Mandating Standard Platforms, Conversation Strategy, 2007 Asian MAKE Winners, Hands-On Creation and Sharing

23-Oct-07 Archive of Weekly KM Blog by Stan Garfield

KM Question of the Week

Q: What do you think about mandating particular types of technology for knowledge work (standard platforms)? For example, strongly encouraging usage of community apps that are tied to email to try to get the tacit knowledge out of the email stream and into a searchable, centralized system.

A: We have standard platforms for team collaboration, portals, threaded discussions, etc. We encourage the use of these standard platforms, and we are supported in this by the IT function which has banned non-standard platforms as shadow IT.

Nonetheless, there are still non-standard platforms in use, so we make the following arguments for using standard platforms:

1. Support is only provided for standard platforms.
2. The intranet search engine will only crawl standard platforms.
3. Funding may be difficult to maintain for non-standard platforms since they are shadow IT.
4. Users prefer to have fewer tools to master.
5. We provide enhancements and integration only on the standard platforms.

We encourage the use of the standard threaded discussion platform over ordinary email with distribution lists. Here are some of the ways:

1. Users can choose to collaborate using forums in one of three ways: online, entirely by email, or with RSS feeds. This provides flexibility and accommodates personal preferences.
2. Discussions in forums are maintained in threads and can be more easily found and read.
3. Forums can be searched from the specific platform or from the intranet search.
4. Our KM Stars recognition program automatically awards points for posts to the forums.
5. We actively manage the forums to weed out dead ones, help moderators successfully build new ones, and avoid redundancy and topics which are too narrow or restrictive.

KM Blog of the Week

Adventures in Knowledge by Chris Fletcher

What is your conversation strategy?

The essence I am trying to get to is that we are looking for the context around information that exists in our many “knowledge repositories” in order to distil the knowledge that exists. To do that means that we must connect, and the easiest way to do so is through conversation, be it face to face, phone, teleconference, blog, wiki or any other medium.

I was told that I was on one extreme end of the spectrum, i.e., connecting people and others were at the other end with a myopic focus on content, and that we needed to end up somewhere in the middle. We need to develop a “safe-fail” not “fail-safe” environment in which we can conduct experiments with our people and see what works in our culture, e.g., use of wikis, blogs, social networks etc.

KM Link of the Week

2007 Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) Winners Named

Teleos has announced the 15 Winners in the 2007 Asian Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises (MAKE) study. For the first time, Samsung SDS has been recognized as the overall Asian MAKE Winner. India took top honors this year with 7 winners, followed by Japan (3 winners) and South Korea (2 winners). Australia, Indonesia and Singapore had one winner each.

The 2007 Asian MAKE Winners are (alphabetically):

1. Astra International (Indonesia)
2. Eureka Forbes (India)
3. Honda Motor (Japan)
4. Infosys Technologies (India)
5. Larsen & Toubro, E&C Division (India)
6. Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (S. Korea)
7. Samsung SDS (S. Korea)
8. Satyam Computer Services (India)
9. Singapore Airlines (Singapore)
10. Sony (Japan)
11. Tata Consultancy Services (India)
12. Tata Steel (India)
13. Toyota Motor Corporation (Japan)
14. Westpac Banking Corporation (Australia)
15. Wipro Technologies (India)

KM Book of the Week

Hands-On Knowledge Co-Creation and Sharing: Practical Methods & Techniques edited by Dr. Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi, Liza Wohlfart, and Dr. Patricia Wolf

30 hands-on moderation, facilitation, collaboration, and interaction methods and techniques, both face-to-face and software-based. The second book by the KnowledgeBoard Community for the Global Knowledge Community, and follows the pattern of the first KnowledgeBoard book, Real-Life Knowledge Management: Lessons from the Field, in presenting the practical experiences of knowledge workers.

Practical methods for knowledge sharing: free book by Ed Mitchell

The second KnowledgeBoard community book is out. It is a free book of excellent ideas, tips and tricks about how to share and co-create knowledge between people, written by the KnowledgeBoard community members based on their actual experiences. It’s got lots of practical tips and hints about facilitation, knowledge transformation, Communities of Practice, building communities, using SNA in communities, running events, etc.

Table of Contents

Section One: Share and Collect

1. Method/Technique 1: Visual Power Networking — Patricia Wolf, Peter Troxler & Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi

2. Method/Technique 2: Using Cognitive Edge Methods for Knowledge Creation and Collective SenseMaking — Sonja Blignaut

3. Method/Technique 3: Exploration Tours — Connecting Past, Present & Future — Ron Dvir, Hank Kune, Paolo Martinez & Arye Dvir

4. Method/Technique 4: Appraisal Interviews as a Tool for Organizational Knowledge Sharing — Marinita Schumacher, Corinna Flöck & Mounib Mekhilef

5. Method/Technique 5: Group Analysis of Knowledge Test Results as a Knowledge Sharing Method — Malgorzata Grabus & Katarzyna Grunwald

6. Method/Technique 6: — Leveraging Interaction Through Cooperation — David Kato & Devanildo Damião

7. Method/Technique 7: Building a Global Online Community — Cüneyt Budak

8. Method/Technique 8: Social Software Tools for Personal Knowledge Management — Swaran Sandhu

9. Method/Technique 9: Finding the Fire between the Nodes: Contactivity Events — Ron Dvir, Ed Mitchell & Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi

Section Two: Measure and Analyse

10. Method/Technique 10: An Integrated Approach to Enabling More Effective Knowledge Flows in an Organisation — Christine van Winkelen & Jane McKenzie

11. Method/Technique 11: Successful Innovation from Effective Knowledge Management — David. W. Birchall & George Tovstiga

12. Method/Technique 12: Cocreation Methodologies to Identify, Select and Maintain Knowledge Value Indicators — Paolo Petrucciani

13. Method/Technique 13: Social Network Analysis: A Practical Method to Improve Knowledge Sharing — Tobias Müller-Prothmann

14. Method/Technique 14: To Know What You Know at the Right Time: Knowledge Visualisation and Sharing Via a Cartographic Process Oriented Approach — Alexandra MüllerStingl,Waltraud Grillitsch & Robert Neumann

15. Method/Technique 15: Redesigning Communities of Practice using Knowledge Network Analysis — Remko Helms

16. Method/Technique 16: Getting Stakeholders Involved in Regional Strategy Development: Basis SWOT Workshops — Patricia Wolf, Christoph Hauser & Simone Schweikert

17. Method/Technique 17: Multistage Analysis for Knowledge Reflection — Jens O. Meissner

Section Three: Plan and Improve

18. Method/Technique 18: Improving the Facilitation of Organisational Knowledge Creation — David. W. Birchall, Jean Anne Stewart & Mike Pedler

19. Method/Technique 19: The Power of Disruption: Understanding the Unexpected — Patricia Wolf, Albert Vollmer, Peter Troxler & Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi

20. Method/Technique 20: Collect and Share Existing Knowledge on Collaborative Multidisciplinary Scientific Research Processes — Ayalew Kassahun, Huub Scholten & Adrie J.M. Beulens

21. Method/Technique 21: Developing, Nurturing, and Sustaining Communities of Practice — Rony Dayan & Yossi Pasher

22. Method/Technique 22: Mediation and the Mediatory Approach — Markus Hess

23. Method/Technique 23: Defining, Instituting and Sustaining a Knowledge Management Program — Gurbans S. Chatwal & Srinivas P. Jagannath

24. Method/Technique 24: CABD: A Complexity Science Based Method for Robust Business Development — Liza Wohlfart

25. Method/Technique 25: Learning and Performance Support for Effective Innovation and Improving Engineering Processes at IAI — Rony Dayan, Ron Algor, Daniel Naor & Avi Kedem

26. Method/Technique 26: Strategic Role of Physical Settings for Creating and Sharing Knowledge — Mustafa Kurt

27. Method/Technique 27: Future Workshops The Unthinkable and How to Make It Happen — Peter Troxler & Beate Kuhnt

28. Method/Technique 28: A People Centric Approach to Creating Taxonomies and Knowledge Artefacts — Shashi Kadapa

29. Method/Technique 29: A System based Approach to the Introduction of Knowledge Management — Mark Hefke

30. Method/Technique 30: Strategic Roadmapping and Implementation Actions — Abdul Samad (Sami) Kazi