Hullistic

In reading Doing Oral History for my semester master’s project I came across a discussion on pages 42 – 45 of corporate oral histories.

Some examples are given and an executive is noted to have become concerned that “the corporation was losing  the knowledge of its ‘epochal events’ because employees and managers with first hand knowledge of those events were dying…” This executive commissioned an oral history archival collection and “Management used the oral histories to develop case studies on decision-making process and for workshops to train potential corporate executives.”

When I decided to take on the oral history project for The Tulsa Historical Society I really had not considered it as relevant to knowledge management, but apparently it is. Upon reflections this makes sense. Oral historians recognize the value of people and their experiences and unique points of view. Then they attempt to capture and share memories and knowledge. 

This looks like pretty straight forward knowledge management though I take KM to generally be more focused on specifics than on general memories.

In any case, for those pursuing KM experience, look for an oral history project and volunteer!

The required text for one of my Fall 2009 Master’s courses is Looking for Information by Donald O. Case. I am only 4 chapters into this book and it’s already the best I’ve read in 27 credit hours. Possibly my previous courses prepared me to find so much value in this text, I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that Case does an excellent job of giving the reader the lay of the land with respect to information studies.

Some may debate the value of Case’s work to Knowledge Management but I consider it immensely relevant and important. Of course I am already sold on KM belonging quite rightly under the rubric of information studies but that is not necessarily a requirement to see how the book can be useful for knowledge managers. Any organization that relies on information and knowledge must build it’s culture and systems with as full and understanding as possible of how staff behaves vis-a-vis that information & knowledge.

Said a different way, if you want your people to be engaged, you have to learn about and care about them and their approach to accessing and using information & knowledge. This book is an excellent starting point to thinking about that very issue.

“The growth areas are library management, taxonomy building, and deep understanding of business processes…”  This according to Bryant Duhon in the latest issue of Infonomics. 

It is good to see these areas in demand not just because they are the areas in which I work but because they are truly valuable. Every organization has a collection of information needing managed (a library). The information should be meaningfully organized (taxonomy building), and actually used efficiently (via business processes). 

Full disclosure demands recognizing that I am possibly expanding the context of Bryant’s quote beyond the boundary he intended, but my goal is not support any claim, just to think about the application of these growth areas, particularly librarianship and taxonomy building, to the enterprise in general. 

It might seem strange to think of enterprise content as a library needing taxonomy. Even the term ‘library’ might seem archaic and nondescript for the enterprise. In fact the SLA is going through a rebranding effort because many believe that the ‘L’ no longer fits. 

Whether a collection is called a library or information workers titled librarians ultimately makes no difference. The important thing is to realize that libraries have been built for people. Interestingly, even in 2009, many business processes are carried out by people. And classification and categorization seem to be innate in the brains of people.

 Good librarians organize and manage information with the ultimate goal of delivering to people so they can use it to learn and achieve goals. Indeed librarians were doing this long before electronics of any kind existed, let alone computer technologies. 

Is thinking of the enterprise content collection as a library for people to use the real growth area embedded in Bryant’s quote?

The 2009 Knowledge & Project Management Symposium starts Wednesday in Tulsa at the OU-Tulsa learning center on the Schusterman Campus. Besides being good a local networking opportunity, the symposium is informative and PMP certified professionals can earn 12 PDU’s.

I’ll be blogging and tweeting during the event but it won’t replace your attending. Take a look at the program and register now at http://www.kpmsymposium.org

Over the winter break from graduate school I got my digital life in order. One of the difficulties of my existence is that I find fascination and interest in so much. Unfortunately, it is just not possible to keep up with *every* category of human knowledge. So I decided to apply some principles from my grad school courses to get a handle on what kind and how much information I needed. I broke the problem down into goals:

1. Organize my web bookmarks in a way that makes the existing resources useful and allows new resources to be added without constantly adding categories.

2. Track feeds in what I choose at present as the most important areas of interest and need.

3. Make my resources mobile to maximize productivity.

4. Make sure I have a reliable policy for backup and redundancy of digital files.

With these 4 items in mind, I set out to determine those “most important areas of interest and need.” To do this I looked at my bookshelf, my current list of feeds and bookmarks, my course notes, my D2L posts, my personal journal, and this blog. From these I created a simple list of terms in MS-Excel. Next, I signed up at MndMeister and created a mindmap using these terms…it was a mess. But over the course of several days I was able to visualize connections between interests. When I found areas that had no connections, I registered them less important and those with the most connections most important. I ended up with 8 Primary branches and relevent terms under each and several connections between branches. The end result of these processes is a personal interest index consisting of 116 terms.

Next, I organized the “My Documents” folder, my Bookmarks, my blog Feed Reader and my MS-Outlook email folder list using the primary and secondary branches of my mind map, they all match. I then reworked my projects in Nozbe adding tags that are all in the list of 116 terms. I can then click on a term like “knowledge management” and see only projects that are relevant to that area of interest. Then, I added my bookmarks to Delicious  and tagged them according to my 116 terms.

With this process, I solved #1 and #2 above and more importantly, provided myself with more focus as to where and how to use my time.

As to #4, I have always been diligent about backup and redundancy locally (i.e. at home) but I really wanted an online backup solution. After some research I found SugarSync that not only provides the online backup solution, but also provides the sync solution I wanted in #3. I am testing it now and will provide my review in about a month, but so far, it looks good.

So for 2009, I have control of my digital life, I have access to my information anywhere, anytime (and I can and sometimes do choose to ignore it), and I am in control of how best to use my time. It feels good. My tools may not be best for you, but I highly recommend the process of creating your personal interest index. That alone was worth the effort.

I have lived in Oklahoma for 3 years this month and wonders here never cease. Oklahoma is the only one of the 50 united states to officially be recognized as a state of creativity and will host the 2010 Creativity World Forum. Oklahoma Creativity’s mission statement reads:

 To establish Oklahoma as a world-renowned center of creativity and innovation in commerce, culture, and education.

Even I would never have guessed that such a mission existed and was taken seriously. I plan to attend and since I found this through one of the KM blogs I follow I suspect that some KM movers & shakers will be there too. I can hardly wait.

I will be on hiatus for the next several weeks so posts will be infrequent until January. Happy Holidays.

OK, I admit it. My Knowledge Management thesaurus project has a bit of a hidden agenda. As a both a KM student and a job seeker, I feel that when I am asked, “what do knowledge managers do?” that I ought to have an answer.

When I was recently asked this question in a job interview, I nervously tried to discuss knowledge retention, knowledge audit and other vagaries. At some point I managed to pull myself together to say, “a Knowledge Management degree is a generalist degree not entirely dissimilar from an MBA, I mean, when you think of it in isolation, what does a Business Administrator do?” We moved on from the question and the rest of the interview is irrelevant. What IS relevant is my revelation that when I needed an answer to “what do KM’s do?”, not only did I have one…I think it is the RIGHT one.

Think about the question as I phrased it in the title of this post and start plugging in for X. We already have, “Knowledge Manager,” and “Business Administrator” so let’s add some other professional titles. Some are quite clear, vocational titles like “plumber,” “welder,” “electrician,” and perhaps “accountant.” But what about “general manager,” or “engineer,” or even “CEO?” We are all aware that job titles just do not cleanly tell the story of the work to be done.

Consider this example of the skills employers seek. Inasmuch as these skills can be taught, KM can teach them as well as anyone but the real point is that these are general skills desired by employers for ALL of their workers. Hard, targeted skills are important, clearly, a job programming in C++ requires the knowledge and skill to write in that language, but in this “knowledge economy” with the emphasis on organizational culture, the generalist has new life.

This may alter my Digital Collections project slightly. My intent was to build a vocabulary and use it to inform curriculum development and job exepectations. But as my advisor pointed out, there IS curriculum and there ARE job expectations today, even though KM terms are ambiguous and/or vague.

I think that my concern over what knowledge managers do in the “hard skill” sense is misplaced, and in fact the question itself may be flawed but at minimum Knowledge Managers must have one relevant skill, tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness. So the right way for me to go about building my thesaurus is to embrace the ambiguity and look at job descriptions to solve for X not universally, but in particular situations.

My Digital Collections project is to begin building a Knowledge Management Thesaurus. A controlled vocabulary that I envision being created by a group of invited practitioners and academics. I think that for the discipline of Knowledge Management to truly professionalize in this country, we have to get past buzzwords and vague terminology to get to what Knowledge Managers actually do. Without that reasonably clear understanding, how can a proper ROI be determined? What is there to measure?

In order to answer the question of what Knowledge Managers do, I think we must settle first on some agreed terminology. As noted last week, I am not alone in this thinking but the very folks I had in mind to participate seem to see the vague language and the buzzwords as good! I remain unconvinced and have every intention of carrying forward. If I cannot spur collaboration and agreement, I guess I’ll be content to vex.

As an example, go to Green Chameleon and watch the video. I have a copy of the document that this video is about. It is impressive in many ways, but also problematic. The first page says both that, “Knowledge Management is not well defined” and, “Knowledge Managers do not have a common body of knowledge.” Then it spends the next 46 pages on Knowledge Management Competencies? I just cannot see how a discpline that is “not well defined” and has no, “common body of knowledge” can come up with core competencies. Nevertheless, I intend to pull my initial terms directly from this document and invite the folks that created it to define them.