|
|
|
Preparing
for Conversations
with Joe Firestone
Managing
Risk Through Knowledge Management
Joseph
M. Firestone, PhD
Managing
director, Ceo for the Center of The Open Enterprise LLC and Knowledge
Management Consortium International; CKO, Executive Information
Systems, Inc.
Alexandria,
Virginia US
 Biography
Joseph Firestone
was the first to define and specify the Enterprise Knowledge
Portal (EKP) concept, and is the author of Enterprise Information
Portals and Knowledge Management, Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann,
2003; the Cutter Consortium Executive Report, "From the
Balanced Scorecard to the Adaptive Scorecard: An Adaptive Maturity
Model," (2006) and the co-author (with Mark W. McElroy)
of Key Issues in The New Knowledge Management (Burlington,
MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann, 2003). In addition, Joe
and Mark have co-authored Excerpt # 1 from The Open Enterprise:
Business Architectures for Openness and Sustainable Innovation
(Hartland Four Corners, VT: KMCI Online Press, 2003), and co-edited
a special issue of The Learning Organization Journal,
entitled "Has KM Been Done?" (April, 2005).
Joe is Co-developer
and Co-Instructor of KMCI's Knowledge and Innovation Manager
Certification (CKIM) Program and K-STREAM™, a comprehensive
project and program methodology for Knowledge Management (see
www.kmci.org). He is a also a trainer and consultant in the areas
of Enterprise Information Portals, Enterprise Knowledge Portals,
Adaptive Metrics, Risk Intelligence Metrics, and Enterprise Architecture,
as well as developer of the web sites www.dkms.com, www.adaptivemetricscenter.com, and of the
blog "All Life is Problem Solving" at http://radio.weblogs.com/0135950. Joe is
working on books on the Open Enterprise, and Reducing
Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas.
Back
to top
Pre-Dialogue
Remarks
The latter
parts of these opening remarks are text copied from the early
drafts of a book under contract and are reproduced here by copyright
permission. They remain under copyright and may not be further
reproduced in any form.
Reducing Risk
by Killing Your Worst Ideas
A Little Background
In addition to consulting
work on portals, succession planning, and KM strategy, and teaching
Workshops, I continue to develop my ideas on the scope of the
field of Knowledge Management and its relationship to other types
of management and to business processes and decision making.
In the last five years, or so, I've seen Knowledge Management
experience what I call "conceptual drift," a subject
I've addressed in a number of other places, but, first, within
AOK in a debate a few years ago with Dave Pollard.
Conceptual drift
refers to the phenomenon of identifying "KM" with one
of the techniques, tools, or areas of focus that have an important
or very productive place in some KM projects. It involves, essentially,
substituting the means we sometimes use to implement KM interventions
or knowledge processing with the end of doing KM itself, so that
Communities of Practice, or Portals, or Social Network Analysis,
or Content Management, or other areas of focus, are thought of
as KM in themselves.
Watching conceptual
drift play out, it seemed to me that one of the reasons why it
was easy for other fields to "colonize KM" was that
KM's conceptual core was weak, in that there was no agreement
and common understanding among us on our key terms, approaches,
and principles. Discussions among KM practitioners and theorists
exchanging views on core concepts didn't seem to be helping much
in creating such a conceptual core. In fact, there was a surfeit
of ideas and frameworks, but a shortage of agreement on how to
evaluate and select among the various frameworks, with the result
that little selection occurred.
Meanwhile with each
passing year, new frameworks were created, adding to the conceptual
variation, and agreement on a conceptual core seems further and
further away. So, when do we get to the selection and retention
to go with the variation? When does our creativity in developing
new ideas, begin to pay dividends in providing us with frameworks
that actually begin to crystallize what our discipline is about?
Only, I think, when
some of these frameworks begin to produce value for us in specific
fields of application that people really care about. Here, as
in all fields, "the proof of the pudding is in the eating."
And KM's conceptual core will emerge from competition among frameworks
in terms of how successful they are in application contexts.
People will come to understand, and will take on board, a few
frameworks, only when they have some very strong and obviously
successful exemplars embodying those frameworks.
This brings us to
the question of application areas for KM. A few years ago, when
the reasoning I've just related was running around in my head,
I began to look for a fairly general application area. The topic
of our discussion in this installment of the AOK Star Series,
"Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas," is about
applying KM to such subjects as "risk," "risk
management," "risk intelligence," and "risk
intelligence metrics." It is the application area I selected,
where, I hope, the value of a particular KM/knowledge processing
conceptual framework can be demonstrated. The conceptual, framework
involved is the one I've been developing for years and for those
of you not familiar with it, or familiar with only a part of
it. You'll find lots of reading material here:
Back
to top
Reducing
Risks by Killing Your Worst Ideas
The complete paper
may be obtained by downloading the PDF.
Back to top
|
