KM World, San Jose, 2007

I had the chance to get out to San Jose in October and attend the now very large and impressive KM world held over four days in the San Jose convention center.

While in San Jose I was lucky enough to run into a number of very interesting speakers including David Snowden, Ted Graham and Charles Armstrong.

David Snowden of Cognitive Edge is a leading light in the field of cognitive science. His two keynotes were perhaps the most inspiring and stimulating professional presentations I have seen in years and, delivered in a deadpan take-no-prisoners style, he kept his audience thinking furiously for 90 minutes while he expounded broadly and authoritatively on a vast area of cognitive expertise that covered things as diverse as classification systems, Australian Aboriginals and the London water utilities.

The thread of continuity woven into all of this was the current state of understanding how people learn things.

In terms of KM this is important because on reflection we can probably all agree that KM per se does not actually have a foundation theory of learning upon which it is based and on further reflection, we can see what an obvious deficiency this is for the field.

The ideas presented in these Key Notes went a long way to helping understand this missing component. Primed by the host to be provocative, Professor Snowden most certainly was. I simply could not write fast enough while also trying to listen and understand what was being said.

If you get the chance to hear him then you must not miss it.

Ted Graham is a McKinsey consultant currently but he was in San Jose presenting on work done for his previous employer (a large publishing company) including the development of their Intranet and the lessons learned that came from it.

The thing that struck me most about Ted’s presentation is how the publishing company measured the success of their Intranet: it was success not based on how many times a benefits form was downloaded or how much time was saved by posting Yankees tickets for sale, not even in the value of having a standardized people finder, no, they measured success by how much the site got people talking to each other. Just as simple as that.

This had me thinking because it is a fact that while we schedule our professional interactions with a degree of physical-presence agnosticism, we also recognize that there is no substitute for sitting down with a person in the same room and talking to them face to face.

Promoting this particular type of interaction was the thing this Intranet’s success was measured by. I thought that was a revelatory approach though it took me a while to appreciate it.

Charles Armstrong, founder and CEO of Trampoline Systems in the UK gave a fascinating talk about how to track complex relationships within groups of people and the path that his company is taking to develop tools to do this.

I had coffee with Charles later and his former career as Ethnographer (I had to look that up) had resulted in his needing better tools for the purpose and so Trampoline was born. What seemed like a small opportunity in a niche market had grown substantially as it became clear there were a great many organizations focusing on the same sorts of fundamental questions but within the organizational structures of business.

The main principle at work here seems to be that if we accept the premise that the more people connect and leverage their social networks, the more efficiently they can get their jobs done, and by extension, promote the objectives of their job and thus organization, then we can also see that mapping these connections will provide a valuable insight into how an organization is performing at any time and might provide key insights to when it is not.

This is not such a new concept of course and there is legacy research going back several decades on the topic. What is new is the development of rules-based mapping tools that can create compelling graphical models of these relationships in all their complexity.

Additionally, as a growing amount of interconnectivity is via email, the opportunity now exists to use email traffic measured between individuals, departments and organizations, and loosely classified by subject, as an indicative proxy for how all these entities relate to, and interact with each other.

Email is one of the data sources that Trampoline has been using when working with clients to create the data points for network mapping. We saw a number of examples of how the tools represent data in an easily understood manner and also how the output of these tools can lead to some very interesting inferences about how well an organization is connecting within it's constituent parts.

I expect we will be hearing more about these sorts of tools and how they may become organizational management decision support tools just as data warehouses once spawned a suite of tools catering to management decision support.

The move to mainstream business acceptance will have arrived when these tools show up in Businessweek as 'must haves' for the proactive COO.

This seems to be a great example of how data, and very raw data at that (emails) can be turned into Knowledge by the application of the right perspective, new tools and an increased demand for a measurable way to manage organizational efficiency.