Knowledge Management: An optimization challenge

Still knowledge manamegent

2009-04-16T14:25:00.001-04:00

I Was pleasantly surprise, that despite the critics, KM continues to be a well used term at least in the hiring arena. I searched in Dice.com and found quite a list of posts , although is funny the way they use it.

Best

Leonardo

Upgrading software

2009-04-07T11:34:00.002-04:00

I am in the midst of upgrading 3 servers , all in paralell, not an easy task, one is on the extranet, the other is the main server, and the 3rd is the index engine db. We have to be very careful with the ports, as the sofware has to have the same ports as the old installation. It should be ok now, with the plan in hand nothing can go wrong right? I'll review the plan again.

Leonardo.

ECM strategy

2009-04-03T16:07:00.002-04:00

What are the elements needed for a successful ECM implementation:

1- Team Lead.
2- Support expert.
3- Programmer
4- Content Administrator. (Multiplied by the number of units in the Organization)
5- Business Consultant.

I will explain their roles and give you insights of what happens as I go through the process of teaching this strategy.

Leonardo.

KM And the future

2009-04-02T10:28:00.002-04:00

Its been a while since I wrote in my Blog, but I am back, and planning to write a lot more.

The last couple of years I have been working with the US government , basically doing consulting work. I've been doing a lot of upgrades, but lately I've been tasked into learning and installing two new programs, Artesia, and LL Archive. It's been a great opportunity to see how they arquitected them, and get a different view and vocabulary of how they deal with information. Artesia is a media database to store videos and photos, and certainly big to huge files. LL Archive handles more the detail of how do we store the data, the media that we use, so that we are legally compliant. I will continue to write more as I get the dust out of my fingers.

Leonardo

KM Losing Popularity?

2007-06-12T10:45:00.000-04:00

Bill writes in his blog Eclectic about KM loosing popularity. It is only logical for it to not be so popular, because of the complexities and fuzziness of KM theory around it. Albeit if there is one. The tools might get popular, but still does not mean they are a good solution (especially when the problem is not wee defined).

The danger is on people buying tools again, thinking that by doing so, they bought the solution to KM, which is never the case. I argue and will always, that tools do not give you the solution , it is illogical and it does not make sense. If you want to be successful, you must follow the PSST system, where you define clearly the Problem, Make sure is not just a Simptom, and then think the Solution through and through ON PAPER. Normally this translates into screen views of what you want to see. THEN , and only then, you look at the tools that will help you build YOUR solution.

Leonardo.

On Wikis

2007-05-23T16:16:00.000-04:00

"Wikis are Not Knowledge Management Tools" writes Zoli Erdos, in his blog, I think Wikis helped solve a problem long standing in IT databases, the power to create versions out of table records. Versions I mean, a track record of how the fields on a given table have changed through time. That was not available in the past, where the transaction committed, values changed and that was the end of the story. Wikis provide a very needed functionality, and as of May 2007, they are not part of the KM tools used in my company, so we are still in the process of integrating it .

Leonardo

Defining KM

2007-05-22T14:30:00.000-04:00

KM is the interaction between human minds, a given culture (Framework), and collaborative technology

Leonardo Mora

Status

2007-05-22T14:08:00.001-04:00

Ok, so after a long vacation from my blog, I think I can continue. I got the book out of the way as well, so now I can concentrate. My job changed as well, but I won't give details about it. For now. Only that you get sleepy every once in a while. I've been reviewing some other blogs, and the stories are fun and interesting. I kind of miss the conferences and seminars, but someday I hope I will be there.

Leo.

Other sites.

2007-05-09T15:57:00.000-04:00

I was going through other KM sites and found some very interesting like

A, ha,

I guess I need to keep posting more often. .. as I decided to publish the book as seen below, and share some insights from my new gig.

Great to see other people writing about KM, I need to learn more about the templates!!

Leo.

Promo section

2006-07-24T14:41:00.000-04:00

By Clicking Here you can find the vision of the system I want to create.

The published book (First Edition) can be downloaded and purchased at

http://www.lulu.com/content/848914.

Knowledge in Organizations

2006-04-17T15:39:00.000-04:00

After a couple of wonderful weeks back home, I was talking to my good friend Orlando about this book and what I am planning (Create this powerful knowledge product), and struck me like a thunder when I said something about knowledge and organizations... I kept asking him and several other people(days later) this question:

Where does knowledge reside in an organization?

The obvious answer I've got was "In people's minds", so I had to change the question to something more specific.."Where does knowledge reside (in a consolidated form) in an organization?". What amazed me is that nothing comes to mind like "your knowledge system", or DMS, or Intranet, no. The answer was in people's head. Note: Recent research shows an average of 80% institutional knowledge to reside on employees head. Bill Gates is targeting this as a big next step.(Zdnet , May 16th 2006)

To me the answer is simple but striking. Knowledge (As I put forward in this book) is in ... The policies and procedures(P&P) manual or book!. I should say, it should be there. This comes back a couple of weeks ago when I was holding a couple of books about how to write good P&P's. Intuitively I knew there was something important to me to look at it, but did not know why. Now I understand and plan to make use of it more extensively.

In a good , serious, ISO XXXXX type of Corporation/organization , decisions , processes agreed, etc, are or should be included in their Policies and Procedures manual (But I will rather call it a system), because thick books or manuals to tell the truth are useless (have not read the first in many years), and there is nothing more boring than reading P&P's because it is an art to do it well after reading recently about it, and you need a proper structure to maintain it alive, as any other information piece. This is something we see many organizations ignoring or partially doing (Those with critical areas as information security). But still, it is no easy feat to read P&P material.
Now, what the problem is/has been, is how to effectively write, publish, promote and track those rules and processes.
My conclusion has been that it should not be a book or document, but rather an active system that promotes itself, and monitors other systems(Data and processes systems) to verify how successful those decisions are. Then it enables you to get timely feedback, so you can take action and adjust faster to a given condition.

Organizations & new structures

2005-11-29T11:04:00.000-05:00

In the future, the focus on hiring people should be not so much on their current skills and experience (Knowlegde i+e) but their learning capacity and team work (A.k.a how well they collaborate with others).

To motivate these future workers, the way we reward them has to change significantly. We need to be able to measure knowledge contributions and impact in the organization by tracking them down. One way is to have the knowledge repository integrated with the payroll system. Then a rating system where team feedback can be collected could be used as a validation mechanism so that payments can be increased (or decreased) in a certain range based on people's contribution. Not sure how good can be, but it should make the salary go up as well as down so that people know the impact of their contributions , a strong incentive to be collaborative.

The structure of this organization looks very different. Here is a summary:

Teams Description

Business Promotion & Finance Team

Former sales, and financial team.
Sales is no longer the focus, the focus is in the customer, and promoting a well thought and excellent product.
Rotation: Projects team

Leadership & Channel Team

Overall leadership, inspirational and organizational
Setting Organizational Vision
Define main strategies
Monitors performance and new projects
Rotation: Feedback team.

Projects Team

Project teams developing products and services for outside customers and Inside Employees.
Rotation: Promotion & Finance

Feedback & CR Team

Creates surveys, forms, track, analysis of customer feedback. Works very close with customers to learn their needs.
Conserve statistics and historical information for future reference.
Applies same methodologies inside the organization
Rotation: Design and improvement team

Design & Improvement Team

Policy design, rules and processes.
Reviews current surveys and recommends new and improved methods and processes
Rotation: Any and All Teams.

Learning & Knowledge Team

In charge of creating and monitoring all training and learning aspects of the business.
In charge of the knowledge repository
Sharing and collaboration of books and any relevant material for employees.
Responsible for implementing 4 elements of the Fifth Discipline.
Rotation: Any and All teams.

Logistics and Resources

Responsible for providing anything and everything the business needs to perform and execute; Includes Legal, IT, Human resources, Purchasing, etc.
Rotation: Projects Team, DI.

Thoughts

2005-11-17T14:02:00.000-05:00

All signals are pointing to a big boom coming in technology and the time to start companies might be very well now. I agree. Article

Open Source projects and software are key to what we are trying to achieve, as much of the things we need to do are simple, but simple does not mean is easy; we need to work from other's creations in order to innovate in a shorter timeframe. Maybe that is why many people cry foul when other's patents holders come claiming ownership of your project. Either way, it is very exciting and I look forward to the challenge of breaking new grounds and markets. "The combined effect of these trends is dramatic: For JotSpot it's cost was just $100,000 to get from idea to launch; for Excite, $3 million." from Business 2.0. That is a huge difference.

Collaboration in the future.

2005-11-11T11:38:00.000-05:00

I've been thinking what the future would bring in terms of devices allowing us to communicate and collaborate better. We need to create an all powerful media device that allows us to use any kind of current communications method. The main question I ask is how voice, video, email and chat will converge into something powerful yet simple enough to allow ubiquity and action anywhere we are. A cell telephone is the place to start. The way it is designed and specially the screen size and functionality are the most important factors. Digital screens that flex are a reality today. I can envision a device that has two sides and you can have a chat, conference, etc on one side, and in the other you can send, receive, share documents, text, etc and be connected to our system at the same time. I recently saw Nokia concept on foldable phones that can be even wrapped around your wrist. It would be extremely useful to have this flexibility. The future looks pretty exciting and positive.

Control might prevent Innovation.

2005-11-11T11:06:00.000-05:00

What would happen if an organization decide to let go trying to control information? Or dare we say knowledge?

I imagine people would automatically feel more confortable. I am not including in this sentence not monitoring what is happening. This means let things happen but make sure you make yourself aware on what is going on, so that you can actually learn and take action.

I was reading a book called "The little book of letting go" and it explains in the first chapter how we adults want to control everything, be right all the time and keep judging life , and that certainly happens to me. Looking at children, they are happy because they are not concerned about those three things. They are focused on today, now, and they have little time for unnecesary thoughts. In order to be trully creative we might need to let go control , and let things flow but monitor them, read feedback closely, learn and adjust.

We can create a friendlier system by "allowing" sharing information instead of blocking people , we can make monitoring and notifying the core funtionality in the system so that a lot more can be done without having manual processes.

An example would be how banks perform a lot of their in house development. They do not have automated tools to check and test the software, generating a big amount of flaws and in consecuence a lot of time spent into fixing those. They could resort to use automated tools to improve the efficiency and reducing cost because if we can write a law it could be " If you want to reduce costs, you need efficiency". Now a days we need to automate more to reduce errors.

Creativity and Innovation

2005-11-11T10:32:00.000-05:00

It occurred to me that the way to handle the perpetual question of how do we promote creativity in a system, would be to grant access in the opposite direction as we are accustomed to see. Huh?

In current organizations and specially the intelligence comunity, the higher you are in the structure, the more access you have to critical, confidential, secret information. So very few people actually see what is really important. That might be a big problem. The higher you are from the ground, the less you can actually see , and observe any detail.

Yes, by granting more and more access to people who are :
1- Closer to the customer 2- Experts or heavy contributors to the system, we might generate the push needed for the "small" people to be more productive , hence innovative. But based in the methodology reviewed earlier of "learning organization" the focus has to shift from individuals to teams. The entire team has to have the same access level to information. I am simplifying the structure down to two phases. The one where you create, modify and refine and then execute, we'll call it private phase. The moment you share the results of what you created, we'll call that public phase . A simple way for people to understand how you can create new knowledge in an enterprise.

Groups , Roles and Users

2005-11-03T11:37:00.000-05:00

These 3 entities are used to handle the security in the repository. Simply put, each node should have a group or role associated to its permissions. In the most basic form, permissions are applied in the form of Guests = Read only, Members = Modify, add and Coordinator= Full access. They can be applied more granularly but that should be only left to power users or administrators of the system and it (personal permissions) should be done in special cases or what your policy mandates. Permissions can be assigned in a hierarchy structure that allows more or less privileges. Every system I've seen did not take seriously roles until the modules for workflows gave or required users to define roles for the flows at hand, as many tasks in a given flow are more readable if we use roles than if we use a personÂs name or a group. Groups are important to organize people, and there should be a special type of group that holds other groups, but to prevent deadlock loops, we should limit it to 2-3 loops when the system is checking for permissions. Recursive groups can grow in complexity, that is why we need to but some safety measures to prevent the system from crashing or slowing down.

It's important to note that there needs to be some kind of synching between these groups and roles with a central directory or at least at the messanging level. Ideally pairing it with a directory services automatically will save you from some headaches.

There should be three sets of roles seen as pools of people that can be assigned to each object:

Owner Or Administrator.

Member

Guest.

To each of those we should be able to add any group, role, or user in a temporal or permanent basis. Temporal should be set for 1 day, or 1 week. , and permanent should be allowed only to the administrator. A report on this assigments should be available for review .

The permissions should be set by roles. This means that the administrator has full permissions, the member can add and modify objects into the place, and guest has read only priviledges. A special member can be created where permissions are set so that they can add documents, but they cannot modify any .

Classification & Structure Definition.

2005-10-31T14:39:00.000-05:00

A classification tree is an structure where we divide information not from the unit or department where it comes from, but from the nature of the information, like contracts, purchase orders, letters, requests, financial reports, manuals, etc. Classifications are key because they can be used as the “controller” and to store aditional metadata concerning each type, meaning many of the rules legal and otherwise can be consolidated in it’s classification. Another aspect that can help you handle better documents is the flow of uploading them, or the number of steps needed to add a particular document. For Example, a Purchase order might follow a different path than the contract for legal services because it involves different sets of groups.

We call retention to the rules defined for each type of information that you want to store. For example, a contract might have the following rules:
• Remain active for 1 year.
• Remain passive for 3 months
• Archive 10 years.
• Cannot be deleted without approval.
• Modifications should be notified to owner.
Information can be treated as a living thing, having 3 main stages called Active, Passive, and Archive or Deletion stage. With this method, information can remain up to date, be more useful, and the overall organization can improve the performance of the system.

I believe classifications can serve tremendously in organizing information and making more useful a central database used as a repository, in parallel with a folder structure and a logical one. Classifying should give you as well a way to customize metadata (Additional fields) so that you can sort and retrieve more easily information. It gives you flexibility and power to configure your information in many different ways.

Again, the key is in your policies and procedures, making sure that a broad vision is set, and a clear mandate given so that teams can implement a complete repository.

Basic Structures

2005-10-25T11:25:00.000-04:00

There are 4 basic structures that handle everything in a repository.

1. Physical

2. Classification

3. Logical

4. Users/Groups/Roles

We have the folder structure where we could follow the way the organization is structured to implement it. Then we have a classification structure which provides us with a way to customize the various types of files we use. A quick example: In legal documents you handle much of the bulk using MS word format. So only classifying by the type of office file would not give us any meaningful benefit as in this case mostly all are of the same type. We need to create types based on the documents themselves, like contracts, letters, approvals, etc; each type can define the retention period and a set of rules the owner requires like for example which medium you want it stored, or how long should it be kept in active mode before sending it to archival, etc. Custom fields can be added to a type so that sorting and searching can be more powerful and flexible at the same time. The folder view should allow you to view not only its contents, but any classification type defined in the objects it contains. This provides you with a mechanism of displaying each node differently depending on its contents. Music and math files should be displayed differently.

The logical structure is targeted more to the “How do I do this” type of question. It does not reflect the groups in the organization but the most important tasks needed to be performed by teams of people. Examples: How do we buy something? What is the process of acquiring insurance? How do we close a deal legally? How do we ask for services? Who is the expert in IT and databases? All of these questions can be put together in a simple structure to help others find their way without getting into the intricacy and complexity businesses create.

The way I’ve been learning how the last structure should work follows a simple rule. Things should be guided by the role more than the name of the person. So this is what it will look like:

Groups

Roles

People

Groups should have a setting where it tells the system not to go in to big loops by looking down more than 2 levels. What that means is that we can create groups of groups, and they can fall into a deadlock, so by creating a group which is clearly marked as a group only, then the system know where to stop looking for permissions (More on this later). Then roles should define the name, any rules applicable, and especially who is your proxy or backup. The major benefit about this method is that we can have the organization chart embedded into the system nicely, so processes can be created more easily based on groups and roles.

Repository Types

2005-10-24T16:57:00.000-04:00

Historically and after observing the way people see things, we have on one side the Library type which I call it Passive archiving, where you have books and publications (Physical items typically)stored in a single place (Public and private libraries follow this method), and you have a single database to find the title of the book, author, genre, etc. It’s features are: Information is in archival mode usually for ever, when searching you are always searching the entire collection, information does not have a cycle, needs tuning when classifying records and it does not posses a structure. The limitations are:

There is no way to find topics inside the material or full text indexing.
Searches can be long and complicated. There is usually a “middle man” that is the expert in searching, called the librarian.
There is no permissions structure.
Usually records are of the same type.
Cannot be customized easily.

On the other side we have Active Filing, which came about with the Internet. The features we find in this side are: There is a structure (Navigational) and it can hold more than one like classifications, user permissions, etc. It is more dynamic, we can create cycles so that information goes from one state to another, Active-Passive-Archival. In this form we have a lot more interaction from people, sharing and collaborating on office documents. There is usually a full text index and you can search for information based on the structure. Classification is usually the key for handling document types and their retention. Ideally, with a retention scheme, the system can move back and forth information from one side to another. I like to view this system with the two types working in harmony, the passive archiving handling the bulk of data and heavy storage, and the active side handling the most used and active documents for quick retrieval. Its limitations are: 1- Not good for very big containers. 2- More complex to build.

Detail.

In passive mode, we use something like a bag of candies; we throw every candy in, and expect to find them in one place. So it is central by nature. These posses a problem for multiple locations, where you need to replicate the data. (The active scheme works well for combining central with distributed approaches). Working with our bag, requires deep knowledge on the tool we use for searching inside the bag. Why? Because the results might not give us exactly what we are looking for. Results can be extremely long and complicated to filter. You might not have the ability to change the resulting records in one shot; this again depends on the tool and the vendor. Some vendors like working with you, some do not even pay attention, so you have to foresee how much support you can get or buy.

In summary, libraries are a good tool only when the records and fields are static, or you do not have multiple types of documents.

There is a need to reform the way libraries are seen today so that they can include a more flexible approach, the active mode I described above. This way, we can integrate both into a “Live system”, and the end goal of having this methodology is to be able to cycle the information. This means that information gets created, is active for a period of time, but then it falls into a passive mode and if obsolete, then it should be deleted, but if it has some value, it should go into archival mode, and depending on the legal requirements for retention, you can store it for a number of years or for ever. Media used in big jukeboxes (used to handle the bulk of data) can survive for many years, some to even 100 years, probably more than what we will be around.

What is a Repository?

2005-10-24T14:51:00.000-04:00

The following sections, will address specifically how do you implement the concept of structures in a repository. If you are not part of a similar project, you might want to skip to creativity and innovation.

The first thing you need to do when trying to go from one point to another is to define where the initial point is, or A taking A-B. This means creating an information map to know where everything is, and how much effort and materials will consume the task of migrating.
The green section is about identifying the different systems holding your information. Identify possible conflicts with duplicated documents and/or special needs in processes requiring more than one group that are to be migrated at the same time. It can provide valuable statistical information about the growth trends, habits, and current activity in all your systems.
In this diagram we follow the elements in our framework Data-Processes and eventually Collaboration. It is always recommended to have a cleaning and consolidation phase before designing your repository; it can give you a fresh start instead of trying to do it later down the road.

After many implementations is safe to say you will need a strong mandate for this sections to be carried on by your employees. So do not be afraid of asking for this mandate to your CEO or president because this is where leading the way makes a very important fact for the project to succeed.
What I am recommending in this diagram is to have a repository first and then your business processes. Why? Because many business processes may require you to have the repository at hand prior to implementation plus it makes it easier for you to do it while you are doing the repository design first.

In my experience I have found out that some groups (I wont name anyone) have the expectation that a consultant will come with a magic formula to convert the mess they have into something clean and pristine. I had the sense that for some reason they think "one solution fits all" will work in their company. Another type of thinking is asking consultants who else has the same solution or implementation. In reality, these projects are each very different to implement because each company or institution is different, how? in the way they conduct business, the way they store information, in their culture. What you need is to assess each organization and come up with a plan based on the assessment and not from some past experience that seemed to work which is important but it cannot be assumed will work for everyone.

What is a repository?

What is exactly a repository? From the dictionary we read “a facility where things can be deposited for storage or safekeeping”. In technology, a repository is a central place where you can store a variety of objects. One requirement is that the policies and procedures you envision for your company in the digital age need to be clearly defined. Now to the question –Do we make it centralized or distributed? To make thinks simple to manage, you want to centralize, but if you have multiple locations (As a multinacional company does), then you need to combine it with some sort of distribution, so that each location can access rapidly your data. So my take is that the solution must meet both schemes but not at the same levels. The other issue with central repositories is that not every one is online all the time (e.g. Airport-airplane, train) or at least not today, maybe in the short future yes as we see these areas been converted into online hubs.

As it was said in the first section, policies and procedures are a must for you to develop correctly a repository so make sure you have them (they do not have to be complete and extensive) before going any further. I strongly recommend automating those policies.

The structures in a repository can be divided into 3 groups.

Physical Classification, Views, Permissions.

Permissions can be further subdivided in Users, Groups and Roles.
The way we find what we are looking for relies heavily on how good your search technology is combined with how flexible is the tool to handle the results in different ways. I call it the FIND engine. Combining search results with spreadsheet functions gives you a lot of power. Imagine having results from Google or other search engine in a spreadsheet format, where you can sort, expand, filter, etc. Those familiar with Excel and working with this layout, would understand the kind of power I am referring to. The problem with search, is that not all “High quality” pages are always in the first batch of results. And depending what you are looking for, this method might help you greatly I finding what you are looking for.

Repositories - Map

2005-10-24T11:20:00.000-04:00

The way forward

2005-10-21T10:05:00.000-04:00

Main strategies needed to create and implement a solution. Here they are:

1. Capturing Knowledge: Information + Experience. This is you Key Goal and main topic of discussion in the book.

2. Giving users multiple access points to information. Having just one way of dealing with documents and other objects is not recognizing that we all people work in different ways, so not everyone will feel comfortable searching and working in only one way.

3. Giving users a powerful integrated search engine. I like to call it the Find engine, something flexible and powerful enough that allows you to "play"with results, and find valuable information.

4. Creating policies and guidelines to host a Document Repository.

5. Fitting to the Organization. Not the other way. This means all to often people look at the tools not aware that the tools are the ones that need to conform to our way of working , not the opposite. Yes, we may have to enhance our processes, but not all at the same time, it could be very distracting and time consuming.

6. A KM system should match the way people work and help them achieve their goals.

7. The system should match the organization's structure. By modifying the way you are structured, that on itself is a major change. You should be very careful on how to approach changes, because remember that you work and are part of a system, and changes in the structure are critical. The suggestion is to try and work with what you have, and once you implemented the technology, make small changes.

8. Business processes must be matched as workflows.

9. Fostering continuous practical training. People need to be reminded once in a while about certain features of a given technical environment. Training people to "learn" how to work with and use a system does not mean the system "will" be used. Reality shows that people will forget mostly everything by the 6th day their training passed. It is important to coach them and hold their hand in the beginning so that change does not scare them enough to prevent a successful transition.

Creating an information map:

Knowing how many, how big, which types of files your organization currently holds is crucial for you to measure implementation efforts on a Repository. Knowing were point A (Where you are) will better guide you on the detail required at this particular project. When you create a map, there are policies required that get created along, like how many files do we want to keep per type, or how should we delete obsolete files, etc. Your process for transitioning point A to point B is as important as defining the target.

Create Rules and guidelines for grant related information and other e-documents for users to follow.

It is essential to provide users guidance for the sake of system efficiency. Without the BUY IN from users, you will not be successful in the long run. Period. Your users are the most important part of the entire process. You need to involve as many of the most visible as you can. Without them your efforts and cost will increase mightily.

Most companies fail to capture their knowledge because there is no Vision and Strategy about rational knowledge, or people assume that there is one but in reality there is a paper document policy not fully translated into the digital world, or no automated policy system that helps you monitor compliance. Thinking that in today's massive libraries you can manually verify policies is not smart.

Files/process organization.

Streamline document creation and storage. Increase accessibility through search tools.

This theory about how things should develop in a project comes as a conclusion from projects that did not have a clear methodology for repositories. As most of the material, these are lessons learned from many projects that did not have or did know which steps to take.

Migrating your Information

2005-10-13T16:58:00.000-04:00

We've reviewed some topics about how to solve the problem – Collaboration, knowledge, etc--. But we haven’t talked about what it takes to move from HERE (your current situation) to THERE. It is another 800 pound gorilla problem. With the number of terabytes increasing exponentially each year, it will be no easy feat to move a giant monster (data) from it’s current place to our solution. Do not worry, it should read our platform sustaining YOUR solution. No solution can solve everybody's problem, cause we are all different, including organizations.

Let's suppose you understood everything I said, and now you ask -- what's next? If you thought the tough part is over, think again. This section is about issues you will face when you look at your current situation to be migrated into the envisioned solution of tomorrow.

What are the issues?

Silos: Information is created based on the company structure. If it is a Silo, information will be in silos too. What is a Silo? It means that your company is compartmentalized, that your departments do not talk to each other, that everyone wants to keep their information from others.
Maps: The consequence of silos is that you cannot create an information map. This means links between files are non existent. We want to be able to "picture" the way information is connected to one another. Without a map, we can't.
Importance: Another consequence of silos is that there is no hierarchy that tells you the importance of documents. Many times you need to make a call to find out how important it is.
Permissions nightmare: In many corporations, there is no overall strategy for easy handling of permissions not to mention digital information. In many cases the non-official strategy is"Individual" permissions which means doom for any migration effort which translates into a very hard and time consuming effort to deal with access. A good way to deal with permissions is a mix between groups and roles as they are more related to other functions through out the system. The issue then becomes the synchronization of those groups and roles in your system B or target solution. Remember this when you plan for a migration.
Massive amounts of information: We have today a lot MORE information than yesterday ( Big companies are already in the terabyte-petabyte range ). So the problem is not getting any smaller. Been able to massively copy, move, tag, log is key to any effort of consolidating information into a flexible platform. This section(Migration) has to be able to deal with errors, inconsistencies and unknowns in a way so that it groups them for later review. As when you look at your personal information, this is always a good time to check for information you want to delete. So filtering and sorting is crucial to let the owner find and select documents for deletion. That deletion can be temporal meaning it does not really delete until certain later date.

Because the web was created on the basis of linking documents one to another it is easier to find information because is linked. In a corporate environment we do not have that. It comes from Silos as already mentioned. We need to mimic the web in our internal structure to build the web of internal information in a corporate environment. How? Making the linkage of documents the center of all effort.

The above points have come as lessons after going through several projects dealing with repositories. In the last 10 years the projects involving knowledge tryed to implement common methods and what I have found is Knowledge Projects are very sensible to people, and the approach you take must be different from any other type of projects. They must involve the people it will affect. You need to consider The Human Factor, in order to be successful. I would say that in most cases there is a lack of understanding of where you are and where you want to go, and because it is so complex and it involves all aspects of the business, it is very challenging.

The Key

2005-10-11T16:14:00.000-04:00

The key and value to every system is in its interrelations between it's elements. Shouldn't we create something along those lines?

I believe that the key to knowledge building is in three parts.
1. Creating the right technology based on the right concepts,
2. Finding the right sponsor.
3. Having organizations follow new learning and leadership theories, understand and implement "Systems Thinking" to ensure you can motivate people to contribute (with their knowledge) not because they have to, but because they want to.

Technology always come last to the PST system, Problem -> Solution - > Tools or Technology as opposed to popular thinking now a days where the first thing people talk when faced with a problem is .... technology as THE solution.

We need to start thinking radically different, in order to be successful at innovating and collecting people's wisdom.

Learning Disabilities

2005-09-22T21:01:00.000-04:00

From Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline.

Seven learning disabilities
1 - I am my position
When people in organizations focus only on their position, they have little sense of responsibility for the results produced when all positions interact.

2 - The enemy is out there
It is a by-product of “I am my position”. When actions come back to hurt us, we misperceive it as externally caused.

3 - The illusion of taking charge
If we become more “proactive” and aggressive in fighting the ”enemy out there”, we are reacting. True proactive ness comes from seeing how we contribute to our own problems.

4 - The fixation on events
The primary threats to our survival, both organizations and of societies, come not from sudden events but from slow, gradual processes.

5 - The parable of the boiled frog
Case for “Fixation on events”

6 - The delusion of learning from experience
Primary consequences of our actions are in the distant future, which it becomes impossible to learn from direct experience. Dilemma in organizations: We learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important decisions

7 - The myth of the management team
Maintaining the appearance of a cohesive team. They seek to squelch disagreement. Most managers find collective inquiry inherently threatening. School train us never to admit that we do not know the answer, and most corporations reinforce that lesson by rewarding people who excel in advocating their views, not inquiring into complex issues. ( When was the list time someone was rewarded in your organization for raising difficult questions about the company’s current policies rather than solving urgent problems?). If we feel uncertain or ignorant, we learn to protect ourselves from the pain of appearing uncertain or ignorant. That very process blocks out any new understanding which might threaten us. The consequence is what Argyris calls “skilled incompetence”– teams full of people who are incredibly proficient at keeping themselves from learning.

The Learning Organization

2005-09-22T20:11:00.000-04:00

As mentioned before, the successful implementation of this knowledge theory in a corporate environment could only be possible if we include Learning Organization's theory explained by Peter Senge's book "The Fifth Discipline". I only make a short overview of the main disciplines and what a Learning Organization is about. There is a tremendous amount of material behind the concept.
Definition : organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together. (PS)

Some companies try to make an approximation to this , an example is GE: "The second management concept that has guided us for the better part of two decades is a belief that an organization's ability to learn, to transfer that learning across its components, and to act on it quickly is its ultimate, sustainable competitive advantage. That belief drove us to create a boundary less company by de-layering and destroying organizational silos. Selflessly sharing good ideas while endlessly searching for better ideas became a natural act.“ Jack Welch
Former Chairman and CEO, General Electric Company
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In summary:
The organizations that will truly excel will be the ones that discover how to tap people's commitment and capacity to learn at all levels in an organization. Learning organizations are fundamentally different from traditional authoritarian "controlling organizations." (Peter Senge)

Personal Mastery: Is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision and focusing our energies to develop patience and seeing reality objectively. People become committed with their own lifelong learning. Mental Models: are deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action. Includes the ability to carry “learningful” conversations that balance inquiry and advocacy, where people expose there own thinking effectively and make that thinking open to the influence of others. Building Shared Vision: The leadership skill most understood for thousands of years that inspired organizations has been the capacity to hold a shared picture of the future we seek to create. When there is a genuine vision, people excel and learn, not because they are told too, but because they want to. Team Learning: How can a team of committed managers individual IQ’s above 120 have a collective IQ of 63?The discipline of TL confronts the paradox. It starts with “dialogue”, the capacity of members of a team to suspend assumptions and enter in a genuine “Thinking together”. Systems Thinking: It is the discipline that integrates all , fusing them into a coherent body or theory and practice. Without it, there is no motivation to look at how the disciplines interrelate

About Experience

2005-09-21T22:18:00.000-04:00

Here some definitions from www.dictionary.com:

The apprehension of an object, thought, or emotion through the senses or mind: a child's first experience of snow.
1. Active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill: a lesson taught by experience; a carpenter with experience in roof repair.
2. The knowledge or skill so derived.
1. An event or a series of events participated in or lived through.
2. The totality of such events in the past of an individual or group.

As I said before, experience is the byproduct of collaboration and a process, and it is a higher form of learning because all of your senses are participating and involved in the procedure. To gain experience you need an individual or a set of them actively and willing to participate through the process to gain full insight. When we are forced into an event, like an accident, or some unpleasant situation, the experience becomes a trauma. The word trauma means " An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption." Scott Berkun says good procedures make people more efficient, not less efficient. This is because we need a guide on how to go about doing things, and it is more efficient to have processes in place, than having people doing things differently each time.

Experience is living or going through a process from start to finish. You can share what you felt and learned from it. This is the part of knowledge that cannot be transmitted or "done for you". I like to see life as the perfect example. Life is the process we go through to learn from experiences that would not be possible other way, and from it we learn the good and the bad. We can write about the lessons we learned after it. To truly understand the meaning of something ,living the process is a whole different learning process, than that from study and reading. Some of us avoid it from fear of being hurt or causing hurt in others which prevents us from learning. (Insert here)

I recently had the experience of unearthing a deep fear that caused a series of behaviors that made me end up in two hospitals (Anxiousness). It was a very tough one day experience but one that taught me so many things, many years of study would not do.

What I found interesting from being in a hospital is that for many patients the cure came by intereacting and sharing their experiences with other patients who where somehow connected to your past life, not in the doctor or the therapy or drugs they prescribed. In my experience, people that had parallel lives or something in common made the big difference in the recovery and the possibility of getting healthy again quickly was very high. Same goes with the ones that did not have anything in common with the patient. They did not help or contribute to the recovery. So in order to produce benefits there must be a common connection.

I used to think doctors did not know what they were doing (I was very wrong), not every doctor fails and they are not right many times either; I have found some that are really excellent at what they do, when they did experience the symptoms or had some similar experience are in a better position to treat it. Others have a very wide exposure to many people, allowing them to learn many aspects from them.

Going back to experience, we can discover that Expertise comes from ΣExperience or the sum of experiences that you go through.

This is a good example that illustrates an area in live where experience is really crucial for people’s health recovery stories.

Experience in general is :

A bigger teacher than theory alone.

HARD

to earn: It gives you the test first and the lesson second.

In some cases, experience touches something called perception or tastes. This happens normally with movies. Some will like the movie, and some will not. The difference between reading a book or watching a movie, is in the side of the brain working. Reading is a left side ability, while movies kick in on the right side. This is the reason why children should not be allowed to watch tv until their brains are fully developed. Images are a more powerful catalizer in the brain than book stories, because when you read you are actively using your imagination, when watching a movie or tv you are not an actor, you are a receptor. (Insert here reference last child of the woods)
------------------------

In summary , the efficient storage of data and information combined with other elements (Experience, collaboration and technology) constitutes the base and foundation for human rational knowledge today.

WISDOM

It is finding the balance and learning to use the two sides of the brain. In the dictionary we find that wisdom is "accumulated knowledge or erudition or enlightenment 2: the trait of utilizing knowledge and experience with common sense and insight".
For me it is the trait of utilizing reason , experience, and intuition with common sense and insight. (Insert reference)

Knowledge Concepts II

2005-09-21T21:25:00.000-04:00

In this section I go deeper into what the relation is between the concept and how we could build into a future technology.

Even though we have knowledge = information + experience, which is for sure something an individual can accomplish on his own, I will call this knowledge k, and when you bring collaboration in we’ll call it K (with upper case), because you will have an expanded view of many people experiences and points of view, which make what you learned a wiser piece of knowledge and confirms it’s validity. If there are any exceptions, you will more likely find about them when collaborating with others.

K= Data + Processes + Collaboration. Let me say that knowledge is not represented by them, but their interactions, same way a system is defined. If you take an elephant and divided it in two, you do not have two elephants. . This means that data only, or processes or collaboration do not give you knowledge, only the interaction between the three will. Collaboration is what we’ve been missing to make it successful in practice when working in a team.

There are additional elements to consider when interacting with knowledge from the technology perspective. These are:

Interface: it represents the medium and the form that we are using to access the systems information. In the past it was a book, today means a computer, or electronic device used to access information. The key aspect of it is it's flexibility and adaptability to any situation, so that people will always be able to read the information presented.

Find: I like more this word than "searching" because you can search forever and never find anything meaningful. Finding means just that, been successful at searching something, sorting it out, and extracting what you are looking for. Google makes a great job at bringing us relevant results based on the value it calculates from the connections or hyperlinks in pages around the web. That is a good first step into what the future could bring, easy tools that allow us to scan and FIND all the information universe.

Generating Knowledge

2005-09-21T20:20:00.000-04:00

The Amazing Jelly Bean Experiment

Treynor asked his class to estimate how many jelly beans there were in a jar. When added together and averaged, the group's estimate was 871— there were 850 beans contained within the jar. Only one student had made a better guess (a rogue genius, if you will). The now historic jelly-beans-in-the-jar experiment showed invariably that a group estimate is superior to the vast majority of individual guesses on a consistent basis.

Granted, there are limited situations in which knowing the amount of jelly beans in a jar is a significant accomplishment. Nevertheless, this example can be found a book by James Surowiecki called The Wisdom of Crowds. In his book, Surowiecki demonstrates myriad situations where the many are smarter than the few.

"If four basic conditions are met, a crowd's 'collective intelligence' will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts, Surowiecki says, even if members of the crowd don't know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. 'Wise crowds' need (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions." —Publisher's Weekly

To validate knowledge, we need to share it with many others and aggregate feedback because they will attest through their own experience (and not only logic) that the information you present is true or need some adjustment; in the diagram below only when you combine information + experience + collaboration or K=D+P+C, then you’ll get validation and better comprehension of a given theory and practice. In other words, you can learn something new through I+E , but you’ll find that there are situations where either it does not apply, or there are other conditions that you as a group need to take into account. Much like developing a new device, only when many people use it under different circumstances you’ll learn how to make it better. Even if your team is talented, they won’t be able to come up with every possible situation where the device might fail. Knowledge is only useful to humanity in the degree you share (it) and collaborate with others. The more you collaborate, receive feedback and incorporate others ideas, the more proof and wisdom you’ll have.

With these elements clear, from the IT perspective, we can transform the concept into a real software application that might transform the way we work today.

The Internet is proving what collaboration is capable of. As of today (May 2006) I can find many examples where the Internet is breaking every paradigm and industry upside down. Real state, publishing, Sales, marketing, just name it, and you'll see a tidal wave coming if not already happening. This is the effect of human collaboration at great scale.

The Model

The interaction generates information between data and collaboration and data and processes. In a big sheet of data, bring it into Excel(Computer program), and then make operations like Sum, Avrg, or filter the information, sort it, etc. You get information (more insight) from applying a process (in this case math operation) to the data. Same can be said about having data and collaboration. Sitting in a room with a team of people and sharing data, can give you valuable information, but different from what you get by applying a process. There is a limitation in how effective is having many people in one room sharing data, as automated processes can deal with vastly more data in a short period of time than what many people can quickly exchange through words. By simply having data combined with collaboration you get more insight, but still, you need process(es) to gain accurate information.

The interaction between processes and collaboration is what I call experience. Many iterations of it bring expertise. An example: Let say you want to take the bike you learned to ride and want to go up the mountain. The process defines that you will be successful and gain experience only if you finish going from the bottom to the top. If you decide to stop 1/4 or half way, is not the same as if you complete the journey or ultimate goal, the top of the mountain. Another example is the process of buying a house. The goal is to purchase a property and have it under your name. Going through the steps but falling short at closing, does not mean you already "know" how to buy a house. Finishing the process is important in earning true experience, if you don not , then you only know parts of it. One byproduct of not completing the process is cost. In the bicycle example would be psychological cost, in the house example is monetary cost and probably both.

All elements interacting as a whole is what makes rational knowledge come true from different points of view (ways of thinking), opinions, and experiences.

There are three major areas in modern society that generate knowledge. Those are: Scientific Community, Marketing research companies and intelligence agencies. Two are prime examples of the model and one is a sad example of what happens when you have two out of three elements. First example: the scientific process or discovery. After developing a theory through observation or practice and after gathering data through trials, experiments, etc, the scientist creates a paper, or document detailing his (her) findings. The reason of publishing in a magazine is to have a wide audience so that ideas can be refuted or enhanced. I call it performing wider collaboration. You want people to collaborate with feedback on your ideas to see if there are holes or parts missing ( as I did in this book), or if there is some unknown case where the theory does not apply.

The Internet is the by-product of scientists wanting to collaborate with a wider audience , making it even easier to accomplish it, and it is why Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web html scheme (and did not patent it or charged for it). The Internet is the biggest collaboration project in human history. The effects are rippling through every business, forcing many to reassess and rethink every business strategy from scratch.
The second example: Marketing companies like Gartner, IDC, and Forester rely on collaboration to bring insights to their clients. That insight comes in the form of surveys that when combined with statistical research, data and other elements provide extremely valuable insight or knowledge to someone. People have to be willing to fill out the surveys, in order to get meaningful and accurate data.

Some people do not see how collaboration plays a role in acquiring knowledge. One way of testing the theory 'without collaboration you do not have knowledge' is by looking at what happened in 9/11. Simply put, a lot of intelligence agencies had a lot of information, but no sharing and collaboration was taking place. Hence you actually don't "know" what is going on in order to take Action. So if you have information , but do not share it and collaborate around, the outcome is simply you still have information, because many times the person responsible in doing something about it is not the same one holding the information in this case. Hence, knowledge (the rational side of it) requires collaboration between groups so that proper action can be taken. This translates into "the wider the audience, the more points of view you get, the closer to actual knowledge you will get”. Another example I remember reading on the web, was about how the military use scientists to discover secrets on advance technologies (Flying devices) they have but that they did not create. In a very secretive environment, they expect a single scientist locked in a room to come out with all the knowledge on how these advanced technologies were built. My conclusion from it is that in a secretive setting, you can't go much further in understanding the unknown without collaborating with more people.

Case study

2005-09-21T14:01:00.000-04:00

As the revised definition mentioned before, rational knowledge is about information and experience, we should be able to prove that this is true.

The Apprentice was a TV program in 2003 defined as a sixteen-week job interview, where eighteen people competed in a series of rigorous business tasks, many of which include well known companies and require information and experience to conquer, in order to show Donald Trump (the host/boss), that they are the best candidate for his company. In each episode, the losing team was sent to the boardroom, where Trump and his associates, judge the job applicants on their performance in the task. One person was fired and sent home each week.

If you missed it, was a very compelling program and very entertaining. I believe you can get a DVD with some additional footage. It is this very theory being put into practice.

When they decided (lucky for us) to build two groups with the condition to have "Book smarts"(Those with Information) Vs Street smarts (Those with Experience) I bet they did not know they would help us a lot!. It gave us a “Case study" to observe in real life how the two are related in normal people that were not acting up. Clearly people with more experience survived longer, but at the same time showed how women and their intuition steam rolled men at the beginning.

Two people lasted until the end, Bill and Kwame. Of the two,-- clearly-- Bill was selected because he had a more balanced background (Education + Experience) against Kwame, and the results showed. Bill had the book smarts (Information) and the street smarts (Experience) that made him the final winner.

The Basic Concepts

2005-09-21T11:14:00.000-04:00

Gary Klein observed in his book How people make decisions (MIT Press,1999) that project managers rarely have enough information and time to make decisions (Using methodologies) work. They have four things: experience, intuition, training and each other. He thought they make good decisions by maximizing those elements. He mentions the two types of knowledge --rational and intuitive, and experience/training or education plus each other (Collaboration) as the way you can make decisions based on all the knowledge available.

Rational Knowledge

In very simple and practical terms, knowledge is INFORMATION plus (+) EXPERIENCE (T. Davenport et al., 1998). This means both k=i+e. To be useful knowledge (K), information and experience needs to be shared with others; in the diagram below only when you combine information + experience + collaboration or K=D+P+C, is when you get useful and actionable knowledge. In other words, you can learn something new, but how useful it is or not and how accurate it is depends if you are the only one that knows about it. Knowledge is only useful to humanity in the degree you share (it) and collaborate with others. The more you collaborate and receive feedback, the more complete (Proof and Wisdom) that knowledge will be.

If we come to agree on the elements, from the IT perspective, we can transform the concept into a real software application that will transform the way we work today.

Information: The principal component of it is DATA. As you know data does not tell you much individually. But if you take a bunch of it, and in general the bigger amount the better, and apply a process to it --Call it operation,process, etc--- you get as a result information. You get something a lot more valuable about what the pattern of the data is trying to tell you. This is in what information means as opposed as other definition equaling information with knowledge. Is only part of it.

Experience: means doing, going through a process or practicing the theory learnt through study. One key aspect of experience is that you have to be willing to go from start to finish on a defined process in order to gain full experience (A partially completed process does not mean you gained experience). Lets take riding a bike to the top of the mountain as the analogy. If you try to cheat or get tired, you will not gain 100% experience on the goal, cause the process defines you have to go from the bottom to the top, so here we define experience as completing 100% of a given process.
Learning by doing is one of the strongest ways of gaining insight meaning the brain will record "vividly" and you will remember about it more easily than when you read a book. The reason: Our brain records experiences in more detail because our body is involved instead of just the mind.

"In plain words, rational perception entails accepting and believing only what is true based on one's study, observation and experience. The knowledge derived through such an approach is rational knowledge. It should be pointed out that the process of attaining rational knowledge begins by having an open mind and by giving up blind faith and notions prevalent in society", by Jainism.

Other knowledge concepts which are similar. Knowledge is "information combined with experience, context, interpretation, and reflection. It is a high-value form of information that is ready to apply to decisions and actions." T. Davenport et al., 1998 "the insights, understandings, and practical know-how that we all possess – is a fundamental resource that allows us to function intelligently." Wiig, 1996.

Connecting the Dots

2005-09-21T10:51:00.000-04:00

“In the long run, the only sustainable source of competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than its competition.” Peter Senge.

This takes us to:

Your Ability to learn lies in the ability to nurture Team Learning

Which in consecuence show us that:

“Team Learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations.” Peter Senge

Collaboration is the key for Team learning.

Break

2005-09-21T10:48:00.000-04:00

Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33 cm.

The slogan on New Hampshire license plates is 'Live Free or Die'. These license plates are manufactured by prisoners in the state prison in Concord.
Montpelier, Vermont is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds.
The word 'byte' is a contraction of 'by eight.‘
The word 'pixel' is a contraction of either 'picture cell' or 'picture element.'
Ralph Lauren's original name was Ralph Lifshitz.

It makes waiting a lot more interesting..

What is the solution?

2005-09-20T15:44:00.000-04:00

The solution falls in understanding the concept of knowledge in a non philosophical way.

Once we do that, we can explain a funding company or investor how we can create this technology platform for any organization to use.

A feasible goal is 100% Collaboration from 100% of people. This means letting information flow more freely and having all people share ideas. Many organizations believe that moving quickly will always keep you in the front, but I would say based on systems theories that it does not always apply -- the quickest theory I mean.

To accomplish collaboration you'll likely need:
Clear Concepts: By carefully using the right words with the right meaning which is understood by the team, you will have fewer problems later resolving them.
Better Leadership: Without better leadership we cannot pretend to go from point A to point B.
You'll need a New Framework (Learning Organizations) and Different model to work on if you want to be successful at having your employees contribute willingly to any technological platform. By combining a set of theories and practice, the Learning Organization model and it's disciplines are a clear path for tomorrow's organizational success.
Different and complete set of priorities L-V-S-P-R-S: By learning how to connect Leadership with Solutions, you can have a clear understanding on what the path should look like. Leaders primarily role is to create a Vision. That vision is the point where you want to go. To do this it must follow a set of Strategies based on facts and information about where you are and where you want to be. Then, you move to transforming those strategies into detailed policies and flows(processes) about how you want it done, what are the rules, and what are the exceptions to those rules and any special situation you can think of. The result can be then translated into a set of requirements that will detail the solution in a NON TECHNICAL LANGUAGE. Then and only then, you can call the technical experts to help you find out HOW to build the solution with TOOLS available or create new tools if nothing else is available.
Successful thinking model: By successful --as we saw before-- it means learning to define the why, what, where, how in a specific order. It means getting rid of the "Quick fix" mentality.
Collaboration is only fully effective in a “Learning Organization.

Technology Consultants

2005-09-20T15:27:00.000-04:00

How this misunderstanding of words affect IT Consultants?.

•

Wrong answers to an undefined problem

When we try to give answers to something we have not defined as a problem , we run into trouble. In other words we try to connect the problem to the tool, not focusing the efforts into creating a solution explained in non-technical language.

Ethics are affected

As seen through practice, many people instead of having the courage to say no, or saying clearly that they do not understand, they continue working in projects that are not clear, maybe through ignorance/fear/other, but many times concious that the person they are trying to help has no idea. Isn't that what the consultant role is supposed to do?

Reputation

Clearly, from one project to another, people want to check your prior experience and solutions. Some customers force consultants into confidential agreements. The nature of our business is showing our prior work to future customers so that they can see how competent we consultants are to have confidence in the contract they are signing. It does not make sense.

Effectiveness: Making sure you check all fuzzy words used by the customer allows better communication and less errors.

I can't stress how important this is. I've seen cases where this happens where the outcome has not been positive.

Get ready for a hard landing. Lawsuits included (God forbids).
Definition: A consultant is a professional that provides expert advice in a particular domain or area of expertise. There are ocassions where the role of the consultant is not well understood by both parties, so there needs to be clear roles and responsibilities in each project to be effective in the long run.

Introduction to Knowledge from another perspective

2005-09-20T15:23:00.000-04:00

Because the word knowledge is one of the most contentious topics people debate on (and for many thousand years), and it seems like a never ending discussion, I will include here a base for reasoning for us to be able to start somewhere with a solid reasoning foundation.

A Base for Reasoning

"All our ideas should produce good and lasting results and then anything that is good now would have been good in the past and it will be good in the future and it will be good under any circumstances, so any idea that does not cover all this broad base IS NO GOOD.

To be right, one's thought will have to be based on natural facts, for really, Mother Nature ONLY can tell what is right and what is wrong and the way that things should be.

My definition of right is that right is anything in nature that exists without artificial modification and all the others are wrong.

Now suppose you would say it is wrong. In that case, I would say YOU are wrong yourself because you came into this world through natural circumstances that YOU HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH and so as long as such a thing exists as yourself, I am right and you are wrong.
Only those are right whose thoughts are BASED on natural facts and inclinations."( Edward Leedskalnin, “A book in every home”, 1936)

In this line, Mother Nature teaches us that our brain (the place where knowledge resides) is divided into two hemispheres. Right and left. The right side of the brain handles intuitive knowledge ( Mona Lisa Md Phd Schulz, Awakening intuition - April 20, 1998), while the left side handles rational knowledge. (Fink, Marshall, Nature vol 382, p 626).)

Right Brain vs. Left Brain

This theory of the structure and functions of the mind suggests that the two different sides of the brain control two different "modes" of thinking. It also suggests that each of us prefers one mode over the other. Modern society (Western) today educates children focusing on the left side (Intellect) over the right side (Humanistic, arts) .
Experimentation (Fink, Marshall) has shown that the two different sides, or hemispheres, of the brain are responsible for different manners of thinking. The following table illustrates the differences between left-brain and right-brain thinking:

Left Brain Right Brain

Logical Random

Sequential Intuitive

Rational Holistic

Analytical Synthesizing

Objective Subjective

Looks at parts Looks at wholes

Most individuals have a distinct preference for one of these styles of thinking. Some, however, are more whole-brained and equally adept at both modes and many cases researches have found geniuses to be the ones using both sides. In general, schools tend to favor left-brain modes of thinking, while downplaying the right-brain ones. Left-brain scholastic subjects focus on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy. Right-brained subjects, on the other hand, focus on aesthetics, feeling, and creativity." (www.funderstanding.com, 2005)
Intuitive knowledge: Intuitive knowledge is viewed as insight that comes directly in dreams/images, gut feelings; those dreams are made of images. Here are some excerpts from the Internet; Intuition: way of knowing directly; immediate apprehension. The Greeks understood intuition to be the grasp of universal principles by the intelligence (nous), as distinguished from the fleeting impressions of the senses. The distinction used by the Greeks implied the superiority of intellectual intuitions over information received by the senses. Christian thinkers made a distinction between intuitive and discursive knowledge: God and angels know directly (intuitively) what men reach by reasoning. A person who has an intuitive opinion can not fully explain why he or she holds that view. Intuition is an unconscious form of knowledge. It is immediate and not open to rational/analytical thought processes. It differs from instinct, which does not have the experience element. An important intuitive method is brainstorming.

Rational knowledge: Please jump to basic concepts section.

Summary:

1- There are two types (Forms) of knowledge, based on our brain.

Rational knowledge - Left hemisphere

Intuitive knowledge.- Right hemisphere.

We'll look deeper into rational knowledge and how it gets generated in the next sections.

Some thoughts

2005-09-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

I've been trying to update Wikipedia, but I see that you have to have a "encyclopedic" term to be left alone. What I find distressing is that people who studied a lot about philosophy thinks they have the knowledge and or somehow want to hijack the term. I would like to remind them that they only have a lot of information. Knowledge only comes when they practice all that theory they learned. Then again, I will describe knowledge in practical terms later... conclusion, is no easy task to make them open their mind to something not covered by epistemology...

I love wikipedia. I think is great and they have done a tremendous job. But I think they've lost track on how the collaboration can be better handled. I realize is no easy task, but they are showing us through practice at least how to start doing it. What I mean is you'll understand something when you learn a theory and then practice it. It is very confusing and complicated the writings you find in their knowledge page. There is no simplicity and no subdivision of the term. I hope I can help a little in these pages with material from the practice of implementing knowledge rather than just thinking about it. Maybe someday someone will take Wikipedia to a new level, where collaboration takes into account the majority of people through a voting system.

About Wikipedia

2005-09-20T12:44:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia is a site intended to let anyone write and edit any article. Some of you might not know what it is, but Wikipedia's statistics are very interesting. Here are some statistics. It is a powerful example of collaboration.

“It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.” LA Times.

“This is a classic failing of old school media thinking. Sure, folks could build on top of the Times' editorials, but then again, why would they? The reason folks build stuff is to build it together, and to do that, they have to know one another, have a shared set of mores, have a conversation that is already going.

A far better approach would have been to create a platform for readers to create their own communities. Leaders will emerge, voices will break out, and conversations will get started. Then the community itself will have a sense of ownership of the media, and begin to moderate out the trolls. It's one thing for the LA Times to kill the trolls - that feels like censorship. It's another for the community itself to do it.” Caterina Fake, founder Flickr.

I love Wikipedia. I think is great and they have done a tremendous job. But I think they've lost track on how the collaboration can be better handled. I realize is no easy task, but they are showing us through practice at least how to start doing it. What I mean is you'll understand something when you learn a theory and then practice it. Relying only on editorial experts telling us what is valid will not be useful in the long run. A platform where everybody can voice their understanding and experience will. I can imagine following the same principle of being able to edit and posting your definition of a word, but instead of having a few individuals rejecting it without proper analysis, having many people read it and voting for the definition they understand the most will promote the best definitions. Then you could reach a consensus by the thousands, and not by just a handful of people. The most voted (Comprehensive) would make it to the top.

Current definitions.

2005-09-19T15:59:00.000-04:00

From Wikipedia... (This changes daily, so click here to see the most recent).

Knowledge is the confident understanding of a subject, potentially with the ability to use it for a specific purpose. The ability to know something is a central (and controversial) part of philosophy and has its own branch, epistemology. On a more practical level, knowledge is commonly shared by groups of people and in this context it can be manipulated and managed in various ways.

From Britannica:

a posteriori knowledge
knowledge derived from experience, as opposed to a priori knowledge (q.v.).
a priori knowledge
in Western philosophy since the time of Immanuel Kant, knowledge that is independent of all particular experiences, as opposed to a posteriori knowledge, which derives from experience alone. The ...
Pramana-varttika
perhaps the foremost work on Buddhist logic and epistemology, written in the 7th century. The Pramana-varttika is the chief work of Dharmakirti, originally a southern Indian Brahman.
Agama post-Vedic scripture conveying ritual knowledge and considered to have been revealed by a personal divinity. Shaivite scriptures, dating probably to the 8th century, are particularly so designated, ... abhijna
in Buddhist philosophy, miraculous power obtained especially through meditation and wisdom. Usually five kinds of abhijna are enumerated: the ability (1) to travel any distance or take on any form at ... Royal Society
the oldest scientific society in Great Britain and one of the oldest in Europe, founded in 1660. It began earlier with small, informal groups, who met periodically to discuss scientific subjects. The ... gai saber
the art of composing love poetry; especially the art of the Provençal troubadours as set forth in a 14th-century work called the Leys d'amors. The Old Provençal phrase gai saber is associated with ...
Knowledge
from the salvation article
Religions that trace the ills of man's present condition to some form of primordial error, or ignorance, offer knowledge that will ensure salvation. Such knowledge is of an esoteric kind and is ...
Transmitting knowledge
from the technology, history of article
In the ancient world, technological knowledge was transmitted by traders, who went out in search of tin and other commodities, and by craftsmen in metal, stone, leather, and the other mediums, who ...
Self-knowledge
from the Locke, John article
Some ideas are not of things outside the mind but are reflexive and internal. Locke finds it necessary to classify these in Book II and in doing so sets down the foundations of empirical psychology. ...

From Dictionary.com

knowledge n : the psychological result of perception and learning and reasoning [syn: cognition, noesis]) Pronunciation Key (nlj)
n. The state or fact of knowing. Familiarity, awareness, or understanding gained through experience or study. The sum or range of what has been perceived, discovered, or learned. Learning; erudition: teachers of great knowledge. Specific information about something. Carnal knowledge.
____________________

The problem we had have in IT , is that these definitions do not translate into bits and bytes and into a practical model we can build. As Scott Berkun writes in his book The art of project management, about the principle from a 12th century philosopher William of Occam whose credited with using the notion of simplicity to drive decisions (as reviewed earlier). "He believed that people often add complexity to situations even though it doesn't help to resolve them. He suggested that the best way to figure out things out was to find the simplest explanation and use that first because, most of the time, it was the right explanation. "
"Occam Razor refers to the process of trying to cut away all the unneeded details that get in the way and return to the core issue at the heart of the problem. It also implies that the solution with the greatest odds of being best is the one that has the simplest logic". I hopeful that what I am writing about knowledge follow this principle.

What does success looks like?

2005-09-19T14:38:00.000-04:00

When you are looking at consequences you have two choices, either you try to find a quick answer, or you scour deep what is the fundamental factor or reason that generated the problem. There are thousands of superficial reasons (or symptoms) why something fails, and in the American culture there is a tendency to blame someone else (“The enemy is out there syndrome”, see Learning Disabilities section). Here are some fundamental reasons I’ve found in my experience why Knowledge Projects (KM) fail.

Leadership

Leadership has always played a key role in the success or failure of any project in history. In IT and especially in knowledge management projects, there’s primarily been a lack of information and experience about how to properly plan and execute them. They way it has been done is the same as any other IT project (trial and error). The fact that we had had rough times doing it proves how complicated it can get. Added to the mix, is the aggressive vendor sale pitch.

There are many reasons, but the biggest sin leaders commit is thinking technology IS a solution(Explained later).

Other reasons fall on the human side, meaning the way you involve, treat users, train and guide them through the process makes a big difference.

The transition from paper based processes to digital has posed as another challenge, and old traditions many times prevail.

Not understanding the big picture. Not asking enough questions about “What is the problem?”, where, why, etc. Where are the rules? What do we envision? What is OUR solution? What is our fundamental goal?

Maybe is the style of leadership we have been accustomed to.

“Show me a hero and I'll tell you a tragedy." F. Scott Fitzgerald.

A book by Joseph L. Badaracco “Leading Quietly: An Unorthodox Guide to Doing the Right Thing” looks at the opposite traits of leadership: restraint, modesty and tenacity shows us that what we see today might not be the ideal way to leadership. -If you look behind lots of great heroic leaders, you find them doing lots of quiet, patient work themselves. —Joseph L. Badaracco Jr.

Psychology

Managers complain that people frequently hoard knowledge, fail to share it with others, and generally behave uncooperatively. In many implementations little involvement is perceived from end users. In others, the system can barely keep up. Why the difference? The difference I found is in the rules and policies. In the first case, leaders put a lot of rules --who can see, not see, create, share, delete, etc information-- and those rules are completely absent in the second case. Now, in the second case people are free to express, subscribe, create, share, agree, and disagree on any topic posted. Results: The system can barely keep up with demand, meaning it is very successful as a knowledge hub.10-20 years ago (and even today) , we were told information is power. Now we are trying to push the opposite message with Knowledge Management. The result: We cannot force people to give away what they know, if they are not genuinely motivated to do so. An example: United 93's lesson yields knowledge is power “Knowledge is power, and pure knowledge must unite us.” Marc Dotson published May 30, 2006 The more we send this message to people, the harder will be the goal to share knowledge. Equaling knowledge to power, evidently will make people hold on to it, instead of sharing it, which is the key to collaboration, which in turn is the key to creativity. A twist to above quote could be “Knowledge power depends on our capacity to unite ourselves collaboratively” and would allow us to have more people actively share their knowledge with others.

Views and Concepts of people involved.

I am amazed about the misuse of words (my self included) everywhere and the lack of understanding in general of their dictionary meaning. If we decide not to pay attention to this fact, even trying to agree on what the problem is will be a challenge, because the words used to define it will have a different meaning for each team member, and the key to succeed is based on how well the team understands the problem. “Instead of thinking of ways to create a business, entrepreneurs should be thinking of ways to create value through solving a problem. And that is a deep, thorough process. "Half of all the energy we spend in inventing new business solutions is first figuring out the problem." Jay Walker inventor of Priceline.com and holder of more than 100 patents.

The way some editors write and use words that either contradict or mislead is bigger than I thought.
If not only the leaders, but the rest of the team believes technology is a “solution”, then they are bound to fail in the long term.

Discovering people believe technology = solution was shocking to say the least. I discovered this trend when sitting in various meetings, I kept listening to people talk about what the technology could do to solve the problem, instead of agreeing what the problem was in the first place and analyzing what was the goal. Even when I later asked about what was the fundamental goal, after a short pause Cristine would say “I do not know”. In another meeting, someone launched a question (maybe in desperation) that it would help me start realizing many things in this book: What does success looks like?

It was odd to say the least. Nobody responded. I kept thinking if there was an effective way to demonstrate it in simple terms. I decided to give it a try and started with a basic concept I am sure you all know. Success is the opposite of failure. Then I looked the other meetings discussions with technology and started to draw a map.
In Figure x , I typed technology and went back to the dictionary to check the meaning (Technology comes from techne (τεχνη) "craft" + logia (λογια) "saying" ) meaning the science about tools created by man applied in conjunction to solve a problem. Tools are not the solution itself, but the way you can create your vision. “Technology is a tool that can change the nature of learning” Lynne Schrum. By observing people around, I could see that they wanted answers from the tool, that would give them the solution, and then they would look at the problem mostly at the end. I kept staring at the slide and for a moment and could not believe it. At the end of that path (Right to left), I wrote FAILURE. Why? Tools (or technology) cannot give you the -right- answers to a solution of a problem that has not been defined from the very beginning (See Diagram left) ; the view I have is that problem and solution should be formulated in a non technological language. The Problem, and the envisioned solution must be simple and clearly laid down for everybody to understand. Any confusion will make harder to implement the project.

Going in the opposite direction (as in the definition) chances are you will find success by clearly defining what the problem is, what the solution is, and then you start defining HOW you will build the solution with the tools or technology available. The how will likely have technical language. Not before.

In other cases I observed people trying to link a problem directly to a tool (Software) believing again that technology = solution;

There is a WHY in every problem. And most likely will be the motivational driver for the team involved in solving it. It is very important to discover the why.

I call this method the PST system (Problem ->Solution -> Tools)

The perfect problem solving analogy I like to use is transportation. Every body can understand the concept easily. How do we go from “here” to “there”. “What is the very first thing you need to do when you want to go from one point to another?”.

1. First thing you need to do is to define or find out where you are. Looks and sounds logical, but in the IT world not everybody does it or is willing to. Why? It can be a huge effort just to know for sure where you are, especially in big corporations with terabytes and sometimes petabytes stored. So not every CIO is willing to do it because sometimes the cost can be out of question and even knowing what to look for can be confusing. This is when the underlying problems begin for any knowledge project.

* Point A : After looking around and asking questions I found I am in New York.
* In reality: many assume they know where they are and give the green light to start a project without carefully understanding the situation. This is risky to say the least.

2. Next step is to figure out or envision (definition: imagine; conceive of; see in one's mind;) where you want to go. (This is the Vision in leadership terms), where do you envision you should be heading to.
In our example, we found that we have a problem being in New York and there is an urgent (defines timing) need to move to Los Angeles (solution). Now we know where we are heading. Next step is to define time. Time will set the pace (and cost) of your project. Do we need to do it ASAP? In some cases time limits the number of options the leader has to choose from.

3.If the requirement is to do it ASAP, then cost will be probably max out, and of all the range of tools that we can use, the list will probably come down to one in this exercise, a tool that provides the fastest way. The Airplane.

Look how the tool you choose is time dependant. If the question was two hundred years ago, the tool did not exist. A Train would be the answer

Reality: Let’s imagine the current and common situation in business, you know there is a need, but do not know yet how, and a consultant or vendor comes to you and tells you --"We have a very economic and efficient 'solution' for you. It is very affordable, it will take you anyplace you want, and it will last a for ever (good warranty). "--- great!! you say. That is what I need! Show me...

Vendor: -- Our solution is called "...a bicycle".

Many companies believe they need to select a software suite first Without defining a whole range of policies and strategies—or the WHAT-- and thinking that the software will be flexible enough to accommodate their “future” requirements so that they can figure out how to make the trip to Knowledge Management easier and painless. This is my biggest concern and their biggest mistake. There is no such a thing as knowledge management in this world. Dealing with the word knowledge in the technology world is not as easy as many of the past IT projects. It involves people, and people will not provide their knowledge easily just because you try to force them with compliance and policies. It involves a lot more than just technology.

Tools & Technology

Software is a tool by definition, and it will never give you the keys (answers) to a problem and successful solution (Going to LA) if you do not know why, what, in the first place.

We should strive to check the dictionary for word definitions every time we see something we are not sure of, or if the words seem confusing.

Tools definition (Dictionary.com): Devices, such as a saw that enables you to perform manual or automatic (Repetitive) tasks. I go on to displaying side by side Construction tools and Technology tools and their fundamental goal. In construction they are used primarily as a "Leverage" that allow you with minimal effort to apply great force, or speeds up a given task. In Technology is about speed, how you can do things faster with less errors and more convenience with less effort.
Making your project a vendor driven “solution” has generated a lot of confusion out there. This is the by-product of thinking technologies are solutions which is a big misconception.

I like to think that companies/organizations as people are all too different, so no application will perfectly work for all of them in a “one solution fits all” fashion.

After some experiences and analysis I came down to ask my self: What on earth is knowledge in the first place.

The more I asked the question, the more I realized there was no easy answer. It was striking to me finding this out; no one was very sure of themselves answering what knowledge means. We all seem to believe we "understand", looking closely , I found some inconsistencies that made the topic even more interesting, and a goal for me. Find out a simple way to explain what knowledge is, so that software can be redesigned to make it more useful. In the next sections we’ll look at some definitions.

Industry fuzziness: A case that shows evidence of how we build complexity (unnecessarily) into everything we do.

There is an inherent problem with us technology people and specially the ones that sell it. They need to have a new buzz word every year to make sure they can “wow” their customers into a new product (albeit being the same with more stuff added) and make the sale. This is good for business but terrible for simplicity, and effectiveness, because they (the products) get tweaked to make the sale but are more complex with each iteration. In many cases, companies have 20-30 different software applications which does not make sense. (See occam razor principle)

The other reason KM projects keep failing is because the fuzziness and lack of clarity software provides today

Here is an example of a content management convention:

• Content Management Architecture, Infrastructure, and Applications
• Data, Image, and Content Capture: The On-Ramp to an ECM Solution
• Centralizing Your Assets: Store, Retrieve, and Preserve
• Communicate, Collaborate, and Manage - "Can You Hear Me Now?"
• Making the Invisible Visible: Measure, Monitor, and Analyze
The fourth topic that talks about Collaboration is interesting. It is amazing the number of elements I found on each topic. In their webpage it stated:
• This theme provides advice, insight, and discussions about how to best share, route, deliver, secure, and control enterprise content so attendees can meet or exceed their compliance, operational, and performance objectives. Areas of particular focus include: email, Instant messaging, Web content, and Portals. Other sources of enterprise information and best practices for process and policy analysis are addressed.
• BPM
• Workflow
• Document management
• Email management
• Instant messaging
• DRM
• WCM
• Collaboration tools
• DAM
• Security
• Localization
• Syndication
• Personalization
• Publish
• Portals
• Case studies
• Versioning capabilities & controls
• Process planning
• Case/exception handling systems
• Cultural/organizational/ownership challenges
• Unlocking valuable information trapped in transactional systems
• Building a performance-accountable organization

It might be seen as useful software, but you can see it exists in many different pieces and no simple explanation how all of them work in conjunction, what is the whole picture, what does it accomplish, what is the problem, how should we start and no concepts behind them as to why they built it like that, and in general a one-solution-fits-all approach. We are stumbling again and again trying to connect a problem straight to a tool believing that’s the answer. IT people are “drowning” in techno speak believing that tools and technology are the solution.

Opening the Flow

“Companies need to consider opening their flow of information”, said Google Enterprise General Manager Dave Girouard

Product management has evolved from being formulaic, linear, scheduled and predictable, to being unpredictable, cyclical and revolutionary. That means companies need to rely on self-directed innovators and move forward quickly, often with little planning.
"You can't schedule innovation," Girouard said.
Google is making big noise on the products they are developing, and they are changing the "corporate paradigm" upside down.

"Companies need to attract, guide and retain self-directed innovators in order to succeed in the next 10 to 20 years. --Self-directed innovators-- who don't necessarily hold high-ranking positions have a wide influence within a company and can make things happen". "Those employees can't always recall details of all of the information they have come across so they need a photographic memory, collective wisdom and the world's information, he said. The way to deal with that, according to Girouard, is to allow information to flow more freely and quickly than it has in the past" he said. He outlined the top five ways to maintain an outdated business model. They are: restricting internal publishing by failing to provide a physical means to communicate or by instituting strict rules about gaining approval; requiring publishers to follow strict metadata standards; assuming employees will use systems because they're in place rather than letting employees' behavior give cues about what works, building overly complex interfaces, and restricting access when in doubt.

All of a company's information should be searchable by all "Innovators" which potentially can be anyone you employ.

About the Author

2005-09-19T14:31:00.000-04:00

In the beginning…

I was born and raised in Colombia. I learned English in high school and, in part, my father pushed me to have a British accent which I never caught quite right. I graduated in 1996 as a Systems Engineer from the School of Engineering, a great university down in Bogotá. I now realize I was not fully aware what the career name meant or encompassed at the time.
I had a quick stint at a research lab finishing my thesis project when I got a call to come and work in a giant fast food US company as their systems analyst. It went well until I finished school and they decided not to raise my pay check as promised. Soon after that, I left in protest not before making a study to show they needed three full time people for the IT department, not one part time freshman.
It was my first experience learning about what the corporate world was about. If it is not in writing you can pretend it was never said. But after sometime I met some former colleagues that told me I probably made the best decision as they recounted how the morale had gone down since then. After doubting about the decision now I felt it was the right one. That first job was in essence do-it-all kind of thing. I managed everything in Information Technology (IT). Network, computer support, email, point of sales systems, everything; I always had some taste for having a broad knowledge for technology and I was been given the chance to put it into practice. I did not know how important that would be later on.
Soon after, I was called for an opportunity to do some training courses as a consultant to an oil company -- a big one that is. I did not think too much about it, they pay was huge compared to what I was making. Months before I met a top executive at another oil company that ignited my desire to be in the oil business, so I already had my mind set into it. The project: A huge migration from Apple to PC and we were the ones training everyone in the office. I was about to witness my first large full scale IT project. That would not be very unique if I didn’t tell you the migration was for two thousand plus people in less than three months. That is an enormous undertaking for any size of company.
They trained us how to train users, and it definitely helped me tune up my presentation skills plus a little of British accent refinement. I remembered how the trainers crinched when I kept coming with “gonna” instead of going to. Now, what it really made the difference in this learning process was that they brought a professional camera guy to film us so that we could see how we looked. Some people felt they looked like clowns. In summary, it was a hard and eye opening experience. At the end, the project was a tremendous success. Soon after I was transferred to work as a support analyst and part time Webmaster. As I said, the Internet was all the rage, and the top job you could think about on an Internet environment was being a Webmaster. What I did not know was how hard it was to become one. You had to know five different programming languages, and all sorts of additional skills, as in the beginning, the Internet was a big piece of “something” putted together with duct tape (the five languages). That means a lot of things failed. So you had to be very technical, but at the same time had to know about design and building “beautiful” looking pages. It was odd to me but a great challenge.
The guy doing the Webmaster juggling decided to leave to Canada very soon, but I did not get the job; they brought someone else with lots of experience in Internet programming and had been a former webmaster himself, so I kept wishing to get the top spot and see what it was like. After a while I finally got the job, but I was starting to get interested in the ERP arena where salaries where all the rage and the technology looked great. Funny thing, I never got very far with it. Call it destiny or something, although I was named the “Focal Point guy” for all ERP matters at my company after a big presentation by an expert explaining the Millions of dollars earned implementing ERP – something that made me not very popular among my peers--- I was never sent to training, because they knew I would be “stolen” soon after by another consulting company to a big mammoth job somewhere else.
Meanwhile I had to deal with this tool for document management that looked pretty interesting but that I did not see much of a future in the webmaster area (How wrong I was). The tool was called Livelink. In the late 1990’s I went from webmaster into being the tech lead guy for a big time project implementing Knowledge management technology (the Livelink product I mentioned) to the entire organization. In that time, KM was unknown to many people including corporations as the Internet was all the rage and this particular oil company was arguably the leader in implementing best practices due to their operational liability issues. This was-is a big and large oil and exploration company down in South America. Figuring out who was to be the project manager posed a challenge at a time those projects were non-existent, so managers decided that the best option would be to select a “traditional” operations manager from the field as the PM for this knowledge project. We soon found out this would not be the best answer, as too many things looked out of whack. We did not know how big and complicated the project could be as well . Many observers and colleagues warned me left and right about this project and its dangers, but I felt compelled to keep trying anyway. The one thing I was asked from the PM in charge to do was to come out with a budget.
In our culture, we are kind of afraid about money matters, so it was unusual for the tech lead to come up with a 1.5 million dollar budget. Given the risks involved, I made big numbers to counter those risks. That probably saved us from a disaster. In other words, if you know you are going to fail, just make sure you fail BIG as they say in Texas, it does not make sense to fail small, as you will not learn much out of it. In summary, the project had three different project managers (definitely not recommended on any kind of project), and we were lucky to have a system in place at the end with the best technology around cause we were able to bypass a long biding process and do it quickly. The only person working full time in the project was me which today sounds really crazy. We struggled to figure out what was the path to follow, so a lot was trial and error, but let me tell you that this method is not for the faint of heart. It is by far the hardest way of learning and the most expensive. That project was probably the first in the world (1997) in size and scope dealing directly and specifically with KM with absolutely no expertise around (I think they scoured the world around for consultants) to guide us without any luck. They found none.
But for some reason the top guy up there believed that I was responsible of the problems the project was having. That did not make me feel too good, so I decided to start looking for something else rather than waiting for the hammer to fall on my head. I was sure warned about it. It looked typical management stupidity where you start looking for the scapegoat (Shoot the messenger syndrome) instead of looking at how the project is structured. Luckily for me, my boss and managers from the consulting company where absolutely clear that instead of guilty I was brave enough for dealing with a crazy project like that. In the end it was straightened out by a very competent project manager—the third in a row. My first big lesson in project management: Make sure you know what you are doing, if not, bring the experts or don’t try it unless you are ready to fail.
Implementing the technology was exciting, new ways of dealing with information, figuring out how to best organize, capture, retrieve data, create workflow processes, etc. The number of things involved was growing and growing big in complexity. We were learning about the importance of interfaces, the users aspect of it, and how delicate was to migrate information from one side to another. There were unseen hidden links between groups of people that proved difficult to deal with without prior research. But again, I learned from the technical perspective as well as the business side.
After that, I’ve got an offer to come to the United States from a big tobacco company. I was very excited, and as always happen, the excitement transformed into frustration, the 2000 year US election proved to be a bump in the road for the papers that were delayed so much that the project I was called to join, dried out. After some calls, I landed a job as project manager for a big financial conglomerate. I had to move to a hotel and start working the next Monday morning in a different country, different culture, and make sure I produced results by the end of the week in a project with “again” unbelievable goals. Not recommended for the faint of heart . It stroked me the way their goals were set. They wanted to go “paperless” in less than four-five months. That is something bordering with craziness (first making the attempt) but I needed the job, and did not think too much about it. I have to say it was again very rough, as the project was already underway, I was coming in the middle of it replacing another PM, and they expected results probably in an hour, thinking that there was a proven method (Shall I say magic formula) of how to implement paperless projects in a snap. Today we know you can't possibly go paperless unless is a brand new company with a different leadership and mentality. For older companies you will always have a mix of paper and digital information.
Ok, so the reason the previous manager was removed, was because he did not agree on the way they wanted to move their information to this new technology. And he was probably right. But I had to do it anyway, so we went ahead and moved all files and folders into the system in less than a month. We did it, but with a lot of errors, because the tools used were not designed for that kind of massive uploading and there was no planning what so ever. Next, I found my self with another challenge; spitting out a fully detailed project plan with no lead time. I had no idea about how to come up with it because you cannot possibly foresee a plan without knowing where you are, their current state of matters, where you are going, and a team of people. In other words, you have to be there since day one as project manager to be able to figure out why, what, how, when, etc to do it and plan it right, but I did it anyway. I can think back now and tell you how crazy everything was. I do not know if heads rolled from the client stand point, but being a consultant kept you in a somewhat safe spot, at least in my case. Luckily they knew that just bringing in a new project manager and doing the same thing would not cut it; another hard lesson in the pocket but very valuable. I was sure learning the hard way how NOT to do Knowledge Management from customers and companies shooting up in the air. That was probably the time I started asking my self why they were doing it like that, and began to step back. I guess that is the way we learn about new things. We fail and fail until we learn a new way that works better.
After a couple of other small jobs 9/11 came and we got a (Sadly) 3 month vacation as everything and I mean every single project was shutdown. When I’ve got the offer for interview in New York later that year, everybody in my family had the terror look saying to me “Are you sure you want to go there?”, I thought to myself that probably the best place to be after 9/11 was precisely in NY, and there could not be any other safer place on earth.
In NY I was offered a two year contract, so we decided to move from our temporal residence in Maryland. The challenge: learning the inner working of a non-profit organization and fixing-guiding them through the tough KM waters. My first impression was that the pace and ways of working coming from the “outside” world were quite different to how the non-profit world behaves. Everything moved a lot more slowly. It was hard at the beginning but I adjusted and figured out the way you could move around and get things done. The technology was fixed, and the users where retrained with a different approach. It proved successful in the number of users using the technology, but at the expense of time. Still, many of the factors affecting KM applied here. It took a long time, as I was the only resource doing everything. I soon learned the value and power of having policies and procedures in place when there are none. Meanwhile I delivered a seminar on KM and in retrospective I realize how messy it must have sounded, but still today, I get people to my seminars that want to know what KM is all about.
It has been 10 years now, so let’s look at the lessons from the past and how I looked back to try finding a clear picture of what is wrong with KM and the definitions behind. Here are the lessons I’ve learned so far.

Where to start

2005-09-19T14:26:00.000-04:00

After many years in the IT world of KM, DCM, etc, etc I started to realize that there was something not working quite right, a very persistent issue I perceived from every project outcome, something telling you that after all those 'successful' projects there was a major problem. Even in the best planned projects, the outcome was not the expected. There was a lot of resistance from people to knowledge projects (Websites, information management, workflows, etc... that made me ask why? I started to observe in my assignments that I was called most of the times to put out fires. Big fires. Implementations that went sour because technology was implemented but there was not 'buy in " from people (the real users of the system). The technology usually was implemented, but many users where trained as if it was yet another application, and not something that would touch and change their lifes every day from then on. Even though everyone in the team knew the solution was about having people coming together, the emphasis was always on the tool, not on people. We believed the technology was right, some believing it was the right "solution".

The way I discovered it: going backwards. From the consecuences, I started to look at the causes, going as far as looking into what knowledge means.

Normally should be the other way, but not everyone knows about history or viceversa, those having a lot of information in history but not knowing what is happening today are at a learning disadvantage . The fact of the matter is KM is too new to many and a very fuzzy and confusing topic even in the corporate world.

Today (2005) we see facts and statistics like these:

"Companies wasting billions on knowledge management because they fail to figure out what knowledge they need, or how to manage it ". writes Thomas A. Stewart,
ÂInternational Data Corp., a research group that focuses on technology, estimates that poorly managed knowledge costs the Fortune 500 about $12 billion a year.
Â>80 % (or more) of KP's are deemed as failure even though some look the opposite. "Only 38% of larger European corporates have an effective document management strategy "( Gartner Jan 2005)
Â"Leaders can no longer keep information under lock and key, nor should they: Networks are faster and more productive than hierarchies". Business 2.0 Jan(2006) Issue
ÂOffice politics -- a proxy for selfishness -- is the second most common reason people give for quitting a job.

I was curious to learn if there was a connection between these facts , there might be others. The main one is the staggering amount of money companies are wasting in KM and other "solutions" without realizing major benefits --aka people resisting the use of them. The other very important reason is why people quit their job. They deeply affect what knowledge projects are about. That is what we are going to put on the table. The Why and the How.

Culture and beliefs

2005-09-19T13:35:00.000-04:00

From observing Wikipedia, I can just say that culture plays a big role into having an open or closed mind to new ways of thinking. What you are about to read is for "those with eyes that see and ears that listen." Kybalion.

For academia and "thinkers" individuals: you might agree or disagree. Today there is a practice of implementing tools to deal with information (Search, data mining), but we need to understand how man is an intrinsical part of it to be complete and successful.

So in these pages you will find new ways of looking at knowledge and points of view that I hope can help you discover how we can re-direct our concepts into a better framework, and understand that we people need new leadership and tools that allow our creativity to be released, expressed and put into action; the opportunities to do it are increasingly tremendous in this Internet era.

Religion and Philosophy

The area that studies the concept of knowledge in academia is called epistemology, a branch from philosophy which tries to explain what it is.
It is very complicated in my experience, and maybe futile to force people to understand something unless individuals are open minded and willing to explore alternate explanations. The objective is to keep this book as simple as possible and focus it into practical examples and avoid any complicated arguments about what knowledge is. I do not intend to make any topic into a philosophical one following the principle “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.” ---William of Ockham. The principle of parsimony, also known as Ockham's Razor, translates from the Latin as pluralities should not be multiplied without necessity. It means that truth is most often simple and lies are most often complex. Parsimony states that when two or more theories are presented that propose to solve the same problem, the simplest that gives the most complete and satisfying explanation has priority to be studied in detail as it is the most probable. If during study the simplest is found to be flawed, then it is excluded, multiplying pluralities becomes necessary, the next simplest gains priority, and so on. Why? Because knowledge is and has been a very contentious topic in religious and philosophical circles which we will make the best effort to avoid as the goal is to come up with a simple concept to create a technological tool to harness it more efficiently.

The Human Factor invalidates KM

2005-09-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

For those of you out of the technology loop, KM stands for Knowledge Management, a buzz word created in the late nineties to imply a practice within IT to implement a set of software tools with the goal of centralizing and controlling information, documents, etc in a given organization.
The "human factor" I am referring to is the deep willingness and commitment or BUY IN from people to contribute, dialogue, share ideas and think together which generates true COLLABORATION. KM tries to impose rules, complexity and control in the same autocratic structure over people and process (es) to generate creative ideas, without addressing the need to create an environment where people feel comfortable and motivated to brainstorm ideas to flow freely with minimum restrictions (Brainstorming). In P.Senge’s book (The Fifth Discipline) it is explained as “Tapping peoples life long learning willingness and commitment” much like the Ipod did by tapping into peoples need to enjoy their freedom of hearing any song they wanted at any time with a simple, intuitive and revolutionary interface and it gave them a tool to be creative and come up with new products like Pod Casts. It is a good example on why information (if you want to innovate) cannot be controlled hence my statement about the human factor invalidating KM. In these pages, I will be explaining the reasons why I arrived to this conclusion through practice implementing "knowledge management" tools and technology dealing with terabytes of information through out the years. We need to understand more what knowledge is to come out with a simple way to create new tools that allows us to successfully take advantage of our own knowledge.

If you find errors in my writing ( I am not a writer) please let me know (Actually this is my first book in English), and kindly point it out in the comments area and I will make sure it gets corrected.

Welcome again....! it is a fascinating journey.

The first post...

2005-09-16T15:51:00.000-04:00

Introduction

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. " says the British scientist and author Arthur C. Clarke "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law), in other words when the human being does not understand advanced technology, it considers it magic. And magic can produce positive and negative reactions, the first called curiosity and the second rejection to the unknown. Experience teaches that when the computer and information science was born, the reaction has been the latter, which explains the delay we've been having expanding knowledge collaboration and administration.

The Human Factor (Collaboration) drives the creation, development, implementation and enhancement of science and nature in general. The faster technology assimilation translates into new concepts formulation, new criteria and a better sharing of ideas and information. Accepting that knowledge is information plus experience we observe that the extensive knowledge possessed by humanity is still in a rejection phase to the possibility of sharing it universally through technology.

In the majority of countries, the official government resists and rejects letting it's knowledge be known to the people. Same principle applies to private companies. The controlling nature and autocracy structure generates silos — Organizational as informational. Human condition copied from nature (Preservation or survival of the strongest) prescribes each individual must defend fiercely its survival conserving any advantage physical or intellectual that differentiates him from others; sharing them takes away the character that makes him (her) possess a privileged spot in society.

In the beginning of the information age alter 1950, the popular question between people was "How many people will the computer replace because it can make thousands of operations per second? In the mid 1980's that question evolved into "How can I use the computer?"

Once into the information age distributed in the Global Village through THE NET, the human factor comes again as the main player (Demonstrating a big shift) with fresh evidence that information availability through services like Google, Wikipedia free to all, forces individuals to rethink what is the key to innovation and creativity, the next phase once you make all information available and accessible to anyone. The big paradigm "Information is power" has changed.

In the corporate environment the fight will be even harder given people's competitiveness. Each member might not be willing to deposit his knowledge in the central "warehouse" until he (she) understand through better (Transformational) leadership that team learning and collaboration are the keys to a successful organization and that each individual interaction with others is the true value of a system.

Knowledge Management has then to rethink the way it approaches individuals to make them share/collaborate their knowledge into one pool and give the right tools to make better and simplet the use of it. The objective might be reached when people start thinking that technology is not magic, and begin using it for its own benefit, learning and growth.
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Why this site-book?

I've come to realize that the "Human Factor" invalidates Knowledge Management (an information technology area) through different sources of information and experience.

My first conference about KM and what is wrong with it became a reality in Poughkeepsie, NY in 2005. It was a summary of 10 years working, studying and learning about data and information technology, how we try to apply it and the tough experience doing it 'successfully'. In other words I have come to learn about Knowledge through continuous practice (Trial and error) through Information technology and here is the byproduct of it. I am delighted to share this e-book on lessons learned and invite you all to collaborate in order to expand these concepts and ideas. Nothing new, just rediscovering the basics... it's time to start looking in the different direction.

Objectives for this online book:

I intend to make this e-book, the first two way product, a collaboration effort to better understand what knowledge means and how we can take advantage of new technologies to make it more useful (Which I do not claim as only mine, many others have come to the same conclusion) and find the organization willing to fund the implementation of a knowledge product based on these concepts.

I invite you to a dialogue about these insights and experience. Email me

Printed version: If you want a printed version of this site, I will include it eventually in lulu.com.