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Back to Square One
Once upon a time, we wrote about one of the challenges in establishing a KM program: understanding what your users really need, as opposed to what they think they need. It's easy (and vague) to talk about "Knowledge," but what does that really imply? If it's a Knowledge base to support proposal writing, it would seem reasonable to store all the proposals your company has written in the past 10 years. But is it? Once your program is in business, is anybody actually reading those old proposals?
Going back to Square One, in this context, means revisiting your initial assumptions, and seeing if they're still valid. Look at your usage metrics, if you have them, or take a survey or just
talk to people. Find out if the stuff you're collecting is still the stuff people need. If it's not, you've got a problem, and it's time for a change in strategy. As the late great Peter F. Drucker said, "You cannot keep a corpse from stinking. You can only manage change with a program of organized abandonment. Do this by looking at everything periodically and asking a simple question: If we weren’t already doing this, would it still seem like a good idea?"
Do You Squidoo?
Somewhere within the space of web-based social networking software, you'll find a place called Squidoo, and it's very interesting from a KM perspective. It's a platform designed so that individuals can share what they know.
Squidoo
subscribers assemble simple, modular web pages which are referred to as "lenses." You can put together a lens on any topic (like model rocketry),
and secure a virtual soap box to talk about it. There's a rating and ranking algorithm in the background, so Squidoo doesn't care how many lenses there are for a given topic. The best ones (as measured
by ratings, lensmaster reputation, frequency of updates, etc.) will rise to the top.
The concept is somewhat similar to the Wikipedia,
in which the collective knowledge of a community refines a single, authoritative listing. But in the Wikipedia, you don't have competing articles, you have collaborative articles. Another difference is
that the lensmasters at Squidoo can earn money with their knowledge. Squidoo generates revenue with click-through adds placed by Google AdSense,
and pays royalties based on the clicks that can be attributed to a lens. It may not change the world, but it's worth a look. Haven't you always wanted to be an expert?
Closing the Loop
Have you ever worked for someone who was driven to get folks "into the loop?" We have.
It was a long time ago, but this particular manager -- when faced with almost any situation -- wanted to defer a decision until he could get so-and-so into the loop. It was a well-intentioned attempt to
build consensus while also leveraging the collective intelligence of his organization. But he was a charismatic sort of chap, and his own tendency to get people into the loop was therefore contagious.
Each time a new person was looped in, he or she reacted in the same way: "You know who you should REALLY get into the loop on this? Pensky!"
The result was that every decision took
longer than necessary, without necessarily being any better for it. Plus, the decision cycle was proportional to the importance of the subject. Simple decisions took days, complex decisions took weeks.
Sometimes, decisions couldn't be made at all, because the facts ultimately disappeared in a strange, spiraling cloud of expanding loopiness.
In general, Knowledge Management has brought a better
awareness of the fact that collaboration can be a good thing for business. Getting the right people involved can help a company make more informed decisions. But you have to know when to close the loop,
too.
Maps as Metaphors
We once offered a Street Smarts tip (#012, to be exact), noting that "the map is not the territory." We thought of that again when reading a recent Jeremy Wagstaff column about treemaps.
Treemaps offer an alternative way of presenting a window into some collection of information. The
size and shape and color of the map element tells you something about the underlying content. So a large chunk of the map might mean there's lots of stuff in that category, while the color of the chunk
may indicate something else. The first time you look at a treemap, it may take a while to figure out what it's telling you, but once you do, you'll probably agree it's an interesting concept. The Hive Group is one of the firms in this space, and you can get an idea of how treemaps work by taking a look at their demo for the iTunes Top 100.
It seems strange, that for all the power and sophistication of the typical home computer, we're still
working with an old fashioned, two-dimensional metaphor to understand what it tells us. Windows Explorer lets you open and close folders to see what's inside, but it's still basically a list. It can show
you icons or thumbnails instead of file names, but the organization is up to you. (In his novel Disclosure, published in 1994, Michael Crichton imagined a Virtual Reality interface, in which
people could locate files by navigating computer-generated corridors. That way, they could tap into their own spatial memory, recalling that what they wanted was three corridors down on the left, at the
bottom of the stack. Humans are good at that.)
Presumably we'll see more sophisticated options here over time, but it may take a while for them to catch on. Think of what Windows does if you opt
to "Auto Arrange" your desktop icons. It starts in the top left, and then drops them onto the available grid points, working top down and left to right.
It makes a list.
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