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.

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 and The Generation Gap

The value of this short video, for me, is it highlights the generational technology divide (even between people who work with youngsters).

KM & Technology

I like to think that KM isn’t entirely about technology, but there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s largely technology based. Will older, non-techie people will be able to handle KM or even be included in a KM program? If people don’t even know what some of these tech tools are, e.g. blogs, wikis, realistically, what will be the chances they’ll ever use them…? Practically none, I’d say.

Litmus Test

Is it the case that aptitude and appetite for KM can be discovered by looking at a person’s aptitude and appetite for technology? Would that be a quick litmus test when kicking off a new KM program? I ask this question even though I’m a firm (hopeful?) believer that KM is more than technology.

Two Camps

As a KM practitioner, would it be reasonable to divide organizations into two camps: tech and non-tech? At the very least, perhaps it would spare one the frustration of trying to convert un-convertibles or shove square pegs into round holes. Could you save yourself the trouble from the outset of trying to ‘lead a horse to water’ and just tailor your KM initiatives to the two camps. You could have your “hard” KM, e.g. document management systems, and your “soft” KM, e.g. sharing and learning.

One immediate flaw I can see is that the “tech” KM people would blast away from the “non-tech” people. The exponential power of technology would mean that a person participating in wikis and blogs, etc. would make far more headway than the people holding monthly sharing events.

Indicators

It may well be the stinging fact that the aptitude for technology is the simple “in/out” test for KM. Even though KM isn’t all about technology, perhaps it’s a lead indicator of the type of people who are sharers, codifiers, thinkers, do-ers, experimenters, self-teachers, etc. It’s a bit rough, but could it be the case that a lack of interest in technology will lead to a person being a poor “knowledge worker”? If this is the case, then perhaps it isn’t an age thing, it’s more of a personality thing?

Question

Bottom line question: from a KM practitioner’s perspective, do you try to bring everyone along or do you cut bait and focus on those who are are “tech friendly”?

Planning on becoming a KM practioner? Read this!

Anyone thinking of pursuing a career as a KM consultant should read this paper. It captures very accurately the challenges facing KM practitioners in their daily work.

“The Gospel of Knowledge Management in and out of a Professional Community “

Norman Makoto Su, Hiroko Wilensky, David Redmiles, Gloria Mark
Department of Informatics
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, California 92697-3440, USA
{normsu, hwilensk, redmiles, gmark}@ics.uci.edu

Institute for Software Research (PDF)

Institute for Software Research (HTML)

ACM Portal

IBM & NYPD – “Fighting crime with ones and zeros”

I saw this IBM infomercial over the weekend and thought it was a compelling case for KM. It’s probably a bit more on the information management side of things but I’d have no problem using it to (vividly) illustrate the ethos of knowledge management and some of the approaches.

Here’s the link to the vid on YouTube and a link to IBM’s site. Here’s a case study if you’re into reading material.

(Production notes: Agency: Ogilvy, New York. Directed by Jeff Feuerzeig of Maysles Films, New York. Shot March 21, 2007. Full details in Shoot)

Apples & Ideas…

For me, this quote by George Bernard Shaw, sums up the essence of KM:

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw

3 strata of KM

I would suggest that there are 3 strata of KM in existence:

1) Academia, where KM is researched and taught

2) Consultants who implement KM programs for organisations

3) Organisations who practice KM as a by-product of their work, e.g. stock brokers

The first two strata are explicit while the third is implicit.  These, in my opinion, are the avenues of opportunity for practitioners in the area of KM.

KM should be like AC

Knowledge management in a company should be like air-conditioning. It should just be there, part of the climate. Staff shouldn’t have to worry about it or try and explicitly implement it (except perhaps at the start of a new initiative). It should be part of the culture. If a subtle awareness is instilled by top management, staff will be practising it without consciously realising it. It will be effortless. It will be what sets a company apart from its competitors. It will become part of their work but not their job (like having security awareness without becoming a security guard).

“Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense” – NYTimes

New York Times

November 12, 2006, Sunday

By JOHN MARKOFF (NYT); National Desk

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 11 — From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.

Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.

Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.

But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.

The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.

“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”

Web 2.0, which describes the ability to seamlessly connect applications (like geographic mapping) and services (like photo-sharing) over the Internet, has in recent months become the focus of dot-com-style hype in Silicon Valley. But commercial interest in Web 3.0 — or the “semantic Web,” for the idea of adding meaning — is only now emerging.

The classic example of the Web 2.0 era is the “mash-up” — for example, connecting a rental-housing Web site with Google Maps to create a new, more useful service that automatically shows the location of each rental listing.

In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.”

Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacation package that was planned as meticulously as if it had been assembled by a human travel agent.

How such systems will be built, and how soon they will begin providing meaningful answers, is now a matter of vigorous debate both among academic researchers and commercial technologists. Some are focused on creating a vast new structure to supplant the existing Web; others are developing pragmatic tools that extract meaning from the existing Web.

But all agree that if such systems emerge, they will instantly become more commercially valuable than today’s search engines, which return thousands or even millions of documents but as a rule do not answer questions directly.

Underscoring the potential of mining human knowledge is an extraordinarily profitable example: the basic technology that made Google possible, known as “Page Rank,” systematically exploits human knowledge and decisions about what is significant to order search results. (It interprets a link from one page to another as a “vote,” but votes cast by pages considered popular are weighted more heavily.)

Today researchers are pushing further. Mr. Spivack’s company, Radar Networks, for example, is one of several working to exploit the content of social computing sites, which allow users to collaborate in gathering and adding their thoughts to a wide array of content, from travel to movies.

Radar’s technology is based on a next-generation database system that stores associations, such as one person’s relationship to another (colleague, friend, brother), rather than specific items like text or numbers.

One example that hints at the potential of such systems is KnowItAll, a project by a group of University of Washington faculty members and students that has been financed by Google. One sample system created using the technology is Opine, which is designed to extract and aggregate user-posted information from product and review sites.

One demonstration project focusing on hotels “understands” concepts like room temperature, bed comfort and hotel price, and can distinguish between concepts like “great,” “almost great” and “mostly O.K.” to provide useful direct answers. Whereas today’s travel recommendation sites force people to weed through long lists of comments and observations left by others, the Web. 3.0 system would weigh and rank all of the comments and find, by cognitive deduction, just the right hotel for a particular user.

“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”

In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things.

Researchers and entrepreneurs say that while it is unlikely that there will be complete artificial-intelligence systems any time soon, if ever, the content of the Web is already growing more intelligent. Smart Webcams watch for intruders, while Web-based e-mail programs recognize dates and locations. Such programs, the researchers say, may signal the impending birth of Web 3.0.

“It’s a hot topic, and people haven’t realized this spooky thing about how much they are depending on A.I.,” said W. Daniel Hillis, a veteran artificial-intelligence researcher who founded Metaweb Technologies here last year.

Like Radar Networks, Metaweb is still not publicly describing what its service or product will be, though the company’s Web site states that Metaweb intends to “build a better infrastructure for the Web.”

“It is pretty clear that human knowledge is out there and more exposed to machines than it ever was before,” Mr. Hillis said.

Both Radar Networks and Metaweb have their roots in part in technology development done originally for the military and intelligence agencies. Early research financed by the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency predated a pioneering call for a semantic Web made in 1999 by Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web a decade earlier.

Intelligence agencies also helped underwrite the work of Doug Lenat, a computer scientist whose company, Cycorp of Austin, Tex., sells systems and services to the government and large corporations. For the last quarter-century Mr. Lenat has labored on an artificial-intelligence system named Cyc that he claimed would some day be able to answer questions posed in spoken or written language — and to reason.

Cyc was originally built by entering millions of common-sense facts that the computer system would “learn.” But in a lecture given at Google earlier this year, Mr. Lenat said, Cyc is now learning by mining the World Wide Web — a process that is part of how Web 3.0 is being built.

During his talk, he implied that Cyc is now capable of answering a sophisticated natural-language query like: “Which American city would be most vulnerable to an anthrax attack during summer?”

Separately, I.B.M. researchers say they are now routinely using a digital snapshot of the six billion documents that make up the non-pornographic World Wide Web to do survey research and answer questions for corporate customers on diverse topics, such as market research and corporate branding.

Daniel Gruhl, a staff scientist at I.B.M.’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., said the data mining system, known as Web Fountain, has been used to determine the attitudes of young people on death for a insurance company and was able to choose between the terms “utility computing” and “grid computing,” for an I.B.M. branding effort.

“It turned out that only geeks liked the term ‘grid computing,’ ” he said.

I.B.M. has used the system to do market research for television networks on the popularity of shows by mining a popular online community site, he said. Additionally, by mining the “buzz” on college music Web sites, the researchers were able to predict songs that would hit the top of the pop charts in the next two weeks — a capability more impressive than today’s market research predictions.

There is debate over whether systems like Cyc will be the driving force behind Web 3.0 or whether intelligence will emerge in a more organic fashion, from technologies that systematically extract meaning from the existing Web. Those in the latter camp say they see early examples in services like del.icio.us and Flickr, the bookmarking and photo-sharing systems acquired by Yahoo, and Digg, a news service that relies on aggregating the opinions of readers to find stories of interest.

In Flickr, for example, users “tag” photos, making it simple to identify images in ways that have eluded scientists in the past.

“With Flickr you can find images that a computer could never find,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of research at Yahoo. “Something that defied us for 50 years suddenly became trivial. It wouldn’t have become trivial without the Web.”

“Silicon Valley’s High-Tech Hunt for Colleague” NYTimes

I think this is an amzing example of KM in action… even though that’s not what it’s about.

NYTimes
February 3, 2007
By KATIE HAFNER

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 2 — When James Gray failed to return home from a sailing trip on Sunday night, Silicon Valley’s best and brightest went out to help find him.

After all, Dr. Gray, 63, a Microsoft researcher, is one of their own.

The United States Coast Guard, which started a search Sunday night, suspended it on Thursday, after sending aircraft and boats to scour 132,000 square miles of ocean, stretching from the Channel Islands in Southern California to the Oregon border. Teams turned up nothing, not so much as a shard of aluminum hull or a swatch of sail from Dr. Gray’s 40-foot sailboat, Tenacious.

In the meantime, as word swept through the high-technology community, dozens of Dr. Gray’s colleagues, friends and former students began banding together on Monday to supplement the Coast Guard’s efforts with the tool they know best: computer technology.

The flurry of activity, which began in earnest on Tuesday, escalated as the days and nights passed. A veritable Who’s Who of computer scientists from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, NASA and universities across the country spent sleepless nights writing ad hoc software, creating a blog and reconfiguring satellite images so that dozens of volunteers could pore over them, searching for a speck of red hull and white deck among a sea of gray pixels.

Coast Guard officials said they had never before seen such a concerted, technically creative effort carried out by friends and family of a missing sailor. “This is the largest strictly civilian, privately sponsored search effort I have ever seen,” said Capt. David Swatland, deputy commander of the Coast Guard sector in San Francisco, who has spent most of his 23-year career in search and rescue.

On Tuesday evening, as the Coast Guard’s search continued, Joseph M. Hellerstein, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, sent out an e-mail message with the subject: “Urgent … Jim Gray.” One recipient, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, wrote back within an hour, and offered to enlist Google Earth’s satellite imaging expertise.

By Wednesday, Professor Hellerstein had started a blog and earth sciences experts at the Ames Research Center of NASA in Moffett Field, Calif., had sprung into action. They secured the promise of help from a high-altitude aircraft equipped with a high-resolution digital camera that was already scheduled for a flight Friday from Dryden Research Center in Southern California but whose pilot could make sure his path included the search area.

By Thursday morning, in response to calls from Google, NASA and the Coast Guard, DigitalGlobe, an imaging company in Longmont, Colo., had commanded its satellite to capture images of strips of the coastline based on the most likely areas where Dr. Gray’s boat might have drifted.

Throughout the day, Dr. Gray’s friends sent out low-flying private planes to search the ocean and hidden coves along the coastline that the Coast Guard planes might not have been able to reach.

By Friday morning, more planes were sent out.

Dr. Gray, a renowned computer scientist and skilled amateur sailor, set out on a calm, clear morning last Sunday for a daylong trip to the Farallon Islands west of the Golden Gate, to scatter his mother’s ashes. His wife, Donna Carnes, reported him missing at 8:35 Sunday night. As of Friday there was still no trace of him.

Professor Hellerstein said it was unusual for him and his circle of colleagues to feel so helpless.

“It’s a group of people who are used to getting stuff done,” he said of the highly accomplished group of dozens of computer scientists who have stepped in to help. “We build stuff. We build companies. We write software. And when there are bugs we fix them.”

The intense search is also a testament to the reverence with which Dr. Gray is regarded among computer scientists. And it speaks volumes about the unusually strong glue that binds the technical community.

“The number of people who feel they owe him in so many ways, personally and professionally, as a role model and friend is incredible,” Professor Hellerstein said.

Dr. Gray is a leader in the field of database systems and transaction processing and has received several computer science awards, including the prestigious Turing Award in 1998.

And there is an infinitesimal degree of separation between Dr. Gray and nearly everyone involved in the search for him.

“Nearly every major research project he worked on has been hugely influential on later research and products,” said Phil Bernstein, a principal researcher at Microsoft who is a colleague of Dr. Gray.

Mike Olson, vice president for embedded technology at the Oracle Corporation, who has worked with Dr. Gray on research projects, said Dr. Gray also happened to be a pioneer in applying computer science to data collected from buoys to gauge wind direction and sea surface conditions, as well as satellite imagery.

Thursday’s weather posed a problem for the satellite effort, as a layer cake of clouds hovered over the search area. “There definitely was a significant cloud cover,” said Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe. But because of the high and urgent demand for that particular strip, he said, the shot was taken.

Once the satellite’s images were received by imaging experts on Thursday, Digital Globe engineers worked on making them accessible to engineers at Amazon, who divided them into manageable sizes and posted them to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk site, which allows the general public to scrutinize images in search of various objects.

“This is a first sift through these images,” said Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon, who had Dr. Gray on his Ph.D. committee at Vrije University in Amsterdam. “If the volunteers see something, we ask them to please mark the image, and we’ll take all the images that have been marked and review them.”

Similarly, Microsoft’s Virtual Earth division, is having satellites capture high-resolution imagery in an area along the coastline and will post the images for volunteers to scrutinize. Microsoft is also collecting radar satellite images which penetrate clouds and is using them together with its Oceanview software, which can automatically detect vessels.

Lt. Amy Marrs, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, said that should a volunteer find something in one of the satellite images that appeared to be a “convincing and tangible” lead, the Coast Guard would follow up.

Lieutenant Marrs said it was highly unusual for there to be no trace whatsoever of a missing vessel, not even an oil slick.

As the mystery deepened, speculation among the public increased: grief-induced suicide, perhaps, or a heart attack; a run-in with a band of pirates or a pod of orca whales; a collision with a partly sunken cargo container.

But most of the computer scientists preferred to remain scientifically sound. As of Friday, the blog dedicated to the search had started filling up with ideas and educated guesses about Dr. Gray’s cellphone, which had transmitted a signal as late as 7:30 Sunday evening, an hour before he was reported missing. And more private planes went up, with a run down the California coastline.

Prof. James Frew, an associate professor of environmental information management at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who has worked with Dr. Gray and is helping to coordinate the search, said he was uncertain at first about how the Coast Guard would react to the scientists’ involvement.

“It wouldn’t have surprised me to get a brush off,” Professor Frew said. “They’re professionals, and they know what they’re doing, and here comes this army of nerds, bashing down the doors. But they’ve dealt with us very nicely.”

Several of the scientists said they preferred not to speculate on when they might cease their efforts to find Dr. Gray. “I prefer to stay concrete and positive for now,” Professor Hellerstein said.

Help Find Jim Gray
http://www.helpfindjim.com