Jeff's KM blog

Knowledge Management and Workforce Issues for Water Utilities

2011-08-06T09:29:00.001-06:00

Over the last few years, KM has been gaining traction for addressing workforce issues in the water industry. The American Water Works Association and the Rocky Mountain Section of AWWA have both formed knowledge management committees. The August 2011 edition of the Journal of AWWA featured the KM committee report.

A recent survey of water treatment operators in Colorado showed:

90% ranked KM as important or very important.

Less than 10% of the respondents had a formal KM
program

65% have a program under development or are just
getting started.

The top issues were ensuring that operators had the information they need to do their job, followed by the loss of knowledge from retiring employees.

The top challenge was resources

In talking with utilities, there is substantial concern over impending retirements. I heard from a system the other day that 80% of their operators are eligible for retirement. In others, this number is over the next five years. No matter what figure you use, concerns over potential knowledge loss
are well justified.

Social media and knowledge management

2010-02-19T15:39:00.004-07:00

Over the years, I’ve started to use more and more social media tools. My evolution started with this blog in 2004, then on to my songwriting blog, joining MySpace to share music, Google/Yahoo Groups, and now LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Wanting to use it more efficiently, I just finished my certification as a Social Media Specialist from the Social Media Magic University.

In thinking about social media and knowledge management I saw Venkatesh Rao's thought provoking article about Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War. Reading the comments alone show how effective social media can be in sharing knowledge. The article talks about a conflict between knowledge management and social media, which he attributes to generational differences.

What's important about the article is thinking about where social media fits into a KM strategy and the barriers to its acceptance. Social media is still relatively new, and I think conflict is typical of any change or innovation. Early adopters embrace the new technology, late adopters wait until all the bugs are out and they are forced into it. For example, KM is just getting started in some industries. When I started blogging in 2004 it was unheard of in my industry. So the potential barrier is the stage of innovation for the person or industry.

My opinion is that social media is a knowledge management tool. It is very effective when working with external groups and with open communities. The yellow pages/expert locator function is excellent for people outside my traditional network. The discussion and informal nature, along with the sound bite mentality encourages flow of more tacit knowledge. It’s also great for knowledge sharing outside my circle.

On the other hand, social media is not great for capturing, storing, and protecting knowledge. This is especially true for key business knowledge. Managers still (justifiably so) are concerned with content or opinions expressed without their knowledge. Copyright issues and other terms of service still need to be carefully considered. Evaluating the quality of knowledge and who’s an expert is another big issue.

So like any tool in the toolbox, it all comes down to what is your strategy? What are you trying to achieve? What are the pros and cons of each tool?

Knowledge retention - bridging knowledge

2009-01-12T06:37:00.001-07:00

I was recently contracted to provide continuity of management for a soon to retire manager. My roles will be to complete one short-term project and provide interim management of another long term project. In essence, I’m providing a bridge of knowledge from the retiring employee to the new employee.

From a knowledge retention perspective my tasks are:

1) Learn all I can from the retiring employee,
2) Capture/ document key and salient items, and
3) Share/ transfer to the eventual long-term employee (hopefully hired soon).

At the first meeting, my first challenge became clear – identify “who” -- who are the contractors, stakeholders and end users. This includes contact information as well as insights on roles and expectations. Another task will be to identify documents and other resources and where they can be found.

While this position is important just to keep things running, this knowledge bridging will enable the new employee to get up to speed more rapidly

Knowldege retention - Proactive vs. recovery?

2009-01-12T05:14:00.005-07:00

With high turnover and difficulty in replacing key employees, knowledge retention is becoming more and more important.

I classify knowledge retention efforts into three categories:

1) Proactive – as an everyday task, capturing knowledge on an continual basis
2) Salvage – When you know someone is going to leave, capture essential knowledge in the time allotted.
3) Recovery – Finding or reconstructing the needed knowledge afterward

In an ideal world being proactive would be the best. However, capturing knowledge takes time, effort, and resources. There’s a fine balance between the value of knowledge captured and resources required. Prioritization and most importantly an understanding of “mission critical” or “position critical” knowledge is a good place to start.

Knowledge management technology lesson in buying a TV

2009-01-07T11:56:00.003-07:00

My wife and I went out to buy a new TV. This was a great example of the promise of technology vs. what’s truly needed. Our business requirements were pretty simple, we needed a new TV (even though our current 25 years old set is just fine) and I had watched the Bronco game on a friend’s high definition set, so high definition was a must. Other than that...

So we went off to our local appliance store. Here’s some impressions:

The promise of technology - The first thing we saw was a wall of TVs of all shapes sizes. The size we were thinking of was too small for the wall and off in some corner. Should we get something bigger than our need?
Technology outpacing current requirements – The first thing we heard of was 760 vs. 1080p (the higher the number, the greater the resolution). Reviews that we saw say you can’t see the difference in the size TV we may buy. Of course 1080p is the future and costs at least $100 more. Buy for now or the future?
Newer technology – LCD vs. plasma – LCD is the newer technology and most manufacturers are moving toward it. It supposedly works better in variable light conditions. We were told that Plasma has better clarity for sports. LCD costs at least $100 more. Buy what’s hot or for one use?
Features – We heard a ton about the different features as a way to differentiate the models. Some could do some very amazing things. Of course, I’m the person who uses my cell phone only to make phone calls.... Buy with features that aren’t in our requirements list but might be cool?
User experience – After two days of technology investigations I began reading customer reviews. All rated the picture quality high. The reviews talked about operations issues such as poor sound quality, poor quality remote, and difficult to understand menu (i.e. can you actually use the TV?). The technical focus of picture quality wasn’t an issue to the majority. The satisfaction was related to the experience during use.

What TV did we buy? Well that’s a different question. I brought my research to management for the final decision.

The lesson here for knowledge management is that the latest and greatest technology may not be the best solution to satisfy your business needs. Whatever solution you chose is a balancing act between the technology (current and future), your needs and organizational culture. And of course, don’t forget to balance your checking account...

KM lesson - returing man to the moon

2008-08-27T11:58:00.003-06:00

Picture this scenario: You’re in a rush to beat a competitor to achieve a very complicated goal. Tons of pressure is being applied to accomplish the goal first. You assemble the best of the best, and use a variety of large and small contractors to help you. After tons of trial and error, you complete it, have a huge success, win accolades, and then move on to another project. 35 years later, you’re asked to do the same thing without reinventing the wheel. Could you do it?

This is the case with NASA’s Ares project, taking man back to the moon 35 years after the fact. Weird Science did a great show titled space junkyard. It’s worth seeing from a knowledge management perspective.

A few points that were clear:
· In the rush and the pressure to accomplish, KM was not a priority.
· There was no central repository of all the files and data. Drawing still exist, but not the why (tacit knowledge) things were done that way was not captured.
· Much of the spacecraft was used in accomplishing the mission and remained in space. That’s why the junkyard is so important. NASA can reverse engineer some parts. The problem is they are working on final products, with no knowledge about the mistakes made along the way.
· Many of the contractors have gone out of business, their knowledge is gone.
· NASA engineers moved on to different projects or private companies soon after the mission. After 35 years, I’m sure most have long since retired.
· The problems and challenges remain the same and while there have been major advances in technology, the engineering is basically the same. In other words the same knowledge needed in 1969, is the knowledge needed today.

A Washington Post article describes the “Saga of the Lost Space Tapes.” The story gives another example about the missing lunar video tapes. They weren’t used much following the mission and for a variety of reasons (cumbersome, highly specialized format) were archived, moved, and eventually misplaced.

Can you blame NASA? Of course in hindsight people do, but at the time, in the rush of the space race, I’m sure 99.9% of us would be in the same place. What’s impressive to me is that NASA learned from this and has developed an excellent knowledge management program.

The Water Advice Network - Knowledge Retention

2008-06-18T16:43:00.003-06:00

As a way to ensure the continued availability of knowledge from recently retired and part-time water professionals, I recently launched the Water Advice Network. I started out by signing up folks that I had worked closely with. In a short period of time, word spread and the network is quickly adding more and more top names from the water industry, worldwide. This includes the retired executive directors of the Awwa Research Foundation and his counterpart in Australia; directors from EPA, Ontario Ministry of the Environment, and the state of Wisconsin; former chair of the National Drinking Water Advisory Council; highly respected consultants; and two retired VPs of major water utilities. I've also begun to add top researchers from major universities.

The individuals I've added to the network have an average of over 35 years experience and represent a huge wealth of knowledge that would be lost to the industry without this network. While they all want to stay involved, they are not interested in a full time or even a formal job, Their main interest is in sharing their knowledge. So in forming the network, my main goal is in making everything easy for them and also for utilities to tap their expertise. I handle the marketing, billing and other administrative matters. We accept credit cards and make the advisers available on a hourly basis. If you want only an hour of their time, that's fine. If you want something more, that's great too. We're not interested in long-term, large projects. That will be left to the big consulting firms. The services we will offer include:

· Advice – They’ve been there and can help you address difficult decisions. They can provide a second opinion or assist you in complying with regulations.
· Mentoring – Have an experienced professional as your personal mentor and only a phone call away.
· Document review – Obtain an independent, expert review of your plans, strategies and reports.
· Peer review – Bring in a team of independent, highly qualified experts to review your project or program.

Our first client is a very small utility and I was able to provide an international expert (recently retired) to assist them and their consultant. Both the utility and their consultant are benefiting from his wealth of knowledge and he's excited by sharing his knowledge.

To read more about the Water Advice Network, go to http://www.oxenfordconsulting.com/The_Water_Advice_Network.html.

KM and Business Continuity Planning

2008-05-27T10:41:00.003-06:00

Last week I attended a two-day training program titled "Business Continuity Planning for Water and Wastewater Utilities: How to keep your utility in business and operating in times of crisis." I went to the workshop to determine if and how I can incorporate business continuity planning (BCP) into the KM work that I'm doing. My general conclusion was that a good BCP plan has components of KM and and good KM plan considers what to do in a time of crisis.

Business continuity planning considers what happens if... How do you keep your business running, continue to complete your mission and keep your people safe. What happens if you can't get back in to your facility for 24 hours, 30 days, or they are destroyed completely? Examples could be a fire, flood, hurricane, tornado or just a water pipe break? We even talked about pandemic flu which could reduce the available workforce by over 50%. How do you stay in business?

From a KM perspective, the issue becomes what critical knowledge do out need and how can you access it during a crisis. Is key knowledge accessible at an alternative location? Do multiple people have access to it? What people and skills (tacit knowledge) do you need and how do you get a hold of them. What happens if you don't have a computer, blackberry or cell phone? What happen if all your paper records are gone?

A good KM strategy needs to consider not only the knowledge you need to manage and use during normal business operations, but also during a crisis. By considering it upfront and as a component of your KM planning, you can save time, effort, and be ready in the event of an emergency.

Is this likely to be needed, let's hope not. However, toward the end of our session a tornado warning was issued and two of our classroom participants rushed out because a tornado touched down by their offices.

Knowledge Retention

2008-05-20T16:03:00.003-06:00

Over the last few months I've heard more and more questions about knowledge retention and tying knowledge management to succession planning.

Myron Olstein in the report "Succession Planning for A Vital Workforce In The Information Age" (Awwa Research Foundation, 2005) stated that for drinking water utilities:

•Half of your workers will not be with you in 10 years
•Most of the useful operating knowledge will go with them
•EPRI report estimates that more than 80% of useful operating knowledge is tacit

These sentiments are being echoed throughout the water supply community, particularly by HR departments that are struggling to fill positions with qualified candidates.

This recognition has also spurred a lot of interest in purchasing systems to capture knowledge. The first question I'm often asked is what knowledge system should I purchase? While some knowledge systems are great, they should be last in your planning for knowledge capture. My recommendations are to:

Identify what information do you need to capture?
What can you do with existing processes and systems?
What simple things can you do first to capture knowledge (people and process)
What knowledge systems can support these activities? (technology)

Knowledge management planning should also not be done in a vacuum and should be integrated with business strategies and succession planning.

Website launched

2008-01-22T14:42:00.000-07:00

To support my consulting business, I recently launched the website, www.oxenfordconsulting.com.

Check it out and let me know if you have any feedback.

Excellent example of change management

2008-01-21T09:07:00.000-07:00

My church provided an excellent example of change management in building a new sanctuary. During the service yesterday we celebrated success and had an opportunity to reflect on our role in the change. Here's what happened:

In the spring of 2002 a congregation visioning meeting was held. There the concept of a new building was launched.

A steering committee from the congregation was formed.

In late 2003, a huge event was sponsored to launch the funding raising and to gain involvement.

During the construction, there were periodic symbolic events that took place to give each person an opportunity to feel part of the construction. For example, one Sunday each person was given a rock and then given the opportunity to place it in the foundation. Another time, people were invited in to sign the new beams. These are just two of many examples.

There were also numerous times when the plans for the buildings were shown during a service, with an opportunity to discuss in a small group after. I must have looked at these plans and added comments at least 10 times during the course of construction.

Yesterday, we were all reminded our role. As each step was announced, those that participated were asked to stand. 99% of the people in the church stood up. The few remaining were invited to join in and given ways they could get involved. Around me I could hear whispers of, "I was there," I did that."

The proof is in the demonstration. Here are some examples:
- 2700 people attend church on Sunday. Over 3200 people donated toward the project.
- Fund raising goals were far exceeded and people have volunteered to continue their giving even after they fulfilled their pledge.
- Construction is on schedule and will finish 6 years to the day after the visioning meeting.
- Most importantly everyone is excited and feels that they had a role this change.

Death by e-mail

2007-07-20T19:01:00.000-06:00

I just watched the demise of an organization's leader after trying to pass a controversial reform via e-mail. This is the third time I've seen this happen.

While e-mail is a wonderful thing, it's not designed as a discussion tool for the following reasons:
- E-mail is one-way communication, not discussion.
- Written words and tone often get misinterpreted - 90% of communication is non-verbal
- Messages often cross in cyberspace, so you're commenting on proposal 1 while others are commenting on proposal 3.
- It's much easier to be negative when talking to a computer screen
- People don't read every word of an e-mail message (or at least I don't)
- Many important decision makers tune out when the flow of e-mails get too great.

My guidelines for e-mail are:
1) It's Ok to use to send out a proposal via e-mail
2) It's OK to accept comments (but don't assume that everyone read it)
3) Only respond to the comments by saying "thanks for your comments."
4) Compile the comments and have a face-to-face or conference call to discuss the controversial points.

Winning proposals

2007-05-22T10:19:00.000-06:00

A few months ago I was on a committee to award a project. We had about five teams that could have easily done the job, what separated them was their ability to transfer knowledge. In the proposals and presentations a few quick things jumped out at me,

1) Proposals are a reflection of what you will produce. Examples that I didn't like were:
- Proposals that did not focus on the end product (more on this later)
- The first 20 pages were on the team (see comment above)
- Small things that made it difficult to read the proposals i.e. small font, colored boxes that hid the text, pamphlets and loose information that fell out.

2) During the presentations, the most important thing is that the reviewers like you and want to work with you.
- If you are a team, present as a team (often one person takes over the conversation too much)
- Don't try to oversell optional items. One team lost because they spent 60% of their time, saying we need this additional item.
- All of your team need to be strong presenters, not just the principals. The team I voted for had the best #3 person (the one who would do all the work).
- Prepare, prepare ....

Winning proposals is about who can best transfer knowledge, saying as clearly as possbile how you will best meet the requestors need.

In my consulting practice, I started working with teams preparing proposals. It's great to help technical experts. They know their subject area, but not necessarily transferring their knowledge into winning proposals.

Idiots Guide to Increasing Blog Traffic - Part 3

2006-09-21T21:23:00.000-06:00

I've recently applied what I learned on this blog to more fun pursuits, my songwriting website and blog. My current focus is on increasing traffic. This is more difficult with music sites due the huge number of sites out there. What I have done so far is:

1) Registered with major search engines
2) Optimized website metatags
3) Use del.icio.us for keyword tagging
4) Use keywords in every posting
5) Comment on other bloggers sites and in discussion forums
6) Contribute articles to key websites

I've seen a slow and steady increase with each of these items. What's really great is that I've been asked by a few musicians to help them increase their traffic and better position their websites. Should be fun!

Position eliminated

2006-08-31T11:40:00.000-06:00

My KM was officially eliminated at the beginning of August. A number of factors contributed including a large reduction in revenue and a new director. However, the reality of it was that it was time. I had served in the cultural and organizational change role since 1994. It is said that a new employee is most effective in making changes for the first six months. Yet I served in this role for twelve years.

Launching innovation in an organization takes a huge effort and if done well, the effort goes unnoticed. As a change agent, you're constantly pushing against the natural instinct to resist change. A management consultant once said to me, "you keep getting bloodied, yet win the war." Looking back, there has been some amazing changes. They happened much slower that I would have liked, but they did occur.

Over the next few months, I plan to do some consulting (feel free to contact me) and move forward with a project long over due, my songwriting website.

I will only be updating this blog on occasion.

Digital final reports available

2006-07-12T14:37:00.000-06:00

We completed our project to digitize and make available via the web 425 of our pre-2003 final reports. This involved digitizing about 90,000 pages. These reports make up the majority of our knowledge base, now with a total of 581 reports available.

A major challenge in this project was copyright permissions for figures and tables in older reports. In the pre-internet days we had requested permission to use figures in tables in the report. However, we did not specifically request rights to use electronically. Taking the conservative approach we used a contractor to obtain digital permission from the original copyright holders.

Increasing communication

2006-07-06T16:06:00.000-06:00

Time flies when you're having fun. I've been too busy to update my blog, so I will try to pick-up from today.

Had a meeting with our senior managers today as well as received a preview of our IT strategy. A common theme that I heard was that there is a need for more communication. We heavily used teams and meetings to launch a number of KM initiatives. However, after the strategies were developed and we got involved in the doing, we focused more on implementation teams rather than broader user teams. We've lost a lot of the momentum with the users and the original vision has become cloudy. In the next few weeks, there will be more effort in sharing information on our activities.

Knowledge retention workshop

2006-05-11T17:25:00.000-06:00

Yesterday I got the chance to participate in workshop that was held in conjunction with an AwwaRF project on knowledge retention. The workshop had about 20 representatives from water utilities to discuss tools for knowledge retention. The final results from this project will be tools and strategies for implementing KM.

The research team from EMA and APQC did a great job. Some of their descriptions of knowledge and knowledge management were some of the best I've heard. I'll try and cover them in a later posting.

Below is a sampling of the discussion. Sorry I don't have time to add the context for each, but hopefully y the majority hopefully will make sense.

"KM can't stand alone. You must build into an existing effort." i.e. KM within workforce planning

Disconnect between upper management and middle manager. There is frustration at the middle manager level. These folks often don't get the vision for KM brought to them. Need more training for middle managers on strategy items like KM.

The old paradigm is doing more with less. Now that we are at less, we're being asked to do more with even less." The first thing that gets cut, is programs like KM. "We just don't have time to do it."

Challenges with knowledge retention are increased when you factor in different generations. Values and learning styles are so different.

"We all talk about leadership buy-in. How do you define your leadership?"

The "crusty old guy syndrome." You should put the crusty old guy on a pedestal and capture his knowledge. Instead he is often shunned.

In some models we try to take knowledge to the point where you don't need to think anymore (i.e. explicit knowledge is so well defined or the process is automated. Think about someone who learns to cook only TV dinners, what happens if they get the raw ingredients? What happens if your automation fails? Do we continue to generate new knowledge?

In looking at roles:
- Finance is on the back-end of projects, they'd love to be in on the upfront planning.
- Front-line people (i.e. the guy repairing the water line) needs as much information as the press guy. They usually talk to the customer first.
- Customer service vs. the field guy - either might be the first to identify a problem. Both need information at the same time.

The shift from "built it and they will come," to "find the need, fill the need."

There was a whole lot more covered, but these were the ones that caught my attention.

I'm certified now

2006-05-09T10:50:00.000-06:00

I passed the test, so now I'm a "Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM)." It's funny, I don't feel smarter, but I do have great initials to add after my name. This will look great on my business card and resume.

Certification in knowledge management is still evolving. My certification required a two day course and then taking a 50 question test. Even though I have over 10 years experience in the field, little of my past knowledge helped me with this program. The STI Knowledge approach, terminology and test questions were different from how I was approaching KM (not necessarily bad, just different). I'm aware of a few other groups that offer certification, and I assume their certification has the same challenges. The course itself was valuable from a learning perspective; the certification, well that's another story.

Until this field is more standardized, certification is what it is, proof that you listened in a short course.

Helping start KM

2006-05-08T08:11:00.000-06:00

On Friday, I made a presentation to the public works department at a local city. I had three hours in which to describe KM, KM tools and to start their dialogue. What surprised me was how quickly they entered into the discussion and got excited about KM. There was no lack of areas where KM could be helpful, the biggest challenge they identified was in finding the time to implement it.

I did ask the question, who's are already doing knowledge management? Not one person said yes. They were a little surprised when I said that they all are managing knowledge, the field of KM is there to help them do it better.

Prior to the session, I spent a lot of time finding examples to put KM into context. During the session, a number of good examples emerged. These included:

- Find "as is" plans - Identifying valves that needed to be shut own in order to work on a pipe. Often the values weren't in the same place as indicated in the plans (causing more of the street to be excavated).
- Converting lab methods into a standard procedure, electronic copy. Previously methods were kept in a "recipe box." The city now has one person who's responsibility it is to document and keep up the methods.
- HR support - A challenge for a supervisors is consistent handling of HR matters. Rules are always changing and recommendations different with each person you talk to.

Some KM tools that I mentioned that immediately got people nodding their heads (in agreement)
- Yellow pages - The idea of developing an expertise based yellow pages for their organization
- Mentoring/ using retired employees - Names immediately began to surface of who they could use.
- Community of practice around HR - The idea of an HR support group.

Following the session, I got a quick chance to talk with the department director. It was obvious that he was thinking about how they could effectively use KM and even mentioned that he has one person in mind to take the lead.

It will be interesting to see what happens here in the next few years.

Putting KM into context

2006-05-04T08:01:00.000-06:00

I've been asked by a local public works department to conduct a workshop on knowledge management at their management staff retreat. They had heard about knowledge management and knowledge retention, but don't know where to start.

It has been a challenge to pull my materials and thoughts together for this workshop. After working internally for so long, this made me look back at the basics, why would someone start knowledge management?

The challenge in my first three slides was to put the drivers for KM into context. I've finally settled on three drivers 1) the changes in information (i.e. too much information and new information expectations), 2) treating knowledge as an asset and 3) knowledge retention (operating knowledge is 80% tacit and over half your staff won't be with you in 10 years). I'm guessing that they will relate to the last item most.

The next challenge has been taking the commonly used terms and knowledge management tools, and putting them into context for the audience. The context is the knowledge that I can bring to this group.

Finally I had to find challenges that they might face and examples from similar organizations. This is where Foundation research and conversations with some of our investigators has been really helpful. The research into utility practices will provide the context I need so that they can see KM is real and not just a bunch of theory.

Certified Knowledge Management (CKM)

2006-04-27T13:57:00.000-06:00

I just completed the certified knowledge management (CKM) program offered through Zavata (STI Knowledge). Going into the class, I wasn't sure what to expect, but after completing the course it was clear that this wasn't the KM certification for me. For someone developing a help desk knowledge base, this class and certification is great and did a good job of accomplishing it's objective. The class was well done, but did not match my definition of knowledge management or where I think KM is heading.

The focus of this program is around articles in a help desk support system (very structured content). To me this is only one part of a much larger KM puzzle. There was only limited mention of culture or collaboration. There was no mention of communities, blogs, wikis, etc.

There was also a significant number of terms that I had never heard of and assume they are only used in help desk KM. An example was the three types of knowledge (with my definitions provided):

Shadow knowledge (information you need, but don't know where to find it)
Passive knowledge (information people have, but don't know they need to share it)
Compass knowledge (information that you need, and know where to find it)

Not to say there weren't a number of ideas I can use. The idea of applying help desk philosophy in our organization does have merit. I had put a number of ideas on the back burner that I may need to dredge up. The basic principles in building a knowledge base hold, however, the content in our knowledge base is much less structured.

One of my friends is enrolling in KM Pro's certification and I'll be interested in his feedback.

Blog recognition

2006-04-20T17:48:00.000-06:00

I was asked the question, "what has been the benefit of your blog?" In the last few weeks, a number of things have surfaced. I've been asked to write chapters in two books, my organization is being used as case study by a local graduate student, and been asked to help an organization look at KM. I've also been corresponding with a number of other KM bloggers and have received some needed feedback.

Of course all these opportunities (along with my regular job) means I have less time to blog, so my posts have been sporadic. It's a good position to be in!

CMS - wellness check

2006-04-18T16:47:00.000-06:00

I received an e-mail about a "health fair for employees" next week. It's appropriate since we have a Stellent consultant onsite today doing a CMS health check. Our systems has been live for about 6 months and have a number of minor bugs that we want to get to a resolution quickly. If we find bugs next week, than we'll really want quick resolution!

The great thing about have theconsultant onsite, is that he's able to work directly with support staff (who are his friends), checks everything out, and identify where the problem is. Items that are support issues have been tagged and it's really clear that it's their issue not ours. Having someone "on the ground" here adds credibility and urgency to our issues. We also have the additional support of Stellent project manager, since these issues now became his issues also.

While we have a resource on site, we're also starting our high level planning for Site Studio implementation and some minor customizations. It looks like Site Studio is going to be a little larger challenge since they don't support .net, which our web site is built on. The words major redesign and a lot of effort send shivers down my spine.

Hope the patient will survive (both this week and next week).

Reuse and content management

2006-04-12T17:44:00.001-06:00

There were a number of interesting papers at the Content Management Strategies Conference 2006 on reusing content. In particular presentations by Jan Johnson-Tyler and Liz Augustine. The following are the some interesting comments from my notes:

Reuse

- Types of reuse 1) modularization (chunking, components), 2) Cloning (similar but not identical, derivatives) 3) Profiling

- Write once, use repeatedly.

- You need to manage components, especially items that may be used in multiple documents (examples include copyright statements, titles, slide background, logos). If you change them in one document you need to change them in all.

- Use need a consistent organizational reuse strategy. Content should be organized by subject, not deliverables. Reorganize content around reuse goals. Books should be prepared using consistent logic, not a book-by-book basis (in otherwords, build the book in reusable chunks).

- Multiple formats are a challenge. Need to convert before reusing. This is a real challenge in legacy document.

Templates

- Templates should look exactly like the product you're producing, so authors can see the playing field that they're working with.

- Define format, font size, use of colors and size of papers.

- Use colors consistently so they can serve as visual cues, not just to look pretty.

Reuse and content management

2006-04-12T17:44:00.000-06:00

- Multiple formats are a challenge. Need to convert before reusing. This is a real challenge in legacy document.

Templates

- Templates should look exactly like the product you're producing, so authors can see the playing field that they're working with.

- Define format, font size, use of colors and size of papers.

- Use colors consistently so they can serve as visual cues, not just to look pretty.

Metadata - Words or relationships

2006-04-03T22:39:00.000-06:00

After a fun filled flight that consisted of a number of delays I arrived in San Francisco to hear the last presentation of the day by Erik Hartman. He was speaking on classifying web content. Below are some points that I took home:

1. Metadata can be grouped as optional, required or automated. The optional files are the challenging ones to get filled out.

2. He described the KM challenge as: “You cannot manage knowledge, you can manage people that have knowledge.” He also presented an equation for KM that basically is:

Knowledge = Information x (characteristics, skills, and attitudes of people)

3. He spent a lot of time talking about the differences between taxonomy and ontology. What I heard as the difference is that taxonomy relies more on hierarchies and ontologies focus on relationships. He made comments like (I hope I captured these correctly):
- Relationships still need a language
- People want the relationships, more than the hierarchies.
- “People don’t want a drill, they want a hole in the wall.”
- We’re not after the semantic web, we want the pragmatic web.
- Ask two experts and you get a different taxonomy. So how do we expect any taxonomy to fit all users?
In pondering these last comments I started thinking about our current path. We’re focusing on the words now, but in the future the relationships between the words is where we will find the value

KM certification

2006-03-31T16:14:00.000-07:00

I've been looking into KM certification for some time. There will be Certified Knowledge Manager (CKM)course offered by STI Knowledge and the Resource Center for Customer Service Professionals in the Denver area. If anyone has experience with this organization or certification, please let me kow.

RFP on KM

2006-03-31T13:19:00.000-07:00

AwwaRF has just issued an RFP titled "Organizational Development Needed To Implement A Knowledge Management Strategy At Water Utilities."

The project objectives include: 1) identify the benefits and costs of implementing a knowledge management (KM) initiative, 2) investigate and identify organizational development factors (e.g., culture, core planning processes, communications, rewards, etc.) critical to the success of implementing a knowledge management (KM) initiative, and 3) develop a tool kit for drinking water utilities to evaluate and develop their organizational cultures so that they are supportive of successful implementation of KM strategies and initiatives.

Maximum funding from AwwaRF is $300,000 and proposals are due by May 19.

KM update

2006-03-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

With so many things going on its hard to keep my blog updated. Here's a small sampling.

Obtained agreement among managers on our priorities for KM activities.
Purchased a MS LiveMeetings virtual meeting room. We can now host web conferences for up to 250 participants and are in the process of planning 4 webcasts for this year. We can also use this tool for smaller, interactive meetings. More on this as planning gets underway.
We have developed an internal team to develop a strategy to get our researchers (external) to start submitting content on our collaborative site. This strategy will tie together people, processes and technology in order to achieve a larger goal of getting updated content on the web. The first step is getting our content submitted directly into our CMS.
Our collaborative site was hacked into. It seems like some industrious hacker used our collaborative site (which is being hosted externally) as a pass through. We lost access to our project files for two days while this was being addressed.
Moving forward on a project to document the past successes of our organization. We're using a contractor to interview some of our past researchers and industry leaders to document this mostly anecdotal information.

The list goes on, but I better get back to work.

Technology at work and home

2006-03-02T16:44:00.000-07:00

I've learned a lot about blogging, through this blog. Now at home, I've started another blog focused on my hobby songwriting. I've even designed my own website which hopefully will be launched later this week. What's amazing is that after getting over the initial technology fear and reluctance, I now have little hesitation with the technology.

My work experiences supported my home activities and I'm now finding that my home experience is paying dividends here at work. I now know how the web functions, the challenges in linking, and numerous little tips that I've learned through my endless calls to customer support.

I've also learned the value of good technical support. At home, I'm the webmaster, technical writer and producer of the product (songwriting). Doing all these tasks, limits my effectiveness at producing the product. Hopefully that will change once everything is running, but now it's time (or sleep) that I can little afford to lose.

RoboCow - effective way to get the message out

2006-03-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

The name RoboCow immediately made me curious. I had to go look and ended up seeing an amazing knowledge tool.

Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada was extremely creative on a very dry topic (no pun intended), protecting drinking water. By using flash media and a great title, they effectively got their message out to a large audience. I got 803 hits when I entered the word "Robocow" on Google.

Check it out and think how this information has traditionally been transferred.

Adding a links section to my blog

2006-02-17T09:01:00.000-07:00

I've been envious of all the blogs that have links sections. Since it didn't come with my Blogger template, I was at a loss. I finally went to the Blogger help page and found some code that could be added to my template. Being HTML challenged, I asked my web master for help and in 5 minutes I've got a links section. Now all I've got to do is populate it.

RFP on organization development to implement knowledge management

2006-02-16T07:57:00.000-07:00

The Awwa Research Foundation, is pretty unique in KM. Not only are we implementing KM for our organization, we also share practices with peer organizations (drinking water research organizations), and we sponsor research for our customers, water utilities.

Our board of trustees just approved the 2006 research agenda, with 38 projects valued at $22M. Request for Proposals (RFPs) for projects will be available by March 31. Of particular interest to KM folks are:

- Organizational Development Needed to Implement a Knowledge Management Strategy at Water Utilities (#4003).

- Workforce Planning for Water Utilities - Successful Recruiting, Training and Retaining Operators and Engineers to Meet Future Challenges (#4005).

Both these projects are will be open for competitive bid. The RFPs and guidelines for submitting proposals will be available on AwwaRF's Web site by March 31. Information on ongoing and completed AwwaRF's KM research can also be found our web site.

Revisiting the why (the vision)

2006-02-15T16:43:00.000-07:00

Last week I spent two days in supervisor training. One key point that was stressed is to clearly define expectations, an action plan around those expectations, and revisit these expectations and actions at a set frequency.

I immediately start thinking how this relate to knowledge management (KM) and in particular our content management system (CMS) implementation. In developing our CMS we spent a ton of time working with management and users to define the business need, define the vision, set the expectations and develop the implementation plan. Since that time we've implemented the system and done a lot of training. However, we haven't revisited the vision or more importantly all the cool applications that will be available shortly (i.e. the value to the users). In being wrapped up in the doing, it's easy to lose sight of the why.

The take home message is after launching a great idea (or possibly a mediocre idea) don't forget to go back periodically and revisit why the idea was launched in the first place. Do this not only for management, but also for folks doing the work.

CMS - Laying the Foundation

2006-02-09T14:06:00.000-07:00

We're about a year into our content management system (CMS) implementation and there are questions on what benefits we have had. In thinking about it, I can honesty say, as of today there has been very little apparent benefit. We have got the system up and running, organized files, migrated them into our system, digitized reports, and most importantly have not crashed our business processes in doing so (the last is probably the most important). The benefit has been in laying the foundation. From this foundation we can now build the house.

I just left a meeting with our IT folks. There was a lot of excited conversation and plans for the near-term implementation of workflows, external document sharing, and web content management (both for the intranet and internet sites). We've also had discussions on long-term items like customer information systems, business process management, and file retention management. The fact that we built such a strong foundation allows us to consider or move forward. From these items, we'll see the benefits of the CMS.

Enterprise content management

2006-02-02T11:58:00.000-07:00

Systems should be transparent to users. Users should go to one interface to accomplish everything they need to do. Easier said than done!

About three years ago at KM World I heard the first description of an enterprise content management. It was great to see a diagram that showed the linking of document management, imaging, records management, web content management, customer relationship systems, etc. Since that time, it seems that this term is being considered a given. An article by John Harvey in this month’s AIIM magazine, stated at “almost all of you reading this understand that enterprise content management is an umbrella term of many technologies.”

At this year’s KM World conference I heard a lot of discussion that the layers you add on top of the system is what adds value (another way to describe ECM). Yair Dembinsky’s presentation was one of the best examples what he called network-centric CM.

A few of our staff members just returned from Stellent’s Cresendo conference. One of the first comments that I heard was “in organizations where the CMS really screamed, it was because the systems were integrated.” At the conference, one CMS manager kept raving about the web team that was using the CMS data. He stated that the CMS was the foundation and his goal for CMS to have the best information (organized, have good metadata, etc.). The web integration was what made all his efforts worth while.

An issue I heard that was discussed was legacy systems. If you could start all over, you’d probably have different systems all that easily integrate with each other. In reality, you have what you have and to change systems requires a lot of time and money. Therefore, the focus needs to be on integrating the systems that you have. Changing systems, while not unheard of, should be part of a long range plan.

A good article on enterprise thinking is posted on James Robertson’s site, Column Two and entitled, Grand enterprise projects: why are we wasting our time?. The article questions grand enterprise efforts and recommends, “instead of trying to eat the elephant whole, perhaps the better way is to take one bite at a time? Individual business units are not well-placed to solve many business problems. A centralised team of skilled (and resourced) project staff can do much to quickly develop small but useful solutions.”

This is interesting thinking as we are getting ready to develop our organization IT plan. My take home from this is to think long-term (the fully integrated enterprise system), but to approach this as a series of steps that allows you to keep your business running, while making needed business improvements. The key to integrating your systems is integrating your units and people.

Implementing keyword tagging - Part 2

2006-02-01T12:57:00.000-07:00

It's all about process - Most of our research staff are engineers, so when we rollout our keyword process, we received a lot of detailed questions, many of which we hadn't considered. So we went back to the drawing board and further defined the process. It never ceases to amaze me how many details are involved with even the simplest of processes. However, not addressing them can bring the best laid plans to a screaching halt.

One of the more interesting twists in this latest revision to our process is that project managers (PMs ) will conduct the tagging for our next go-round of projects using a paper form. The paper form will be reviewed and then given to an administrative assistant to enter into the CMS. While contrary to our goal of doing everything electronic, using paper will save PM's time and be easier to implement.

A key lesson here, "remember the goal is to make the process as easy as possible. To accomplish that, use whatever means works the best." Of course, this doesn't preclude us for developing and implementing an electronic process in the future, which I hope is sooner rather than later.

Capturing knowledge - part 2

2006-01-30T08:57:00.000-07:00

My daughter and her friend got first prize in the science fair!! We were very nervous after seeing the quality of other displays. Most were much more impressive. Their display look like a small bungalow hidden between high rise condo's. Factors that helped in judging were:

1) Kept it visual, not textual - The display was mainly pictures and graphics, with an example filter and testing equipment. You could scan and understand the project quickly. Many of the other exhibits had pages of text and required extensive reading in order to understand what was going on.

2) In the language of the audience - It was obvious that the kids did all the work. All terms used were in the language of a 2nd grader, not something so impressive that it took a Ph.D. to understand.

3) Understood the real-world application - They understood the difference between our filters and what's used in practice because we toured our local water treatment plant. By leaving the lab and seeing the real-world, they knew reality as well as theory.

4) Enthusiasm and clear explanations - Most importantly they did a great job explaining the project to all who asked. Their excitement was obvious as well their understanding of the subject matter.

This was a great learning experience for them and a good KM lesson for me.

Efficient communicaiton - The three minute song

2006-01-17T08:22:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a performance class. One of the first requirements is that we prepare three songs, each no longer than three minutes in length. I immediately groaned, because most of my songs are much longer and I hate to cut any of the lyrics that I painstaking wrote. Each line is vital to deliver my message. However, in listening to radio, I realized that most songs are right around 3-minutes. These artists (the ones who make money) have figured it out.

In thinking about this, the most effective communicators are those that get to the point quickly. They've learned, that to have success you need to keep it short and to the point.

Implementing keyword tagging

2006-01-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Over the past year we had a team develop a new scientific keyword taxonomy (i.e. tags). These tags provide the relationships between our unique projects (for example, project related to the arsenic).

We are using these tags as a metadata field in our CMS and to support our new web search capabilities. We have not yet added them into our project tracking database and that's a next step.

The challenge we're now facing is consistency in using these tags by different users and in different (not integrated) systems. A final issue that we've tabled for the time being is the impact on existing products that use old tagging schemes.

We just had a meeting and came up with the following recommendations:

1. Project managers should only tag projects once for all systems
2. For consistency sake we need a gatekeeper to ensure that PMs are tagging projects consistently. The gatekeeper will review any changes to the keyword list.
3. We need to integrate entry of these keywords across all our systems. Entry can either be automated or manual by one person and we're now evaluating options

We've discussed and tried in the past more flexible/collaborative ways of tagging, without much success. Because so many of our products rely on structured relationships between projects, we need to ensure the consistency of use.

Capturing knowledge

2006-01-09T08:43:00.000-07:00

This weekend I helped my seven-year old daughter and her friend prepare their science project. We spent around four hours building water filters and running a variety of tests. It was great fun. Everything was going great up until the time we had to write the lab report. At that point, the mood rapidly changed from fun and excitement to tears and frustration. She finally ended up with a report and did a great job (for a second grader). Of course, the report missed some of the important details, and it was difficult to see the excitement that she had. The excitement returned when got a chance later to describe the experiment to her grandmother and answer questions. She was easily able to articulate how we did the experiment, how the filters worked, and the challenges we ran up against. At the end, grandma had a good understanding and I was peppered with more detailed questions later in the evening about water treatment. Her excitement was passed on!

This speaks volumes about capturing knowledge. Next time I think about how great it would be to capture tacit knowledge, I will remember this example. Writing things down is difficult to do and especially hard to capture the excitement. It's much easier to verbalize what you know, it's more interesting, and a much better way to exchange knowledge.

KM interconnectedness

2006-01-06T15:46:00.000-07:00

I've spent today reviewing the past year's KM activities and ideas for the future in preparation for a meeting with senior managers. We're plotting out where to put the emphasis in the coming year. Points that really struck me are:

1) Every activity required multiple individuals in multiple groups. In most cases it took longer to accomplish than expected due to hand-offs between individuals. There were delays in scheduling meetings due to working around travel schedules, losing time due to the start/stop/start nature of these activities, and often conflicting priorities.
2) Many of activities we're not core job functions, even though they were identified as important to the organization. The famous "other duties as many be assigned" clause in job descriptions.
3) We didn't reward folks enough for their extra efforts on these tasks.
4) There was often an initial compliance with the new task and then a drop off in compliance.
5) We accomplished a lot and have even more to do.

Some lessons from these:

1) Embed, embed, embed - this will be my motto. My goal will be find every opportunity to embed processes, such that they don't get forgotten after the initial push.
2) Schedule meetings when they are needed, and don't delay because everyone can't be there.
3) Focus efforts even more. Select a few activities and concentrate on moving them through completion.
4) Find more ways to acknowledge and reward these "extra efforts."

End of the year blog statistics

2006-01-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

This is the time of year to reflect on all-sorts of things, so why not blog statistics.

I started blogging in December of 2004 and was just another anonymous blogger until July of 2005 when I started promoting my blog. I added SiteMeter in July of 2005, so here are the statistics for the last half of 2005:

Visits: 826
Page Views 1662
Average length of visits: 1:21
Highest visits in a month (December): 350
Links to my site (from Google) - 163
Most popular entry: Lessons learned during CMS implementation

An interesting KM program

2006-01-04T16:21:00.000-07:00

An interesting knowledge management (KM) program is at the Training, Research and Networking for Development (TREND) Group in Ghana. While I'm sure we have large technology differences, both on the KM side and application side (drinking water technologies), I was surprised to see how similar our KM challenges and approaches are.

In their background paper they describe the knowledge challenges as:
1) How to tailor information to the needs of local users
2) Ensure that information is optimally used,
3) To develop capacity to manage and use the knowledge, and
4) Identify where more knowledge is needed.

They go on to describe the development of a Resource Center with services to:
- Assess knowledge needs and demands
- Collect, validate and store information
- Package and version information to target groups
- Dissemination knowledge
- Quality assurance of knowledge disseminated
- Marketing and promotion
- Generate revenue to support KM activities

They have spent a lot of effort on promoting the need for KM. One comment that sounds familiar is that there is little coordination of KM activities between institutions.

For implementation they approach KM from 4 angles:
- Information and communication technology
- Human resources management
- Office and workspace instruction
- Organizational set-up

Keyword search

2005-12-23T12:57:00.000-07:00

I just received a great Christmas present, our new topic search was launched on our web site today. This will greatly improve our customer's ability to find research information.

Behind the scenes is a Verity search engine and a 250+ scientific keyword classification scheme that took over a year of debate to develop. All of our research projects (around 800 projects) in our database have been tagged and we've added these keywords as a metadata field in our CMS.

Personal knowledge management

2005-12-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Last year for Christmas my significant other gave me a GPS. This year, I'm asking her to teach me how to use it. I can't use half of the features on MS Office 2003. I just learned how to use animation features in Powerpoint. Am I technology incompetent, you bet. Am I out of the norm, nope!

I have a Palm, home computer, cell phone, digital camera, digital camcorder, DVD player ...(you get the idea). At work we have a database, e-mail system, network, intranet, CMS and all the latest software. How can I keep up with all this technology and still do my job efficiently? How can I expect folks to learn all the new features offered by our new content management system( CMS)?

I was very intrigued by Tom Davenport and Dave Pollard's presentations on personal knowledge management at this year's KM World. The concept is about helping the individual better manage personal information and knowledge. It's not so much about technology as learning how to use the technology you already have or to link different personal systems together. It must account for differences in work and learning styles.

I presented this idea to my staff technology guru's (IT, CRM, Web, CMS) along with some ideas for new technology. Within a few minutes new technologies were ignored and we focused on how to get people using our existing systems. We talked about shadowing, embedding technologies, internal and external training courses, etc. In the end we are going to propose something very simple - a short presentation at the all-staff meeting on "searching tips." We'll hope to use this use this to kick -off a existing tools training program. Details to follow ...

My take home message, is that new technologies make sense for an organizational level. How to use these technologies is at the personal level. To be successful, you need to account for both.

Idiots guide to increasing blog traffic - part 2

2005-12-19T16:39:00.000-07:00

Over the last two weeks I've had a significant increase of traffic coming to my blog. This is by no means a huge number but it's fun to watch the increase. I can attribute a large number of these hits to one referring URL, James Robertson's blog , Column Two . Thanks!

I've been investigating how to get blogs noticed for some time. Back in July, I described my first attempts in the posting "Idiots guide to increasing traffic on my blog." At that time, I signed up with some blog listing services and began tracking responses. At KM World this year I was given a number of new ideas after listening to Bill Ives and other presenters. Below are some of the new things I'm trying:

1) Analyze my blog traffic by:
- Using Google search to look for links to my site (link: kmjeff@blogspot.com). This does a pretty good job, but misses a lot of the links in other blogs.
- Using an RSS reader to see recent postings that mention my name or site. Seems better for blog traffic
- Looking at the URLs that referred people to my site. This is one of SiteMeter's (at the bottom of my blog) free features. I also look at what page of my blog they entered on.

2) Look at your more successful posts. I've found that lessons learned articles have high interest. My first CMS lessons learned article was captured on Tom Godfrey's blog. My second on was picked up on James Robertson's blog.

3) Linking within your posts and on other's sites. I'm trying whenever possible to add links to other blogger's sites. I've also posted comments on their sites and have asked some to include me on their blog roll. Good sites that I look at are Knowledge Jolt, Olaf's Notebook, John Quirk: On Content Management, and Portals and KM.

4) Tagging - I started using del.icio.us for tagging my documents with keywords. I seen an increase in traffic after starting to tag and was picked up by another feed service, Planet KM.

I'm still a novice at this, so if you have additional ideas let me know.

CMS expectations

2005-12-14T09:59:00.000-07:00

I ran across some notes in one of my old innovation files that reminds me to be careful of expectations. It describes the "phases of commercialization" to be:

1) Recognition - The idea that a technology can provide the solution needed
2) Overhype - In order to move the idea forward, it's potential is emphasized
3) Disillusionment - When it doesn't live up to the hype
4) Improved understanding - More realistic expectations based on practical experience
5) Realistic investment - Sustainable use of the technology

A key factor in the success of a product is how long it takes from the original hype to meeting realistic expectations? Excitement is generated around the potential benefits, delivery on these benefits is how success is judged. The time between system start-up and being fully functional is where you need to worry about disillusionment, i.e. loss of support for moving forward.

We're just getting started and we've still a long way to go before meeting the promise of our system. We'll get there, but it's going to take time. Making sure that our stakeholders understand this is important.

Lessons learned during CMS implementation

2005-12-07T16:46:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post, I gave 10 lessons learned in getting an organization to embrace a content management system (CMS). These focused on getting our staff ready for CMS (i.e. the organizational culture).

Below are 10 lessons we learned when implementing the system.

1) Keep your priorities and goals clear. Complete tasks associated with your first priority before moving on.
2) Expect changes - As we learned more, we constantly needed to revise our thinking.
3) Address gray areas with policies - i.e. file naming conventions, metadata changes, etc.
4) Balance honoring the team process vs. making it work.
5) Manage your consultants. Questions should you should ask:
- When should you use design consultants and when do you use support?
- Do you have what your consultants will need before they come on site?
- Watch out for non-standard design items.
6) Err on the simple side, you can always add the complexity later.
7) Paper migration - It's all about process.
8) Different levels of users have different training needs.
9) Don't try to implement all tools at once.
10) Don't forget implementation is as much about people as it is about technology.

Web cast completed

2005-12-06T14:21:00.000-07:00

We had our web cast today and while I don't have the official numbers in yet, what I do have is promising. The numbers (which I'll finalize later) were:
- invited 500+ researchers via e-mail
- had 109 registered
- 90+ attended
- 77 stayed until the end

It seemed to go quite smoothly and I'm impressed with the ease of the Live Meeting tool. Our only technical glitch was thirty seconds of silence, with one of our presenters talking into a muted phone. A few lessons learned:

1) Getting the final slides is a challenge. It's easy to import slides into the tool. Once they're there, I needed support to do the manipulation. The problem came with last minute changes after inserting polling slides, you can't just reload slides. In the future, I may be brave and keep polls in a separate file.

2) Have a separate moderator and presenter. Having someone else review the questions is a huge help. Trying to select questions and answer them is a challenge. We're now discussing how to answer the questions we couldn't get to.

3) Send out a second invite close to the show date. I sent out a second invite e-mail a week before the show (our first went out 4 weeks before the show). We almost doubled registration (58 to 109).

4) The majority of problems are audio problems. Be ready to give a phone number that attendees can use for the audio. Also, remind them that they need to have WindowsMedia player loaded (we found that out on one of our laptops).

5) Give yourself plenty of time for set-up. We set-up and tested all our computers on show day 2 hours before the start time. Even though we practiced with this tool, we still needed this time. It was great not being rushed before the show time.

6) Have a lot of breaks or changes of pace in the show. I heard somewhere that webcasts need a poll or change of pace every 10 minutes. We had 3 presenters and 4 polling slides in our 45 minute show. This seemed about right.

These are my initial reactions. I see a few e-mail rolling so hopefully these won't change ...

CMS update

2005-12-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

We're two months into our content management system (CMS) implementation. The majority of our electronic content has been transferred into the system and it looks like most of the staff is using the system.

Most of our project managers seem happy about the system. Our recent modification to allow folks to access to content via the internet (externally) is seen as a a huge advantage.

One disappointment has been in the metadata directed searches. The problem with bringing over legacy documents is the limited amount of metadata (unless you touch each document). We're trying to add metadata to existing files, however, when you have an estimated 100,000 files, that's quite a task. We've also had some requests to add new metadata fields.

We just purchased a new scanner and our next phase is to begin scanning paper files. However, before we add a new layer of files, we have decided to survey users about changes they would like to see with the system. With input received, we hope that these files can be more useful.

Webcast update #2

2005-12-05T10:38:00.000-07:00

We're getting ready for our first webcast tomorrow. We've got about 90 registered as of today and I expect a few last minute folks. Not a bad crowd for our pilot. In preparation for the show, we did the following:

1) Sent instructions to all staff in case they get assistance call (anyone in our organization might get a panic call)
2) Set-up our three in-house presenters in adjacent office (to ease communication, just in case)
3) Scheduled computer set-up and testing well before the show (with IT back-up if needed)
4) Sent presenters instructions that included:
- Turn off cell phones, blackberries, etc
- Don't use the speaker phone, mute your phone when not in use
- Make sure you have a hard copy of the presentation and glass of water
5) Attendees received an e-mail reminder from Microsoft.
6) Assigned a staff member to review questions and developed procedures for getting the questions to the presenters.
7) Prayed!!!!

As you can see, we're trying to prepare for possible problems. To get to this point, we've already had training on the software and a dress rehearsal of the presentation.

Notes from KM World 05

2005-11-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

KM World is a great place to stimulate new thoughts about KM and more importantly about the business. These notes were complied from a variety of speakers and I apologize for not giving all the authors credit.

Some of the business concepts I heard emerge this years are:

1. We’re becoming a knowledge economy and the indicators of business success are changing. (Verna Allee)
- The change is from purely financial indicators (tangible items) to intellectual capital indicators (intangibles, knowledge, etc.).
- Social consciousness is changing how a business is perceived. Investors look at the bottom-line but consumers look at “are you a good company.” Reputation is everything. Your brand is your value.

2. The value in an organization is it’s network. Content serves as the backbone, put people connections are more important

3. The highest level of customer service is tying your success in with your customer’s success, share the risk. Design products in collaboration with your customers. (Hubert Saint-Onge)

4. A knowledge strategy is a component of your overall business strategy. (Hubert Saint-Onge)
- Business strategy, why are you in business
- Customer strategy - what are you going to do for your customer
- Organization strategy - how are you goin gto do this
- Knowledge strategy - how are you going to manage knolwedge and expertise to accomlish this.

5. The model of a professional is changing. More people are working at home or on the road instead of an office. How do you make the person more effective? (Tom Davenport)

6. Managing you knowledge is key for change and innovation

Some new ideas on KM strategies I heard are:

Personal knowledge management - personal productivity (Tom Davenport). Focus on making the person more productive, recognizing that individuals are very different in habits and norms. How can you link the personal productivity tools with your KM systems? Need to develop an e-workforce program that includes training on tools.

· How to better use the tools you already have? (training on how to search, convey messages in PowerPoint presentations, etc.)
· Cultural anthropology/ shadowing/ mentoring – How does someone work, how can you help them better prepare for their job.
· Linking personal devices (Blackberry, cell phones, etc.) with organization systems.

Watching vs. searching/RSS readers (Darlene Fichter) – The new trend will to get notification of information sent to you as it is being produced. RSS readers get information that’s coming out now vs. Google searches that historical content.

Contact and the social networks are key. The person who knows is more important that the content.
- There were lots of discussions of systems that mine contact information in e-mails. Ethical issues were also discussed
- Finding the galaxies vs. stars (Peter Gloor)– Tap into the hubs of networks. Finding people who are in contact with others who have large networks.
- Most productive people have strong internal and external networks.

The value of document management systems is the layers you put on top of the systems (Yair Dembinsky). I was surprise to see the decreased emphasis on CM at KM World. It seems that CM has matured to the point where people want to talk about more exciting new ideas, with CM being a given.

Embed KM processes in ways of doing your job. Tools should operate behind the scenes. Folks are unlikely to go to another system.
· Provide templates.
· Embed training into the job
· Capture knowledge as it is created

Dialog is needed for information to be used. People don’t use information until they can talk with someone they trust.
· Plato -Text is best to capture and store knowledge. Meaning is best derived from dialog (Bill Ives)
· Collaboration is needed to add the context.

The nonsense of "knowledge management"

2005-11-29T08:04:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting article by T.D. Wilson a professor emeritus called "The nonsense of 'knowledge management.'" If you like to challenge your beliefs, this is a must read article.

His basic conclusion is that knowledge management is "in large part, a management fad, promulgated mainly by certain consultancy companies and the probability is that it will fade away like previous fads." He states that "knowledge can never be managed, except by the individual knower." Data and information are what is managed. He also cites inconsistencies in how KM is defined, especially in the differentiation between knowledge and information. He sees a new marketing ploy of changing the terms from information to knowledge systems. In other words, he's see the fad as using the term knowledge in place of information.

He goes on to say that KM "also shows signs of being offered as an utopian ideal." Being a past survivor of total quality management (TQM), team processes, empowerment, quality circles, etc. I remember all the excitement and promise around these concepts. I also remember endless debates over the terms and how they could be applied. Even though these terms have gone from usage, some of the "good" components are still being used today.

I agree that knowledge management is a fad and will most likely be replaced by a new term in a few years (I already see new terms emerging like competitive intelligence and business process management). However, where I disagree with the author is that I believe fads are good. Fads get people excited and energized. By having something new to grab on to, the business issues around capturing and managing knowledge (or information) are being addressed. THIS IS GOOD. There's a new energy here and new solutions are being tried. Will all these be in practice in a few years, I highly doubt it. Will some, definitely!

This article does point out a trap, the idea that KM is utopia. It's not, its just a means to the end, a better way to manage how we do business. Will I end my career in knowledge management, probably not. Will I still be using concepts of knowledge management, definitely.

As for the distinction between information and knowledge, its not important. What is important is deciding what information is needed, by who, at what time, and then making sure it gets there so it can be used.

Implementing content management (CM)

2005-11-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

From planning to reality: Implementing content management.

The slides from my presentation can be found on the 2005 KM World conference web site.

The presentation abstract was:

In March 2005, the Awwa Research Foundation began implementing the Stellent content management solution. This implementation represents the culmination of a two-year organizational readiness effort and is considered a key component of AwwaRF’s knowledge management initiative.

This presentation will provide “real-world” advice in preparing an organization to embrace content management. Practical tips and lessons learned will be provided on obtaining staff and management buy-in, understanding business needs, and developing practical system requirements. Moving from design to reality will also be discussed, with issues such as training, migration of files, and implementation of the metadata model.

Knowledge management reality award

2005-11-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

AwwaRF’s Knowledge Management Program was a finalist for the 2005 KM Reality Award, sponsored by KM World Magazine. There were 120 applicants for two awards (the other was for vendors). The reality award is given to an organization “that demonstrates leadership in the implementation of knowledge management practices and processes …” IBM was the eventually winner of the award (and well deserving). The fact that AwwaRF’s program was recognized by this leader in the KM profession speaks highly of our program.

On a fun note another finalist was Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, a law firm, that my brother is a partner with. I'm just glad that his organization didn't beat mine.

At the risk of making this post too long - I'm attached the text from our award application:

Date of initiation of KM program?

January 2003 official launch date (however, the knowledge management emphasis began in 2000)

Why were knowledge practices & processes initiated

To continue to improve customer satisfaction with AwwaRF’s research program. While having received high marks from customers on value and overall performance, there was still room for improvement on key knowledge-related performance indicators. Management and the Board of Trustees recognized this and formally approved the KM initiative in January 2003.

What were the key business results &/or organizational improvements targeted by the KM initiative?

Three customer directed indicators of satisfaction were targeted:
- Provide research results that are practical and useful
- Provide information in formats that are easy to use
- Provide cost-effective solutions to problems facing water utilities

Organizational improvements targeted included:
- Establishing an organizational culture to support knowledge management and improve sharing of information among staff and customers.
- Implementation of an enterprise content management system including document management, workflow, collaboration and web content management
- Implementing user-friendly communication tools (Web, targeted e-newsletters, etc.)
- Putting information into context by summarizing knowledge in key areas
- Improving customer feedback mechanisms
- Providing results from ongoing research to customers
- Increasing the availability of content electronically by digitizing legacy reports

Who were the champions or supporters of the initiative?

The initiative received top-down and bottom-up support. Champions at the top of the organization include members of the Board of Trustees and an ad-hoc committee of the board, senior management (with the Deputy Director leading the initiative), and the 2004-created KM Coordinator position. Bottom-up support included staff members from all levels of the organization. Key customers are also championing this effort.

What metrics or measures were in place to evaluate the program and its impact on organizational goals?

Biannual customer satisfaction survey includes questions directly indicative of the performance of the KM initiative. Key indicators have been tracked since 2000.

Web and e-newsletter usage are analyzed quarterly. Periodic satisfaction surveys on specific communications products

Targets for organizational goals are reviewed quarterly. .

Direct feedback is received from the Board of Trustees, ad-hoc board committee, customers, and staff. Surveys and focus groups are conducted as needed.

What KM competencies were developed within the organization?

o Vision – KM incorporated in the organization’s vision. Board approved KM strategy, with roll-out to staff
o Culture - Top-down and bottom up culture that supports KM. Key stakeholders were identified and champions have emerged
o Processes
- Established internal process to share knowledge
- Developed processes for multi-unit communications items
- Information modeling – Developed an information model
- Taxonomy/ classification – Developed a metadata model that included a scientific keyword system
o Technology
- Content management system including document management, collaboration and workflow
- Targeted e-newsletters
- Redesigned Web site (including a new search engine)
- Featured topic section of the web site that puts information into context
- Digitization of legacy reports and other documents

What outcomes, benefits, & impacts have been realized today?

1) Customer survey results indicated
- 27% improvement in providing information products in formats that are easy to use
- 13% improvement in performance on practical, useful results
- 7% improvement in performance in providing cost-effective solutions to challenges faced by water utilities (our customers).

2) A culture that supports KM from the top-down and bottom up
- “Our number one goal in upcoming years is providing you with practical knowledge ...” Board chair at 2004 annual subscribers breakfast
- Organizational Critical Success Factor #1 - “Creating, managing and transferring knowledge” in AwwaRF’s 2005 Strategic Plan
- Over 50% of staff participated in teams to develop the organization information model
- 100% staff participation in transferring electronic files into a newly created file structure to support the CMS

3) Increased knowledge offerings and usage by customers
- Web traffic increased by 60% in 2005
- 4 fold increase in report ordering on-line
- 15% increase in subscribers to Target Topics e newsletter

4) AwwaRF recognized as a leader in KM by the Global Water Research Coalition (peer organizations worldwide).

Comment spammers ruin it for everybody

2005-11-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Blog parasites have found my site, yuk! This blog, once the bastion of pure knowledge, has been defiled.

To keep the parasites out, you must now register before adding a comment. If you have a real comment, please don't let the registration page stop you.

CMS - continuing training

2005-11-01T16:17:00.000-07:00

We're about three weeks into the CMS implementation. As we should have expected there have been a number of "how-do-I" questions. Our administrator is doing a good job of working with staff on a one-to-one basis, however, this is taking a lot of time. We also sent out some tips via e-mail. However, with the large number of e-mails folks are getting, the message doesn't always get out via e-mail. Other things we will be doing are:

1) A 10 minute "tips" presentation at each monthly all-staff meeting. The goal will be to show folks how to respond to some of the FAQs. Luckily our executive director has gone though an implementation before and is all in favor of this.
2) Offer a 15-30 minute session at regularly scheduled unit meetings to go over features of most interest to that group. This way we can offer more indepth training without scheduling another meeting.
3) Adding a "FAQ about the CMS" folder in our contributions folder for answers to common staff questions.

The lesson here is for a successful implementation, don't just train once and walk away. Continually train!!!!

Web cast update

2005-10-28T11:06:00.000-06:00

We're moving forward with a web cast, scheduled for December 6. We chose MS Live Meetings as our provider and are using their package that includes an event planner. As part of our packager we get a 90 minute training session, a dress rehearsal, and the actual event. They are also handling the event registration and building the web registration page. With all this, it should be easy, NOT!!!

Below is a list of other tasks:

1. Develop the show objective and line up the speakers
2. Write a description of the program
3. Work with MS to design the web page and response letters. Provide MS with our logo as well as description of the event.
4. Schedule training sessions and dress rehearsal.
5. Prepare marketing material
- Get list of e-mails
- Prepare an e-mail account if folks respond to the message (i.e. not my e-mail address)
- Send out broadcast e-mail (include link to registration page)
- Prepare print description that can be handed out
6. Obtain speaker slides for the show
7. Get someone who can review and compile e-mail questions during the show.
8. Prepare an item for all staff on how to handle calls that we may get during the show (i.e. here's how to get technical support).

I'm sure this list will grow as we get closer to the show.

Going live with CMS - update

2005-10-27T16:19:00.000-06:00

Our CMS has been live for about three weeks and people are starting to use it. It's been fun watching our system administrator go back and forth to one person's office to offer assistance (a big cheese - but I won't mention names). The good news is that he's using the system.

We've bumped into some conflicts between the current ways of doing things and processes for checking in documents. After a few discussions, we've decided not change the processes for the time being. This does mean that were are not capturing some content, however, with time and people becoming aware of the system capabilities I'm sure this will change.

We've also starting to look at migration from paper files into the system. Since folks are accustomed to thumbing through the whole file, it has been decided to scan the file in as a whole. One day we may want to break this file apart, but for now this adds a level of comfort. It also has the advantages of simplifying the scanning job and reducing the number of files in the CMS.

For another set of files, we found a way so that only one document in a group will come up in a search and the other working documents can be hidden from view. This along with version control will minimize the confusion about what document people are viewing.

To continue the education process, we're sending out tips as we find new ways of doing things. For example, we found a way to attach documents to e-mails directly from the CMS. At our monthly all-staff meetings for the near distant future, we're going to be offer short demos. Finally, there's our administrator, who's been great at going from office to office offering advice.

The lesson learned here is that you need a lot of flexibility when implementing a system. With time, were going to have better alignment between our people, processes and this system. If we try to force too many issues now ...

Yawn - Going live with CMS

2005-10-14T09:08:00.000-06:00

We went live with our Stellent CMS system on Monday. After almost three years of planning, design, etc. the day came and went with barely a ripple in the force. In fact, our change over was so boring that I took the day off, our administrator took two days off on the following Thursday and Friday. In other words, this was exactly what we had hoped for - a seamless (and unexciting) transition to a new system. We did celebrate with treats, but other than that an unremarkable day.

The keys to this success were - 1) staff helped build this system (buy-in and ownership, i.e. supportive culture), 2) we had an excellent in-house training program, and 3) we're starting easy only using the document management component with 50% of our legacy content being migrated into the system (the other 50% comes in 2 weekends). Preparation was the key!

Of course we are finding some things that could be better - these are:
1) Display - We have been using 800 X 600 pixel display. Stellent software is optimized at 1024 X 768. With our traditional settings, you can't see the file title without manipulating the column size each time you look at the directory (a real pain). According to Stellent support, there isn't a fix to this. I better get reading glasses.
2) Most of our legacy documents came over without much metadata, so the searching capability is limited. With time this will be cleaned up.
3) Much to the frustration of our administrator, there was still some ROT (redundant, outdated and trivial content) coming into the system. Some folks have arranged their files by how they work, i.e. multiple copies of the files in different project. We're going to have to accept this and work on little changes over time. People don't think in terms of the file (how it's managed, etc.), they only think about the message/content contained in that file. This mindset will limit the usability of CMS, so at some point we will need to implement more file management rules.
4) We can't attach files from the CMS to external e-mail message (i.e. to non-users of our CMS) . We need to first save a document onto our hard drive and then attach it to an e-mail. For internal e-mail, we can attach a link and this works great. Stellent is developing an integration with Groupwise that has been promised in November. Until that happens there will be some frustration.

At this point we're only live with the document management on our internal core-server. In two weeks we start using our external collaborative server. I hope that it's implementation is just as boring

KM outreach

2005-09-28T17:00:00.000-06:00

I just returned home from a conference for our subscribers in St. Louis. I had the chance to talk about our KM program, some new activities, and how it should benefit them. I emphasized that our KM efforts are being driven by their comments and if they have additional feedback, to let me know.

In a related item, I signed an agreement today with Microsoft for a LiveMeeting event. The event will target our researchers and explain how we need their support in some upcoming KM activities. I've asked our new executive director to start the show off and describe the importance of KM to our customers and organization. I will follow-up, give some background on KM and show areas where we need their help. I plan to plant the seed about our use of a collaborative tool for managing research projects and an on-line proposal submission process.

The goal behind these discussions is bring our customers and other stakeholders onto the KM bandwagon. Much like we did with building the culture to support KM among staff we're now reaching out to build this culture among our major customers and stakeholders.

Web casts

2005-09-20T16:17:00.000-06:00

It's been almost 4 years since we have done a web cast. We were an early adopter using a vendor called MShow and later WebEx. At the time the technology was slides over the internet and a phone line for the audio. Unfortunately the person who was our expert retired and we lost the in house champion.

I'm now looking at reviving the use of web casts and am trying to pull together a pilot for the end of October. I've looked at two vendors. It appears that the technology is mature enough to do both the presentation and audio over the internet. However, from one vendor I understand there is a delay between changing the slides and what actually appears on the screen. I also heard comments on vendors not providing a full-screen look at the slides. Costs also seem to vary quite substantially.

I'm still pulling questions to ask together. Any experiences with these technologies, please let me know.

Invisible KM

2005-09-14T09:49:00.000-06:00

Hugh McKeller, editor of KM World just did an interesting article titled, "Invisible KM." The conclusion of the article was that "KM programs should be invisible." I totally agree and this follows on a conversation I had with a co-worker yesterday. She was reading a KM article and pointed out some of the things we should be doing. I politely pointed out that we had been doing those things, however, we purposely didn't call them KM activities.

Here's my logic - In the early 1990's our organization implemented total quality management (TQM) with a whole lost of fanfare. Staff were assigned to work on "TQM activities." After time, if you asked for a definition of TQM, you would have received a whole range of answers. What became obvious was that individual's definitions revolved around the aspect of TQM that had a personal connection to them. Eventually folks started pulling in different directions, the initiative faltered, and TQM became a dirty word.

In 1994, I began working on the Research Applications Program. I watched the same thing happen to the word "applications." The activities that were most successful were those under the radar of applications. For example, when we changed the research process, the concept was directed by research project managers. Application had a large role in the change, but only management recognized it's role. To staff it was a research driven process.

In our organization today, the word KM is hardly used, however, the concepts of KM are being incorporated by the organization. To accomplish this my role becomes developing the strategy and then getting individuals or teams to take ownership. Rarely do I just conceptualize, design, and launch an idea myself. Getting this "buy-in" gets tiring and is often frustrating, but in the end produces a working product for the organization. Also it's very important that the team gets the credit for the outcome.

A word of caution --Making the KM role invisible best serves the organization, but may not be the best career move. I need to spend a lot of effort making sure that management recognizes what I'm doing. However, most staff don't recognize my role in the initiatives. I haven't built an empire but work on the philosophy "when my message becomes someone else's message, I've succeeded." Another way to state this is "organization building rather than program building."

Output vs. outcome

2005-09-07T13:19:00.000-06:00

I was having a debate with Julie O’Brian on what she called the “theory of action.” After I got through my initial shut-down to the word theory (more on that later), I heard an interesting concept.

The concept is how do our outputs lead to the outcome we are seeking? Are they tied together or is there a disconnect? What is the outcome we're seeking?

In everyday life we seem to be output focused, i.e. need to publish this report, develop Web content, make a presentation, etc. How often do we step back and say does this output really address the outcome we are hoping for our customers?

In 1999, I did an analysis of the barriers to innovation in the water supply community (riveting reading if you want a copy). In the study I classified barriers as: cultural, market, and regulatory. In addition I identified the lack of rewards for innovation, the disconnect between organizations involved in technology development, and the information explosion.

The barriers assessment set the stage for the KM program, where we're focusing on user friendly communication. If we continue to work on the outcome being innovation in the water supply community, the bariers assessment can help us design some future outputs.

What is knowledge?

2005-09-06T08:41:00.000-06:00

My biggest challenge? Defining my job around the campfire. In explaining it to folks, I became clearer with some things. Here's some ideas:

The reason knowledge management has become so important is that there is too much information out there. We're still coming to grips with the internet, media, and how people use information. When I was growing up you went to the library, searched indices and the card catalog. You'd find a handful of books and skim through them. Now I can search from my desk and get information from around the world. You can get thousands of hits, and the skimming takes place in the paragraph provided by the Google search. Very rarely do I ever touch an actual printed book. Concise summaries are becoming as important as a book. As an organization we're finding that people want options, concise summaries but also the book for when they are really interested in a topic.

What is knowledge? Is it knowing everything about a subject area including the theory? Knowing where to find the information or who knows the answer? Knowing the one nugget of information necessary to make a good decision? The answer could be yes to any of these questions, depending on the situation.

Take for example the definition of the term knowledge. I've seen whole books about what is knowledge. Most definitions are 1-2 paragraphs long. Definitions often include descriptors like people, processes and technology. Some define how information is to be used like "in making a decision." In adding descriptors or modifiers, do we dilute the message being sent?

For my organization, we've defined knowledge as "usable information." Another definition of knowledge I like is "actionable information." If folks want more, I'm happy to pile on the detail, but to me the knowledge is the core message (i.e. remove the details).

It's a Monday (actually Tuesday after a holiday) so I may not be totally coherent at this moment. I will explore some more of these ideas over the next few days.

Katrina - Finding the right information

2005-08-31T08:40:00.000-06:00

I've been watching the story of Katrina unfold and my heart goes out to those impacted. Like many people, I've been searching for information on what is really happening especially to folks I know. I typically goes to the Weather Channel and CNN for information. Unfortunately, what I finds on these sites is a few pictures of the suffering, watch some reporters get blasted by the wind, but few hard facts. I found some information on blogs and disccusion boards, but still not what I was looking for. Finally today, some resources are emerging that can actually help folks, but still it's difficult to get a clear picture of what's happening.

This event highlights the KM challenge. Providing usable and timely information, not just information. The "news media" provides a lot of information, but is this the knowledge that people need? It would be great if there was one source that provided information to the important questions like:
- What are the locations of the shelters? (pre as well as post event)
- How do I find loved ones, my friends, or neighbors? An example is the Next of kin registry.
- How do I get assistance? - Fema has a disaster assistance program.
- Maps - what roads are open, what areas of New Orleans are flooding, etc. ?
- What's the best way I can help?

Like most events, people are rushing to provide information. What is needed is someone to coordinate the information gathering and provide the information that people need to make decisions. Someone is needed to coordinate this and provide that knowledge that people actually need.

A leader

2005-08-25T15:05:00.000-06:00

We had the retirement party for our executive director yesterday. In essence he started our organization and without doubt is responsible for our current success. So what made him a successful leader? Here are some of things that were said about him:

- Visionary - He had a strong vision of the future
- Innovative - Implemented ideas that were thought to be crazy at the time. The model for our organization has been copied by at least 8 other organizations. He also encouraged innovative among all staff.
- Decisive - Could make quick decisions, but still be could be persuaded to change his mind if you gave a strong enough justification.
- Allowed people to do their job - He set forth the vision and goals and then let staff do their job.
- Loyalty - Believed in his staff. Because of this we have been a very stable organization
- Set the tone - There is a balance of personal and business relationships. Most of our partnerships started with personal understanding and trust. At meetings, there was always humor.
- Asked good questions - Always seemed to ask the obvious questions that were overlooked.
- "The success of the individual, is judged by the success of the organization." - He was very humble and put the organization's success as top priority.
- Positive - His final statement at the party was something like "We are the best organization in the world and we've done it by hiring the best people who are committed to our mission."

Blog Traffic - Results

2005-08-23T13:14:00.000-06:00

It's been about a month since I started efforts to increase traffic on my blog. During this phase, I focused on adding my URL to blog listings. Results to date are:

- 148 hits and 298 page views in the past month
- The biggest day was a high of 60 hits. This occurred three days after getting on Blog Catalog. Since this time, there has only been a trickle of activity.
- Number of links to my site has increased from 4 to 13.
- Received 4 comments
- Had a one day flurry of spam hits

It seems that the traffic is related to the days I get added to a list. After an initial flurry, traffic dies down.

Being a scientist, I'm going to give it another month, then move to my next phase -- article marketing.

Knowledge management and songwriting

2005-08-22T16:19:00.000-06:00

Knowledge management and songwriting - what does this have in common? Believe it or not a lot.

I just returned from at week at the Song School and Folks Festival in Lyons, CO. During the week I was exposed to a huge number of amazing artists. Only a handful of which ever become popular. In seeing this large amount of talent in one place, the question comes up, why do some artists become household names and other toil on in obscurity. An analogy to knowledge management, is how do you get your information recognized in this age of information overload.

Over the last week , I looked at what sets artists apart. Here are some thoughts (note: these are not universal truths):

- Being different - One of the students that stood out to me was playing a Bouzouki (a Greek type of mandolin). His unique sound is what I remember.
- Simple is often the best - Being a guitarist, I noticed those that were playing the hard stuff. However, the tunes that stuck with me often had very simple melody lines (and in most case only three chords).
- It's not so much the instrument, it's the music - I spent a ton on my last guitar, however, Joe Craven "has made it" using a Holiday Inn trash can for a drum and a banjo made from a bedpan.
- Evoke an emotional response - In performance classes we discussed connecting the audience to the music. The challenge is to reach the variety of different individuals.
- The performance is key - What often separates performers is how they walk on stage, the short stories they tell, or if they make eye contact with you. The performance can be as important as the sound.
- The words are important - It's amazing how different people interpret lyrics and how these differing interpretations can change the reaction to the song.
- Breaking the rules - Often the most memorable songs break the rules. If all musicians followed the rules, we'd be pretty bored. Those that are innovative stand out.

This is just a short list, and are there are many other items I could add to the list. In communicating information, these same apply in making your information stand out among the crowd.

Preventing blog spam

2005-08-09T08:23:00.000-06:00

Two weeks ago I began efforts to get my blog noticed. And now I've hit the big time, getting spam on my blog. This morning I learned about Blogger's delete comments feature. Now I need help on how to block spam on Blogger and preventing posts from that famous blogger, anonymous.

Any suggestions would be welcome.

The IT KM conundrum

2005-08-03T16:57:00.000-06:00

I've been pondering the relationship between information technology (IT) and knowledge management (KM)? Our organization has defined KM as managing the flow of information among our staff, customers, and other stakeholders. It's very clear that KM is not just technology, but where's the line between technology and KM?

I received an interesting e-mail today that IT staff are going to be developing the organization's IT plan. In the next few minutes, I had a parade in my office of folks asking questions. The situation in our office is that we have an IT group housed in administration and KM technologies (Web and CMS) housed in Technology Transfer. While most times these folks work well together, these artificial boundaries at times become real boundaries. When TT first mentioned the idea of an overall IT strategy, IT objected. Now IT says they are going to develop a strategy and it's TT's turn.

The whole issue boils down to these groups not being connected. These individuals need to be as connected as their systems need to be connected. The IT strategy is a good example. From a technological perspective it's clear that the expertise in both groups should be harnessed. From a business perspective, the organization's business strategy (which KM is one component) needs to be the core. The challenge will now be to bring all these groups together on the strategy.

Suggestions?

Nothing changes the culture more than success

2005-08-02T15:52:00.000-06:00

Today we celebrated the success of our first major all-staff effort on our content management system. The task was for all-staff to transfer their files into a new temporary file structure. This is necessary so that we can batch load these files into the system with metadata permeating down from the folder level. In the process of doing this we had people remove the ROT (redundant, outdated and trivial files). I don't have metrics on this, but after being in this organization for over 17 years, I removed between 50-75% of my files. Getting 45 people to spend up to a day cleaning up and reorganize their files is a reason to celebrate. Now since we can find documents, we don't even need the CMS (just kidding).

The celebration was quite simple, I made a small announcement at today's all staff meeting about what we are celebrating and then we an ice cream sundae party in the afternoon. In was just a 30 minute break in the afternoon, but people like to be acknowledged. The funniest thing was that one person who has been slow in transferring files was dragged into party. After some good natured ribbing, she walked out and immediately set to the task of moving her files. Another reason to celebrate.

For another form of celebration, I nominated one of my team chairs for an individual performance award. Coming into this project, she was identified as a stakeholder that could be a detractor if not involved. By putting her in charge of a team, not only did she steer the team into finishing a difficult task, she took it on herself to do the work for implementation (a herculean task). She also has ownership of the system and has become one of the systems biggest champions, let's party!!!!

Blogging for knowledge management

2005-08-01T09:15:00.000-06:00

Last week I researched how to get my blog noticed. I tripled the number of comments to my postings (going from 1 to 3 comments). I also had 28 hits in the last week. Not huge numbers, but at least there's some activity.

I was asked the question, why am I blogging about knowledge management (KM)? It doesn't appear to have any benefits to my customers or in my current job.

The reason I started blogging was as an experiment. I wanted to see how blogging works and if people use it, prior to investigating business opportunities.

One of my knowledge management goals is to increase our customer's connection to our research. Currently we use traditional communication items newsletters, Web, conferences and other print communications. A few years ago we started having customer account managers visit our large customers. However, we still find that there is the need for more connection to our research. A comment from a recent focus group asked for more transparency in research processes. In the future, I'd like to take advantage of some less-formal or less-structure communications tool to increase the transparency and add a more personal connection to the research. Using communities of practice or blogs are great opportunities.

For example, wouldn't it be great to go to a research project and not only see progress reports, but to also read the observations (in a blog) of the researcher or their graduate students (the later would be really interesting, since they are doing most of the hands on work). Then to be able to post comments or ask questions in a community. This would not only help our customers feel more connected, but could also lead to better research by having end-user review and feedback.

We're taking the first step in this direction by developing a collaborative tool for our ongoing research projects. Blogging and communities could be the next step. This is at least a year off, since I don't want to introduce too many new things at once.

Idiots guide to increasing traffic on my blog

2005-07-28T15:59:00.000-06:00

I've had this knowledge management blog since December and have had only one comment. I did find that my blog was linked to in 4 places, two of which I placed myself. So today I set off on a path to determine how to increase my blog traffic. By no means am I an expert, but here's some simple things that I'm doing.

1) Added a counter to my site to see if anyone hits my site. I'm using Site Meter.

2) Added my blog to some blog listing services. I used blogwise, blogcatalog, and blogexplosion. I tried bloghub but got stuck in their verification process, so I didn't get listed there. Each site requires registration, so I'm a little worried about giving out my e-mail address, but what the heck. I may also try others at a later time.

3) Check the number of links to my site from my Google search - link:(your site name.com)

4) Checked my Google site rank again from the Google toolbar (4 out of 10 when I started this)

In the future I will be doing the following -

- Being more conscious using keywords such as knowledge and knowledge management. To try and use them often but not so often that readers get sick of them. I've also heard of using trade names whenever possible (but be wary of what you say, companies do check use of their name).

- Adding comments on other bloggers sites and leaving a link. I guess this is common practice.

- Start some article marketing. It seems that many folks are repurposing articles from their blogs and posting them on sites like Ezine Articles http://ezinearticles.com/. I read that you need to post 25-100 articles to get noticed (yuck!).
- Take every opportunity to give folks my blog address. (One suggestion I read was to include it in my e-mail signature line. Luckily for my friends, I have not done this yet).

This all seems like a lot of work, but if I want folks to begin reading my blog I better get to work.

If you read this posting, please attach a comment and add me to your blog roll. I'll do the same if I can figure out how.

"Just goes to show, that it's always something..."

2005-07-27T12:52:00.000-06:00

I'm returning from a week on the Yampa River in Dinosaur National Monument. Prior to leaving, I did all the right things, checked the weather report, got a river guide, checked out my equipment, etc. Of course the weather report was wrong (luckily mostly in our favor) and I forgot the river guide, but other than the one unexpected item (black flies) we had the perfect trip.

I returned to the office to find the project tagging with keywords complete and a reality check of the process underway. One cool thing that emerged was a new look at the whole of our project information. We were able to spots some gaps in our current information. We also found that some of our project titles, objectives and abstracts weren't descriptive enough to tag projects meaning that we needed to go back to the original reports to understand what the projects were about. If we had to do this, it easy to assume that our customers would have the same problems.

This new look provided us an opportunity to improve our data. It's important to realize that what we found wasn't because of screw up, it's the challenge of dealing with legacy information. In some cases, information existed before the last coding system. In others, the information was prepared for one purpose and we're trying to use it for another purpose. The biggest challenge is to use this as an opportunity to clean-up our system.

I liken this to the black flies on the river. By swatting them and then throwing them into the river, I got to see trout and next time I'll bring my fishing pole (yes I know this is a stretch ...)

Keywords, keywords, keywords

2005-07-18T13:43:00.000-06:00

After months of debate the time has come to code all of our research projects with the new key word list. I have approximately 650 projects to code and even with an easy to use access form, it's taking a ton of time. I'm also finding that navigating the keyword structure still isn't that intuitive for all projects and I'd love to go in and modify the list some more. Now I see why most organizations only use the keyword search function instead of taking the up front effort to prepare a guided or parametric search.

The team spent a lot of effort making sure items go into proper buckets. This may mean that popular search term may get buried down in the hierarchy. For example, if you're looking for information on arsenic, you need to search level 1 water quality, level 2 inorganic chemicals, level 3 arsenic. This approach makes sense in classifying documents, but maybe not from a users perspective.

In the future, I'd like to try a wiki approach to classification. Wouldn't it be great to have the classification system emerge from those using it and then changing as appropriate?

Monday musings

2005-07-11T15:31:00.000-06:00

It's a Monday!! Unlike the poor folks suffering from Hurricane Dennis, it's extremely hot and too dry here today in Colorado.

Today, we're progressing on the scanning of final reports. It's amazing the number of issues with this process. Of course, having over 450 reports from the last 20 years makes it exciting. New issues that we discussed today are: 1) what's our retention policy (should we keep all reports, our when do we drop them from the list), 2) do we also want to archive periodicals and newsletters, and 3) how to get a list of all our projects from the beginning of our organization to today.

One interesting thought - Most of our new communications efforts focus on electronic (e-mail and web). Print publications and conferences have basically stayed the same. From surveys, we find that people still want options (print and electronic). With people being overloaded with electronic media, what will be the next trend? From a long-term perspective, are we moving in the right direction?

KM in a water utility

2005-07-08T14:46:00.000-06:00

I managed to take a day during my vacation to visit a large water utility company and talk to their knowledge management manager. I was very impressed with their program and all they can accomplish with a staff double mine (2 people). One thing that I heard very clearly from them, was the use of awards and incentives for motivation. Below are some other things I heard:

Communities of practice - Currently have 52 communities with 2868 community members. Use Quickplace software. Communities vary in scope, number of members and topics. They have a defined process for setting up a community. Each community has three contacts 1) Administrator Â from the KM group, 2) Leader - content manager, technical expert and 3) community champion Â other major contributor. The challenges they identified are keeping the communities alive, a single sign-on for multiple communities, and maintaining soconsistentlytcy.

Ideas into action - Program to get innovative ideas from employees. Originally gave the submitters a percentage of the savings to the company, have now put a cap on it. Have a well defined review and selection process. Ideas must be related to the business and identify cost:benefit as well as how to get it done. Had over 6000 ideas submitted last year. Originally implement about 12% of the ideas, now up to 32% implemented. Some of the challenges they faced are:

- Getting well thought out ideas - Sometime are only a thought, with no detail
- Implementing ideas does take time and effort
- Controversy about the awards, some feel that they submitted the same idea

Database Creep - A major goal of their KM is to consolidate organizational knowledge. They have a real challenge with rogue software and databases being used throughout the company. Huge challenge in reigning in these systems.

Workflow - Have made workflows much simpler by making the content owner the approver of most content.

Intranet - Company information is exchanged through the internet. Have a "submit feedback" button on every page of the intranet. For updating contact information they did a contest, with gift card rewards, significantly improved the response rate.

Learning reviews - KM leads post mortems of business processes. How did the process work, what could be done better next time?

Changing shape of knowledge

2005-07-06T15:40:00.000-06:00

My girlfriend related to me some of the discussions at the National Educational Computing Conference. There were many connections between the discussions in education and KM being implemented for my business. What this means to me is that I need to look more closely at changes in learning and teaching. If people are learning in a new way, we need to target communications products that better match how people are learning.
One presentation that I heard about was a keynote on the changing shape of knowledge, http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/004153.html. The message I heard is that knowledge sharing is changing from paper based to the more fluid and interactive internet based. On the Internet, information is provided in short bites, with a more flexible structure provided by linking.

Information is also being developed in collaboration rather than the one authoritative source. A great example is the wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page. This is an on-line encyclopedia that can be changed on the fly by anyone. Definitions are arrived at by consensus and reviewed by thousands, not just the "expert." Of course, the big question is who is ultimately responsible for posting the information and checking its accuracy? Also the structure is all over the place. For example, under the category drinking water, you can find bottled water, tap water, along with product names such as Evian and Dasanti.

Thinking about how knowledge is changing is very interesting. I'm sure that when my daughter reaches college, she will laugh at how much effort her dad had put into producing paper reports.

Cleaning up the ROT

2005-06-23T17:14:00.000-06:00

I'm moving my files to the temporary directory in preparation for the CMS. With the deadline being July 1, I better get started.

My job is to clean up the ROT (redundant, outdated and trivial files). Since I've been with AwwaRF for over 17 years I've got a lot of ROT. Some files can't even been read by current software.

Some observations from this process are:

1. The need for a good naming convention and file structure - I have to go into a lot of files to see what they were all about.
2. The need for version control - It's amazing how many outdated versions I have.
3. Redundant material - I found the same file in many locations
4. Finding gold - In reviewing old files, I found a large number on my past journeys with the organization. Some example include information on the barriers to the implementation of research, surveys, analyzing benefits, and thoughts on the mission of our organization. Many of the items have been accomplished, but a few still need to be addressed.

Completed key items, now I can enjoy my vacation

2005-06-23T16:50:00.000-06:00

I'm getting ready for vacation and doing a lot of last minute wrap-up items. Many of the items that have been flux are being wrapped up. These items were:

1) We have come to agreement with our sister organization on how to scan legacy final reports. With all the go-aheads obtained, we can now start the 3 month process to get 90,000 pages from over 450 documents into electronic form. We still need to have some business decisions made, but we can get the process underway.

2) Agreed on the design of a new bulletin board for the web site. In one side discussion, we discussed ways to increase the content in our calendar. Another side discussion, that I need to follow-up on in coming weeks is the need to develop information reporting criteria for our partnership projects. What once was an occasional item has now become a large part of how we do business.

3) We just completed a beta-testing of our scientific keywords. This was an extremely valuable exercise and the results will be used by the team in the next two weeks to revise our keywords. We also discussed tagging all our projects and we're on target to have this completed by the end of July. This feedback decided the outcome of the war, peace at last!

4) Our communications and research staff are working together to develop a communications plan for a project that will have high interest to the public. The need for this was identified in one of our unit sharing meetings but getting to the planning took a lot of prodding. Everyone is now on the same page and happily working together.

5) Staff are migrating files to the temporary directory, prior to migration into the CMS. The deadline is July 1, and it seems like the majority of folks are complying (even our senior managers). I just better get done by the end of the day tomorrow or I'm in big trouble.

It's great to head out on vacation with things seemingly on a good path. Of course all hell will break loose while I'm away. I just hope it's all resolved by the time I return refreshed.

Clarity of the relationship

2005-06-22T14:03:00.000-06:00

We just got approval to move forward with a joint program with our sister organization to begin the scanning of legacy reports. Our goal is to make reports published prior to 2003 available on the Web.

The biggest stumbling block in getting the process moving forward had little to do with the scanning of documents, it was recent changes in our publishing agreement (which didn't apply to this project). The challenge was to keep the discussion focused on the task at hand, while finding a way to address these concerns.

It became very apparent that what's needed was a clear definition of the connection between the two organizations. Different individuals were operating on different assumptions about the relationship. Conflicts occurred because individuals, while operating in good faith, were trying to achieve different objectives.

To address this we will promote a senior level discussion to define our relationship. Items to be included are what's the driver for cooperation, how does this match with the drivers for each organizations, how should we share information between the organizations, ...

Once we came up with an approach for addressing the relationship, agreeing on the task at hand was simple. On accomplishing the task, you'll just have to wait ...

The e-mail merry-go-round

2005-06-21T13:49:00.000-06:00

It's amazing how one e-mail can all of a sudden becomes a storm of e-mails. It's fun (or painful) to watch how responses cascade and how different people react. Some respond to all while others only to the author, some give lengthy responses and others only one sentence. Often times messages begin crossing in cyberspace. The worse part is that the original intent often gets lost, words get misinterpreted, and the solution gets farther away. To then get back to the problem, you have to first massage the hurt feelings before getting everyone back on the same page.

I've written in the past about this, but since it seems to keep coming back, I'm going to discuss this again. Some keys for e-mail:
- Break the chain of e-mail exchanges: Instead of responding to a message for the second, third or 10th time, pick up the phone or walk over to the person
- Start the message with the outcome you want: i.e. for review and comment, FYI...
- Don't copy people you don't want to respond
- Watch you're tone, conversely be careful of interpreting the tone (computers don't have body language)
- Avoid negative responses or attacks in an e-mail: You'd be more hesitant to confront them in person, so don't fire away from the safety of the itnernet.
- Take a breath and reread - Before reacting, reread the e-mail before responding. Try to see where the other person is coming from.
- Remember an e-mail is not a true conversation. You're missing 90% of the information which usually comes in body language. In reading e-mail you often replace that 90% with your own feelings.

I'm now heading to a meeting to resolve the problems that occured from the last set of e-mails.

KM World Presentation

2005-06-20T09:45:00.000-06:00

For the second year in a row I had an abstract (below) accepted for KMWorld. My presentation will be on November 16. Its really fun to talk about how things really work. Most of the other presentations talk in glowing terms about the technology, where I will focus more on the people aspects of implementation along with seeing how technology measures up to expectations.

From planning to reality: Implementing content management

In March 2005, the Awwa Research Foundation began implementing the Stellent content management solution. This implementation represents the culmination of a two-year organizational readiness effort and is considered a key component of AwwaRF's knowledge management initiative.

This presentation will provide "real-world" advice in preparing an organization to embrace content management. Practical tips and lessons learned will be provided on obtaining staff and management buy-in, understanding business needs, and developing practical system requirements. Moving from design to reality will also be discussed, with issues such as training, migration of files, and implementation of the metadata model.

A great report from the annual conference

2005-06-16T10:40:00.000-06:00

I read the article about blogs in USA Today, so from now on I only going to say nice things about the wonderful people I work with.

For the past 5 days I was in San Francisco at the AWWA annual conference. I had a chance to talk with a large number of our customers, researchers and board members. There was a lot of validation that our KM program was on track. Our ad-hoc board committee met (our new executive director also attend) and were very excited about our progress. All our activities got a thumbs up and they were impressed with the progress of our implementation. They even mentioned that they'd prefer that we do things right, even if it meant pushing back the schedule. That's always good to hear (of course I'm not going to mention this to staff). Our CMS and KM efforts were also mentioned at the full board meeting and during our subscriber breakfast. I'm not sure if I like being that visible, but at least they said good things.

Our consultants from ComTech conducted a beta-test of our keyword structure. We had 100 stakeholders spend 5-10 minutes providing feedback on our structure and proposed keywords. The exit reviews that I conducted were very favorable, with folks liking our structure and appreciated being asked. Of course the hat we gave them for taking the survey also helped. I'm looking forward to the consultant's report next week. Of course the challenge will be how our team chooses to deal with the feedback.

There's a lot of excited about knowledge management systems within water utilities. Two of our large customers are using Documentum. I've arranged to visit one and learn more about their CMS and KM initiative. One utility executive talked excitedly about linking their GIS system to document management. Even being on the other side of the country he was able to pull up a map of his distribution system, see what type and size pipe they had, and read notes about that area that had been written in the past 40 years. What I found most interesting was senior managers (typically from a water quality/ engineering background) talking about KM and CMS. This just shows how visible these activities are becoming.

I initiated a number of discussions on developing a water-XML standard. I was surprises at that the level of interest both in the US and from some of our international partners. Of course, they left it up to me to get it moving forward.

Finally I heard our program being recognized in a few technical presentations. It's really good to hear outside organizations citing our efforts as the model.

The joy of metadata

2005-06-08T08:31:00.000-06:00

Someone left a photocopy on my desk. Highlighted in yellow was the quote, "taxonomy is not a science, it's a war." So true, so true...

We're in the process of finalizing our taxonomy. The majority of our items were quite easy and basically followed the Dublin core. Everyone could agree on items like author, date, etc. Our largest challenge came with scientific keywords. We view this as providing the largest value to our customers.

We formed a team to accomplish this task. The team painstakingly evaluated each word, looked at current keywords searched on the web, had others in the organization evaluate the words and came up with final list. A recommendation from the team was to have this list evaluated by our customers. To accomplish this we hired consultants to conduct the testing. Yesterday, our consultants presented the test plan to the team. I was surprised by the resistance of some team members to the test plan, especially those components that could provide unsolicited input, i.e. not being directed by team's current list. The concern, justifiably, is that this input may reveal major changes to the classification system. We're also on a tight timeframe with the need to begin using this in early July.

In hindsight, it would have better to have built this evaluation much earlier on or had this in the assignment to the team. Live and learn...

Lessons learned

2005-05-31T10:35:00.000-06:00

Returning to the office after a wonderful Memorial Day weekend, I see a note reminding me of a deadline for article submission to the Best Practices Newsletter. Since I can’t (or just don’t know how) to attached an article to my blog, I going to summarize below my 10 lessons learned for getting an organization to embrace CMS.

Lesson 1 – Changing technology is easy compared to people and processes.
Lesson 2 – Changing culture takes time, a lot of it.
Lesson 3 – Entropy and the vision, the vision of the project shifts over time and must be managed.
Lesson 4 – Keep your eye on the target, each possible solution has the potential of shifting the goal of a project.
Lesson 5 – The voice from outside lends credibility and is essential for instigating change.
Lesson 6 – There are never enough champions.
Lesson 7 – Design first, buy software second to ensure that the product purchased meets your needs and has organization buy-in.
Lesson 8 – Address common misconceptions
Lesson 9 – Start small and be successful by breaking implementation into small well defined tasks. Nothing changes the culture more than success.
Lesson 10 – The need to distinguish between design tasks and policy issues.

The paper has much more detail on each of these items and is bound to be a fascinating read.

Managing priorities

2005-05-25T08:59:00.000-06:00

With the launch of the CMS file migration effort, we began to hear grumbling about workload and all the new things that people need to do. Items that I heard mentioned include a getting aligned with federal reporting requirements, evaluating new research processes, and of course KM and CMS. Adding a change in management ... Managers justifiably are worried about the workload of their staff and accomplishing the tasks before them. Staff are being pulled in a variety of directions for the new priorities.

To address this we had a meeting last week of our KM team (managers of the various units). The questions we discussed were; what activities are taking the bulk of time, which have priority, and what should be delayed. Since my concern is launching KM initiatives in a time when people are overburdened, I offered to put some KM activities on hold if necessary and offered to take on some additional activities to help alleviate the load. While we weren't able to completely answer the questions before us, we did get the issue on the table and the commitment to talk further. Yesterday, I did discuss with one of the managers options for using support staff to help with the file migration. We also discussed some options for me to take a more active role in identifying some KM products. In both cases, this will require individuals giving up some control (I'm sure this will lead to a future post). A step in the right direction, I hope ...

Bottom-line: It's really easy to add new tasks and very difficult to tasks away. A tendency is to just let things pile up. The challenge is to manage the priorities.

High water

2005-05-24T09:40:00.000-06:00

I'm just back from a 4 day canoe trip on the Dolores river. The river was really high and therefore we sped down to camp each day, arriving by lunch time. The frantic pace on the river, followed by a calm afternoon and evening, is a perfect analogy for my role in KM.

Preparing for and launching new activities requires your full attention. Being unprepared can spell disaster. If you're prepared and the unexpected does happen (like a canoe tipping over), you can react quickly with no real harm done. Once you get to camp, for me that's equivalent to getting a new initiative underway, all you can do is sit back and watch others float by, look at their progress and shout an occasional encouragement. The hardest part of the trip is when you have wait for others to accomplish their task, especially if they arrive late to camp with the food.

Time in camp (after the activity is launched) can be used to do a side hike (i.e. a short activity), talk about the day's adventures (an activity debriefing), repair your gear or look at the map for tomorrow (prepare for your next activity). The challenge is not to take a nap after arriving in camp.

Final reports to be available electronically

2005-05-12T13:28:00.000-06:00

One "quick win" that we identified was making all our organization's final reports available via the web site. In 2003 we started offering PDF reports, however prior to 2003 all we have are paper documents. Our subscribers would like the convenience of having web access to these reports. These reports are considered our main repository of knowledge.

This has been discussed for years, but keeps getting tabled because of all the potential challenges. When you hear a barrage of questions, it's easy to think that the problem are insurmountable or just not worth the effort.

In order to address this, we're tackling the challenges in a systematic three-prong approach. The first phase, that we just completed, was to define what we need technically and get vendor costs. By getting the technical folks together, OCR with chapter bookmarks for navigation easily emerged as the way to go. The ability of our search engine, Verity, to full-text search OCR documents simplified our conversations.

Phase 2 is just getting started and will involve senior managers. In this phase, we will focus on project management, funding, and other how-to issues. We're proposing a partnership with our sister organization and while it makes sense from a managerial and technical point of view, getting buy-off from two sets of management will be fun.

Our final phase will be to address all the ownership, royalty, and copyright issues. In the past, these were the comments that stalled out this project. I'm hoping that by building the momentum prior to this phase we can push past all the legal hurdles. Am I dreaming ...

Getting back on track

2005-05-03T14:22:00.000-06:00

The sun's finally back and things are looking up again.

Following the discussions last week, we've gotten back on track by scheduling meetings (my favorite thing) to identify all the new initiatives and decide the priorities. Therefore, instead of reacting to "one more item" we can place each item in its priority for the organization.

Today at our all staff meeting we officially launched the migration of organizational files to the CMS. Surprisingly, we had a warm reception with only one or two scowls in the crowd. Of course I did make numerous statements about our awareness of workload issues and the need to coordinate with unit managers (I feel like a politician, yuk!). Folks had a lot of fun when we introduced the concept of "getting rid of the ROT" (redundant, trivial and outdated files). The first suggestion was to get rid of the KM Coordinator.

The silver lining or lesson learned is to take advantage of a break (like to weekend) to get things back on track. After folks had a chance to express their frustration last week, they were very amenable to talking calmly this week on how to move forward.

The implementation backstep

2005-04-29T14:07:00.000-06:00

It's been cloudy for three days. In Denver this is rare and it's really showing up in people's attitudes. While we typically works together well, there are some cranky people here today.

I'm coining today's post the implementation back step. While this should be expected, I didn't.

The past few days I've been getting a lot of pressure from managers to slow things down and also to mediate numerous little conflicts. What's happening is that the change we've been planning for is finally here (add the weather and the disruption in the force [yesterday's post] and there's bound to be trouble). People are nervous about the change, afraid for their jobs, and worried about the workload. Managers, upon hearing the complaints from their staff are in turn reacting, scrambling to get us to slow down and reduce the pressure. The involvement, consensus, and goals we built up front is temporarily being forgotten.

The silver lining is that because we've built consensus upfront, people are coming to me with their concerns instead of the behind the scenes sabotage. The challenge for me is to not take things personally and to reassure people.

Sound like fun? I'm going somewhere sunny!

A disturbance in the force

2005-04-28T09:48:00.000-06:00

We had disheartening news yesterday that our well-liked deputy director was not selected to replace our retiring director. With our deputy being the lead champion for the KM program, this definitely hits home. What makes matters worse is that we won't know who the new director will be for another month. Questions are swirling around in my head; Will KM remain a priority? Will the new director want to change the direction of the program? Will the new director want a new person leading KM? How are staff going to react? What am I going to have for lunch?

Being in the middle of a change effort, this uncertainty definitely causes problems. People were already being challenged with the changes being implemented. Can we keep the momentum going without pushing people over the edge?

Being the eternal optimist, I'm hoping that this change in leadership will bring a new sense of urgency to the knowledge management effort. A big barrier to change always been our organizational memory (the "we've always done it this way" and the "this can't change" syndrome). New ideas and new leadership may be what we need.

The challenge will be to keep things moving forward during this transition and period of uncertainty.

I knew it sounded too easy

2005-04-27T16:24:00.000-06:00

We're now well underway in our implementation of our CMS system. We've been working closely with the Stellent consultants to finalize the architecture, load the software, and configure the system. In general, they've been great to work with but as we get into the details have had a few surprises with our original design. We've also found that we need to push some items back because we just weren't ready.

We are well positioned in metadata and file structure, since we spent a lot of upfront time on these. They've gone into the system quickly. Our challenge is now is having our staff move files into our new file structure prior to batch loading them into the system. Sounds easy, but are giving this process two months. I'm waiting for the next phases of migrating in paper, implementing workflow, and changing the search on the web. All should be quite fun!!!

A comment from the CMS conference is ringing true, that people still need to do their jobs while you are implementing the new system. We're finding this a challenge as we identify things that we need to fully configure the system. As the list of things grow that we need to do, my uneasiness of about asking too much of staff grows.

We also found that for a few of our business requirements, there's still a lot of "art" involved, not out-of-the-box as I expected. Using XML is one of those challenges. With all the talk I've heard about this at conferences, we're finding that this still requires a large amount of customization.

As a friend of mine puts it, "it's all good." While it may seem overwhelming at times, we've got good conscious people working on our staff and Stellent consultants. I'm looking forward to reading this posting a few months from now when everything is up and running perfectly.

Notes from the CMS conference

2005-04-18T10:19:00.000-06:00

Attending the CIDM “Content Management Strategies” was very interesting. Some things that peaked my interested are below. Reader beware - no warrenties on the accuracy.

Globalization
- Machine aided “gisting” (with appropriate disclaimers) can be used for dynamic content. The World Bank is using this. For important content (i.e. those few pages that are used the majority of the time), translation must be done by humans. Text in graphics is a large challenge.
- Metadata and logic for search is different for different cultures
- The largest number of sales of PCs and the greatest utilization of Web search are from China.

Topic mapping and search
-The first level of search on a web site is the tool bar and other menu systems (often designed by programmers).
-Keywords are high maintenance and users must know the list to search. Key words don’t capture the relationship between topics.
- Ontologies – Relate subjects on the topic level and can capture the relationship between topics. A link for more information is http://www.ontopia.net/omnigator/models/index.jsp.

On CMS implementation
- Keep in mind the need to meet deadlines, while learning new tools
- Outsource or have a dedicated team do the conversion into the system, this is a one-time event, so don’t waste time training a lot of people.
- During the implementation, focus on training not process re-engineering.
- For those resisting the change, try to determine what is causing their fear and address.

Collaboration and workflow
- In many cases collaboration and workflow are just new models for pushing a document around.
- Where knowledge comes in is capturing the collaboration and the context of comments.

XML and document components –
- 90% of content is already in other documents
- The challenge is in linking the document components.
- Defining dependencies is important – for example changing data in one document may affect 10 documents. Do you need to allow folks access to the previous versions?
- This still seems to be an art to me, with folks understanding the challenge, but requires a lot of programming to solve.

DITA – There was a lot of discussion on DITA. Can say that I really understand it yet, but here’s a link: http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-dita1/

Changing my thinking about documents

2005-04-15T12:00:00.000-06:00

I just returned from an epic journey to participate in a conference on CMS. Scheduled to fly out of Denver during the middle of a blizzard, I arrived in Baltimore at 1 a.m. a day and a half later. I still haven’t caught up on my sleep, so this entry may be a little foggy.

There was a comment at the conference that really made an impression on me, “we need to rethink the concept of a document.” The author was discussing XML and making the point that instead of thinking in terms of a document, we need to think in terms of developing reusable components. In the past the goal was the document, not the content itself and how it was going to be used. There was one statistic that 90% of all content gets reused.

Technology and the internet are changing the way people use information. The ability to easily search and find the needed information is as important as the content. Short summaries or in document navigation facilitate use. Reusing content for the Web or a variety of print products has huge value gains for organizations.

For my organization, the gold standard has been the final technical report which can range from 100-1000 pages. We consider this to be our primary knowledge product and go through great pains to ensure that the documents are complete and each section receives the same level of effort. As a project manager, I always wanted to ensure that important knowledge was not lost. However, in producing these large documents, was knowledge lost because it was too difficult to find the small nugget of information that was needed? Is there a way to “chunk out these documents” to make it easier to find the needed information? Does the time it take to produce these make them obselete? We recently heard from our customers that they often get interim results in papers and presentations, by the time the report gets out it's old news.

I'll think more about this question after I get some sleep.

User friendly information

2005-04-01T13:57:00.000-07:00

I just returned from vacation in the Florida Keys. Prior to my trip I searched the web for information on what to do, where to stay, etc. While there is a ton of information out there, it seemed that the information I really wanted wasn’t available. I had to wade through multiple sites to find little nuggets of information. Upon arriving, I asked questions to every local I met. I received all sorts of advise (most not what I was interested in) and occasionally got some really valuable tips. We kept getting handed a brochure from the local tourist board that really didn’t have information I wanted. The last day I was there, I stumbled on a great book with things to do in the Keys. It was hidden on a bottom shelf in a gift store, don’t figure…

Finding useful information is a real challenge. Finding information in context of my questions is harder. Finding it with one click of the button is impossible. You would think that an area that makes it living on tourists would have information catered to tourists.

This gets to the challenge of presenting user friendly information. Presentation of information should always address user questions. Not just to address their questions, but their real desires. For example, for a hotel, what I really want to know is what it would feel like to be there. How to give a user the feel for this is the challenge.

In today’s information age, it still takes a lot of time to gather information. Wouldn’t it be great to call one person who could give you all the details you need to plan your vacation? For our business, we always hear about the need for a “help-desk” or the need to synthesize information. Same concept…

Finally, if you want to learn, what I learned about my vacation, you better give me a call, because it’s not captured anywhere. The challenge of tacit knowledge, need I say more...

Strategy rollout

2005-03-09T12:35:00.000-07:00

When too many things happen, the last thing that gets attention is my blog. I better correct that!

On March 1, a major step was taken - rolling out the KM strategy in an all-staff presentation. Since I've been planning this for a long time, I was able to use language that everyone from technical staff to administrative staff could understand. I received a number of complements and only could see one face with a scowl in the crowd.

Points that I covered in my presentation (if I every upgrade my blog I can include slides):

- How we defined knowledge and knowledge management (along with examples of our organizational knowledge)
- How the program is structured (who reports to who)
- How this ties to our organizational goals
- Specific strategies
- Common myths

A major theme I hoped I got across is that KM is everyone's job. My role is to coordinate this for the organization, however, it's the individuals contribution that makes things go. I also stressed that we've been doing KM for a long time, the major difference is that instead of doing it ad-hoc, we now have a focus for our organization.