The architecture of enterprise strategy.

Architecture creates spaces for functions; Strategy creates functions for spaces. On with the show. Featuring ...taunts, riffs and reminders to find and fix the defects, omissions and errors in your enterprise mojo. Find or predict particular issues via the text-search tool, the archive categories,  or (in the archives) the Topical Framework. To kvetch or co-conspire: comment on any articles, click here to contact me via email, or just gossip across your full six degrees of separation.

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September 28, 2009

KM Unplugged

Well into the 21st century, knowledge management still circulates around many neighborhoods looking for a definition. With a definition, it could get grounded in a budget and, taking root, actually grow into a support system of record in the enterprise. It could get a job.

Or that's the script, anyway. Notable exceptions include sites where it has already taken root, sites where it is not debated and is actually planned for implementation, and sites where it is just a cultural reality not needing additional formal justification. But even if all of those sites made up half of the places that use the term KM, the other half are places where KM is still either unconvincing or on the loose. What needs to happen at these places? 

Let's approach the challenge like this. ask the question(s), "how do you know if you are managing knowledge?"

Of course, that is really two questions: how do you know if you're managing, and how do you know that it is knowledge that you are managing?

For the most part, knowledge is a "resource" and management is a practice that pursues the efficient and effective application of a resource to operational performance requirements. But let's be far more specific.

As for distinguishing knowledge from other resources, we like the value-chain model that shows data becoming information through modeling, and information becoming knowledge through practical utilitarian relevance to a context or presumed circumstance.

In effect, knowledge is a status, not a material -- very much similar to "health". This helps to identify what is at stake when managing it, as well as suggesting what kind of risks accompany neglecting it.

We know that under pressure, healthy bodies can do more than less healthy ones, and/or that it will take more out of a less healthy body to do the same thing that a healthy one does.

This throws the light on the matter that the skeptical half need: the big problem of not doing knowledge management is the opportunity costs that result. For an organization that presumes to compete and win based on advantages, understanding knowledge management is a no brainer.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:47 PM

September 1, 2009

The Media Middle

Many writers of many ilks ask the question of "where" we will be going with the new social networking tools including Facebook, Twitter and the like. It makes for fun reading, with science on one end of the spectrum and fantasy on the other. Chances are that the differences in their predictions have more to do with which writers are getting paid, which have someone's attention already, and which are seeking attention or pay versus which could care less. It might be that the most reliable statements are the ones that fall into the "notes to myself" group because they are relatively unadorned or unfettered -- whether they later prove to be right or wrong. They will be the breadcrumbs on the thinking trails that can be reviewed later and learned from, as evidence of what helps analyses succeed. But, there is this problem of whether there are too many useless crumbs with no one coming by to sweep them up. On that note, welcome to the web.

And still, below, my notes to myself.

As these social networking instruments continue to power up the breadth of opportunity for participants in the "read/write web", it becomes more evident that vast social experimentation with communications will fall into a relatively few categories of general importance.

Each of these categories will be an arena where we will see development (planned change) and evolution (adopted adaptation), and eventually we will see certain types of relationships developed and evolved between the categories as well. The categories are content, community, and channels, in the midst of which sits a media user.

 

Content

Self-publishing is the primary driver in this category, with multi-media presentation being the most compelling target. Technicians point to "rich media" on the developer side, but this is essentially about bringing portability, seamlessness and streaming to presentations. On the evolution side, the goal is convenient compilation and tagging as a way of dynamically organizing and discovering special interests. 

In fact, discovery is the key link from here to the next category.

Communities

This area is driven mostly by communications dedicated to representing and validating common interests. On the development side, discovery tools are premium; and on the evolution side, sharing is the top priority, which as a result also makes access privileges and property rights a key issue to decide.  Social policies emerge as the main indicator of evolution here, which is why the cultural dimension of social networking is most basic in this area compared to the two other areas (content and channels). 

The key link between this area and the next is targeting.

 

Channels

The exponential increase in "offered information"  does not cause a similar level of increase in "attractive content", but it clearly stages the occasion to produce more content that is attractive if the information can be appropriately contained. It seems inevitable that information consumers, who are the full population of social networkers, will not spend most of their time "boiling the ocean" by speculatively exploring unfamiliar information, much of which is hardly, if at all, "packaged". Instead that they will increasingly devote their consumption time to credibly familiar information sources. Social networkers will do an entirely traditional and conventional thing: they will more and more often pick certain routes and destinations first, and those first picks will use up most of their time and, barring interventions, become somewhat habitual. This will be the case regardless of what communication instrument is in use. Typically, when innovative instruments are released, the excitement is all about convenience and this stimulates speculative use. But familiarity of results will almost inevitably take over as the ersatz "content" either delights or frustrates -- and this will make discrimination the user's priority over convenience.

To make use of that discrimination, the link between Channels and Content is, not surprisingly, promotion.

Survival Strategies

As we can see, there is not really that much new going on in the overall dynamics of communications. Instead, there is a difference in the task-level efficiency of communications efforts, which amplifies the dynamics in various ways. Depending on who the stakeholder is, some of this amplification is deemed positive and some negative.

Arguably, fatigue is the main culprit in content, as publishers find a recurring audience more or less elusive and begin to evaluate the effort to continue publishing. Whether we point at blog graveyards or a deeper excavation of sites like Facebook, it is predictable that most publishers will significantly diminish their output over time unless they can leverage discovery to refresh their audience and thereby regain incentive to publish.

In the area of community, the most obvious dynamic is that communities are, from the bird's eye view, "chaotic", with ongoing splintering being just as important as ongoing conventions. What this really means is that communities are not so much simply environments themselves but also they are organisms within a larger environment. Organic development, assuming survival, may mean compositional change, maturity change, change in range and reach, or any mix of those changes. This is continally fortified by the ever-increasing ease of communications, which presents alternative stances and boundaries to the current community. So while communities are concerned with sustainability, what actually happens is that the community is more dedicated to the survival of "a" community than it is to the retention of most of its particular members. It is predictable that a community will diminish unless it can leverage targeting to reinforce adoption of its agenda, whether by new members or old.

And with channels, the lack of regulation means that a limitless number of potential channels compete and must rely on profiling the relationship of their content to channel users -- then promoting the profile. The underlying secret success factor, however, is that the promotion must actually change the cost effectiveness of competing --favorably for one's own channel, and unfavorably for competitors. The content itself is possibly a way to do that (think historically: MTV and "reality" shows), but such cases will be few, unusual and at best famously disruptive with an uncertain timespan of reaching evolutionary equilibrium. Some get there almost immediately, but some never quite make it.

 

So, in the full picture:

- Content is linked by Discovery to Communities

- Community is linked by Targeting to Channels

- Channel is linked by Promotion to Content

 

This is certainly not always a virtuous circle or even one that can be fully traversed by any one party. But importantly, it is more like a spring coil spiralling up and away over time/distance, while the whole coil might rock to and fro in different directions, pointing at a wide range of destination points. With predictions, one needs to consider also how long the coil is and what direction it is pointing in. In that light, what causes the coil to change directions? As of this writing, one of the curiouser matters is that promotions are getting more attention as content than is nearly any other kind of content, because there is such a frenzy about how to "monetize" social networking. But if this monetizing was not such a prominent issue, other kinds of content might be more highly valued.

This model looks an awful lot like marketing. And if marketers find it appealingly credible and familiar, they risk being accused of wielding the marketing hammer and seeing all problems as "nails". Non-marketers may be much less comfortable with it all. On the other hand, few disciplines are as relentless in their study of social communications as is marketing. So, as one of my colleagues taught me to say, this is king of the hill until somebody knocks it off.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

August 14, 2009

What's wrong with this Price Tag?

I'm sure that creators of ads would be amused (NOT!) to find out from media professor and consultant Jeff Jarvis that ads are not "content" !

Jarvis's stance, as reported by Stefan Deeran of BNET in the article Who Benefits from the "Link Economy", is summed up as this problem:

"In general, the consensus is that producers of original content that want to put their work behind a paywall or demand payment from linkers, just don’t get the fluidity of web."

The proof of this, they say, is that linkers prosper without paying non-ad content providers; instead, linkers get to charge the ad providers, while non-ad content providers don't get to do that.. Thus the Jarvis claim that we are shifting from a "content economy" to a "links economy".

But obviously, ads are content, and meanwhile, how many linkers actually turn a profit?

So to remain clear, the shift is about what kind of content has the most "economic" value as currency, not as net income that supports a continuation of the cash flows for non-ad content providers or linkers.

Non-ad content, now highly commoditized by the web, is most similar to currency that has suffered inflation beyond any important redemption. The "face value" has stopped being significant.

But while technology has made ad content easier to distribute, and thus magnified its face value, there is no rational proof that people suddenly prefer ads to non-ads. Instead, there is proof that ad-content providers are willing to work harder to deal with the problem of someone's "preference" than are most people willing to work on it for themselves.

As soon as non-ad content providers get people used to paid subscriptions again, the "economy" will rebalance in favor of branding, editorialism and other things that people want with non-ad content to conform to their preference.

 "Non-ad Content" providers must solve the Cost-of-Preference problem. This is already being trial-and-errored with concepts like "MyContent", "Premium Content", "Actionable Content", and so on -- and most of these approaches are long past being "new". 

But if paid "links" are simply today's version of booth rentals at a trade show, it's not the content that dissuades people from buying; rather, it's that the trade show is huge and unmanaged, so people are fatigued by it very quickly.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:05 PM

August 13, 2009

Why Business Processes drive Customization... and what to do about it

Customization of business processes means that there is more "precision" in the targeted effort to succeed. But in situations where support may not be up to speed and where targets may change, this precision comes at a high cost of achieving readiness and warding off eventual irrelevance, making it just as risky as it may be attractive.

The general sense of "customization" compares against three basic options for the formations of a business process.

Option 1: One-Size-Fits-All

For business processes, this is a myth, because “business” is primarily about accommodating multiple relationships and requirements, not primarily about manufacturing a standard product. The “process” must support what business “is about”. Relationships tend to be privileged, not indifferently available.

Option 2: Specialization

Sometimes incorrectly called “customization”, specialization is different: it means variations on a single theme. The theme has standard requirements; the fulfillment is where the variety occurs.

Option 3: Customization

Customization begins in the requirements, not in the fulfillment of them.
There are three reasons why requirements may be “custom”:

• Cost structures


• Competitive Innovation


• Capability Immaturity

Three reasons why requirements may be custom, not generic.

Cost Structures:

• Satisfying customers is not profitable if it is too expensive; different organizations (different suppliers, and different consumers) have different cashflows

Competitive Innovation:

• Existing customers, to decide to stick around, need to feel that the relationship is fresh and current
• Potential customers need a reason to prefer one provider over another

Capability Immaturity:

• The time available to use for improving capability may not be in synch (priority, availability) with other resources

Three reasons why requirements may be "custom", explained.

Cost Structures:

• Lack of visibility on true economic impacts puts operations on a risk-aversion basis seen in typical micro-management approches

Competitive Innovation:

• High rate of change is necessary to sustain improvisations that generate necessary nw effects or advantages

Capability Immaturity:

• Required performance level outstrips currently available supporting mechanisms, forcing risky workarounds. 

How to mitigate or avoid customization.

Micro-management:

• An operational performance model allows activity to be prioritized and weighed by differential contribution to goals and thus by ROI perspective. (For example, the 80/20 rule.) Relieves pressure to dwell on the microscopic. Define objectives, CSFs and KPIs. Switch to “trust-and-verify” mode.

Improvisations:

• Linking process models to knowledge management allows standardized roles to be able to move quickly and differently on incoming information, without re-organizations.
  

Workarounds:

• Organizing around known best practices clarifies ways to structurally reduce risk and to more rationally divide the labor required to meet performance targets. Such greater clarity allows managers to make the compelling business case for additional help to cover properly allocated responsibilities.

When to Customize.

Considering the above notes, executives should still project the likely value of customizations. The punchline is that it cannot be taken for granted that customization is the best path to take, neither in the short run nor the long. Customization proposals that withstand comparison to the above considerations should be given even more enthusiasm than usual, as they probably then point at nearly unique opportunities to do something strategically important to the business.

 

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:37 AM

August 2, 2009

An Inconvenient Reference. (Content, Knowledge and Information Networks)

At The Global Human Capital Journal,GHCJ pays respects to the passing of an empire of bound knowledge: the Encyclopedia Brittanica. Noting that online search is giving a better topical hit rate, the compelling value proposition of going to the paper shelf comes up mainly as a memory. Somewhat proving the point, I came to the GHCJ post online via a colleague, but at the same time there's irony in the uncertainty of relying on unfamiliar online sources to be authoritative about the passing of familiar offline sources. Online, when it comes to navigating certain topics, I'd prefer to route through a colleague than through Google. That said, as the GHCJ piece was really well put together already, I collegially posed some off-shoot thoughts in a comment left there, and shown below.

When you said "Authority", I first thought of "credibility", not of "power". My reading of your Authority description is that it is about power. I think the credibility issue is more critical to pursue. I would compare not the old hierarchy of a production "pipeline" versus the newer flatter production "collaboration", but instead the old value "chain" versus the new value "network". So far, I think the new production paradigms distinguish themselves primarily in terms of convenience, not credibility nor value: what does happen is that I can presume to meet information deadlines "cheaper", and maybe "faster', although far less certainly "prettier" (even though the acceleration of work is economically "sexy" so to speak). Tech innovation a la the web poses essentially the same risk that process automation does: it is now much easier to do something poorly more often.

And when you said "Knowledge Economy", I again experienced a related but tangential thought. Much of the widespread discussions of these affairs appears to me to terribly confuse "content", "knowledge" and "information". Each term respectively already carries a relatively new and trendy mythology about "producers", highlighting in common the newfound convenience of being one. To this I say that being a producer is "valuable", but being a producer does not "cause" value. And more to the point, the confusions I fear are the heavily marketed notions that content producers create better knowledge, that information producers create better content, that... well you get my drift. I suppose if I could make a practical point here, it would be that while the innovations in production may be revolutionary, the innovations in knowledge are instead still evolutionary. We are experiencing an expansive Content Economy that far outstrips the growth of actionable knowledge.

This brings me to the last thought to share for now: the notion of "reference". By exploiting the vehicles (let's not call them sources yet) for acquiring information, we do one or both of two different things, and it is worth knowing the difference. One of them is "referencing". The other is "researching". Part of the competency of KM is knowing that there is a difference while knowing how to relate them; to create a reference from competent research is still something that is a practice with differing degrees of acquired skill, differences that are more important than whether we are known as professionals or amateurs.

All that said, you hit a big nail right on the head. To summarize my takeaway from your posting: an inconvenient reference will lose out to a convenient one, for better or worse.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 19, 2009

The Smarts about Experts

In the article Your help with the new expertise By David Weinberger posted Jul 3, 2009 at KM World, three things stand out in his "arc" of thought as factors of "expertise" -- credence, confidence, and communication. How they are blended for consumption is the matter that is under observation.

In effect, he describes that using a network to access a healthy debate is like watching the sausage getting made instead of just heating up the product already in its skin by buying the expert book or the expert consultant.

Or to be fair, he indicates that when it comes to "managed" knowledge, participation is more compelling than mere consumption.

What is really at stake here though, I'd say, is the ability to accept the quality of the production as being good enough for the issue at hand. In this analogy, the production is not the knowledge itself; the production is the communication experienced. But communication and expertise are not the same thing at all.

Of course, communication can provide very high quality knowledge, but it might instead just provide very high confidence in something that is not very high quality knowledge.

So where is the value, actually? We are *not* necessarily smarter than me; instead, a network hosts collaboration -- and from that, we might be way more productive than me. Unfortunately, ad hoc collaboration is often unpredictable: you don't know whether you're going to get a committee or a team, and you don't know whether the practical impact of the group fest is likely to cover the opportunity cost.

Nonetheless, thanks to networks, collaboration is a more usable path to effective knowledge now than it has been in the past; but counter to David's hypothesis, I suggest that it does not change the nature of expertise.

For example, the difference between an edited book and a networked interaction is about the same as the difference between an authoritative critic and a peer review. They presume different kinds of credibility but it is not a given that either one of them is credible until they prove it. And they *can* come to the exact same conclusions.

So, what happens next? Someone who needs to make decisions will go back to whichever party has the best proofs. Someone who is just thinking about stuff can go with whichever party is most convenient. The latter is much more sensitive to culture than is the former. I think this will be borne out by truthful stories of how people are pursuing expertise so far in networks.

Those of us who are cheerleaders for innovation might confess that we'd prefer to invest in making the new convenience cough up the better results. Given the latitude to have that attitude, the real burden on us is to establish that "convenient" is better, not that the product is better.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)