As a KM practitioner, I use various approaches, methods and tools to cultivate a positive knowledge sharing and learning environment. Bringing ambient effects like this into an organisation is far better than driving people nuts on what they have to do for KM.
At certain point in time, organisations planning to cultivate Communities of Practice (CoP) need to put up a business case to justify the relevance and investment to the management.
Here is a simple CoP business case template for reference. I'm looking forward to your comments to further improve this template.
Project Sponsorship (Enter the name and title of the project sponsor)
Business Objectives (Introduce the community and the expected changes that creating a community will make to the business and members) Pointers:
What the community will be used for (helping, stewarding knowledge, impart best practices, innovation, improve a specific practice, build relationships, motivation, communications, professional development…)
What changes will this community bring about
Community approach (State the high level activities that the community will take to achieve the desired changes) Pointers:
Pay attention to activities that will cater to practice improvements; and ALSO
Pay attention to regular activities that will sustain the interest of the community. A CoP is different from a task force or project team. Members will have different needs at various times and they’ll need to leverage on the community for guidance. A community that neglects this aspect and focus just on specific practice improvements risks poor adoption from members.
Business impact (State the business impact that will be brought about by the CoP) Pointers:
State the impact that will be brought about by both practice related changes/improvements and regular ongoing activities.
Focus on the outcomes, benefits and beneficiaries.
Critical Success Factors (Enablers) (List the critical success factors for this community to be successful) Pointers:
Identify issues that the organisation and the members are passionate about
Properly scoped community such that we can bring in new ideas and new members, but narrow enough that most members will be interested in the topics discussed
Regular interaction and relationship building activities among members
Strong community leadership
…
Probability for success (High, Medium, Low) (List a fair probability of success and why)
Other notes and issues (List any other supporting notes that can help make the case)
I'm likely to be embarking on a project soon to look at services we can provide to support learning for various forms of communities. There are 3 fundamental and important questions that have been bothering me with regards to the scope of services:
What type of services would appeal to the masses?
How many services should we offer?
How do we make it easy for the masses to decide on the suitable services?
In short, it's about how I should be developing choices and how to make it pleasant for consumers to make those choices.
I came across 2 talks on TED that provided me some leads to answer these questions. The first talk was from Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce and the second was from Barry Schwatz on the paradox of choice. In a nutshell, Malcom's points out the importance of having variability in choices and Barry's point is that too much variability can be a bad thing.
The perfect choice vs perfect choices Malcolm pointed out that the quest for the perfect sauce is wrong. Rather, we should be going for perfect sauces. Howard Moskowitz, a psychophysicist, made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce to cover every possible conceivable way of varying the sauce; from the level of sweetness, garlic, tartness, tomatoes-ness and visible solids. After getting a truck load of people to sample 10 types of sauces each, Howard found out that all Americans generally fall into 3 preference groups. They generally liked the plain, the spicy and the chunky sauces. The findings on the liking for chunky sauce was revolutionary because there was no chunky spaghetti sauce in the market at that time when 1/3 of the Americans would want it. For that, Prego made 600 million dollars over the next 10 years from chunky spaghetti sauce. This is why there are at least 7 types of vinegars, 14 different kinds of mustard, 71 kinds of olive oils and 36 types of Ragu sauces (LOL) today. Howard loves to say "The mind knows not what the tongue wants!"
Malcolm then went on to conclude with 4 points:
Experimentation (tasting) helps us to realise the desires that we cannot explain.
Horizontal segmentation. Different kinds of sauces suits different kinds of people. This fundamentally democratised the way we think about taste.
The shift to variability. What we thought would make people happy was to provide them with the culturally authentic and universal tomato sauce. But there has since been a shift towards the understanding of variability.
Embracing diversity. That in embracing diversity in human beings, we will find a surer way to providing happiness.
With these, here comes Barry with his views which I thought were counter arguments to Malcolm's to some extend.
Barry started by saying that the official dogma of the west has been to maximise welfare. To maximise welfare we have to maximise freedom. And by maximising choices we get greater freedom. However, he argues that more choices have not make us freer, but more paralysed, not happier but more dissatisfied. He gave several examples.
Problems with freedom of choice In the case of a patient who is about to receive treatments, the doctor would practice patient autonomy; that is, explaining the options available and the risks associated with those options, and then insist that the patient decide for himself. This essentially shifts the burden of decision making from someone who knows something to somebody who knows much less or nothing.
When it comes to working, we now have the freedom to decide when, where and how to do it. With a smart phone which gives us online access to our emails, we are reminded again and again on our ability to work. This thought alone affects the quality of our leisure and family time even though we have chosen not to work.
Problems with abundant choices Abundant choices produces paralysis rather than liberation. With many options to choose from, people find it difficult to choose at all. He gave an example of 50 over retirement financial plans offered by a company and the results is that many employees forgo evaluation and took up the default plan. This came as a result of employees being over zealous and cautious in making that critical decision that they end up spending the next day, and then the next and so on to try to identify that perfect choice.
Effects of making that choice Even if we manage to overcome paralysis and make a choice, we normally end up less satisfied than we would be if we have fewer options to choose from. Barry cited 4 consequences:
Regret. If the results of our choice does not match our initial expectations, it's easy to imagine that we should have made another choice. The perception of a better alternative induces regret in the decision we make, and the regret subtracts away from the satisfaction of our choice even though it was a good decision.
Opportunity cost. Attractive features present in other options are going to be seen as opportunity cost. They too subtract the satisfaction we'll get from the choice we made.
Escalation of expectations. All the available choices make our expectations go up, as compared to having only one item to choose from. In the past when there was only one type of jeans, we made do with it and it eventually got more comfortable over time. But with the present day variety of jeans, we tend to feel that there is a perfect pair of jeans out there.
Self-blame. In the past when the one type of jeans weren't that nice to wear, it was the world's fault. But with the present day variety of jeans, picking a less satisfactory pair of jeans becomes our fault, because we tend to think that we could have done better with the available options out there.
So what have we learn from these opposing proponents? Here's my take and I welcome further comments from you:
Limiting the number of choices. I've no idea of a perfect number. But we know that too many is no good and not having choices is a bad thing. I guess it's a combination of time taken to evaluate an option times the number of options available. Choosing jeans is much easier than choosing a retirement financial plan, and this relatively means we can have more types of jeans than financial plans. Limiting choices to a few helps reduce the satisfaction issues.
Horizontal segmentation research. It's important for providers to develop the varieties based on segmentation. Constant testing and fine tuning of those options would be tedious but essential.
Disconnect between providers and consumers. In the case of the 36 types of Ragu sauces, Howard effectively did a horizontal segmentation. But the person standing in front of the 36 Ragu sauces in a supermarket may not have any idea which segmentation they belong to, and to aggravate matters the supermarket staff may not have cluster the sauces according to the intended segmentation. We cannot assume similarity in mental models between providers and consumers. We need a simple way to present the categories of sauces to help people adapt to the way providers think. If the providers have done their homework, it should be easy for the consumers to relate.
Experimentation. This has been prevalent in the IT industry where trial versions of software is available for experimentation. Fitting jeans and tasting spaghetti sauce are experiments too. This perhaps is the best way to help people make informed choices. But there are also situations where experimentation is not possible, like in the case of surgical procedures.
Expert advice. This is crucial in helping people who know nuts, don't have much time to learn or when the stake of the choice is high. Experts can help single out the common or popular choices and even help clients recommend the ideal choice based on their needs/profile.
Bundling. Bundling helps to combine the benefits of various choices and makes selection easier since we have a reduction of choices. The responsibility of making a choice is shared between the provider and the consumer since the consumer can now say, "It's not purely my choice, it was bundled in that way!". Of course the availability of itemised choices can co-exist in another purchase category for people who can or prefer to pick alacarte items.
It's a human tendency that we take care of things that matters to us, and we pay attention to things that help keep them in good condition. For example, we pay attention to our mobile phone casing for our mobile phones, and we pay attention to our shoes if we do a lot of walking. But do organisations pay attention to the KM team for improving business performance? I hope the answer is Yes. However, I've seen circumstances that cause KM teams to underperform:
Not the core business - The KM team is often a support function to the core business and may not fall within the active radar screen of the senior management. i.e. don't really matter since the KM function is not the direct contributors of the organisations KPI.
Inadequate resourcing - Trying to rollout too many or huge initiatives with too little resources resulting in delay of KM initiatives. When a KM team member has to juggle himself between projects or submerge himself in one part of a huge project which he fronts alone, momentum is broken and stakeholders get disengaged. It then takes unaccounted effort to re-establish the work, build rapport and trust.
Poor planning for the post-implementation - In many cases, the focus were given to implementation and less emphasis for the operation. Just as one of my pass KM program manager puts it, "We have created a huge dinosaur, now we have to feed it" - too late I suppose.
Lack of measurements - Without proper measurements and feedback to the organisation on the effectiveness of KM makes the KM team unpopular over time. "What is this KM team doing? Are they required?". Engagement with stakeholders become a problem as they question the value of KM.
Too future-oriented - Why spend too much on building the infrastructure for the future when there are already immediate pains today. When we are too future-oriented, we end up doing things that don't relate to people's current issues and thus don't really make sense to people who need to prioritise their work. For example, Knowledge Base may be a good idea for issue resolution but updating skills profile in a staff directory is a much faster way to connect people to the right expertise.
KM team members - KM is a wide domain with varied practices. Team members who work in silo give up learning opportunities which will make them less effective and outdated.
And what can we learn from these observations in making KM teams successful?
Strong support - A KM team needs strong senior management support. A KM program is an investment and so is the team. Don't start a KM program unless the organisation is truly serious about it.
Buffer time, allow experimentation - As we probably know by now that KM best practices are hardly repeatable. KM team members need the additional bandwidth to explore and design their initiatives. They need time to exchange and validate ideas with those who've been there and makes sense of new territories with those in the same practice. I would argue that each type of KM initiative for every organisation has its unique challenges. This means that it's a good idea to start small, test the ideas, refine them and even be prepared to scrap them.
Resourcing KM operations - Governance for the operations of each initiative is essential and the timing to start planning for it is just as crucial. Think about users adoption and engagement, the makeup and recruitment of members needed to sustain and rejuvenate the initiative, support from the KM team, budgeting and work processes during implementation. Without proper governance, the present KM team will be consumed by the post-implementation duties.
Communicate successes - Measure before and measure after. Establish baseline for the state before the implementation and measure the effectiveness after the implementation. Shout about successes - don't be shy about it. This helps to build credibility for the team.
One of us - Take care of the present pains. It's crucial that people in the organisation regard the KM team members as one of them. Doing big picture things which takes too long to realise demotivates participation. Not to forget that some initiatives need a period of constant participation before the benefits will be realised. To keep KM team members relevant to their colleagues, make sure that KM team members are up-to-date with what people are doing. Do at least one project that addresses current pains at any point in time.
The right KM team - The right attributes and attitudes of a team member is more important than the KM skills, experience, relationships and artifacts that he possess. The KM domain is constantly evolving. A competent team member will be one that constantly keeps up, leverage new opportunities, unlearn old practices and master new ones, validate ideas, form new relationships and demonstrates curiosity as an everyday affair. As a change agent within the company, he must be courageous, demonstrate perseverance, engage with staff members and facilitate discussions. In short, a KM team member must possess the drive for self-improvement and solve problems. Skills can be picked up, experience can be accumulated, relationships can be established and artifacts can be collected; but attributes and attitudes are ingrained. There are many ways to achieve KM goals and objectives just as there are many ways to get to a location, thus it's worthwhile to bend the initiative to capitalise on the team member's strength once we've found them.
KM is a demanding job. It's not a place for the weak-hearted or someone who's looking for a 9 to 6 job. The team needs to work cohesively to cultivate a spirit of our KPI and not my KPI. Thinking only about the success of the KM program without thinking about the success of the team is the beginning of failure in itself.
A keynote address by David Gurteen on People 2.0 last Wednesday at KM Asia emphasises the behaviours that we ought to have in the 2.0 world - behaviours that would encourage participation. I'd like to think about breaking People 2.0 into Me 2.0 and We 2.0. Me 2.0 is the use of social tools to fulfill personal needs while We 2.0 is the use of social tools for collective gains. I think this breakdown is necessary as motivation drives behaviour and I don't see how the reverse reflects natural tendencies.
The themes around Me 2.0 revolves around:
Building influence, improving reputation, earning trust (Book: Trust Agents)
Giving freely and getting unexpectedly - Reciprocity?
... while the theme around We 2.0 is driven mainly from the point of participation, making the outcome better as a result of collaboration.
The question:
Given the prevalence of Me and We 2.0, how can we be successful in Enterprise 2.0 adoption?
We have been adapting what's work for the outside for the inside:
The internet, than the intranet
Web 2.0, than the Enterprise 2.0
I'm sure we can come out with a few more examples but I think we see the point, the inside is always one step slower than the outside and what works for the outside sometimes just fail badly when applied for the inside. The most common reason for having closed doors Enterprise 2.0 is to prevent information leakage and protect intellectual property. If we try to apply 1.0 practices for 2.0, it will fail.
So... why can't we keep what works outside outside!
For the reasons of Me 2.0 and We 2.0, wouldn't we be better off with a wider audience and like-minded practitioners beyond the firewall?
The idea I have is to treat each employee as a capable knowledge worker and respect that knowledge comes from them. I'm stating the obvious here but what's more important are concrete actions we can take to support this premise. Here's a suggestion on what we can do:
Introduce to employees what the web 2.0 world offers for learning, sharing and self-improvement
Show them how to do it effectively
Encourage each of them to create a public blog, twitter and/or delicious account
Use Creative Commons to protect their good work, if needed
Tell the employees that if they wish to share their postings with the organisation, tag them with XYZOrganisation so that the RSS parsers can extract them for inside consumption. Using Yahoo Pipes is a good way for aggregating postings from various sources into a single RSS feed.
Find a way to identify and consolidate these accounts and postings. A probable way would be to update their account information on their staff profile page
Organise these aggregations and present them logically to employees
In doing these, we are shifting from a paradigm of compliance to a paradigm of freedom and trust. There are many benefits we can draw from this approach:
We are teaching employees how to fish, so that they continue to learn from the outside to benefit the inside
There is a higher motivation for them to generate quality ideas, gather insights and express their opinions for something that belongs to them, and not the organisation
When they move on to another organisation, they may still choose to share the relevant knowledge with the organisation since there are some like-minded people there. Kind of an alumni programme
They collaborate with external practitioners to bring in additional perspectives in the context of the organisation's work
They stay in touch with cutting edge practices and discussions that gets exposed to the organisation
So I'll remind myself of this:
Where would I post if I have my personal blog and a blog within the firewall?
I'm currently working on the design of an online Knowledge Centre based on Sharepoint 2007 for a business unit here. I'm going to share mostly about the governance plan for the Knowledge Centre. Supplementary to this post is a sitemap which shows the purpose and functions of the entities within the Knowledge Centre. I'll share some screenshots of the completed implementation at a later time.
The governance plan for this Knowledge Centre comprises of:
[Business reason(s) for Knowledge Centre] This should come clear for any tools implementation serve to enable Knowledge Management. It's at the top of the pyramid to guide every action for this Knowledge Centre. The business unit uses the this business reason:
To achieve excellence in project delivery through sharing, learning and collaborating.
This is a simple reason and some could be more elaborate. I like simplicity, it helps people remember and not to forget, this is for just one business unit with many more to come.
[Adoption and engagement strategies] Adoption here is about helping people get use to the new Knowledge Centre, what it is, what can I do there, how do I do it? Whereas engagement focuses on helping individuals (and the team) discover the shared purpose and motivation for using the Knowledge Centre. They are mentioned together here because the strategies for dealing with them are overlapping and different people respond differently to these strategies.
Training All tools implementation come with training and most of the time training conducted by the IT department or external certified IT trainers are... IT centric. This is why business owners must take ownership of training and address these areas:
Desired behaviours - This is best done by the sponsor of the Knowledge Centre to authorise or mandate a set of rules. For instance, advocating preference for knowledge stewarding instead of knowledge hoarding, moving all technical discussions from email to the online discussion forum, blogging during office hours is acceptable, it's OK to overwrite each other's article in a wiki, respect - everyone knows something that the other doesn't, tag contributions so others can find it and so on...
Orientation - A quick tour to the various sections of the knowledge centre explaining what they are, their purpose and how staff members can use them.
Features training - The standard no frills training a geek can give. The minimum a staff member needs to know to survive.
Effective learning and sharing - Bringing in tips and tricks on how effective learning and sharing can take place. For example, using Alerts or RSS to keep abreast on areas of interest, place a stub in a wiki and come back later, integrating events calendar with MS Outlook, allocating time for blogs and wiki, identifying new like-minded colleagues, what not to do in Sharepoint and etc...
Wiki Raid workshop We all know by now that the "Build and they will come" model doesn't work. A good way to liven the Knowledge Centre's ambiance is to have a Wiki Raid. It's a facilitated session where participants gather in one room and start writing an article about something that they are knowledgeable about. Before they start writing, the title of each article is advertised by the author, written on a cardboard and pasted at a gallery area within the room. Each title is numbered and participants can then decide which article they can link to, and which article they can co-author. There are a few benefits of doing this:
In the instance where content migration is required, the author migrates his/her own content to the Knowledge Centre.
The credentials of the author is preserved during the migration, giving the recognition back to the originator, instead of some Admin account in some cases of automated migration or passing the migration task to another person.
Staff members familiarise themselves with the technicalities of Sharepoint and the Knowledge Centre.
If wiki is something new to them, they'll start to experience the dynamics of this social computing tool and the amount of effort that is required.
Of course, we get some new articles to refresh the Knowledge Centre. For new Knowledge Centre, we won't need to start from ground zero or depend on the central team for contributions.
Publicise how they could effectively Learn and Share
Access to the online usage guides and contact information of the central team
Personal Marketing The intrinsic value of accessing resources within the Knowledge Centre is to discover the link between knowledge resources to the contributing staff members. Since every contribution automatically captures the author's credentials with a link to his/her profile page, it's important that every staff member update their profiles. Matching a member's profile to his contribution helps tell a story on why this person is writing this article, whether what he says can be trusted, and if I should continue to follow him for this knowledge domain.
Apart from sharing work knowledge, it's also good to know about the social aspects of a person such as interest areas. This can be used to serve as an icebreaker for people who are talking for the first time. I was following a Sharepoint Consultant on his blog and he shared that his 9th kid was just born. Me, as a Dad of one, can hardly find time for this blog post. So I was really curious how he survived with 9! In our first conversation, I started asking him about this and he said, "Just close the door". That caught me by surprise and I replied, "Then you'll have to tell me more about the door." We both then went "ha ha ha" for awhile.
Lastly, filling up your profile information helps people to know you without having you know them. In this age, it's not about who you know anymore, but who knows you. Of course, who knows you comes largely from contributions by the individual, which is another motivation point for contribution.
Chanelling of knowledge This is the movement of knowledge from their un-managed sources to the Knowledge Centre. I have 3 points on this:
Instill knowledge processes - From an individual's perspective, he "don't really need" the Knowledge Centre to do his job! Tons of self-talk prevents people from going to the Knowledge Centre, "Can I find something useful if I spend my time?", "Isn't the Internet better?", "What is the quality of the articles there?", "Is it appropriate for me to blog?", "I'm busy, no time to go there?" and so on. The truth is that the Knowledge Centre is isolated from their work unless we channel some necessary learning and sharing processes into the Knowledge Centre. A good example is the use email for discussing issues, where it should be enforced to take place within the Knowledge Centre when it's materialised.The other thing we could do is to identify some project phases or repeatable practices for planting in sharing and learning activities. For instance, blogging about project learning at the end of each project milestone or scanning the Knowledge Centre for knowledge needs before embarking on a project phase. Time can be formally allocated for such activities if required.
Removing cannibalisation - This is based on the idea that neither the new nor the old medium used to conduct activities will do well when the new one is introduced, and we should put a firm stop to the old ways of doing things. The activities that will be moved to the Knowledge Centre must be clearly articulated so that staff members within the department can synchronise their actions, gain confidence that this new way of working is going to take off and it's no longer "right" to do things the old way.
Support open knowledge sharing - We can make people feel good about contributing to the Knowledge Centre, and maybe even cause them to want to do it. The first is a simple pat-on-the-back by the Sponsor to acknowledge individuals who have shown good knowledge stewarding behaviours. This goes a long way as people talk about it during coffee breaks and as the surrounding people witness the commendation. The second idea is to acknowledge that knowledge shared belongs to the individual and not the organisation, since good quality contributions can only arise from volunteerism. Thus, make it explicit for people to know that it's perfectly fine to copy whatever they have contributed when they move on from the business unit, even for articles that were co-authored. The third idea is to license outstanding articles under Creative Commons. The basic idea of Creative Commons is to share something useful to the world so that the recognition comes from anyone that re-produces or enhance the work. Wiki as a co-authoring tool makes the generation of good articles possible.
Rewards and recognition This goes beyond monetary rewards, attractive gifts and the bestowing of KPIs. As I've mentioned, the quality of knowledge is best when volunteered. These traditional rewards and recognition mechanisms are good for bringing awareness and understanding of the Knowledge Centre, or at best rally sub-standard contributions to fulfil the KPIs. I tend to think that we need to create a positive supply (sharing) and demand (learning) ecosystem to sustain the vibrancy of the Knowledge Centre. Work on people's motivation to contribute and help them develop individually. Here are a few ideas:
Spotlight recognition - Showcase staff members who have exhibited exemplary knowledge sharing and learning behaviours prominently on the homepage. Tell people what they have done to earn it so that people can learn about acceptable behaviours and model after them.
Peer recognition - When someone publish a post on the blog which is useful, tell them how that article has helped them or how they intend to use the ideas in the post.
Celebrating expertise - Identifying articles published for Creative Commons licensing is a good way to recognise expertise. I remember that there was a cool walkway in one of my previous companies where title of patents and their contributors were engraved and showcased with artistically designed stainless steel plaques.
Success stories - Tell the rest how the use of knowledge from the Knowledge Centre had helped them become more effective in their work.
Announcements It's very important for the central team use the Sharepoint Announcement as a focal point for communicating about the Knowledge Centre. This is in line with Clear Usage Guidance mentioned above. Here's a few pointers:
Lookout for new contributions and tell staff members what is it about, how to find it and how to react to it.
Share success stories of people who have used and benefited from the Knowledge Centre.
Advise all staff members to subscribe to Announcement email alerts so that they do not "lose out".
Constant interactions via the Announcements make people feel the presence of the knowledge centre (it's alive!) and help develop trust in the Knowledge Centre as a good resource.
The good old one-to-one support There'll be staff members who would prefer the personal touch of someone being around when they need help. This is why the central Knowledge Centre team must be reachable electronically and physically. Meeting face-to-face has many benefits, although it's extremely time consuming:
Get deeper insights on staff members' issues and concerns
Provide better quality (and sometimes more efficient) support for staff members
Establish rapport between staff members and central team. The effects of building this relationship will inevitably propagate to the use of the Knowledge Centre.
[Information Architecture (IA)] Follow Louis Rosenfeld for expert guidance on IA. My sharing here is not complete (or I'll seem to be writing a book), it's just to give an appreciation on the areas we should look after. IA put simply is the design of the information space that will contribute to ease and intuitiveness of finding information. Some emphasis is given here because the central team needs to take care of information findability as the amount of contribution grows and new purposes for the Knowledge Centre get introduced. Therefore, it's important to engage an experience information architect to design the IA and have him advise the central team how to maintain it. There are basically 3 aspects of IA to look out for in Sharepoint:
Site Structure
Page Layout
Metadata
Site Structure The best way to think about Site Structure here is to visualise a tree structure. It's how we group information, give those groupings intuitive labels, and use those labels as navigation items to guide staff members to find the information from the homepage or related pages within the Knowledge Centre. Site Structure in other words helps us browse for information (although the field of interaction design contributes to better information browsing experiences too).
Growing the Site Structure potentially makes existing information less findable. I was having a conversation today on the need to introduce a Calendar for the Knowledge Centre since we already have an Announcement feature which can be used to broadcast events. I was for awhile contemplating that if people are interested after looking at the announcement, they can add the event into their personal calendar or sort it by the event metadata value within the calendar itself. After the discussion we decided to include the new calendar because:
There could be many events announced each month
It's not mission-critical (calendar entries in Sharepoint don't show in your personal MS Outlook free/busy schedule)
People need to see it along their work schedules in their Outlook calendar
And because of the volume of events it can translate to an issue keeping track of events in staff members' personal Outlook calendar.
See, we seriously consider this change because it's a new navigation item, people need to learn what is it used for, what they can do with it and also increases the cognitive workload of people trying to process information on the page (however minute they are, they do add up eventually).
Page Layout Page layout is the positioning of information elements on the page to achieve consistency across pages and priority in information access. There are a few things to take care of with regards to page layout and few other things at the page level:
Page usability - What is this page about, what can i do here, why should I do it here, where do I start. I like the book from Steve Krug on Don't make me think!for advice in this area.
Page clutter - Use sufficient white space and hot spots. Keep the level of elements on a page to the minimum (this could be a daunting task!).
Visual prioritisation - The basic on this is to flow left to right and top to bottom in a zig-zag fashion.
Navigation - Location of primary and secondary navigation.
Metadata Metadata are the attributes we give to information to describe it. Author, Publisher, Date Published, Title are all metadata of a book. While the Site Structure helps us find information based on location, metadata helps us find information based on meaning. There are 3 main uses of metadata in Sharepoint that I can think of:
Search relevancy - The Sharepoint search engine depends a lot on metadata for the relevancy ranking of search results
Creation of collections across lists and libraries, and across sites within the same site collection. For example, we may want to use the Sharepoint Content Query Web part to aggregate all the wiki articles, blog posts and discussions around (1)Java programming (2)best practices. Java programming can be a Competency metadata and Best Practices a Knowledge Type metadata.
Improve information seeking, do away with folders - We can sort, filter and group information in Sharepoint using metadata which can generate various information collections. Folders on the other hand confines information to one location. I've shared a bit on this in Metadata design considerations.
This is why it is important to get the metadata definitions and their values right. Someone with a library science background can greatly help in this area.
[Governance Structure] This is the roles and responsibilities we have defined to make the Knowledge Centre work. The roles comprise of the:
KM Sponsor
Knowledge Activist
Sharepoint central administrator
Sharepoint geeks
KM Sponsor The KM sponsor is the overall owner of the Knowledge Centre. He is accountable for the success of the Knowledge Centre. His responsibilities include:
Ensuring alignment of Knowledge Centre with technical excellence objectives
Resourcing for the maintenance and vibrancy of the Knowledge Centre
Communicating the value and success of the Knowledge Centre
Communicating the appropriate behaviours for using the Knowledge Centre
Reward and recognise staff members who are good exemplars of KM
KM Activists The KM Activists are responsible for the success of the knowledge centre. They are responsible for:
Ensuring that staff members adopt the use of the Knowledge Centre
Facilitate the transfer of knowledge from blog and discussion forum into Wiki for sharing and further developments of the article
Serve as a knowledge broker - Announce what's there in the Knowledge Centre. Connect people to information, and information to people
Assess health of Knowledge Centre and lead improvement initiatives. This entails improving information findability and stewarding the use of Sharepoint.
Moderation - moderation of blog comments to protect the publisher, resolve conflicts in wiki wars and keep track of discussion forum entries that may derail the enquirer.
Policing violations - Making sure that people are not using email and other undesirable means to perform activities that should be done on the Knowledge Centre
Sharepoint Administration Team This is the central Sharepoint Administration Team that makes sure that the application, infrastructure and data is well taken care of. They are responsible for:
Administering the Sharepoint application and infrastructure making sure that they are operational and performing well. This includes central Sharepoint administration, applying patches, increasing disk space, replacing hardware and so on
Performing Sharepoint admin tasks that the Business Owner can't do
Resolving or helping to resolve technical issues reported by the business unit
Backing up and restoring of data at the Knowledge Centre level
Sharepoint geeks These are people whom we turn to when we have an idea and want to find out the best way of achieving it in Sharepoint. They are typically active in the Codeplex community. They are responsible for:
Advising on Sharepoint technical approaches, strengths, limitations and design based on business intentions
Assist on technical development - we need them for the technical talk with developers
Highlight opportunities to KM Activists based on technology advancements (this is why Sharepoint geeks need to know about your Knowledge Centre)
[Summary] I'm pretty sure that this is not a complete governance plan. But I'm also pretty sure that I've given enough for us to think about. As a practitioner and with the hype of Sharepoint, I felt a sense of obligation to know enough about Sharepoint so that I can connect what business needs to how Sharepoint can serve those needs. This means a keen eye in knowing what Sharepoint is good for and exploit its full potential, it also means that there is a need to know the limitations of Sharepoint from the features and usability perspective. This post is about the people side of making Sharepoint successful.
Pre-creating categories for information deposit and retrieval is a bad idea and using metadata is a much better one.
Pre-creating categories is no different frommindreading and fortune-telling. It's an attempt to make sense of the information we would create in future and preempting where information should be stored and retrieved. Pre-creating categories stifles what comes under it and potentially forces a mismatch with what goes within it. So if we need to create categories to put some order to the mess, it should eventuate from the commonality of documents described by the contributor or anyone who uses it. Moreover, we can do much more to manipulate information if we know how to describe them appropriately.
We are talking about metadata design here. In essence, a good set of metadata includes a unique identifier and other metadata that satisfies information capture and retrieval. Unique identifiers are for instance URLs which can be referred by links. Capturing and finding information can be achieved with tags. Clay Shirky put up a convincing argument on how links and tags are better ideas than pre-created categories, but also suggests some hard to meet conditions when ontology seemed possible.
So why aren't people seeing the benefits of metadata? Here are some possible reasons:
People haven't got use to the idea of using metadata for information capture and retrieval;
People are entrenched with the "benefits" brought about by categories in relation to controlled vocabularies;
Lack of exposure to what metadata can do;
Prevalence of the folder concept packed with operating systems from about 2 decades ago - maintaining status quo.
With the drawbacks of pre-defined categories and the need to shift mindsets for adoption of metadata, we should give some thoughts to metadata design and their applications to digital information.
Some considerations and uses of metadata Metadata should help us manipulate information. This differentiates what qualifies as metadata and what doesn't.
Global or local Use global metadata if we want to achieve information governance for an organisation. Such applications include support for the corporate taxonomy and information disposal. Corporate taxonomy - didn't we say that pre-creating categories is not a good idea? To a large extend - Yes. And I'll talk more about it below.
Local metadata should support finding information in context. For example, if we are deciding for a place to eat at a lifestyle website, then metadata like cuisine, location, type of eatery, price range and ratings are important. However, information such as reviews, signature dishes and food pictures are less used to manipulate information and they should be regarded as content and not used as metadata. Also be aware of metadata that could potentially be global, especially when you see them appearing consistently in local metadata. Corporate taxonomy In the same article, Clay Shirky has mentioned that Ontology is possible given these hard-to-meet characteristics:
Small corpus;
Formal categories;
Stable entities;
Restricted entities;
Clear edges
And the people participating should be:
Expert catalogers
Authoritative source of judgement
Coordinated users
Expert users
Corporate taxonomy provides common vocabulary and structure within an organisation. So browsing into a category of the taxonomy tree helps us identify what other information our colleagues have contributed. This is a good thing although it is hard work to develop a corporate taxonomy, but it might be worthwhile especially for identifying critical knowledge within an organisation even though it suffers in findability as the amount of information scales.
And once we've made a corporate taxonomy, it's time to look at a tool that can make metadata and taxonomy work together. The US Air Force made use of Sharepoint to integrate with Concept Searching to achieve automatic metadata tagging, taxonomy management and auto-classification. This is a great approach especially if we are concern over the possibility of anyone tagging. However, as with any auto tagging/classification systems, the danger of this best guess approach is accuracy in semantics. Fortunately, the ability to narrow the search results with tags means that we should be able to filter away irrelevant results pretty easily.
Information disposal All information are subject to disposal. The ways to handle disposition are normally tied to the need and duration to keep the information. These parameters varies from organisation to organisation but they may be consistent for government agencies within a country / state. There are the rest who may like to follow established standards such as ISO 15489. Information disposal metadata may for example include:
Draft documents - should be deleted when the final document is produced.
Final documents - should be kept for 3 years and then routed to the information custodian for disposition considerations.
Records - should be kept for 7 years and then archived.
Metadata creation Metadata input should be made as easy as possible. This is especially true for people who have migrated from the local or shared folders environment, where metadata input was not required. We should always scrutinise the number of metadata fields. One approach is to expose the number of metadata fields only when they are required. Expose Basic metadata for draft documents, followed by Sharing metadata for finalised documents, and then exposing more Record Management metadata if that is a controlled document.
Inheriting metadata is another way of minimising the amount of input required. This can tie to taxonomy categories, folders (or other types of containers) and pre-defined metadata.
There are also lots more useful metadata that can be captured automatically by the system. These are stuff like creation date, modification date, author and etc.
Description and tags metadata When the title fails to show what a piece of information is about, description and tags gives the next level of details. When these three are presented in a listing together with metadata such as the name of contributor and date created/modified, it helps a reader decide the relevant entry to read without the need to open up the document/page.
These two metadata also help overcome the dilemma of having candidate metadata in or out. Forget about "Just in case" metadata. Instead, tag the information or put what you intent in the description. It's better to do this rather than to have people populate them with no apparent value.
Tags are extremely powerful because they tell people exactly what the information is about and probably suggest how to use it. This overcomes the insufficient or skewed semantics offered by categories. Many applications now allow us to subscribe to tags, streaming in relevant information as they are created. Browsing or searching tags bring us to a collection of relevant information, and we can further zoom in by selecting the next tag of interest. Repeating this process gives us more precision as we discover what's left. Summary I've started by talking about what's not too good about our natural tendencies to pre-create categories. The discussion then went on to show the importance of using tags and links to overcome the issue of pre-created categories with reference to Clay Shirky's article. However, tags and links (unique identifiers) are just a part of a metadata scheme and they cannot be design in isolation. This leads us to a wider discussion on metadata and their application.
Hope this has been useful and please let me know your comments.
I've recently crafted a CoP leader's appointment letter with few of my colleagues help. I thought some of you may find this useful. I took the responsibilities description from Cultivating Communities of Practice.
There are many ways to identify a CoP leader and appointment may not be the best approach. At least, that's what I thought in the beginning. But given that the leader needs to be someone who is already in the practice, reputable and resourceful, this inevitably means that he has a current job in the organisation. Since he is so good at doing what he's doing, taking away time from his current job is serious business to the organisation, his boss and himself. Which is why if the idea of CoP is new to an organisation, it might be worthwhile to appoint someone simply because it's fast and you get a leader to work with at the end of the process. Voting or volunteering approaches to identify CoP leaders can come after the organisation experience what's a CoP like.
But the downside of the appointment approach is an irony - that the leader is asked to function in a community of volunteers. This is where the central KM team needs to come in and work out some magic.
Asking the right person to award this letter is another important consideration. I feel this is best sent out by an authoritative figure such as the COO or CEO. This will help the leaders gain instant recognition and support for the appointment.
here it goes... replaced text that are italicise.
Dear [CoP leader's name],
I'm excited to have you on board as the [domain] Community of Practice (CoP)Leader because of your recognised qualities as a [organisation appointment]. Congratulations!
The cultivation of the [domain] CoP is part of the strategic KM program in [Organisation name]. [The group of people] are the most critical workforce in [Organisation name]. Our highly competent group of [people] enable [Organisation name] to differentiate from our competitors and it is paramount that we continue to develop this strong [Domain] competency. I hope that as the [Domain]CoP Leader, you will be able to lead and facilitate the unification of our [people] despite their dispersed presence across the organisation. We need to bring them back together as a community, provide a platform for constant interaction, learn with each other and get better in what we care about. I'm confident that the [Domain] CoP under your leadership will achieve just that.
You'll form a core team of three to four members to grow this community with you. As a guide, some of your duties include:
Identifying important issues in the Sales domain.
Plan and facilitate community events.
Informally link community members across [organisation name].
Foster the development of community members.
Help build the practice - including the knowledge base, lessons learned, best practices, tools and methods, and learning events.
Assess the health of the community and evaluate its contribution to members and the organisation.
A CoP is unlike a project team, task force or department. The health of a CoP depends mainly on the voluntary engagement of members and leadership. You are going to need support to flourish this CoP. The [KM team], the [some other supporting departments] and the management teams are all supporting you in this [1] year journey. [Twenty] percent of your time has been formalised for this strategic cause.
I wish you success in advancing [organisation name] with the [domain] CoP and do approach me if you need any direct sponsorship.
Don't get me wrong, proper information security governance is absolutely necessary in any organisation. I've put "infromation security" in quotes here to signify a mindset issue that hinders the progression of KM programs. This has been a recurring issue as I witness it happening throughout my KM career.
I was recently working with a colleague from another department on the requirements of their collaboration workspace when he raised to me concerns about information security. He deals with confidential projects where the customers hand delivers hardcopy project documents to them, in an attempt to dissuade their reproduction. When a softcopy document is co-created by team members for such projects, only the team lead gets to keep the final copy and the rest of the work-in-progress documents that resides with other team members will be deleted. On top of that, the customer will perform security audits to ensure that project documents and data are confined only to the project team who have signed a stringent NDA.
Now, this colleague of mine came to a meeting fully aware that collaboration requires an open, trusting and sharing mindset and he was there just to pinned down the idea with "information security" justifications. It was a scheduled 2 hours meeting and he told me that he had to leave in 1 hour for another meeting - D'oh! Seemed to me he's trying to take an hour to convince me that it doesn't work for their department.
Fortunately, I was able to say a bunch of things that made him looked forward to a 2 hours make-up meeting. Here are my counter-security measures:
The information custodian, not owner - Unless the customer states and our organisation agrees that all information produced during the project belongs to the customer, the information that is produced during our course of work belongs to our organisation and not any staff member. As project teams, the members serve as the information custodian and not the owner. Information custodians have to act in the interest of the company, and a part of that is knowing how to balance between information sharing and information security, and not just information security.
Knowledge Manager, do your part - And since the department has sent my colleague as a rep for his department's collaboration workspace initiative, he represents a positive figure for KM among his peers. As knowledge manager for his department, he needs to convey the importance of knowledge sharing, learning and collaborating, and take a systematic approach to deal with information security, not an emotional one.
Share unless confidential - As we contest on the importance of information security within an organisation, it normally works out that only a small percentage of documents are in the confidential category. The colleague of mine mentioned that 20% of their projects are confidential. Even for confidential projects, there are things that we can share such as the team members working on it, the duration, an abstract write-up of the project and the project status.Thus, we are easily talking about more than 80% of sharable information. If this is the case, we should make it easy for sharing to take place and let as many staff enjoy the benefits of information access, rather than the other way round. The way to make sharing easy is to open up access for all documents unless they are confidential.
Go with the mass - Unless he was telling me that 50% of such projects are confidential, that would make me think twice about the validity of the collaboration workspace. It's more than 80%, so let's go for it and deal with the 20% at a later time! 80% will reap enough benefits for the department.
Acknowledge the information security concerns - So much about the importance to share. The aspect of information security does need to be taken care of. We have to sit down with the Corporate IS department to discuss how we can handle those confidential information. If all these talks fail, we still have the 80% to work on. Some points to consider:
Physical location of the database and application server. There are times when these need to be secured away from the Corporate IS access. This means that the department may have to be self-sufficient for the Infrastructure, server, database and application administration.
There are time when the Corporate IS can access and help manage the setup, but the question here is whether they have the resource to do it, and if doing so is against their policy.
Can the information be kept in a central storage? Sometimes the existance of a confidential document in a central storage fails the audit immediately.
Does the nodes that are accessing the application and database need to be in a private network?
What is the exposure level of the information? Can it be shared between teams within the same department, across departments under the same business unit or across the organisation?
Will the inclusion of third part tools or customisation cause a security briege based on the information it is able to extract?
