A blog (a contraction of the term “Web log”) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog. - Wikipedia

Estimates have blogs growing at the rate of 20,000 every day. Now that’s quite a figure. Just imagine if you were able to tap into that vast array of blogs and extract something useful. Then imagine you could do this whenever you needed the information, would make your life a lot easier wouldn’t it?

So what makes them such marvelous information houses? well for one, it can be run by pretty much anyone, a single individual, a group or an organization. A simple layout allows people to collaborate , share presentations and other documents. It’s very well structured, allowing articles to be grouped by specific categories and to top it all of its search able. Now put a couple of hundred of these together and you get the picture.

The Blog is a platform that’s relatively easy to manage and can easily be scaled up to meet requirements of any size and the best part, most blogging software is available free of cost and even the ones that aren’t are reasonably inexpensive. Always a good angle to push when you have a tight budget.

Using these Blogs within your organization or project team is a great way to promote sharing of thoughts and ideas.

There are generally three types of Corporate Blogs:

• The CEO Blog
• The External Blog
• The Internal Blog

CEO Blogs

CEO Blogs have been gaining popularity for a while now as it becomes a medium for employees and people outside the company to connect with the leadership.

External Blogs

External blogs allow corporates to communicate with their employees, clients and vendors. Putting a human face to the company unlike the memo’s that every corporate employee receives when something of any significance ( well, most of the time ) occurs.

While external blogs are great tools for communication their primary purpose is for PR.

Internal Blogs

Blogs at the team level allow much greater collaboration than was possible before, ideas, thoughts and musing can be captured. Information that is generally lost in a large forum of ideas or that is absent from “reviewed” documentation. Simply, they are perfect tools for capturing and harnessing tacit knowledge in the organization.

It becomes a medium to allows users from different sections of the organization to connect with each other. More importantly it becomes a conduit to allow people to talk about subjects that are not part of their regular job description.

Constraints

There are of course a number of constraints when blogging within a company. The most predominant is that employees are generally a lot more careful about what they say and how they say it. Unlike a personal blog there is always an apprehension about how what they say is going to be perceived. This could act as a hurdle to many of them blogging.

Selling the Idea

The leadership team would be very interested in promoting blogging as long as you have clearly defined goals of how you are going to harness the knowledge.

You might try talking to employees about the advantages of having a platform they can use to share their ideas and be recognized. A blog becomes a powerful tool to market themselves.

So, if you’re company hasnt started using blogs you might want to broach the topic to them. Start small, stay internal till you come up with a blogging strategy to maximize the effectiveness of the message and you might just surprise yourself.

If you’ve experimented with Blogging within your project or organization do leave a comment on what your experiences were.

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Doing things better and in less time seems to be a standard requirement of most clients in long term maintenance engagements.

The thought process here is - you’ve spent the past year figuring out what we do and how we do it so now you need to to it little bit better - and this story continue year in and year out.

So while the organization at large agrees to this in principle ( i.e: the wordy contracts and service level agreements ) its’ up the Project Manager to actually make good on this promise.

The challenge now is to fine tune existing processes and this is where your team comes in. The more heads you put together to figure out a better way of doing things the better your results are going to be ( well most of the time anyway ).

In one such project they set up something called the innovation challenge. Here, employees were asked to suggest process changes that could improve the efficiency of the system and in some extreme cases suggest which processes could be retired.

This serves two purposes, your team can now speak up about changes they feel need to be made or archaic and impractical process that need to be done away with, and the fact that if their change is accepted they get the recognition of helping to achieve a few goals.

You can do this both informally or formally, you might need to put together a panel that evaluates these suggestions before any of them are put into place. Let’s face it, changing an organization process is not the simplest thing to do!

The benefits of doing this correctly:

• Improvement to the processes within the project and hopefully within the organization as well
• Will lead to meeting and in some cases exceeding the service level agreements in the project
• An increased understanding of the process in the organization by your team.
• Motivation by your team as they are contributing to something larger than the project and the recognition that comes with getting it right.
• Appreciation from the client.

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KM Theory Vs Practice

“While i haven’t spent a decade working with KM, i believe working with the challenges faced on a day to day basis, over the past couple of years, has provided me with some insight on what practical KM actually is.”

How Businesses are using web 2.0

“I just completed reading a rather interesting survey done by The McKinsey Quarterly. This was done to identify if and how businesses are using Web 2.0 within their organization. I was pleasantly surprised to note that a large percentage of companies have started taking a serious look at Web 2.0 technology implementations within their ranks.”

Why KM?

“As with most of my thoughts this one started after a conversation i had with a colleague.

A number of us are so caught up in meeting deadlines, creating drivers that ensure our existing KM initiatives don’t fall flat. We don’t stop to think “Why KM?”, at least thats what I’ve found after talking to a number of people. Sure there were indicators that lead to the decision of implementing KM, however no clear cut goals were established right at the beginning.”

What’s in Web 2.0?

“We’ve all heard of the term Web 2.0, but what exactly is it? and how do benefit from its use? Listed below are the various components that make up Web 2.0.

Social Networking : refers to a system that allows users of a specific site to learn about other users skills, talents, knowledge or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and MySpace. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.”

Blog Review - Weekly KM Blog

“The Weekly KM Blog by Stan Garfield is another blog that i read rather frequently. It has a wealth of information , mostly in the form of external links.”

The Week that Was ( July 2nd to 6th )

“Thought I’d add this new section to my blog, something along the lines of a recap of posts the previous week(Some of them more popular than the others) with a brief excerpt.”

The need for a Knowledge Audit

“The traditional definition of an Audit is to check performance against a standard, as is the case with financial audits. However a knowledge audit works a little differently, its more of a qualitative evaluation. Its essentially an investigation of an organizations knowledge “health”.”

Getting paid to Blog - Good or Bad?

“When i first started this blog a couple of months ago the focus was to get my thoughts on KM in order, and hopefully connect with like minded people across the globe. I’m happy to say I’ve accomplished both, Gridlock has given me the opportunity to put my thoughts down on paper (so to speak) and allowed me to network with a number of very smart individuals.”

State of the Art for Enterprise Portals - Part 4

“All vendors and open source communities brag about the depth of available, 3^rd-party portlets. Reusing and sharing components is already a great idea, but without community ratings it can be prohibitively difficult to assess the quality and usefulness of available portlet code.”

Knowledge Culture

“It is widely acknowledged that the biggest hurdle of establish a long term knowledge management practice in any organization is culture. So what is culture? well in an organization its a set of unwritten rules, expectations and social customs that compel behaviors.”

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Content - a Taxonomy Perspective

“The basic idea behind creating and implementing a taxonomy structure is to get people to the content they want in the least possible time using the least possible effort. You use this simple idea as your bedrock principle and build other complexities around it.

In order to this a significant portion of your time must be dedicated towards identifying and mapping the content in your organization. This exercise ensures that you have the information required to create a successful Taxonomy framework.

If you have been part of the creation of a Taxonomy framework you know the amount of hard work that needs to be put in to establish a comprehensive, concrete structure. The biggest uncertainty of the framework however is its use. Long term studies on Taxonomy structures have shown that unless you have a process in place to ensure documents and files get tagged or stored properly even the most robust system will come apart at the seams.”

What prompts the need to capture Best Practices?

“There are a number of reasons that spur an organization to institutionalize a best practices capturing mechanism. Here we discuss five of the most prevalent reasons.

Demonstrated Success : There have been many instances where one particular unit of a corporation has started doing much better than the rest. A causal analysis of its processes generally finds certain modifications and improvements that lead to this dramatic rise in performance. In an effort to replicate this process improvement across all other units considerable effort is put into identifying these process changes and trying to replicate them, this is one of the main causes for companies to implement a best practices capturing methodology.

Decentralizing : In order to maintain a light support overhead most companies have started downsizing their corporate support teams that were initially responsible for inventing, discovering and transferring best practices. Now most of the individual business units are expected to handle this load. However with an increasing need is being felt to re-establish these teams that can help with identifying and transferring these best practices across business units, as the cost savings associated with these best practices far outweight the costs of maintaining a corporate support team.”

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If you’ve ever cooked anything, or attempted to like i have. The first thing you need to do is take a look at the recipe ( the knowledge audit ) . Once you’ve done that you need to make a list of the various ingredient ( the knowledge inventory ) . Unless you do this you might end up with something completely different from what you started out trying to accomplish.

So what is a knowledge inventory? well, as the name suggests its a kind of stock taking to identify and locate knowledge assets around the organization. This includes the explicit and the very difficult to locate tacit knowledge sources.

The best way to make a comprehensive list of knowledge sources is to segregate it by explicit and tacit knowledge.

Some of the questions you might want to ask when identifying explicit knowledge sources are :

• What explicit knowledge already exists? - categories of documents, databases, intranet libraries, links etc.
• Where this knowledge is located? - locations in the organizations and the various systems that house the information.
• Access and Organization - How is the knowledge structured and how easy of difficult is it for people to locate this information, and do they have access to it as well.
• Purpose and relevance - why does the information exist? how relevant is it to the users?
• Usage - who uses them? how often ?

Identifying tacit knowledge sources is an entirely different proposition. Unlike explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is much more difficult to quantify. Though there are a few questions you could ask to create a rough map of where it exists.

• Who we have - The numbers and categories of people working in the organization.
• Where they are - Identifying where people are located is extremely important when building a tacit knowledge map
• What they do and what they know - job profiles, expertise areas and so on.

The above questions should give you an excellent place to start collating the list of knowledge sources you have in your organization. Once this is done you can move on to the next step of identifying the gaps after comparing this information to the information you’ve garnered from the knowledge audit.

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Thought I’d add this new section to my blog, something along the lines of a recap of posts the previous week(Some of them more popular than the others) with a brief excerpt.

Driving Innovation.

“In order to drive innovation in your company you need to have an innovative way of tackling the rewards and recognition system, which is the cornerstone of any such initiative.

Considering employees do have needs for achievement and status, defining and creating systems and processes that rewards employees based on their innovation would be an ideal way to tackle something like this. However the issue of how a structured rewards and recognition system encourages employees to change their behavior must also be studied in depth before one is rolled out……. ”

Categorizing CMS Solutions

“If you have ever been part of a team tasked with the responsibility of choosing a CMS application for your KM ( or otherwise ) initiative you probably know the effort involved in trying to identify an application suited to your needs.

For the record I’d like to say, ideally, it would be in the initiatives best interests to design a KM application from the ground up ( using existing components where available ) . The list below is just a break up of CMS solutions as they exist in the market. Open source is grouped in a separate category to ensure there isn’t any complications….”

How Businesses are using Web 2.0 - My favorite post of the week

“I just completed reading a rather interesting survey done by The McKinsey Quarterly. This was done to identify if and how businesses are using Web 2.0 within their organization. I was pleasantly surprised to note that a large percentage of companies have started taking a serious look at Web 2.0 technology implementations within their ranks.

This perhaps is driven by the fact that user-driven online services like MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube are gaining popularity. The technologies that these applications use however are known to most corporates, social networks, blogs, p2p networking and web services.”

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For any initiative to succeed and be accepted across an organization it requires some serious leadership buy-in. This is more so in the case of Knowledge Management. There are certain things that leaders can do to promote the sharing of knowledge in the organization.

Tie your initiatives to your vision: Create and publish an integrated mission, vision, and values statement that endorses and sustains learning and transfer. It’s very important to showcase success stories at each executive meeting. Unless there is a clear indication of progress the executive backing for an initiative like this will quickly die out.

There has to be an emphasis on re-enforcing management commitment to identifying new ideas and removing barriers to progress. This has to be built on top of a robust rewards and recognition program, and most importantly, make sure you have the right people working on this.

The management as a rule is always looked up to for direction, and its the same with knowledge management, lead by example and show commitment to learning through action. Tell employee groups that the most important thing is to share and use best practices.

Once this has been accomplished start rolling out these initiatives across the rest of the organization.

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Over the past few posts we’ve talked about a variety of subjects, Strategies to implement KM , How to run communities of practice, the effect of blogs on KM and so on. The most common question however is not how to implement KM but when. I thought I’d put together a few thought on when you should start think of looking at a Knowledge Management initiative for your organization.

So when is your company ready to start a KM initiative? If any of the following statements are true then its probably time for just that.

• A number of people have already started exploring the benefits of implementing KM in your organization.
• Someone has a personal stake in developing KM.
• KM has emerged as a topic of interest in your organization.
• The organization has a high-level vision of pursuing and implementing KM.

Right, now you’ve figured out that its time to implement KM in your organization, but how do you go about doing it?

The only way an initiative like this is going to gain traction is if people see a clear benefit to what they are already trying to accomplish. The main aim of any Knowledge Management initiative should be to make a person’s job easier, not more difficult.

The first step is to de-mystify KM, do not use complicated terms and strategies to define what it is, rather use simple definitions and examples that provide a clear, tangible picture of what its all about.

The second step involved finding people who are really interested in pursuing KM activities. Launching an initiative amongst this group of people will most definitely ensure a much higher success rate. Recruiting well respected and influential people in your company is a very smart way to promote the value of the initiative to the rest of your organization.

The third step involved looking for opportunities to implement KM. Use groups you feel can benefit with an KM initiative. Target low hanging fruit, market any win you have with the initiative however small , as it can be used as a platform to promote other initiatives as well.

The last step involves creating a technology framework that can support the initiative. While KM is not just about technology it does form a large part of it, without the technology infrastructure it might be difficult to sustain many initiatives.

The biggest road block to any KM initiative is culture, ignoring it is the single biggest mistake many people commit while rolling out KM initiatives. Most importantly - Do NOT sell an enterprise level KM solution without the evidences to back up your initiatives.

While these are just some of the thoughts on how you get started, you will find dozens of smaller ways to improve on it once you get started. Remember, start small and work your way up.

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