A Curious View of the World » knowledge management

OPSpedia: how the Ontario government uses wikis, blogs and social networking

Bruce — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 03:05:48 +0000

This evening, I attended a great presentation on OPSpedia organized by Toronto Wiki Tuesdays. The presentation covered how a small team of three people built a social media space with blogging, networking and professional networking with almost no budget. Technologically, the team used a combination of MediaWiki (also used for Intellipedia and GCpedia), WordPress and BuddyPress. Socially, approximately 3900 users are registered to OSpedia (i.e. about 6% of the Ontario government’s 65,000 workers). The system, still in pilot status, looks like it has been very successful so far. The implementation was also fairly fast – some discussions started in the fall of 2008 and it was launched by the spring of 2009. The internal case for the project rested on three pillars: to better capture the knowledge of retiring/departing staff, to encourage technologically savvy staff to engage more deeply with the organization and to help staff in different units and ministries work together on problems of common interest.

Going through my notes for the event, I found a few other aspects of the project noteworthy. To address concerns about possible abuse or misuse of the system, the designers implemented a two strikes rule for news (i.e. if a news item – be it a blog post or link to a resource – received two warning/negative votes, it would disappear from public view and by reviewed in greater detail by others). The other general rule adopted for the system was called “accountability through attribution”: you have to sign your name to your contributions so that encourages people to behave well. The wiki aspect of the system currently has approximately three thousand well developed articles.

This was the first time I have attended a Toronto Wiki Tuesday event and I found it a valuable experience. I got to see how an organization has developed these tools and encouraged people to use them. It is also inspiring to see an example of a new system being built and seeing social media tools being used to serve larger goals. The casual atmosphere – good natured heckling is encouraged – also fostered an atmosphere of frank discussion and lively debate that really pulled me into the event and made me smile.

The High Social Cost of Poor Records

Coping with the Dangers of Information

Bruce — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 22:32:40 +0000

Information and knowledge are powerful but can one have too much of a good thing? This is the question recently posed in an article in the New Scientist called, The Dangers of a High-Information Diet. The title of the article reminds me of one of the directives that author Timothy Ferriss considers vital to success; embracing a lot information diet. Several arguments can be made here; the productivity draining effects of multi-tasking, for example or the difficulty of making assessments of information value when the volume of information becomes overwhelming.

Some of the cases discussed in the article are extreme – the ethics of publishing the genome of deadly viruses – which poses the question of whether censorship may be needed in some circumstances. Misuse of such information is not a problem that many will face however. Most people probably face more mundane problems of handling a large volume of information and not knowing what to do with it all. Solving this problem is difficult at the individual and social level but librarians and other professionals can help. Beyond professional assistance, it is important to consider a few basic questions when considering a new piece of information. For many readers, this may come as review but it is well worth reviewing.

Principles to Cope with Information Danger and Overload

Why does this information matter to me? (Possible answers include: I need it to work better, I want to be entertained, I want to forge a social bond through information a la marriage discussion forums)
Does this information have lasting value to me? If so, then how will I absorb or preserve it? (There are a range of options ranging from take some notes on it to preserve the item in its entirety)
Does this information require any action from me to become useful? (e.g. respond to a message, think through an exercise, write a letter to the editor etc. Dave Allen’s GTD principles has more on this.)

Applying these principles will set you on the road of more responsible information usage. What kinds of strategies have you found useful in manging your own information? I have experimented with Tim Ferriss-esque experiments in cutting down my information consumption (i.e. on vacation, I tend to read books largely to exclusion of other media) but have not had any major revelations from that approach as yet.

The Notebook Conundrum

Bruce — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:45:47 +0000

Recently, I’ve been thinking about how people work with notebooks vs computers. The behaviours are quite different in my experience thus far and it represents an interesting challenge for knowledge/records/information management. Often when I attend lectures or such events (sidebar: the lecture is a still a worthy medium for those who know how to use it. For some good examples on a variety of topics, check out TVO’s series Big Ideas; you can download lectures for free there), I often take notes in a Moleskine notebook such as the one depicted above. Occasionally, those handwritten notes will get references for something I write on the computer. I may not reference the material again but the act of taking notes helps me work through the material and learn it. Based on conversations with other people, I get the sense that many people continue to operate with paper and digital systems.

Given the above information habits, how can one apply knowledge/information/records management to paper notes, journals and other materials? I’ve been consulting with a few colleagues and scanning seems to be a popular option. I can certainly appreciate that as one good way to go. However, I also think that hard questions need to be asked about the value of the notes. If the notes are for background needed to create or contribute to something else, then their value can be tied to that output. For example, let’s say that your organization provides funding to send you to professional conferences but on the condition you submit a report describing how the conference benefited you. Your handwritten notes from conference sessions could prove very valuable in producing the report but they may not be needed after that. In other contexts, regulatory or legal requirements may necessitate keeping everything to document how decisions are made. Thinking about this topic has underscored the importance of being comprehensive in looking at how people manage, use, record and access information.

The importance of observing information habits is the secondary purpose of this post. It is crucial to stay informed (and thoughtful!) about information habits. How do people in your organization track their schedule? Are they using paper datebooks, Outlook or something else? What about meetings? Do people take notes? I would also highlight the importance of looking at how people choose to learn. I suspect you will find a combination of paper and digital preferences. I often prefer to read in paper while on public transit, trains or planes but prefer digital when I have sustained and comfortable access to my computer and the Internet.

Abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms

The High Social Cost of Poor Records

Bruce — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:46:55 +0000

When I’m not thinking about libraries proper, I often think about records, information and knowledge management. In that environment, activity is driven by a combination of organizational needs and compliance requirements. Certain kinds of records must be kept for a certain period of time – for many people, the requirements to keep income tax related records for seven years is a good example. There are also times when records and information has to be managed in order to support work, analysis and other needs of that nature.

The social cost of poor records management had not occured to me however. In yesterday’s New York Times, there was an article called Recession Drives Surge in Youth Runaways which described growing numbers of young people who decide to run away from home. The full extent of the problem is not understood and the authorities often have a difficult time helping those who need help due to poor records and weak record systems. Here’s what the article found:

And in 16 percent of cases, the local police failed to enter the information into the federal database, as required under federal law, according to a review of federal data by The New York Times.

<…>
Police officials give various reasons for not entering the data. The software is old and cumbersome, they say, or they have limited resources and need to prioritize their time…The police also say that entering every report into the federal database could make a city’s situation appear to be more of a problem than it is.

But in 267 of the cases around the nation for which the police did not enter a report into the database, the children remain missing. In 58, they were found dead.

There are several issues to take notice of here. The reports are being entered into a crime related database and arguably, that may not be a great place to store this type of social services information. Further, the users of the system find it difficult to use. There is also a cultural problem where records are not kept properly since that could be embarrassing. Sadly, there does seem to be an implication that a lack of records leads to a greater chance of death or something else terrible happening. I would be the first to admit that this is a large, complex problem that needs a whole host of people to cooperate. Good records and record systems could go a long way to solving the problem though.

The Human Rocket Science is…. information!

Bruce — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:33:11 +0000

This PBS interview with Dr. Kim Yong Kim made some very interesting points about the delivery of health services. Dr Kim has spent much of his career working on the health of the very poor (he has played a lead role in Partners For Health) and was recently appointed President of Dartmouth College.

Here is the part of the interview that stood out for me:

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean, complexity of [health care] delivery?

DR. JIM YONG KIM: Well, just think about a single patient. So a patient comes into the hospital. There’s a judgment made the minute that patient walks into the emergency room about how sick that person is. And then there are relays of information from the triage nurse to the physician, from the physician to the other physician, who comes on the shift.

From them to the ward team, that takes over that patient. There’s so many just transfers of information. You know, we haven’t looked at that transfer of information the way that, for example, Southwest Airlines has. Apparently they do it better than any other company in the world.

BILL MOYERS: Computers?

DR. JIM YONG KIM: No, they have taken seriously the human science of how you transfer simple information from one person to the next. And in medical school, and in the hospitals that I’ve worked in, we’ve done it ad hoc. Sometimes we do it well. Sometimes we don’t do it well. But what we know is that transfer of information is critical. Now to me, again, that’s the rocket science. That’s the human rocket science of how you make health care systems work well.

Understanding, supporting and enhancing those transfers of information looks like a good opportunity for librarians to work on. Dr Kim also observes that simply adding more technology does not solve the problem. Careful observation of the information flows involved by knowledge management staff could be productive here. Marrying insights from psychology with our own knowledge of how people use information could produce some valuable insights. Better handling of information could also improve the quality of the experience (i.e. no more answering the same basic questions over and over again).

Information Management Fundamentals

Bruce — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 00:46:24 +0000

Today, I took a course on information management fundamentals and decided to blog about some of my observations. With about a dozen students, there was plenty of interesting discussions that supplemented the course content. Advocating for information management and the range of occupations that make up the field were two of the topics that struck me as particularly interesting. We also had an interesting exercise in the taxonomy of grocery stores which pointed out how taxonomy can be used for commercial gain and how it is tailored to serve the needs of a given audience (e.g. a grocery near a university campus is likely to make fast food items easy to find).

Most classic and compelling justifications of information management (and its relative, knowledge management) focus on risk and disaster. Failure to manage archives resulted in NASA losing some of its 1969 Moon tapes, for example. In a corruption trial in British Columbia, the destruction of email records (which should have been put on hold due to legal proceedings) caused a world of grief. These cases are compelling and dramatic, but I would surmise that they are also rare. Another piece of the argument needs to be the positive benefits of managing information such as more efficient use of staff time or the potential to make new connections with other staff who have valuable knowledge. Then again, I have come across some economic research that claims that people are more motivated by the fear of loss (loss adversion) than the prospect of gains (endowment effect – people value what they currently have over potential gains), so perhaps focusing on the loss does make sense.

People working in information management come to the field with a number of different job titles: information architect, taxonomist, metadata specialist, privacy officer and more. Taxonomy – a system of naming and organizing things into groups that share similar characteristics – has recently been booming, but this field may be in decline with better technology. Business analysts, on the other hand, is a new and growing field. However, some brief research into the business analysis field shows that it is dominated by those with expertise in either finance or information technology. If one already has deep knowledge of those fields, then business analysis could be a good way to develop one’s career. I think the next frontier is privacy work. That sub-field is still very new, but as privacy related scandals continue to pile up and threaten the credibility of governments and companies, addressing this need can only become more important.

Use Web Analytics To Improve Your Information Service

Bruce — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 01:30:48 +0000

Web analytics is the practice of analyzing data on how websites are used in order to improve how the resource performs. After studying this topic in a two day course, I am much better informed about the tools, methods and resources that make analytics worthwhile. The course was oriented mainly toward commercial needs, but the ideas presented can be applied to a variety of contexts. Computers can automatically track a great deal of information which can be a mixed blessing. The course helped me to think through the right questions to ask so that that mass of data can be analyzed and then put to use to improve operations. To sort through the data, it is best to clarify what one’s goals are.

Let’s say you want users to use a resource that you have designed (an internal website, a catalogue or something similar). You can use analytic tools to measure what proportion of your visitors use the feature (this would be your “conversion rate” – conventionally, conversion refers to the portion of website visitors who continue on to make a purchase, but I am using it to mean “portion of users who take a desired action”). Further, you can also see how many times the function is used and if people are turning up empty search results. What is the value of doing this? You can learn learn some sense of how much time people spend using a tool, how much it fails and identify areas for improvement. Much of this can be accomplished through skillful use of a free tool like Google Analytics, but it is not the only (nor necessarily most powerful) game in town.

Web analytics can also be used to determine how people come to your information service. Do users entering the website through a URL (i.e. typing it in or through a bookmark) behave differently from those arriving from a search engine? If the library is embedded in a larger organization (e.g. KM unit in a firm’s intranet, public library in the city’s website, academic library in the university’s website), that usage can be tracked as well. Analysis of these kinds of data can assist in refining the website design, eliminate problems and evaluate marketing campaigns. If users arriving from the Internet are “bouncing” (i.e. leaving after accessing a single page), then this may indicate a need to better explain the services.

For those looking to learn more about web analytics, there is a wealth of information available to help you get started. There are a number of good books out there including: Web Metrics: Proven Methods for Measuring Web Site Success by Jim Sterne, Competing on Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris (I gather that is a more general work; not focused on web analytics only) and Web Analytics: An Hour a Day by Avinash Kaushik. And here are two blogs to consider: Web Analytics Demystified and Occam’s Razer (OR is written by Avinash Kaushik). Most of these resources come to web analytics from a marketing and/or business perspective. These insights can be applied to other contexts with some effort and care.

Knowledge Management through story

Bruce — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:21:53 +0000

Last week, I finished reading Daniel Pink’s book, “A Whole New Mind: How to thrive in the new conceptual age,” (which I originally heard about in this EconTalk podcast) which argues that “right-brain thinking approaches” (design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning) are increasing in importance. Instead of writing a full review of the book right now, I’m going to quote a particular section that interested me. It involves a large financial institution that many may be familiar with from the headlines:

Dan Pink tells the story of Steve Denning (author of several books on organizational storytelling) who:

“… an Australian who began his career as a lawyer in Sydney and later became a midlevel executive at the World Bank. “I was a left brain person,” he says. “Big organizations love that kind of person.”

Then one day, in a World Bank shake-up, he was booted from a job he loved and banished to the organizational equivalent of Siberia: a department known as “knowledge management,” corporate jargon for how a company organizes its vast reserves of information and experience. Denning became the department’s chief. And – grudgingly at first – he underwent a transformation… As he sought to understand what the World Bank knew – that is, what knowledge required management – Denning discovered that he learned more from trading stories in the cafeteria than he did from reading the bank’s official documents and reports. An organization’s knowledge, he realized, is contained in its stories. And that meant that if he was really going to to be the top knowledge honcho at the bank, he had to go well beyond the L-Directed [Note: This is Pink's shorthand term for left-brain thinking styles that emphasize formal logic and other similar approaches] lawyer-executive approach he’d learned in the first twenty-five years of his career. So he made the World Bank a leader in knowledge management by making it a pioneer in using stories to contain and convey knowledge.”

This struck me as an interesting contrast to a presentation I saw on the Bank’s knowledge management processes at the SLA Conference in Washington D.C. last month. That approach emphasizes organizing existing, explicit information such as documents and reports – no small challenge in an organization that employs thousands of economists and other people from all over the world. I have been thinking about how these two methods can work and how to engage staff with both of them. Organizing documents, data-sets, internal records and other materials is something familiar to me, but I wonder how stories can be accessed and organized (are stories classified by theme? Inspiration? How-To?)

Can the act of story telling (including capturing and organizing such stories) assist organizations as much as Pink and Denning suggest? Such suggestions (including Pink’s example that Xerox’s database of stories has an estimated value of $100 million) and examples lead me to think that seriously story-telling KM is well worth pursuing.

What’s one story you know from working at your organization that could benefit from wider circulation? Would it inspire? Would communicating it in a story – rather than a memo or report – help others remember it better?