What you see…my work offers for 2020

As you’ll know from the home page, I’m Dion Lindsay, and I provide training and consultancy services in the rapidly growing knowledge management market.

I have done for a few years, although for the last two I have focused on public training while I took time away for family needs. Now that I’m returning to the full range of services (public training, inhouse training, and consultancy), this is what I’m intending for the rest of this year:

Public workshops:

• Continuation of my Practical KM workshop and Advanced KM workshop, which I run in the Spring and Autumn under the CILIP UKeiG banner.
• Communities of Practice, Collaboration Tools, Knowledge Transfer and Retention probably as public courses under my own Real KM banner
• All these will be extensively advertised – on twitter @dionl, LinkedIn and JISCmail lists and everywhere else I can think of!

In-house workshops

These are by arrangement when public workshops don’t quite cover what your IM and KM workforce needs, or when the timing of my public workshops isn’t right for you. The best way to find out about these is by emailing me at dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com

Consultancy

• In previous years this has included organisation-wide knowledge management strategies, and development programmes for Libraries and Information Units wanting to adopt knowledge management as a new service.
• My clients have included Amnesty International, the General Social Care Council, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Motor Neurone Disease Association, and the International Bureau of Fiscal Documentation (Amsterdam)
• The best way to find out about all this is to email me dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com for a list of the topics and services I provide or to discuss your needs with me. Watch my blog here and my twitter account @dionl for a view of my current expertise and interests.

Developing my resources

• I’m maintaining a strand of research on genuine KM digital tools as they come to market, including those that claim an element of artificial intelligence. Definitely part of KM future, but we need to be realistic
• Discovering what employers think KM involves, by analysing detailed job advertisements on LinkedIn and similar
• Sifting my consultancy experience, of course, for lessons learned and new perspectives to offer on KM

Looking forward to hearing from you if any of these have a value to your organisation. This year promises to be productive and fun!

dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com / @dionl / https://www.linkedin.com/in/dion-lindsay-9208323/

Important dates for Knowledge Managers in Q1 2020

24^th January 2020 [20200124¹]

The close of the current public consultation on guidance on how to explain the impact of decisions, processes and services delivered by AI.

The Information Commissioner’s Office says individuals expect to have explained to them the decisions taken about them on the basis of artificial intelligence, and that expectation is justified by articles 13-15 of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).

So ICO is working with The Alan Turing Institute (The Turing) in Project ExplAIn to provide organisations with guidance on how to do that. The public consultation closes on 24^th January, and the background and the work involved is thoroughly described in the project’s interim report here

30^th January 2020 [20200130¹]

Practical Knowledge Management for Information Professionals. I’m running the public version of this course through the UK electronic information Group, in CILIP’s offices in Ridgmount Street, London WC1. It gives a grounding in the principles and modern practice of knowledge management, and provides participants with lots of material to take back to the office.

I run the same course, and others like it, on request as in-house training. Contact me at dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com for more details.

12^th February 2020 [20200212¹]

The European Conference on Knowledge Management (3^rd and 4^th September) is in the UK this year, hosted by the University of Coventry. It has 12 February as the deadline for registering abstracts. If you are intending to present a paper, don’t forget – barely 6 weeks left! If you are intending to go to the conference  (so handy if you are a UK Knowledge Manager), follow the design and booking arrangements as they emerge here https://www.academic-conferences.org/conferences/eckm/

For in-house courses, public courses, or consultancy enquiries, contact dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com tel 01604 686797 or mob 07540 659255

¹A note about dating conventions

The dates in square brackets are my celebration of ISO 8601:2019 Date and time — Representations for information interchange, continuing to agree

yyyymmdd

as the preferred date format for information interchange.

I love it for practical dating purposes also, while feeling it might take time to become universal in non-technical environments.

I have used it for the last 10 years in my own practice. It is the simplest, truest filing convention I know for my own files, as well as the shortest format in which to represent a calendar date. And a sure way to avoid the confusion of eg 12/5/2019 (12^th of May or 5^th of December?)

And it is extendable to 12 digits – you can add two-digit hours and minutes.

E.g.

I’m loading this blog post at

202001061602

Where have I been?

dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com tel 01604 686797 mob 07540 659255

During a couple of years away from Knowledge Management consultancy while I attended to family responsibilities, I continued to run my KM workshops and, since I came back this Summer, I’ve been…

…at Stationers’ Hall…

…wrapping up the proceedings as a featured speaker at Stationers’ Hall (EC4 behind St Paul’s) after a beautiful summer’s evening of discussion in July. The event was organised by Carol Tullo and The Stationers’ Company to welcome Katherine Schopflin and Matt Walsh’s Practical Knowledge and Information Management (Facet Publishing 2019).  My full-length review of the book will appear in January 2020’s eLucidate.

…working with Clive Snell (Info International Ltd)…

… in August to bring the urgency of changes in scholarly publishing to the world of librarians and information professionals (LIPs). It included contributing to the ConTech 2019 conference, with EBSCO’s generous sponsorship of bursaries and discounts for LIPs. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and natural language processing were all represented and will feature in future posts as part of the future of knowledge management.

…at European Bank for Reconstruction and Development…

…in November, with Paul Byfield and Paul Corney to discuss the benefits of ISO 30401:2018 Knowledge Management Systems: Requirements, and CILIP’s new KM Chartership Programme. This followed discussions with East Midlands’ Legal Information Professionals (EMLIP) in October, and is part of a drive to modernise CILIP’s reach and impact as the professional body for IPs .

…running the first of this season’s KM courses…

.. for UKeiG at CILIP’s headquarters in EC1 at the very end of November. I’ve been running Advanced Knowledge Management: Strategic Design and Digital Implementation and its companion workshop: Practical Knowledge Management for Information Professionals, frequently in the last two years. This one in November was attended by professionals from the NHS, Government, universities, charities and quangos – which with the addition of law and accountancy firms would be a close cross section of my pre-family-break KM consultancy clients!

For in-house courses, public courses, or consultancy enquiries, contact dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com tel 01604 686797 or mob 07540 659255

How to turn “lessons learned” into “lessons applied”

One of the key features of knowledge sharing is the lessons learned technique. It is an obvious thing to want your organisation to be good at, but it is a surprisingly difficult thing to do well.

Here are some of the reasons why, and what you can do about them

1. People’s attention moves on. Once the activity or project is over, people have other things to do, and going back over old work seems as much fun as cold rice pudding. Instead, make sure the questions you are going to use to elicit the lessons are known from the start. It makes the burden less at the end, enriches the participants’ experience, and the mixture of work and reflexion usually makes the activity/project go better

 

2. It’s hard to convert people’s experience into lessons anyone else wants to learn. Find the best conversational writer in your team, or think about making the record an audio visual one instead of textual. Above all the lessons need to be engaging: fun to read, and relevant to apply later.

 

3. People tend to prefer to ask for help than to read ready-made answers. When I worked at the Motor Neurone Disease Association I was amazed to find that discussion forums were much more used than databases of solutions, and at a KM conference I found the metrics on this were exactly the same for Shell with thousands of staff as for the Association where we had barely 100. If the extra cost of making the experienced people available is too great, go for a hybrid solution: make the recorded solution as personable as possible

 

4. A lesson learned can become fossilised very quickly. Instead let it breathe by allowing comments from future users – what happened when they tried to apply it later? There are environments (health and safety, regulatory and so on) where lessons have to be urgently formalised as rules, but keep them “juicy” where you can

 

And here’s my mnemonic for increasing the lessons’ chances of having value – FARE.

• make them Findable
• when people know where the lessons are make them want to go there by making them Accessible
• make sure when they get there the lessons are Readable – fun to read or view and think about
• record them in a way that Encourages the reader or viewer to apply them.

The Lessons Learned technique is one of the building blocks for good knowledge management: the effort, applied selectively, pays dividends for the whole organisation!

For more help with lessons learned exercises contact me at

dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com

+44 (0) 7540 659255

+44 (0) 1604 686797

or direct message me on twitter @dionl

Best wishes and good km-ing!

Dion

 

 

 

Tooling up to contribute to making improvements stick

Libraries and Information Units have a range of entry points when looking to move into the knowledge services space.

One such is helping make sure improvements stick when they have been sourced in published external research. In many cases the future of LIU acquisitions budgets, for example, depends on the value their funders place on the material they acquire, and the “stickability” of the change that can be attributed to the material is one very good indication of that value.

In commercial environments these changes centre around delivering innovation to customers, and at London Info International Conference last December I discussed how sure we can be that published information contributes to innovation¹ .

In public health environments, the pressure is on to contribute new knowledge to the drive for continuous improvement. Stephen McMillan, Head of Knowledge Mobilization, Department of Health and Social Care, Wales, has generously drawn my attention to the work IHI is doing in this area. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement is based in Cambridge Massachusetts and published a short 3 page paper this February on making healthcare improvements stick. It makes great background reading for anyone in the Knowledge and Information Management arena who wants to understand this important area.

In very clear language it proposes 6 principles driving the sustainability of improvement which they have observed in leading healthcare systems.

To encourage stickability of practical improvements at frontline management levels, the paper proposes that organisations should do the following:

• standardise what makes good sense
• develop systems that promote routine review of standardised work
• introduce visual management techniques, such as visual boards or walls to display success
• ensure staff are following problem solving tools fluently and collaboratively
• provide clear escalation processes for non-standardised problems
• integrate these 5 principles right across the organisational hierarchy

The paper goes on to explain how to realise these principles – all in all it makes clear and purposeful reading for any Knowledge or  LIS manager wanting to step up into the contribution that knowledge and information can make to making improvements stick.

1. 6^th December 2016 http://info-international.com/2016-conference-programme/

2.    Mate, K and others (2017) Ensuring healthcare improvements stick: six key principles aid in continuous quality improvement. Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Cambridge Mass. http://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/Publications/Ensuring-Health-Care-Improvements-Stick.aspx

What counts as knowledge management software, and why?

When I ran my Advanced KM: Strategies and Digital Implementation course in London on 24^th October (1) we discussed what count as knowledge management products. The issue is not as simple as you might think.

1. KM is a discipline which finds expression in different ways in just about every organisation which adopts it.
2. The needs of the organisation seeking support from knowledge management need to be carefully planned for, with education, analysis and testing. Making document management/storage systems (however configurable they may claim to be) available to all staff and saying “Now you have knowledge management: get going” and waiting to see what happens has a case history of failing.

On the supply side no supplier claims to cover all of knowledge management. And there are products with knowledge management potential for which the supplier does not make that their number one claim.

To illustrate, here is a selection of products we used as the basis for a quiz on 24^th October.

Feel free to suggest additions , but be sure to say which knowledge management function your suggestion supports. The answers we came up with for matching the product to the KM function are at the end of the post.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

(1) I’ll be running another in Spring 2018: contact below for advance details

Dion Lindsay

Real Knowledge Management (DLC Ltd)

Mobile + 44 (0) 7540 659 255

Telephone + 44 (0) 1604 686 797

email: dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com

twitter: @dionl

KM Functions

Use this list to organize the KM products in the next section in a way appropriate to your enterprise’s needs and aspiration

A. Connecting people with people – so people can collaborate and discuss, interact and interact in real time and face to face

B. Capturing and publishing new knowledge – so users can generate and access new lessons, customer solutions, in print, audio or video formats

C. Organising, synthesizing and structuring knowledge – so that established good practice, guidance notes, rules and heuristics can be stored for easy access

D. Connecting people with documented knowledge – so people can find externally and internally created knowledge at the point of need

E. Assisting specific tasks – so that in-house experts and function leads can push knowledge to the user during each task

Digital products

Coveo

listed by Gartner, Inc. as a leading enterprise search engine in its Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines September 2017. Mostly deployed in organisations as Intelligent Search Platform but, like many KM products, going increasingly cloud-based https://www.coveo.com/

Engage intranet software

Intranet design software by Sorce, a supplier offering intranet software or various stages of bespoke design http://www.sorce.co.uk/intranet-software/

MediaWiki free and open source wiki software which can use relational database management systems such as MySQL or Oracle. Famously used to create Wikipedia https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Opentext

A leading Enterprise Content Management system which organises and stores an organisation’s documents and increasingly other sources such as transactional data. https://www.opentext.com/

Pega Express

The lead product of Pegasystems, which enables organisations to design workflow systems, including the knowledge needed to complete tasks. An early and enduring example of automated workflow process is annual reporting in the HR environment https://www.pega.com/

Rapidminer Studio

A highly regarded data and text mining product. Available on-premises or as cloud service. Text mining platforms can be used in innovative environments to discover and “push” ideas to the user. From free to US$10,000 pa depending on size of database. https://rapidminer.com/

Vanilla Cloud

provides an internet environment for enterprises to create, contribute to and manage discussion forums connecting staff, customers and suppliers. p.o.a. https://vanillaforums.com/en/software/

YouTube private and corporate channels

used to create videos for viewing only by employees or supplier/customer communities. The comments facility can make these easy and lively discussion formats. https://www.youtube.co.uk/

Zoom Video Conferencing Service

includes instant messaging and breakout room functions. Priced £10 to £130 pm depending on functionality and number of participants https://www.zoom.us/

 

(Answers: Coveo D; Engage B D; Mediawiki B; Opentext C; Pega Express E; Rapidminer Studio D; Vanilla Cloud A; YouTube private and corporate channels B; Zoom Video Conferencing Service A )

 

 

 

Is an asynchronous knowledge cafe possible? Part 3

Hi all

This is a much longer than usual blog. Apologies for that but not for the very interesting message from Juanita.

I had an exchange this morning with Juanita Foster-Jones about asynchronous cafes in another medium. I’ve reproduced it here with Juanita’s permission. Comments?

Dion

From Juanita

Interested in this. I haven’t participated in knowledge cafes but I have participated in asynchronous communities of practice – which I think is quite similar. One example of this is SCOPE community of practice. This is a group of educational learning technologists led by Sylvia Currie who would have themed asynchronous discussions. Format of these has been along the lines of

• A discussion topic is announced, with a moderator that is set to run over a finite period of weeks
• Moderator may make a presentation, either live webinar or recorded or just put some resources in the discussion area with notes
• Questions may come from the participants or moderator and are discussed over the period of the topic
• Participants can join in to the bits that interest them, share resources, and their may be live events throughout
• Group wikis and resource banks have been created as a result of these

What makes this work is the clearly defined time. Yes it is asynchronous but you have a limitation on this. This means you get a body of people together over a set period, so have posts coming in and chance to interact with a known group and know you will get a response. This helps build the community, you have shared understanding, a common purpose to the discussion.

In terms of knowledge cafes isn’t the whole point that it is real time? That it is face to face?  If it is just about knowledge sharing that can be done online, asynchronous ways, but maybe not in the same format that you have for a face to face or video based online gathering.

E.g. Break out rooms – these might be break out discussions over a period of a few days within the larger programme. Different discussions in different rooms. The point with break outs in face to face is to break a large group into smaller ones so every one can talk. But in an asynchronous discussion then it is easier to have your say, because you can think, write and post and not be talked over/have a short time to get it all in.

Coming to a consensus and feedback into main group – again in asynchronous if you assign people roles e.g. for/against/moderator/note taker you can all come up with an agreed summary of the discussion. Or this could be done on a wiki page which is then shared with wider group.

As with any activity that you are taking from face to face into online I would say focus first on what you are wanting to achieve from it, and then think about which technology would best allow that. You may find it is a combination.

Juanita Foster-Jones

My reply

That’s fascinating, Juanita – I really like the idea of a hybrid feature in a community of practice. Beyond that:

1. You’re right that breakout room discussions are one of the key features of knowledge cafes. But there are many aspects of the breakout rooms, in either the face to face cafes or in the digital cafes that David Gurteen has been running this Summer. The trick seems to be to identify all those aspects and imagine/discover whether they are critical to the success of knowledge cafes (which are synchronous). Without them (as we would have to be in asynchronous) would knowledge cafes work so well?

For example:

1. Spontaneous – it might be that not knowing until seconds before you start having the conversation who it is you’ll be talking with means you are relaxed enough to access or communally create ideas which don’t come if one thinks too much.
2. Face to face – it might be that body language as people react in the moment during the discussion provides inspiration to the participants. Interestingly,  the David Gurteen digital cafes allow even more observation of body language than is possible in the full discussion that happens after the breakout sessions
3. No record – In face to face the conversations aren’t recorded, which again might remove some inhibitions and the temptation in the second etc round of breakout discussions to check what exactly was said earlier and build on that

2. Answers to  “what are we trying to achieve” are usually deliberately absent in face to face or digital knowledge cafés other than perhaps “to have an inspirational conversation”.  You would think that would make it unattractive in a work environment, but in fact they have been really well appreciated onsite (see David’s website), with plenty of evidence that they turn out to be very useful in unpredicted and thoroughly business- like ways. It’s hard enough to keep a strong sense of purpose from arising in face to face cafes – it would be next to impossible in asynchronous, I think.

3.     It isn’t even the purpose of knowledge cafes to reach a consensus: it can be just as valuable to come up with a variety of ideas and recognise them.

Best wishes and thanks

Dion

Real Knowledge Management (DLC Ltd)

07540 659255 / 01604 686797

dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com

twitter: @dionl

Is an asynchronous knowledge café possible? Part 2

Thanks everyone for contributing – it has been a really interesting discussion so far, and of course the opportunity to comment is still there for everyone!

Effect of asynchronicity on café breakout/table discussions

So far we’ve concentrated on the effect of asynchonicity on the breakout/table discussions. We think that contributions to the conversation would tend to be more thoughtful and refined, and less spontaneous, with the extra time asynchronicity would provide us (David, RobR, Mike). That might mean this alternative model would be more appropriate for discussions that need tangible advances (RobR) rather than “pure” conversation. Mike also wonders whether we need a name other than café for this kind of interaction, and that makes me think this might be where the value of the café as a process could start to be defined, if we wanted to do that. RobS wonders whether the more considered nature of the asynchronous would make people less interested in contributing, and whether that’s a hint towards what holds people together in discussions.

I’ve been wondering about the other stages as well.

• In asynchronous the participants probably wouldn’t hear the presentation/talk at the same time. Does it make a difference to people’s appreciation of what is said, and the value of their later contributions, if they are aware of others listening?
• What if the participants chose not to listen to the talk? That would surely devalue the post talk discussions?
• Would participants in each breakout room have to be aware of who else was going to be there, and would that change the nature/value of the discussion, with issues of deference, ego and so on? It might be possible for participants to be anonymised to avoid that!
• Would a participant’s experience of contributing be devalued by not being heard while they were doing it?
• Would the existence of an audio/visual record, which participants in later rounds could refer to, spoil the effect of open-hearted discussion?

Some (Mike and Chris) have suggested we might give this a go in real life. Well I hadn’t intended to, but why not?

But before that

I wonder if there’s anything more we can get out of this as a thought experiment. Does the imagining we’re doing right now help gently work out what is so unique, and so valuable, about the synchronous digital knowledge cafés most of us experienced earlier this year?

Very best wishes all

Dion

Real Knowledge Management (DLC Ltd)

07540 659255 / 01604 686797

dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com

twitter: @dionl

Is an asynchronous knowledge café possible?

After a period of experimenting, David Gurteen ran his first commercial Zoom Knowledge Café in April 2017. I was fortunate to be involved in the experiments and the commercial Café, and they set me wondering.

Ten years ago, with just about everyone else, I didn’t believe a knowledge café could work digitally – there were too many technical and psychological features that were suited only to face-to-face conversation. And yet now the digital café seems to work very well. Here’s my blog post about the April event to demonstrate that https://nkmtblog.wordpress.com/2017/04/29/is-it-possible-to-run-knowledge-cafes-digitally/

Asynchronicity

So while we’re in the mood to be surprised, what about synchronicity – is that essential, the way we thought face- to- face was?
Today I’m pretty sure an asynchronous knowledge café just wouldn’t work. Surely people couldn’t join in, leave and re-join whenever they wanted, and record their contribution even if there was nobody in the café right then? And that’s what an asynchronous café would be.
Wouldn’t it break some of the principles from which knowledge café benefits derive, and anyway technology wouldn’t support it. But those are the same class of objections I had to the idea of digital knowledge cafes, and they work now!

Wouldn’t it be good if asynchronous did work?

Just think: with digital cafes we don’t have to get everyone together in the same place – with asynchronous cafes we wouldn’t even have to get them together at the same time.

I want to be very clear about this: I’m a great fan of knowledge cafes, and I don’t want to make things awkward with the outlandish idea of asynchronicity. In fact, it’s because I like them so much that I want to understand them better, and this sort of thought experiment seems very unlikely to do them any harm, while helping us explore them.

Would you like to join in thinking about this?

Here are the essential stages of a knowledge café, extracted from http://knowledge.cafe/knowledge-cafe-tipsheet-english/ .

What truly would NOT work in a digital asynchronous mode, where people could come and go, listen and contribute as their own time priorities allowed them?

1. Gather 12-24 people to have a conversation
2. Have someone make a 15-20 minute presentation to the participants on a topic that matters to them
3. Divide the participants into smaller conversation groups of 3 or 4 and invite them to talk amongst themselves about a question set by the speaker
4. After an appropriate time (in synchronous mode this would be 20 minutes or so), rearrange the conversation groups and invite them to discuss again
5. Repeat at least once more
6. Have all the participants come together for a further 20 minutes, where they continue the discussion

Let’s see if each step could be arranged so participants could join in when they wanted. And if anything needed to change to make that possible, would it destroy the effectiveness of a café?

Please contribute by commenting below, and let’s see if we can explore the essence of a knowledge café by discovering what “harm”, if any, the asynchronous challenge would do.

Best wishes all

Dion

Real Knowledge Management (DLC Ltd)

07540 659255 / 01604 686797

dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com

twitter: @dionl

New Public Commentary dates for British Standard on Knowledge Management (updated 20170913)

I promised in my last post about BS ISO 30401 Human resource management –Knowledge management system (2 September 2016) that I would blog with any updates I spot.

For most of the time since the draft ISO 30401 was passed to National Standards Organisations for review, the public commentary dates have been showing on BSI Standards Development site as 10/08/2017.

In fact that has been delayed while the ISO working group consider the pre-consultation draft: it seems the date for release of the draft for Public Comments in the UK is now 7 December 2017.

The publication date has been moved now to 4 January 2019! Let’s hope it has been waiting for. It bothers me that such little public sense of urgency signals that a sense of enthusiasm is missing. Not among those of us who teach, consult or implement Knowledge Management – come on committees!

On the plus side, there will still be an opportunity for public comments in the winter and early Spring, which we all thought had passed.

Here’s the link to the appropriate page on BSI’s website https://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com/projects/2015-03421

Dion Lindsay
Real Knowledge Management (DLC Ltd)
07540 659255 / 01604 686797
dion@dionlindsayconsulting.com
twitter: @dionl