Socks and knowledge

I read this blog post by Nick Milton today. He uses the analogy of the sock drawer and some images to demonstrate ways of managing content in a knowledge base. This resonates with me because I struggle to find a balance between the librarian in me (orderly, clearly titled documents, restricted structure and categories) and the focus on search as a better solution for finding randomly stored information (the mess represented in the first image).

Photo taken from Nick Miltons blog.

Nick is right - re-use is key in this debate. Project managers want to have all of their project information and knowledge in one place but our legal team want to be able to see all contracts for the agency in one place too. Do the contracts sit under the program area folders or in a Legal > Contracts folder.

I am thinking of our or electronic records management system (ERMS) at the moment, which is based on a Windows-like file structure. This structure is tight with limited ability for users to change names on files and create new ones. It works for some and not for others.

Some love the orderly approach and can find the info they need, especially the information they filed (because they thought about the detail BEFORE THEY FILED). Others don't understand why the system doesn't 'work' for them, in which they generally mean - it doesn't look like their own folder structure (folders called stuff, my stuff, more stuff etc). It takes time and some thought to work out where to save and find information and our ERMS search function is poor.

So, is it better to have a free for all, let people stick what they like, where, create folders, name folders and just provide a super dooper search function?

In our case I think the solution Nick Milton recommends and one that I agree with is a way of accessing all information around a topic (in our case a project) in one location. This becomes more of a knowledge solution - a knowledge base. For my agency this is likely to be based on SharePoint 2010.

Instead of having a folder under Legal for Contracts which holds all contracts for all projects in the agency, contracts would sit with the related project information (budgets, e-mail, presentations, agreements, publications, reports, contacts etc). It would tell a richer story around that project, provide access to reports, financials, research, people and background information. If all of the contracts are tagged as contracts a good search function should satisfy the legal and finance departments also?

Fine, I just have to work out how to do the records management, behind the scenes :-)

Are we ready for KM?

We are considering implementing an online collaborative open source platform to replace the functions of some of our existing, more traditional platforms and systems over the next year or so. Effectively a knowledge management system (KMS).

We currently:

• have a very customised LotusNotes database as our main project management tool
• use e-mail to communicate with multiple project teams external to our organisation and internally
• use e-mail and word documents to create, share and save documents, reports and forms
• have a separate finance system and multiple excel spreadsheets in use across the organisation
• have an internal SharePoint Intranet
• and an EDRMS for records management
• and an external facing website (of course)

We have information overload, duplication of information, inefficient and unlcear processes, work-arounds, poor version control and full inboxes.

Of course for knowledge management (and information management) this is a nightmare. It is also difficult and inefficient for users - our staff. They have to think about what information goes where, when does it become a record, should it be saved into LotusNotes or to the Intranet (or both)? Which version with tracked changes is the latest?

Technology is at the stage where it is fairly easy and relatively affordable to solve many of these issues and allow us to communicate and collaborate within teams, across silos, internally and with external partners. Our staff travel so they need access to information on portable devices, wherever they are. Being able to locate all they need in one place and communicate across multiple channels at the same time would be ideal.

Behind this business need and the main driver are deeper issues. We need to standardise and document our processes, promote transparency, provide accurate reporting and accountability and measure impacts. Of course we still have to consider copyright, privacy, accessibility, record keeping and other compliance, good governance and regulatory requirements. See my last post on KM v RM.

So what is stopping us? Fear of change, a fear of failing and an unhealthy attachment to personal inboxes and file structures. A culture built around personal relationships, sharing on a 'need to know' basis, individual ways of doing things, freedom of individuals to choose how to manage a project, internal silos, cultural differences and technological barriers (overseas partners), information technology illiteracy, 30 years of having done it a 'certain way' and a lack of resources.

We desperately need to change but have no appetite for it and no energy or time to learn new ways of working. Do we wait another 20 years for the next generation who will demand these changes or do we go for it? I'll let you know how we go :-)

A leader who does not allow himself time to think may turn into a thoughtless leader. Likewise, an organisation that does not allow itself time to think may turn into a thoughtless organisation.
Anonymous.
 

Work in progress and 2012 so far

Wow, a while between posts! A lot has happened this year so far and it is speeding by already.

• Agency's Information Publication Plan has been posted on our website as per the IPS requirements. 
• Information and Records Management Policy has been updated. Waiting for sign-off by CEO.
• Knowledge Management Strategy and plan completed.
• Risk assessment done on an internal project management system.
• Working groups set up for Intranet and internal project management system.
• Social Media up and running with great results.
• Reviewing Attorney-General's Consultation Paper on Extending Legal Deposit for impact on agency.
• Attended NAA's Digital Continuity Plan launch.
• Attended 3 day training on SharePoint @ DDLS
• Uni has just started again - Knowledge Management subject this semester! Reading lots!!
• On panel for current recruitment exercise
• Conducted two social media sessions for internal staff
• Involved in working group to implement smart forms for project applications
• Started compiling monthly analytics info from website
• Trialing Storify and other ways of archiving social media
• Attended an info session at NAA on new GRA 31
• Assisted external auditors in legislative compliance audit (FOI Act, Privacy Act and Archives Act)
• Had a week of leave (to do a bit of work on my house :-)
• Started discussions around a refresh or review of our external website
• Not so regular fortnightly Records Management team meetings (will get onto that)
• Took part in discussions around updating our internal Outlook distribution lists
• Attended first Corporate Managers meeting
• Attended several in-house 'brown bag' presentations
• Helped celebrate a colleague's 20 years with the agency
• Researching how to best conduct an Information or Knowledge Audit.
• Moved 100 Recall boxes of old registry files out of a compactus
• Completed an online survey which turned into an online article - needing corrections! Lesson learnt.
• Various updates to website, Intranet and social media channels
• Discussion around procedures and recording permissions and access to our EDRMS

Wowee! Good exercise to do, I used to do a similar thing as a report to my boss in my last job, weekly. This covers 2.5 months worth of work but is a good snapshot of what I do and am working on.

Social Media in Government

Following tweets and blog posts from the Social Media in Government Conference being held in Canberra this week. It sounds like some of the speakers also presented at Gov 2.0 or the Digital Management Summit so I am glad I didn't sign up for this one.

I love following the tweets with links to presentations and other sites that are being discussed! It is almost like attending. Craig Thomler is doing a liveblog link in his blog and commenting on presentations and the twitter hashtag is #socialmediagov

I have started my Masters in Knowledge Management at Charles Sturt Uni and am trying to get through my readings without being side tracked. Such interesting topics!! I am doing two library subjects before moving on to KM: The Information Society and The Digital Environment.

Also coming to terms with how my agency may be different from other Gov departments and agencies when it comes to open access, creative commons publishing etc. Challenges!! We have recently jumped into the social media world with a new blog, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube accounts. Small steps. I am also almost ready to publish our Information Publication Plan (IPP) which is required under the Government's IPS.

Gov 2.0 Conference - Canberra October 2011

A bit of background: Gov 2.0 (Government + web 2.0) is all about Government moving towards a more transparent, open culture. A recent taskforce made several recommendations – most of which the Australian Government agreed to. This has led to a drive towards increased engagement with the public: seeking input to agency policy and strategy, uptake of social media (or web 2.0 technologies) by agencies to help support this and increased openness and sharing of Government information/data and processes.  

My summary of some of the slides and presentations:

·         Nicholas Skytland, Director - Open Government Initiative, NASA – amazing!!! Great presenter, he and the team have created a culture of innovation and collaboration at NASA. The slides don’t really convey the power of his talk but some of them have interesting facts and quotes (tweeting astronauts etc). They do a lot of crowd sourcing where they ask the public (amateur star gazers) to help them identify stars and planets. They have found that putting scientific questions out into the public domain often provides a correct answer or solution faster than their scientists could. Watch this amazing concept drawing.

·         John Sheridan, First Assistant Secretary Agency Services, Australian Government Information Management Office – good to hear what AGIMO and the government is doing and planning for the future. PSI = Public Sector Information. John's blog post on the event

·         Chris Beer, IT Develop Manager, Department of Regional Australia, Regional Development and Local Government – interesting concept – MyRegion.gov.au. Connecting services, data and people by location in real time.....

·         Patrick McCormick, General Manager, Online Collaboration and Citizen Engagement, Department of Justice Victoria – another great speaker, this Vic Gov department are also doing fabulous things with social media and open data. Again some of these slides won’t make much sense without the commentary but some are interesting. Their internal social media policy video is a great example of transparency and sharing resources, it is available on YouTube with many other government departments adapting it for their use.

Andrew Schatz, Senior Lawyer, AGS Media – a lawyers cautionary words on using web 2.0 and open access to government information. Need to balance risk and benefits.

Rachel Spalding, Assistant Commissioner Policy, Office of the Australian Information Commissioner – need to balance open access to information and privacy.

ActKM conference - part 3

Stephen Byrne - Developing people to develop knowledge 
Sha Reilly - The unknown unknowns - making sense of expertise.

These were really interesting activities around mapping roles and capabilities to create a capability framework. Fascinating to see the range of KM capabilities and skills at the event, but would work well for any role or team in an organisation to identify gaps and outline future learning needs.

I definitely want to use this technique in the future.

Matthew Tukaki - Preparing your organisation for the future.


This was one of the most inspiring presentations I have heard for ages. Great story and well told. Matthew talked about going into an organisation as a consultant to look at their processes and structure. I was so inspired I didn't take notes......

Matthew Cain - Using IS to promote KM - iArmy wiki page

This presentation created quite a discussion around the room. It was great to see the military using new tools for sharing and managing knowledge. iArmy allows troops on the ground to communicate real time problems and experiences back to headquarters and leaders. Cain talked about the importance of organisational buy in and the importance of participation at top levels for this program to work. In such a hierarchical structure if the person at the top is taking note, those under them will make sure they are onto it too!

Good resource to read up about "after action review (AAR)" Thinking we could use this at the end of each project we manage here.

Graham Durant-Law - Using SNA for organisational and personal improvement.

Social Network Analysis (SNA)

• organisational and personal dynamics are at play
•  there is a need to identify key staff for change management (this may be the tea lady)
• he discussed link analysis and graph analysis
• brokerage roles - personal influence
• how work really gets done - personal relationships and networks
• who are the influencers int he organisation?

Vladimir Videnovic - BI, the reinforcing steel in stories. 

New York is doing some very cool stuff with social media and public engagement!! www.nyc.gov

• NYC government - 350,000 employees, US$60 billion budget and 8 million New Yorkers!
• They have a central non-emergency contact number 311 - for all queries about roads, waste management, libraries etc - all Local Government issues relating to New York City.
• They have a central cite which mashes up and provides access to all city data - provided by different agencies and organisations. They had to move to standardised and consistent reporting to achieve this. Non-secured, non-taxpayer information only.
• There is a central citizens portal for the public to use to follow up on queries and to encourage open engagement and promote accountability.
• Mayor Bloomberg wants to know if his cops illegally park. He wants to 'sack that guy'!

That's all folks (few got it all down, eventually)! I am sure I have forgotten many good bits.

I met some lovely KMers and made new contacts too!!

ActKM conference - part 2

Again (see part 1) - these are some of the points I jotted down or tweeted from the ActKM conference I attended recently. They are largely comments I agree or disagree with and/or learning that is relevant to my current workplace or role. Quotes and notes from each speaker in bullet points and my personal notes and comments in italics!

I found the interactive sessions at the conference to be great for learning new techniques, meeting new people and also just to change the pace from the usual presentation style. Arthur Shelley got us to do some thinking about what keeps CEO's up at night and to brainstorm around specific themes or terms. The resulting mind map was quite a mess and in a way sums up why the KM role can be so hard to describe or summarise. We cover so many areas with an organisation.

I have been to many seminars and read so many government website that advise me to write a policy, strategy, framework, guidelines or some other sort of document. Disability Action Plan, Information Publication Plan, Information and Records Managment Framework, Information Architecture, Knowledge Management Strategy, Social Media Policy, Digital Transition Plan and it goes on ..........

Michelle Lambert - Planning your social media strategy.

• Social media is about relationships and engaging with stakeholders and the public, not just here's more 'about us'. It can so easily be added on to a Corporate Communications Strategy to drive visitors to the organisations website or as another media release feed.  These are good uses of some social media tools and a good way to start. But there is so much more value to be made here. 
• The communication should be two-way and interactive.
• Resourcing is fundamental to a successful social media campaign. 

Ian Fry - Is "good enough" KM OK?

KMers need to toughen up!! KM doesn't keep CEO's awake at night..... How do measure our contribution or ROI?

• There is safe and unsafe re-use. When promoting collaborative workspaces and technologies it is important to establish that they are editable and should be understood in context. An example of 'unsafe reuse' that Ian gave me was of a wiki where someone cuts and pastes a section of content for use in another tool or page. The content may have been correct in it's original location (jurisdiction, part of a process, different industry etc) but is wrong or misleading in it's new context or location.
• Metadata is important - when was the content validated or updated? Whjen is it due for it's next revision? Other contexts at time of creation/background information? This is an important consideration with wiki content, in my last workplace we had an internal research wiki and came across these issues, how do we revise content, do we remove old content, how do we know if it is still correct? In an unstructured collaborative space like a wiki these questions are difficult to answer. We had to retrospectively go back through images and apply a template to capture source, authorisation for use and other metadata across several years of content when we discovered that we were at risk of breaching copyright law.

Probably enough for this post .......