Last week I published a post titled Mining for Knowledge where I discussed some of the research that I’ve been doing in my doctorate program.

One of the favorite lines from the article, and one that resonated with a few others as well. The line was:

…converting tacit (i.e., internal) knowledge to explicit (i.e., external) knowledge is one of the most difficult things to do.

I’ve been thinking about this (and reading A LOT of articles, papers and books on the subject) and have come to the conclusion that trying to force someone to convert tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is a wasted effort.

Why?

Can I truly convert 100% of my knowledge into the written form?  Will the context of my knowledge be converted?  Perhaps a good portion of my knowledge can be converted, but can my experiences, thoughts and believes that shaped that knowledge be converted?  Can I ‘write down’ the knowledge that I have and truly make it meaningful to others?  I don’t think (feel free to disagree here).

Does that mean that an organization should stop trying to gather an individual’s internal knowledge to add to overall organizational knowledge-base?  Nope…. definitely not.

Rather than forcing a conversion from tacit to explicit (which is darn near impossible), are there ways to manage the internal knowledge of people?  Managing that knowledge is a much easier process that converting that knowledge.

Knowledge is best internalized when wrapped in context

Nonaka and Takeuchi, the godfathers of Knowledge Management, argue in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation (affiliate link) that tacit knowledge can be converted into explicit knowledge only through externalization and describes this process as being one of dialogue, discussion and reflection.

Basically, they’re saying that in order to share internal knowledge, you’ve got to start a dialogue with others.  That’s why activities like storytelling, mentoring and other forms of social interaction can play a huge role in knowledge managment…they help to start and maintain dialogue and discussion on various topics.  These activities help to provide context around knowledge, which helps a person internalize that knowledge and make it their own.

In my previous article I talked about ‘mining for knowledge’. I talked about using web 2.0 platforms to capture knowledge and to share knowledge. All good stuff (and still interesting to me) but I’m looking at other methods to make these platforms more social.  Make dialog and discussion a more active portion of these tools.

If we can find ways to create dialogue and discussion within the enterprise, knowledge sharing would happen much more naturally.    This is why I like the idea of Enterprise 2.0.  While some people hate E2.0, I think there’s some real value there. Of course, E2.0 won’t solve world hunger and probably will never truly win over its detractors, there are many aspects to the idea that make sense.

What would it mean for an organization’s knowledge managements capabilities if a system could be implemented that found indexed the many disparate repositories of structured and unstructured data sources found throughout the enterprise and then provided that information in a socially aware platform that could wrap context around the indexed knowledge as well as provide a mechanism for dialogue, discussion and reflection?   You’d have a platform that could capture and share explicit and tacit knowledge.

Anyone know of any companies with products in this space?  I know SocialText is out there but I don’t think they have a platform as robust as the one above. SharePoint also has some aspects to this but not everything.

Mining for knowledge in a social word is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Mining for Knowledge
2. The New CIO: Social Media and the Enterprise
3. Improving Knowledge in Projects
4. Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management
5. Knowledge Management In Projects – An Overview

One of the biggest issues I’ve found while working as a consultant is the amount of knowledge that I walk away with after a project is complete.  Sure, I try to share this knowledge in every way possible but converting tacit (i.e., internal) knowledge to explicit (i.e., external) knowledge is one of the most difficult things to do.

Let’s assume though, that some portion of the knowledge that I hold in my head is converted into some form of writing at various periods throughout a consulting project.  Where does that explicit knowledge live?  In an email?  In some document stored on a server?  In a knowledge repository somewhere?

In the past, this problem has been attacked using centralized knowledge repository platforms.  These systems require users to log in and ‘enter’ their knowledge into the system.  Many of these platforms have been well built and some have been successfully used in organizations, but the success stories are far outweighed by the stories of KM repositories sitting idle and unused.

So…how can we get that tidbit of knowledge from my brain into some form of knowledge repository without me logging in and ‘entering’ it into the system?

Web 2.0 as knowledge repository

The use of Web 2.0 tools (blogs, IM, wikis, etc) has become ubiquitous..  If incorporated into a project environment, these tools might allow an easy and efficient method for capturing and sharing knowledge throughout project teams and project organizations.

The key to retrieving knowledge from tools is to make the user experience as seamless as possible. For example, an employee creates a blog on an organization’s intranet and then uses this blog to write different topics, some that pertain to her project and some that don’t.

Perhaps this employee is participating in two projects within the organization and she writes about topics that might be of interest to a portion of the organization and project team members.  While she writes about interesting topics and at times, writes about her experiences on the projects that she’s worked on, perhaps her blog posts aren’t widely read.  This employee has attempted to convert a portion of her tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge but few people on the project team or within the organization find this knowledge because its tucked away in the intranet site (which is rarely used anyway).

In the above scenario, knowledge was converted from tacit to explicit but few people are able to absorb this knowledge and make it their own (i.e., perform the conversion from explicit to tacit knowledge).  What would happen if this knowledge were indexed, searched and shared with the rest of the project team in something akin to a project knowledge ‘journal’?

Since Web 2.0 platforms are ubiqutious, why can’t we use these tools as our knowledge repository?  Employees and project team members are already using them…so can we find a way to ‘mine’ these platforms for knowledge?

Could a system be built that ‘mines’ these web 2.0 platforms along with other unstructured data (documents, email, etc) to ‘build’ a knowledge repository available to the entire organization?

Mining for Knowledge

I’m currently looking at ways to use text mining methods and techniques to mine for knowledge. Text mining looks to be a good approach to solving this problem because it allows for knowledge to be gathered without additional work by project team members.

There are other approaches that could be used for gathering knowledge from project team members, but all require additional work to input information.  For example, a project team using a manual approach could ask team members to regularly update their blog and to ‘tag’ their posts with a special project tag or keyword so that a non-intelligent aggregation system (RSS, etc) could simply pull these tagged posts into a central repository.  While this is a good approach, it relies on the end-user to tag their content correctly, accurately and in a timely manner.  Tagging, and other categorization and taxonomic approaches, require the user to do something to allow their knowledge contribution to be categorized, indexed and found by aggregation systems and other users.

Using text-mining methods against pre-existing tools and platforms takes away the human fallibility issues found in current knowledge management repository platforms or by requiring a user to ‘tag’ a piece of content correctly as described above.

Using text-mining and other data mining approaches, I’m looking at ways to build semi-autonomous systems to index and organize both structured data and unstructured data pulled from blogs, email, IM, social networks, documents, spreadsheets and any other location / data sources. This system could aggregate knowledge found via text mining and social network analysis and build a project knowledge ‘repository’ that will contain all knowledge for any specific project. This repository will be searchable and will contain both manually curated content (e.g., content uploaded by project team members) and automatically curated / generated content based on text-mining and indexing techniques.

There are some major privacy issues here of course. How can you mine a users email and find the relevant knowledge without truly invading their privacy?  Not sure you can but I’m looking at it.

Trust & Mined Knowledge

One key element of this new inter-connected world that we live in is trust.   How can I trust that the information I read on a web page is worthwhile, honest and accurate?   If I want to know something about organizational behavior do I read go read a Wikipedia article on the subject or do I go look through the Harvard Business School’s Organizational Behavior faculty pages and find publications written by the faculty there?

Which of these two sources of knowledge would you trust to be more accurate?

The same can be said of knowledge captured and shared within an organization. How do you know that the white paper on your new API is true?  Is it because it was released? Is it because of the author(s) of the paper?   What if you had a knowledge-base generated by an autonomous agent using text-mining techniques…how would you know to trust the information contained in it?  Who wrote the content?  Were did it come from?

This is where trust comes into play. If you could ‘see’ the qualifications of the author or authors of the knowledge base articles would you trust the content more?  If I knew that the worlds leading authority on organizational behavior wrote the Wikipedia article on the subject, I’d tend to trust that article more.

This is another aspect of my research…building trust into the mined knowledge using social network analysis (SNA) methods & techniques.  Using SNA techniques, can the background, profiles, connections and knowledge of the users within an organization be automatically (or semi-automatically) generated to provide some form for initial trust metric to show that mined knowledge can be trusted?

I don’t know if it can…but I’m looking into it

Next Steps?

So what are the next steps for me and this research?

I’m working on a research paper now that I hope will outline the research in more detail.

Lots of questions still exist and there is quite a bit of research left to do.  I do believe I’m headed in the right direction as evidenced by an HBR video & Blog tilted How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal which discusses a similar topic.

Look for more on this topic from me in the coming months.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Tacit knowledge: you don’t know how much you know (newscientist.com)
• John Tropea: conversation matters: The Incentive Question or Why People Share Knowledge – hypergogue (hypergogue.posterous.com)
• Why We Share Information (forbes.com)
• Knowledge Management and Collaboration Create Knowledge Sharing – Intelligence (baselinemag.com)
• Problems of Shifting from KM to “Knowledge Sharing” (kmci.org)
• How Knowledge Management Is Moving Away From the Repository as Goal (blogs.hbr.org)
• How Social Tools in SharePoint 2010 Encourage Engagement and Innovation (cmswire.com)

Mining for Knowledge is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Mining for knowledge in a social word
2. Improving Knowledge in Projects
3. Knowledge Management In Projects – An Overview
4. Project Knowledge Management
5. Using Stories to share knowledge

I just realized that I hadn’t shared an update on my doctoral studies in a while.

I’m 2 classes away from being completely done with coursework.  Woot!  But…I have 23 hours of dissertation credits left.  woot?

I’ve completed 58 hours and have 31 hours remaining. I passed my comprehensive exam in Dec 2009 (whew!) and am now working on determining a dissertation topic and building a portfolio of articles, presentations, etc (part of the requirements of the program).  The dissertation topic is going to be something to do with Knowledge Management in teams (namely project teams) and methods used to capture and share knowledge (using storytelling and other soon to be added topics).   In other words, I’ve not narrowed my topic down quite yet

I start a new course (Theory Development and Design Research…sounds like fun!) the end of June and will take another course in the Fall and some disseratation hours.  Should have all my coursework complete by Dec 2010.

And if all goes as planned, my dissertation will be complete by end of 2012.  That seems like a long ways of but it’s closer than it was when I started the program!

If you’d like more regular updates on my progress and my journey to my doctorate, you can join me over at Distance PhD – my new website dedicated to earning a doctoral degree via distance learning.

I started this new website to help others who may be interested in earning a doctorate degree online….I found it very difficult to find reliable information about accredited schools when I was searching so I plan to gather as much information about all the distance doctorate programs I find and host them on Distance PhD.

Don’t fret though if you don’t want to join me over there…I’ll still keep you updated here regularly.

Doctorate degree pursuit update & announcement is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Doctorate Pursuit – Year 1
2. I am now a doctoral student
3. Doctorate Work = 43% complete
4. My New Blog – Road to the Doctorate Blog
5. First semester in the Doctoral program

In this presentation I talk about the need for knowledge management in projects and methods for sharing different types of knowledge.

I’ve embedded the video below from vimeo (jump over and watch it on vimeo) and uploaded a slidedeck to slideshare.net for your review. I’ve also provided a PDF version for your review.

Enjoy.

Knowledge Management In Projects from Eric D Brown on Vimeo.

A review of current research and literature covering knowledge management methods and practices in projects

A review of current research and literature covering knowledge management methods and practices in projects

If you liked this one, you might like my other presentation titled “Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management”

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• Recommended KM 3.0 part IV: A practical KM system (fredzimny.wordpress.com)
• Three Models of Knowledge Production (downes.ca)
• The role of technology in Knowledge Management (therunninglibrarian.co.uk)
• Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management (ericbrown.com)

Knowledge Management In Projects – An Overview is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management
2. Project Knowledge Management
3. Improving Knowledge in Projects
4. Article Review on Knowledge Management
5. Using Stories to share knowledge

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this question? What are you focused on in your life or your job?  What’s your focus for the future?

It’s a simple question but a difficult one to answer for most people.  Ask this question of 10 of your coworkers and you’ll probably get most people staring back at you with a blank reaction with very few answers. In fact,  I’d bet there would very few responses that truly answer the question.

In fact, I asked myself this question today and couldn’t answer it to my own satisfaction.

Let’s look at what I’m doing these days:

1. Working for the Boy Scouts of America National Council on the web team.  In this role, I work within the marketing group and try to help the BSA use digital tools to reach out and engage with our audiences.
2. Blogging here about Technology, Strategy, People & Projects – although most of my recent writing has been focused on “The New CIO”.
3. Writing a few articles with co-writers (Gene De Libero for example – we are writing an article for an upcoming Cutter IT Journal).
4. Working on my Doctorate in Information Systems.  This is a TON of work but enjoyable.  I’m on track to finish up in 2012 and am will be starting my dissertation work in Spring 2010. I’ve been blogging about my “Road to the Doctorate“  on another blog.
5. Working on a few new entrepreneurial activities (some which I hope to be able to announce soon).
6. Trying to find some time to really dive into my passion for learning about photography and actually taking some photographs.  This is getting harder and harder for me these days.
7. Last but definitely not least, I’d like to spend more time with my wife traveling and just generally enjoying life.

Lots of things here…but I’m sure there are some of you who have much more going on so please don’t tell me that I’m a slacker if you do!

I’ve got quite a bit going on and I’m extremely lucky to be in a position to be able to do all of these things and the things that I’ve been able to do in the past.  That said, when I asked myself “what’s your focus?” I wasn’t really able to answer the question.

Am I an academic or a practitioner? Am I a technologist or a marketer?  Should i focus on the role of the CIO in the future or am I better positioned to look at how the role of COO or CMO might change over the coming years to integrate technology, marketing and the business?  I love the world of technology and marketing… can I bring this duality together as a focus?  Or…do I focus on the topic that really pulls at my heart strings…building a business of my own?

Think about yourself and your daily activities.  What are you focused on?  Are you getting up, driving to work and doing what has to be done to make it through the day?   Or are you focused on your passion and doing what it takes to keep that focus?  Are you focused on making your life better or just making your life easier?

What’s your focus these days?

What’s your focus? is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. CIO’s – what’s your focus?
2. Time for a Mid Year Review
3. Photography is tough
4. Links for August 8 2010
5. Musings on Passion, Life & Organizations

Recorded Presentation via Vimeo:

Storytelling, Project Knowledge & Knowledge Management from Eric D Brown on Vimeo.

A review of stories, project knowledge and sharing project knowledge using stories. Includes an introduction to to my storytelling model for KM in projects.

Don’t want to listen to me drone on and on?   You can view just the slides on Slideshare:

Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Knowledge Management In Projects – An Overview
2. Using Stories to share knowledge
3. Project Knowledge Management
4. Improving Knowledge in Projects
5. Article Review on Knowledge Management

So…I started a new blog focused solely on my doctorate work and titled it “The Road to the Doctorate“.  You can find the blog at http://eric.biblioref.com and you can subscribe to the RSS feed here.    I’ll probably continue to post a few ‘big’ announcements about my progress here but the majority of the journey will be capture on The Road to the Doctorate.

If you’re observant, you’ll notice the ‘BiblioRef‘ domain…that’s a small project I’ve been working on over the last few months.  The initial rollout is a community platform (blogging & discussions) for academics, researchers and students.   I’ve got some interesting ideas for that community and will be working on grow it in the future.  Stay tuned for more on BiblioRef…you can also follow BiblioRef updates via RSS or on Twitter.

My New Blog – Road to the Doctorate Blog is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Doctorate degree pursuit update & announcement
2. What’s your focus?
3. One Four Photography – My Photography Blog
4. Photography is tough
5. I am now a doctoral student

What’s transpired this year?

• In February, I put my consulting practice on hold to join the Boy Scouts of America full time after working with them for 1.5 years as a consultant.  Previous to starting full-time, I’d been leading the Sitecore Content Management System implementation and since going full-time have been involved in some major technology and marketing initiatives.  It’s been fun and an education in how non-profits are run.

• I’ve just finished year #2 in the Doctoral program.  Only X number of years left (i have no idea what X actually is…probably 3 to 4 more years).

• I’ve held up my resolutions for the year fairly nicely. I used the ‘three words’ approach (I learned this from Chris Brogan).  My words were: Create, Think & Lead. I’ve written more important stuff (at least to me) on this blog than I used to and I kicked off another blog focused on my photography.

• My wife’s photography business is starting to see a bit more life.  The economy has taken its toll but we are starting to see a bit more traffic and interest from potential clients.

• I’ve disconnected from a lot of things that were taking up way too much of my time.  While this has been hard to do, it’s been necessary to allow me to focus on those things that will bring the most benefit & value to me in the future.

What does the rest of 2009 hold? I’m not sure…but I’m positive it will be a good 6 months.

• I’m anxious to kick off a few projects that I’ve been thinking about and can’t wait to see the results.

• I’ve got a couple interesting side projects that have been brewing for a while…they are looking like they might show some signs of life later this year.

• I’ve submitted a few articles & papers to academic journals & trade publications…hopefully I’ll hear back on whether they are accepted for publishing.

How has the first half of 2009 been for you?

Time for a Mid Year Review is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. What’s your focus?
2. Three words for 2010
3. A milestone – 3 years old (not 4 like I thought!)
4. Doctorate Pursuit – Year 1
5. Resolutions for 2009

Current Status (May 2009)

• 39 hours complete
• 52 remaining (27 hours coursework, 25 hours dissertation)
• 43% complete.
• Coursework completion ~ mid-2010
• Dissertation completion ~2012.

I’m taking another six hours this summer…might be a beating but we’ll see.  The courses are:

• INFS 750 – Telecommunications Technology & Management – Starting May 18
• INFS 892 – Advanced Design Science Research Methods – Starting May 18

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Doctorate Work = 43% complete is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. First semester is complete
2. Doctorate degree pursuit update & announcement
3. Doctorate Pursuit – Year 1
4. Photography is tough
5. Time for a Mid Year Review

While looking through my RSS Reader last week I ran across Glenn Whitfield‘s post titled ‘When thinking isn’t an option – tell a story‘ and felt a sense of deja vu….Glenn was talking about the very subject I’ve been researching.

The last two paragraphs of Glenn’s post are:

So how do you get your point across when people don’t want to think?

Just tell a story. For thousands of years, human beings have learned many life lessons from stories or fables (remember Aesop’s Fables). So why not use them to get your point across? In just a few paragraphs, you can tell someone about a problem (the issue), provide a plausible explanation (impact of the issue), and teach a lesson (the solution to the issue). Nice and neat, and everyone is satisfied. By using the facts and information you have and molding it into a story that the audience can relate to, you will have their attention, and you can make your point effectively. Yes, you will have to really think about how to put your facts into a story your audience can relate to, but remember, you want to make sure that your issue is clearly understood.

As much as we may want to get people to think more, when it’s clear your audience is not up for it, telling a story is a very effective way to get your point across and get what you want. Remember, we all like a good story.

Great introduction in the use of stories to get your point across.

Stories have been used to pass down wisdom and knowledge from the beginning of time.   Every culture has had its own stories and storytelling techniques so it makes sense that using stories to transfer and share knowledge within project teams might prove worth researching.  I’m currently researching this topic and will be working a paper that I hope to get published later this year.

In the meantime, If you’re interested in learning more about storytelling applications in knowledge management, take a look / listen to the  presentation I put together for one of my courses on the topic of storytelling and knowledge management.  You can view the PDF here or watch/listen to the quicktime presentation here. You can download the Quicktime video (in Zip format) here.

Using Stories to share knowledge is a post from: Eric D. Brown.
About Eric Eric D. Brown is a Dallas based Technology Consultant, and Entrepreneur focused on helping businesses and non-profits merge business, marketing and technology. He writes extensively about technology, strategy, people and projects at ericbrown.com. Eric is also an amateur Photographer and shares his photography work at Photography Minute and on his flickr photostream.
Read more about Eric...

Related posts:

1. Stories, Projects & Knowledge Management
2. Knowledge Management In Projects – An Overview
3. Project Knowledge Management
4. Mining for Knowledge
5. Mining for knowledge in a social word