Just finished reading Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges

My review in two words: Excellent book!

Whether you are an expert in the Enterprise 2.0 world or just a beginner, this book has something for you. Whether you believe in Enterprise 2.0 or not, this book has some excellent concepts that can be used to help bring social tools into the enterprise.

The book is split into two parts with the Part 1 covering the tools of Enterprise 2.0 and Part 2 discussing how to successfully utilize social tools within the enterprise.

Part 1 provides a very good overview of the tools and techniques of Enterprise 2.0 as well as some real-world case studies of companies that have implemented Web 2.0 platforms.  These companies are extremely diverse running the gamut from government agencies to start-ups and the information provided by McAfee shows real-world usage of Web 2.0 within enterprises.

Part 2 is where the really good stuff happens.  This is where McAfee shines.  This is the stuff that every CEO, COO, CIO and CMO should read and digest.   This is the place where you get to see some strategies for using social tools within the enterprise.    When you read this book make, sure you pay attention to the Six Organizational Strategies starting on page 179.  Good stuff.

Will this book give you the recipe for successful use of Enterprise 2.0?  No.  Will this book make your Enterprise 2.0 project(s) successful?  Maybe. Maybe not. What this book will do is give you some ideas on how to introduce Enterprise 2.0 into your organization and give you some tips on make it successful.

So…let’s take a step away from the book for a minute and look at the topic itself.  Enterprise 2.0.  Great name but one that has been much maligned.  The topic has caused a lot of debate since being introduced.  For some examples, go read Dennis Howlett’s article titled “Enterprise 2.0 – the non-debate” and then read Mark Fidelman’s response on CloudAve titled “Enterprise 2.0 Caffeine: Let’s debunk the non-debate” to get some flavor of the various debate’s happening out there on the topic. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the topic of Enterprise 2.0 in the comments.

With all of this debate, or non-debates as some would say,  let’s look at McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0:

Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.

McAfee continues with his definition when he writes:

Enterprise 2.0, then, is about how organizations use the newly available ESSP’s [emergent social software platforms] to do their work better

With those definitions in mind, let’s revisit one of the main arguments against Enterprise 2.0 –> The value of Social Media / Enterprise 2.0 cannot be determined.  In fact, there are many (Howlett included) that say social media tools are worthless to the organization.

My response to this argument is a simple one:

How valuable is the knowledge of an employee?  How valuable is the knowledge of 10, 100 or 1000 employees? Can you place value on that knowledge?  Maybe.  Maybe not. That doesn’t mean that trying to harness that knowledge is worthless.  So why would using tools to harness that knowledge be worthless?

I can understand some of the arguments of folks out there against Enterprise 2.0.  There are a lot of buzzwords floating about and a lot of hype around the subject, but if you take the lessons from this book to heart, you’ll do more than buy into the hype…you’ll give your organization an opportunity to succeed by really harnessing the expertise, experiences and value of your organizational knowledge.

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Here’s the latest version of my storytelling for knowledge management in projects presentation.  Enjoy!

Recorded Presentation via Vimeo:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

A few months ago I ran across the IDEO Fellows website and saw a lot of really interesting authors listed and realized I’d heard of everyone on the page except for one: Daniel Wilson.  Included with Wilson are such notables as Chip Heath, Bob Sutton and Barry Katz so I found it intriguing that I hadn’t heard of Wilson before.

The IDEO website lists Wilson as Research Director at Harvard Project Zero and co-author of a book titled ‘Learning at Work‘.  Dr. Wilson’s background intrigued me so I took a deeper look at the book.   As far as I can tell, this book is only available from Harvard’s Project Zero bookstore…a quick review on Amazon shows a few books with the same title but they don’t appear to be the same book.

I ordered the book and waited patiently for its arrvial…then waited patiently to find time to read it.  I finally found that time and I’m glad I did.

The main purpose of the book is to describe the fundamental need to turn knowledge into something that is actionable and useful to an organization. The official description of this book is:

For four years researchers at Project Zero worked closely with the leaders and over fifty office managers of a university as they sought to cultivate a culture of learning and understanding throughout their organization. This book shares the story of this project along with the key lessons and practical strategies that helped to enhance understanding, deepen inquiry, strengthen leadership, and improve communication. Organizational leaders, group facilitators or those interested in applying Project Zero concepts in the workplace will find this book of interest.

The book is a wonderful treatise on learning within organizations and provides a great deal of information on how an organization can build a culture of learning.

Great book and one that I’d highly recommend.

As part of a research project for my doctorate work I’ve been looking at the use of storytelling for knowledge sharing in project teams.  I’ve found the topic extremely interesting and perhaps even something I can find a dissertation topic out of.

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.

Management Issues has a nice post titled “Organizations Ignoring the Transfer of Knowledge” that talks about the lack of planning for the transfer of knowledge between the Baby Boomer and younger generations.

An excerpt:

A study by U.S research body The Conference Board has found most American, Canadian and European businesses are woefully ill-prepared for the exodus of the post-war Baby Boom generation from the boardroom.

Most firms do even not have a plan to manage and transfer knowledge and even fewer included cross-generational issues in what strategy they had.

And another:

“Knowledge transfer is not as widely practiced as the potential business benefits and workforce demographics suggest it should be,” concluded Greenes.

“In a knowledge economy, firm-specific knowledge is critical to the sustainability, performance and innovation of organizations facing the imminent retirement of large numbers of baby boomers,” he added.

Looks like all the talk about Knowledge Management over the last 20 years has been just that…talk. Any ideas as to why this important aspect has been overlooked by organizations?

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This post is an excerpt of a recent paper titled “Improving Knowledge in Projects.” If you’d like to read the full paper, click here for the PDF version of Improving Knowledge in Projects.

In the project management world, a considerable amount of research exists to describe the reasons behind the success or failure of projects in the information technology space. Most of this research focuses on failures being caused lack of executive sponsorship, lack of project management methods, lack of change management processes, project scope size and/or project duration (Reich, 2007).

While these causes of failure are quite common, a large and overlooked stumbling block that causes failure in IT projects is the lack of proper knowledge management methodologies throughout the project management lifecycle.

This paper provides a brief review of the literature within the knowledge management space, and more specifically, how to manage knowledge transfer, sharing and application in projects. The main question that is initially asked (but not really answered) in this paper is that following: Can a framework containing “best practices” be developed that can be use to improve knowledge transfer and sharing in project based groups and organizations?

Brief Literature Review
Although most project management methodologies claim to be interested in knowledge management, none offer any real guidelines or practices for gathering and maintaining knowledge throughout the project lifecycle.

Disterer (2002) argues that traditional project management methods are overly concerned with efficiency and effectiveness of project team members, which in turn makes the act of capturing knowledge a lower priority during a project (Disterer, 2002). This is compounded by the fact that the knowledge needs of future projects doesn’t lie within the context of the current project requirements therefore project managers and leaders do not focus on these efforts (Disterer, 2002).

Leseure & Brookes (2004) take this claim a step further by stating that knowledge transfer is one of the largest issues in projects today when they write “Knowledge is generated within one project and then lost. Failure to transfer this knowledge. leads to wasted activity and impaired project performance” (Leseure & Brookes, 2004, p. 103). Leseure & Brookes’ designed a research project that would attempt to benchmark knowledge management practices within projects to help provide a broader and more qualitative evidence of knowledge management methods in projects. The results of this research pointed to two main areas that could improve knowledge management in projects: collecting knowledge in projects; and managing tacit knowledge (Leseure & Brookes, 2004, p. 106). By focusing on these two areas, organizations can help to improve project knowledge management.

Kasvi, Vartiainen, & Hailikari (2003) performed research on how knowledge is managed in projects and what knowledge management capabilities are required for proper knowledge management in projects (Kasvi, Vartiainen, & Hailikari, 2003). The researchers used interviews to gather data on knowledge management capabilities and practices in various organizations. The results provided interesting feedback on organizational knowledge practices in projects and led the authors to observer that “knowledge management practices were weak and unsystematic” (Kasvi et al., 2003, p. 578) and that paper documents and interactions with colleagues were the most important sources of knowledge.

Research by Karlsen & Gottschalk (2004) addresses the factors that affect knowledge transfer in projects (Karlsen & Gottschalk, 2004). The authors used surveys to gather information from project managers and organizations on knowledge transfer in projects. The survey results showed that organizational culture plays a key role in knowledge transfer within projects and should be the main area that organizations focus when looking at knowledge transfer methodologies capabilities.

Research by Slaughter & Kirsch (2006) extends the concept of the importance of organizational design and culture on knowledge management with the introduction of Knowledge Transfer Portfolios. This research, which was conducted as a field study in the area of Software process improvements, provides some very interesting ideas on organizational design and knowledge transfer and outlines the following three items as being key for knowledge transfer within organizations: Proximity, Frequency of Interactions and Relationships (Slaughter & Kirsch, 2006).

The Framework

Blaize Horner Reich, an Associate Professor at Simon Fraser University and Visiting Associate at Templeton College, Oxford University has developed a framework for knowledge management within IT Projects which seems promising. This framework, published in the Project Management Institutes’s Project Management Journal in an article titled “Managing Knowledge and Learning in IT Projects: A Conceptual Framework and Guidelines for Practice“, proposes a three level model that addresses the following topics:

• Describes what “knowledge management in IT projects” is
• Provides a typology of critical IT project knowledge
• Identifies the top ten knowledge-based risks found in IT projects. In addition, key principles for knowledge management in IT projects are provided for use in helping build strong knowledge management capabilities within IT projects.

Reich’s framework is a good place to start as it provides a model built upon sound principles and research in the IT project space.

The first ‘level’ in Reich’s framework defines IT Project knowledge management as:

Knowledge management in the context of a project is the application of principles and processes designed to make relevant knowledge available to the project team. Effective knowledge management facilitates the creation and integration of knowledge losses and fills knowledge gaps throughout the duration of the project (Reich, 2007, p. 8).

The second ‘level’ in Reich’s framework consists of a typology of IT Project knowledge. This typology contains four distinct types of knowledge: process, domain, institutional and cultural. A brief definition of these types of knowledge follows:

• Process Knowledge: knowledge that project team members have regarding the project (tasks, methodologies, timelines, structure, etc) (Chan & Rosemann, 2001; Meehan & Richardson, 2002; Reich, 2007).
• Domain Knowledge: knowledge that a project team or member has about the industry, technology, processes, current situation, business and products (Chan & Rosemann, 2001; Reich, 2007).
• Institutional Knowledge: knowledge that a project team or member has about the organization (Reich, 2007).
• Cultural Knowledge: knowledge about the organizational culture as well as cultural backgrounds of the project team members (Reich, 2007).

The third ‘level’ of Reich’s framework consists of knowledge-based risks in IT projects. The author has listed ten risks that can affect knowledge in IT projects. These risks are:

• Lessons aren’t learned
• Flawed team selection
• Changes in the project leadership team
• Lack of knowledge of project team roles
• Poor knowledge integration
• Poor knowledge transfer within projects
• Changes in project team
• Determining “who knows what” (knowledge maps)
• Project team changes between phases
• Failure to Learn

Building Upon Reich’s Framework

Using the knowledge contained within Reich’s framework, and knowledge generated during a literature review, the following seven topics must be considered as key pieces of this framework in order for it to address project knowledge management:

• Continuous Learning / Lessons Learned - Ensures that all “lessons learned” are documented and shared throughout the organization and applied in future projects.
• Organizational Design – Develops proper project teams to ensure that the necessary knowledge transfer mechanisms can be implemented per Slaughter & Kirsch’s (2006) research
• Organizational Culture – Works toward building a culture that is pre-disposed to sharing knowledge.
• Human Capital Management practices – Covers the human capital management aspects to ensure proper motivation for project teams.
• Project Selection – Covers proper project selection as well as team member selection.
• Risk Management – Covers the aspects of project risk management as well as knowledge-based risk management as described in Reich (2007).
• Knowledge Typology Management – Covers the four types of knowledge outlined in Reich (2007) including Domain, Process, Institutional and Cultural Knowledge.

There is a considerable amount of research and thought that needs to be done to further develop this framework but an initial model can be found in Figure 1. This model provides a high-level overview of the areas that must be considered when developing project knowledge management practices.

Click for Figure 1: Project Knowledge Management Model

The model is separated into three “sections” plus feedback loops. The three sections are: Project Leadership, Project Teams and Projects. Each section contains the areas of focus for that particular project entity and outlines the areas of responsibility. A description of each section as well as the feedback loops follows.

• Project Leadership – the project leadership section covers the higher level “strategic” aspects of project knowledge management and contains Organizational Design, Culture, Human Capital Management Practices, Project Selection and Management, Risk Management and Knowledge Management.
• Project Teams – the project teams section covers the individualistic aspects of project knowledge management and contains the knowledge types (Domain, Process, Institutional and Cultural) as well as project management methods and processes.
• Projects – the projects section contains the more “tactical” aspects of project knowledge management and includes Knowledge Transfer, Lessons Learned and Continuous Interaction.
• Feedback Loops – In addition to the three sections, the model contains feedback loops that are used to ensure that continuous feedback is provided from each layer of the project knowledge management model. For example, project teams will continuously communicate with each other throughout projects regardless of which projects they are working on. Project Leadership will always be “kept in the loop” on all projects.

This framework provides an easy to recognize area of responsibility for the seven key topics that must be considered to ensure proper knowledge management in projects. As an example, let’s consider Slaughter & Kirsch’s (2006) research on Knowledge Transfer Portfolios. One of the key outputs of that research was to show that organizational design plays a key role in knowledge transfer. Using the model shown in figure 1, it is easy to see that organizational design lies solely on the shoulders of the organization’s leadership to consider.

There is still a considerable amount of research that needs to be completed in order to create supporting data to support this framework. Although not complete, the model does show areas in which organizations can begin to consider making changes to improve project knowledge management.

Conclusion
The extent of knowledge management in most project management methodologies begins and ends with the “lessons learned” document that is created after the completion of a project. This document is a good exercise, but doesn’t do much to manage knowledge during the project or ensure that knowledge is transferred between project members because project members must know to read the document to receive any value from it.

It is widely reported that project failure rates are still very high (Ahn, Joo, Cho, & Park, 2005; Owen, Burstein, & Mitchell, 2004; Pawlowski & Robey, 2004; Reich, 2007; Scarbrough, Bresnen, Edelman, Laurent, & et al., 2004). Industry research shows fifty to sixty percent of all projects are considered failures (IT-Cortex, 2007). While most research blames these failures on poor project management and/or lack of executive sponsorship (Reich, 2007), the fact that there is very little knowledge transfer and sharing between project teams has to play a key role in allowing these failures to occur.

By building a framework that can be used to help improve knowledge transfer within project teams, it is hoped that the failure rate due to knowledge-based issues will drop significantly. This framework, which still is the early development stages, should help organizations understand the underlying requirements for project knowledge management, provide best practices for knowledge management in projects and provide a way to build a corporate culture that is focused on sharing knowledge.

References

• Ahn, H. J., Joo, L. H., Cho, K., & Park, S. J. (2005). Utilizing knowledge context in virtual collaborative work. Decision Support Systems, 39(4), 563.
• Chan, R., & Rosemann, M. (2001). Managing knowledge in enterprise systems. Proceedings of the Americas Conference of Information Systems.
• Disterer, G. (2002). Management of project knowledge and experiences. Journal of Knowledge Management, 6(5), 512.
• IT-Cortex. (2007). Statistics over IT Failure Rate. Retrieved 3 May 2008, from http://www.it-cortex.com/Stat_Failure_Rate.htm
• Karlsen, J. T., & Gottschalk, P. (2004). Factors Affecting Knowledge Transfer in IT Projects. Engineering Management Journal, 16(1), 3.
• Kasvi, J. J. J., Vartiainen, M., & Hailikari, M. (2003). Managing knowledge and knowledge competences in projects and project organisations. International Journal of Project Management, 21(8), 571.
• Leseure, M. J., & Brookes, N. J. (2004). Knowledge management benchmarks for project management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(1), 103.
• Lytras, M. D., & Pouloudi, A. (2003). Project management as a knowledge management primer: The learning infrastructure in knowledge-intensive organizations: Projects as knowledge transformations and beyond. The Learning Organization, 10(4/5), 237.
• Meehan, B., & Richardson, I. (2002). Identification of Software Process Knowledge Management. Software Process: Improvement and Practice, 7(2), 47-55.
• Mitchell, V. L. (2006). Knowledge Integration and Information Technology Project Performance. MIS Quarterly, 30(4), 919.
• Owen, J., Burstein, F., & Mitchell, S. (2004). Knowledge Reuse and Transfer in a Project Management Environment. Journal of Information Technology Cases and Applications, 6(4), 21.
• Pawlowski, S. D., & Robey, D. (2004). Bridging User Organizations: Knowledge Brokering and the Work of Information Technology Professionals1. MIS Quarterly, 28(4), 645.
• Reich, B. H. (2007). Managing Knowledge and Learning in It Projects: A Conceptual Framework and Guidelines for Practice. Project Management Journal, 38(2), 5.
• Rice, M. P., Oconnor, G. C., & Pierantozzi, R. (2008). Implementing a Learning Plan to Counter Project Uncertainty. MIT Sloan Management Review, 49(2), 54.
• Santhanam, R., Seligman, L., & Kang, D. (2007). Postimplementation Knowledge Transfers to Users and Information Technology Professionals. Journal of Management Information Systems, 24(1), 171-199.
• Scarbrough, H., Bresnen, M., Edelman, L. F., Laurent, S., & et al. (2004). The Processes of Project-based Learning: An Exploratory Study. Management Learning, 35(4), 491.
• Slaughter, S. A., & Kirsch, L. J. (2006). The Effectiveness of Knowledge Transfer Portfolios in Software Process Improvement: A Field Study. Information Systems Research, 17(3), 301.

I’ve been reading up on knowledge management topics (due to one of my classes being “Knowledge Management”) and have found that there is a nice subset of knowledge management research focused on managing knowledge in projects. I found this interesting and dove into a few articles that I found.

In the project management world, there is a considerable amount of research describing the reasons for success and/or failure of projects in the information technology space. Most of this research focuses on failures being caused by such things as: lack of executive sponsorship; lack of project management methods, lack of change management processes, project scope size, project duration, etc.

While these causes of failure are quite common in IT projects, one of the largest and most unrecognized reasons for failure, in my opinion, is the lack of proper knowledge management and knowledge transfer methodologies throughout the project management lifecycle.

Most projects that I’ve ever been a part of wait until the end of the project to write a lesson’s learned document. That document is a good exercise, but it doesn’t do anything to manage knowledge during the project or ensure that knowledge is transferred between project members. It also isn’t a given that anyone will ever read the lessons learned document.

Leseure & Brookes (2004) state this clearly when they write:

“Knowledge is generated within one project and then lost. Failure to transfer this knowledge…leads to wasted activity and impaired project performance” (Leseure & Brookes, 2004, p. 103).

How can project managers, team members and organizations ensure that knowledge is captured, transfered and managed in the proper ways? There seems to be a considerable amount of research on the topic.

I have a feeling that regardless of what research is done, the main focus will come down to the culture of the organization. This seems to be backed up by previous research performed by Karlsen & Gottschalk (2004) when results of a survey showed that organizational culture has the most impact on knowledge transfer in projects and should be the one area that organizations focus on when looking at knowledge transfer methodologies and knowledge management capabilities (Karlsen & Gottschalk, 2004, p. 8).

This area of research seems to be a pretty hot right now. The most recent edition of PMI’s Project Management Journal had an article dealing with this same topic and ran a great article from Blaize Horner Reich in 2007 titled “Managing Knowledge and Learning in It Projects: A Conceptual Framework and Guidelines for Practice”. Reich’s article has some interesting concepts and a framework for knowledge management in practice.

Interesting topic…at least to me Any readers have some pointers for knowledge management techniques that you’ve used in the past that might be applicable to projects?

References:

• Leseure, M. J., & Brookes, N. J. (2004). Knowledge management benchmarks for project management. Journal of Knowledge Management, 8(1), 103.
• Karlsen, J. T., & Gottschalk, P. (2004). Factors Affecting Knowledge Transfer in IT Projects. Engineering Management Journal, 16(1), 3.
• Reich, B. H. (2007). Managing Knowledge and Learning in It Projects: A Conceptual Framework and Guidelines for Practice. Project Management Journal, 38(2), 5.

[tags] project management, knowledge management [/tags]