PKM and competitive intelligence

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What’s competitive intelligence? The Wikipedia says:

“A broad definition of competitive intelligence is the action of defining, gathering, analyzing, and distributing intelligence about products, customers, competitors and any aspect of the environment needed to support executives and managers in making strategic decisions for an organization.”

Several years ago I advised a client on how to develop a CI process:

1. Start by asking questions internally and seeing what kind of answers you get. Use your existing social media tools to do this.

2. As a distributed team, each person can be responsible for a specific information source that is monitored regularly. This should be narrated and posted for all to see and comment.

3. Ask a weekly question and see who can get some information that may be able to answer part or all of it.

4. In the feedback to these questions people may ask you to re-frame the questions. Continue to learn and refine this process for your unique context. Better questions will make for better CI. Keep this process visible.

5. You may not need to hire anyone else to collate the data, but if you do, keep your team (who have industry knowledge) involved.

6. Don’t just hand CI over to a junior staff member. CI should be part of the conversational flow in the company. Marketing, sales, developers and management should be actively involved.

7. The process of asking questions, seeing if there are answers and in turn asking questions about the questions can hone the team’s ability to gather competitive intelligence.

8. If you decide to purchase access to information sources, only buy one at a time. Use that source as much as you can (squeeze it dry) until you realize you should eliminate it or augment it with another purchased source.

CI, like knowledge management, needs people to be continuously involved and engaged. CI is really just a focused type of knowledge management. Therefore, people with good PKM skills should also be better contributors to CI.

In How to Map Sources for a Competitive Intelligence Project, Cate Farrall provides a basic set up guide to those practicing CI, and describes a 3 step process.

competitive-intelligence-project-source-map
Image: Cate Farrall

This map can also be used as a way to initially set up the Seek part of a personal knowledge mastery framework. Once your PKM objective(s) is/are clear, then identify one or more resources from each part of the map. This should give a fairly broad selection of knowledge resources.

Institutional Memory

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Roger Schank has several interesting articles posted on his site in the Corporate Memory section, which I decided to dive into recently.

In The Future of Knowledge Management, he says that the main problem with KM systems is that they do not copy how real people think and that unlike a person, a “KM system simply gets slower as a result of more information”. He proposes creating software scripts to organize information, but these must be capable of self-modification. I have not seen any systems that really do this well, yet. Schank concludes:

There is a lot of knowledge in an enterprise that can be used to organize new knowledge that is coming in. People understand new knowledge in terms of what they already know. A smart KM system must know a lot of about an industry and a particular enterprise before it starts up. This is hard but by no means impossible. And it is the future of software – namely software that really knows a great deal about your business.

Until these types of systems are available though, I would encourage individuals to practice personal knowledge management and use enterprise social networks to share within the organization. It may not be as elegant, but I know it can be implemented today, with existing technologies and skills that can be developed by anyone.

Algorithmic search filters that can push things out, based on certain criteria are what Schank calls “Information that Finds You”. Add geo-location and you can get immediate feedback on things around you. These exist, but take time to setup and maintain. In organizations, providing coaching and support on how to optimize our software & hardware tools (our outboard brains) is often lacking. Not only is there a need for a learning concierge but also a basic digital concierge, so that we can use our tools optimally. For instance, even doing an advanced online search query is beyond the grasp of most people on the Net.

Schank also writes about the need for a Reminding Machine, which is based on the premise that knowledge is best communicated just in time.

A reminding machine has thousands of stories from experts in various areas of life telling about important aspects of their lives that have lessons about life in them, the kind of stories you might tell to colleagues or to students … In order to build this machine it is necessary to collect people’s stories and index them according to the goals and plans that a story instantiates.

In his keynote at DARPA in 2010, Schank discusses story telling and KM in great detail. Here are some highlights

  • Stories: should be full of details but short
  • Lecture: people cannot think about what they are thinking and listen to the speaker at the same time
  • Stories, to be effective, must not be too abstract for the person listening. Listeners must be able to absorb the stories.
  • Comprehension means “mapping your stories onto my stories”. It’s difficult to communicate with someone who has different stories.
  • In good stories, we do not give answers.

There are 12 Fundamental Cognitive Processes, according to Schank:

  1. Prediction
  2. Modelling
  3. Experimentation
  4. Evaluation
  5. Diagnosis*
  6. Planning*
  7. Causation
  8. Judgement
  9. Influence
  10. Teamwork
  11. Negotiation
  12. Describing*

* These processes are what Schank calls “The Big Three”.

Several examples of the 12 processes are presented as stories in the second video of the keynote.

For anyone interested in institutional memory, story telling, or knowledge management, all four videos are well worth watching. Roger Schank concludes that the most difficult part in all of this is actually collecting the stories. The best people to collect stories from are those who are able to admit that they mismanaged, botched, or bungled something. This can be a real challenge in organizations that do not discuss failure.

Network Era Fluency

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Today, it’s all about networks, something you were most likely not taught about in school. This means that most of our education is useless in understanding the world as it currently exists. Yes, useless.

If you were raised during the past several decades you probably understand tribes and institutions. You likely heard a lot about market forces, especially in 2008. But that is a triform society. What happens as we become a quadriform society (Tribes +Institutions +Markets +Networks)?

There are some interesting things that happen when hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, as the writers of the Cluetrain Manifesto said in 1999 (that long ago). For example, United Breaks Guitars, a video that gave a whack on the side of the head to United Airlines, adversely affected United’s stock price. Wikileaks published some documents and enormous state resources were put against one person, now holed up in an embassy, at significance expense to those who pay the guards. Arab Spring became a force overnight, confusing intelligence agencies (the same ones who never saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc in advance). The Occupy movement came and some say has gone, but it’s likely a field test for more movements to come.

In education, the current subversion is called a MOOC, which has already been subverted by corporate interests, but will likely rise again in another name or form. In the labour movement we are seeing things like alt-labour as well as a growing shareable economy. CSA’s are becoming the norm. Networked, distributed businesses, like AirBNB, are disrupting existing models, with the inevitable push-back as they become successful.

Big data is also networked data. Data is the new oil, according to Gerd Leonhard. While my personal data may not be that important in the great scheme of things, networked data drive advertising, brands, and security systems. To negotiate the network era we need to understand networks – social networks, business networks, government networks, and information networks. We need network fluency.

Tony Reeves wrote a recent post about the 21st century skill set, showing that global fluency could be developed through certain skills like critical thinking, in addition to some key literacies, like information literacy. I have taken these ideas but describe them slightly differently, as shown in the image below.

network era fluencyNetwork era fluency could be described as individuals and communities understanding and being part of global networks that influence various aspects of our lives. For individuals, the core skill is critical thinking, or questioning all assumptions, including one’s own. People can learn though their various communities and develop social literacy. Information literacy is improved by connecting to a diversity of networks. But control of networks by any single source destroys the ability for people and communities to develop real network era fluency, which is not good for society in the long run and may kill innovation and our collective ability to adapt.

Mass network era fluency can ensure that networks remain social, diverse, and reflect many communities. This kind of fluency, by the majority of people, is necessary to deal with the many complex issues facing humanity. We cannot deal with complex issues and  networked forces unless we can knowledgeably talk about them. This requires fluency.

Related: The Network is the Solution

Friday's Finds 196

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Friday’s Finds:

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“When prepping for a big story about a company in crisis, news outlets go to LinkedIn to look for people who have recently left.” – @TorontoLouise

“Culture is what happens when the managers leave the room – doing what’s right in the absence of authority.” – @ValaAfshar

“I actually think that getting schools to change the physical ways kids use the school space is harder than changing pedagogy in class.” – @ChrisLehmann

Innovation is only innovation when it’s sustainable. – by @DonaldClark

All in all, she [a school teacher in Cambodia] was building a sustainable, scalable solution by fitting the technology to her scant resources with a fair amount of cultural sensitivity. This is exactly what I presented at Online Africa, and why I’m so critical of many of Sugata Mitra and Negroponte’s ‘parachute projects’. Innovation should not trump sustainability.

The Brazilian Protests are Existential: an indicator of a crisis of civilization bubbling up at the margins:

Most of the kids I met in Brazil had at least two mobile phones. They monitor their global community of Facebook friends hourly. They are impatient to get on with their lives but as they reach adulthood they find little space for either their aspirations or their concerns. The work available to them (and for 25% there is none) is as low paid drones in faceless corporations or failing public institutions that deliver neither adequate services nor fulfilling career opportunities.  They feel oppressed by massive cultural forces that are making robots out of them. They feel “rage against the machine.”

Fast Co.Exist: Meet Alt-Labor, the non-union workers movement – @FastCoexist

“Brands like Nike, they don’t own factories anymore. They don’t manufacture anything. They don’t even manage manufacturing,” Fine says. She cites the shift from vertically integrated firms to a world of contractors and subcontractors as a central problem for any labor movement, especially since unionizing contract workers is illegal. “We have this dramatic mismatch between 1930s forms of representation and 21st-century forms of employment,” she says.

skills + literacies = global fluency – by @tonyjreeves

Global-fluency-v3_by Tony ReevesImage by Tony Reeves

Preparing for the network era workplace

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My presentation at the Learning Technologies Summer Forum in London two weeks ago concluded with the advice to help people be more explicit in their work. Leading up to that conclusion, I showed how the nature of work is changing. We are moving into a creative economy, as Gary Hamel says. Customized work, with high task variety, is becoming the norm. Routine work is being replaced by software and robots. Formal instruction cannot keep up with workplace needs, so there is an increasing requirement to support informal learning and the sharing of implicit knowledge. Finally, much of what we produce at work today is intangible.

Here is the video recording: enterprise social technologies, learning & performance

 

Learning is too important to be left to the professionals

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profWorkplace learning professionals are in for a shock. Business is waking up to the fact that learning is now mission critical. Will executives continue to allow learning policy to reside in a separate department or some sub-department of HR for much longer? Do you think they will let “learning professionals” maintain sole control? I doubt it; especially if the military, which is either training for war or engaged in one, is an example.

For example, the military lets training specialists and schools run individual training, but even more time and effort is put into collective training that emphasizes social and informal learning. The latter is run by operators (e.g. line of business owners) not learning specialists. I think business is going there as well, if the struggle over control of enterprise social media is an indicator – and the learning function seldom is allowed to run it. Using the 70:20:10 lens, it’s likely that these professionals may only look after the formal 10% of organizational learning. You could say that is being marginalized.

Enterprise social media and external social networks are where more business transactions will occur. They are also where a lot of learning will happen, but not separated from business. The networked business world is subverting the learning and development hierarchy. Scalable learning does not come from a separate departmental function.

The cost and difficulty of coordinating activities across entities, on a global scale, is far lower now. The pace of change is accelerating and the degree of uncertainty increasing. Perhaps a new rationale will be required to drive institutional success in the future. Perhaps we need to move from a rationale of scalable efficiency to one of scalable learning — designing institutions and architectures of relationships across institutions that help all participants to learn faster as more participants join. —John Hagel – HBR

Mainstream media are catching on that in the network era, work is learning and learning is the work. This article from BloombergBusinessWeek is an example of the growing understanding that social learning is a business imperative:

Staff who carry out day-to-day duties—and whose productivity you’re looking to improve—should ultimately be the source for defining what knowledge they need and what knowledge they know is valuable to others.

With learning in the business spotlight, questions will be asked about the efficacy of current methods and practitioners of those methods. We are seeing a growing demand for self-directed and networked professional development. Recently, Craig Wiggins told the ASTD (training & development) community to just stop pretending – “Let’s stop pretending that, at one point or another, we haven’t for a moment wondered if we deserve to be marginalized. (Opinions on learning are never short supply.)” Learning will not be marginalized, but the learning trades, like scribes of old, will be.

The network is the solution

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Our future needs to be focused on learning, not instruction. The key to a flourishing civilization in the network era is sense-making. We have to move from what David Warlick describes as individualized instruction to personalized learning. In the latter, “Literacy becomes a wide range of evolving information skills developed around the activities of learning – the ability to acquire knowledge and skills through the resourceful and responsible utilization of information.” Self-instruction, the basis of personal knowledge mastery, is a necessity in effective peer-to-peer networks, as networks are how we will govern ourselves more and more. David Ronfeldt articulates this with his TIMN [Tribes-Institutions-Markets-Networks] framework.

TIMN has long maintained that, beyond today’s common claims that government or market is the solution, we are entering a new era in which it will be said that the network is the solution (e.g., here and here). Aging contentions that turning to “the government” or “the market” is the way to address particular public-policy issues will eventually give way to innovative ideas that “the network” is the optimal solution.

We all need to understand how to become contributing members of networks, for work and for life. This should be the primary focus of all education.

“Reed’s Law” posits that value in networks increases exponentially as interactions move from a broadcasting model that offers “best content” (in which value is described by n, the number of consumers) to a network of peer-to-peer transactions (where the network’s value is based on “most members” and mathematically described by n2).  But by far the most valuable networks are based on those that facilitate group affiliations, Reed concluded. – David Bollier

Without sense-making skills, the citizenry cannot understand complex issues, such as individual privacy versus national security. These issues require networked, human intelligence, not broadcast sound bites nor ‘learning objects’.

Sensemaking should drive policy. Policy drives decisions. Decisions, of course, need to be informed. If the People don’t know what makes their world go ‘round, the folks on the Hill sure won’t. Globalized governments can’t. – What the Snowden Case Teaches Us

As David Bollier concludes, “Legitimate authority is ultimately vested in a community’s ongoing, evolving social life, and not in ritualistic forms of citizenship.” Should not education move beyond ritualistic forms of subjects, classes, and certifications and toward ongoing, evolving social learning? How else will we be able to deal with the complexities of this networked, connected sphere that we inhabit?

Jon Husband writes that we are all in this together:

The interconnected Information Age is beginning to show us that we’re all linked together – and that the whole system matters.

This principle applies to organizations, to networks of customers, suppliers, employees and communities, to our societies and to the planet.

New language for this principle is popping up everywhere – knowledge networks, intranets, communities of practice, systems thinking, swarming, social software, social networks, tipping points.

Awareness is the key.  Maintain an “open focus”.

Being aware of yourself, others and the effects of your actions and ways of being in relation to others is a fundamental requirement in these conditions.

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Note: This post was written in order to put a number of ideas together into an initial narrative, mostly for myself. To me, it makes sense, as I have read and tried to unpack the many linked articles. For the casual reader, this may not be so clear. – Harold

Social, Cooperative, Mobile

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Work is an activity, not a place. – NineShift

Is mobile the future of work? Are we social creatures? Social learning is for human work, I wrote in my last post. Staying connected while we move, maintains our social networks. Mobile connections also help us get things done. Mobile devices give access to what we need, wherever we are. All indicators are that mobile work is increasing.

Mozilla now has the Firefox OS phone for the ‘next billion’ people. Many developers design first for mobile, and then for the web. IDC forecasts worldwide tablet shipments to surpass even portable PC shipments this year. At the Mayo Clinic, iPads and iPhones are standard.

Cooperation is becoming necessary to get almost any work done. The majority of people use social tools at work, to communicate with customers, or for professional development. Cooperation differs from collaboration. Cooperation is sharing freely without any expectation of direct reciprocation. It’s what most people do naturally. Mobile enables wider cooperation by being continuously available. Cooperation drives the networked enterprise — customers, suppliers, partners, and beyond. Cooperation strengthens networks by increasing trust between people (nodes). As work gets more complex and value more intangible, cooperation across previous boundaries of time and space will change the nature of work, from place, to activity.

Mobile also provides complementary tools for sense-making, an essential skill not just for work in the network era, but for life. Clark Quinn writes, “That’s why mobile makes so much sense: it decouples that complementary capability from the desktop, and untethers our outboard brain.” If you believe that work is learning and learning is the work, then mobile work requires mobile learning. The future of learning is Social, Cooperative and especially Mobile (SoCoMo).

SoCoMo—

This post is brought to you by Mobile Enterprise 360 Community and Citrix

Note: I retained editorial control and take full responsibility for what is posted. Contract writing is one of the ways I make my living.

Social learning is for human work

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This past week I came across the theme of the changing nature of work several times.

As computers transcend many human capabilities and work is dehumanized, we must focus on the skills and abilities where humans excel beyond any imaginable machine capability. At the heart of those human capabilities are creativity and innovation. – Ross Dawson

“Focus on the human factor,” says Gerd Leonhard, “If our work – and our output – is robotic we will soon be surpassed by intelligent software agents and machines.”

This is exactly the message I am trying to convey in the image below. Standardized work (blue) is already being outsourced to the lowest cost of labour and will eventually be automated. This includes knowledge work. Customized work (yellow) is human. Its dominance will mark the end of the industrial era. Talent will replace labour as intangible assets will provide value while machines and software will handle any work that can be standardized.

jobs and workThe learning imperative for the new workplace is not to know more stuff, because software can do that for us, but to become more human. Social learning will help us collaborate and cooperate in doing customized work, requiring thinking and building skills in order to innovate and craft unique products and services.

Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” –Albert Bandura, Social Learning Theory, 1977

Social learning helps groups of people share their knowledge in non-hierarchical ways and is not limited to the confines of instruction. Training courses take too long to develop and will be obsolete before they are launched. Most organizations today have a 95% informal learning gap they are not addressing. Social learning, using PKM methods and social networks, can address much of this.

Social learning networks enable better and faster knowledge feedback loops, essential for innovation and creativity. In an environment of constant innovation and faster market feedback, social learning is how we will share implicit knowledge and get work done. Social learning is for human work.

social learning is how work gets done

Friday's Finds 195

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Friday’s Finds:

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“Any sufficiently advanced form of testing is indistinguishable from monitoring.” – @shs96c

“A writer never has a vacation. For a writer life consists either of writing or thinking about writing.” – Eugene Ionesco – via @PascalVenier

Competency Models – HR and Understanding Work in the Network Era – by @JonHusband

Today we know much more about how to function effectively in social networks than a decade ago, and I think much of what we know is portable to the networked workplace.  Off the top of my head ..

Listen to others
Share generously
Add value, but don’t insist on being right
Listen some more
Practice good ‘social hygiene’
Avoid attacking others
There’s a fine line between criticism and negativity .. find it and use it

When Training Fails, Try Learning – via @NickMilton

“There is a necessity to create real learning opportunities that are directly linked to the business and to move away from training driven by other objectives. If any learning initiative is to succeed, there must be a clear understanding among everyone about the necessity of creating, sharing, and managing knowledge for specific business objectives.The right learning interventions provide frameworks and guidelines that allow people to make the right daily decisions” – Margareta Barchan, President and CEO, Celemi

Being a Professor Will No Longer Be a Viable Career | History News Network – via @AdrianCheok

“Average” faculty, [Steve] Weiland [MSU] said, will be subject to the kind of unsympathetic management advocated by foundation heads like William G. Bowen, president emeritus of the Mellon Foundation, who wrote in a recent book that “the days are over when faculty can … expect to have complete control over the tools they use.” Bowen didn’t mean faculty like Nagy or Michael Sandel, Weiland said. He meant professors like Weiland himself, and most of those present at the AAUP.