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Preparing
for Conversations with Patti Anklam
KM Mavens: The
Way Ideas Rise, Emerge and Mingle
Patti Anklam
Consultant,
Hutchinson Associates
Biography
Patti Anklam is
an independent consultant specializing in assessing environments
and recommending strategic interventions or programs in systems,
processes and work practices including community of practice
development, social network analysis, and information architecture
and knowledge management systems.
Recent clients include
a defense industry consulting firm, an eLearning solution development
company, and a financial services firm. She is author of numerous
articles on knowledge management for Knowledge Management
magazine and  Knowledge Management Review; presenter,
panelist and keynote at conferences sponsored by KMWorld,
Delphi Group, InfoToday, and e-Gov.
Patti's capstone
corporate position was at Nortel Networks, as Director of Knowledge
Management for the Global Professional Services organization.
Responsible for assessment, design, implementation and management
of knowledge management programs for community-of practice development,
action-oriented "lessons learned," information architecture,
learning and capability development, and knowledge management
context-setting, connections, and innovations in KM.
The overall program
proved the efficacy of a systemic approach to knowledge management,
encompassing collaboration and learning, knowledge engineering
for repeatability and leverage of intellectual capital, and the
integration of knowledge capture and synthesis in the core business
processes.
Patti was formerly
a Senior Consultant and Knowledge Architect at Compaq Services
Group (formerly Digital Services) of Compaq Computer Corporation.
In her 25+ years in the computer industry, she has worked primarily
in systems software and systems integration groups.
Her integration
of her personal knowledge and experience in technology with her
interest in social network analysis provides an ideal professional
mix for knowledge thought leadership.
Please welcome Patti
Anklam, as guest moderator for the August 2003 edition of the
STAR Series Dialogue.
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KM
Mavens: The Way Ideas Rise, Emerge and Mingle
Jerry,
Thanks for making
me a Star! I'm sure that most of the AOK community is wondering
who the heck I am, and I want to make it clear that I'm here
as a humble KM practitioner. Like many of the audience, I am
not an inventor of new ideas, models, frameworks, or processes,
but I am an insatiable idea maven, learner, adopter/adapter,
and translator. Add to that that I -- like almost everyone in
knowledge management -- do share relentlessly (a great
observation by Kamoon's Lori Wizdo), you'll start to see what
the universe of KM means to me.
I'd like to start
a number of threads in this dialogue, and engage some of the
listeners who don't normally contribute by painting KM practitioners
into the timeline of ideas that spark, fuel, and sustain our
profession. So I'll start with my perspective on the eras of
KM, move into a description of the practitioner's toolkit, and
then set the stage for what I hope will be a great dialogue that
turns the focus to KM practitioners themselves and our relationship
with ideas.
The ground on which
we walk was established by previous AOK Star Dialogue moderators
Karl-Erik Sveiby and Leif Edvinsson in their work on intellectual
capital (subsequently brought into the mainstream business press
by Tom Stewart, another AOK Star). This work validates the premise
(idea) on which we base all of our work: knowledge is valuable.
The first era of
knowledge management, we know, was focused on technology and
tools to support knowledge workers in the capturing, cataloging,
finding, and reusing content. The Internet and World Wide Web
technologies spurred the content management, groupware, and document
repository software industries to produce applications for corralling
both real and referenced knowledge. The industry has shaken out,
and few companies are spending millions anymore to bring in super
software, but the pervasive influence of activities related to
designing and using these systems (more ideas) remains in much
of the language we use today.
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In the second era,
the ranks of knowledge management practitioners were augmented
by people skilled in process improvement and organizational disciplines:
best practices sharing, continuous improvement, reward and recognition
policies, change management, and communities of practice. Note
that this era built on the previous, not replacing it, but bringing
insights and practices (even more ideas) that, we expected, would
engage the knowledge workers themselves while shifting the focus
on technology from "end" to "enabler."
The work of the
second era of knowledge management -- the transfer and exchange
of best practices, the development and creation of knowledge
through communities -- emphasized that knowledge management is
really important insofar as it enables knowledge to move among
people in organizations. Through transfer of knowledge, especially
of the tacit, don't-know-you-know and hard-to-write-down kind,
new knowledge comes into being and passes along paths of social
connection in organizations. Through diffusion, knowledge creates
insights that enable decisions; generates innovations in products
and processes; and provides a medium for sense-making and trust-building
across boundaries.
The current, third,
era of knowledge management goes to the heart of this focus on
the importance of connections that enable diffusion of knowledge.
At this same time, a number of social science researchers were
leveraging advances in computer technology that enabled them
to map social networks, that is, networks of people known to
each other in some way. Complexity science was and is building
keys to understanding of how people work and behave in complex
social systems. Natural language processing technologies have
matured to open the door to a semantic web, where we can find
and connect people and ideas in ways we'd only imagined possible
in the past.
What marks each
of these eras, and the response of KM practitioners, is the way
that ideas arise, merge and mingle, and land in the practitioner's
path. Some of us began our idea practices before the term "knowledge
management" gained currency. I know that that is the way
it was for me. My career, beginning in software technical writing,
has been marked by my love of ideas, and my ability to understand
when a new idea makes sense for the organization I'm in. (These
days, I map new ideas to business problems that clients face,
which means I get to work with many more ideas!)
One great idea that
landed in my path in the early 1980s was the notion of "gencode,"
a proposed model for generic markup of documents. I'll make this
long story short by saying that there is a straight path from
gencode to HTML. It was a notion that revolutionized publishing
and prepared the way for the world we live in today. I was working
in a technical publications group at the time, and this idea
was so right for what my company Digital Equipment Corporation
needed, that I made it happen. Of course it took extreme
management support (early versions of my team's software sucked
up computing cycles in a way that brought networks to their knees),
and ultimately a team of 15 people, but we changed how the company
worked. That's what can happen when an idea practitioner is moved
to action.
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We acquire ideas,
map them to our mental models, internalize, and either apply
them or tuck them away for future reference. (Naturally, we learn
the most from those we apply.) Some ideas come with emerging
disciplines and practices, and a set of specialist practitioners.
Consider something as straightforward as user-centered design,
also called participatory design, which is a field adjacent to
the science of computer-human interaction. The notion of paying
attention to the user interface in design, itself once a novel
idea, created a set of disciplines and practices. As an idea
practitioner, I adopted the basic principles of user-centered
design and some powerful tools -- contextual inquiry, for example,
invented by Karen Holtzblatt at Digital -- and have adapted these
into an interviewing style and approach that I use in my consulting
practice.
But I also know
when I'm out of my depth and need to call in the experts. Systems
modeling, Six Sigma, competency modeling, to be applied successfully
in organizations, require specialist expertise. (Heavens, they
even award black belts in Six Sigma for training accomplishments!)
Ideas like this are important to collect, and also important
to know when to apply. The KM practitioner will always have a
skill profile that has a lot of breadth -- we need to know about
a lot of things, but we rarely have depth in more than two or
more. It's the "know-about" that matters in these cases,
along with (even more importantly) the "know who."
Abstract ideas take
a different path. They must be socialized. Here, the idea practitioner
must become an idea maven -- that is, must become a person who
is compulsive about networking and sharing the idea. In a company,
this means associating yourself so firmly with an idea that you
become known as the expert. (You maintain this reputation by
never turning down an opportunity to speak to a group, no matter
how small. You are the translator, the astronaut who has journeyed
to another galaxy, and brought back ideas that can be used right
here on earth.) You can remain modest, but don't protest the
expert mantel if you don't feel like an expert; expertise is
relative. And, as David Snowden reminds us, we always know more
than we can tell. As we live and breathe this stuff we are experts
in collecting and organizing the ideas -- true practitioners.
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I like to think
about this practice of ideas as one that is rooted in sense-making
and model-building. I love to work with models, and I particularly
like the tried and true, the ones that are flexible enough to
take in new ideas while still grounded in a language common enough
in business to resonate with leaders. Here is one that I have
used and expanded over the years. It has five components, one
that overarches and one that underlies. The three in the middle
are very old friends: people, process, and product. You'll note
that I actually use the term "systems" instead of "product"
in this model. Models need to be flexible!
 I actually borrowed this model
from organizational development folks. (Talk about a hotbed of
idea practitioners: these folks are right up there on my list
of people to be friendly with in organizations.)
Models -- pictures
-- provide a natural medium for socializing ideas (the other,
well known to KM practitioners, is story-telling). Along with
models come principles and standards. "Principles, models,
and standards" is almost itself a definition of system architecture.
I captured this idea, and many others, from working as the knowledge
manager for a worldwide community of senior software solutions
architects. I also learned there about methodology, and the patience
and discipline that it takes to build one.
This systems model,
as I call it, is a kind of "know what" model. It lets
me talk about different aspects of work and knowledge management
practices in an organization in familiar language. Almost all
"systemic approaches" to KM will have these elements,
slightly varied, sometimes with additional elements and sometimes
abbreviated, but this model is always a good place to start to
ask questions. I use this in a KM audit.
The mission part
of this model relates to the business goals of the group or organization.
What is it that this group does, and what is the role of knowledge
in meeting goals and objectives? This part of the model might
be a "know why" model or objective statement. I also
have a "know how model" that usually takes some time
to explain, but is essentially a process-oriented model that
shows how to position knowledge management practices in the business
value chain.
I created this version
of this model at Nortel, in which the central value chain (the
blue chevrons in the middle) was the central business process
steps identified by BPR consultants. Looking at the technologies,
documents, systems and tools as inputs and outputs in the lower
half of the picture let me describe the nature of explicit knowledge.
The people activities -- communities, conversations, telephone
calls (it is a telecommunications company) -- let me talk about
tacit knowledge. In all, looking at innovation in services, business
intelligence, CRM, and all the "ideas" that come into
the value chain, it became easy to talk about specific KM initiatives
that met specific needs in each part of the value chain.
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And then we come
to organization -- the structures, roles, and relationships that
are put in place to ensure ongoing operation and monitoring of
processes, systems, and work practices necessary to achieve the
mission. We've seen a real breakthrough in this organizational
dimension in the past three years with an idea that really turned
my head: social capital. I was lucky enough to participate in
Rob Cross and Andrew Parker's research at the Institute for Knowledge
Management in social network analysis. This, I knew, was a tool
that I wanted to add to my toolkit -- and one that I wanted to
go into, deeply.
For those who haven't
yet been introduced to social network analysis and its application
in knowledge management, I humbly recommend my own article in
a recent edition of Knowledge Management magazine, KM and the social network.
A network map of
an organization, unlike a standard, hierarchical-based org chart
shows the real "know who" in a group, community, or
company. What's best about a network map is that it prompts questions,
and questions prompt dialogue, and dialogue spurs action. You
only need to take a brief look at some network maps, knowing nothing about the
organization, and you can ask pretty legitimate questions. What's
up with the brown dots (lower right)? What about the triangle
on the far left? The green dots and the blue dots are tenuously
connected. Is that enough?  The manager (orange) in
the middle was one of my sponsors for social network analysis
in Nortel. He was astonished by this picture -- and he was able
to tell a good story about it. I especially like to tell about
his response when he saw his lack of direct connection to all
but one of the green dots: "Well! I never thought to put
them on my email distribution list!"
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Social network analysis
is a great tool, but it the understanding of the idea of social
networks that really fuels how I think about my work and the
organizations that I work with. What is the impact of certain
types of connection? How can I best translate my understanding
about how work moves through the network into a positive KM benefit?
Just because this is my latest new idea doesn't mean that it
is the right idea all the time. Sometimes old ideas are pretty
good, too. I recently talked to a manager of a research group
who hadn't yet understood the importance of a central "team
page" or web site to provide a common list of resources.
That's a pretty old idea, but intranets are still pretty new
to some people!
I've guest lecturered
recently to a few college-level knowledge management classes.
Gosh. Classes in knowledge management! It was just an idea 10
years ago. And it's so full of other ideas! I like to tell students
that what I love best about being in knowledge management is
that people in KM are naturally idea adopters -- they love to
listen to what's new, and they have created, as best they can,
receptive ground in their organizations (or with their clients)
for the introduction of new ideas. They keep on practicing.
Here are some questions
that I hope will start the dialogue. Reflect on your own path
of adoption/adaptation through the three eras of knowledge management.
- What ideas drew
you in?
- Which ones did
you decide to adapt/adopt and which to leave to the experts?
- How has your toolkit
grown and expanded?
- What paths do you
take to ensure that you'll keep encountering new ideas?
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