KMaus09: Day two practitioner Leanne Fry

August 6, 2009

The first of the day’s practitioner case studies up now. Leanne Fry former knowledge manager at AMP, now a consultant. Needed to establish that knowledge is a by-product of activity not a repository. A real breath of life here, knowledge is about decision effectiveness moving way from embedded attitudes. Its all about connecting people, no need to get hung up on difference between information and knowledge. People information knowledge presence activity. Nice quote from someone called Snowdon, must look that up as I don’t remember it!

Interesting diagram now (reproduced quickly above), emphasising need for presence (although not defined). Talking about creating the behaviours first, focus on sharing, before you choose the tools. Most intranets are mostly formal mostly moribund. Argues that the reason for this is command and control, using web 2.0 was a wiff an anarchy in contrast. Talking about creating a culture of contribution, people want to share, influence, sell, progress things and that motivates people into the web. Aimed to achieve a similar motivational environment inside the organisation. Mentions Yammer (we use that in Cognitive Edge as well) and podcasts.

Now talking about issues, which seem to be all about having lots of “things” but not being able to find them. Guiding principles now:

  • Make knowledge part of the the way people work
  • Imbed km in business process capturing project IP, managing systems documentation and driving consistent use of methodologies
  • Target business processes that deliver real benefits to teaks samve time cut costs prevent errors
  • Drive interest and further uptake
  • All on the internet

Good point on millennials, they may not share more, but they do understand connectivity. Mind you I think us over 50s are getting smarter at that than our children …..

Now talking about getting some core tools in place, again good basis stuff here, its about putting capability in place not applications. Office based shells, enterprise search, RSS feeds, drag and drop, blogging, wikis. Tools should allow an application to be set up in minutes, while you make a cup of coffee to get things started.

Used the innovation curve, selling as if it was to an external customer. I would suggest a variation on that, use Moore’s Crossing the Chasm 200908060238.jpg instead, same concept but more practical (and here is the illustration), the key thing is the CHASM has to be crossed. New ideas are taken up, but they have to be sustained to work.

Introduced blogs, lived through the initial heated discussions and things sorted themselves out (that is a key learning from social computing in general by the way, don’t jump in, stand back). After that they went onto Wikis, used shadowing of experienced people which is certainly a good idea. Better to get a young person to capture knowledge from an older one.

Interesting, set up various communities, including communities of social conscience, I like that, getting an external focus as well as internal. Emphasis on fine granularity tools being imbedded into day to day work – in my terms, making the tools fit the hand rather than the hand fit the tool.

I would have liked to see more of an emphasis on identity than individual, it creates more flexibility in terms of the organisation, the only alternative to corporate command and control is not rampant individualism. However the principles in this description (I will assume reality matches) are sound. Worth listening to and good enough to add another blog to the RSS feed.

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