Heavy industry of KM

I’ve been thinking about knowledge management (KM) over the last few days as we have a new KM programme kicking off in BT. This is good news as KM has languished a bit over recent months.

Inevitably, the meetings have begun to happen and the latest set of KM papers are starting to circulate for comments/sign-off etc. (… good news is they are in a wiki for anyone in the company to edit/comment upon ).

The problem for me is that we are also at the stage where the enormity and complexity of the task ahead becomes apparent in an organisation as large as BT. The temptation is to wheel out the old heavy industry KM powerpoint decks so the strategy becomes so complex that the whole things grinds to a halt and becomes a long series of turgid meetings discussing impenetrable diagrams and concepts.

The truth is, I don’t think we have any chance whatsoever of managing knowledge in BT – if it’s actually possible to manage knowledge anywhere. What we can do is help people to help themselves and others as simply as possible.

It got me thinking about what we can reasonably expect to achieve and which would actually make a difference to the way people share what they know.

If we could achieve three things, I think we will have made more progress in the field of KM than we’ve ever managed before. Those things are:

• expose in the network who people are and what they are interested in/working on/thinking about …
• provide a way to search through the above and then offer a simple mechanism to connect like-minded people together in networks
• automatically expose the activities of individuals to those in their networks through activity streams.

That’s it … simples!

Well … possibly not as simple as it sounds … but achievable at least.

So much of what we read as employees follows a standard format and includes stock phrases and meaningless jargon. We build up a similar level of immunity to this kind of content as we do to web adverts. Our eyes skim across it without taking in any of the meaning – assuming there is some meaning behind it in the first place.

I recently had to send out a request to fellow employees to fill in our twice-yearly customer satisfaction survey. I started writing the standard invite text and then stopped and decided to rip it up and start again. I wondered how I could make this stand out for people and carry some meaning. So I started again … below is what I sent out.

Amazingly, I had a number of people e-mail me back saying what a pleasure it was to receive this e-mail and how it made their day. The response rate to the survey itself was nearly 40% … staggeringly high for internal surveys of this nature.

As communicators, we all know that we could write in a more engaging style and take that little bit longer to think about how the stuff we send out will be received … the problem is, we rarely do anything about it. From now on … I will …

———————————————————————————————–

I could say: “Your feedback is valuable to us …”; or start by saying something like: “In a bid for continuous improvement … ”; but I’m guessing you’ve heard this stuff so often before it’s become pretty meaningless … so, although these things are true, I won’t bore you by repeating them again.

Instead, I’ll just say that we – the ecomms channels team that is – are trying really hard to support you and would like to invite you to help us to do that even more effectively by filling in our short customer survey. I’m afraid you won’t be entered into a prize draw for a once-in-a-lifetime holiday – let’s face it, you wouldn’t win it anyway – but you might just help us make your life that little bit easier in the future.

Go on … you know it makes sense … please fill in our survey – it’ll only take you about 10 minutes.

Thanks very much.

Kind regards,
Richard

YMAUCZRAB3WP

Having been immersed back into the mainstream of employee communications for the last six months or so, certain things have struck me. The thing that keeps niggling me is the crazy idea that employee comms people should refer to colleagues to whom they provide comms advice as customers. This is so wrong for so many reasons …

My main beef with the use of customer/supplier terminology in general terms inside an organisation is that it sets completely the wrong tone and context  for open collaboration. The next logical step from using this terminology is bits of an organisation marketing and selling to other bits of the same organisation – and we all know where that ends up!

I think this has been particularly damaging for employee comms. As communicators we are continually fighting to get higher up the value chain, closer to the decision-makers as early as possible and away from the perception that the only value we offer is in doing stuff after all the important decisions have been made elsewhere (i.e  we are just distributors of information after the event).

I believe calling ourselves suppliers has the complete opposite effect and is a barrier to involvement in projects from the beginning and sets us apart from being key members of teams right throughout a project lifecycle. It gives the impression that we can be picked up and dropped at whim when the grown-ups need something doing … that employee comms is some kind of add-on activity and not central to everything. That employee comms is a commodity.

Furthermore, one of the most difficult aspects of being in employee comms is when you have to advise someone, often senior, not to do something they are intent on doing, or to do something very different from what they have in mind. Calling ourselves suppliers simply opens us up to the following retort: ‘I’m the customer, you’re the supplier … just do it!’ And, frankly, who can blame them!

So let’s stop this silliness now. The use of customer/supplier terminolgy inside an organisation is so 1990s … let’s get one thing straight … a customer is someone who pays money for the goods and/or services of your organisation … PERIOD! These are the people we should all be working together to satisfy … not each other.

After careful consideration, I’ve decided to breathe new life into my lovely little blog … a kind of sad one-hit-wonder-comeback-type-thing – I’m sure my therapist would have a term for it.

Anyway, it seems ages since my last post and I’ve increasingly found myself thinking and finding stuff of interest which I would like to share in more than 140 characters but no longer have an appropriate vehicle to do it. I’m also amazed at the number of people who still drop by here everyday and can’t help feeling I’m doing them a disservice by not blathering on about stuff. So … I’m back.

As I’ve aged and wisened (… is that a word?), I’ve decided that I can afford to be a bit more relaxed in the style of my posts which will still be about social media and internal communications … plus some other stuff as it crops up. I’ve also changed the design to mark the new start …

Please drop in for a chat when you’ve got a spare moment …

I’ve been wondering what to do with this blog for a few weeks now. I couldn’t make up my mind as it’s been a labour of love for over a year and I’ve picked up a fine following of interesting peeps along the way.

While I hope it will remain a useful resource for those starting their own corporate social media journeys, I’ve decided I’m pulling the plug on this blog and not posting here again

My role at BT has changed and I don’t have the time to be clever anymore …

Also, while my back was turned my personality escaped and rushed off to the other side of WordPress Land where it’s calling itself: Richard Dennison Uncut. Frankly, I think it’s being very irresponsible and I wouldn’t go over there if I were you. And, if I catch anyone subscribing to its blog feed I’ll be VERY, VERY annoyed indeed. Enough said!

Wow … has it REALLY been that long since I last posted??

In my defence, we’ve just finished a high-stakes game of musical chairs in my bit of BT – when the music stopped, there were 25% fewer chairs to sit on and they were arranged in a different way.

I had to dust off my CV and have a job interview for the first time in more years than I care to mention … fortunately, I secured one of the new chairs upon which my butt is now firmly placed … to recover from the experience, I had to take two weeks off!

Anyway, I’m now responsible for managing a group of business partners in a channels centre of excellence team providing channels expertise to the communications community in BT.

The major downside to this is that I’m having to hand over all my lovely social media toys to Mark Morrell, the BT Intranet Manager I’m sure he’ll love and nurture them as if they were his own … and if not, I’ll be waiting for him in a dark alley one night when he least expects it!

Although I no longer have the luxury of majoring on social media in BT, I am still very involved … we’re actually doing some really interesting pilots engaging with our customers in on-line forums … and Twitter is also on the radar screen which is really exciting.

In recent weeks, there has been a huge amount of interest in engaging with customers and stakeholders externally in social channels from different bits of the company … we’re taking it slowly and not biting off more then we can chew. The great thing about this enthusiasm is that it’s coming from unexpected quarters and from people who seem to get it. I’m optimistic that we are doing, or plan to do, the right things … time will tell.

Anyway, one of my final parting shots as social-media-guy was to re-write our social media guidelines. If you’re interested, take a look (downloads a PDF file; some of the links in it pointing to BT Intranet pages obviously won’t work).

I plan to keep blogging … if you can call my poor performance over recent weeks blogging! Must do better …

A couple of weeks ago I spoke at the IntraTeam event in Copenhagen which was an excellent event in every way … a gave a short video interview after my presentation and did an interview for the funniest man on the event circuit, Steve Crescenzo.

I’m taking a break now from conference speaking until I have some fresh material to share.

]]> http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/intrateam-conference/feed/ 0 richarddennison http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/usability-warning/ http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/usability-warning/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:53:06 +0000 richarddennison http://richarddennison.wordpress.com/?p=305 ]]>

I just had the following conversation with my son:

Felix: I found this really cool racing game on the computer.

Me: What do you have to do?

Felix: You use the forward and sideways arrows to control the car – but I’m not sure yet whether you’re supposed to ram the other cars or race past them.

Me: Why don’t you read the instructions?

Felix: I never read instructions, I just figure it out for myself.

(Felix is 8 yrs old!)

TAKE NOTE intranet system designers!

I’ve seen lots of articles recently asking whether social media is the death of knowledge management (KM) … I’ve even written about myself, albeit nearly a year ago now.

In this context I was struck by an answer in Computer World from John Seely Brown to a question about what he learnt at Xerox (thanks  to @jobsworth for the heads-up):

“First, wisdom is often the biggest obstacle to innovation. In a rapidly changing world, the assumptions that underlie our past learning may now be invalid. So, an idea that didn’t work five years ago may work fantastically now.

Second, we tend to hold on to assumptions longer than we should. Often, by letting go of old assumptions, whole new vistas are created.”

I’ve always felt that traditional KM practices are too slow moving and try to impose an overly simplistic and controlling model onto what is essentially a chaotic, vibrant, real-time reality. Sometimes, it feels like KM is trying to take a series of still-shots of this real-time reality to present back to users who have already moved on – and when you put the still shots together, you get a jerky and incomplete picture.

I think John Seely Brown makes a great point – the world is changing so fast that keeping stuff for future use is becoming less and less valuable and can blinker our future potential. It challenges many of the precepts upon which KM is built.

As the world has become more and more real-time, so the balance has shifted away from re-use of existing information to the notion of relationships. The need for knowledge now is what has driven social media practices which, not only acknowledge the chaos of humanity, but embrace it to deliver distilled, real-time value. It’s not formally organised, it’s often not pretty, but it seems to work.

The million dollar question is how do you strike the right balance between learning from history and living in the past?