From the Desk of the Editor-in-Chief

Xenia Stanford, Editor-in-Chief, KnowMap and President, Stanford Solutions Inc.*

What's New and What's It to You?

In our second issue we started a special Toolkit column on Standards & Conventions by Michael J.D. Sutton. He continues this section this time with Digital Preservation Strategies and Principles for a Knowledge Management Initiative.

Also this issue we begin another series under Toolkit with the new heading Strategy. Alain Godbout kicks this series off with Building a KM Program: Toward a Knowledge Architecture with the first part on Strategic Intent.

Although many articles in KnowMap and other KM magazines focus on strategy, our intent is to make the process more concrete and achievable for knowledge practitioners. With the generous help of Godbout and some learning gained from assisting clients with mapping strategy, we are finding ways to do this.

The Vee map and audit as tools for planning a knowledge strategy are demonstrated in the articles: Using a Vee Map to Plan Your KM Strategy and Auditing Procedures for Planning Your KM Strategy Using the Vee Map.

The vee map used for strategic planning was created when I encountered a real need among practitioners to articulate and frame what components must be audited, studied and mapped to achieve a meaningful KM strategy. I borrowed the basic template from Gowin and Novak but modified their model (which was designed to provide a framework for research and learning) to fit the questions and elicit answers needed when planning a KM strategy.

Learning and Leveraging - Favourite KM Words!

Isn't this what KM is all about? I certainly believe it is about learning and leveraging the knowledge of others to create new knowledge and new ways of sharing that knowledge with others.

This is how tacit or implicit knowledge can be made explicit. It is also how brown knowledge can be made green as new knowledge is created; then how green knowledge becomes common and brown through the aging process. Knowledge is cycled and recycled but attracts and grows as it continues its upward spiral.

Certainly not only did my clients benefit, but I as well, since it forced me to articulate what I knew and could do in such a way that clients who were struggling with developing a KM strategy could pick it up, learn and do as well. In articulating I drew out the knowledge deep within me and created a new approach to a recurring dilemma.

As an educator in my early adulthood, I learned to call this transfer, the means by which information (knowledge to others) could be taken in, understood, learned and thus become usable in a new situation.

In other words it could be learned and leveraged!

Will the Real Owner of KM Please Stand Up?

When this question is asked the seats are usually emptied and the stands crowded but not necessarily with all the right people.

In the last issue I explored this question as Knowledge Management: Who's in Charge? This time Mark W. McElroy delves deeper into this discussion in the first of a two-part series called Where Does Knowledge Belong? He examines it by the advantages and disadvantages of attributing it to one group or another within an organization.

It is a question that plagues many and yet one that many others take for granted. Do we all feel KM belongs to us? Perhaps we should but the problem is we generally feel it is to the exclusivity of other groups. I can hardly wait until the next issue when McElroy finishes framing the question and offers a better solution than those often suggested.

Can You See What I Am Saying?

The title of Michael Losier's article is comprised of seven very simple words and yet these very words can completely mystify. To some it does not make sense. Others are unable to hear these words and some cannot grasp the substance.

Words - so basic, so simple and yet so complex. I know what I mean but do you?

It may be a matter of foreign language that causes lack of understanding. However, it is not always the native tongue that interferes. You and I can both speak English perfectly well, yet perhaps cannot communicate effectively.

It could be a question of idiom, jargon, dialect or accent. However, it can be a far more subtle reason that prevents a listener from hearing the speaker and of the speaker making sense to the listener. You can listen but not hear. You can speak but not be understood no matter how willing the audience to learn.

It can be a matter of cultural differences. However, there is also an individual difference or at least a group of differences that may come from your culture or upbringing. If it were only such, why then do members of the same family have clashes due to misunderstandings and failure to communicate?

Understanding why others can't hear or see what you are saying is the first step toward improving our communication, which in turn is vital to a knowledge sharing organization. How can you share knowledge if you don't see what Losier is saying?

Is the Generation Gap Growing?

Stephen Abrams (Time to Shift the Hiring Gears) thinks so. It may not be because the older generation doesn't know how to communicate with the younger. Perhaps it is that the older generation is walking out the door and many companies don't care until it is too late.

Tom Peters (9) and others believe the energy of KM and business is in the youth. However, it takes a long time to learn all the old tricks and this is often overlooked by the yuppies (does anyone still use that term or should I say Gen-X?) If you look at the dot.com bombs what is the average age of those who are taking the nosedive?

Xenia sharing knowledge....
Xenia sharing her knowledge. That's right you can't see her for all the people at her table!
It is true the older generation had their crashes once, even if it wasn't on their computers in the age of the information highway. However, they didn't trample each other to death on the road ahead! Yet it is estimated that the baby boom and the prior generations knew better than any before them how to make, save and build a solid nest egg along the way.

As the old grey (that is, wise) mares and stallions leave the racetracks to the young, who is going to learn all that was known, thus be able to build on it rather than begin all over again?

Now I am not saying that any one younger than I is not as, if not more, intelligent. Knowledge does not necessarily hinge on intelligence of the book-learning kind. Nor does it depend on the computer type. It is more about knowing how to and from whom to learn.

If you think of the movement of knowledge up the steps from chaos to wisdom, do you think one can leap from the bottom to the top in one fell swoop? Does sound backwards doesn't it?

In the article Knowledge Management: Who's in Charge? I included an image of the new means of climbing the corporate ladder. It shows one person helping up the other. Not one person trampling on the shoulders of the other to get ahead. Rather we see one leaning down to pull the other up to join him at the top. This is called mentoring and it takes both old knowledge and new minds to make it happen.

I wrote above about brown knowledge and green knowledge. The brown is the fodder for the green to grow. Perhaps in this case we can call it grey knowledge and green knowledge. I am not suggesting either is more necessary than the other. Only that the green does not successfully grow without the grey and the grey fades to invisibility if not absorbed by the green.

Now how are we going to do that if the baby boomers take their hard earned, well-saved cash and head to their retirement homes on the beaches before they share their wealth? Perhaps you should read Abrams article Time to Shift the Hiring Gears: The Coming Retirement Crisis for Senior Knowledge Professionals to find out.

What's a Knowledge Map Again?

Now many think concept map and mind map are synonymous with knowledge map. Is turkey synonymous with bird? All turkeys are birds but not all birds are turkeys. Maybe reading the article on syndetic mapping can help you figure that out graphically!

Then there are others who call their long list of words and phrases on their homepage a site map. If a pirate gave you a list of words and phrases in alphabetical or some other non-spatially related order, would you call it a treasure map?

Even arranging those words in the right sequence to find the treasure might give you a logical list within a space but it does not show proximity, adjacency or containment - all of which are map elements. Paul Marsh knows that as he shows The WISHA Map he designed for the Washington State Department of Labor & Industries' site.

Lest you think all knowledge maps are site maps, think turkey versus bird again. To make sure this is embedded in your brain, we show you how a clock can be a map and how a map can show course participants' needs to aid learning facilitation and course evaluation in the articles Mapping Needs To Structure Learning Facilitation in this and volume 1, issue 2 of KnowMap.

Sometimes it is difficult to either map or measure intangible values. Systems mapping does this by building the system a part at a time exploring causal links. Although a systems map, like a housewife's work, is never done, some excellent examples are found in Cybermedicine: Systems Thinking Scope and Diagnosis. This Case Study demonstrates how Dr. Gunter Eysenbach examined the impact of the Internet on medicine.

Everything's on the Web and Anyone Can Find It

Even medicine is on the Web. Isn't everything?

Talk about a myth if there ever was one! The second part to the myth is that even if it were all there, you could find it when you need it. How many needles in the haystack have you found lately?

The problem with the Internet is you don't know what you don't know and you don't know if it is out there or not. So how are you going to learn it?

The advantage of having a variety of careers over the span of more than a decade or two is learning things that can be used elsewhere. There is the concept of transfer again.

However, transfer must also be used to transform. Thus as a librarian I learned to catalogue before computers were affordable enough to be used to store and access data much less full-text articles.

Once I read that with computers there would no longer be any need for human indexing. Uh-huh? I am still waiting for that day to happen.

I'm not saying you cannot just enter a free-text term and a search engine or two might make the relationship for you between all the documents out in the wide wild Web and what you had in mind. However, there is more out there than meets the eye and do you have forever to find it?

Oh the search engine made the most relevant documents come to the fore and ranked them downward accordingly. Then why is the document I know exists not retrieved?

Well one could be (heaven forbid!) that it is not on the web! Another could be it is there but on the hidden web - that is an internal database or proprietary pages that search engines can't access.

It is true that the spiders can spin their way through the Web zillions of times faster than a human ever could. However, can it prevent the highest-ranking documents on cats being about felines when you want the machines? Oh then just enter caterpillar, right?

Hmm why did that fuzzy creature come up on top?

I'm not saying you need to have a complex thesaurus built into every search engine but knowing how to search deeper and more efficiently might require some thinking about what relationships you might encounter on the Internet. I'm not talking about the romantic kind but about the syndetic ilk.

So read the article on Syndetic Mapping: Searching for Relationships on the Internet already! Can't access it because you don't have a subscription to the proprietary pages of KnowMap? Well what's stopping you?

Works Cited

Gowin, D.B. Educating. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Novak, Joseph Donald. Learning, Creating, and Using Knowledge: Concept Maps as Facilitative Tools in Schools and Corporations. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 1998. (Review)

Peters, Tom. The Circle of Innovation: You Can't Shrink Your Way to Greatness. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. (Review)


ISSN 1499-1209	© Stanford Solutions