On the Psychosocial Determinants of CoP Success

Over the past few years I have been inching along with a thought – what if we looked at Knowledge Management through the lens of psychology, what would we see and what problems and issues would stand out in relief against the many prickly problems faced by KM practitioners.

One that stands out to me is the question of whether CoP success (and we get to define that however we like) is proportional to variation in how much and how its members share knowledge.
When we look at this from a psychosocial perspective, the question that pops out to me is why do some people share knowledge and others don’t, why do some share more and others less.
Is there perhaps a character trait that predisposes people to sharing knowledge, are their environmental pressures and social norms that cause the behavior to vary, are these relatively stable over time and place or do they vary according to some sort of root cause?

Success Factors

Here is the first pass at a list of facets for what constitutes “success” for a CoP:

1. Longevity
2. Membership Factors
   1. Member Count
   2. Member Seniority
   3. Member Diversity
3. Activity
   1. Level of Interaction
   2. Number of meets
   3. Participation
4. Productivity
   1. Creation of a Controlled Vocabulary
   2. Innovations
   3. Creation of Operational KPIs
   4. Documentation of Best Practices
   5. Degree of Outreach
   6. Efforts in Training & Induction
   7. Mentorship

Psychosocial Constructs

So far this is what I have noted as potential constructs.
The list needs to be expanded somewhat and then trimmed back to only those things that really contribute towards explaining variation in success.

1. Emotional Intelligence
2. Locus of Control
3. OCEAN
4. Individualism vs Communitarianism
5. Emotional Investment
6. Great Leader / Cult of Personality
7. Action vs Reflection
8. Conservatism vs Liberalism
9. Q
10. Creativity
11. Frustration Tolerance

 

 

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Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management practitioner, and is a peer reviewer for the Journal of Knowledge Management Research & Practice. Matthew holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions.

It’s Time for a CKO

This blog post is a companion piece to the presentation I gave at the June ICKC Practitioner’s Meeting in which I presented slides and discussed some of the history of the launch of Knowledge Management, and why now is a critical time for firms to have a CKO. The title of the presentation was “Time for a CKO?” and was the second presentation of the meeting after “The New Economics” by Peter Bretscher.

The full slide-deck is also available both as a pdf and as a power-point slide deck at SlideShare

The Big Flop

In the 80′s and 90′s “The Knowledge Age” was the new fancy idea, and was taken up mainly by gurus like Drucker, but also several business academics.
Unfortunately the hype quickly overtook any ability to deliver, and consulting firms and software companies pounded money out of it and it quickly turned into a fad.

The idea was good, but the terrain was unprepared and consulting and software simply wasn’t going to deliver an ROI – Management didn’t know how to “do KM”, nobody was quite sure what the objectives were, and there simply were too few actual KM practitioners to even make a dent in it.

The result was an expensive, highly visible, and embarrassing belly-flop.

Back to Basics

So let’s just revisit two of the big moving parts driving KM and for the moment ignore all the practical reasons for KM like faster on-boarding, reducing waste, increasing quality, etc.

Two major changes have been underway historically – where wealth comes from, and the proportion of corporate value that is due to intangibles.

Firstly, wealth has changed in principle source from real-estate during feudal times, to being able to command labour and capital, to a current situation in which knowledge is the primary source of wealth.

Over the last hundred years, the measurement of corporate wealth has shown an increasing shift from property to ability. At the turn of the last century a firm’s wealth was made up primarily from its ownership of tangible assets – real estate, equipment, stock, and cash, but by the arrival of the early Knowledge Era, this had already been shifting

The current era is marked by a shift in the balance between the contribution to EBITDA and Market Capitalization in favor of Intangible Assets, and this is deemed likely to continue for several decades.

Secondly, the share of Intangible Capital as a share of the market value of firms has changed from a historical norm of <20% in the 1970′s to a current situation in which IC accounts for over 80% of a firm’s value.

illustration of the split between tangible and intangible value in the S&P 500 rising from 20/80 in the late 70′s to 80/20 in 2005

Knowledge was seen by Drucker, Senge, and others as being the only remaining way that firms can stay competitive in the Knowledge Era, and the major source of differentiation amongst competitors. These days every firm has more or less the same access to capital, raw materials, basic labor, and equipment as every other, and competitive advantage is no longer a matter of merely securing access to resources or materials.

The thing that separates Apple or 3M from the lower-order players is not physical assets but knowledge and acumen.

At the same time the people that track market valuation have been noticing an increase in the “Q” value that Tobin derived by comparing the market value of a firm with its physical assets and cash.
What has been increasingly obvious since the mid eighties is that the gap has been rapidly widening and that it seems to be stabilizing at around 80% of a firm’s market cap being attributable to intangible assets.

Source Adams & Oleksak (2010)

As per the International Association of IC Practitioners (IAICP), these include:

1. Relationship Capital such as customer goodwill, reputation, and referrals
2. Human Capital such as skills, knowhow, and expertise
3. Structural Capital such as processes, patents, and trade secrets

They also add a fourth component, “Strategic Capital”, which I take as being the overlap of the first three that are individually necessary and collectively sufficient to achieve organizational strategic objectives.

Where Are We Now?

“Intellectual property has become one of the most important resources in the 21st century. It’s now an accepted fact that, just like financial capital or commodities or labor, IP is more than an economic asset – it also forms the basis of a global market”

Manny Schecter, chief patent counsel at IBM. (Forbes 2012)

Nonaka provides a model that distinguishes between knowledge that people can turn into documents (Explicit) and knowledge that either can’t be expressed or is locked away in their heads and practices and maybe even something they were unaware that they knew (Tacit). His model provides ways to move explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge (like studying and practicing the cello), tacit into tacit (like an apprenticeship), tacit into explicit, and explicit into explicit.

In support of this much has matured since his model was devised:

• Many colleges and universities now offer master’s and doctoral programs for KM, and several institutes such as the Knowledge Management Institute and KM Pro offer certification courses for practitioners.
• Several KM journals are published, amongst which the Journal of Knowledge Management Research & Practice has a rated impact factor.
• KM interlocks with several other fields – at one end with the TQM, Lean/6Sigma movements, Applied Psychology, and Operational Research, and at the other end with Finance & Economics through Intellectual Asset Management and Intangible Asset Management

In addition, many large and innovative firms employ KM – from 3M to Xerox, including Deloitte, Dow Jones , Forrester, Fujitsu, Gartner, Google, HP, IBM, Lexis-Nexis, Pratt & Whitney, PWC, Siemens, World Bank , etc.

The primary areas of activity for KM are in workplace collaboration, management of innovation, the development of occupational communities in which standards of practice are refined, and corporate valuation through increased discovery and accounting of intellectual assets.

So where are we compared to the 80′s and 90′s?

The reasons for the lack of mainstreaming of institutionalized Knowledge Management have all fallen away, but the reluctance is still dwelling because of that memory in the minds of many executives. At the same time we have several emergent and increased pressures for institutionalizing Knowledge Management.

• Technological changes and adoption rates continue to climb
• You cannot simply put 80% of an organization’s worth under “goodwill”
• The trade in IC has increased sharply over the last decade both for defensive and product development uses.

Simply put, IC is becoming fungible.

… and even being considered as collateral for loans by banks.

Return of the CKO

The CKO is not a new role, but one which holds increasing relevance in an age where knowledge and other intangible assets form such a large proportion of value, and in a time when retirement rate reaches 10,000 people per day in the US.

The CKO should be the structural keystone that brings IC and knowledge in particular under a single umbrella of scrutiny, management, and governance.
The days in which a firm’s knowledge could be left to the day to day operational dynamics are long gone, and it amounts to corporate suicide to leave knowledge management to chance.

To be sure, everyone “does” Knowledge Management, just like every firm “does finance”, but leaving it to chance implies that it is not likely to be done well, nor done in a fashion that enhances the likelihood of achieving organizational objectives. In much the same way that a CFO does not personally own all the money in the organization but provides governance, guidance, and a framework under which money and physical assets are managed and accounted for, the CKO should do the same for knowledge and IC.

Knowledge Management straddles all operations of an organization, and at its heart asks a simple duo of questions: how does a person know what they are meant to do, and how do they know how to do it?

In this sense KM overlaps on one side with HR/Recruitment in terms of what skills and experience a person needs to have prior to joining the organization in order to execute the assigned activities in their role.
KM also interfaces with Learning and Development in order to make good on knowledge that must be taught in addition to those “just-in time” job aids that must be presented to a worker at the time of execution in the form of knowledgebase articles.

On the valuation side, KM interfaces with Finance to establish value of knowledge artifacts and the abilities of staff.

KM provides both tactical and strategic support for the organizational mission as far as knowledge is concerned – from operational knowledge-bases, to Communities of Practice, to valuation of Intangible Capital such as trade secrets, methods, procedures, copyright, patents, etc.

In addition KM provides the framework and basis upon which those could be bundled or commoditized to make them available for franchising, leasing/licensing, or sale.

Is it For You?

The CKO role, and in fact organized and institutionalized Knowledge Management, is not for everyone, and the research shows consistently that there are several factors that are indicators that institutionalized KM and a CKO role would deliver a strong ROI.

The higher a firm rates on these items, the more likely there is to be a positive ROI for institutionalized Knowledge Management.
Here we deal with the three broad areas.

1. The Business Model
2. The Organizational Culture and Environment
3. Volatility & Variability in the business terrain

Variability and Volatility deserve special attention since the more fluid and volatile the market, products, and labor pool are, the higher the need to be able to learn quickly and adapt fast and be able to lower the risks of volatility by having on-hand knowledge that represents the best and most current available.

To find out for yourself, try two surveys that I have built

1. The KM Fit-test Survey
2. The KMOL-C climate survey

Conclusion

The time to institutionalize Knowledge Management is now – the game has changed and all the old obstacles are either solved or no longer significant hurdles to implementing a formal process to gain control of IC.
There has never been a time in which pure knowledge in the form of know-how and know-who determine the value of a firm, and ongoing survival is going to depend on gaining a high degree of management capability over intangible assets.

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Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management professional and holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra. Mr. Loxton has extensive international experience and is currently available as a Knowledge Management consultant or as a permanent employee at an organization that wishes to put knowledge to work.

Expert Wisdom and Slurping up Context

Most firms employ experts, and let’s be honest, don’t really use them much.

Considering that being smarter, that is fielding better knowledge resources, than one’s competition is a key survival criterion in business.
After all it is putting knowledge to work, or the actual deployment of Intellectual Capital that is typically what makes one firm survive and another die or get eaten.
So it is curious that many firms fail to leverage their expert’s discretionary effort, subject interest, and awareness.

In this blog I will provide a practical technique for using your experts better to increase your holdings of Intellectual Capital and for improving your firm’s awareness of its business environment, and perhaps even taking another step in the direction of becoming a learning organization.

In a recent webinar for the ic knowledge center I presented some ideas on Knowledge Management & IC and you are welcome to download the presentation slides from the ICKC website, or to join the conversation.

Objectives of Knowledge Management

Firstly, let’s just remind ourselves of the two main forks in Knowledge Management objectives

1. Operational Excellence
2. Niche Mastery

In the first we want to put knowledge to work and by doing so to reduce cost due to wasted effort and duplication, increase output and efficiency by replicating best practices, and by propagating knowledge across the organization.

In the second we want it to be seen that we do this, and make it clear to potential customers, investors, and would-be employees that we are masters of our craft and market niche.

Expertise is the gold, but alone it is insufficient – you can’t just have expertise, you must put it to work in as many ways as possible in order to make it a competitive advantage rather than just an “also-have”.

The Learning Organization

As I have outlined in previous posts, a major cause of corporate mortality is failure to learn – in essence a fatal learning disability.

One of the primary features of such a learning disability is an inward focus and a steady loss of awareness of what is going on outside the firm – such firms stop using external events and information to drive change within their organization.
For a firm to learn I believe there are several components that must be satisfied.

Inter alia, a firm must successfully engage in and master:

• Environmental Awareness
• Processing & Contextualization of external information
• Deriving Synthesis & Meaning from external information
• Adaptive Behavioral Change

A firm needs its experts to be aware of what is going on in the world and specifically in terms of their area of expertise, to have a high index of curiosity, and to do something with what they see.

Specifically, what I have in mind is that they will place a context around things that would otherwise simply pass the rest of us by unnoticed or unmarked, and as a result the firm will adapt to external conditions and innovate.

How an Expert Tags Novelty

What this means in real terms is that I want experts to be aware of things going on in the outside world, for example news items, events, technological changes, and market movements, and then to pull those into the firm, and provide an explanation of what this means, how it is relevant to what the firm does, and finally, to suggest actions that could put this to use for the firm.

In the presentation I give two examples, but your use is likely to be different and should be driven by your experts because they are the only portal through which new ideas can enter your firm without triggering the embedded immune systems that usually crush novelty as a form of error.

DIY

Here then are the steps I suggest you use in getting your experts to pull in Intellectual Capital for your firm

1. Capture Content from external sources
2. Provide a Context from the eyes of an expert
3. Explain why this is Significant to the firm
4. Add an Evaluation to test message integrity
5. Provide a Social Environment for interaction
6. Layer with advised Actions

Although hosting the content in a CRM, LMS, or Wiki will help, don’t prioritize IT systems over the people element – most KM practitioners I have polled believe that people-factors account for 80-90% of the success of this kind of thing, and technology only 10-20%. So spend proportionate amounts of time and effort on organizing, motivating, and helping the people and don’t get distracted by the shiny IT toys.

Conclusion

Experts are often underutilized and pigeon-holed into highly specific roles that reduce their effectiveness as agents of organizational learning that can boost operational performance and increase adaptive capacity. By deliberately encouraging your experts to retrieve found articles of information from the outside world and add value to them by explaining context and implication to the firm, and by specifying recommended actions, the expert can extend their value and that of the firm.

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Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions. Matthew is a peer reviewer for several Knowledge Management and Information Science Journals.

QR Codes and You – A Match from Heaven or Just a Fad?

QR Codes are something you are going to enjoy getting used to – from booking seats for a concert to reading a business card, QR codes are a way to shorten the distance between you and something you want, and all for free via your smartphone.

This particular code takes your smartphone browser to my website, but then what were you expecting? – Tickets to the MOMA?

However, keep your eye open and your phone handy and you will see coupons, special deals, and concert tickets on QR codes splattered across bus-shelters, walls, and magazines.

A savvy person might even consider using them at work to link to instructions for the office printer, claim forms, or meetings.

Nielsen pegged the share of smartphones in the US at 31% as of the end of 2010, and has projected the share to climb over 50% this year.
The proportion is higher amongst technology workers and managers, and therefore provides a fertile space in which QR and bar-codes can be used as part of work environment where most staff will have their own readers.

Since many are already using this functionality to scan products, find coupons, and book tickets, it makes sense to put the same technology to work in providing information at work.

This can be done in two major ways

1. Barcodes and QR codes that link a user to work-instructions, knowledge articles, or contextual information
2. QR codes that link to an online user profile

The standard QR code can fit neatly on a business card, and can transport directly to a meaningful landing zone like a personal profile page that outlines business activity and contact details.

That’s my story and I am sticking to it!

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Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert, holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra, and provides pro-bono consulting in Knowledge Management and IT Governance to various medical institutions.

Will this be the Year of SharePoint?

Most of my blog posts avoid discussing products and technology, and while I hasten to add that I really do love the techie side, the point is that while the technology is really cool and makes a significant contribution, it has a very short shelf-life and is never going to account for more than 30% of the success factors.
Technology comes and goes and mostly needs massive hype and spin to make it crack open the budgets and get the dollars rolling out, which inevitably leaves a lot of people embarrassed or frustrated, and disillusioned by the whole Knowledge Management idea because they equated it with a specific brand or technology .

So I tend to focus on the other 70% more or less stable side of the equation, which includes human behavior, organizational structure, and all those other bits that make up the socio-behavioral complex.

However, something is going on in techieland that is worth talking about – According to Global360, the adoption of Microsoft’s Sharepoint will hit 97% this year and has already reached a user-count of 130,000,000.
Of course they are very bullish on the topic because they sell Sharepoint stuff for a living, but still, even in the 90′s when Knowledge Management was something many software vendors and gurus were proclaiming as the next big thing, nobody ever thought that all the products put together would get near 97%, and 130 million licenses is a big number in any language.

Towards the end of 2010 I briefly flirted with a company that pretty much only does Sharepoint add-on’s and seemed to be doing just fine, although I thought they were way too focused on plumbing and pipes i.e. the software and technology, and far too little on the human side – which is where the action really is and why this time Knowledge Management may be rising as never before.

During 2010 I actually tried to stamp out SharePoint at a previous employer, but failed, and now I am a strong advocate of Sharepoint adoption (yes Christy, I am).
So what led to this Damascus Road change of heart?

Epiphany

At the start of 2009/2010 SharePoint was just another (yet another) file-sharing toy that users had discovered and had started to put things into – just like the wikis, Lotus Notes groups and folders, fileshares, portals, and all the other bits and pieces that proliferated over the years and slowly gathered dust under layers of corporate accretion. We already had an order of magnitude too many file-sharing/storage methods, most of which were hidden and not spidered by the corporate search engine, and some of which were backed up onto expensive RAID while other repositories should have been but weren’t.
There was also already a huge investment of time and money in Alfresco, and I didn’t want to simply attenuate focus on another contender.

However, as the year drew on, and just before I left, I had changed my mind and was actively pushing for adoption.
Why did I change my mind? – It was simply that there was a strong user desire that was capable of pushing through the resistance.
My view is that when users put that much effort into something, then that enthusiasm should be supported and guided where possible and not left to rust out in the cold.
A KM solution is less than 20% technology, and over 70% culturally determined in my view, so where you find a high degree of engagement and desire from users, especially where it will help to form Communities of Practice, then this is worth supporting.

… and it seemed that SharePoint wasn’t going to go away anytime soon.

What can SharePoint do for YOU?

Well, it’s a bunch of code that costs money, so it can eat some of your budget and keep the IT guys out of mischief for a while.
It can also be a reasonably good document repository with passable workflow for approval and control and reasonable version-control, which means with a modicum of effort you can shift files that were lying in a nice orderly canonical structure on a server into another nice pile in SharePoint. Naturally you can start corralling all those stray files and index them, but of course that was possible with canonical file-shares too.
SharePoint also allows searchable Knowledge Bases to be built, but before you get too excited about that remember that retrieving hundreds of hits that are infojunk is no better than not getting any at all.

What it adds that canonical file taxonomies can’t however, is folksonomies via tagging that give multiple taxonomical hooks to a single file, and it can provide a far more social environment for people to access than regular traditional fileshares could – and this is where SharePoint can bring you real value.
By bringing information closer to people in a more natural ecology than before, SharePoint can make a real contribution to your operation.
It also allows add-on products that build out the social side, and can bring learning, socializing, chatting, and people’s biographical pages to cohabit in an informational ecosystem that plays far more naturally to our inbuilt preferences.

One thing that you can use it for that probably dwarfs everything else if you have an organization with more than 150 staff, is to make people searchable in terms of their skills, training, and experience by adding them as knowledge artifacts. Why this isn’t done more completely baffles me, because a “facebase” was something we were experimenting with long before Bill Gates brought out Windows.
Using technology like integrated search and content management to help find people should be a no-brainer.
The point is to give people a page that can be modified to suit their tastes but that contains scrapable information that says what they are good at, trained in, and willing to help with, along with their availability and rules of engagement – how to contact them, when, for what, etc. If you tie this in to the more modern B&N/Amazon idea of “what I am reading”, and also to what articles they have authored you can do some magic that goes far beyond a semantic web will ever get.

Allowing the thought leaders to emerge, and to allow people to see what informational sources they are producing is probably worth the investment, but add to that the ability to see what informational sources they use and how they rate them, and you will have as close to a miracle as ICT can deliver.

Life After SharePoint

Not that I go in for predictions much, but until exobiology produces something better, humans are always going to be way faster at finding semantic information than machines. Long after Microsoft is just an historical footnote, people will still be the fastest way to get meaning out of information, and that’s what knowledge is all about.

This is SharePoint’s year, and with it an opportunity to use technology to support and sustain very ancient and effective human abilities to share and create meaning – we should not let it slip by.

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Matthew Loxton is a Knowledge Management expert and holds a Master’s degree in Knowledge Management from the University of Canberra. Mr. Loxton has extensive international experience and is currently available as a Knowledge Management consultant or as a permanent employee at an organization that wishes to put knowledge assets to work.