Archestra: Knowledge Management Archives

August 25, 2008

Cyberpresence and the new SOX

Some of the most nuanced things that we can encounter come from marketers. But the enduring charm of marketing is, basically, shamelessness.

In the strategy of shamelessness it is still, paradoxically, a requirement to maintain some cool. This amounts to predetermining what kind of "online presence" is needed, and why, backed by the right tools to generate that online presence. Where should people find you online? who should they meet when they find "you"? and why should they (from their perspective) find "you" the way that they do? Assume that they are wherever they are not because of you but because of what that channel offers them; then determine what version of yourself is appropriate to have appear in that channel. "You" might be different from one channel to another, but the different "You's" need to all be appropriate representatives of the brand you are trying to maintain.

Humphrey Bogart got to say it first: "The only cause I'm interested in is Me."

Then there's the famous Andy Warhol saying: "In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes."

As for blogs, it's more like "in the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people." (I can't remember who it was that said that, but the quote is certainly memorable, and the citation for it is probably retrievable via Google, etc.)

Strategically, there are different levels of shamelessness, with blogging and online social networking holding down the opposing goalposts. (Incidentally, Archestra is not a blog, although it runs in blogware. Archestra is, instead, just an open studio.)

Surely, blogging is important to marketing, particularly with the aspect of staging a "market" of ideas about what you sell. But blogs are just the booth in the marketplace. Blogs are inherently editorial, and the only reason we would expect one to succeed is because of the popularity of the personality that is the explicit editorial energy of the blog. (Note: not being a blogger myself, I can't claim to have any expertise on making one work; but having subscribed to several in the past, I found that I only go to the ones where I feel like I am interested in the person whose blog it is. Moreover, with zillions of blogs out there, the fatigue factor of going through yet another new blog is a real impediment that makes it just seem unnecessary. What gets me past the impediment is either a recommendation from someone or a sample of the subject handling that shows me the blogger is unusually interesting.)

Wikis are a bit like blogs in that they have a subject focus, and that subject attracts a crowd (you would hope), but the subject focus is maintained by a crowd, not by a singular editorial personality. With a wiki, one always hopes that peer criticism will culture the crowd towards "wisdom", as they like to say.

Finally (for the moment), the point of a social network is that the crowd moves its focus around and shares what it finds by talking to each other. Focal points emerge rather than being prescribed. But the sharing occurs because of people in the crowd who are already interested in each other and keep introducing who they know to other people. This thing about "buzz" is about when the communication gets flowing strongly about an emergent focalpoint.

A marketer should look at how the online forums* perform compared to each other:
- blogs establish relevance
- wikis establish credibility
- and social networks (which I hereby impertinently deem "SOX"), being where markets actually live, establish importance

(Let's face it, most people who have used the term "SOX" outside of baseball could not tell you who Sarbanes is nor Oxley nor whether their company would survive an audit. So why should they get to monopolize the acronym? In the real world, social exchanges are vastly more interesting, and after I've said "wiki" a few times in a row I'm not interested in two-part five syllable elaborations. SOX it is. Could be lonely, but I don't care.)

* apologies to anyone with a language degree

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:49 AM

The Mystery of I.P., or Not

What mystery?

The rule of thumb is that concepts are not property. The challenge is to wrap "property" around the concepts, so that the property is where people go to find the concepts. Since the value of the property is to some degree related to its scarcity, it is not difficult to understand what to do next.

- Use of ideas can be licensed in certain contexts.

- Information is either confidential or it is not, and you can sell access to confidential information.

- Knowledge is proprietary only if you have the ability to control the context of the knowledge delivery; control is all about packaging (whether the package is a venue, an event, a medium, or a box). You can sell the package; you can also sell delivery.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:27 AM

May 29, 2008

Savvy About Knowledge?

Just what is it about knowledge that makes it so.. interesting... so... appealing?

On National Public Radio's KQED show "Forum", much of what was discussed recently about the elusive nature of knowledge had to do with the experience of being "certain" or "uncertain", and how that experience could be provoked, as it turns out, by altering not only the state of consciousness but the state of the brain itself. This argued that we must be able to admit the difference between believing we know, versus objectively being correct.

But it's not so important that there is any state of being absolutely "right or wrong" about what is real or what is actual.

Instead of right or wrong being the decisive criteria, what matters is that knowledge as an embrace of abstraction is different from knowledge as an embrace of concreteness.

Abstraction leads us to expect that future experience will have some particulars; concreteness leads us to accept that current experience has some particulars. Abstraction provides models; concreteness provides examples.

In both cases, selectivity is a critical determinant; maturity in knowledge broadens our scope of selectivity.

And in both cases, our mind invents experience as well as receives experience. Note that we constantly take models as examples of something, and we constantly take examples as models of something...

This "flexibility" shows that as an ongoing phenomenon, our knowledge is continually tested by the activity of inventing and receiving particulars into what we call our awareness.

In the end, we are certain that we have awareness, but we may be uncertain of whether our awareness is all it can or should be. This throws the value more on being knowledge-able than on "having" knowledge; a mind is a terrible thing to close, and uncertainty is actually a key to generating the value of knowledge. Ultimately, the important thing about "knowledge" lies in what knowledge makes you do.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:42 AM

April 26, 2008

Inciting Insight

In the big picture of purposefulness versus accidents, management accommodates a coincidence of things that ought to make a difference, such as designs, events, and states. Information systems grind on each of these, going both deep and wide. But what matters is whether management orchestrates a convergence of those things. Is such orchestration forcing the issue, or is it simply the way these things actually turn out to have meaning?

It's customary to eschew information overload; but the key to their useful combination is not the specific information compared, rather how the available information is positioned in the overall scheme of interpretation. As seen in the picture above, intents and impacts which superficially represent "how things are going" will relate in terms of the "5 W's and How". Seeing the certain blending of factors here, it is easier to realize that most insights will be moments of correlation that are the prize for maintaining ordinary but diligent awareness in a variety of ways.

But just like money, insights are mainly worth the use to which they are put. So, whether this big picture describes the competency of an individual savvy person or of an enterprise, it tells something about being strategically capable but the goods are in the doing after the learning.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:15 PM

April 19, 2008

The Innovator's Real Dilemma

Jessica Stillman at the new BNET1 blog rounds up research from Accenture, the Conference Board, and Wharton to talk about why Fostering Innovation Stumps Executives ...

This is an interesting situation to ponder: making choices about how much to invest in innovation , versus in knowledge management and, separately, business intelligence as other paths to insight. Overall, what the organization is mainly after -- where the real money rests -- is the insight, whatever the path. But the current thinking about management priorities indicates that insight is pretty hard to come by, so lesser-beaten paths to it are also getting a lot of attention.

One challenge that surfaces, somewhat amusingly, is the presumed need to be innovative about how to foster innovation. For example, given that "innovation" is so easily approached as "creativity", it is not surprising that at places where real urgency comes from competition against either industry rivals or the budget, the idea of stimulating the worker's right brain with art experiences can gain some real traction.

But perhaps everything new is old again... The simplest way to assure that innovation is "fostered" is to provide
(1.) a clear statement of why the company will consider something to be "innovative" and...
(2.) a clear statement about what circumstances will cause the innovation to be rewarded in a way that directly benefits the individual(s) involved.

Generally, if company leadership can't get that much communication together and abide by it, then most other "fostering" efforts are essentially arbitrary.

Furthermore, this effort should not be confused at all with management's concern about how to measure the innovation's impact on the company's performance. The performance impact issue is not something that should be making innovation special. Any management team that rewards "performance impacts" with bonuses should simply add innovations to the mix of things that can be clearly accounted for as contributors to better performance. Meanwhile, innovation is about doing things differently to create opportunity; but execution is about doing things a certain way to hit performance targets.

This is where managers have to get real: if they will not reward innovators for being innovative, as opposed to making the reward conditional upon performance increases, then people will learn that innovation is not worth the effort at this organization. So in step (2.) above, the "circumstances" to be declared must start with something other than performance metrics.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:42 AM

March 30, 2008

Careful What You Ask For...

Anyone who has visited Archestra more than once ( all nine people! ...well, ok, eight not couting myself) knows that a major point getting made is this: what looks like problems without solutions is often due to the romantic allegiance we have to a misleading vocabulary.

It's especially important to catch those times when strategy, management, execution, and other fundamentals are being wrestled by name. In that vein, one of the longest-standing friends of Archestra -- Bruce MacEwen at Adam Smith, Esquire -- caught the notice (again) of a somewhat newer friend -- Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt -- setting the stage for the commentary now here.

Bruce starts it off by reviewing ideas in the The Halo Effect, by Phil Rosenzweig. Rosenweig explores the historical ineffectiveness of management guru wisdom, and Bruce shortly comes to his own punchline: "In this unknowable world, what attitude and what approach grace us with the best odds of success? Only one: Critical thinking."

But as you read Bruce's fluid argument to the conclusion, you pass through the equally important question in his theme: "What do you have to know, to be the best performer?"

Jack, a seasoned spokesman for the Theory of Constraints (TOC), embraces Bruce's conclusion; but moreso he picks up that earlier question with his own followup, posing a perhaps ironic counterargument to Bruce's conclusion. With no pretense of being gurus, both men argue for the value of logic to management that would aspire to the top rung of performance. But Jack shines a light in the dark corner of logic's chronic problem with gaining broad acceptance. Case in point: Jack's observation that TOC works but still doesn't proliferate poses this question: "What does it take to get chosen as the management approach?" And our question, naturally, becomes "if you aren't chosen, then how can you be the key to success?"

Evidently, what it takes to be chosen is a combination of marketing and politics -- and the facts may be that the underlying genius of "success" is not the management approach used but instead the competitive approach employed by the executives. What Jack points out, intentionally or not, is beautifully brutal: that sometimes things work and sometimes they don't. And we must remember that winning ugly is still...winning. TOC companies may be winners, but most winners don't use TOC. (True, or false? Jack suggests, True.)

Consequently, when it comes to competition, we can't be sure that a great lot of companies should do anything in common; but instead we have to focus on why something works for the company that it works for.

In other words, there is a glaring difference between strategic management and competitive strategy, with the better competitors doing most of the winning, not foremost the better managed.

What executives must be responsible for is figuring out what strategy their company can win with; and what managers must do is figure out whether the company is doing what that appropriate competitive strategy calls for.

As both Bruce and Jack assert, critical thinking ought to be a key tool, and here we assert that it is a key tool in both competition and management. But what overrides both circumstances is the possibility that the thinking will be done about the wrong thing.

Eschewing mythologies and the emperor's new clothes, Jack quotes Bruce's counsel against that problem : "rigorous and unblinking analysis of reality as it is, not as you want it to be..." What we must take this to mean is not that some approach is inherently more competitively clairvoyant than another, but instead that executives and managers must not run the company based on a mythology (of an approach) that does not fit the company. To puncture the mythology, you have to be able to cut through the marketing and politics that surround it within the company.

New punchlines: as the top person in charge, you can't know what strategy will be your most successful against the competition before you know your organization; and when you reach an understanding of what your organization can do, you then have to either select a strategy that fits the organization, or you have to change your organization to fit a different strategy. What's tough is that you have to do this while the game is already underway.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 1:53 PM

March 21, 2008

Who Knows how to Manage Knowledge Management?

The initial impetus for practicing knowledge management as a discipline is to Effect a different outcome from what has already otherwise been obtained.

Best practices of knowledge management are meant to Affect the approaches to gaining the target outcome.

Question behind the outcome: "Why should knowledge be managed?"

Answer: knowledge has proved to be a resource that is critical to efficiently determining a two-part condition:
- when solution options exist and
- which options are optimal.
In the past, opportunity and quality have both suffered because effective knowledge was not available to be incorporated in a timely way during investigations and decision-making.

The goal of managing knowledge is to achieve timely discovery and acquisition of quality-checked knowledge for use during "live" investigation and decisioning.

It is important to recognize that investigation and decisioning are "constants" across a wide range of distinctive eforts:
- development (design, build)
- analysis (assess, interpret)
- auditing (measure, validate)

The management discipline provides people (roles), processes and tools to facilitate the following treatments of knowledge:
1 - discovery/generation
2 - QA
3 - acquisition/distribution
4 - lifecycle control (content versioning and retirement)

Practices within the discipline are "best" when they accomplish the following two things:
- they manage to align each of the four treatments individually with the operational environment that is meant to be sustained by executive influence (or group culture),
- but the practices align them in a way that allows each treatment to align with the other treatments (!) -- especially so that you get a chain linkage from 1 to 4 that allows 4 to also loop back as a "supplier" to 1.

With this overview, it is possible to understand where most of the phenomena that are now associated with KM should be able to fit in, and to simultaneously recognize that the various phenomena can be creatively "fitted in" to exploit special circumstances such as existing resources, emergencies, enthusiasm, or general curiosity and inventiveness. Those circumstances should be governed by a higher-level strategy. The typical phenomena include collaboration, multimedia (rich content), social networks, semantic search, library science, and games.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:51 AM

Who Knows how to Manage Knowledge Management?

The initial impetus for practicing knowledge management as a discipline is to Effect a different outcome from what has already otherwise been obtained.

Best practices of knowledge management are meant to Affect the approaches to gaining the target outcome.

Question behind the outcome: "Why should knowledge be managed?"

The goal of managing knowledge is to achieve timely discovery and acquisition of quality-checked knowledge for use during "live" investigation and decisioning.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:51 AM

January 1, 2008

Driving Value from Change with Knowledge

Frank thoughts about why people are important to an organization mainly go down two tracks.
One track examines what is necessary for the organization to be "in the game" it plans to play... The other examines what is necessary for the organization to play the way it wants to play, when already in the game.

Few experienced people still hold on to the simplistic idea that the former track is about line workers with the latter being about the managers. Since the recognition of CRM's dominant influence on the top line of the business, ample evidence establishes that alignment of front and back offices is critical to sustaining wins. Repeatedly getting the right things to the right place at the right time for the right reason means that staff in management and in line production must both attend to operational fundamentals, and both attend to situational performance differentiators.

During the early adoption period for that principle of alignment, "knowledge worker" became a profile arguing for distinction. We identify it as a profile, and not as a role, because it is an optional mode for every role. In organizations where it actually makes sense to discuss "knowledge workers", I.T. has made the greater part of production dependent on information processing and on interpreting the status of the processing outputs. Net: in the procedural life of the organization's activity, analysts now constantly threaten to outnumber mechanics.

The appropriate new idea of worker "productivity" follows quickly on the management of information, where the issue is about what value the worker's information management should provide. In the usual formula, value is expected to result where experience influences the information management.

But there are two tracks involved in applying that experience to the information:

- keeping things the way they were designed to be; and,
- successfully adapting as necessary to changes.

Most practical experience in organizations is role-based. In fact, we must assume that managing experience through roles is the complement to managing information, with their sum being what we recognize as practical knowledge. The question that the information age has added to the foreground of this discussion is how the manager role and the line worker role respectively exercize the knowledge worker profile to provide the value expected from their roles.

Workers with a higher degree of performance recognition in the organization are most frequently those who run the second track -- adapting to change -- in the knowledge worker mode.

To point this out more specifically, it helps to identify what qualifies as "change". The table below identifies, in ordinary language, the key types of change (points where value is generated), and the relevant "valuable behaviors" sought from managers and line workers executing their roles in the knowledge-worker mode.

Aside from confidential facts, the most privileged type of information is ideas. Speaking broadly, we can say that an "idea" is a proposed condition with an expected meaning. Left to its own devices, the "k-worker" (knowledgeworker) profile is about managing ideas for specific circumstances. As shown in the table, that relatively "pure" focus is pulled to different pragmatic effects by the role that uses it (manager or production line worker). That said, for most companies relevant to this discussion, a prescribed business process is the production line of importance that "manufactures" the necessary deliverables from the organization.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 14, 2007

Smart enough to be Lucky

Along with confusion about "business intelligence" comes similar uncertainties about "predictive analytics".

Aside from the very entertaining irony of not being able to predict the value of predictive analytics, is this another case of managers and markets just making things harder than they need to be?

The very notion of analyzing one's way to a "correct prediction" is so provocative, it's hard to even make a comment about it that stays on point instead of swinging freely between paranoia and irrational exuberance... But let's look at the enthusiasms, this way:
- everyone wants predictive analytics;
- a subset of everyone wants to pay for it;
- a subset of that payers' group is willing to trust it;
- and a subset of that trusting group is willing to depend on it.

Meanwhile, the difference between what makes predictive analytics successfully marketable versus successfully useful is a gap just as large as between the whopping percentage of enthusiasts versus the miniscule percent of dependents.

Useful? To figure out where you ought to be within that gap, you have to decide whether you need, or not, to bet on change in order to get what you insist on gaining. The more you need to bet on change, the more you're ready to rely on predictive analytics.

But "predictive analytics" is confusing to people because it makes them think of "calculation" which makes them think of "facts" -- and in other words encourages the idea that there's science leading to certainty. The problem is that it isn't the kind of certainty they suspect! The real point of prediction is not to identify certain future outcomes; it is to identify certain future possibilities. If you're only interested in one possibility, you're not looking for analysis, you're looking for accounting.

(Timo Elliott's BI Questions Blog is the most recent location of discussion that provoked these comments.)

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 10:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 31, 2007

The DnA of Knowledgebased Producers (Pt. 1)

Pretty much everyone recognizes "R&D" -- research 'n' development -- as a discrete activity with a special place in supporting the future prospects of the business.

Even so, the explosion of literature on how hard companies find it to make profitable sense of their desire for "innovation" certainly suggests that the expected output of R 'n' D is too often either missing or mystifying.

The current official wisdom is that these companies need to step up to an innovation *process*. This is pretty difficult to argue against, since management will likely not finally be tolerant of any sustained activity that can't be designed as such. So the emphasis shifts quickly to wondering what the process should be like, especially in terms of how to link it to other "normal" incumbent management processes.

If there is a flaw in this attitude, it is a fundamental flaw. By definition, innovation must be derived from having a supportive perspective on a change to a designated status quo. But since "perspective" and "status quo" both call for awareness based on presumptive ideas (which we'll call knowledge), the problem to solve about innovation is not to generate "auto-magic" extension of *activity* called R or D. Instead, the problem is first to understand why innovation would be the true nature of any outcomes, and then to look into how to breed it or at least capture it as it occurs.

It is in that light that the framework below provides the corrective lens spotting the place where innovation would emerge on the scene. It represents an important shift away from the presumption of R 'n' D and moves instead on the basis of Design and Application, or D 'n' A.

This organizational DnA breaks out the issue with a cross reference of the two key elements of design (concept and form) versus the two key elements of application (specification and implementation).

The shorthand supported by this framework is for representing the range of circumstances that might be "innovative" in character. Typically, these circumstances will include (a) new items on old contexts, (b) old items in new contexts, or (c) new items in new contexts.

Said even more briefly, when something old or new is used in a new way, there is apparent innovation. But this situation of associating some item or function with a usage will have included interesting particulars. For example, how did the idea for the association arise? What criteria established the practical acceptance of the association? How was it recognized that a new association -- proposed or found -- was possible and/or meaningful?

What the DnA framework exposes is the way that the intersections of design and application generate innovation and position it for leverage. Here are just some of the observations that match the framework:
- Inspiration: borrowing details from an existing specification provides us with inspiration.
- Invention: reconnecting the details in a designated arrangement generates our invention.
- Innovation: even without a prior invention, the decision to implement the inspiration can drive forward progress in an explicit attitude of accommodating new methodology and goals. (e.g., inernal organization or reorganization)
- Orchestration: to actually execute the accommodation, the arranging of feasible adaptations and options generates the output that can "go to market"... Without this orchestration, there is little reason to expect that either an invention or an innovation would have a channel of delivery to appropriate recipients. (e.g., external organization or reorganization)

One test of the framework is scalability -- meaning that it works, and works the same way, regardless of whether the trip from concept to delivery is only the few microseconds needed to blurt out in a useful language a sudden original thought, or instead is the many months in a cycle of product or corporate reorientation in its industry's marketplaces. Either way, the producer's initial efforts, in DnA, may not necessarily result in innovation; but given the material effects of Design (already perhaps "keepers"), we can always try to move from the framework's left to its right in Application and reach different and/or more "marketable value". These movements, including Form (e.g. models), Specification, and Implementation are easily recognized as domains of knowledge that are typically extant in the organization regardless of how well they are currently managed. Meanwhile, a producer may move within the framework in many different actual paths; one of the most typical paths to innovation means taking a concept through invention and various orchestrations to arrive at an innovation; but this is not the only path necessary or possible.

This knowledge-based perspective in no way displaces RnD from a position of critical importance. Instead, it helps to clarify that RnD is "instrumental", yet is not the point at which target value is primarily generated. The products of RnD (engineering) are not ready to be valued; instead they need to go on through to DnA where the value gets defined through the knowledgeability of the producer.

The important pattern of progression that hosts the emergence of innovation along with other productivity will begin with a *motivation* to manipulate the status quo. Something about the way things already are leaves something to be desired -- in other words, a perceived "need"... Illustrated left to right, the full progression goes on to look like this:

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:17 PM

July 14, 2007

The Radical Evidence of Artistic Research

Everyone who has ever argued about something is familiar with the challenge, "Prove what you know!"

This provokes a popular and creepy confusion. Taken to its extreme, the challenge even shifts its own point -- from establishing "truth" as a quality of knowledge, to estabishing proof as a quality of technique. That is, what is really demanded is not so much the absolute veracity of the ideas but the circumstantial reliability of "expertise". In that way, for example, the mode of scholarly evidence is allowed to overrun the confidence in artistic opinion. Yet when time has passed and reality aligns with artistic opinion, that opinion is seen (in hindsight) as being "foresight" and -- belatedly if not quite posthumously -- granted its due value, except of course by those who going forward want to co-opt the credit.

What is artistic opinion? Most people recognize it as "intuition", and this discussion recognizes intuiton as knowledge. In what follows below, the point is not to discuss opinions about art but instead to discuss the nature of the labor of formulating and presenting an idea. Two of its three key considerations will be that: (a.) this labor is artistic; and, (b.) the opinion produced by it is a form of knowledge.

The third consideration? When it comes to accepting things offered as "knowledge", we worry only because we need relief from the anxiety of uncertainty. But if we discover that we don't need the anxiety, then uncertainty is not a bad thing per se, and instead it becomes intellectual freedom that allows new knowledge to occur.

Still, looking briefly at the phenomenon of art works is helpful in setting the stage for recognizing this . A work of art "proves" something, but actually all that it proves is its own mechanism of conveying what it is about. That is, it's "proof" is essentially structural, more or less in the same way that a math equation is... but the structure takes its significance (literally, its ability to convey an idea) only from the context of what it is concerned about. The key question about a given work of art is, "why is (or was) its structure important?" And the correct answer will be primarily about that why, not a substitute answer describing the how. The "why" answer will wind up describing what concern was the one to which the structure was responding as it developed -- thus providing the context for understanding the importance of its "how".

In large part, this is what many people can find to be so exactly aggravating about an artwork -- either that it is not apparently concerned with what the observer is concerned about, and/or that the choices made by the artist to develop the responding structure are unexplained. Since there is vastly more art, and vastly more variety of art, than a typical single person has experienced and reached familiarity with, it is not at all improbable for a given artwork to be "about something in a certain way" where the observer is sympathetic neither to what it is about nor to the way it is "about it"...

In moments like that, the observer may have the high anxiety of uncertainty -- of possibly being fooled by something that doesn't actually try to successfully mean anything; by something that might be just "going through the motions" without detectably bothering to try to convince us even that the motions are taken seriously.

But with that same moment there may instead be the challenge of confronting knowledge that one simply didn't have before. And to avoid observer cynicism about the unfamiliar, the moment calls for realizing that not all things can be known the same way.

As goes with art go other presentations of ideas as well.

It might be considered fair for an observer to always ask the presenter to push an unfamiliar idea at least half of the distance towards being familiar knowledge. If the observer wants to accept the idea, and the presenter wants the idea to be accepted, then why not go at least 50/50 on the effort? The answer would be that the producer has typically done far more work already just to produce the artifact for the first time, than has the observer to become exposed to it for the first time. It would appear that the workload starts out with a huge imbalance, as the producer's "half" may not ever be balanced by an equal effort of observation on the observer's part.

The way that this balance is achieved, however, is not by the observer waiting for the presentation to occur and then giving it "equal time" -- but instead by the observer having already behaviorally invested in intellectual openness to new forms of knowledge before the presentation occurs.

For too many serious-minded people, the ability to accept some given presentation as "knowledge" is all bound up in an insistence on some particular technique of "proof" in presenting evidence. In the heat of the moment, their comfort leans, let's say, towards academic footnotings and away from unfettered idiosyncracy. Said differently, it is a competition between citations of historical factversus proposals of theory. In order for theory to be accepted as (conventional) knowledge, the burden of "proof" must be lifted in the form of historical citations. Science, not art.

Well, interestingly, the history of science has the characteristic of revealing that theories are often more reliable representations of truth than is the "evidence" dug up to support them -- simply because in the heat of the moment, the conventional program for generating the evidence just can't get it right, and much later, after that program has been abandoned, the theory is admitted by some other means (e.g. a better program). That is, scientific revolution has always been much more a story about our ability to know something, than about whether what we thought we knew was "actually the truth"... Certainly we do believe that we now know vastly more than we did even thiry years ago -- but the bigger story remains that we now have many more ways of knowing something than we did before. Re-inventing investigation is actually the key to knowledge breakthroughs. And investigation is essentially about actions, not about results.

Let's run with this a bit: the basic activity of knowledge acquisition is the thought process, which is what allows a way of knowing something. What is tricky about a thought process is that if the process is being invented, too, then it is more highly uncertain what it will allow us to know, and meanwhile it can be quite difficult to know whether the current process is conclusive. This is strongly reflected in the saying "a work of art is never finished, rather, it is just stopped"...

But to put things more to our point, when the process reveals something to us, we often hit the pause button and show off what was revealed so far. These exhibits (or "findings") are the knowledge in the moment. From there, they may or may not be formatted for re-presentations. Another option is of course to formalize the process so that the revelation can be re-produced.

Preserving findings for future reference stages the occasions where they may later come off as being "predictions" (literally, "said before"). Case in point: this article you are currently reading is content in the Archestra repository, where the bulk of the material to be found is, persistently, findings from an artistic research mode rather than from an organization of empirical evidence. Even the oldest of the Archestra content, going back to about 1996 origins, most frequently states or argues circumstances in some combination of "what if" and "as if" postures, seeming speculative and not academically rigorous. Yet the oldest of these ideas and assertions are sometimes only now showing up as "valid" in the conventional broad publishing of consulting firms, corporate marketing (especially by IT firms), and the like -- venues where there are customers who immediately demand "prove it!" because, for these customers, investing in uncertainty is an unacceptable risk. Typically, consultants and marketers, once they decide to collect conventional evidence for a theory, kill a significant amount of time and/or money doing that before they bet their business on it. The major point here is that those efforts are not about turning something into knowledge that wasn't knowledge already; instead they are about turning exposure to existing knowledge into adoption of it.

It's a nasty marketing habit to call those conversions "thought leadership", but no one wants to leech the fun out of marketing. At least today -- thanks to the web or other modern tools of exposure, surveillance and access -- we can more likely watch where ideas are actually coming from and get beyond the less benevolent artifices of "intellectual property".

To return to the beginning of this discussion: is there any reason to avoid identifying intuition and opinion as "knowledge" ?? The usual rap against them -- lack of credibility or objectivity -- is so rooted in anxiety over uncertainty that the rap should be discounted except in certain practical circumstances like heart surgery or legal contracting. The supposed alternative -- empirical evidence and testing -- is a power play, but it is so vulnerable to the capriciousness of competition and politics that it, too, should be discounted as an automatically correct default.

But does this mean that neither approach should be embraced? No, only that they are peer opportunities that both need to be understood before either is tolerated or used.

As a matter of "knowledge management", a responsible party must be able to determine what is really being asked for, whether what is received is appropriate to the request, and whether the request is appropriate to the circumstances in the first place. Education (exploring thinking) and execution (acquiring results) are simply not the same thing. Even more basic: does the requester need truth or instead a belief? Facts or confidence? Insight or accountability? As a knowledge provider or cog in the knowledge provision machinery, is your responsibility to provide insightfully truthful facts, believably confident accounts, or some other blend? Can you tell the difference, and is what you provide even the right thing for the recipient to be using?

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 8:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 28, 2007

Knowledge as Capital

The McKinsey gang examined corporate performance on two fundamental indicators of sustained competitive advantage—revenue growth and profitability—over an 11-year period from 1994 to 2004. Their finding:

"...we found that ...nine companies had higher market-to-book ratios than their competitors did. (The M/B ratio is a measure of corporate performance that compares a company’s market cap with its book value.)...the top nine performers strongly preferred organic growth: they made few acquisitions and divestitures when compared with other companies in their industries...
In our view, their ability to generate value from knowledge-intensive intangibles (such as copyrights, trade secrets, or strong brands) represents a good starting point for further exploration of their superior performance."

Just connecting the dots.

To connect them yourself, log in at The Elusive Goal of Corporate Outperformance -- McKinsey Quarterly 28 April 2007

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 22, 2007

The Value of Intellectual Property

Nearly all discussion of intellectual property is intellectually dishonest without the acknowledgement of the most essential aspect: that "property" means "taken", specifically as in "a portion of"...

An extension of this is the matter of what defines "not taken", which must also mean not withheld. Withholding is a major consideration, as in usual practice, enforcing property gets tricky, but most often winds up focussing on the matter of having the right, even more than the opportunity, to take a part from the whole.

But on whose terms do we get the privilege, in the first place,to take? Or to put it more bluntly, at whose expense or benefit is it done -- by which we justify the act?

The following discussion, along with the illustration below, describes the layers of transformation that partition a supply of ideas into an artifice called intellectual property.

Again, on whose terms do we get the privilege to take? Takers would like to think that the terms in question are both ordinary and appropriate in some obvious way. But what is obvious to some of us will often be obscure to others of us. For example, the "I'm doing this for your own good" school of taking is ethically justified as "beneficial protection". But the only thing that makes it ethical is the special reasoning by which it is considered to be "beneficial"... You know the drill: major museums nab artifacts from third world countries for "preservation", and cities nab private homes and grounds under "emminent domain" for developers. Clearly, the trick here is in who really gets the net benefit, which calls for some yardstick. But in my neighborhood, regardless of the measure, gaining benefit at someone else's expense is generally unethical except in sports, crimestopping, or other mutually declared wars.

Continuing to question the idea of just who's good is at stake, look at withholding. Not just a nuance of taking, "withholding" is commonly accepted in ordinary marketing, where the basic idea is to compete for (and win) control of a supply -- control that effectively makes the supply itself "property". Such withholding -- that control of supply -- finds itself ethical only in the same manner as benefits are accepted in sports -- namely, by convention amongst the players. The beneficiary? In this case, everyone playing who agrees to let everyone else "do it too if you can"...

In that scenario, what's actually most interesting is this: before "property" is established, all the fuss is really over opportunity even more than over rights or actual possessions; thus the game can't actually be played without judges and referees who evaluate the fairness of the fight for opportunity.

And at this "pre-property" stage, there is something even deeper. Unless everyone assumes some limiting factor that creates the need for "defense" of the supply, the agreement that condones taking is unnecessary in the first place. For example, in sports, this limiting factor might be a timer, or a fixed number of allowed attempts, or some other arbitrary boundary on a key enabler -- an enabler which could therefore run out or be hard to come by. Without the limiter, you don't need defense, and thus you don't need property.

Likewise, the first gimmick behind conventionally justifying "intellectual property" is to create an artificial limiter. This limiter might be a purely imaginary one, but marketing teaches us that we can make the perceived virtually real, and that's practically good enough.

Before we investigate the artifice of that limiter needed for intellectual property, consider the starkly contrasting issue of the supply of intellectual capital.

II.

Virtually no one knows how much intellectual capital there really is out there, but there is an accepted industrial practice of estimation. Namely, at any given time, the detectable level of supply is virtually created -- by organizations that measure the level in terms of "products" to be appropriated to one agenda or another. In fact, in common across all particular instances or organizations, the standing agenda is to convert capital into products that represent property. Why? Because property is worth more future capital than the amount of past capital consumed to make it.

For these organizations, it hardly matters to the agenda whether 5/10's or only 1/10 of the "real" supply of capital is available, if in effect both amounts are only capable of the same product. So the organizations don't measure the "real" supply, but instead only measure the effectively available part (i.e., not all the supply that there is to hold, but just what opportunity they have to hold, captive, any of it in a practical way.)

Not to say they are worry-free about the beginning level of capital. They do have to work to get some, from somewhere. Ironically, the organizations with the most ferocious marketing of an agenda to "produce more intellectual capital" inhabit the most painfully costly strata of stakeholders' investment (think public elementary schools and Ivy League universities) even though they also inhabit both the lowest and highest extremes of operational ROI (think public elementary schools and Ivy League universities). For the record, note that they are gone missing in the middle. Oh well.

Whatever: so what drives it all anyway?

Answers vary. In some realms, it is possible to think that intellectual property is bought with intellectual capital. This is neither completely hallucinatory nor broadly true. The mechanism that allows intellectual property to appear to be bought with intellectual capital is... politics! -- or in other words, rhetoric.

This shouldn't be taken lightly at all, because rhetoric is the basis of the construct called 'the marketplace of ideas".

It doesn't matter whether that dynamic is being manifested by Gallup polls; or by the Thomas Kuhnian structures of scientific revolution; or by US Weekly, InTouch, and the rest of the pop porn periodicals that duly say Who's It And How. All these examples have the same thing in common. They all show us that our luckiest experience as consumers of rhetoric is to learn that we can believe anything we hear but we might be wrong -- merely perched, anxiously, on the fence between ideas and products.

III.

Forget "mindshare." Instead, consider the two most basic intellectual products: fiction, and non-fiction.

Often, we intentionally choose to ride "fiction". And often, that's okay. After all, there's no special reason why we should be forced to confuse good fiction with truth or bad fiction with lies. As one friend of ours likes to say, they are orthogonal to each other:

When you keep the picture straight, it's easier to understand that what's at stake, usually, is not the thing that gets told but instead the art of the telling. In the scenario above, we'd love to be in the upper right quadrant, but we'll settle for the upper left when we can get it. As audiences, we're all about having a preference for plausibility, and we simply, and usually, require a better performance over any other matter.

For example, what do we learn from Google, the marketplace of ideas? We learn that for a given idea, 86 people will have had it and taken a shot at packaging it, some of them pretty good. Of those 86, thanks to Google, who do we now care about? Answer: not necessarily the name brands amongst them.

So why should the name brands get paid more, and why shouldn't the others get just as much play? By removing (as Google has) the artifical defense of scarcity, we've left old school promoters facing the equivalent of an absolutely thriving black market suddenly declared legit, like, like... Second Life.

What about non-fiction? Here the magic is actually not "plausibility" but the "service" of delivery. Limited service is much more aggravating than limited information, because if the information supply overloads the service, the orphaned information is still not useful,regardless of what it might be about. Our emotional response to service is key. In non-fiction, it's really about tolerance, and in the range of tolerance we go, worst to best, not from lies to truth, but instead from the inconveniently alien to the conveniently familiar.

IV.

Against the production rhetoric of both fiction and non-fiction, of plausibility and service, we have to bring our skepticism, or else caveat emptor. We'll demand that we get a good performance in either case, but in getting it, we have to be sure that the delivery is neither turning non-fiction into fiction, nor vice versa.

In exposing the nature of these products, it seems that their packaging would make them property at least for their producers. But their prospects for success are in the control of the packaging facility; that is, it's actually the facility that is the property.

At this point, let's imagine that the mind is the facility. Then of course it is not the mind's ideas that are the property, but instead the mind itself.

Is it plausible to extend our identification of that mind by abstracting the distinguishing model of its behavior? After all, we can say that the packaging facility called the mind asserts itself by it's repeatable application to the raw materials that it processes. The essence of "property" here is the way that the mind does it.

This issue of "process" makes it worth pointing out that "taking" should be seen differently when the event is "consuming" versus "holding" however briefly. But more importantly, we have to see that when the mind's process has finally output a product such as an idea, withholding the idea from other minds doesn't make the idea "property"; instead, it simply leaves the idea captive, uncommunicated. The probability is that the idea can be reproduced somewhere else, in another property. And, of legal note, the other property need not be dissimilar in order to be an "other". It only needs to be a different instance.

So logically, we can see that many identical intellectual properties can occur, notably by mechanisms other than "copying" one to another. (And empirically, we already knew this to be true, having seen that some great ideas have occurred at multiple points in time or space with no discernable "live" connection of those points.) Not only does this demonstrate that an idea is intrinsically not captive to only any one mind (property), but also that the active restraint of an idea's reoccurrence is truly artificial.

VI.

That realization puts heavy pressure on the dumber ideas held about intellectual property -- the ones which like to flog the criteria of uniqueness and exclusivity in the face of a much more obvious probability that "my" intellectual property may be practically indistinguishable from someone else's.

The full reality is that my intellectual property is publicly interesting only to the degree that either other people's is unavailable or that mine (my mental behavior pattern) is relatively inventive.

VII.

Now we have the terms to untie a couple of knots in the line of thinking about intellectual property.

For example, what is copyright about? It can't be about the final similarity of products, alone, since (a.) re-production is not actually necessarily "copying", and (b.) the ability to reproduce is more likely to be the property than is the product; and (c.) my property need not be any different from another.

Instead, copyright is fundamentally competitive, a limiter attempting to regulate the presence and use of a like property for a like outcome in a prescribed market. Naturally, unless the market itself actually has a prescription (i.e. definition), then there is no artificial or conventional limiter that necessitates a defense of exclusive opportunity.

Copyright specifically intends to prohibit a "same" opportunity to compete. But in a fair market, the convention normally established is about having an "equivalent" opportunity to compete. And finally, where competition is irrelevant, so is copyright.

Next: just as the purpose of intellectual capital is not to purchase intellectual property, the purpose of intellectual property is not to support copyright. This assertion doesn't keep those components from being used that way, but there are no inherent protections or mandates to do so -- except in the agreed conventions of some agenda that has the need.

VIII.

The last area of consideration is to distinguish, in accounting fashion, intelectual property versus "assets". Intellectual property may or may not be an asset. Proof? Ask any artist who is not independently wealthy, or any person who cannot speak the language of his current domestic or local community. How you know what you do know may simply be mis-fit. What you don't know may not hurt you, but what you do know may not help.

But let's get away from the accountant's schema of things and look at "assets" differently. In real life, property is always an asset, but it may just be worthless until it is given a job to do, which them makes it a functional resource. The importance of the resource is what attributes value to the asset. Naturally, if competition proceeds in a way that makes the resource unimportant, then the relative value of the asset decreases. The question is, to whom does it matter? If you take your assets to a different game, or you don't care what game they are in, it doesn't necessarily change the asset in any important inherent way.

IX.

Finally, then, what is inherently important about intellectual property? Intellectual property is a resource, and here's what it's for: the designation of "intellectual property" brands something as a design benchmark for follow-on invention that can evolve or even revolutionize the conditions of the environment. In management practice, the point would be to use it as a base from which to cultivate 5 new offshoots; then take the one or two best of those five and focus all parties on sprouting five more offshoots from that; then trim and sprout again; etc.

Some will see that as just an argument for innovation. But the impact is more profound, as it equally affects all points of the spectrum ranging from renovation, to remodeling, to reengineering, to innovation.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 7:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 16, 2007

Mind Canary

For decades, as a precaution, miners have been reeling canary birds down into their mines to warn them of potential disaster -- as the canary is particularly sensitive to toxic gases such as carbon monoxide which is colorless, odorless and tasteless. If the canary dies, then the mine is dangerous.
A mind canary is very similar, with the word "mind" as a play off of the word "mine." If the "idea miner" sends an idea canary into the "mind" and it fails to return, then the mind may be lethal!

Thanks to marketing pro Alan Brooks at Mindcanary.com for memorializing this bit of Archestra legacy. He's adapted it a bit (as you'll see in the wording on his homepage) -- but to good purpose: he's guiding folks to safe mines. Hi Alan!

What do you do with a lethal mind? See "change management" and/or "knowledge management" -- at an Archestra location near you...

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 6:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 2, 2007

Role Your Own

Note to Sun Microsystems: now, the network is the producer.

Increasingly we read that the new books of importance will be written collaboratively and, in fact, will be Wiki-ed.

Aside from inciting thoughts about the demise of Books 2.0 (remember when Scrolls 3.0 was crushed by Books 1.0?), what are we to make of this?

Well, blending what we generally think about wikis and books, this news presumably heralds the rebirth of the Collective Wisdom.

Or not.

Proof? It was fairly predictable that Wikipedia's own founder would eventually rate it a failure. But it wasn't because people couldn't use it; it was because it was mis-used.

If the "open to all" offering of the production approach is merely a free-for-all, then all bets are off. To understand what is most likely to happen, someone who cares will need to know and cultivate what the real profile of the group effort ought to be, as detectable by the terms of the framework here. In the simplest terms, one should be able to put an "X" in the boxes that distinguish the nature and objectives of the group effort, and leave the other boxes empty, and tell everyone the same story:

Otherwise, one of two things will likely take over-- .the fatigue of herding cats, or the natural inclination towards entropy.

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By the way, due to laziness and working solo, "we" took a really long time with this article, during which Infoworld coincidentally arrived with a more conventional but important review of Wikis. Click it up now, or come back to it afterwards, as you like.
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For the general populace in-the-know, things are still new enough so that when one says "wiki" it likely means the real branded thing -- dubya3 dot wikisomething dot xyz. But already, we can safely say "wiki" the way we say "kleenex".

It's what happens with all perfect products: we didn't know we needed it until we got it, and now we can't live without it -- so we talk about it in an absolute or archetypal sense, and, we don't use upper case.

In saying "wiki", most people already could, and might as well, really mean any of fifty different but similar online-powered production collectives -- whether fragrance free, textured, twin ply or whatever -- instead of only authentic Wikispots. For most people, the obscure technical diffentiations of the exact underlying brand of technology are unimportant: the main attraction is always the same -- functional collaboration. Collaboration is hot.

What we still have to worry about, though, is that "functional" part -- the part that gets wisdom out of the collective. Understanding the nature of the collective is more work than many care to worry about. Working together has never been more convenient; but is it a community, a workshop, a studio, an archive, a marketplace, or what? In other words, how is the collective managed?

As for the big rebirth, let's curb our enthusiam... It isn't proven yet that wiki wisdom is superior to any predecessors - it simply collects a hell of a lot faster.

II.

That might be cool, but inevitable or indispensable?

Nahh. This is an option or tactic, not a sure thing. Being online facilitates a higher speed of cooperation, but if you don't know where you're going, it doesn't matter how fast you get there. As for being indispensable, if you don't know any happy people who do not use and do not need a wiki, then you should get a bigger life than the one you have.

If you want to be a contributor yourself, though, life is good; wikis make donating easy. Now, that irresistable urge to share is covered.

Still, we can't assume that the effort to contribute to the production will wind up making the final product important. Now it's more convenient than ever to make bad stuff as well as good stuff. Meanwhile, getting a lot of bad stuff will make the novelty of this production wear thin really fast -- leaving it not much more important than anything before it.

Easy donations are just the starting line. If this is really going to work, then somehow the good stuff has to come about because of the way that the donations get handled.

Beyond the hype, the real story of the online collective is about the open-invitation supply chain versus a discriminating value chain -- when open-sourcing and authority mix in production.

III.

Deep within the cloudy buzz of collaboration, open-sourcing is the great (we believe) new extension of production mechanics. But great for whom? The null hypothesis isn't that open-sourcing is magically delicious, but that adult supervision creates collaboration from open-sourcing -- when collaboration has some specified advantage for the supervisors. It doesn't just happen by itself.

Probably the most generic form of collaboration is the workshop. Collaborative workshops, whether for making books or something else, are not new. The online part isn't even new. (Remember Compuserve?) But since we don't need collaboration to make a book, and we don't need a workshop to make a book, what the online collaborative workshop actually does of importance is bring is a workshop discipline to all comers.

IV.

Challenging that, one of the most popular supply-side notions of a collaboration is inclusiveness: the idea that anyone who can pass muster can contribute their labor to the works. While this has normally resulted, actually, in an advantage (cost) for the main producer, what's greasing the wheels on lots of the new online stuff is on the contributor side. Namely, thanks to the tools, there's not much muster to pass. For skeptics, this threatens the ambition for quality. But on the other hand, some thinkers propose the distinction "peer-production" as a way to indicate a "flatness" or absence of excessive hierarchy in the natural diversity of production roles. Is this stance a breeze of creative enlightenment, or merely political correctness? You be the judge.

Another, older spin on this flatness is the idea that the membership of a collaboration is a community gently floating in "equal rights". But that equality really applies to the benefits, not to the producing: it isn't equal opportunity. Community-based production is usually not "peer". Why not? Remember that when the producer is "the community", the community typically embraces a wide variety of roles in the production to be sure it gets what it wants, some supervisory (or "leader") and some not.

With a product like a book, we also get the connotation of an outcome having quality -- here attributed to concentration of the kind from a studio. In a collaborative "studio", getting from the labor to the works -- from the acts to the results -- is not just a collaboration. It really is a study, whether it's collaborative or not. The ongoing study itself is the main point of the studio. Not a product, but a process.

Facing that fact, we'll frankly note that some people study better than others, and that the attraction of "innovation" is not necessarily a given objective of the studio. We bring this up because it might be that many people find innovation sexy and studying not sexy -- leaving an online studio with a couple of inhibitors that push many early enthusiasts into the trough of disillusionment after the initial blush of procedural simplicity. Production is not easy, whether there are hierarchies or not.

Meanwhile, even for studios that are targeting innovation, neither is collective production usually "flat" -- otherwise, we'd only need to post the old Suggestion Box, and cool things would just sprout from it into realization. (Instead, our experience is littered with stymied suggestion boxes, probably outnumbered only by dormant "collaborative" websites).

Normally, delivering value features some complexity, which confronts the ersatz participant seeking the warmth of collaborative inclusion. For example, the ongoing effort conducted by a collaborative studio typically has a topic -- like "ferrous glass" or "business-IT alignment" (or perhaps even "How To Make A Book") -- and the topic will immediately triage at least some potential participants. Then, beyond self-selection away from or towards the topic, there is generally some authority conducting a further ultimate triage. Why is this authority there? Well, for example, the benefit of participation in a studio is aimed at promoting the value of its topic; and where participation is not seen to be promoting the value of the topic, that participation gets weeded out.

VI.

As a great benefit of online contributions, exploration for "supply" is scaled up by orders of magnitude without extra cost. But if the the collective takes on any responsibility for generating groupwide benefits, then it must decide whether it wants to find value in whatever suppy it receives, or instead wants to vet the supply for its fitness to a predetermined value. That is, the responsibility of the collective is still to convert the supply into value.

Call that governance or go-to-market, the basic problem is the same.

What's interesting is that to be a community, the collective has to declare a self-interested group need for one or both of them, or else it has little claim to actually being a community. This is the authority of the community. It begins to make the gap between participation and importance fairly explicit, and weaker participants fall into the gap.

Yet these Darwinian consequences are not even the interesting part. They miss the bigger point and breakthrough of the collaborative environment. Namely, who needs community, anyway? What we really want is not community but that underlying production network, and this difference is now much more explicit due to wikis.

VII.

Having something like Wikipedia lose credibility (and thus fail it's mission) is disappointing. But the story might not be over yet, anyway. A general difference in the collectives that wikis foster is between collectives pursuing connoisseurship (quality) versus ones pursuing entrepreneurship, and a switch in direction is not out of the question.

In the case where an "online collective" commits itself to defining new value from its available content supply, the most common cycle of events is that someone in its communications network proposes the value, and the rapidly expanding acknowledgement of it creates a demand that can be met by the incredibly rapid supply of uninhibited contributors (suppliers) in the same network. And when membership in the collective does not require prequalification, the communications network expands exponentially. What isn't predetermined is who will come up with the good idea. For the source of the idea, if everyone has to agree on who has the "good" idea, it's a problem. But if the idea can simply find its own audience, then for the source it's pure opportunity.

So, for example, is there a particular need for, or interest in, Valentine's Day jokes for divorcees? Let's find out, in an online production network. The cover story here is not that these particular jokes might become a success or not, nor that the network should get seriously focused on divorcees or holidays or jokes, but instead that anyone in the network could come up with it and trigger its pursuit. Anyone in the network can now be not just a source but a producer. What's needed from the network is its natural ability to grow itself, and the ease that it offers the individual in finding a hospitable sector.

This doesn't mean that everyone should be a producer, and certainly it doesn't mean that most will be any good at it. But now the opportunity is there.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 2:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 26, 2006

KM and "the Need To Know" Basis

If you're a provider of knowledge, then blogging, social networking, globalization, and other developments ought to be so liberating. The payoff: orders of magnitude more audience for you.

But somehow, it's turning out to just be disappointing. The downside: these changes are actually more work! They have made it far more important to understand how information can travel and how it gets contextualized as "knowledge". Anything you send out might get more abuse or misuse than use.

AND what's worse, the fun of being exclusive isn't there. It's all... less grown up. You have to regress to the old "party in your head" instinct of having more people involved just for the sake of having more people involved. Otherwise, it turns out that you're working a lot harder to be noticed (as opposed to merely exposed), and right when you are noticed, a bunch of people just like you get noticed too -- and it's not even clear that they worked hard for it; why should you?

I'm not happy with all this freedom. Call it an open market if you like, but when information is free, only bums will have information.

All this unrestrained circulation reduces your knowledge to information. Ouch. What are you gonna do?

Well, some knowledge is really, in the first place, just information that is appropriate to a needed decision. In fact, it's not the provider that gave the knowledge, it's the needy recipient that makes it out of the information. In this case, they don't need your stinking knowledge; mere "data" would suffice. What's finally being called "knowledge" here is simply an awareness of facts -- not the provider's awareness, but the recipient's. [Note: clearly, you have to pick your audience.]

Gaining awareness and gaining facts are bundled together in that thought, but they are rudely separated in action. Unless the facts seem appropriate, gaining them is not what amounts to "knowledge" for us. We don't value awareness of facts that we don't care about. Without the value, we don't think of the awareness as knowledge.

This indicates that, because of a difference in context, one person's knowledge always risks being merely another person's information. [Note: send the context along with the info.]

Of course, there are conventions formed to brand certain classes of information more "absolutely" as knowledge. "Instructions" come to mind. Providers who subscribe to the convention enjoy some confidence that their information exchange really is knowledge transfer, because they are aware, in advance, of how it is likely to be used. But we know that it's sometimes pretty hard to understand instructions; after getting them we can sometimes still feel like we don't know anything.

The thought here is that the information may originate as knowledge, but in transit it is just information again, and then it arrives in the recipient's processing where it becomes knowledge again -- or not...

In other words, knowledge is not a material -- it's an effect. It's a condition, different from information in the same way that being amused is different from a joke.

Here's no joke. An article in the "news" says that 2% of the world's population owns over 50% of the world wealth. Some may say that they've heard it before; but this time it comes from research. The warm aroma of validity wafts across the counter, and where before if we thought there was only opinion (and not even convention), now there's "knowledge" again... this time, our own willingness to believe. Frankly, this is the kind of information that many in positions of authority would not like to have circulated. The whammy is doubled by the further news (says Anuradha Mittal of the California-based Oakland Institute) that "unfettered free trade tends to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor".

Speaking colloquially, is it safe for everyone to know this? Or, asked more along the lines of the points made earlier, should this info be passed around strictly on a "need to know" basis? When you think about what people might do with this information, you can understand why some authorities don't want people to "know it". (gasp! say it ain't so!)

This makes us ask about what's going on when managers "manage knowledge". What's the deal? [Parents of preteens, don't get cocky. What follows is not what you're thinking already.]

Here, the key aspect of management is the designation "information of note", which we observe is just like the police designation "person of interest" -- i.e., not quite a suspect, but not quite scott free either. Hey, you there, stay in town, and be ready to answer questions.

Rounding up persons "of interest" is kind of a stretch of our tolerance, but its a practical strategy for the authorities to acquire the person that they eventually really want, so that they can do what they really want to do: charge someone!

Paralleling that, perhaps the real basis of practical knowledge management is strategic roundup of information . But what makes that containment (content!) strategic is not the information that's rounded up; rather, it's what you eventually get people to do with it. -- which is what makes it interesting.

Net: the beginnings of knowledge management are in organizing people to use information in a certain way. Then you have to aim the information providers at those uses. [Note: oh yeah, libraries..]

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:10 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 23, 2006

Street Cred versus the Uncommon Knowledge

In the world of expertise, knowledge is power; but power isn't enough. Knowledge and expertise go hand-in-hand, but if not for marketing, the value of knowledge could be largely undetermined.

Before we go on with this, prime your pump with this holiday sampler of pieces from Jack Vinson at Knowledge Jolt With Jack. Jack writes about knowledge management, personal effectiveness, theory of constraints and more. He's offered a quick tour that you can take at your leisure, in handy categories. Definitely do the first one, if your'e squeezed for time:

Expertise:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/11/22/clay_shirky_on_expertise_again.html

Expertise locators:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/06/23/expertise_locators_on_the_brain.html

The KM keystroke:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/09/06/f1_as_the_knowledge_management_key.html

Definitions:
http://blog.jackvinson.com/archives/2006/08/29/km_definitions_from_my_perspective.html

Jumping into the fray, here's my pitch:
Knowledge is content, but by itself it isn't product. In the markets, "expertise" is the packaging used for knowledge transfer. Its point is to convert contents into applications. Applications! Now there's a product.

This is why it actually makes sense to hire experts; that's how you, as the consumer, access the knowledge. And yet there still might be an issue of customer satisfaction; what if the expertise doesn't bring the knowledge you really wanted? It's not that it couldn't -- just that it didn't. Is that aggravating, or what!

This ultimately highlights the issue of value: when we're shopping for expertise, we're shopping for knowledge delivery, not necessarily for the knowledge itself. In the end, the credibility of an expert is usually about his track record of delivery. It's nice if that credential is based on delivering under real-world pressure, not just under pressure of exams. But let's not get distracted: we know the knowledge is out there in many places, and we want the credential to tell us the best place to get it.

This helps explain the difference between credibility and authority. To the point, we can think of authority in terms of "authorship" -- nothing less than the virtue of having defined the knowledge in the first place and thereby being its master. Authority is at a different location than credibility in the knowledge supply chain. It's not the distributor or the retailer, it's the manufacturer or producer.

Consequently, the more we are determined to get right to the knowledge and skip the packaging, the more we're predisposed to cut out the middle man: experts.

Of course, cutting out the middle man leaves us with a situation:
- we either have to do more work (shopping), or
- we have to accept that what we buy may not be the best of breed.

In the first case, we probably want to be lucky; and in the second, we probably want to be... smart!

My favorite practical stance on that is all about being able to accept what happens.
- In the former case, it's the first rule of shopping -- After you've bought it, stop shopping.
- In the latter case, it's the second rule of shopping -- You're not perfect, but you're perfect for me.

This practicality isn't very sexy. Being your own expert is just not the same as being someone else's. But the good news is, not being someone else's expert isn't going to hamper you in getting your hands on authentic knowledge.

The bad news is that you might be competing with other people's experts, to get your hands on it first, before they obfuscate it with packaging.

In the Web Do Dot Oh-ver era, the biggest problem is getting faked out by electro-powered shoppers and distributors posing as authorities. Be forewarned, they might be merely experts.

Well, gotta run; my unauthorized autobiography is overdue at the editor's.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 5:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 1, 2006

The CMDB as a Knowledge Base

An executive overview.

In the front-office world of a business, the holy grail of a "360-degree view of the customer" is already old hat.

Well, much of what is now happening in the middle office -- the IT world -- revolves around the criticality of utilizing a "configuration management database", or "CMDB". This database is the key to a 360-degree view of any IT asset. In particular, it is a centralized repository of information about how items are defined and situated as components of the information technology infrastructure on which the business runs.

As a singularly authoritative (or "master") source of information about the infrastructure's components, the database content is very involved in the documentation and decision support for almost any business process workflow requiring IT enablement. But what is it about the components that the CMDB describes?

Typically the components for which the CMDB holds descriptions are referred to as "configurations". A quick survey of the CMDB literature shows that would-be CMDB users can get mired in great controversy about what consitutes a configuration, because there are so many ways to segment a chunk of infrastructure IT and legitimately call it a component. After all, the notion of a component necessarily refers to the idea of some larger entity that the component helps to make up. The problem is that any entity's distinctive identity must be defined with a boundary around its scale, complexity and purpose -- but just as any category may be said to be a subcategory of something else, any entity may be a component of some other entity. Thus it may be unclear where to draw a boundary, create an object, and call it a "configuration". The question always begged is "of what entity is this item a component?"

This makes it very difficult to decide what to include and exclude -- the CMDB's catalog of entities should be neither too general nor meaninglessly specific. How many levels of categorization and subcategorization (so to speak) must the CMDB contain?

In the below, we skip all of that confusion by looking at "things" in a more objective way. First, we take the notion of configuration not as a noun but instead mainly as a verb that has a result. The focus is on the motive for action. That is, nothing in the IT infrastructure is there except through the labor of making it fit into the company of other things -- and our first emphasis is on the labor that takes place to respond to the perceived need for including something that wasn't there before. This allows us to think of a "configuration" as the output of a system of functions, and the CMDB first of all collects facts about that output (and other ones, similar or related, in the same infrastructure ) -- as accounted for by its system.

But why collect the information? The primary reason is to put management of these outputs on a foundation of knowledge instead of on hunch. The CMDB's content can fuel knowledge by organizing its information into the three main contexts that matter to the difference between being managed and unmanaged.

Managed conditions always compare the actual against the planned and the authorized. This indicates three forms of knowledge that the CMDB would support: respectively, models, analyses and histories.

The essential CMDB content will be descriptions of states generated by the functions (as illustrated above), to be evaluated in these three contexts.

However, management tends to root itself in the posture of "operations" -- with the difference being that operations are mainly about organizational responsibilities while functions are about activity. This distinction is more profoundly yet simply identified in the hierarchy of management as shown in the next table. Top-down, starting from a focus on business value, the table rows address the questions "Why are we doing something?"; "how are we going to do it?"; and, "what are we going to do it with?":..

It is easy, then, to recognize the same top-down pattern in management's attempt to associate the needs of the business with the infrastructure that would address it.

Arguably, tactics are derived from respect for the customer's agenda, and functions leverage the offerings of suppliers -- so the primary challenge for differentiated management is in the operational dimension. Not surprisingly, Operations lays out responsibility areas in a way that tends to generally reflect functions. For example, the operational chain of development/implementation/administration/support is, on the surface, an echo of the functional flow of build/release/monitor/maintain. But Operations must intentionally, not coincidentally, associate its responsibility areas with the functions it can govern, if the dynamic is to be called "management". Operations must decide what functions will "execute the infrastructure" and how.

Consequently, what management wants from the CMDB is content that helps construct the artifacts of management that should populate the following framework. In this framework, captured knowledge explains how Operations currently puts functions into the context of the bigger management picture -- the one that generates business value. That overall knowledge-based governance looks to the CMDB to fortify its perspective and acuity on what to change, when and why.

In the above article:

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 11:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2006

Where's the "System" in Managed Knowledge?

Swimming around in phrases like "knowledge management" is easy until it comes time to actually do the management. The abundance of innovations for promoting the transfer of knowledge from point A to point B is exciting and often dramatically leaps over old barriers to practicality. But just getting knowledge moved around more readily is no guarantee that any significant achievement results from the activity. By comparison, if our wariness of email's excesses is any indication, we gave up on that kind of naivete long ago.

Yet, getting past the romance and denial in the "knowledge management" label is something most users of managed knowledge would like to leave on someone else's To Do list.

If that To Do list belongs to you, a major first step is to note and remember that knowledge exists in an environment, not in a container, and knowledge users roam all over the environment doing spontaneous and therefore frequently unpredictable things. The idea of transferring knowledge from A to B is about hitting moving targets with items you first have to catch.

To start catching the important items, it helps to categorize them according to why they are useful to you and to the presumed recipients. The users themselves also should be categorized according to what we can expect them to do about what they receive. Otherwise, the constant risk is that you don't get the right thing to the right user at the right time, meaning that the effort is somewhat wastful and, what's worse, discrediting to further efforts.

Taking the idea that the recipients should get what they actually need, the high-level perspective on managing knowledge has to do mainly with context-sensitivity. In pursuit of repeatable, optimal, reliable context-sensitivity, the mechanics of managing knowledge have to take care of combining a knowledge "supply chain" capability with a knowledge "value chain" capability. In the picture below, this combination is represented so that the reasons why anyone should care are exposed at the different points between "not knowledge" (lower left) and "full knowledge" (upper right).

In this scenario, most users are "consumers" and hang out at the upper right. Wandering leftward brings more and more responsibility to be a "producer" -- taking what is there and driving it right-ward, or at least making it highly available and suitable for that. Going from left to right, the "Who Cares" factor goes higher and higher. Having an idea is fine, but packaging it makes it more valuable, and targeting it to a matching audience tops out its probable value.

Meanwhile, going from the bottom of the layout to the top similarly sets up responsibilities and value-generation. Here the most important thing is to handle the transformation of data first into information and then on into knowledge. We already have various repositories that we think of as systems for separately managing the three things . That is, we can point at a data base, at an information base, and at a knowledge base. But often users don't distinguish them from each other, counting on a wild array of tools for search and analysis to force transformations (i.e., "interpretations") from whatever base the user starts with.

If knowledge is really being managed, then instead the different responsibilities of the repositories won't be indifferently violated. For example, what should a database contribute to knowledge transfer? At most, a focus on (i.e., selection of facts according to) a defined subject. Heading upward, an information base should emphasize the ability to associate the data with the circumstantial need. A knowledge base emphasizes the perspective of the user who is actually in that circumstance.

If knowledge is systematically managed, there will be clarity about what kind of value is being generated at the different points in the process of making, saving and delivering it, and users will not hop around randomly in this production environment but instead be guided through it appropriately in real-time as they work.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 12:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2006

Harmonic Convergence

Welcome to the harmonic convergence of new-wave KM where, in the (flawed) holy triumvirate of People/Process/Technology, it's sometimes hard to tell whether the people are processing technology, or whether its the technology that is processing the people.

By now, it is already mainstream to think of blending blogs, wikis, search, and business intelligence into a hyperethos of "smarts". IT industry writers such as Michael Vizard at Ziff Davis go so far as to say, "This means that companies for the first time might actually be able to figure out who knows what, and when, within their organizations in real time."

Academics haven't changed their outlook a bit, however. Serious researchers rightly refuse to confuse data, information, and knowledge, understanding that crucial transformations must occur in order to get from data to info, and from info to knowledge. Taking that as a cue, and as the only one that we need, our understanding of a "process" for managing knowledge clearly embraces an expectation that systems will be developed to power and control those transformations.

Is it just me, or do you agree that the Card Catalog is still where the bar got set in knowledge management systems? When I was five years old, I learned how to use it and it worked for forty years virtually unchanged. It even withstood, without blinking, the unmeasured nuclear explosion of bad poetry brought on by the advent of the home word processor. I sometimes wonder why "management" people are so eager to dismiss the discipline of library science and insist on hot dates with so-called "self-managing" or "organic" content.

That is, let's not forget that the user-community for knowledge is not homogenous, and even unscientifically it can be confidently separated into roles like managers, knowledge workers and line workers. In a business, these roles are distinct, are actually held to some standards of accountability, and a lot of what passes as "process" exists mainly to avoid having these roles waste time. These aren't per se "knowledge management" processes -- they're work management processes. Knowledge isn't supposed to be magical; it's supposed to be practical. How does it get that way?

Interestingly, the card catalog is brutally efficient. It just doesn't work well until you learn how to use it. But when you've learned, it works for two key reasons: one, it has built in accounting; and two, everything it knows about is formally published. Let's see: if you were paying someone out of your pocket to be responsible for assuring those two characteristics, do you think you might call them a "knowledge manager"?

I'd sure hate to go into a library where the catalog was missing, the shelves had all fallen over, and anyone could arrive and poke around adding, moving, or removing whatever other materials they wanted. Unless, of course, I was there for recreation. Oh wait, that's why we surf the web!

But surfing on my boss's dime is a little different, don't you think? If newer and newer technology is going to bring about maturity in new-wave KM, the technology is going to have to get primarily focussed on making management processes better, and only secondarily on making more and more spontaneous content sources continuously reachable. In a business, the purpose of KM is to integrate two proceses, content management and work management , in order to improve the content of work! Until then, the convergence of the technology innovations is going to continue increasing the dissonance instead of the harmony, the noise instead of the signal.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 9:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 9, 2006

The Knowledge Tax

Here in the knowledge economy, life can be very taxing.

Doing research involves looking for:
- things that you don't know exist,
- to get reliable information that is new to you
- about things that you want to know.

So from the start, you have pretty significant uncertainty at the basis of your effort. Moreso, when researching concepts, it's often unclear as to whether the information, terminology, context, etc. that other people have used will allow you to readily recognize the same thing that you were looking for, when it is right under your nose.

So some kind of map is needed to guide you to the right needles in the haystack of research.

A taxonomy is a "custom dictionary" of categories. It tells you which particular terms are going to be used as the "working labels" for certain groups of ideas, for how those groups are related to each other, and therefore for how you might confidently categorize examples of those ideas. So we use the taxonomy (categories) to zero in on examples. Taxonomies create the aisles and shelves in the grocery store of knowledge.

But then there is also ontology. An ontology is more like a belief system -- in this case a set of beliefs about how things "really are" and why they are that way. Ontologies are heavy duty because they do a lot of editing in the same way that we think of "design" shaping things up.

What's interesting about ontologies versus taxonomies is that when a professional taxonomy gets imposed on a cultural ontology, there's a big struggle to see which one of them is going to re-arrange the other more. You don't get arguments about whether a chair is a chair, but you get arguments of another kind.

A taxonomy might look at a space and say "You know, this could easily include, or could be, a playroom."
In the same space, an ontology might not say "there's no such thing as a playroom," BUT it might say "this is a chapel; we don't acknowledge playrooms here; there is no playroom."

Brutally oversimplified, and relative to each other, taxonomies are more data-based, and ontologies are more point-of-view-based. Taxonomies don't care who is looking; ontologies do.

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (Denis Howe) says, "Formally, an ontology is the statement of a logical theory..." but it goes on to emphasize that the logic is something shared, like the shorthand lingo of an established social group, which has decided what qualities of something matter the most and can categorize them that way. Our favorite example of this is from an essay by Jorge Luis Borges, cited by Joe Celko in Intelligent Enterprise magazine, called "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins. In it, Borges presents a Chinese Encyclopaedia named "Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge", which categorized all animals in this way (note various copyrights for Borges and Intelligent Enterprise):

- those that belong to the Emperor
- embalmed ones
- those that are trained
- suckling pigs
- mermaids
- fabulous ones
- those drawn with a very fine camel's hair brush
- others
- those that have just broken a flower vase, and
- those that resemble flies from a distance.

On the other hand, in a taxonomy, there is some presumed (and presumably demonstrable) set of what everyone insists on calling "natural" relationships. More surely, the main distinction is that the relationships respected are "scientifically systematic". The facts in question are the ones that dispassionately glue the classifications to each other and to their sub and sub-sub classes, and would be seen the same way by all scientifically careful eyes.

Oh well, imagine trying to get credit for proving anything, without a taxonomy to stick up for you. It's the price you pay for a better job in the knowledge economy. But cheer up: there's always marketing and its genius of turning taxonomy into ontology... a well-tested way to try to get your money's worth.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at 4:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 28, 2006

Web What.dot.ever

I hadn't been able to put my finger on what has aggravated me so much about the phrase "Web 2.0". But the May 26 posting on Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow nailed it.

Usually, the nature of my annoyance with phrases like that is easy to pinpoint: namely, that I didn't think of them first. This aggravation is a healthy Stage 1 denial that is not too hard to flip into grudging respect for someone else while still being entertainingly pissed off in private. But let's face it, grudging respect only gets you points if the subject of the grudge gives a hoot about whether you do or don't come up with it. As Woody Allen riffed so long ago, what's the point of self-awareness if no one else notices that you have it? Although he explained it in the perverse ("I would never join a club that would have me as a member..."), he got right to the point.

Stage 2 denial is more like self-defense. Sometimes the target phrase of my distaste seems like a gratuitous dare, tossed out on the table like casual porn to see who in the room is either dumb enough to drop their cover of propriety and pick it up, or stupid enough to be manipulated into showing their low brow by dwelling on it even when something better was readily available. Resistance to being manipulated like this is identical to my rehearsed disdain of most (but nowhere near all) junk food: if it was my idea to have some, I still wouldn't tell anyone that it was my idea even if they caught me having it. Briefly, I had thought my initial bristling at the phrase "Web 2.0" was mostly of this sort.

But now, thanks to the posting on Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow, I'm comfortable with acknowledging a Stage 3 denial of the phrase, in which (this time) it is necessary to proactively ward off intellectual colonialism by fashionistas parading as "thought leaders". Truthfully, even at Stage 3 Denial, where you're blowing energy that could have been spent better elsewhere, there is normally still some entertainment to be had. The way you have fun with it is, for example, to choose a team and root like hell for it -- even though you know another team is probably better. The fun in this is all in the choice being willing, so much so that underdogs are actually more appealing than smug habitual winners. And the point is to not be told how to think. Furthermore, what's fun about rooting for teams whose winning just makes them smug? They're not more right for being winners, they're obnoxious. Ya just wanna smack 'em. The 1997 NY Yankees: "We want you to crave baseball all the time, but only if you're watching us." Whiners.

Parkinson's Law says that "buzz" will always expand to fill the volume of any container it is put in -- including the one between your ears. Insidious. Bad. Like millions of other folks, I just didn't know who coined the phrase "Web 2.0" ... Nor did I care, because, well, I hoped it would soon enough auto-inflate beyond the point of any gravitas. Yet more importantly, right at the beginning I sensed it trying to crowd out other thoughts and airtime around me. Then, Doctorow's Boing Boing post named names. Now I know that O'Reilly Media birthed the beast, and because they chose to be obnoxious about sharing it by handcuffing it to their lawyers, I can't retroactively grant them mere Stage 1 or Stage 2 denial. O'Reilly: "We want you to always be thinking about this as much as possible, but only if we tell you to!" Whiners.

The question we should ask is, if no one ever again said "Web 2.0", would there be even the slightest significant dip in the ability to talk about or understand what might happen next between the environment of the internet and the environment of consumer mentalities profit and non?

Duh, no. For starters, the idea of "the web" is not nearly as interesting now as "the channel", and even monetizing personalization is old news. In fact, the more interesting shift is not from Internetworking 1.0 to Internetworking 2.0 (which probably happened eight years ago), but instead from content personalization to access personalization. Gimme streaming hi-res Tivo'd podcasts of "Lost" and grad-school courses, with voice-activated search -- and no, I do not want to screw around with the plotlines. I do want really thin fold-out widescreens on the iPod, though. And/or a projector button, good enough to size and throw the image on an 8.5x11 piece of white paper.

And here's another "no". Is there any chance that only O'Reilly can explain what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 as well as O'Reilly can? Uhh, no. Further, is there something I now understand better about Web 2.0 than I did yesterday before I knew O'Reilly had anything to do with it? No.

Really, the irony is that because the web 1.0 works pretty well it is much more likely that I could continue to go far not knowing or needing that O'Reilly be involved. Nonetheless, does O'Reilly have a vested interest in the fruits of promoting the attention to the future of cyberspace under the Web 2.0 banner? Sure. But giving them credit for the phrase is way different from giving them cash for it. Not only do I refuse to use the phrase Web 2.0 with anti-litigative quotes around it, I'm basically disinclined to use the phrase at all. So there.

Bonus Beats: For more fatiguing commercialism that makes you crabby, let's dwell on the stupidity of the Beatles suing Steve Jobs. I mean, really. Although, now we have a new twist on the "apples to apples compari