November KM Café Podcast

[Music]

Carolyn:

Hi everyone, welcome to the KM Café in our November 2009 podcast. Todayat the café we’re joined by knowledge management consultant Neil MacAlpine whocame to knowledge management (KM) of necessity while working for the government of Alberta as an engineer. In the process of exploring how best to support knowledgesharing across his organization, he became one of those go-to experts in the field andsoon turned this avocation into his career. For nine years Neil advised a 1000 persondepartment on the finer points of knowledge access, development, and sharing and todayhe consults many well known organizations across Canada and we are pleased he couldshare some of his experiences with us here today.

So let’s welcome Neil to the café and ask him first to tell us a bit more himself.

Welcome Neil.

Neil:

Good morning, so my background basically I worked in the Department of Agriculture for about 15 years as an engineer in water and conservation and water [coly]management. And then as KM start to appear on the radar we were one of the firstorganizations into the internet back in the1995 it is hard to believe that we’re only talkingabout technology that’s12 years old. Very quickly we realized that our website that we’reusing to communicate critical information for the farmers was also becoming theorganization library for critical knowledge and after about 3 years of some pilot projectsaround KM in the Department of Agriculture we decided to get serious about it and because I’ve been doing some interesting work with what would have been today regardas an early vision practice of doing a lot of information sharing back to the rest of theorganization about critical breaking news about what were hearing I got recruited into being one of a two man unit in KM so the Department of Agriculture in Alberta. So theDepartment of Agriculture was the first government department in 2002 to actually createa coaching unit with our role to encourage staff around the process and tools of knowledge sharing. So that’s what we did for the next 9 years my cohort Ron Weizenber was the first chief knowledge officer in the government of Alberta and he left after thefirst 5 years and once he retired I wind up as a one man unit continuing the work on untilI left last year, actually in the Spring, so it became our internet experience and movedinto collaboration tools and tools for project teams and we also did some work aroundcommunities of practice not an awful lot but enough to really understand what were thecritical elements of it and had enough communities that didn’t work and enoughcommunities that did work to understand d the difference between successful means of practice and […]the organization learning

Carolyn:

Right well that is a pretty interesting way to develop a function within anorganization especially coming from an engineering background as you did and intowhat might seem like a completely unrelated endeavor do you think that is a commontrajectory?

Neil:

One of the things that organizations has to think about in terms of the kind of people you want to support KM is not so much whether they understand knowledgemanagement but whether they understand the way organization works and I have done a

lot of work across boundaries, across the organization so I knew a lot of people and Ronwas very well connected and so between the two of us there was not too much of theorganization that we could not reach out and touch. The other part was to understand our KM initiative was not around KM projects it was around supporting the knowledgesharing that had to happen in the organization.

Carolyn:

Right, so you were supporting work that needed to be done?

Neil:

Yeah so very often we were going to the organization and saying what’s the criticalwork you are doing, what are your knowledge sharing challenges around that and theywere usually quite a few and then we could say well here’s some of the tools that wealready have and what would do you think would work for you and what do you think wecould do around improving those to actually make them work so we wind up as sort of afront line salesman to some of the IT tools but we also very often wind up understanding business processes as well.

Carolyn:

So I am gonna I’m just gonna ask you a difficult question right of the top hereand I’m saying it is a difficult because I know that the question has not really beenentirely answered yet so my question really is

what is KM today and where we at interms of our understanding of what it is?

Neil

: KM varies by organization and it is really truly when you think about what KM isabout it is about enhancing and being delivered about the critical information sharing thatgoes on in the organization. An information sharing takes two components there is thestrategic information that the organization needs to get to and share quickly and there isknow-how. Know-how about how you actually do things as a high end knowledgeworker in a particular technical or professional setting or know-how about a business process how the steps of the business process how they work effectively. So you takethese two components know-how and strategic information you say ok how do we makereally work well in our organization? Every organization has different critical business processes that need to be supported and KM is doing its work like any other supporter,corporate support process. You should be able to say what exactly you do is dependent onwhat that critical business process is. So I’ve had the chance to sit in on a community of practice of [folks] across Canada that work on the strategic side of the KM inorganizations and this include the big five accounting firms Deloy Douche, KBMG,Earnest and Young, BWC and so on and the Bank of Canada, Hydro Québec. So somefairly pretty high powered organizations and critical that have started out KM andcontinued to pay attention to it and KM has different flavor in each one of thoseorganization. One of those organizations started off with a community of practice [Farmacross Canada] which is a crown corporation that makes loans to farmers, ranchers andfood processors so they’ve had a really robust information around organizational learningthat the communities of practice has really enhanced that has really profoundly affectedthe way the culture of organization has evolved and how they get their strategic businessinformation. And then you go to other organizations where for example you’ll find theKM folks in charge of the internet because the internet is in some organizagtion is the primary tool that the new staff and the consultants of the organization go to you find the

critical business information they need to be sharing out to clients on a regular basis. So itreally is dependent on what the business need and the business process that you supportit. The early days of KM were technology focused and consequently because thetechnology really quite frankly wasn’t very well wasn’t all that a great and secondly poorly well built, we went through the profit disilluisionment as Gardner calls. Gardner says that software evaluation companies they look at technologies and basically havewhat they the call the [hyper] where a new net technology starts to emerge and is goingto be the solution to all the ills of the world. As people discover that it is not that quite aseasy to make work as sunlike in the softwares and not quite robust enough. Eventually hereached a place where he called a profit disilluosionmenrt and then as both practice andtechnology get more robust you get this rising level of use where technology and the practice actually start to provide strong continuing value to the organization. I think we’reout of the profit disilluisionment around KM that happened back around 2004-2005 sincethen the technologies to do the foundational work around tagging information has got alot better. It is not there not all the way yet because we still have to develop some casesof robust taxonomy but where most of this earlier years in KM wind up going to isrealizing that in behind all this stuff was something that we’d all have been doing whichis knowledge sharing. That’s where a lot of the focuses in KM switch from how do Imake the technology work which wasn’t all that fun quite frankly because it was not tohow do I remake knowledge sharing work better in the organization because it issomething we already do. And that’s where some of the really nice stuff aroundcommunities of practice start to emerge.

Carolyn:

Yeah well that’s the question that’s really risen to me as a student of knowledge man if technology itself is only a tool of KM that is intended to supportknowledge work within an organization and really what you wanna get at as a personinterested in KM is how to facilitate knowledge access and sharing across theorganization.It seems to me that the line between what we do naturally and KM is kindof grey sometimes and it can even interfere with what might be natural communication processes in organization. Have you experienced that?

Neil:

Well this is an overwhelming focus on trying to collect and categorize information.The worst thing KM can do is sink down into the depth of information management.Information mangers and record mangers have a legitimate and important function in theorganization about keeping track of the work order, the contract, the memo that sayswe’re going to work with this particular business partner you know, and here are theconditions we’re gonna work with them under. All that information is really important but it is not where you want your KM stuff to focus on because the strategic informationis really something that starts out of conversation and there is five principles of KM that Ikeep coming back to, the first one is that knowledge sharing is a behavior is not a process. So you coach the behavior coach it as much as you can with the process andtechniques that make KM happen, and then David Stone has a series of additional basicrules of thumb that talk about what really is at the core of knowledge sharing. Thosethings are import to pay attention to. So after the basis of it, a lot of us in KM out of theearly days have moved across and started to focus on the conversational side of KMcoming back to on of David Snowden “twisms” I know more that I can say and I will say