Knowledge Jolt with Jack

My friend Patti Anklam passes along this entertaining diffusion experiment from happy flu, so I am too.  If all is working properly, you will see a Flash window that shows elements of a network.  And my node should be connected to Patti's, which is on a branch in the "11 O'Clock" position.

The slider on the right does a zoom in/out, and you can click-and-drag to navigate around the larger window.  And if you click on a node, you can see the name of the website in the top bar.  And clicking on the url will take you to that website.  The basic network looks like hub-and-spoke.

I've had Xobni running on my new work computer since I started in December.  It is an Outlook plugin that lets you "find people, email & attachments instantly."  Essentially, it is a fast search algorithm for your email.  Here are some thoughts about how Xobni fits into my worklife.

If you check their website and some of the hype I've seen reported, there is a social networking aspect and there are some interesting things one can do with statistics.  But the thing that seems most important to me is the ability to find stuff that I've seen or written already.

I've been looking at how it fits into my regular flow of work.  The screen shot to the right is the basic view you get when viewing email from a contact.  At the top, it shows the contact (Rhonda) and how frequently I communicate with her.  It extracts her phone number and makes a connection to LinkedIn, if she's in there (including a picture).  Then it shows all the other people we're connected with: this is the CC list, sorted by how frequently they occur together.  This can be quite useful if I know two people have been in a conversation together, but I can't quite remember the second person's name.  As far as I have seen, Xobni doesn't do anything more sophisticated with my social network.  Below that, I get a list of email threads, with the subject line, how many messages in the thread and how old it is.  I particularly like the last one: a list of files that we have exchanged.  I can click to open right from the Xobni toolbar.

The reason I went for Xobni is the ability to find stuff in my mail archives.  My gold standard is still an application called Lookout, but that product is long gone (absorbed into Microsoft)*.  And I haven't been happy with other desktop search tools in relation to email search (they are great for other stuff).

So, how does it do with search?  It's fast, since it has an actively updated index of my email.  Until recently, it was missing a major component for me: it didn't have deleted emails in the index, so there was a wide swath of email missing from the results.  Overall, though, I find the search and the results display just okay.  It uses the same toolbar as above to show the search results and any related mail.  There aren't good ways to filter the results by anything other than the search term and "people."  I frequently want to get a grid (like Lookout gave me) to help me filter in more dimensions.

And what about those handy statistics?  I find them to be more interesting than useful.  I can slice my email behavior by a number of dimensions, though it primarily shows me the flow a different time slices: hourly, daily, weekly...  In general, I can see that I receive about twice as much mail as I send and that the bulk of that happens during work hours with a small blip after the kids go to bed.  If I were really curious, I could also explore mean time to respond (of my contacts to me).  This screen is my hourly average received and sent mail.

* Lookout can work with Outlook, and it can be found in various archives online.  The original developer posted something about it last year.

Steve Kelman has Knowledge management 2.0 in the July 14, 2008 Federal Computer Week magazine.  It's a short article, but the gist seems to be this paragraph from the middle.

If yesterday’s catchphrase was knowledge management, today’s is collaboration. To some extent, knowledge management and collaboration have common features. However, knowledge management has a more vertical, hierarchical sound, implying wisdom gathered by headquarters employees who then pass it to the field. In contrast, collaboration has a more horizontal, peer-to-peer sound, more of a wisdom-of-crowds feel than one of central direction. Of course, a central office, at least in CBP’s case, has established the infrastructure for peer-to-peer collaboration, and it might be sensible to codify ideas that emerge from collaboration.

It's all about collaboration.  Kelman is reporting on several efforts at Federal agencies related to enabling people to collaborate.  When applying the "2.0" moniker to knowledge management (or the enterprise), connecting people is frequently the biggest element of the discussion.  And this connection usually gets turned into enabling collaboration.  I've done it myself.

Interestingly, I found this from an intense discussion at the actKM Forum discussion list.  The gist of the discussion is that, while collaboration is important, knowledge management has a much wider impact than strictly collaboration.  As usual for actKM, the discussion ranged well outside the tight confines of the original topic.

A couple weeks ago Adam Bullied put together an initial draft of The Product Management Manifesto.  It contains two major pieces: a philosophy (definition?) and a set of fundamental activities.

His basic definition / philosophy of product management is

Product management is the function of serving as a proxy to a defined set of markets (or market segments), in order to be able to ensure appropriate product creation, and ongoing product health and quality for those markets throughout a product’s entire lifecycle, until end of life.

I read the definition a couple times before it started to make sense.  I like the "ongoing product health and quality" line.  My read of this is that Product Managers shepherd a product through its creation and its entire life, all with the customers in mind.  Product Managers don't typically come up with a product and throw it into the market without understanding of what the market needs.  (This immediately makes me wonder: how do those "unknown needs" products get launched - most likely without the more formal processes of product management.)

After this basic definition, Adam lists a bunch of "fundamentals" that start to flesh out the definition and activities of Product Management:

1. Understand the Problem
2. Know Who It's For
3. Ascertain Appropriateness or Health
4. Develop a Clear Picture of the Future
5. Execute in Concert
6. Shepherd and Adapt Based on Feedback

If you are interested in Product Management, have a look at the original and provide your own commentary (as a comment or on your own space).

Victor Newman has started blogging with Knowledgeworks.  I've always appreciated his unconventional take on knowledge management, so I was happy to see that he hasn't changed his approach in this piece, Don't Share -Build.  From the summary (and to see he take on the world): 

1. Reduce the number of idiots in the organisation to the bare minimum necessary. No-one will share anything with an idiot.
2. Employ the tactic of using language with real meaning. Deliberately stop talking about Knowledge Sharing: it only confuses people with its altruism and its implicit democratic message. Start defining aspirational knowledge frameworks within which new knowledge can be built that meets the need of delivering competitive advantage.
3. Create crises to focus knowledge contribution from those who can, and remove investment from the aimless sharing of everything.
4. Use 30/70 until they notice, then do something else.

One of Victor's early comments is that knowledge follows the laws of supply and demand: knowledge available to many people has less value than knowledge available to the few.  The more common claim is that knowledge isn't like commodities in that is not limited supply: you can share an idea with one person or 100 people.  These statements aren't opposed to one another, they just expose different philosophies about knowledge sharing.  Victor seems to be onto something, though.

Oh, and be prepared.  These aren't short little blog posts.

We were both employees of Pfizer, though I never had the opportunity to work directly with him before deciding to do other stuff.

Lessons learned only matter when someone else takes the results and does something with it!  My former LOC students would be thrilled to hear this.

At today's SIKM Leaders monthly discussion, Steve Wieneke of GM talked about Lessons Learned.  I really liked his methodical approach to the topic and the difficulties organizations have had with turning the idea of lessons learned into something useful for the organization.  He differentiates between lessons learned which result from failure and the correction, and learnings which result from things gone well and valued for the success.  Both things need to be part of the process for benefit of the organization.

And for the organization, lessons can only be useful when someone other than the person or team who had the experience can take that experience and do something with it in their situation.

Steve advocates moving away from the typical lessons learned database (unused, focused on failures) to a more transparent "visible learning process" that supports both learning from failures and successes.  It is focused on discussions, rather than a database of incidents.  He didn't talk about how this would be implemented, but it could work in standard discussion forums, or it could work in the more current technologies of web2.0.

Steve Wieneke has documented some of this in a chapter of Tom Young's Knowledge Management for Services, Operations and Manufacturing.

Due to the seemingly-unconventional approach to lessons learned, I was reminded of Dave Snowden's recent article in the July/August 2008 KM World, Everything is fragmented - Building CoPs for knowledge flow.  In this one, he recommends tossing out the typical view of the Community of Practice (discussion groups) for blogging which will help the real knowledge flow blossom.

Update: Fixed the spelling of Steve's last name. It's Wieneke.

To prove that I haven't vanished into complete thin air, I provide two items of entertainment.  Oh, and I've moved to Boston, for those that haven't been following me on Twitter.

I just finished Scott Adams' Dilbert and The Way of the Weasel.  It's loaded will silly and entertaining observations about the weasels we encounter everywhere in our lives -- even our own weasel selves.  If you take Adams' writing too seriously, the book is bound to make you feel cynical about everyone you meet.  But then, if you take Dilbert seriously, I am worried.

The other fun thing was a discovery by my family while I was off working.  They went to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.  My wife's favorite exhibit was always the walk-through heart.  It's been updated to include some music from They Might Be Giants, a song and video called The Bloodmobile.  It's available for download from the Franklin Institute website.  You might also want to check out the Dave Logan flash version (the song's producer).  Here is the video that's used at the Franklin Institute. 

Thanks to a note at the KM Forum blog I see that there is a virtual open house at Kent State's information architecture and knowledge management (IAKM) program. 

Online Open House on Knowledge Management Online Options in IAKM

Online Open House
Online KM Masters Degree and Certificate Program
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Beginning at 6:00pm

The presentation includes options for students to ask questions live. Any questions received during the presentation should be addressed at the end of the session.

The presentation has two segments:

Dr. Thomas J. Froehlich, Director of the Masters Program in Information Architecture and Knowledge Management, will provide an overview of the program and its online options in the area of Knowledge Management.

Dr. Denise Bedford will speak about her background, experience and expertise in knowledge management and will provide an overview of the two courses she will be teaching for the IAKM program in the fall, Foundational Principles of Knowledge Management and the Economics of Information.

Eli Goldratt is in the process of writing another book, this one entitled Inherent Simplicity.  Rather than a fiction, it is a monograph set up as a (fictional) discussion between Goldratt and his daughter, Efrat.  I received a galley proof on the arrangement that I would tell people about it and offer to pass the same offer to more people.  So, if you would like to get a copy (free!), have a read and pass along your information to me.

For people who have been following Goldratt, the material in the book should sound very familiar, particularly the interspersed chapters of "letters to the community" that Goldratt uses in the book as examples of various elements of the discussion.  I felt that these were the weakest part of the monograph.  I much preferred the discussion format of the book, but I also see how the letters moved things forward in the discussion.

So, what is Inherent Simplicity?  It's what Goldratt has been professing throughout his business consulting career:  It's a deep understanding that is always a simple explanation to any seemingly intractable problem.  This leads one to use their intuition to find the core of the problem and develop a solution which both solves the immediate problem and doesn't create additional problems along the way.

Okay, but what did Goldratt spend 176 pages talking about?  Well, that was the nature of the conversation between Efrat and him.  Efrat doesn't get it, and the book is a means for helping her and the readers make the connections.  And in what I see as his classic style, he leads readers (and Efrat) through a series of discoveries about how people normally interact with problems.  Where does the discussion start? With a particular application of the TOC principles to business?  Nope.  With the statement that people want meaningful lives.

But there are some barriers, and this is the setup for the entire book.  What are the barriers and why are they either not barriers - or how can they be removed.

First, people assume the solution must be complex, because they feel the problem is complex.  But simplicity is not the opposite of complexity, in Goldratt's definition, rather it is a measure of how much difficulty is involved.  In a scientist's view, this is the degrees of freedom in the system.

Second, conflicts and obstacles are a fact of life, but people assume the best solution is a compromise - a compromise where someone comes out with less than they'd hoped.  Goldratt suggests that there are no real contradictions - that nature doesn't allow them.  "Nature is exceedingly simple."  He had an interesting discussion about how people tend to get so ingrained with their assumptions that they find it difficult to see them when they are in a conflict situation.  As a result, they see no option other than compromise.

There was an interesting item within this discussion that talked about why people and businesses tend to go for the easy solutions that have nothing to do with the core problems.  The difficulty of examining these assumptions is often so difficult that it leads people to believe problems cannot be solved.  As a result, they just go after the small things that have very little impact on the overall.

Third, along with being exceedingly simple, nature is harmonious with itself.  This leads Goldratt to the third barrier - that people have a tendency to blame one another for problems.  This builds on the previous two, but adds this other twist of our inclination to jump to the conclusion that a bad situation must be someone else's fault, rather than the natural reaction to various stimuli.  It's easier to assign blame than put in the effort to understand why people and the systems they operate behave the way they do.

There may be a fourth element / barrier for people reaching a full life, but I think this covers my current understanding of the book.  And it is one where the more I think and talk about it, the more (or less) I will admit to understanding it.  There are several other discussion elements of the book that I found interesting, but they all revolve around this idea of how to move from whatever the current reality to something bigger and brighter through the belief in Inherent Simplicity.

[Update minutes after posting] And if you are interested in talking with other people about the book, a discussion group has been created to do just that.  Just walk on over to the Inherent Simplicity group at Yahoo.  They've already started discussing the first couple chapters.

Goldratt Consulting have created a place to share a variety of videos that relate to Theory of Constraints, from Eli Goldratt talking about various aspects of the TOC concepts to other demonstrations of successful implementations of the principles.  And yes, they do own TOC.tv. Here's the overview page with a list of current videos.  I think some are shifting to for-pay after a few weeks. 

Welcome to TOC.tv! Click on any of the main sections shown on the top left, or use the menu below to learn about any specific title. Details are shown on the left. The PLAY button takes you directly to view the video. Please do do not hesitate to Contact us if you need any assistance.

Featuring

• The TOC way to an ever-flourishing company
• Introduction to TOC - How to cause the change?
• Viable Vision
• The Difference between Theory and Practice Implementing TOC
• The Goldratt Webcast Program on Project Management - an extract
• US Marine Corps Logistics Base
• The fastest House in the World
• Realization Customer Conference 2007
• Delta Airlines: The Change and Challenge in Engine Maintenance - a Case Study.
• Make to Availability and Beyond
• The reason for Technology
• GSP Session 7 - Managing People

Free Access (there are many videos under this section)

• Testimonials
• Excerpts
• Goldratt Presents
• Q&A

Memberships and Subscriptions (there are many videos under this section)

• TOCICO Conference Presentations
• Goldratt Explains

Pay Per View (there are many videos under this section)

• The Goldratt Satellite Program
• The Goal Movie
• N&S Series
• The Goldratt Webcast Series

My friend, Lilia Efimova is wrapping up her PhD thesis work on the subject of blogging and has a nice summary of a number of Reasons for using weblog to keep information bits.  I see these as all elements of personal knowledge management where weblogs provide lots of assistance.

• Portability / Number of access points.
• Preservation of information in its current state / Currency of information.
• Context (remembering why it was saved) / Reminding.
• Ease of integration into existing structures.
• Communication and information sharing.
• Ease of maintenance.

Do you find it interesting that Communication and Information Sharing is in that list?  I am convinced that a major element of "personal knowledge management" and personal effectiveness in general is the ability to exchange information and ideas with others.

Just for fun, I am attempting to post while on the rail - Amtrak that is.

It's a familiar refrain, once you get into the business world far enough.  The business needs a solution, but the IT team delivers a technology that doesn't match.  Or reversing the blame, the business asks for a technology (and IT delivers), but that technology doesn't actually "solve" the problems the business confronts.

The June 2008 Communications of the ACM has a teaser of a longer article on the topic, Give Me Information Not Technology by Arik Ragowsky, Paul S. Licker and David Gefen.

Don't confuse technology with business solutions, focusing instead on what users value most - information.

Interesting what they are saying here.  I'll have to pay attention to their upcoming case study that suggests other differences between what IT does and what the business needs.