Knowledge Management MeFites - I need your help
July 18, 2013 8:38 AM Subscribe
In a week's time I have to give a short (under 10 mins) presentation on Knowledge Management. I know nothing about this subject and so I'm asking for the help of the hivemind.
The exact topic is as follows:
“You have been asked to recommend a change/improvement to the way we share knowledge:
* what is your recommendation?
* how would you go about ‘making it happen’?; and
* how would you know/be able to measure that your recommendation had been successful?”
What I intend to talk about is this: my organisation employs nearly 4,000 people and, apart from the colleagues I work with closely, I don't know what specific knowledge or technical expertise other staff members working in other areas might have which would be useful to the work that I do. I'd like to be able to identify ways of harnessing that knowledge, but I have absolutely no clue about how I'd put this into a short presentation.
Powerpoint won't be available, so this has to be a spoken/paper exercise.
Are there any KM professionals out there in MeFiLand who can direct me to specific resources that would be helpful in putting this presentation together? Nothing too technical, it has to be fairly basic and accessible, as it's being presented to people who themselves aren't KM people either.
The exact topic is as follows:
“You have been asked to recommend a change/improvement to the way we share knowledge:
* what is your recommendation?
* how would you go about ‘making it happen’?; and
* how would you know/be able to measure that your recommendation had been successful?”
What I intend to talk about is this: my organisation employs nearly 4,000 people and, apart from the colleagues I work with closely, I don't know what specific knowledge or technical expertise other staff members working in other areas might have which would be useful to the work that I do. I'd like to be able to identify ways of harnessing that knowledge, but I have absolutely no clue about how I'd put this into a short presentation.
Powerpoint won't be available, so this has to be a spoken/paper exercise.
Are there any KM professionals out there in MeFiLand who can direct me to specific resources that would be helpful in putting this presentation together? Nothing too technical, it has to be fairly basic and accessible, as it's being presented to people who themselves aren't KM people either.
Best answer: A great resource is here. They also have white papers.
The key themes they list are:
- Business Intelligence
- Business Process Management
- Collaboration
- Competitive Intelligence
- Content Management
- Customer Relationship Management
- Digital Asset Management
- Document Management/Conversion
- E-mail Management
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Enterprise Search
- Image, Forms, Document Capture
- Intellectual Property Management
- Knowledge Management
- Mobile
- Opinion
- Portals
- Records Management, E-Discovery, Compliance
- SharePoint
- Workflow
I would suggest there is a hole in that list: Big Data (although its sorta covered in business intelligence)
The most interesting themes there are, in my view: collaboration (which fits into what you want to talk about), content management and search, and big data.
Perhaps a way to go about the presentation is to start like this:
- What the big themes are in KM
- What you want to talk about: collaboration
- Brief summary, with factoids, of the risks/benefits of not collaborating/collobarating
- What collaboration means: this is a huge topic in its own right, and you can take this from the view of company culture, the social business, accessibility to human capital, accessibility to the outputs of human capital, the metadata of human capital (such as what xingcat mentions - the projects people have worked on, their skills), workflow and processes.
- How you go about making it happen - I'd keep this really top level. But in short, the three big themes are culture, technology and process.
- How so you measure success: really hard. I'd suggest a user survey, and top that off with specific examples of collaboration or knowledge sharing as a result of a specific initiative.
I'm not a knowledge manager, but I've worked in the wider space for over 15 years and advise companies on how to make their information more relevant, accessible etc.
posted by MuffinMan at 9:00 AM on July 18, 2013 [4 favorites]
The key themes they list are:
- Business Intelligence
- Business Process Management
- Collaboration
- Competitive Intelligence
- Content Management
- Customer Relationship Management
- Digital Asset Management
- Document Management/Conversion
- E-mail Management
- Enterprise Application Integration
- Enterprise Search
- Image, Forms, Document Capture
- Intellectual Property Management
- Knowledge Management
- Mobile
- Opinion
- Portals
- Records Management, E-Discovery, Compliance
- SharePoint
- Workflow
I would suggest there is a hole in that list: Big Data (although its sorta covered in business intelligence)
The most interesting themes there are, in my view: collaboration (which fits into what you want to talk about), content management and search, and big data.
Perhaps a way to go about the presentation is to start like this:
- What the big themes are in KM
- What you want to talk about: collaboration
- Brief summary, with factoids, of the risks/benefits of not collaborating/collobarating
- What collaboration means: this is a huge topic in its own right, and you can take this from the view of company culture, the social business, accessibility to human capital, accessibility to the outputs of human capital, the metadata of human capital (such as what xingcat mentions - the projects people have worked on, their skills), workflow and processes.
- How you go about making it happen - I'd keep this really top level. But in short, the three big themes are culture, technology and process.
- How so you measure success: really hard. I'd suggest a user survey, and top that off with specific examples of collaboration or knowledge sharing as a result of a specific initiative.
I'm not a knowledge manager, but I've worked in the wider space for over 15 years and advise companies on how to make their information more relevant, accessible etc.
posted by MuffinMan at 9:00 AM on July 18, 2013 [4 favorites]
I have dabbled in KM throughout my entire career, and the advice above is very good.
In the short term and apropos of xingcat's comment, you can sort of fake your way through it (if necessary) with great graphics provided for free at MindMeister.
Really, if you have to fake it, graphics are the way to go, even if all you "graph" are the "challenges" to KM in your organization.
posted by digitalprimate at 10:27 AM on July 18, 2013
In the short term and apropos of xingcat's comment, you can sort of fake your way through it (if necessary) with great graphics provided for free at MindMeister.
Really, if you have to fake it, graphics are the way to go, even if all you "graph" are the "challenges" to KM in your organization.
posted by digitalprimate at 10:27 AM on July 18, 2013
Response by poster: Thank you. This is great. xingcat, I may well take you up on the MeMail over the next few days. You guys rock!
posted by essexjan at 11:44 PM on July 18, 2013
posted by essexjan at 11:44 PM on July 18, 2013
"You have been asked to recommend a change/improvement to the way we share knowledge...
Powerpoint won't be available, so this has to be a spoken/paper exercise."
Maybe you could start with a suggestion of a projector and Keynote?
essexjan: "What I intend to talk about is this: my organisation employs nearly 4,000 people and, apart from the colleagues I work with closely, I don't know what specific knowledge or technical expertise other staff members working in other areas might have which would be useful to the work that I do. I'd like to be able to identify ways of harnessing that knowledge, but I have absolutely no clue about how I'd put this into a short presentation"
In my field, best practice falls into three general ideas:
1. Read-Only Fridays. This one's a two-fer. You stop making serious changes before leaving for a weekend, and you have a dedicated window for documentation and information gathering.
2. Wiki culture. if there's a typo, fix it. If the process is poorly documented, fix it. Lean towards permissive models.
3. Revision control. Proper revision control gives us insight not only into which change broke something, but also who used to work on a given project, and which parts they're most familiar with. Even in system administration the concept of "Infrastructure as code" means we take the same approach as software developers.
These three together give us a data set, and the tools to search it.
As for metrics, it's simple to describe but nontrivial to implement or improve. Your metrics should represent both uptake (the number of searches made), and the quality of your search results. To borrow a tactic from Google, poor quality search results can be identified by someone making a search, being given the results, and immediately making a new search without clicking on any of the results. I think this model can be adapted for your purpose. Crucially, you'll have to solve the enterprise silo by which every file and document is default deny in the name of compliance, and documents are stored in formats unamenable to search.
Maybe you'd be better off advocating that everyone just use public internet sites; LinkedIn for finding employees with needed skills, Youtube for training videos, and StackExchange for Q&A. ^_^
posted by pwnguin at 1:15 AM on July 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
Powerpoint won't be available, so this has to be a spoken/paper exercise."
Maybe you could start with a suggestion of a projector and Keynote?
essexjan: "What I intend to talk about is this: my organisation employs nearly 4,000 people and, apart from the colleagues I work with closely, I don't know what specific knowledge or technical expertise other staff members working in other areas might have which would be useful to the work that I do. I'd like to be able to identify ways of harnessing that knowledge, but I have absolutely no clue about how I'd put this into a short presentation"
In my field, best practice falls into three general ideas:
1. Read-Only Fridays. This one's a two-fer. You stop making serious changes before leaving for a weekend, and you have a dedicated window for documentation and information gathering.
2. Wiki culture. if there's a typo, fix it. If the process is poorly documented, fix it. Lean towards permissive models.
3. Revision control. Proper revision control gives us insight not only into which change broke something, but also who used to work on a given project, and which parts they're most familiar with. Even in system administration the concept of "Infrastructure as code" means we take the same approach as software developers.
These three together give us a data set, and the tools to search it.
As for metrics, it's simple to describe but nontrivial to implement or improve. Your metrics should represent both uptake (the number of searches made), and the quality of your search results. To borrow a tactic from Google, poor quality search results can be identified by someone making a search, being given the results, and immediately making a new search without clicking on any of the results. I think this model can be adapted for your purpose. Crucially, you'll have to solve the enterprise silo by which every file and document is default deny in the name of compliance, and documents are stored in formats unamenable to search.
Maybe you'd be better off advocating that everyone just use public internet sites; LinkedIn for finding employees with needed skills, Youtube for training videos, and StackExchange for Q&A. ^_^
posted by pwnguin at 1:15 AM on July 19, 2013 [1 favorite]
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Much of what I believe you say you'd want to gather is called tacit knowledge. In a nutshell, that's knowing what people know, even if they don't know they know it. (That's possibly the most convoluted way I could have put that, I understand.)
Having a directory of the knowledge the people in your organization have is a great way to start. I've been involved in "Who Knows What?" projects where directories of employees show not only their titles and departments, but also what industries they've worked in, what major projects they've worked on, and what other knowledge they may have that they're willing to share.
I'm happy to chat with you about this, if you'd like. Memail me if you're interested.
posted by xingcat at 8:50 AM on July 18, 2013 [2 favorites]