Comments on: The KM and Social Computing Culture Changes

By: Gordon Rae

Gordon Rae — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:43:17 +0000

Luis, you lost me at “chaotic, messy and unstructured”. Three very positive adjectives, when we are talking about productivity and supporting improvised performances driven by tacit knowledge.

I’m afraid most KM initiatives do for knowledge what McDonalds does for beef: they grind it down to size, and make it easier to control. Productivity is only allowed to exist within structures of control.

The difference between KM and social computing is visible in different tools, different approaches to process, and different attitudes to people.

By: David Christopher

David Christopher — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 21:51:08 +0000

You are spot on with your thinking and assessment. The growth of the Social Networking & Business Collaboration (SNBC) approach in Oracle has been purely organic and grown at a phenomenal rate with strong roots. The challenge we have now is how to meet demand…
The obvious advantage of this method is that you embed and change cultural habits for good. Localised change agents evolve how tools/knowledge/processes are created and shared through a self sustaining social network of other change agents.

By: Maria Helm

Maria Helm — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:31:57 +0000

I like the idea of a Social Networking & Business Collaboration group within the organization. We currently have ‘engineers’ who go around and try to improve our operation processes, and I see the potential for a group to do the same thing for collaboration/km/social networking… visit various departments/locations and see how they work, what they need, how it could all flow better/faster/cheaper. The advantage with having a group like that is that their visits plant seeds and get people thinking about it, then their recommendations plant more seeds, the tools/processes we put in place water the seeds, etc. I can see that being more sucessful than just throwing the tool out there with a quickstart guide. That’s something I’ll have to chew on and talk up.

By: Jeremy Sluyters

Jeremy Sluyters — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 14:40:38 +0000

Some interesting thoughts here, a business culture is not going to change overnight.
The business needs a leader to get employees engaged in knowledge sharing, and there need to be systems in place to support knowledge sharing. There also needs to be a valid business problem that is going to be solved, that people can latch onto. People just need a leader, I have been at this for 2 years at my company with full executive support, and only know am I starting to get buyin and change from a few employees. At best, it is a 5 year plan (that evolves every year) There is definitely no silver bullet.

By: Christoph Schmaltz

Christoph Schmaltz — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:42:45 +0000

Uh, the formatting looked different in the preview. Apologies for that.

By: Christoph Schmaltz

Christoph Schmaltz — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 05:41:27 +0000

Thanks for the interesting post, Luis. But I do have to agree with Maria. I think we all know WHAT needs to happen but nobody or very few know HOW to achieve it.

How to get people to ’share knowledge’ has been a key question from the very beginning of KM. Organisations tried everything from providing incentives to implementing expensive and sophisticated yet useless KM systems. Problem was that incentives didn’t work long-term and tools ignored the way people work and exchange knowledge.

But in the past few years we have been witnessing a fundamental shift in the way people get work done and are connected to others thanks to social tools. It’s not about knowledge management anymore but knowledge networking.

1) Getting work done
Today we have tools that make people more productive and at the same time provide unprecedented transparency. Thus, knowledge-sharing becomes a by-product of getting work done!

2) Connecting with people
People assume it’s good to hoard ‘knowledge’. But if no one knows what you know, what is the value of that? I wouldn’t know about Luis and his amazing expertise if it weren’t for these kind of public conversations.

We need to understand that these days people are a platform and not an end-destination anymore. Think of Facebook, Twitter or the iPhone. All of them are platforms, but what makes them really valuable is their ecosystem of applications. However, that ecosystem wouldn’t even exist if the platform did not exist OR if it was closed.

Of course, there is a continuum of what ‘knowledge’ can and should be made accessible to others. I am sure people will learn when it benefits or hurts them to put out certain type of ‘knowledge’. And if they are honest with themselves they might realise that hoarding isn’t always helpful.

By: The Grocery Store Analogy of Learning, KM, Comm & Content | trainingwreck

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 02:52:12 +0000

[...] That crazy cat Luis Suarez over at elsua.net (who I really respect) got me thinking with a recent post entitled “The KM and Social Computing Culture Changes“. [...]

By: David Christopher

David Christopher — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 22:10:36 +0000

Fear! I hear this every day – “Fear of change”, “fear of sharing my knowledge that i will become less important somehow”. I have a saying i use in my organisation “for every piece of pie i give away, i receive a second helping in return, and as you can see – i have eaten a lot of pie!”
Ok, so how do you overcome this fear? Practical solution: Use the collective intelligence of your staff to work together on overcoming those change / fear barriers.
Example: Take 2 teams of approx 5 people. Each team spends 15 mins discussing what barriers they face in sharing information / knowledge. After 15 mins, swop the barriers you have noterized with the other team, and then spend the next 15 mins coming up with solutions to the opposing teams barriers. Once done, comeback together as a group and discuss the ouput collectively.
The advantage of this practical solution is that they feel part of problem and solution.
We use this method as part of our socialnomics change workshop and so far it has worked a treat.

By: David Christopher

David Christopher — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 21:46:10 +0000

Mmm…should i set the cat amongst the pigeons here
Why do we still talk about “traditional Knowledge Management” – has this not evolved into something that is no longer recognisable as KM? We no longer “manage” knowledge, and yes we do “share” knowledge, but surely what we now do more than ever is “evolve” knowledge collectively.

In our organisation we have taken the tools out of KM and created a new group called Social Networking & Business Collaboration which focuses on the people and adoption of those tools to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of individuals and teams. Thus leaving KM to focus on some of the basic processes. So in essence we have taken a key component of Social Computing and a key component of Knowledge Management and combined them together.

Guess the point I am trying to make is somewhat similar to Luis’ hypothesis, but just from a different angle. It’s the components of KM and Social Computing and how they work together to evolve knowledge that is important, not how they should be pigeon holed.

By: Jacob McNulty

Jacob McNulty — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:54:50 +0000

Bravo Luis – various disciplines are essentially saying the same thing…but sometimes so loud that they can’t hear the similarities in the chants from the other camp. These (and other) worlds are bound to come together…