Via Chris Collison's bog All of us are smarter than any of us… 

I recently came across the following, apparently anonymous, quote:

A person who graduated yesterday and stops studying today is uneducated tomorrow

If ever a few words made me think of good management. And the good knowledge management. 

I have written before about the importance of learning, and how that is the ultimate goal of KM (and, in that context, the value of failing too). There are still people who are protective of what they see as "their" knowledge. And perhaps the language we use has something to do with that: hearing that somebody wants to "capture" your knowledge can seem a little invasive. But of course when you are too protective if your own experiences and ideas you are diminishing the opportunities for others to share theirs. Thus, in fact, diminishing what it is you know. 

It's not about recording everything you know and sharing that with everybody else involved. In fact this is where the hard work comes in: it's about identifying those bits of intormation that are of value in multiple contexts; extracting those and making them first easy to understand, and then easily accessible to others. There is great skill in understanding what those elements are, and the best ways to share them. An understanding of human nature is also required to get the balance just right, and I admire those who do this successfully. 

And as I started with a quote, I shall end with another, this oneattributable to Jack Welch, of General Electric Fame:

“An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action is the ultimate competitive business advantage”

You may be familair with the KM News page on our main website. We monitor your top knowledge and information management blogs and publications, as well as relevant news from larger publishers. We then select articles of interest and post them on our website (and we do this with a few short clicks, using the Linex platform, of course). We are looking at blogs like Slaw.ca, Harold Jarche's Life in Perpetual Beta, Robert Ambrogi's LawSites and Mary Abraham's Above and Beyond KM; as well as publications such as HBS' Working Knowledge, CIO.com and KM World. 

You can visit this page every day to see the latest on technology trends, KM products and commentary, event reviews and more. 

Or, now, you can receive it straight to your inbox. These articles are now also available as a daily email alert, free for all Linex registered users. Visit your alerts page and look for the KM News alert, click on the large red Subscribe button. Starting tomorrow some of you will be receiving this alert already. 

Send any suggestions for further sources or articles my way. 

A few years old now but still so good, via the blog Royce Bits:

Why is information overload still such a big surprise? 

Quick answer: Gutemberg is the cause of all our problems. 

I am very pleased to be adding a guest post by the knowledgeable and fascinating Laura Hannan (ask her about her life sometime, it tells like a movie). Laura is a Business Development manager at Chameleon, a digital communications organisation creating results for B2B and B2C organisations across web, mobile, search and social.

If you want to get in touch with Laura use the links below or let me know and I will be glad to pass on your details to her.

Marketing for Professional Services Firms

How do you market organisations online that have traditionally relied on referrals, face-to-face networking and the reputation of individuals or partners?

I think it comes down to your brand.

Professional Services firms are generally made up individual experts and it is from these individuals that people buy.

However, it is an organisation’s brand that attracts the best people to work for them in the first place, so internal marketing of that brand to partners, their marketplace, Universities and Alumni is something that most firms are perfectly familiar with.

With the best people working for them, the brand over time stands also for a place where a specialty lives.

Even the industry I work in, a digital agency, we are just a group of digital professionals.  We should be leaning on every individual’s expertise whether they gained that experience within these four walls or not.

Traditional ‘referrals-type’ professional services firms are now relying on search traffic for new business leads.  The brand benefits of being at the top of search for your services keywords are harder to measure and therefore often ignored.

Some B2B organisations have been slow to dominate their brand search page.  See PwC filling up the page with paid and organic search, link extensions, places and maps.

Online advertising / affiliates where brands can gain a lot of impressions are unlikely to be as effective for professional services firms as other sectors.  However adverts focusing on individuals will have more traction, e.g. on LinkedIn individuals by default allow their data to be used in advertising.

ePR and blogger engagement is a great way to promote both the individuals and the brand together.  Perhaps try influential websites within your sector e.g. http://www.big4.com/blog/news

Social media is an interesting channel and one we get asked about a lot by B2B organisations, usually asking “what should we be doing?”  This is probably another blog post all on its own!

For larger professional services organisation, brand and buzz monitoring can be incredibly effective to react to news/PR/blogs and measure brand reputation and penetration.  If someone is saying something negative about your brand, you’ll want to know about it, and if there are positive comments you will want to keep that buzz going for as long as you can.

We’ve been working with Drivers Jonas Deloitte, Kingston Smith and RIBA.

For more chat and debate feel free to connect http://uk.linkedin.com/in/laurahannan or www.twitter.com/laurajhannan

The practice of Knowledge Management is as old as language itself. How esle to explain the creation of a set alphabet and vocabulary if not to share information, creating knowledge growth? The creation of written language was of course a major step in the evolution of knowledge management. 

Does it follow from here that the evolution of the written word is in fact the evolution of knowledge management? Perhaps not directly, but the two certainly share major milestones. 

Enter the following infrographic showing "The Evolution of Knowledge Management", from the Socialcast blog. Note that about the first 5000 years follow the evolution of writing, to then switch over to the accelerated evolution of computer technology. This, the post explains, happened 

As we have shifted from an industrial-based society to an information-based one, many jobs and tasks have been automated by machinery. The result is a smaller workforce and the advent of the knowledge worker.

It's a short paragraph introducing the graphic, and well worth the read; I suggest you take a look and then click on the image below to see the details. 

Following on your comment, Ewen, I add a link to your follow up post. To keep the conversation going. 

Capacity development, organisational development, institutional change – The extended happy families of engagement

Thank you to Harold Jarche for a fairly recent blog post about Managing Engagement, a commentary on a piece by Ewen Le Borgne on “The Happy Families of Engagement”. The piece is a good read, premised on the fact of course that KM is a facet of engagement; part of a greater “family” in which each part is improved by the others.

The author breaks this family down in to three broad categories of Communication; Knowledge Management and Monitoring & Evaluation.

I’m going to visit KM last, and start with the Communications branch. This involves PR, Marketing, and internal as well as external communication. This is, as Le Borgne points out, all about the message. The audience may vary, and the tone or approach, but the goal remains the right message. 

Monitoring and Evaluation is performed by the “collectors and reporters”. This goes from the planning stages to the “lessons learned” steps, passing straight through data collection. Le Borgne points out that “other family members consider this branch to be … procedural”, rather than creative as they are.

So where does KM come in? Knowledge Management happens where these other two branches meet. Knowledge Management is about “strategic information”. It is not about the message in of itself, and it’s not about the mere data points, but rather about learning from the message. In the author’s words: “it’s all about how you can use information (“evaluation”) and communication to improve your approach.”

 A great start in understanding the role of KM, Jarche’s commentary on this post goes on to discuss the Network, moving in to talk about Collaboration. His post is also a good elaboration on the “Engagement Family”.

How do you find this explanation of KM? Do you see it this way yourself?

Are plentiful. And in such a situation it is often the obvious that gets overlooked. There are many places you can turn to for keeping up to date, and each has something different to offer, be it in content, presentation or opinion. Below are some of the main resources available electronically for current awareness.

Email Alerts - of course. Subscription and non, although many are paid email alerts. Often publishers will offer particular collections of articles via email, not accessible on a website or RSS feed, for example, to enhance the value of that email alert.

RSS Feeds - mainly free. Most websites now offer RSS feeds in various forms. Large news sites will tend to have feeds for each section. On a smaller site, a blog or specific journal for example, often you will have just one feed for all the site updates.

Blogs - tend to offer feeds or email updates, but I point out blogs separately because the value is not only in the posts, but often the comments as well. Many blogs now offer feeds for comment streams too.

Social Media - in its various forms. For the sake of brevity I group in this category the many social websites and tools, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare, YouTube. They are all of course vastly different and deserve individual discussions, but let us put them together here under the banner of “sharing”. We are well into opinion territory here, but when used well there is a huge amount of value to be gained form each of these.

Journals - for more in-depth, subject specific information. Most journals are now available in electronic form as well.

Websites - good old fashioned websites. Perhaps an RSS feed is too broad, or too specific. Perhaps they have no email option. Website scraping is another way to get the information you need.

Crowdsourcing options - which is linked to sharing, of course. Listservs, recommendations, “have you read this article” functionality. As the quantity of information never ceases growing, this option increases in value. If I may interject - we are working on tools to fit this in to the Linex platform, watch this space.

What have I left out of this list?

This started out as a list for my own benefit, to focus on what I needed. But I can’t end it without mentioning Linex: once you have all these streams you need to bring them together and then filter down to the content you need. I hope you are aware: this is what Linex does for you.

Fairly recently I read David Snowden’s and Mary Boone’s award-winning paper “A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making”. What it highlights primarily is the diversity of the Knowledge Management practice. Km is not just about capture and sharing, but also - and perhaps more importantly - about learning; “knowledge creation” we could say.

You may have heard of the Cynefin Framework, created by Snowden, which splits business issues into 4 possible quadrants, or domains: Simple, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic (the domain of Disorder is also recognised, but is beyond the scope of this post). The domain is determined by the relationship between cause and effect, going from the very obvious, to a complete lack of said relationship. In effect this framework moves us from the standard - “obvious” - solution of best practice, to the realm of full creativity in creating a new solution, sometimes called “novel practice”, passing of course through “good” and “emergent” practice, to use the accepted lingo. 

Best Practice itself, however, poses its own risks. As Snowden and Boone point out it is”by definition, past practice”. When something works well it risks complacency, where it is not reviewed or updated simply because “it has always worked this way”. When outside circumstances change, and the best practice does not, you risk falling straight from the Simple in to the Chaotic realm.

The Complicated quadrant, that of “good practice”, is the realm of experts. As it was explained to me, a good example is the need to construct a building: there are many ways to do it, but only experts in the field can actually get it done. What this realm highlights to me is the different between “expert” and “leader”. Not only are the two not the same, but nor are they interchangeable. It is most important for a leader to be unfettered by entrenched thinking, and to welcome creativity and, occasionally, perhaps even some folly. We want our experts, on the other hand, to know their subject in extreme depth and give us straightforward, right-or-wrong answers.

The Complex and Chaotic quadrants are where the strongest leadership skills come in to play. It is often hardest, for the person in charge, to state that he does not have all the answers. However these two frameworks requires exactly this: these areas are the opportunity not to implement current knowledge, but to create new knowledge.

Applying a framework such as this aims to help leaders more accurately asses business situations and opportunities, and move them beyond their own limitations, in particular in the Complex and Chaotic scenarios.

A great read, much to learn, and à propos as we at Linex, and I in particular, embark into a new territory and new ventures.