Knowledge Management vs. Social Media

For a little while now I have been subconsciously irked by something, but only today did I realize why.  The trigger for this mild epiphany was a one year old blog post.  I will link you to it as soon as I explain my thoughts on the matter.

First of all, we all have our own biases.  Here is mine.  I came to KM from an IT/process background in 2000.  I came to SM from a KM background in 2004.

The irking I mentioned is being caused by the fact that I continue to practice both KM and SM and yet they don’t seem to be getting along.  KM has not embraced SM nor vice versa, despite their similar ideals: to support the sharing of information.

Many people have heard me espouse my theory that KM will never become more than an academic foundation because as each facet of KM gains a foothold, it breaks off into its own discipline.   However, I don’t believe that is what is happening with SM.  On the contrary, SM from its birth was very opposite to KM in so many ways.

• where KM seeks to provide structure/control, SM prefers chaos
• where KM tends towards large top-down systems, SM tends to be grass-roots
• where KM is often practiced by older professionals, SM has captured the imagination of a younger crowd
• where KM seeks to define the goal and then select appropriate tools, SM provides the tools and hopes that a common goal will emerge, but at the least everyone will individually find value

The triggering blog post I mentioned above is called Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War by Venkatesh Rao.  Personally, I think he puts too much emphasis on age, but it is at the very least thought-provoking.

One of the parts I like best is where he talks about Generation X being in-between the Boomers who prefer KM and the Millenials who prefer SM.  By the very fact that Venkatesh wrote the post the way he did, it is clear he likes to seek out patterns and meaning which is more of a KM type trait.

This tension between KM control and SM freedom is typified by the discussion of taxonomy vs. tagging.  Only now, as I write this blog post, do I realize that my fervent advocacy of tagging over taxonomy beginning in 2005 was a sign of my shifting allegiance from KM to SM.  I have had many debates with KMers about taxonomy and I am perceiving in new light why we were not seeing eye to eye.

If there is to be a war (as Venkatesh terms it) between KM and SM, then Enterprise2.0 is going to be the battle ground.  In order to have successful E2.0 initiatives, I believe that we are going to need to borrow from both camps.  There may be compromises that make neither happy.  Keep your eye out for these clashes as your organization rolls out any web2.0 tools/programs company-wide.

Addition: Since writing this post, I found an excellent series of slideshare posts that discuss the relationship between KM and SM

Part 2, Part 3

Side Note: I am currently working on building a Twitter driven (SM) community for knowledge management professionals (KM) called KMers.org and launching end of 2009.  It will be very interesting to see what lessons we learn.

The ROI of anything

I have been involved with the field of Knowledge Management (KM) since about 2000.   In all that time nobody has worked out a great model for how to compute ROI on KM projects.  The same discussions are now taking place around social media and collaboration projects that are now possible through the fast developing web2.0/enterprise2.0 toolset.

I was recently reading the Information Week cover story, “Can Enterprise Social Networking Pay Off”  and was utterly amazed by the referenced CIO’s who had absolutely no idea how they were going to ever show an ROI.  One was contemplating doing it based on the amount of server space that would be saved for email.  Could that possibly even scratch the surface to describe the value of social networking?  I would call it statistically insignificant. 

My mind started wandered to contemplate ways of capturing ROI for investments that are in the “squishy” domain.  Any aggregate after-the-fact metrics are challenging because too many assumptions will have to be made and the “return” will often have many other claims upon it from other projects.

On the other hand, if we measure the return closer to when the value is provided, we may have a shot.  For B2B sales, more and more CRM systems are being used by companies.  At first the field was dominated by large players with large customers, but over the last few years companies like salesforce.com and even the small SaaS player Highrise have made it much easier for the SMB market to participate.  The nice thing about these systems is that they track a number of process points including when a sale is made.  As part of that data entry why don’t we ask the salesperson to explain what contributed to their success.  They are likely in a good mood and willing to “share the love”.

Imagine the value of all that bottom-up information about what information/process/people is leading to sales.  The managers and executives would have a lot better sense of where to invest in order to make MORE sales.  If you believe as I do that social networking tools are a major contributing factor, would that not prove your ROI and lead to additional investment?  Wouldn’t most salespeople often rank the following as important?

• Finding the right people in the client organization
• Getting the right information about each of those people
• Learning about the company’s past successes and failures in that space and with that client
• Finding the right information within your firm in order to put the best solution forward
• Finding the right people in your organization in order to help support the sale
• etc…

I would propose a step in the closing of a sale where a number of pre-selected factors (for that product or type of sale) were put in front of the salesperson and they were asked to rate one of the following

• Essential
• Major Factor
• Minor Factor
• Not a Factor
• Negative Factor

Of course this type of measurement could also be done at other key transaction points, but a sale has a very nice neat tie to “return”.  Other measures like customer satisfaction while important can be challenging to tie back to solid undisputable items like money.  B2C sales would certainly pose more of a challenge for this technique, but customers may be willing to tell you what contributed to their purchase especially if you offer them something in return.

Please let me know what you think and share your comments on the ways you have found to measure ROI on the squishy stuff.

Future Education

There is no doubt that Education is critical to the future of the United States economy. Thomas Friedman talks about it extensively in his very popular book, The World is Flat. Therefore, the concepts in this post on Future Education are not only directly applicable to business, but our success in Future Education will have a direct impact on our abilities in Future Business.

I spent 90 minutes last night on the phone with an excellent visionary from the NYC Dept of Education.  Arthur VanderVeen is focused on how best to achieve knowledge sharing for NYC educators.

We talked about the difficulty of turning tacit knowledge into explicit and we talked about the challenges of fostering active communities of interest/practice.

Two of the main tenets of our discussion were

1. Give them what they want: the sharing needs to have value to the way they work today or want to work today. There are some technologies (eg. Computer, cell phone) that completely change the way we work, but most enhance the way we already work in a more evolutionary fashion rather than revolutionary
2. Work bottom-up rather than top-down. Try various programs in schools and see what works. Where there is success, invest more to work out if it can be scaled up.

One thing that has come to mind since our discussion is the 100-10-1 rule of community involvement. In the case of education it is probably 1000-100-10-1 due to the challenge of getting already overworked educators to even view information.

• For every 1000 educators
• 100 will actively or passively browse the knowledge-base
• 10 will comment on or use existing content
• and 1 will contribute something new

That means that for 80,000 teachers you may only have 80 contributors. This is likely not sufficient volume to create a critical mass of content that keeps the 100 coming back and gets more of the 1000 to view. The larger districts may decide to invest in “librarians” who seek out good content and take the time to get it into the knowledge-base, but this is not the most efficient model and is probably not tenable for the smaller districts.