Patrick Lambe: Profiles in Knowledge
This is the 30th article in the?Profiles in Knowledge?series featuring thought leaders in knowledge management. Patrick Lambe is a globally-recognized knowledge management practitioner. He is a consultant and researcher in KM and e-learning, with a special interest in the "soft systems" - how and why people and social groups use, consume and produce knowledge. Patrick specializes in taxonomy development, knowledge audit and knowledge maps, expertise transfer, and knowledge management strategy development.
I have been citing and quoting Patrick ever since I started blogging in 2006. He presented on the SIKM Leaders Community call that I hosted in September, 2007. I first met him in person at KMWorld 2009, and we have been friends ever since.
Background
Profiles
Posts
Presentations
1. SlideShare
4. SIKM Leaders Community
5. KMWorld
Articles
3. Taxonomies and Knowledge Management by Don Hawkins
5. What makes a good taxonomist? - "There’s many a slip twixt cup and lip" is an ancient proverb, attributed by some to the time of Homer. Increasingly, this is true of how taxonomies are implemented. Good designs, poor results. The difference between a competent taxonomist and a great taxonomist is increasingly coming to be about a social, technical and practical knowledge of the various technologies through which the work of enabling discovery and access gets done, including search, text analytics, semantic technologies, and data visualisation. It’s not enough to be a great winemaker any more. Our role is to help people drink.
Cited and Quoted in My Blog
1. Certification
2. Is KM Dead?
3. Sins and Pitfalls
4. Maturity Models
Just a couple of thoughts on the limitations of maturity models — when the organisational landscape is heterogeneous, a maturity model tends to gloss over/average out significant differences in portions of the landscape, removing them from visibility and opportunity for action. It also tends to ignore unique but salient factors of the environment being assessed.
Also, when used as a guiding mechanism promoting idealised frameworks, it tends to start getting gamed. If at all, maturity models are much better used as part of a diagnostic/planning mechanism along with a lot of independently gathered data and in focused, homogeneous contexts. There’s a blog post here.
Now it may be your context is sufficiently focused in both domain and community scope for my concerns to be dismissed. But it will sit within a bigger context, so a health warning is always in order.
I do think by the way there’s a bit of confusion here between a KM framework and a maturity model. A framework is essentially two dimensional until it gets a strategy to give it meaning and direction (conversely a strategy needs a framework to give it actualisation). The strategy forces the framework to “get real”.
A maturity model postulates somewhat idealised statements about lifecycle stages and their indicators, and I find it can actually exist quite independently of reality on the ground. I’ve seen maturity descriptors that look fine on the report card while the organisation actually flounders in practice. A typical indicator is “senior management appreciate the significance of a knowledge-based approach and support KM”. I’ve seen KM initiatives that do well without senior management noticing or bothering, and I’ve seen KM initiatives that failed because KM was given too much support (everything new was labelled KM and loaded on the KM team until they died of exhaustion).
Appreciative Inquiry is an interview/dialogue technique which expresses perfectly the positive deviance principle stating that it’s better to look for what is working rather than what is going wrong. It goes a little further than that by also trying to define the aspirations of the actors in a given situation — i.e., what the desirable outcomes will be.
Identification and transfer of “best practices” fulfills a classic positive deviance goal, though they might be more appropriately be named “better” or “more successful” practices. Moreover, the adding of a positive deviance frame to “better practice” identification and transfer, gives a greater sensitivity to the context in which the practice is developed and in which it works, and it emphasizes the importance of local origination and ownership of the practice. Not all practices travel well from their native context, and it is this indiscriminate, context-insensitive lifting and re-application that has given best practices in KM their bad name, not to mention the lack of ownership of practice that it instills.
6. Metrics and ROI
So when we put up our e-business investment proposals, our e-learning proposals, and our knowledge management proposals, the CEO wants to see an ROI analysis, and the CFO will be doing a surreptitious EVA. All very objective, terribly easy to decide. The trouble is, when you look at them very closely, very few aspects of real-world enterprise actually run on numbers, and ROIs tell you surprisingly little about whether you really should invest — especially once you move outside the ambit of simply buying something.
The passion for ROIs, which is often justified in the service of a simple purchase that has attributable profits, becomes positively dangerous when it is used in the service of complex investments, business innovation, capability development, or infrastructure investment — as it happens, all characteristics of e-business, e-learning and knowledge management initiatives.
I’ve always been wary of KPIs in knowledge management, because they appeal to a tangible measurement mindset that is easily distracted from the intangible and hard-to-pin down outcomes of KM efforts. I can’t tell you how may implementations I’ve seen where the measurements are diligently gathered and presented as tokens of success (number of documents, number of contributions, number of sharing sessions) when behind the metrics facade, the KM culture and rich sharing habits are as dead as a doornail.
But KPIs, used intelligently alongside “softer” evaluation techniques, do enable you to monitor progress and health in relation to your expectations as you move along your KM journey. And changes or spikes in activity or output trends can signal a need to investigate deeper. So if you take the KPIs with a big pinch of salt and remember you always have to interpret them, they can be a perfectly legitimate tool. So I sat down and wrote this guide to using KPIs.
The paper is in three sections: the first sets out some guidelines for how to use KPIs smartly. The second section gives ideas for sample sets of KPIs covering KM activities and tools as diverse as communities of practice, KM roles, and use of wikis and blogs. The third section is a template for drawing up your own sets of KPIs.
7. What Would a Knowledge Sharing Policy Look Like? - The contents of this document cover all the main principles and guidelines for effective sharing (I think), but I’m hoping you, the readers will give feedback and point out any factors I’ve missed.
10. Stories
11. Wikis
14. KM Champion Guidelines with Edgar Tan
15. Records Management
18. Metadata and Tagging
20. Taxonomy
There are three basic characteristics of a taxonomy for knowledge management, and to be any good at its job, it needs to fulfill all three functions:
80 Methods and Tools
From KM Method Cards
Approaches
01 Knowledge & Information Management Policy
领英推荐
02 Better Practice Transfer
03 Positive Deviance
04 Change Management
05 KM Champions
06 Community of Interest
07 Community of Practice
08 Email Detox
09 Evaluation & Monitoring
10 Subject Matter Experts
11 Expertise Transfer
12 Knowledge Continuity
13 Information Architecture
14 KM Awareness
15 KM Governance
16 Knowledge & Information Literacy
17 Knowledge-Enabled Work
18 Learning Culture
19 Rewards & Recognition
20 Safe Fail vs Fail Safe
21 Work Group KM
22 Project KM
23 Stealth KM
24 Stakeholder Management
25 Enterprise 2.0
Methods: Interview
26 Interviews
27 Appreciative Inquiry
28 Critical Decision Method
29 Concept Mapping
30 Expertise Knowledge Audit
31 Fish Bowl
32 Mentoring & Coaching
33 Play of Life
Methods: Group
34 After Action Review
35 Challenge Session
36 Strategic Conversation
37 World Cafe
38 Open Space Technology
39 Retrospect
40 Pre-Mortem
41 Peer Assist
42 Anecdote Circles
43 Speed Networking
Methods: Process
44 Cultural Archetypes
45 Knowledge Audits & Maps
46 Business Process Mapping & Design
47 Before Action Review
48 Environmental Scanning
49 Future Backwards
50 Most Significant Change
51 Story Listening
52 Social Network Analysis
53 Value Network Analysis
54 Card Sorting
Methods: Packaging
55 Decision Games
56 Rich Pictures
57 Graphic Facilitation
58 Information Neighbourhood
59 Podcasting & Vodcasting
60 Screencasting
61 Storytelling
Methods: Events
62 Share Fair
63 Knowledge Fair
64 Knowledge Market
Tools
65 Blog
66 Bulletin Board
67 Taxonomy
68 Competency Framework
69 Instant Messaging
70 Knowledge-Friendly Environment
71 Social Bookmarking
72 Social Tagging
73 Wiki
74 Yellow Pages
75 Metadata
76 Enterprise Search
77 Intranet
78 Dashboard
79 Document Management System
80 RSS
Videos
1. KMWorld
3. YouTube
4. Vimeo
Book Reviews
Books
Taxonomies are often thought to play a niche role within content-oriented knowledge management projects. They are thought to be ‘nice to have’, but not essential. In this groundbreaking book, Patrick Lambe shows how they play an integral role in helping organizations coordinate and communicate effectively. Through a series of case studies, he demonstrates the range of ways in which taxonomies can help organizations to leverage and articulate their knowledge. A step-by-step guide in the book to running a taxonomy project is full of practical advice for knowledge managers and business owners alike.
2. The Knowledge Manager’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Embedding Effective Knowledge Management in your Organization with Nick Milton
4. KM Approaches Methods and Tools — A Guidebook with Edgar Tan
I help 28,000 colleagues swear less over their digital workplace.
6 年Thanks Stan