KO | RM | Uncategorized

Stories, effectiveness, and efficiency

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Estimated reading time 3–4 minutes

I’ve not been writing much lately, having finished my dissertation on September 1st and hours later having handed in my notice at work, to take up a new post as Taxonomy Manager for the BBC. I was delighted to be offered a role that follows on directly from my studies of taxonomy work, and I can’t wait to get started.

I have been very busy during September handing over to my successor, so inevitably thinking about knowledge transfer. Records management has been for the most part fairly straightforward mainly due to the nature of the business, which has enabled us to be reasonably efficient records managers, but I found it very hard to express my tacit knowledge well except through stories. This reminded me of a post by Ron Baker on effectiveness as opposed to efficiency.
Good records management is the “baseline efficiency” you need to keep functioning. It is hard to gain a competitive advantage simply by having decent records management, because if you don’t, you won’t even meet basic professional standards. Effectiveness, however, is a much more elusive beast – relying on slippery concepts like tacit knowledge, judgement calls based on experience and intuition, even artistry.
Storytelling in business has become popular because it is such a natural way of communicating expressively, as has the use of scenarios and personas in marketing and design. However, what surprised me was how formulaic my stories were – even though they applied to different areas of the business and different situations. The same characters (including myself) followed the same patterns of behaviour, through technology upgrades, changing customer needs, and other staff coming and going. I have been facing the same dilemmas and worrying about the same things over and over again, while at the time believing that things were changing and situations were different, probably because I focused on the differences not the similarities each time.

This reminded me that managing characters is just as important as managing situations (or technologies or products) and also how useful it would have been to have tried some storytelling earlier on. However, it takes time to see patterns, so you need storytellers to stick around long enough to be able to grasp what is a repeating dynamic and what is coincidence. The fast turnaround of knowledge managers is an obvious barrier to this. At the very least, it means the knowledge managers have to identify the people who have been around long enough to see the patterns in the stories, rather than expect to find it easy to pick up patterns themselves. In an organisation, there are many intertwined stories operating at different levels – from the stories of individual careers, single projects, to the overall corporate history. The conflicts and resolutions in these stories – how the tanking project was salvaged, the difficult client appeased, the divided team reunified – and between the levels of stories, seem to me to be where you will find the secrets of organisational effectiveness.

It is very easy to see taxonomies solely as mechanisms of efficiency – classifying documentation related to very linear processes such as stages in a project – but they also embody characters and stories, reflecting what is culturally important, for example. Taxonomies for knowledge discovery in particular are most effective when they are able to work with stories – if you are looking for paint does that suggest a story in which you also want paintbrushes, white spirit, an easel, etc.?

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information architecture | KO

Why bother with information architecture? — RenaissanceCMS

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Why bother with information architecture? — RenaissanceCMS. I was happy to be asked to write something on information architecture generally for Rob’s blog. It’s easy to forget that not everyone takes for granted the usefulness of IA, so I have tried to inspire people who aren’t sure what it is or what it can do.

Rob creates charming ethereal designs as well as working on marketing, branding, and visual identity and being generally ethical and sustainable. I particularly liked his latest post on tagging. I tend to approach folksonomy from a management and retrieval point of view, and so find myself arguing that just because it is cheap, doesn’t mean it can replace all other KO systems. However, I have been thinking about image retrieval, and one area where social tagging is useful is in labelling vague and abstract ideas like “mood”. If most people tag a photo as “sad” or “mysterious”, that is probably going to be useful for creative people who don’t need a specific image but are just after something that evokes a “feeling”.

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KO

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work?

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

Social Tagging and the Enterprise: Does Tagging Work at Work? | Earley & Associates confirms my suspicion that people aren’t as enthusiastic about content tagging at work as they are at home, tagging for fun or when it is their own content. As usual, it’s all about context. There are lots of ways tagging can work at work, but it isn’t reliable for core or high value asset management and information retrieval.

Taxonomies are sometimes criticised for not being scalable (or at least not scalable cheaply), but folksonomies only work really well when the scale is massive (e.g. web-wide). Most enterprises are right in the middle, which is presumably why synergistic solutions remain popular.

Here’s a similar take: Explicit and implicit metadata @ CommonPlace.Net.

The ever excellent Green Chameleon covered another aspect: Green Chameleon » The War Between Awareness and Memory.

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KO | search

Public knowledge, private ignorance

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Estimated reading time 3–4 minutes

Public knowledge, private ignorance by Patrick Wilson is one of those fascinating books that reads as if it had been written yesterday, but in fact was written in 1977. In what struck me as such a contemporary theme, he discusses the importance of personal contacts and trusted authorities as sources of knowledge – a theme that has returned with a vengeance in the form of “social search” and leveraging social networks for recommendations etc. A wonderful example of this was given to me by a friend last night who told me about how their archives division suddenly gained recognition when the new media lot realised they needed metadata for their rapidly growing digital repositories. The new media folks were in a panic until the talked to the librarians and archivists and realised they had already worked out – and been assiduously cataloguing all the digital assets. Without that personal contact, the new media folk might have ended up building their own catalogue, and duplicating all that work! It’s a sadly familiar story even in these days of information abundance when you’d think such communication would be easy, but even the problem of how to make sure “public” knowledge is actually used is nothing new. Wilson quotes Lord Rayleigh at a meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science in1884 (yes – eighteen eighty four – it’s not a typo) as noting how much scientific knowledge was published but unread, saying “It is often forgotten that the rediscovery in the library may be a more difficult and uncertain process than the first discovery in the laboratory”. Wilson points out that “knowledge existing only ‘in the literature’ is no different from knowledge possessed by undiscoverable or inaccessible individuals”.
Wilson also claims that “where there is knowledge, there must be a knower”, which struck me as a challenge to notions that publishing alone – whether it be tweets or academic research papers – is only half the battle. This reinforces to me the absolute fundamentalness of findability and serving the needs of the user both within individual publications and across the whole of our “public” digital repositories. Again, this is nothing new. Way back in the 19th century Charles Cutter was anxious to serve library users better, Grace Kelley (disambiguated from the other one by the extra “e”!) in 1937 was what we would now refer to as a “usability evangelist” and both Ranganathan (1959) and Bliss (1935) had a passion for getting the right information out to the right people.
As Computer Science from the 1970s took over much of information retrieval and then with commercial products being heavily marketed, I worry that this sort of passion has been lost in a blur of what you can get an algorithm to do, rather than what people actually need. As Wilson says “we do not make knowledge available simply by making available documents in which knowledge is represented”. Google is wonderful, but that is, essentially, all it does. Of course the more sophisticated programmatic tools we have the better, but as information providers we should never be afraid to say “this gets us so far, but not far enough”. We need to keep reminding everyone that it is the minds of the knowers and potential knowers we need to be serving and so we should not be afraid to keep demanding ever more sophisticated systems that are mixed, variable, and downright difficult to automate.

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information management

Managing the Crowd: Records Management 2.0

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Estimated reading time 1–2 minutes

I’ve just read Steve Bailey‘s book Managing the Crowd: Records Management 2.0. It is a thought-provoking and timely read and very enjoyable as well. There’s an RM 2.0 Ning site too. There’s a good summary on the TFPL website. Bailey is clear that he is trying to provoke debate, so I will raise a question. There is a widely held belief that people like tagging, but I’m not sure that this applies once you get into the office. People love to tag their own photos on Flickr, but is that because they like tagging or because they like their own photos? Similarly, people like to tag their own blog posts, but is this not a rather self-selecting sample? If you have the time, motivation, and energy to blog, the additional burden of adding a few tags to try to get yourself a few more readers is hardly great. So, is there any evidence out there that people tag work documents just as enthusiastically as they tag stuff about themselves? Are they really as enthusiastic about thinking of appropriate tags for financial reports and product information sheets as they are about tagging their favourite songs or You Tube clips?

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information management

It’s not easy staying on the edge of chaos

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Estimated reading time 3–4 minutes

I just read this very excited article about the use of wikis and blogs to revolutionise the US intelligence community: SSRN-The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community by D. Andrus. Its giddy praise of Wikipedia amused me (especially as I found it as a linked reference from a Wikipedia article), but it does include a clear exposition of the principles of complexity theory. Dave Snowden at the ISKO event in April discussed complexity theory, and I remember an emphasis on “light touch” control of complex systems. This seems to be an emergent paradigm at the moment. Obvious examples are “shepherded folksonomies”, which seem to be working better than uncontrolled folksonomies (one example is the Records management 2.0 – thanks Danny – another is the occasional tagging suggestions made by the editors of ravelry.com – thanks to Liz for this tip – and even Flickr’s category clusters are an attempt to impose a little bit of order on chaos).

The theme is also cropping up in a number of posts on the future of knowledge management. For example, Should Knowledge Managers look for a new job? emphasises the need to allow individuals to become custodians of their own knowledge stores rather than teaching them to access centralised repositories. This has been bewailed as the end of the Knowledge Manager as a role. I think this fails to understand how difficult “light touch control” actually is in practice. Authoritarianism is big clunky expensive and arguably inefficient, but at least within it people know what they are supposed to do and how to do it. You can learn the rules and follow them. Anarchy is also easy – it might make a big mess and not get you what you want – but nobody has to worry about whether or not they are doing the “right thing”. Applying this to KM, the anarchic system simply lets individuals sink or swim – if they are very skilled in their own area of expertise for example – but hopeless at managing their personal knowledge repositories or accessing information – they will gradually become less effective and productive (presumably ending up losing their job). It may seem like a cheap and easy solution for organisations, but actually the lost productivity (not to mention human potential) has a serious cost. Under complexity theory, the most creative, flexible, and adaptive systems are those on the “edge of chaos”. Keeping a system balanced on a knife-edge is far harder than just letting it stagnate in authoritarianism or fragment into anarchy. Identifying those individuals who aren’t doing so well, figuring out what they need to help them, and making sure that each individual intervention contributes to the improvement of the whole system is actually fantastically complicated and difficult. It requires all sorts of skills ranging from the ability to notice who needs help in the first place, how best to help them on a personal level, and how to leverage technological and social developments to keep everyone moving forward. The Knowledge Manager of the future therefore needs to be more highly skilled, multitalented, and personally adept than ever before. This strikes me as an upskilling and increase in the importance of the role, not a downgrading. The fact that individuals are doing a bit of self-organising as well doesn’t diminish the KM role, it makes it more sophisticated, subtle, and critical.

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information architecture | KO

New browser tab concepts

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< 1 minute

I was very pleased to be sent this link: Mozilla design challenge showcases new browser tab concepts – Ars Technica. The winner is a lovely hierarchical visualisation that could work really well with concept maps/visual thesauruses/taxonomies. It preserves parent/child relationships using a radial format, which is more flexible than traditional trees, in that you can follow several pathways at once and maintain an overview.

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