Category: Knowledge Management

How to Find Answers Within Your Company – Would Quora Work?

Making sure that people get the right answer to questions is vital to the success of a business. From a compliance perspective, it’s important that questions in the compliance domain get answered correctly. It’s just as important that compliance professionals can find the correct answers to their questions.

On one side you have GRC, trying to answer questions related to governance, risk and compliance  in an integrated platform. But lots of questions will still be ad hoc and outside the information in the GRC systems.

One of the latest Web 2.0 darlings is Quora. It’s a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by the community.

Quora

I found Quora mildly interesting, but a compliance nightmare.

From the perspective of a lawyer, answering legal questions in a public platform is fraught with peril. I found most of the legal questions to be vague and incomplete. It’s an easy trap for a less-careful lawyer to inadvertently create an attorney-client relationship or legal liability. For financial professionals, you can easily trip over the requirements for record-keeping and preapproval if the answer related to financial advice. (I have only answered questions about snowboarding.)

I view Quora as another knowledge management platform placed in the public web. It’s interesting to see it work, but I’m skeptical of its viability. I’ve seen many question and answer platforms come and go. Quora adds the improvements of requiring registration, community run organization and rating of answers.

Quora seems to still be at the stage of altruism. People are asking questions and answering them out of curiosity and the willingness to share. The marketers and self-serving, underemployed consultants will come eventually and fill it full of inane answers and ads.

Once the shiny newness wears off, what will keep someone coming back to contribute content? That has always been the problem of knowledge management. It’s hard to get the experts who really know the answer to contribute their response. A recent article in the MIT Sloan Management Review drove home this point: How to Find Answers Within Your Company.

Knowledge Markets

Altruism will only last so long and a person’s willingness to contribute will wane as the next fad comes along the web. The challenges and the needs are different when you bring a knowledge market, like Quora, inside your company.

The first generation of knowledge management was all about centralized systems. They produced mixed results. They ignored the market for knowledge and just imposed a top-down centralized structure to try capturing work product.

How to Find Answers Within Your Company points out that the system failed to place a value on contributed material or, if it did, the value was fixed. The failure to gain contribution was largely a failure to understand the economics of contribution. Bebya and Van Alstyne point to three forms of incentives: spendable currency, recognition for expertise and the opportunity to have a positive impact.

You can’t fix the price. Information that is more valuable than the price is less likely to be created. Experts won’t waste their time. When information is less valuable than the price, less-expert workers will volunteer just to get compensated. This is the classic knowledge management problem, getting the experts to contribute and highlighting the best content. The paper offers examples of knowledge systems that added a marketplace to better value and price contributions.

It’s not just about cash. Take FourSquare as an example. They use gameplay to encourage people to check-in to locations. Earn a badge or try to become mayor. They also offer the cash reward of specials offered by merchants.

For anyone interested in improving their ability to capture knowledge, the article provides lots of other great insights in what works and does not work in knowledge markets.

Sources:

Fourth of July and Compliance

With the Fourth of July on Sunday, most businesses are closed on July 5th. (We hate to waste a good holiday.) What better way to celebrate the independence of the United States than by taking the day off from work and watching stuff blow up.

In colonial times, official proclamations were read from the Old State House balcony, looking down State Street towards Long Wharf.

Each July 4th, the Captain Commanding of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company reads the Declaration of Independence from the balcony of the Old State House. The reading of the Declaration of Independence dates back to July 18, 1776, when Colonel Thomas Crafts performed this duty for the first time.

Old State House

In this image, USS Constitution Sailor of the Year, Navy Counselor 1st Class Paul Grunder (at mic) leads a crowd of thousands in the Pledge of Allegiance at the Old State House in Boston on the morning of July 4th, 2009. Also on the balcony assigned to Old Ironsides are Storekeeper 1st Class Benjamin Hanson (left) and Electrician’s Mate 1st Class Michael Pendergraft.

Sources:

Data Breaches and Knowledge Management

One of the features of the new Massachusetts Data Privacy Law is that it forces some knowledge management on companies in the context of data breaches.

Since the law required compliance on or before March 1, 2010, I assume you already have the policy and safeguards in place. That is, if you have social security numbers or financial account information for any Massachusetts resident in your computer systems or files. Yes, the reaches beyond the borders of Massachusetts and is not limited to Massachusetts companies.

201 CMR 17.03(h) and (i) require regular monitoring of your program and a periodic  review of its scope.

201 CMR 17.03(j) goes on to require that you document any responsive actions, have a post-incident review and document any changes to your program after the review. That sounds a lot like knowledge management to me.

The Office of Consumer Affairs and Regulation has published a handy 201 CMR 17.00 Compliance Checklist (.pdf). You should also review and be familiar with the law itself contained in 201 CMR 17.00 Standards for the Protection of Personal Information (.pdf).

Image is by Darwinek in Wikimedia Commons: Flag Map of Massachusetts

The Four Areas of Risk and Knowledge

4 box black swan

When thinking about risk, I break things into four quadrants. There are things we know and there are things we don’t know as individuals. I then slice slice that further again with the things we know and the things we don’t know as part of the larger organization or conscious state.

Our sweet spot is the the things we know that we know. (The green area on my chart.) Those are our operations. Those are the things we have in the realm of compliance. We may not be fully compliant and dealing with the risk. But it is known.

At the opposite corner are the things that we don’t know that we don’t know. This is the black swan territory. This is an area of danger for an organization. This is a knowledge void and a compliance void. These are risks that we don’t know about. We don’t know the magnitude of the risk and we don’t know it even exists. Our models miss this factor. Our organizations are not paying attention to these risks.

4 box black swan

The other two areas are also interesting.

The things we know that we don’t know is an area that we know we can improve. (The orange quadrant on my chart) This is the area of known ignorance or accepted unknowns. You can manage these risks, because we know them. They have been identified, although not quantified. They may be on the list of things to address. Or we may just be willing to run naked in this area and are not worried about the risk.

The last area of the things that we don’t know we know is an area of opportunity. (The purple quadrant on my chart) This is risk that they are managing, even if they don’t know that risk exists. Often this will be a risk associated with another risk, either through causation or correlation. If an organization realizes they have this knowledge, they maybe able to create a new opportunity for themselves by discovering it. You do need realize that the causation or correlation may sever at some point, pushing this risk down into the territory of the black swan.

There is also an element of danger in the opportunity area when it comes to records management. These may be the pieces of information getting unearthed during litigation that gets an organization in trouble.

It’s important to realize and accept that there are things we don’t know. The key to bettering the organization is to continually try to reduce the amount of stuff that we don’t know.

I want to credit Liam Fahey, a professor at Babson College and co founder of the Leadership Forum, for the origins of this matrix. He gave a presentation using this analysis to a group of law firm knowledge management leaders in October of 2008.

Who Knows What?

WSJ-who-knows-what

A nice piece in Monday’s Wall Street Journal on knowledge management: Who Knows What? Finding in-house experts isn’t easy. But most companies make it harder than it should be. The article, by  Dorit Nevo, Izak Benbasat and Yair Wand, explores the expertise location benefits of enterprise 2.0.

The authors describe the use of blogs, wikis, social networking and tagging as ways to collect and expose expertise with an enterprise”

“Every big company has in-house experts. So why don’t they use them more?

In-house experts, with their specialized knowledge and skills, could be invaluable to both colleagues and managers. But often workers who could use their help in other departments and locations don’t even know they exist.

Talk about a waste! Because of an inability to tap expertise, problems go unsolved, new ideas never get imagined, employees feel underutilized and underappreciated. These are things that no business can afford anytime—let alone in this tough economic climate. Which is why so-called expertise-locator systems have become a hot topic in corporate IT.

To date, most such systems are centrally managed efforts, and that’s a problem. The typical setup identifies and catalogs experts in a searchable directory or database that includes descriptions of the experts’ knowledge and experience, and sometimes links to samples of their work, such as research reports.

But there are gaping holes in this approach. For starters, big companies tend to be dynamic organizations, in a constant state of flux, and few commit the resources necessary to constantly review and update the credentials of often rapidly changing rolls of experts.

Second, users of these systems need more than a list of who knows what among employees. They also need to gauge the experts’ “softer” qualities, such as trustworthiness, communication skills and willingness to help. It isn’t easy for a centrally managed database to offer opinions in these areas without crossing delicate political and cultural boundaries.

The answer, we think, is to use social-computing tools.”

Missing from the online story link are some additional resources listed in the paper for further reading in the MIT Sloan Management Review (they sponsored the Business Insight section).

  • Six Myths About Informal Networks— and How to Overcome Them
    By Rob Cross, Nitin Nohria and Andrew Parker (Spring 2002)
    Informal groups of employees do much of the important work in companies today. To help those networks reach their potential, executives must understand how they function.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4337
  • Improving Capabilities Through Industry Peer Networks
    By Stoyan V. Sgourev and Ezra W. Zuckerman (Winter 2006)
    By sharing insights and perspectives with a group of noncompeting peers from other regions, managers can stay abreast of industry trends and combat complacency.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47210
  • Defining the Social Network of a Strategic Alliance
    By Michael D. Hutt, Edwin R. Stafford, Beth A. Walker and Peter H. Reingen (Winter 2000)
    Paying attention to personal relationships accelerates learning and increases the effectiveness of alliances.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/4124
  • Creating Sustainable Local Enterprise Networks
    By David Wheeler, Kevin McKague, Jane Thomson, Rachel Davies, Jacqueline Medalye and Marina Prada (Fall 2005)
    In developing countries, examples of successful sustainable enterprise often involve informal networks that include businesses, nonprofit organizations and communities.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47109
  • Are You Networked for Successful Innovation?
    By Polly Rizova (Spring 2006)
    To manage research-and-development projects, companies need to ensure that informal social networks are reinforced—and not thwarted—by formal organizational structures.
    http://sloanreview.mit.edu/x/47310

(I’m not sure why they left out Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration by Andrew P. McAfee, Spring 2006)

Another resource is this video of Jennifer Merritt from the Wall street Journal interviewing Dorit Nevo from the Schulich School of Business at York University.

Personal Knowledge Management and Compliance

boston km forum

Today, I am presenting at the Boston KM Forum on Personal Knowledge Management. My presentation is part an all-day symposium on personal knowledge management.

My take on this subject is that knowledge management had been too focused on the benefits to the enterprise instead of the immediate benefits to the individual.

Firehose of Information

We are all on the receiving end of a firehose of information. We need tools to help filter, reduce and save that flow of information. In compliance, we are dealing with ever-changing rules and regulations. We need to find out which ones affect us, how they affect us and what we should do. Even better would be to see the rule changes coming so we can be ready for them.

What’s In It For Me

I’m sure it’s great for the enterprise that we save our stuff into a central place according to the rules imposed by that central system. But how does that help me manage my firehose of information? Give me a tool, a system or a technique that has an immediate, direct affect on me.

Many companies offered incentives, like gift cards, for contributing to the system. If you have to give away a prize to motivate people to contribute, then perhaps they do not seen enough value in contributing. What in it for me? Sure, you get the Starbucks giftcard. And you get some smug satisfaction for contributing into the central knowledge system vault.

Marketplace of One

Davenport and Prusak, in Working Knowledge, point out that “People rarely give away valuable possessions, including knowledge, without expecting something in return.” There is a knowledge marketplace. But I’m the biggest consumer of my knowledge. Help me organize and memorialize the things I know. Others can benefit form this, but the focus is on me.

Knowledge management solutions will work better if they are focused on improving the normal workflow and better capturing that information. The user is more likely to use a new tool if it is easy to use and provides more functionality than what they currently use.

Compliance Building is published for me. I am the biggest consumer of information on the site. I am happy that it allows me network and be a part of the compliance community. But I primarily put the posts together so I have a collection of the information I need for my personal use.

Lessons from Web 2.0

I spend a lot of time during the presentation showing how web 2.0 tools have helped me manage my flow of information. Compliance Building being one of them.

Slides

Here is my slidedeck:

Personal Knowledge Management

References:

Update:

Other views from the Knowledge Management Forum Symposium on Personal Knowledge Management:

Web 2.0, Knowledge Management and Professional Development

Mark Frydenberg

Mark Frydenberg is teaching a new, experimental class at Bentley University’s: CS 299 – Web 2.0: Technology, Strategy, Community. I am the experiment today, telling my story to his students.

The focus of my presentation will be how I learned about Web 2.0, started using it as a knowledge management tool and how I now use Web 2.0 for my professional development.

If you want to listen and watch, there will be a Ustream video. It should be on Checkmark’s Ustream at 11:20.

We will be watching the Twitter hashtag #cs299. Send any questions you want me to ask a roomful of college students learning about Web 2.0 by using CS299 in a Twitter post. Class starts at 11:20.

I gave them this reading list to give them some background on the topics I intend to cover. You can also see what the students have been doing by checking out their Class Blog and Discussions.

Below is the slidedeck I put together for the class:

Presentation to CS299 on Web 2.0

The slides are mostly visual so you may find it more useful to see my notes that go along with each slide. The slides with the notes are available at JD Supra: Web 2.0, Knowledge Management and Professional Development.

Federal Knowledge Management Working Group

fed_km_initiative_words_logo
The Federal Knowledge Management Working Group consists of over 700 Federal employees, contractors, academicians and interested members of the public who have mounted a campaign to enhance collaboration, knowledge and learning in the Federal Government by implementing formal knowledge management.

Neil Olonoff, who is the leader for the initiative looking at the formation of a Chief Knowledge Officer for the federal government, sent me note about this impressive initiative.

Mission: Inform and support federal government departments, agencies, organizations, and their constituencies in the research, development, identification, and implementation of knowledge management (KM) activities, practices, lessons learned, and technologies. To accomplish this mission, the Federal KMWG will mobilize and leverage thought leaders and KM practitioners from government, quasi-government, academia, non-government, nonprofit, and the private sector around the globe.

They have already putting together a tremendous wiki full of information at KM.gov (which redirects to http://wiki.nasa.gov/cm/wiki/?id=1926).

I recommend taking a look at the PowerPoint presentation they posted on knowledge management is important to the federal government: Federal Knowledge Management Initiative (PPT). There are some great ideas that are can be reused for your organization.

UPDATE:

Jeanne Holm is the elected chair of the Federal Management Working Group. In the original post, I had identified Neil Olonoff as the holder of that position. Jeanne sent me a nice note with the clarification. You can reach Jeanne on Twitter @Jeanne_JPL.

Knowledge Management Sites Search

I have update my KM Sites search tool.

The search below is built from a custom Google Search

Google Custom Search

It searches the following sites:

Some of these sites are not active any more, but still offer a great repository of thoughts on knowledge management.

Originally posted on my KM Space Blog: KM Sites Search.