization dedicated to professionals in the field of knowledge management, heard two specialists introduce the core aspects of "harvesting" on April 10. The discussion was led by Kate Pugh of Intel Solution Services and Nancy Dixon of Common Knowledge Association. They frequently referenced work by Hans Meidjan of HP Services who is doing knowledge harvesting work in The Netherlands. Members and friends of KM Chicago participated in person or via teleconference.
"Online community building is a key role of a the community manager, This role is a fairly new one, and although it has its roots in the roles of those who managed bulletin boards and discussion forums - when they were often known as facilitators - the role is still emerging and evolving.
However, the role of a Community Manager is essentially to encourage, foster and support the engagement of participants in the community, although the way this takes place will depend on the nature and purpose of the online community"
"Community manager is a role that more companies will adopt in the coming years. Jeremiah Owyang provide a huge list of companies who have such a champion already, and more recently gave businesses a scorecard for whether startups should have a community manager. "
"One of the top 10 questions in social media marketing asked is "How do we kick start our community?" This post aims at providing some resources for brands that are preparing their community strategy.
The old adage of the field of dreams isn't true -if you build it-they won't neccesarily come. Brands must have a kick start plan to be successful with their community. Below, I'll list out some practices I've heard from companies that have had successful communities, and I'd ask you chime in and add more ways, let's get started, I'll be as specific and actionable as possible."
"As a matter of fact, the questions that zip through my mind everytime I think of how I can improve my own skills at community building, are so many that I always end up with more unanswered doubts than solutions.
* How do you nurture engagement inside your community?
* How do you keep the community going?
* How do you get people to socialize inside a new community?
To get some answers to these critical questions, I have briefly taken hostage online facilitation and community-building expert Nancy White during her last Rome visit, a few days ago.Nancy is a truly experienced person in this area and she always speaks out of the ongoing in-depth experience she has with real communities, both online and in real life. Her answers are non-technical, pragmatical, and if you are not into community building yet, quite enlightening."
"Networks grow from separate nodes, to a hierarchical organization where one node manages the connections, but the true power of a network is unleashed when every node knows what the goal is and the nodes coordinate to achieve it. It is this unleashing of the power of the network that we want to facilitate. But if you build it, they may not come.
Networks take nurturing. Using the gardener or landscaper metaphor, yesterday I said that networks need seeding, feeding, and weeding. "
Purpose/Outcome
What is the desired outcome for the group? What is the INTENT?
Purpose/Outcome
# What is the purpose and desired outcome for the group? What is the INTENT? Does it have a mission or a vision that you can communicate to potential members?
# Are the benefits measurable and visible to members and potential members? Are the benefits focused on the individual member? The group?
# Is the outcome determined by the organizer? Group members? Both?
# If the group is part of a larger organization, is it consistent with organizational goals and culture?
# Is the group's purpose something that can only be done/accomplished online? Will it replace something offline? Or is it some combination?
Community of Practice Handbook - Company Command
Posted on April 10th, 2008 by Harold Jarche
company-command.jpg
Company Command is the most practical community of practice (CoP) implementation guide that I've read so far. It traces the story of the development of an online community designed to share knowledge between US Army company commanders, past and present. If you can get over the military jargon (and even some acronyms that I, an ex-soldier, couldn't figure out) the lessons in this book are transferable to civilian life.
Here is a summary of the key concepts from Chapter One:
* Knowledge resides primarily in the minds of community members
* Connecting members allows knowledge to flow
* Relationships, trust and a sense of a professional community are critical factors for an effective community
* Content development emerges from needs expressed in conversations
* A decentralized network is best
ABSTRACT
Communities of practice consist of people who are informally as well as contextually bound by a shared interest in learning and applying a common practice. Their focus on learning, competence, and performance bridges the gap between organizational learning and strategy topics and generates new insights for theory and practice. This paper outlines the rationale for a competence-based view of organizations and proposes a community-of-practice approach to address a number of important business challenges: mergers and acquisitions, leveraging and stretching competence across functions and SBUs, accelerating innovation, business-unit disaggregation, and outsourcing.
Communities of Practice
Social network analysis (SNA) is the mapping and measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, organizations, animals, computers or other information/knowledge processing entities. The nodes in the network are the people and groups while the links show relationships or flows between the nodes. SNA provides both a visual and a mathematical analysis of human relationships. Management consultants use this methodology with their business clients and call it Organizational Network Analysis (ONA).
A method to understand networks and their participants is to evaluate the location of actors in the network. Measuring the network location is finding the centrality of a node. These measures help determine the importance, or prominence, of a node in the network. Network location can be different than location in the hierarchy, or organizational chart.
We look at a social network, called the "Kite Network" (see above), developed by David Krackhardt, a leading researcher in social networks. Two nodes are connected if they regularly talk to each other, or interact in some way. For instance, in the network above, Andre regularly interacts with Carol, but not with Ike. Therefore Andre and Carol are connected, but there is no link drawn between Andre and Ike. This network effectively shows the distinction between the three most popular individual network measures: Degree Centrality, Betweenness Centrality, and Closeness Centrality.
CPsquare is like a town square, a place where people gather to connect and learn together. We are from corporate, private, non-profit, and academic organizations; we hail from many nations across the globe; we are involved in consulting, research, and direct support of communities of practice; and we join together to create our own community of practice. We are a non-profit organization, registered as a 501(c)(6) organization in the US.