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With this book in your hand, you’re probably looking for ways to help your organization get smarter by making the most effective use of online conversations. In these pages we write about a basic human drive to share what we know. We reposition that age-old practice at the intersection of two social environments: the modernizing organization and the expanding electronic network. Your company should know what this book reveals, because in this competitive and downsized economy, you are being forced to make the best use of your current human resource assets. You can’t afford the high cost of replacing the knowledge of people you’ve trained and lost. You must find, harvest, and distribute current and relevant knowledge from a wide variety of trusted human sources in order to make decisions and innovations in today’s hyperactive marketplace of things and ideas. Organizations today must change intelligently and constantly to survive. Ongoing, high-quality conversation is a key to making that kind of change possible. Though online knowledge networks can involve sophisticated technology, this book is not, at its core, about technology; it’s more about people and motivation. Though terms like application integration are important to understand in this context, you’ll likely find terms like cultural evolution and self-governing systems to be more relevant to the successful adoption of useful online conversation as a productive process within your organization.
TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® Building the Knowledge Management Network Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Putting Conversation to Work Cliff Figallo Nancy Rhine Wiley Technology Publishing Building the Knowledge Management Network Best Practices, Tools, and Techniques for Putting Conversation to Work Cliff Figallo Nancy Rhine Wiley Technology Publishing Publisher: Robert Ipsen Editor: Cary Sullivan Assistant Editor: Scott Amerman Managing Editor: Pamela Hanley New Media Editor: Brian Snapp Text Design & Composition: Benchmark Productions, Inc. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trade- marks. In all instances where Wiley Publishing, Inc., is aware of a claim, the product names appear in initial capital or all capital letters. Readers, however, should contact the appropri- ate companies for more complete information regarding trademarks and registration. This book is printed on acid-free paper. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 0-471-21549-X (paper : alk. paper) Printed in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 iii Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix Part One Cave Walls to CRTs: The Landscape of Knowledge Networking 1 Chapter 1 Knowledge, History, and the Industrial Organization 3 Our Ancestral Heritage 3 Stories, Rituals, Trust, and Culture 9 The First Mass Medium 16 The Dawn of the Info Age 21 Summary 27 Chapter 2 Using the Net to Share What People Know 29 Managing Knowledge 29 Roots of the Knowledge Network 32 A Knowledge-Swapping Community 40 Organizational Knowledge Networking 45 Summary 59 Chapter 3 Strategy and Planning for the Knowledge Network 61 Strategy and Change 62 Planning and Cost Issues 74 Summary 81 Contents Part Two Matching Culture with Technology 83 Chapter 4 The Role of IT in the Effective Knowledge Network 85 IT and Knowledge Exchange 86 Technical Approaches to Managing Knowledge 97 Basic Tools of the Knowledge Network 103 Online Environments for Knowledge Sharing 107 Summary 111 Chapter 5 Fostering a Knowledge-Sharing Culture 113 Creating the Ideal Conditions 114 Analyzing an Organization’s Culture 116 Tapping the Mind Pool 125 Leadership: Energy from the Top 127 Self-Organizing Subcultures 131 The Challenge of Change 134 Summary 135 Chapter 6 Taking Culture Online 137 The Medium Is Part of the Message 138 Tools and Their Configuration 146 Three Dimensions of Collaboration 153 Knowing the People and the Policies 159 External Collaborative Communities 161 Summary 162 Chapter 7 Choosing and Using Technology 165 Tools for Every Purpose 166 Tools, Their Features, and Their Applications 176 Instant Messaging and Presence 191 Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Nets 192 Building Environments for Collaboration 195 Tools for Transitory Conversational Events 199 Summary 202 Part Three Practical Applications of Knowledge Networking 205 Chapter 8 Initiating and Supporting Internal Conversation 207 Cultural Preconditions 208 Where Consultants Come In 209 Selling the Idea 211 Engaging the Stakeholders 215 Incentives to Participate 216 Learning to Tell Stories 220 The Practice of Online Conversation 224 Organizing the Community 227 Spontaneous Conversational Communities 229 Transitory Conversation for Immediate Solutions 239 Planning to Reinforce Knowledge-Sharing Culture 242 Summary 244 iv Contents Contents v Chapter 9 Conversing with External Stakeholders 247 Building External Relationships 248 Learning about (and from) Your Customers 254 Customer-to-Customer Knowledge Exchange 262 Hosting the Customer Conversation 274 Where Customers Gather on Their Own 281 Summary 286 Chapter 10 The Path Ahead 287 Interdependence and Infoglut 288 Conversation Proliferation 290 The Sustainable Organization 294 The New Skill Set 312 Future Technical Paths 316 Summary 321 Appendix A Resources 323 Notes 327 Index 337 vii Knowledge networks depend for their success on the right social environment. We have worked within many such respectful, trusting, nurturing, and educa- tional social environments, and those experiences have led us to write this book. We both spent many years learning together with hundreds of others in building a small, self-sufficient community in Tennessee. We applied what we learned in that challenging social experiment to the work we did in the early days of our first online communities at The WELL and Women.com. The members of those communities showed us the value of lowering the communications boundaries between management and customers. In those and in subsequent positions at AOL, Digital City, Salon.com, and PlanetRX, we observed the value of informal knowledge sharing through the Net. And so we thank the innumerable people we worked with and did our best to serve for being our teachers in collaboration in those virtual but still very personal environments. We would not have traveled our respective paths toward community interac- tion were it not for the support and example of our families. And so we each acknowledge their parts in our development as leaders who look for the ways in which people agree rather than ways in which they disagree. Nancy : I want to thank my mother and father, Bill and Dorothy Gerard, who have always exemplified the essential best practices of granting people the benefit of the doubt regardless of age, race, gender, or social standing. I have learned from them that 99 percent of the time people not only prove worthy of Acknowledgments [...]... communities for teaching me how to listen and work together for the common good AM FL Y We’d like to acknowledge all of those who provided the information and stories that have made this book happen Special thanks go to Tom Brailsford of Hallmark for his generous insight into what may be the model of customer relationships for the future And last, but not least, we express our appreciation for the support... leaders, but in being closer to the workers and their specific responsibilities, their role definitions are changing due to the selforganizing influence of the Net Because managers direct the activities of working groups, they, too, need to understand the capabilities of the technology to support conversations so that they can begin to plan and lead their departments and teams within the emerging online meeting... communications media to exchange mission critical information about their jobs or projects, but this book is for them, too For although leadership from the top of the organization is a necessity for changing a culture to one that values creative conversation, the best conversations and best ideas are most likely to bubble up from the bottom of the organizational chart, where the actual work gets done and the company... knowledge networking: culture and technology Because technology is necessary to create the online environment, xv xvi Introduction its influence cannot be separated from the resulting culture Chapter 4 looks at the role of the information technology department (IT) in building and maintaining the technical platform for the knowledge network, and the ideal working relationship between the network and the. .. organizations prepare and brace themselves for changes that might otherwise blindside them Incorporating knowledge networks into the company’s strategic future requires leadership that understands how such networks function, for any top-down design of what is basically a bottomup activity can render it dysfunctional Likewise, in designing the platform for knowledge networking, the actual users are the best judges... through a dark, wet, and narrow passage into a cavern Holding crude torches before them, they groped deeper into the damp gloom, past the evidence of bears that had made the cave their home They built a small fire to light the space, and after mixing clays and water for their medium, they painted depictions of the creatures they often encountered stalking the hills and river bottoms around them Leopards,... of management philosophy that has come with the widespread adoption of the Internet and the Web Information management has become a necessity, and as the tools and connectivity have advanced, the concept of knowledge networking has been born Chapter 3, “Strategy and Planning for the Knowledge Network, ” considers the many challenges that organizations face in changing their cultures, perspectives, and. .. of their creation We may be the distant descendants of the cave painters, but the best we can do is guess that these paintings had meaning and solved problems for the clan They could have created them to keep clan members safe, to keep them fed, or simply to allay their fears In the lingo of modern knowledge management, the art in Chauvet Cave would be described as TE 8 Knowledge, History, and the. .. recognizes the animals and symbols on the cave wall 2 The knowledge space: The cave itself and its limited access make it a special place for sharing knowledge 3 Recordkeeping and access: Pictures are drawn to record what the artists knew for others 4 Context and purpose: The tribe understands the meaning and importance of the animal figures on the cave wall 5 Knowledge communities: The tribe itself shares and. .. and benefits from the special meaning and purpose of the paintings Stories, Rituals, Trust, and Culture Trust is the cornerstone of knowledge- sharing cultures The one certain showstopper to revealing our knowledge to others is mistrust the perception that The Other is our competitor or enemy and might use what we tell them against us Historically, we have opened up to others when they were recognized . 29 Managing Knowledge 29 Roots of the Knowledge Network 32 A Knowledge- Swapping Community 40 Organizational Knowledge Networking 45 Summary 59 Chapter 3 Strategy and Planning for the Knowledge Network. at the role of the information technology department (IT) in building and main- taining the technical platform for the knowledge network, and the ideal work- ing relationship between the network. of them find their communities within the workplace. Yet these communities and the conversations that go on within them are invisible to most of the companies providing the intranets on which they