KM in the Jerkplace: Knowledge Factory Settings, Part 2

Installment Summary: A bumpy transition slides into a personal predicament when an annual performance review turns rocky. That review cycle is a politically charged rejection of merit-based promotion. Here we encounter our first skirmish with a petulant subject matter expert more intent on surrounding their homegrown system with a privileged fortress than an actual team.  

(c) www.idiotsguides.com

Performance Anxiety

There are few corporate rituals less popular and more practiced than performance reviews. If our people are our greatest resource, no platitude rings hollower than the feigned understanding of their resourcefulness.  This is the actual nuts and bolts of actual innovation – the ability to move beyond the gravitational pull of power structures, the boundaries of siloed systems, and the inertia of entrenched bureaucracies:

• To penetrate new markets!
• To remedy chronic shortcomings!
• To forge game-changing innovations!
• To get the real work done!

Each of those laudable goals must be met by steely resolve and channeled through the social loop. Consulting staff enlist KM support for realizing these aims. But a peripheral assist does not a critical path make. At review time those managers might well be trading up for a promotion by focusing on the contributions of their direct peers and not the collaborations of an extended team. And the indirect nature of knowledge work begs the existential question of knowledge-based ethics, practices, and careers:

How does one gain a merit-worthy move up the managerial ranks – particularly on teams that are often scattered, and double-staffed to other operational groups?

That uphill incline tilts even steeper for the folks retained to blast through the indifference. Those calcified process flows stuck in-between: (1) the front-office that brings in the revenues, and (2) the back office that counts them.

Knowledge managers by definition are expected to break with routines while playing within the rules. They are expected to do this typically by flying solo into the strong headwinds of ingrained habits. That whistle-blowing can sound shrill and incriminating to the keepers of longstanding allegiances. These are not your father’s old boy networks. These are keepers of traditions to policies and protocols that appear just fine from the inside and positively undefendable from a longer-term and customer-facing perspective.

Muckraking over the Coals

At CYA that tension was further inflamed by the binding rationale for acquiring System Wisdom: Let’s absorb the profits but then swallow this change management formula too? That didn’t go down so well. Organizationally this meant looking in the mirror – could we integrate the acquisition mindset into the larger culture? From a KM perspective this meant confronting CYA’s ambivalence to new thinking and alternative approaches.

The role of muckraker for knowledge managers assumes not only that we're suited to be mavericks but that our success operates around an operational imperative. Without a targeted outcome successes are small and isolated by the vacuum that forms in the absence of tangible benefits to the business. 

Failing that, the knowledge brain trust reports to no one and answers to all. We tend to float below front-line customer operations and revenue streams. While no less beholden to them, knowledge folks typically report to teams of one with visibility into every which silo we're required to smash.

That muckraking happened over the coals of the well-tended CYA pecking order. This dominance hierarchy was not just a Darwinian take on the corporate food chain. It was also the obstacle course sanctioned as the performance review cycle: hunting season for jerks.

Respecting the Box

As we’ve seen through the lens of the performance review, thinking outside the box is one thing. Acting on that thinking from within said box is a decision that lives outside our authority as change agents. As CYA decorum suggests that box is reinforced with some pretty thick walls. What’s communicated within them does not deviate from those boundaries. A knowledge manager who reaches outside their reporting level or distribution list has not only waded outside the collective comfort zone but violated its confidences. By reporting upward without regard to station the KM grunt has circumvented the command chain.

Like most CYA lessons this was an act of omission. I wasn’t aggressively stepping over a superior but inadvertently stepping on a landmine.  The inspiration to stray outside the talk box came from the need to bond with the business and draw from the same gumption and resourcefulness of the System Wisdom team model. The resulting reprimand was the first hint that the old bootstrap routines were boxed out of the CYA power structure. To think otherwise was naïve. To act in anyone’s interest beyond one’s immediate reports was not simply a misinformed overreach but a glaring error in judgment.  

Demerit-oracy in Action

Like any reasonable knowledge manager I sought to connect these isolated violations of the CYA protocol. As performance review season kicked in it became apparent to me that under the veneer of merit flew the flag of Demerit-ocracy. Drum roll please … what exactly is Demerit-ocracy (accent on the “DE”)?

Definition: Gotcha culture for punitive politicking – one where all point systems and scoring formulas give way to who’s minding the performance store. Here’s a sample range of outcomes:

·         I will overlook your shitty performance because I admire your winning personality.

·         Every marginal misstep will stick to you like the static cling of a thousand shag rugs – take that you loser!

Organizationally performance reviews serve two pragmatic functions:

1. It’s a collection basket for days of plenty: “Tell us what line you’re waiting in and we’ll tell you where the lines are shorter!”
2. It's a dragnet operation for times of scarcity. Demerits are tradeable currency for trimming the ranks from the bloat of past hiring binges.

On a personal level the practice plays out as corporate frontier justice – beyond shouting distance from the civil liberties that defend us against shakedowns, entrapment, and self-incrimination. All roads run up and down one’s organizational progression. Yet there are no arbitrators to broker an honest difference between the reviewer-supervisor and reviewed-underling. In a padlocked top-down review system there is no incentive to favor or even consider the greater good or recognize the win-win outcomes that stem from the positive reciprocity encouraged by KM.

The spoils go to the jerks: the rewarding of power for power’s sake.

At CYA this meant placing your standing in the hands of your time-keeper – the manager/owner for the tasks you clock into your time sheet. To CYA’s HR folks it meant an observable check-in on the career growth calendar between the knowledge doer-bees and their scorekeepers. To me it will forever mean a license to silence constructive feedback or ambush useful advice.

Taxonomy and Representation

Brittany Whalesong had two unique gifts:

• Creating a taxonomy that shadowed CYA’s obsession with counting and fact-keeping.
• Treating her creation as the exclusive province of Brittany Whalesong.

In fact the care and feeding of the taxonomy was booby-trapped by her need to retain proprietary control through a tortured blend of reporting schedules, batch updates, and spreadsheet acrobatics. I thought that we would bond over an abiding love for metadata. But the sense-making part of the pattern-matching never entered the picture. Instead I spent the balance of the assignment chasing misshapen pieces of a puzzle that never quite came together.

The first hint I was over Brittany’s barrel was the inability to reach her. I knew she was resourced as a subject matter expert to a client engagement and that availability was limited. That meant stockpiling blocks of questions dependent on the conditional logic of multi-step instructions. Since her know-how of the taxonomy resided solely with her, there were limited opportunities to crowd-source or leverage the team's insights. I assumed that trying independently to solve these problems would be the best teacher.

It wasn't.

Follow-up requests for additional onsite training were denied. Remote-based training was scheduled, postponed, and ultimately cancelled a few weeks after Brittany communicated that I was to receive "a couple of months more of training" before I would be "officially ramped up." Instead she refused to schedule any form of regular communications and team-building for problem-solving and Q&A. All that receded into the background until review season. That’s when I learned through the food chain of Brittany’s …

'Shock' at my ignorance of taxonomy development, my inability to learn it, and my dishonesty in pretending to be a skilled practitioner. She writes that my misrepresentation of this skill caused the reputation of vocabulary services to suffer. Surely she overestimated my talents as a salesman: "My biggest recommendation is not for Marc to oversell himself."

Rather than follow-up a hatchet job with another losing hand I chose not to dispute an unfavorable rating (this is a managers' prerogative). I spoke to the professional virtues of periodic feedback and the firm behaviors that inform all touch points in the review process. My role was not to advise or assess but to learn and to support the team.

The one prerequisite Brittany insisted on was not about prior experience but that I be dedicated. On both counts I worked diligently to learn a new tool, accruing 213 hours, mostly over a short, intensive burst of six weeks. How’s that for counting? Regrettably my client interactions were minimal and almost exclusively on email -- mostly cc-ed as a recipient. That made it harder and easier:·  

• Harder to understand the viewpoints and priorities of our clients
• Easier to piece together an escape route from the obstruction of jerks

Next week: A move from CYA to the greener, if not ever greener pastures of an fragmented engineering group. These guys will come with no prior KM program and no understanding of the profession that a Google search can't explain.

***

The blog series KM in the Jerkplace is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

The Philanthropilization of Commerce

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="487"] Clean-up crew descends on Great Pacific Garbage Patch[/caption]

Since our species has evolved from hunting, gathering, ducking, and unplucking, our trading systems have moved up the same maturity chain. Once cowing, plowing, and bowing to lords and kings, we are no longer judged on what we produce but how we acquire. And while we agonize over how this all reflects on our values and grandchildren, our unblinking systems patiently await our future purchasing histories.

In a couple of dozen centuries we've gone from unwritten agreements and provincial codes to the recording of every articulation and graphical utterance. From fist clenches and handshakes to security tokens and payment releases.

Our free modern markets are at the ready for setting prices and finalizing sales but speechless when it comes to processing the loss of things once valued but never priced. We lose radio contact with value at the point where cheaper is the rationale for shortening a supply chain, doing more with less, not covering preexisting conditions, and the familiar litany of "house bets." Those free market calculations designed to lower prices without regard to their costs.

The Tyranny of the Free

Any 21st Century content connoisseur will tell you that we are drowning in the social costs for making information free. Information for a price is a world in which producers compete to know the priciest information, and then trade on that knowledge, benefiting the information, the linings of of their pockets, and the trading systems that carry their instructions. The world of free belongs to all of us and we're drowning in the details. It's a fishbowl, echo chamber, and labyrinth of transactions. A ticker-tape parade of personal metadata confetti. Our own claims of privacy aboard a Texas-sized flotilla of personal information garbage, brought to us by opaque password bypassers and lax regulations (with a capable assist from our own lethargy).

Is it any wonder we can't build a consensus around a set of shared priorities in a world where everyone gets to hear themselves think and the slightest dissension is an unwelcome distraction?

I'm not suggesting we go back to a world of publishing magnets, three national TV networks, and gatekeepers who defined the public interest through the prism of their own. But just because the content spigot is more control resistant  these days doesn't mean the biggest media mouths and ears can go on smearing and eavesdropping with impunity. And that brings us back to the marketplace of ideas where we shop. In these kiosks and stalls and pushcarts anyone with a bill-supporting income can ascend to the roll of benefactor -- a supporter of sounds, tastes, looks, and priorities that amplify our sense of what counts, knowing that the dollar we spend will be counted regardless of what the counters are thinking in their calculations.

Keepers of the Analog

Being a patron of the arts is not just about buying your CDs directly from the performers as mementos of the concert experience. It's more basic than that. It's about preserving the musical worship ritual itself.

The highlight of this past gift-giving season centered on buying two albums at Newbury Comics for my wry-witted, macro-analytical, and culturally clairvoyant step daughters. It felt both odd and compelling that the $40 for the two works equaled ten LPs back in the golden days of Disc-O-Mat, Sam Goody's, and Titus Oaks. It was also a trifle under the $40 more that I've managed to spend on downloads through the 2013 music season. But I'd be just as mistaken to confer a 1979 dollar value on the post record label musical food chain as I would for labeling the LP, its fluffy sleeves, luxuriating foldouts, and epic cover art as mere "packaging." Behind that hedonistic splurging of harmonic layerings lies a tactile immersion that focuses the mind on the concept behind the album, the liner notes behind the lyrics, the devotion to the vision in the sound.

If vinyl makes a comeback, can other pay-for-content packagings be revivable? Printing and reading text on paper instead of screens has a way of marshalling the concentration that is otherwise claimed by the labors of a competitive world, i.e. memorizing answers to tests. Another clarifying benefit of paper-based information is that it's static, doesn't beep or flicker, and awaits the scratching within the editorial margins to activate the reader. Print on screen is content that never sleeps. It's resistant to reflection, analysis, and the perspective-taking carried by the authority of definitive works.

We've lost that one big time in the online.

The Future Makes a Comeback

The question of getting it back is not reducible to whether there's a business model for offline content or a marketing edge for self-referential authority. The answer is to pay for the information whose usefulness will grow with time.

That doesn't mean a pointless retreat into a nostalgic past of argument-settling finality. It does mean cultivating the restraint, introspection, and deference given to containers that not only preserve the original contents but reveal that larger framework for committing positive and memorable change in our unyielding and inarticulate age. A time where the present is no better suited to take in the future than the haste and prejudice of our own self-selection.

Question: When the last time you picked over the hidden messages and visual nuances of the art on a CD cover? If you're like me you're harkening back to a time that never passed because it never happened. It's funny what choices the free, modern marketplaces make for us. Especially the choices it takes away that were never counted in the first place.

A Problem Child Named Big Brother

The media has fixated under this past week’s news leak that all Americans are now and forever spied on until proven dead. Wait … that might not be provable. This revelation casts a glaring light on the low profile and high concept surveillance innovators within the clandestine NSA – the part of our intelligence community that makes the CIA seem catty and loose-lipped.

There was something both alarming and innocuous about the story that broke in the Guardian on June 6th. This snooping or PRISM program is a vast soup of browser logs, text, graphics, videos, voice calls, and all manner of singing, dancing, and soliciting from my screen, to yours, and your next of yours. Think of the color-coded warning systems from the Bush era reformatted by degrees of separation and you begin to see Obama era risk assessment through the PRISM lens.  Concepts like criminal motive or case relevance have been replaced by the pervasive need to place our electronic selves under a passive and insidious house arrest.

Now I like to connect hypothetical dots like the next armchair analyst. But I resist the sweeping explanatory powers of slam dunk conspiracy theories. I’ve always maintained that paranoia is a luxury of the self-important. Our lives are much more open, generic, and predictive as data patterns than we are as erratic and complex individuals.

So before we start quaking in Orwellian tones, let's give the NSA its day in our court of opinion. Even if they answer in confidence to secret courts, it makes sense to vet the rationales behind such a deliberate and undiscriminating assault on our virtual identities. Besides we’re all part of the same feuding and dysfunctional family. If we know Big Brother’s allegiances and loyalties maybe he won’t seem so poker-faced, inscrutable, and extortion-prone.

Equal Mistreatment

First of all, it boils down to fairness. After all, what could be more even-handed than to spy on everyone? How could anyone feel frozen out of the action or singled out for selective treatment?

Secondly, when it comes to justice systems you can't bet against the house. That's because the PRISM guardians own all the evidence. You need to play by their rules to prove: (a) they're not following them as (b) they are following you. It's a circular tail-wags-dog-chasing-own-tail situation. It’s designed to tie tea party activists and ACLU partisans in knots for years to come. You say your rights are violated? Hard to try your case when your first amendment freedoms have been guantanamoed down in broad constitutional daylight. That's the blank check known as the Patriot Act -- the NSA having its way within the exigencies of perceived threats. Case closed.

And even without a public trial, there’s a great potential in PRISM for self-inflicted embarrassment. What if Big Brother arrests the wrong guy and that guy is you or me? That’s the advantage of secrecy. It’s botched raid insurance. It’s a hedge against hiring the wrong henchmen. It’s the peace of mind that comes with plausible deniability -- the first mover freedom to ask forgiveness in the future because it's easier than getting timely permission from a government at war with itself.

Home Team Advantage

But never mind our institutional paralysis. Judging by the poll numbers the public's prepared to write a blank check to rival the size of the credit card financing of our delinquent war chest. According to the New York Times' David Brooks, recent polling suggests that pending terrorist investigations are beating up on the prospect of privacy intrusions by a 2:1 margin.

Take my privacy, please. I have nothing to hide. That's assuming a healthy skepticism of those bringing the charges, equal access to the evidence they're citing, and an informed and disinterested judges who won't throw us under the wheels of justice. As Danah Boyd writes this week in Slate ("If You're OK With Surveillance Because You Have "Nothing to Hide," Think Again), the big data Rorschach of PRISM is a placeholder for pious aggression as much as discrete protection:

“It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.”

And it all boils down to the specifics of the cases yet to be brought -- namely who's prosecuting the aggression and who's being protected. A concentrated set of assets in the hands of a select few is a containment begging for its lid to be blown off. An establishment that hates surprises will conduct itself in secrecy and cloak itself in suspicion -- namely a presumption of guilt in the quest to wage the first articulated post 9-11 terrorist containment policy -- Dick Cheney's Doctrine of Preemption.

Reasons Boyd:

“[I]f someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s not impossible to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data.”

Safety Deposits

My problem child understanding of the PRISM program is shaped by my job as a knowledge manager. It's my responsibility to make information available, useful, and even prepared for the uses intended by my inundated colleagues. My role is justified by the assumption that when folks don't have to care where things are kept they can free up their resourcefulness to solve problems, not to be compromised by their login credentials or limited understanding of the gatekeepers and their keepings.

But in a world where Google can settle most public arguments there is a parallel private one. It says that secure assets deserve a single, repository. Think employer records and documentation. It's that safety deposit box ideal that lulls most managers into the seduction that the information unity of a single storage location will save our collective and individual asses. Our big NSA brother is no different. Only in our case it's the prospect of lost income, not privacy, that stokes the hot single repository coals.

It goes something like this:

“This is my livelihood. It's in a state of perpetual risk because I'll be blindsided by some error or memo or bug or unredeemable email tied to me six file folders deep on some mystery server.”

It may sound as quaint as a world of gold standards. But there are a whole flock of literalists who would throw all their mattress-bound savings from the market run-ups of yesteryear just to be at one with those bricks. There's Grandpa Ron Paul. There's Senator Rand. No slouch when it comes to blustering all over the shadows of big bro. Oh, look, Glen Beck's grabbing a titanium-laced shovel. They're all digging furiously to exhume the sacred dirt of a dignified Fort Knox burial. There but for fortune or just to keep the Fed accountable? I'm no economist so here’s the takeaway for my fellow knowledge managers:

Everyone needs a mental space holder -- a concrete sleeve for bookending their references. It doesn't matter how virtual, triangulated, asymmetric or plain old complicated the chessboard has become. People clamor for the tangible in a sea of uncertainties. So too do lynch mobs and NSA bureaucrats who are pledged to upholding the public order in blank check proportions.

Inner Sanctum

Hence the mega warehouse to trump all data centers in Bluffdale Utah desert is now under permanent occupation by the commandos of security clearances.

NSA isn’t just boiling the ocean in Bluffdale. It's trawling the ocean floor as if national boundaries didn't exist. It's sucking our transgressions and transmissions down with a giant straw and belching our hiccups and encoded byproducts back into a vast swill of super collections. Rumor has it that the threat of a wild fire would unleash a sprinkler system so powerful that nearby Salt Lake City could slip into the Great Salt Lake. The collection effort appears as ambitious in volume as it's frivolous in an ultimate motive or meaning or justification. Data is the new stockpile. We collect because ... we can.

Since I'm spilling a parade of secrets I'll toss my baton in and march proudly with the middle-aged telecommuting knowledge grunts. I'll sign the release, I'll self-incriminate. I'll freely confess that I am a bona fide metadata freak. The layers of details buried in the assets I maintain hold the key to making information searchable and ultimately useful.

Social Dragnet

And the hastily scribbled set of defensible talking points is that metadata can't hurt you. I say hasty because if the NSA was truly in the damage control business they would have hired the PR wing of the leaker contractor. Booz Allen could repent. They could assure the public that metadata is actually a good thing. Especially in private where your credit card company asks if you were pumping gas in Colorado at the same time that you were sucking down brewskies in bean town.

The insidious side of metadata is that it provides groupable sub-sets of unseemly data sprawls. Add some unfounded suspicions to the mix and you've got guilt by association. That's a dragnet that happens every day on Facebook. What will happen when the terror-mongers catch up to the marketers? These are no longer personal computers.

It doesn't matter what you spring on your gadgetware. So long as we're tethered to a network there's a screen that only we can see and Google and the Google customers. And you thought your love of GMail made you a valued account holder? That personal device is more impersonal than meets the consuming eye. That won't change with your first pair of Google Glasses -- until you splurge on an even newer pair of Google spyglasses.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:



He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

LinkedIn First, LinkedOut Later...

To a metadata freak, LinkedIn is a marvel of information science. It is the botanical garden of social media.

Every germinating seed is dutifully watered in flower beds tended by a volunteer army of self-selected gardeners. The blossom worth budding here is that the attentiveness is anchored to the premise that our professional fortunes depend on this.

The LinkedIn premise is a massive database of self-administered professional life narratives. Access is determined by a network of click-happy connections: show you mine if you show me yours (both the resumes and the contacts).

The database gets regular feedings and weedings because -- hey -- those are my bowling trophies and and inflationary job titles and biopic documentaries I put on my reality series reward card program. Psst ... got any seed money?

What I'm unpacking here through unlicensed metaphor is a database of resumes. The splendor of the architecture is that the profile templates are self-organizing. There are no semantic web quibbles over taxonomies versus folksonomies, what vocabulary is worth controlling and which tag clouds deserve to float above the fog. In doing so, LinkedIn has achieved organic adherence to the age-old riddle:

How do I describe my uniqueness in the least invasive and most universal way possible?

That vessel is the cross-fertilization of the knowledge garden we researchers, sales animals, and job-seekers can all cultivate, horse-trade, or hunt down online through the sprinkler system known as LinkedIn's "advanced search features."

I did a session on this for the career options folks at my Alma mater of Hampshire College last month. It was fascinating to map the academic disciplines signified by each of the colleges schools to the requisite job skills, career paths, and institutional dimensions reverberating in the professional odysseys of Hampshire grads.

Then just last week I get pinged at work by Jon Lee, a Hampshire cohort from a 1.5 separation degree of overlapping concentric social circles circa 1980-84. Who better than a former Hampster and current job-seeker to put that ivory-coated knowledge harvest to the test?

Jon writes:

So, anyway, I want to harvest some of these connections. At first I thought I'd contact the person I knew, tell them who I was looking for and ask them to search the name and find the 2nd degree connection. A little awkward and time consuming (for the person I'm asking the favor). Yeah, so then I see the "Get Introduced Through A Connection" link. I choose my connection, then:



He continues...

My question is this... What happens, how does this work?

I hit send, a message goes to you. Do you only see my note to you - or the message to X (Leslie B. in this example) as well? And what about the person you know, who knows Leslie? How is that connection made? Automatically - or do you have to find the connection for me? Do they see my message to you, my message to Leslie?

The hypothetical scenarios go on for a few more paragraphs before the logic is tortured right out of the motivation for getting to the actual conversation stages -- the linking out phase of the process. I appreciate these questions because they underscore the associative clunk factor of shuffling through an overloaded circuit of lateral connectors.

The community spirit of pay-it-forward reciprocity might work for random acts of kindness. But maybe not so much for calculating and indiscriminate emails -- especially from people we know more for their degree of separation than we do about them. Period.

The artifice of the social media back-scratch points to the exit ramp or the link-out. This is the realization that as gorgeous as that well-groomed garden is, all the growth happens within the narrow confines of Linkedin.com. It is a walled in garden. That's why a thousand Facebook weeds makes more advertising perfume than the most painstaking bouquet of freshly cut resumes at LinkedIn.

You need to step on a few weeds, maybe even some poisonous ones before any meaningful conversations can happen. That's where a nose for research meets an eye for opportunity and an ear for discussion. That kind of growth can only happen in soils and climates where the greatest variety of vegetation takes root.

If I didn't answer your question, Jon, that may be because six years and 750 connections later, I still haven't plunked down $24.99 a month to find the answers.

Taskonomy -- Where Resource Meets Resourcefulness

How does an information architect get their IP connoisseurs to feast on delectable helpings of choice information?

This morning we had an interface designer in to look at our search outputs. We showed him lots of buckets brimming with appointed rounds of patterns and hit counts that speak to the taste, smell, and texture formed by tens of thousands of documents and list items simmering in the stew pot called SharePoint.

But as orderly and configurable as each displayable facet, this designer made me realize the ball of confusion that awaits the untrained eye. No matter how complete the documentation, each bucket spills into a claustrophobic interface. Point and consider isn't quite so convincing as point and click. Every patch of white space already claimed by some rankable re-ordering of some expandable (if not expendable) subtext.

I'd like to think that we stock the best content store that any interface chef could conceivably conjure in devising the smartest possible holding tank for knowledge transfer.

I own that with equal parts frustration and pride. Pride speaks to the hard-won realization that we are not stockpiling content for the sake of collecting it. It's calibrated, populated, and ready for serving. Each artifact passes more than a knowing glance that it's intended for re-assemblages to support some new revenue-bearing endeavor.

The frustration is that our basis for action stumbles in a poorly designed interface. In fact our design is about as kludgy as our metadata is immaculate. Why are we so late to this table? Perhaps there is no rapid translation on intranets from look-and-feel to shop-and-spend? Then again we've squandered resources straying off the SharePoint reservation because of our unwelcoming and cluttered interface.

What we've executed on is metadata and the assertion that an action-based taxonomy is foundational. But the front door that swings open to users can dignify the underlying structure by exposing the proper detail at the moment of instigation -- that user becomes a producer by synthesizing those not-so-raw materials into a refined and unique deliverable.

Whether the end game is simple (the completed form is in my out-box) or glorified (IP creation), it takes the marriage of taxonomy and design to deliver a taskonomy -- that stretchable dimension between what's been conceived and what will become conceivable.

Taskonomy -- Where Resource Meets Resourcefulness

How does an information architect get their IP connoisseurs to feast on delectable helpings of choice information?

This morning we had an interface designer in to look at our search outputs. We showed him lots of buckets brimming with appointed rounds of patterns and hit counts that speak to the taste, smell, and texture formed by tens of thousands of documents and list items simmering in the stew pot called SharePoint.

But as orderly and configurable as each displayable facet, this designer made me realize the ball of confusion that awaits the untrained eye. No matter how complete the documentation, each bucket spills into a claustrophobic interface. Point and consider isn't quite so convincing as point and click. Every patch of white space already claimed by some rankable re-ordering of some expandable (if not expendable) subtext.

I'd like to think that we stock the best content store that any interface chef could conceivably conjure in devising the smartest possible holding tank for knowledge transfer.

I own that with equal parts frustration and pride. Pride speaks to the hard-won realization that we are not stockpiling content for the sake of collecting it. It's calibrated, populated, and ready for serving. Each artifact passes more than a knowing glance that it's intended for re-assemblages to support some new revenue-bearing endeavor.

The frustration is that our basis for action stumbles in a poorly designed interface. In fact our design is about as kludgy as our metadata is immaculate. Why are we so late to this table? Perhaps there is no rapid translation on intranets from look-and-feel to shop-and-spend? Then again we've squandered resources straying off the SharePoint reservation because of our unwelcoming and cluttered interface.

What we've executed on is metadata and the assertion that an action-based taxonomy is foundational. But the front door that swings open to users can dignify the underlying structure by exposing the proper detail at the moment of instigation -- that user becomes a producer by synthesizing those not-so-raw materials into a refined and unique deliverable.

Whether the end game is simple (the completed form is in my out-box) or glorified (IP creation), it takes the marriage of taxonomy and design to deliver a taskonomy -- that stretchable dimension between what's been conceived and what will become conceivable.

Threadecessors

I've been preparing for my next round of Internet Research courses for the Boston University PI program and it's come to mind that two esteemed teaching examples have shut their windows and folded.

The first is Kartoo. Kartoo was the literal interpretation for "connecting the dots." Kartoo was a metasearch visualization tool that ran on Google. That means you could apply Google syntax to Kartoo and get the added bonus of the Kartoo interface doing its magic.

Instead of presenting an endless scroll of countless pages, Kartoo processed the top-cut or highest ranking sites like a clustering tool. Then it displayed your terms as connection points between information sources. It also augmented the referencing of relevant words and phrases between sources. For instance an original story picked up in other places would display primary and secondary sources (and the paths between them).

The second also-ran was Newssift which closed shop after only a year. It was the first websearch that kept and expanded on the promise of sentiment analysis. If you wanted the dirt on a high profile executive Newssift would enable you to do this without soiling for a single adjective. Brilliant. If you want to lament more here's my review of them from last spring.

One of the promises I make my students at the beginning of each cycle is that they've already paid to take the course. There's no double-dipping in subscription fees. The flip-side of course is that these innovative answering machines are at the mercy of a rather dominated and unimaginative business model where Google hegemony is as absolute as the Microsoft/Intel cartel was to the desktop. This is small comfort to BU's instructional designers who are on the verge of publishing outdated curriculum every semester.

However, in the biggest picture this doesn't count as a service disruption or even a broken link. So long as there's more than one answer to a question there will be a reason to improve on existing search technology.

Threadecessors

I've been preparing for my next round of Internet Research courses for the Boston University PI program and it's come to mind that two esteemed teaching examples have shut their windows and folded.

The first is Kartoo. Kartoo was the literal interpretation for "connecting the dots." Kartoo was a metasearch visualization tool that ran on Google. That means you could apply Google syntax to Kartoo and get the added bonus of the Kartoo interface doing its magic.

Instead of presenting an endless scroll of countless pages, Kartoo processed the top-cut or highest ranking sites like a clustering tool. Then it displayed your terms as connection points between information sources. It also augmented the referencing of relevant words and phrases between sources. For instance an original story picked up in other places would display primary and secondary sources (and the paths between them).

The second also-ran was Newssift which closed shop after only a year. It was the first websearch that kept and expanded on the promise of sentiment analysis. If you wanted the dirt on a high profile executive Newssift would enable you to do this without soiling for a single adjective. Brilliant. If you want to lament more here's my review of them from last spring.

One of the promises I make my students at the beginning of each cycle is that they've already paid to take the course. There's no double-dipping in subscription fees. The flip-side of course is that these innovative answering machines are at the mercy of a rather dominated and unimaginative business model where Google hegemony is as absolute as the Microsoft/Intel cartel was to the desktop. This is small comfort to BU's instructional designers who are on the verge of publishing outdated curriculum every semester.

However, in the biggest picture this doesn't count as a service disruption or even a broken link. So long as there's more than one answer to a question there will be a reason to improve on existing search technology.

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

SharePoint -- Suiting Up for the Sophomore Season

I'm presenting next week on a webcast hosted by Waltham-based KMA ("Knowledge Management Associates"). The venue is called SharePoint the Sophomore Year: Maximizing your investment in SharePoint after initial implementation.

I didn’t know SharePoint when I came on board in my current role and I came on-board to implement SharePoint. The freshman year was about implementing SharePoint 2003 for a business region. SharePoint 2007 was launched in early 2008. You don’t know me so I’ll focus on the ugly and the unscripted. Stay off script, come clean with your failures and people believe you -- even when they know more about SharePoint than they do about me.

Here are some the of the takeaways I'll be sharing:

Centrality: The sophomore year story is around making SharePoint the cat herder’s container of choice. How do we unify and rally around our mutual interconnectedness? It begins with shared experiences all employees cycle through. I count three: bi-weekly pay dates, bi-monthly staff meetings, and logging into SharePoint. You could set your watch to this. That's a big arrow in the quiver of the enterprise cat-herder.

Utilization: No ability counts more in consulting than billability. For cost centers like KM grunts and SharePoint administrators this means designing systems with a user focus. A user focus for us is about architecting SharePoint by actions – not destinations or cataloguing, or laundry lists. The results mean fewer arguments about what to call things and no need to memorize where documents are stored. This is a skill reserved for savants and reference librarians -- not management consultants.

Motivation: Motivation centers on the draw of SharePoint in skill-building for our consultants – not because we have it but because our clients do.

Participation: Participation bridges directly to our community of practice discussions. The end game is that there’s content supply (corpus) and demand (search logs). That’s how we remind our users that they’re knowledge producers too. When they ask for advice they have a responsibility to re-invest those assets back into SharePoint.

Payback: Payback is not about proving how many more deals go through because now we’re all on the same SharePoint page or even reducing the number of search results our users have to slog through before their requirements are met. Payback is about fitting form to function. That means addressing knowledge demands through best bets, search collections, inbound email, and expertise finders to name a few.

The metadata schema is a huge reporting payoff because it helps us understand the long tail – those queries that are specific to a set of requirements – not the common search terms that can be found in the short tail of most search logs. In the build above you can see how our metadata structure is helping the user to combine specific teams, practices, date ranges, and even caliber of results. Best of all they can subscribe to the results as an RSS feed in Outlook so they needn’t ever run the search again.

So those are a few ways of leveraging your sophomore year investment – hopefully without having to pay for your junior year in advance!

S-Y-N-C-ing Content Supply to Knowledge Demand

I like to place the fact base right up front:

Like most info-mavens I live part-time in the practical world and the other half in my theoretical head. The mental benefit of getting paid for what comes naturally is that I get to put my theories to the test every day.

Five days a week (give or take an at-home office email marathon) I labor in the circles of a system that tests some assumptions I hold about people find, store, and most importantly act on the lessons they draw from the information in there. This learning is not the 9-5 reality of some firewalled online university. It's not garden variety intranets for dummy corporations.

It's not even the harbor of last refuge for sleep-deprived, travel-logged thought leaders and efficiency experts. For them it's about their piecing together where they need to be to cinch a deal, eliminate a problem, maybe buy an argument, dispel a doubt, or even rationalize away the reasons for taking no action.

I'm guessing that at least half their education is about confirming what they already know or apprising them of what others experience. Either way at its roots the most expansive online search expedition is really about reduction. Best case it's about making problems disappear. Worst case it's unpacking those issues into manageable chunks. Either way it's setting an expectation to follow (and perhaps lead by).

For them it's not about a system or a document or a tag or a search option. It's not about the pissing contest that ensues whenever an esprit of egos clash on what to call something. If there is any awareness of my system that's a negative:

"I can't get on KM."
"I can't find XX document from YY project."

Any obstacle between the system user and their reason for learning is at the to-do list of any knowledge planner. Now it's not just the problem our users are addressing. The problem becomes the system itself. This is by far the less welcome of the two problems. It was not invited. There's a reason that "crashing" applies to system failures and uninvited guests.

We've invited the reason for using the system. Now where to seat the system error? To my mind and experience the best way to eliminate this obstacle is to stop treating the system as an "it" and more as a process. It is not a destination but a journey. Learning is not a noun. It is a verb.

The way we've tried to achieve this is presented in the following reference model that I call Search Yield Network Contribute (S-Y-N-C). This addresses information as a process by which we can anticipate the supply and demand patterns reflected in the system's provision and usage. Any planner worth their supply chain, trading, or econometric mettle can tease the numbers from the cyclical interplays of these better-known systems we dance with every day as investors, producers, and consumers. SYNC appropriates that thinking to the interdependencies of intranet travel where the rule of all roads lead to the same dead-end:

Supply = Content Surplus
Demand = Knowledge Deficit

How do we close that gap? Some overlooked SharePoint feature? Gift cards? New, improved nomenclature? Triple nada.

Nothing gums up the works more than a dump yard of bloated ZIP folders. Nothing focuses an intranet faster than how people spend their information surplus once they can process how past outputs connect to their next steps.

Information by itself hangs itself. What folks do with it is intrinsically fascinating. That's both the motivation and method behind S-Y-N-C.

Treating information as a verb and not a noun clarifies what our users are looking for (the "S" or Search cycle of S-Y-N-C) and what they intend to do with it (the "Y" or yield in defining the usage patterns or outcomes fueled by those search results. On the supply side again it's action predicates, not subject nouns that inform the build efforts of knowledge planners. We've reduced the description of our corpus from thousands of unwinnable arguments about what our content is into three potential use cases:

* Learn
* Sell
* Do

Nothing clarifies a taxonomy like appending an a verb to a thing. This is foundational not only to the network architecture ("N" in S-Y-N-C) but to where and how your information suppliers contribute their IP (locking up the "C" in S-Y-N-C). Here the factor of storage location is key to honoring a second success factor of the reference model -- that users on the demand side should focus on usefulness to the exclusion of all supply side distractions -- particularly storage location. This notion of location neutrality can only work on the demand side if our information suppliers honor the location sensitivities of our governance structure. Location -- it should mean everything to suppliers and absolutely nothing to users.

Here's what I mean: say I need the latest, greatest outputs about some long-established frameworks that were recently retooled to meet the exacting and unique requirements of a new and potentially lucrative client? If the IP is in its place I can filter the supply by my demand criteria -- what other clients have we done this for, who did the work and when, and how was it presented in the context of those projects?

If supply is in S-Y-N-C with demand then I Joe User should not have to enter a single keyword or mind-reading mantra about what my intentions are with the work in question.

More on the clarifying power of verbs in a future post.

S-Y-N-C-ing Content Supply to Knowledge Demand

I like to place the fact base right up front:

Like most info-mavens I live part-time in the practical world and the other half in my theoretical head. The mental benefit of getting paid for what comes naturally is that I get to put my theories to the test every day.

Five days a week (give or take an at-home office email marathon) I labor in the circles of a system that tests some assumptions I hold about people find, store, and most importantly act on the lessons they draw from the information in there. This learning is not the 9-5 reality of some firewalled online university. It's not garden variety intranets for dummy corporations.

It's not even the harbor of last refuge for sleep-deprived, travel-logged thought leaders and efficiency experts. For them it's about their piecing together where they need to be to cinch a deal, eliminate a problem, maybe buy an argument, dispel a doubt, or even rationalize away the reasons for taking no action.

I'm guessing that at least half their education is about confirming what they already know or apprising them of what others experience. Either way at its roots the most expansive online search expedition is really about reduction. Best case it's about making problems disappear. Worst case it's unpacking those issues into manageable chunks. Either way it's setting an expectation to follow (and perhaps lead by).

For them it's not about a system or a document or a tag or a search option. It's not about the pissing contest that ensues whenever an esprit of egos clash on what to call something. If there is any awareness of my system that's a negative:

"I can't get on KM."
"I can't find XX document from YY project."

Any obstacle between the system user and their reason for learning is at the to-do list of any knowledge planner. Now it's not just the problem our users are addressing. The problem becomes the system itself. This is by far the less welcome of the two problems. It was not invited. There's a reason that "crashing" applies to system failures and uninvited guests.

We've invited the reason for using the system. Now where to seat the system error? To my mind and experience the best way to eliminate this obstacle is to stop treating the system as an "it" and more as a process. It is not a destination but a journey. Learning is not a noun. It is a verb.

The way we've tried to achieve this is presented in the following reference model that I call Search Yield Network Contribute (S-Y-N-C). This addresses information as a process by which we can anticipate the supply and demand patterns reflected in the system's provision and usage. Any planner worth their supply chain, trading, or econometric mettle can tease the numbers from the cyclical interplays of these better-known systems we dance with every day as investors, producers, and consumers. SYNC appropriates that thinking to the interdependencies of intranet travel where the rule of all roads lead to the same dead-end:

Supply = Content Surplus
Demand = Knowledge Deficit

How do we close that gap? Some overlooked SharePoint feature? Gift cards? New, improved nomenclature? Triple nada.

Nothing gums up the works more than a dump yard of bloated ZIP folders. Nothing focuses an intranet faster than how people spend their information surplus once they can process how past outputs connect to their next steps.

Information by itself hangs itself. What folks do with it is intrinsically fascinating. That's both the motivation and method behind S-Y-N-C.

Treating information as a verb and not a noun clarifies what our users are looking for (the "S" or Search cycle of S-Y-N-C) and what they intend to do with it (the "Y" or yield in defining the usage patterns or outcomes fueled by those search results. On the supply side again it's action predicates, not subject nouns that inform the build efforts of knowledge planners. We've reduced the description of our corpus from thousands of unwinnable arguments about what our content is into three potential use cases:

* Learn
* Sell
* Do

Nothing clarifies a taxonomy like appending an a verb to a thing. This is foundational not only to the network architecture ("N" in S-Y-N-C) but to where and how your information suppliers contribute their IP (locking up the "C" in S-Y-N-C). Here the factor of storage location is key to honoring a second success factor of the reference model -- that users on the demand side should focus on usefulness to the exclusion of all supply side distractions -- particularly storage location. This notion of location neutrality can only work on the demand side if our information suppliers honor the location sensitivities of our governance structure. Location -- it should mean everything to suppliers and absolutely nothing to users.

Here's what I mean: say I need the latest, greatest outputs about some long-established frameworks that were recently retooled to meet the exacting and unique requirements of a new and potentially lucrative client? If the IP is in its place I can filter the supply by my demand criteria -- what other clients have we done this for, who did the work and when, and how was it presented in the context of those projects?

If supply is in S-Y-N-C with demand then I Joe User should not have to enter a single keyword or mind-reading mantra about what my intentions are with the work in question.

More on the clarifying power of verbs in a future post.

The Case for Knowledge Planners -- An SIKM Forum

This past week I was invited to present at the monthly SIKM ("System Integrators KM Leaders") group call hosted by PwC's Stan Garfield and HP's Marcus Funke.

The topic was entitled "Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand." It focused on the post web 2.0 imperative to get inside the heads of users on a transactional level -- just because we're selling arguments and buying rationales doesn't mean we can't be as savvy to our own internal marketing as marketers are to moving iconic shopping carts through their virtual stores. Inside the firewall what we've got to move and replenish are cartloads of content.

But in our case not only are the items intangible and instantly perishable. We also have to contend with the fact that the consumers and the producers are actually one in the same -- a fact of enterprise life forever confused by the objectification of our colleagues as the ITspeak term of users.

The talk was presented in four chunks:

1. Voice of customer transcripts – responding to the project requirements of consultants who live in luggage, airports and client conference rooms.
2. How to weave KM into the workstreams of our projects for minimal disruption and maximum benefit.
3. Resulting best practices and KPIs generated from regular knowledge reporting.
4. Slide builds around the screen interfaces reflecting workstreams supported by our taxonomy and provision policies (on supply side) and our search and usage policies (on the demand side).

Before I offer a few specifics and delve into some of the finer points I also want to acknowledge the occupational downside of dense, multidimensional polemics delivered in an impassioned drone. Only a couple of questions were asked and comments passed. The "discussion" literally touched down one hour to the moment the droning began. Hopefully the presentation will be organized well enough to attract a more open exchange than possible over one synchronous conference line (+ slide deck).

I first put forward the Case for Knowledge Planners in an article that run this past winter in Searcher. Basically the rationale is this: Information overload may be a fact of knowledge management life. But could this be a blessing in disguise? We know it as a black hole but for the knowledge planner it can be a golden opportunity by getting to know our colleagues as well as we do our inventories. I started down the KM memory parade beginning with the seminal work Tom Stewart did by addressing knowledge capital in the pages of Fortune in the early nineties. That's when I first heard the now shopworn cliche: “I wish we knew what we know.”

But anyone with access to the usage log of your internal search tool can flip this lament on its side ..."We may not know what we know but we're completely certain now of what we "wish" we knew!"

Being able to measure uncertainty? Approximate a level of doubt? All those queries that end in no hits? Those are not errors -- those are invitations to fill in the blanks.

Another golden KM oldie goes: “right information to right person at right time...”

But what if the right information found the right person ... the timing takes care of itself? Now it’s about having that information find them because it was trapped in advance – not desperately sought the morning of a presentation. The knowledge planner is at the cross section between supply and demand, inputs and outputs, usage and provision. It is more than uploads and downloads though. It is being able to translate aggregates like search log transactions and the metadata contributors use to tag their materials into a shapable and productive outcome -- a dialog between user requests and producer responses.

Documents can do only so much. At a certain point the redundancy of boilerplate documentation must give way to less formalized materials found in social media and discussion boards. But more tacit and experiential knowledge still deserves to be tagged and archived. Last night's all nighter could be just as relevant in broad daylight many cycles from now. The most critical lesson is not to archive every stray thread from every shared curiosity but to insure that discussions and documents are stored separately. Why?

As important as it is to free users from the burden of knowing where content is stored, the ability to search for it in meaningful ways hinges on the ability to search for it in containers that separate documents from discussions. Anyone taking a serious look at how practitioners talk to their peers on email know this intuitively. There is little overlap between the knowledge transfers exchanged with colleagues and those captured in the project outputs delivered to clients.

The practical dimension is this: for your demand-side customers they should be free to search as much as your corpus as your access policies permit. The provider base, however, needs to be sensitized to the impact of where they things. If significant IP goes untagged, it will go unsearched. If an important change to a policy is buried in a folder or library, it may well go unheeded.

The fact that few organizations are structured to handle the question of institutional relevancy means that outside of email there are entire worlds of knowledge capture and discovery that fly below the individual radars of your KM system's less savvy users.

Next dispatch: The internal marketing requirements of enterprise knowledge planners.

The Case for Knowledge Planners -- An SIKM Forum

This past week I was invited to present at the monthly SIKM ("System Integrators KM Leaders") group call hosted by PwC's Stan Garfield and HP's Marcus Funke.

The topic was entitled "Content Supply? Meet Knowledge Demand." It focused on the post web 2.0 imperative to get inside the heads of users on a transactional level -- just because we're selling arguments and buying rationales doesn't mean we can't be as savvy to our own internal marketing as marketers are to moving iconic shopping carts through their virtual stores. Inside the firewall what we've got to move and replenish are cartloads of content.

But in our case not only are the items intangible and instantly perishable. We also have to contend with the fact that the consumers and the producers are actually one in the same -- a fact of enterprise life forever confused by the objectification of our colleagues as the ITspeak term of users.

The talk was presented in four chunks:

1. Voice of customer transcripts – responding to the project requirements of consultants who live in luggage, airports and client conference rooms.
2. How to weave KM into the workstreams of our projects for minimal disruption and maximum benefit.
3. Resulting best practices and KPIs generated from regular knowledge reporting.
4. Slide builds around the screen interfaces reflecting workstreams supported by our taxonomy and provision policies (on supply side) and our search and usage policies (on the demand side).

Before I offer a few specifics and delve into some of the finer points I also want to acknowledge the occupational downside of dense, multidimensional polemics delivered in an impassioned drone. Only a couple of questions were asked and comments passed. The "discussion" literally touched down one hour to the moment the droning began. Hopefully the presentation will be organized well enough to attract a more open exchange than possible over one synchronous conference line (+ slide deck).

I first put forward the Case for Knowledge Planners in an article that run this past winter in Searcher. Basically the rationale is this: Information overload may be a fact of knowledge management life. But could this be a blessing in disguise? We know it as a black hole but for the knowledge planner it can be a golden opportunity by getting to know our colleagues as well as we do our inventories. I started down the KM memory parade beginning with the seminal work Tom Stewart did by addressing knowledge capital in the pages of Fortune in the early nineties. That's when I first heard the now shopworn cliche: “I wish we knew what we know.”

But anyone with access to the usage log of your internal search tool can flip this lament on its side ..."We may not know what we know but we're completely certain now of what we "wish" we knew!"

Being able to measure uncertainty? Approximate a level of doubt? All those queries that end in no hits? Those are not errors -- those are invitations to fill in the blanks.

Another golden KM oldie goes: “right information to right person at right time...”

But what if the right information found the right person ... the timing takes care of itself? Now it’s about having that information find them because it was trapped in advance – not desperately sought the morning of a presentation. The knowledge planner is at the cross section between supply and demand, inputs and outputs, usage and provision. It is more than uploads and downloads though. It is being able to translate aggregates like search log transactions and the metadata contributors use to tag their materials into a shapable and productive outcome -- a dialog between user requests and producer responses.

Documents can do only so much. At a certain point the redundancy of boilerplate documentation must give way to less formalized materials found in social media and discussion boards. But more tacit and experiential knowledge still deserves to be tagged and archived. Last night's all nighter could be just as relevant in broad daylight many cycles from now. The most critical lesson is not to archive every stray thread from every shared curiosity but to insure that discussions and documents are stored separately. Why?

As important as it is to free users from the burden of knowing where content is stored, the ability to search for it in meaningful ways hinges on the ability to search for it in containers that separate documents from discussions. Anyone taking a serious look at how practitioners talk to their peers on email know this intuitively. There is little overlap between the knowledge transfers exchanged with colleagues and those captured in the project outputs delivered to clients.

The practical dimension is this: for your demand-side customers they should be free to search as much as your corpus as your access policies permit. The provider base, however, needs to be sensitized to the impact of where they things. If significant IP goes untagged, it will go unsearched. If an important change to a policy is buried in a folder or library, it may well go unheeded.

The fact that few organizations are structured to handle the question of institutional relevancy means that outside of email there are entire worlds of knowledge capture and discovery that fly below the individual radars of your KM system's less savvy users.

Next dispatch: The internal marketing requirements of enterprise knowledge planners.

Unstructured

Unstructured.

That's the word that vendors use to describe the state of the problem you are hiring them to fix.

Me, the content romantic: Send a crawler that can paw through the stacks of our towering piles in hopes of rescuing a lost lesson or past bid for potential greatness, sandbagged by the ravages of past downsizings and market disruptions.

The vendor responds: We are not in the business of fixing something that is too unruly, rampant, and culturally taboo for your colleagues to care -- let alone change or hire an outside firm to go fix. Besides, the vendor doesn't sell to the business -- it sells to my IT group and it's a message of plug and play -- not asset recovery.

The vendor proposes a work-around that indexes every file and treats it with the same deference that one might your recyclables at curbside: this was a leaf pile and those were some egg cartons but either way they're being carted off in the same truck.

But how does unstructured become structured? Content is not reducible to "1"s and "0"s. Content is about subjects and predicates. This is not how IT thinks and this is not what's being sold here. When it comes to the recycling of your unstructured data the vendor has some useful wrappers for "re-purposing" the IP trash you might otherwise toss with your document shreddings. For instance there might be some kind of precanned attempt to classify your unlabeled inventory by mapping some recurrent keywords in your index to sets of selective phrases that hint at structure. But it's just a tease.

There's no more credence between your content and organizing it than a simple passing match-word resemblance to the phrases reproduced in the vendor's approximation of your salient concepts -- what the document is about.

Is that better than nothing? It's better than nothing if you've already surrendered to the notion that unstructured information was never meant to be...

* recovered
* gathering electronic dust like some deep cryogenics freeze of your firm's institutional memory
* re-dedicated to a higher state of usefulness -- even though so many of these past lessons hold shelf lives beyond the retention of a major account, product line, or fading wisdom of a key former contributor).

Really, when you get down to unstructured it's only the structured world's way of saying that it can trap context, meaning, and judgment in the same binary webbing that entraps numbers and facts in spreadsheets and databases. But trapping is not the same as translating or interpreting why yesterday's document landfill could become tomorrow's breakthrough thinking. True structuring requires an understanding of the actions taken with the information as the basis for any formal content structure.