Darcy and Gerry from APQC are speaking on Web 2.0 for KM: Accelerating Collaboration and Knowledge Transfer, based on a 2007 research study. APQC is three fold … (1) to conduct research to find best practices, (2) to disseminate them, and (3) to connect people-to-content that helps them do their work.

Agenda:
– background
– study and themes

Background to the Study
– the study had 30 sponsors (“the learners”) … eg, Bank of Canada, Deere & Co., IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Solvay, US Air Force, Vale Inco. Many different industries.
– the players … the “best practice sponsors” … Accenture, HP, Royal Dutch Shell, Siemens AG, and the US Department of State. These five were chosen through careful research. Looking for the organizations that are doing interesting things, ask subject matter experts about who they should be talking to, attending conferences to see who is talking.

Project scope:
– #1 … to align IM strategy, architecture, and components to support knowledge transfer.
– #2 … integrate IM and KM initiatives
– #3 … address organizational and cultural issues
– #4 … evaluate the current and future trends in technology

About the Study
The revolution in social computing:
– the locus of control is moving from institutions to individuals, communities and self-organized networks. Users decide and launch the tools they want. They invite whom they want to collaborate with.
– the responsibility for content is shifting and becoming more democratized. Eg, value is determined by users, its shifting from expertise to experience.

Social computing has high potential:
– can link people who have similar interests and knowledge
– can share relevant and useful content and sources, based on user feedback
– provide user-driven content that is less dependent on content managers
– … by … reducing barriers to use, giving users more control over the tools, and making it more fun.

Themes and Findings
– KM is decentralized in some of the organizations. Eg, HP, Siemens and Shell. There is loose collaboration between the different parts of each firm (my term would be “human facilitated collaboration”), not formal structures. The other two had more centralized KM structures.
– wikis are used in diverse sectors for diverse needs. Eg, project teams, glossaries, to update policies and procedures, competition tracking, bug tracking.
– social bookmarking, tagging and folksonomies … not so much used, but are on their radar. HP … experimenting with social bookmarking, not widely adopted yet.
– social networking and blogs … aim was to emulate the Web-based social networking tools in their corporate expertise location and profiling systems. Firms are thinking about the governance strategy for blogs.

Theme … “Using 2.0 tools does not require new communication policies”
– the best practice organizations have had nil intentional misuse
– already have … ethics codes and annual training, confidentiality notices and training, self-policing, etc.

Theme … “KM and IT are working very closely to test and understand Enterprise 2.0 tools”
– they are acting as internal consultants to the user communities, by scoping the proper deployment of tools, and helping with user training and adoption where needed.
– Accenture … SharePoint as fundamental enterprise platform, plus a range of newer things
– a challenge … do these system collide, or they connect in some way? The best practice organizations provide a learning laboratory to explore these things.

Theme … “slow and steady wins the change management race”
– less formal change management techniques were better. Deployment tends to be grassroots and adoption is viral within the communities. Viral and iterative approaches to introduction and roll-out.
– HP used soft incentives.

Theme … “organizations use activity measures and success stories to gauge value of 2.0 tools”
– driving value is harder than driving use. Value is often personal and local.
– most partners rely on activity measures of adoption, user surveys for value, and stories of capture and reuse.

Michael’s Thoughts
The things that appeared to be working best were direct and easy correlates to current working practices, eg, from Word to a wiki. The “paradigm-breaking things”, eg, social bookmarking, were less adopted.

I Skyped Eric during the session and said that my question was “Given that all of this material has already been said in the news and blogs for the past few years, what is the knowledge that you have added through this study?” He said, “validation”. Okay … there you have it.