Eric Mack On-Line

As I mentioned over on the Notes on Productivity blog, this last weekend I talked with David Allen on a variety of subjects around productivity and Lotus Notes.

David allowed me to record a portion of our conversation, and he has this great riff on Outlook and Lotus Notes that I want to share with you.

I've followed Stan's writing on KM for years, so it's a treat to finally meet Stan in person.(Stan will be on our PKM Panel this afternoon, as well.). Today, Stan reflects on his 13 years on KM with a fast-moving presentation on his lessons learned about effective KM. Like all of his writing, Stan shared many insights. I have listed a few below.

Started in KM in 1996 at DEC. KM was something on the side.

Reflecting on his 13 years in KM: (I'll try to come back an fill in details later)

1. Collect content: Connect People
        Key influencer: Patrick Lambe

2. Try things out; improve and iterate
        Key influencer: Tom Davenport

3. Lead by example; model behaviors
        Key influencer: Carla O'Dell

4. Set goals; recognize and reward
        Key influencer: Nancy Dixon

5. Tell your stories; get others to tell theirs
        Key influencer: Steve Denning

6. Use the right tool for the job; build good examples
        Key influencer: Tom Stewart

7. Enable innovation; support integration
        Key influencer: Verna Allee

8. Include openly; span boundaries
        Key influencer: Larry Prusak

9. Prime the pump; ask and answer questions        
        Key influencer: Etienne Wenger

10. Network; pay it forward
        Key influencer: Hubert Saint-Onge

11. Let go of control; encourage and monitor
        Key influencer: Clay Shirkey

12. Just say yes; be responsive
        Key influencer: Chris SollisonC

13. Meet less; deliver more
        Key influencer: Seth Godin

My workshop on high performance knowledge workwork went well. Today we are on schedule fo the KMWORLD conference and our keynote presenter is none other than Andy McAfee. (Let me explain the photo. I wore my Michael Sampson mask as I entered the room where the keynote was and Andy saw me right away and waived. So, there you are, Michael. Andy says hi.)

Here are some of my notes from his presentation on resetting the enterprise with Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Why does Enterprise 2.0 work?

Altruism
     People want to help

     Implications
     - Stop obsessing about risks
             Lower barriers to altruism

Process
     Beware of the 'one best way' and slotting people into a predefined workflow
     Emergent tools allow altruism and innovation

     Implications
     Ask "How much workflow, this process, this structure, is necessary to be successful at this time?"

     make it easier to corect mistakes instead of hard to create them
     use tools that let structue appear

     

Innovation
     Strategy may be dead
     Time for a Chief innovation Officer instead of Chief Strategist
     Don't nail it down up front. Set the direction and the outcome.
     Innocentive - open source problem solving for problems that stump the home organization
             Question credentialism. Innocentive lets anyone, regardless of credentials look at this.
     Build communities that people want to join

     Example: Verizon Customer support open source
             Createed method of identity and the ability to acquire status reputation and identity

Intelligence
     With a little bit of technology facilitation, crowds can be very wise
             Enable peer review
             Experiment with collective intelligence (wisdom of crowd)

Benefits
     Better collaboration is not the only goal
             "Narrate your work" (Dave Weiner) Do this over time and let people link to it and talk about it.
     
     Increated awareness, not of solutions, but of people behind the solutions
     
Impact
     Real results
     Sitting this one out is a bad idea
     Look at technology with fresh eyes
     We're not going back to business as usual

How to succeed with Enterprise 2.0
     How to snatch defeat from the laws of vistory
             - Declare war on the existing enterprise
             - Allow waled gardens to flourish
             - Accentuating the negative
             - Try to replace email
     New entrant needs to be 10x better than incumbent (e-mail is not going away)
             Where you can succeed is where there is a blank space in technology landscape (no incumbent)
     Fall in love with features
             Think iPod - all it does is play music.
     Overuse the word "social"

The media landscape continues to change as a result of convergence of devices, communication, and technology. This updated video was prepared in partnershp with "The Economizt" in preparation for the Third Annual Media Convergence Forum.

I've just completed all of the requirements to earn my Master of Information and Knowledge Management Degree, with honors. Just over three years ago I closed the first chapter of this journey.  Today, I close the second chapter. Before I begin the next chapter, I want to pause and reflect on my experience and thank the many people that helped me get to this point.

After working for two decades as a consultant in the areas of technology, information management, collaboration, and productivity, I realized that while these were all good things to do, the next opportunity was in the area of how we manage what we know and what we do with what we know. That realization led me to pursue the field of knowledge management and the management of intellectual capital. Unlike many people in the 1990's and early 2000's, I decided not to focus on the organizational level but rather to direct my attention to the individual or personal aspect of knowledge management. My work as an eProductivity specialist  taught me that it's much easier to bring about a lasting impact working with individuals - from the bottom-up - than to try and create a system to be imposed on the organization top-down. Thus, my interest in knowledge management, and specifically my interest in what is frequently referred to as personal knowledge management, began.

Continue Reading "Completion. What a wonderful feeling! Chapter 2" »

I took off the last few weeks to complete my graduate research and writing for my final project for my Master of Information and Knowledge Management degree. It feels great to mark that item as "Complete." Other than a few blog posts about the National KM Conference, I've been off-line. No email, No Internet. No Twitter.

A few people have asked how what my office setup looked like as I worked to complete this assignment:
Here's my workstation set up for studying: 24" 1200x1900 Portrait monitor on the left, Hi Res 1680x1050 Laptop in the middle and a 30" 2560x1600 display for MindManager on the right. From time to time, I will also use the two projection screens in the background. All are controlled by my laptop.

Continue Reading "Graduate paper done, thanks to Notes/MindManager/Brain" »

Steve Newman, ARES Corporation is sharing his experience with KM in NASA’s Exploration Directorate.

Steve works for NASA Exploration directorate as a contractor in KM area. ARES is responsible for developing NASA’s Process Based Mission Assurance (PBMA) site – which is one of the knowledge repositories that I have seen. http://pbma.nasa.gov/

Steve’s current work is with the Exploration directorate, which is responsible for the Orion Program, which is designed to take men back to the moon and ultimately to Mars.

Steve’s Lessons learned from NASA regarding KM

• At NASA never say “I’m here to help you with KM” instead – it’s “I’m here to accomplish work” Work is the central theme – technology is just an enabler.
• KM initiatives that have succeeded are those that have been sponsored by a business leader
• There has to be a personal return on investment. It has to help me do my work more effectively.

Continue Reading "KM in NASA’s Exploration Directorate" »

Notes from National KM Conference at Pepperdine University

Next up is Dr. Jay Leibowitz, presenting research Cross-Generational Knowledge Flows In Edge Organizations.

Notes in progress....

1.

...get it right and everything flows smoothly.

Perhaps I should change my business card:

Eric Mack, MKM
"Knowledge Plumber"


Some potential tag lines:
Knowledge not flowing?
Have a knowledge sharing problem?
Plagued by knowledge silos?
Call the knowledge plumber!

Next up is Vijay Koduri, Google Sr Project Manager

Been at Google for two years….works in the Google Enterprise organization, which focuses on use of Google Apps within an enterprise. Products include Search, Maps and Earth, Applications…

Key customers – Universities + small and mid size businesses.

One of the most interesting things at Google is the culture of openness and transparency.

Google is over 20,000 employees world wide.

Culture:

• Resource allocation. Google has the 70-20-10 rule. 70% of the time spend working on core apps, 20% on something that has strong potential and 10% on wild and crazy.
• Challenge – how to leverage people across the entire organization – to get help on the 20% and 10% projects. Developed Google intranet tools to help find the right people. The idea bulletin board lets you send out an e-mail with an embedded survey that allows people to vote on the idea. Scale ranges from 1 to 7. 7 – would incredible if implemented to 1 – would be harmful if implemented.
• When a document is created by someone in Google it is automatically available to everyone in the company – unless you restrict access.

Approach to collaboration

Google docs allows people to share and collaborate on a single document. This eliminates the needs to have multiple versions of a document – or to merge comments on a document.

Value of keeping data in “the cloud.” From a security perspective – loss of laptop is not a big deal. 10% of laptops will be lost in the 1st 12 months of ownership. The biggest risk of data loss is at the point of the end user… Note—as several people have noted there is a lot of debate about this topic. This is the Google perspective.

[Eric's Note: I refrained from raising my hand. I felt that he did not defend his position. He kept saying trust me… I don’t. He said that no end-user data is collected and then 10 min later said that they collect end user data in order to deliver user-specific ads… Hmmm]

Next up, Dr. Steven Newman, Vice President, Technology Application at ARES Corporation is sharing his experience about "Succeeding with knowledge Management." Dr. Newman manages programs related to the Space Exploration Mission Directorate, integrated knowledge management, and risk management.

Notes from: Succeeding with Knowledge Management

First rule: don't call it a Knowledge Management System; we call it the Knowledge Management Program.

Don't walk into the room and say "I'm here to talk about knowledge management."

Instead, say, "I'm here to talk about helping you do work, efficiently and effectively."

For KM to succeed, it has to have a personal return on investment. Then there has to be ROI for the team, and then for the organization.

Continue Reading "Succeeding with knowledge Management" »

Notes from National KM Conference.

What the Air Force is doing in KM
Presenter: Doug Brook – Senior Partner, Triune Group

“Technology is not the answer…. It is the easy thing to set up…and the easy thing to talk about. It’s also were many of the failures have been.”

New Imperatives for the Air Force where KM plays a major role

• Need to capture aging expertise, amidst expandin sue of web 2.0 tech
• Need to connect for knowledge sharing with minimal investment
• Gov 2.0=transparency, accessibility, accountability
• Need to work within secure confines for privacy and OPSEC

Air Force Knowledge Now – this is the AF’s management center of excellence. Started as a lessons learned system, has morphed to more of a Community of Practice center. Have 16,000 virtual communities,12 million page hits per month.

Continue Reading "What the Air Force is doing in KM" »

Doug Brook, President and CEO of Triune Group is up now, talking about knowledge retention and transfer in the Air Force.

New imperatives of KM
Need to capture aging expertise, amidst expanding use of Web 2.0 tech.

Need to connect for knowledge sharing with minimal investment

Gov 2.0 = transparency, accessibility, and accountability.

Challenge with Air Force is to work within secure confines for privacy and Opsec.

Technology is not the answer. Tech is the easy part. It's the knowledge side that is difficult.

Air Force Knowledge Now (See last year's note from Randy Atkins presentation)
16,000 Virtual communities, 225K registered users
12 Million page hits a month
2 Million documents
325,000 registered uses and 100K non-registered cruisers.

(Note we are talking about the business side of KM in the Air Force, not Battlefield. That's why we can be more open about certain elements.)

Talking about collecting KM success stories - typically something that is hard to do - by acknowledging these submissions with CoP of the quarter or CoP of the year. Getting 30-50 submissions each quarter. Very little cost to provide recognition.

What does it take to make KM successful for the Air Force?

• Leadership: Focus, Resources, Commitment
• Process: What, When, How
• Community: Culture of sharing, openness, service

Continue Reading "Knowledge Retention & Transfer: Air Force Knowledge Now" »

Notes from the National KM Conference

Rick Brennen, who works extensively with the DoD on KM talked about the changing nature of warfare and the resulting changing nature of the military. Key to his discussion was what this has meant for sharing knowledge – and in particular sharing knowledge on the battlefield.

Rick has an interesting background in that he was a navy fighter pilot, worked for Sun in the 80’s, worked for Jack Welch in acquisitions – and now consults for the DoD and works as a Venture Capitalist. He is someone that has great insights…..

Notes from Rick’s talk.

We are struggling with how to effectively share knowledge real time on the battle field. And these are related to several of the same issues that corporations face

• culture
• business model
• organizational structure
• security policy
• systems inertia

The cultural divide Our war fighters are digital natives – our leaders are immigrants. Today’s leaders don’t recognize that these technologies are built into the fabric of today’s lives. May leaders still say “we don’t trust this technology—we need to go back to the basics.” Thus it is difficult to get our leaders to say “we need to study this to understand how to effectively get more info to the warfighter – that they can quickly understand and act on.

Business model DoD is struggling with the open systems concept. Systems are built by large contractors – and their products frequently don’t talk to each other. This makes communication, coordination and knowledge sharing between military personal very difficult.

Organizational Structure and tie to KM: Organizational structures are not good or bad – but they need to be designed to meet what you are trying to do. In an organization where you are looking for repeatable performance a hierarchical org with strong rule-based structure works. But they are very poor when things are changing rapidly. Here you need flexibility & innovation. This is where flat structure and strong influence works… Organizations flatten to adapt to rapid rates of change… The knowledge management structures in these organizations are horizontal… In the past military organizations were hierarchical – missions were pre planned at least a day in advance. Today – when an airplane is launched the mission is designed after the aircraft in the air. In this case – knowledge flow has to be horizontal. Need to communicate with the army guys, the marines, the tanks and the civilians.

Security policy: How do you build a KM system that can tap into multiple secure systems and release it to people that need it. People don’t have the time to decide who can see what data when. In particular when dealing with things that need to happen within minutes to be successful. We don’t know how to do this yet.

Systems inertia: Most DoD systems are designed – not to be refreshed. Moore’s law says processing capability will double every 18 months – but military systems are not designed to be refreshed. Thus – they don’t take advantage of rapidly evolving technology

Summary / Recommendations

KM is critical to the future of the military – on the battle field. It is a critical component of the DoD’s ability to respond appropriately to a rapidly changing world

Adopt open systems: Break the ppopreietatry strangle hold of large prime contractors have on key systems.

Org structure: deign systems to support flattened, COCOM structure crossing serviced, agency and nation state boundaries

Systems inertial: take open systems and scalability concepts seriously and design them in approximate at the platform and Enterprise level

Security policy: build multi-level security infrastructure for real battlefield KM systems

Rick Brennan, Senior Managing Partner, Brennan and Associates, is up next, sharing considerations for the expanding role of KM in the Department of Defense.

Many challenges and opportunities for KM in an organization that looks ahead a few years, say 5, but has a typical cycle-time of 10 years to deploy systems. This requires a change in thinking. KM is the lever that is helping.

General trends:
Conflicts are smaller and of shorter duration
Resources are more constrained
Effects are global, and felt more rapidly
Stability is the goal

What happens when the bad guys, using social networks, etc., know stuff that happens on the battlefield before the good guys do?

War is different. It's no longer about killing people and blowing things up, but about bringing about change in a nation.

Katrina was a disaster.

So, how can we be  better prepared?

Continue Reading "Knowledge Management on the Battlefield" »

First speaker is Melodie Mayberry-Stewart. Melodie is the CIO of New York talking about the case for Open Government.

The case for Open Government
Government should be:

• Transparent
• Participatory
• Collaborative

Continue Reading "The Case for Open Government" »