James Robertson’s recent post Collaboration tools are anti knowledge sharing? got me thinking about the introduction of technology-enabled collaboration into large organizations. (Thanks to Jack Vinson for bringing this article to my attention via Twitter).
All in Knowledge Management
It's unusual for me to be interviewed. I usually do interviews in connection with my own research or my own client work. Over the past month, however, I've been interviewed five different times by five different people:
An Associated Press story on Yahoo! News titled AMA wants doctors to swap idea online describes how the AMA has started an ad-free, subscriber based network for use by physicans in conjunction with Sermo, Inc. The network is used for sharing questions, answers, and medical opinions.
The best podcasts I’ve heard recently on enterprise adoption of social media are two interviews with Toby Redshaw of Motorola by Dan Bricklin. One is from March of 2006 and the other from March 2007.
In a previous post I commented on the need to take into account, when developing strategies for implementing enterprise content management (ECM) systems, how social media can support not only internal and external corporate communications but also corporate innovation processes. In this post I discuss some of the issues associated with defining and assigning ownership and responsibility for such systems.
It's amazing what you can find by searching the web -- if you know how to look.
I've been heads-down for the past few weeks on a client project, a strategic market analysis for an international outsourcing firm. I've been researching available public sources of sales and technology trends in a variety of markets. I've been aggressively pursuing a variety of web based research options as well as purchasing research documents in a few key areas.
For my first weekly podcast I’ve recorded a twelve-minute commentary on All Kind Food’s “weekly top ten posts” as of November 29, 2006. To download the podcast, click the microphone:
Web 2.0 and the Manhattan Project
While listening to a podcast of a recent interview with Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, I was struck by the question, “What if the Manhattan Project had been conducted using the collaborative and social networking tools we now have?”
Luis Suarez recently blogged and podcasted about social bookmarking services. He highly recommends BLINKLIST, a service that I have not used.
I have been using RAWSUGAR, COGENZ, and CONNECTBEAM, so I also have been forming some personal opinions about social bookmarking.
One blog I read is the Microsoft Knowledge Network Team Blog (registration required). It describes development and features of the "Knowledge Network" product that will accompany Microsoft's upcoming Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 which is also in Beta status.
Several things stand out based on this interview with Oscar in combination with information gleaned from my previous interviews and research:
Rod Boothby (or someone using Rod’s name) recently stopped by and left the following comment attached to my recent accelerating network effects post:
The IT Director in a Large Manufacturing Company Discusses "Baby Boomer Brain Drain"
Last week I interviewed “Ferris” (not his real name) about how his company is handling the pending retirement of senior IT staff.
Ferris is the IT Director in a large manufacturing company. Ferris’ company doesn’t have the mix of custom legacy Cobol and Assembler based mainframe systems that Boris the Insurance Company CIO has.
Last week I interviewed “Boris” (not his real name) about his and his company’s handling of the pending retirement of senior IT staff who are critical to the maintenance and operation of a number of his company’s business-critical mainframe legacy systems.
I was initially interested in learning whether Boris thought that modern social networking and collaboration tools might be useful in documenting and transferring the specialised expertise staff needed for maintaining critical systems. Instead, the discussion took a different direction and revealed some underlying issues that go beyond technology enabled knowledge sharing.
Back on July 17 I wrote about the potential impact of pending retirement related “baby boomer brain drain” on IT departments, especially those heavily invested in supporting legacy mainframe systems.
As a followup I asked for research interviews with several CIO’s I know in order to get a better handle on the issue and to find out whether emerging Web 2.0 and social networking and collaboration technologies might be supportive of knowledge transfer to younger staff.
Paul Carney provided this insightful comment on my earlier post titled What if Communities Don’t Share Their Expertise?:
Keeping people connected in order to share expertise is a great idea, but the problem is that those people who have a large amount of knowledge tend to grow very large networks.
Once upon a time I helped manage a complex post-merger system consolidation project where two mainframe based systems were being integrated. The client hadn’t done a lot of projects like that and hired outside consultants to help with the project planning, management, and execution.
We found out quickly that a few key client staff members were extremely scarce resources. One was a senior consultant who had been brought back by the client after his retirement. He was, hands-down, THE absolute expert on the target system’s very large and very complex database. I’ll call him “Alex.”
Expertise Management and World of Warcraft
While researching the topic “expertise management” as a follow up to earlier articles posted here, I came across a fascinating article concerning the automated construction of an “expertise database” that I think has some relevance for enterprise expertise management.
I recently wrote here about using social networking and information technology to improve access to expert knowledge within the enterprise. Luis Suarez has also commented about the "knowledge management" aspects of this idea.
An interesting experiment incorporating some of these ideas is already underway here in the United States -- the Peer to Patent Project.
In the first article in this series I commented on the web based evolution of systems for matching up experts (and their expertise) with users based on relationship management and social software technologies.
In this article I discuss the implementation of such systems within large organizations