New blog…

Hi folks,

I’ve decided to retire this blog and set up an new one at trovekm.com.

Participatory Leadership – trust builder?

I attended the 2008 Annual Partnership Conference yesterday held by the National Centre for Partnership and Performance (NCPP).

The theme of the conference was “Participatory Leadership Identified as Key to Public Service Reform”.

It was set against the backdrop of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation & Development (OECD) major review of the Irish Civil Service.

My motivation for attending was to validate a hunch I had about trust. One of the biggest obstacles I encounter as a KM practitioner is people’s lack of interest, anxiousness, fear, etc. KM is often seen as a tool of management with no upside for the employee. Not an unreasonable view given that I am invariably hired by management. It is said time and again that without employee engagement you are not really doing KM. And yet, for the most part, employees have no interest in doing KM. I believe it comes down to a matter of trust. As an extreme example, an employee may well fear that they might be “downsized” once they have revealed all their valuable tacit knowledge. I can appreciate that.

Participatory leadership could be one way of resolving this issue of trust. If an organisation engages in real participatory management where all views are represented at the table and people feel they have a real input, then all initiatives that are carried out, including KM, will have the impermatur of legitimacy and trust. It’s pretty straightforward – people are more apt to cooperate and join in processes that they initiated.

I posed this question to the panel and was told that, yes, evidence has shown that participatory management has been shown to be major builder of trust in organisations.

My follow-up question was, how to get started with a participatory leadership program? I found the answer to this less satisfactory. In my mind, I thought there was a government program that an organization could sign up for. I had visions of mentors, booklets, hand-holding, etc. Instead it was recommended that the best way to get started is with “service reform”. That is, change the way you serve your customers.

For me this was a big disconnect. I thought it would have started with, say, next Monday get all employees together in the conference room and tell them, “From now on, we will be practicing participatory leadership. This means…. x, y, z. Over the coming months we will be holding lectures, workshops, forming teams, etc., etc.” Instead, the view seems to be start from the outside and work inwards. Maybe I misunderstood…

I am not an participatory management expert, but I think the process should start internally. Surely, the participation is between staff and management, not between organization and customers? An organization could always change the way it offers its services without touching participatory management.

I’ll have to do some more reading on this one. I think it holds great potential for KM. Of course, like a lot of management initiatives, it could be a fig-leaf for business as usual. A sop to the staff. That, however, is beyond the scope of this post which is, to say, if participatory management is carried out properly, one of the side benefits could be a much more positive reaction to KM.

KM Localization

Localization is critical when it comes to the human side of KM. That is to say, the ability to empathize with your subjects.

Because there is so much weirdness when it comes to “people-KM”, e.g. fear of loosing job/power/advantage, etc., it is vital that the KM practitioner is able to lessen these anxieties. One of the most important elements is that he/she is not seen as a complete outsider. Sometimes the far-away-prophet status of a consultant is useful, but it is not a good label to have when dealing with rank and file staff. Good for winning the contract, bad for doing the work. It’s a fine line. Obviously you are an outsider so trying to be too chummy will come across as insincere (and possibly appear more sinister). But you have to understand and identify with the people undergoing the process. How you speak, how you dress, how you conduct yourself, etc. will all send powerful signals of intent.

Remember, there is a fear of KM. It carries with it am implicit threat, no matter how you spin it. When you, as a KM consultant, walk through the door you are perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a threat. All our lives we build up and improve our knowledge. It’s an innately personal thing. In work, it’s where our paycheck comes from, the next promotion, the annual bonus, etc. It’s where a huge amount of our prestige comes from, especially if you’re smart (and nobody likes to be thought of as dumb). As far as most people are concerned, you want to take their knowledge. The higher up the corporate ladder you go, the more there is to take and the more there is for that person to loose. Knowledge isn’t like any other quality. In the same way an expensive suit or car can make a person fit in or measure up, knowledge cannot be simply taken off a shelf. People can have all the Cole-Hahns, the Callaways, the BMWs, but they know that it’s their knowledge/their smarts, that’s truly what makes them superior (unless they’re really stupid/shallow). Naturally then, any discussion or attention on this area is going to elicit a visceral reaction like none other. (I’ll get into the other side of the equation in a later posting, i.e. what’s in it for them, but for now I’m just focusing on the qualities needed as a KM consultant). Therefore, trust is a key factor in being a successful KM consultant. More so than other consulting profession, the ability to connect with people and show concern/respect for their feelings is a vital skill for KM consultants. The difficult thing is, it can’t really be taught and it certainly can’t be faked. If you are naturally imbued with personable qualities, your professional life will be that bit easier and more productive.

One of the implications of this is (and this isn’t going sound very “PC” or cosmopolitan) if you’re operating in France, use French consultants; in Poland, use Polish; Malaysia, use Malaysians, etc. Even within countries, if you’re in Glasgow, use Glaswegians; Moscow, Muscovites, Los Angeles, Angelenos, etc. Of course there will be exceptions, but in general the closer you can get to embodying the outlook, concerns, thought processes, etc. the more insight you will have and consequently success.

A lot of this only comes with experience and a bit of trial and error. If you have err, just like at a social event, err on the side of being overdressed. You can always pull off the tie. Likewise with your demeanor, go in formal. It’s always easier to loosen up during the day. It’s easier to climb down and relax than it is to try and get back respect if people think you’re a joker. You don’t need to go too far down… you don’t want to become so empathetic that you forget what you’re being paid to do (”Stockholm syndrome”…?).

• You don’t want to be crawly/subservient
• You don’t want to be haughty
• You kinda of want to be one of the gang, but not too much that you’re overstepping social boundaries
• You don’t want to be too cool/laid back/aloof/disconnected
• You don’t want to be too intense
• You don’t want to be too alien

You need natural empathy, heaps of it and as fast as you can. It’s the Goldilocks equation: you don’t want to be too cool or too heated. You want to be just right.

Screen casting for L&D

I’m starting to experiment with screen casting to pilot some demonstrations under the L&D (learning & development) banner.

Not familiar with screen casting? Here’s a helpful article by Beth Kanter, “An Introduction to Screencasting”

I’m going to be testing the following free packages:

AviScreen

CamStudio

Wink

VirtualDub

Taksi

Windows Media Encoder

oRipa

We’ll see how the effort goes. Might have to go commercial.

MediaWiki vs Twiki

MediaWiki

I installed MediaWiki recently. It was pretty easy to install and get up and running. I started using it with a small group of staff members.

No User Permissions

All was going well until I realized there were no permissions on the pages. There was no way to give ownership rights. I thought this would be important to (a) stop people accidentally delelting posts; (b) prevent too much re-authoring of pages. This might seem to go against the very ethos of the wiki movement but I had been asked several times what’s to stop people monkeying around with pages and entries. Like any professional organisation, people are territorial and protective of their work. I had assured everybody that there were mechanisms to protect pages which authors/owners could set. I had to remember, that (a) we’re taking baby steps here, and (b) codification is more important at this stage than openness. The permissions I had touted turned out not to be possible with MediaWiki out of the box:

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Other restrictions

You may want to have pages editable only by their creator, or ban viewing of history, or any of a number of other things. Neither of these features are available in an unhacked version of MediaWiki. If you need more fine-grained permissions, see the #See also section for links to other wiki packages that are designed for this, as well as hacks that attempt to contort MediaWiki into something it’s not designed to be but may work anyway.http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Other_restrictions

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I decided to take a look at a couple of other packages: DekiWiki and Twiki.

Twiki

Twiki is pitched as an enterprise level wiki. It is way more than we need getting started but it does fulfilll a number of criteria: it has fine grained permissions and it looks like a traditional wiki. That was enough for me to get started.

Installation

Twiki has a number of install options: source code, installer bundle, VMWare platform. I took the middle option and downloaded most of what I needed: Twiki Release 4.2.0: zip. I downloaded and installed Perl from ActiveState. There are copious notes and instructions on Twiki so I won’t regurgitate here.

Perl error

The one thing that tripped me up for a few hours, that I want to mention, was configuring Perl. I got the following error when configuring Twiki. I kept getting: Permission denied at ../tools/rewriteshbang.pl line 71. At first I thought it was permissions on the files within, but it turned out the problem was my folders were “Read Only” (Windows XP). Simple to fix but cost me a couple of hours. Here’s a screen shot of the code – check out item #15.

That’s as far as I’ve got so far. More progress reports when I have them.

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DekiWiki

I checked out DekiWIki as well. It looked and behaved really well. However, I felt that users might get mixed up between it and our intranet. It looks more like a website than a wiki. This seems to be a trend in wikis… world’s colliding – wikis, websites, groupsites, self-authoring sites, mysites, personal homepages… All good stuff but I want something more traditionally “wiki” for this instance.

Running Ontopoly on Tomcat service

I’ve been playing around with Ontopoly topic map for the last week. It comes with its own Tomcat server. You have to start and stop Tomcat manually which is clunky. I wanted to have it run on my existing Tomcat server which I have set up as a service. There was no info out there about how to do it so this is what I did…

(If you’ve already downloaded Ontopoly this will be clear)

Copy these files over from OKS Samplers to Apache Software Foundation\Tomcat:

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\bin
[I copied everything over but didn’t replace/write-over anything - just added]

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\common\classes\log4j.properties
C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\common\classes\tm-sources.xml (this one took me a while to find and it’s *very important*)

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\conf\jaas.config (added)

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\logs
[copied everything over but didn’t replace/write-over anything - just added]

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\webapps
Omnigator (replaced entire folder)
Ontopoly (replaced entire folder)

C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\work\Catalina\localhost\ontopoly\SESSIONS.ser (replaced)
C:\Program Files\oks-samplers\apache-tomcat\work\Catalina\localhost\ontopoly\tldCache.ser (replaced)

I’m no Tomcat or Ontopoly expert so I can’t say specifically what these files do (apart from tm-sources.xml which points to all your topic map sources, like an index). Sufficive to say, they make Ontopoly work on Tomcat, which is all I wanted to achieve.

So now I’ve got Ontopoly running on my Tomcat service which means I can “localhost:8080″ into Ontolply anytime I want.

Nice!

KM and your health

It occurred to me that many things in life are not measured with explicit reference to finance and profit. The most obvious being health. We measure our health all the time without reference to money (unless perhaps if one is very sick or maybe a professional athlete). Health is seen as an end in itself. We simply want to look and feel good.

Health sells

There is an important lesson here for KM. Just because an activity is not measured in financial terms, it does not mean it isn’t important. Why else are gyms, dental practices, cosmetic surgeons, vitamin shops, personal trainers, sporting good stores and clothing manufactures (to name a few) booming? Our mountain trails, jogging paths, swimming pools, golf courses, basketball courts, yoga centers and other sporting arena are full of people seeking to improve or extend their health levels.

Prove it!

There is a drive and exigence among KM practitioners to prove the financial addition KM brings to an equation. And that’s understandable. When it comes to business conversations it is the (missing) elephant in the room. For KM, proving its value is both desirable and difficult. This is not very different from other “soft” services, such as HR or Public Relations, and contributes to significant frustration among its believers.

Explicit KM gains

Certainly, there are times when KM actions lead to obvious, quantifiable financial gains. The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has seen significant cuts in time to market resulting in millions of dollars extra profit. Several auto companies have had large cost savings through their KM programs.

Change in ethos

Perhaps, overall, KM should switch to a “health check” ethos? We all know being healthy brings many benefits, both financial and otherwise, but money is not foremost in our minds when we go for our annual check-up. After all, like the saying goes, “health is wealth”.

KM Mapping tools

I’m doing my dissertation on knowledge mapping, an elusive and misunderstood area, with tremendous potential for KM.

My supervisor advised me to look at XML Topic Maps, and boy, was she right! No other approach to mapping that I researched came close to really delivering.

For anyone interested, here’s a huge amount of information for a start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic_Maps

http://topicmap.com/topicmap/tools.html

This is a good place to start reading: The TAO of topic maps

I downloaded Ontopia and tm4j so far and am trying to install them. I’m more interested in a web based application as I want to deploy on an intranet.

I’ll be investigating these in the next few days.

In the meantime, check out this very comprehensive review by Margaret Hilsbos.

I’ve seen the future of KM…

…and it’s called SharePoint (at least from a technical perspective).

I know, I know, I know… SharePoint, SchmarePoint! Everything is about SharePoint these days! Well, here’s the reaction of a deep sceptic (namely, me). I never thought I’d be saying these words…

SharePoint

SharePoint

Scepticism
I was at a demo today at Version 1 in Dublin for SharePoint. I wasn’t really that jazzed about going because I wasn’t really interested in hearing about another software tool that claims to do KM. Even though I love the tech gadgets, a large part of me believes that KM is more than the tools. For years now snake-oil salemen have been hawking their kluged together, re-packaged software and calling it “Knowledge Management”. And for years it’s been disappointing and failing and taking down the reputation of KM. It’s not that I don’t like software, on the contrary, I really do. I just abhor the half-truths and mediocrity. I also don’t have any truck with the “IT=KM” notion. There’s a lot more to it than sticking in an install disc. As Patrick Lambe summed up perfectly in his post (which I love!):

“Oh Well, Time to Change Trade”

The Knowledge Management Toolkit

Anyway… I went along to the demo…

Sold!
Within 10 minutes I was sold! I couldn’t believe it. Everything after that was gravy. Without going through two hours-worth of detail, let me just sum up and say, from a KM perspective SharePoint offers me this:

Self-Service
For a start, it allows users “self-service”. They can update their own profile (YellowPages). They can build their own personal homepages (blogs, FaceBook, etc.) called ‘MySites”. They can build sub-sites and project pages in a snap, wiki-style. They don’t have to ask IT to help them with anything. It’s very Web 2.0.

Smart Centralization
It ties together several applications in one package. Many organizations currently have an intranet that incorporates/offers multi-functionality such as Expert Finder, Forums, Image Libraries, wikis, document managment, etc. Sometimes the intranet product doesn’t have all the tools so links are made out to the WikiMedia install or the Gallery2 application, or whatever add-on you need. In my experience, this ad hoc approach doesn’t work all that well for anybody (KM officer, IT Dept, users). I mean, it does work, but it could be better. I didn’t get a chance to really stress-test any of the functionality but if it does what it says it does it’s enormously powerful. I’d like to have kicked the tires more on the the document management function.

(random screen shot)

Wikis
(I’m singling out wikis for special mention because they’re useful, they’re all the rage, and I’m currently setting one up for a client)
An interesting thing I found was, I asked if SharePoint has a wiki function or if that’s obviated by all the self-publishing ability? The vendors were of the opinion that by virtue of the way SharePoint works (it’s self-authoring nature), it is a wiki-esque tool. There is no actual “wiki” button though a sub-site could be set up to fulfill this function if desires. They said the publishing/authoring functionality is a lot more customer-friendly than most wikis.

Extensibility
All I’m going to say here is, if you can think it up, SharePoint seems to be able to support it. From pages, to project spaces, sub-sites to plug-ins. There is a lot going on under the hood of this product. It’s totally up to you.

IT
SharePoint would (appear to) eliminate a lot of software struggles that have cost me loads of time in the past. This would allow me focus more productive energy on the KM side of the equation: culture, buy-in, education, externalisation, mapping, auditing, etc. I know IT is part and parcel of KM, in fact, that’s what drew me to the practice, I just don’t want to fight and struggle with it. It’s not time well spent and it detracts from the quality of the KM program. It’d be like a carpenter having to wrestle with his tools every step of the way on a job.

Anyway, that’s the edited version. There are several other highly interesting functions, such as: business intelligence reporting, enterprise search, workflow, content management, surveys, to name a few things. Overall, I would say that SharePoint will go a long way to doing KM whether you call it KM or not.

To say I’m pleasantly surprised would be a big understatement. There’s talk of installing the 180-day free trial version so if that happens, I’ll be making further posts.

More information
If you’re looking for more info you could do worse than contact Piaras MacDonnell at Version1. His e-mail is: Piaras.MacDonnell@version1.com . He and his colleague, Niall Moran (Microsoft “expert”) really know their stuff. Thanks for a great demo, guys!

Here’s a few useful links:
What is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server?

SharePoint – Wikipedia

SharePoint blogs

The Six Pillars of MOSS

Hosting my own blog.

I finally decided to try hosting my own blog.

Seminar

I attended a seminar during the week at the Irish Computer Society on blogging (actually, the title was “Web 2.0 – The Emerging Opportunities in Mass Collaboration”). The second of two presentations was given by Damian Mulley. I found Damian’s talk very useful from a strategic blogging perspective, i.e. if you’ve got a blog, how to get more out of it.

Damian recommended hosting your own blog instead of free siting. I’d been thinking of doing this for a while but mostly out of laziness I didn’t. Plus, I thought using WordPress would give me more powerful (aggregated?) exposure. I’m not sure if that turned out to be true.

GoDaddy

Since I host with GoDaddy (whom I find pretty good, despite all the bad press out there) I used their automated installation option and set up WordPress on my own site: www.kmassets.com. It was pretty hassel free insofar as they set up the database and everything in one or two clicks. I also set up a subdomain instead of using folders. I’ve always liked sites that organise in this manner.

Subdomain

One thing that tripped me up for a few hours was I think you need to set up the subdomain before you install WordPress. My first attempt didn’t take but then I did it the other way round (set up subdomain, then installed blog). That could have just been me monkeying around though.

Widgets/add-ons

I discovered you have to select and upload any widgets/add-ons you want as the install comes bare bones. Not a big deal for me. I also discovered that there are many more templates for own-hosting than free-siting. Of course, I stuck with the same “simpla theme”. I’ll get experimental over the weekend…

Driving traffic

The main reason I switched over was, per one of Damien’s recommendations, it helps drive traffic to one’s website. The example he gave was IceCreamIreland which is a relatively small scale blog/webiste operation run by Kieran Murphy in Cork. Kieran has a huge Google presence even though he does it all himself. It’s due to his regular blog postings, another key point, according to Damien.

Exploration

Anyway, for me, most of this was a technical exploration. Since I don’t have anything on my website yet the benefits will be minimal. I’ll be curious over time to see if it increases my Google rankings. Sure, it’s all good fun!

Opps! Nearly forgot… here’s the link where I’ll be posting from now on… blog.kmassets.com.