ResourcesCategory Archive

Opportunity: A Survey (with a Report!)

By: David Kay 0 Comments
25 Oct

I just got a note from our friends at ServiceXRG.  They’re doing a survey that some readers of this blog may be interested in participating in.  Pasting from their email:

I want to drop you a note about a KM study I am doing…It is a two-part study to examine how and where customers (Knowledge Consumers) go for service and support information and the practices companies (Knowledge Producers) use to create knowledge.

The Knowledge Consumer study is compete with input from over 650+ individuals (consumer, small business, and large enterprise). I am now working on the Knowledge Producer study. If you know of anyone that may want to participate I have included the link below. All participants will get a copy of the published results. [...]

To participate just click the link or copy and paste this URL into your browser: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/XRG_KM  All responses are confidential and we will share the published results with participants.

I like their work, and I expect the report will be well worth the time required to complete the survey.  Let us know what you think about their questions in the comments below.

Is Your KCS Really KCS?

By: David Kay 1 Comment
20 Aug

The good news is, KCS is getting more popular.  The bad news is, lots of organizations say they’re doing KCS…but they’re actually doing something different.  And, unsurprisingly, they’re not seeing the benefits they expect.

Here’s a quick video that you can use to find out if you’re on track with KCS:

And, here’s a printable copy of the checklist.

Please let us know what you think in the YouTube comments.

Summer Reading! Reamde

By: David Kay 6 Comments
29 Jun

Look at all the good stuff you’ve queued up onto your Kindle or iPad.  But don’t you think we deserve some good escape fiction after all that work stuff?  We’re going to end our summer reading series with a novel that has almost nothing to do with knowledge management.

Reamde Cover Image

Reamde: A Novel. Neal Stephenson. (@nealstephenson)

A lovable Russian Mafioso working with an insane Russian Mafioso.  A plucky heroine and her weaselly boyfriend who gets what he deserves.  An international jihadist organization that unwittingly shares a building with an international hacking ring, with poor results for everyone.  The hacker with a heart of gold who hooks up with the hawker with a heart of gold. The game entrepreneur with a hidden past, saddled with the world’s most impossible creative team.  The buttoned-down Asian-Canadian intelligence agent who is the only one surprised by her own lust.

In other words, Neal Stephenson’s back.

Look, if you loved his recent historical fiction, I admire you.  He’s a really smart guy, and I appreciate (in principle) his ability to…do whatever he was doing in Quicksilver and the Baroque Cycle.  I tried three or four times, and never got past page 200 of the first volume, and let me tell you, at page 200 you’re just getting started.

No, I prefer the still sprawling but still tightly plotted Stephenson of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and The Diamond Age, and that’s the Stephenson on display in Reamde.  He creates wonderful characters and then designs these wonderful Rube Goldberg plots that you know will inevitably cast them together, but you’re not really sure how or where.  Except you know that when they get there, there will be some big explosions, some good hacks, and—most of the time—the good guys will end up doing OK.

OK, that’s enough summer reading for this year. What great books did we miss?

ps – this is a work-free page.  No marketing ps this time.
(I said “ps.”  Sheesh.)

 

Summer Reading! Lessons Unlearned

By: David Kay 0 Comments
26 Jun

Just because a book is full of really great information doesn’t mean it can’t be fun to read.  For example, take John Ragsdale’s wonderful first book:

Cover image for Lessons Unlearned

Lessons Unlearned: 25 Years in Customer Service.  John Ragsdale (@john_ragsdale).

Unlike the books I’ve reviewed earlier. I’m not even going to pretend to be objective here: I’m a big fan of John.  He’s familiar to many of you as Vice President of technology research for TSIA; he came to that role having worked on the front lines of service delivery, as a manager, as a vendor, and as a Forrester Analyst and VP of their CRM research practice.  So if it has something to do with service and support, he’s seen it, he’s done it, and he has a great story to tell about it, too.  Lessons Unlearned is refreshingly free of corporate-speak; while he writes as a member of TSIA’s leadership team, what comes through is John’s warm, authentic, and positive voice.

Oh, and does that voice have some things to say.

For support professionals, he has a great section on metrics, showing how to use them in combination to assess what’s happening and to inform good conversations, rather than using measures blindly or in isolation to reward and punish.  He also describes support employee archetypes—the Slammer, the Geek, the Socialite—that will have you smiling in recognition of the uncannily accurate portrayals of your colleagues…and perhaps yourself.

One section that should be required reading for anyone involved in a technology procurement exercise is “Selecting Technology,” which turns common practice on its head.  (When you’re thinking back on a successful relationship with a technology vendor, did the 327 requirements in your RFP really end up being the high order bit?)

As a reformed product management and marketing professional, I especially enjoyed the advice to vendors about dealing with analysts and launching a successful startup.  If anyone can figure out how to ship this book back to me in 1998, I’d appreciate it.

OK, there’s no mistaking Lessons Unlearned for 50 Shades of Anything.  But you’ll enjoy it nearly as much, and you won’t have to hide it behind a copy of The Economist, either.

Summer Reading: Moonwalking with Einstein

By: David Kay 0 Comments
25 Jun

OK, we have the kind of heavy stuff behind us.  Now we’re going to sneak in a few books that represent the lighter side of summer—kind of like the Bomb Pops of my childhood, but less likely to make a sticky mess on your hands.

Moonwalking with Einstein Cover

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Joshua Foer (@joshuafoer)

We’re in the knowledge management business, a big part of which is capturing tacit information from peoples’ brains and gathering them together in a shared repository of explicit knowledge.  In other words, “knowledge base good; memory bad.”

So it feels almost just a little naughty to explore the outer fringes of human memory, and how it can be trained to do seemingly impossible things, for example, to memorize the order of the cards in multiple decks—in minutes.

I admit I’m a sucker for participatory journalism—give me George Plimpton taking on a prizefighter, or A.J. Jacobs living strictly according to the Bible for a year any day of the week.  Joshua Foer’s initial article about the community of competitive memorizers turned into an intense, year-plus training regimen that culminated in his winning the US Memory Championships.

As a guy who routinely forgets where he parked his car, the things memorizers do seem nearly impossible.  But as you learn techniques of memory palaces, subject-action-object schemas, and the other tricks of the trade, you learn that it’s not impossible for any of us to perform great feats of memory.  It’s just hard.  Really hard.  “Mental athletes” (in their words) need to build up remembered analogs of physical places, so they can store memories in specific “places” (for example, the front porch of their childhood house) and recover them by “walking” through them in a consistent order.  The memories themselves are converted into memorable scenes—the more bizarre, the easier to remember—like the book’s title.  Through a series of memorized associations, Michael Jackson (Moonwalking) is one playing card card, and Einstein is another.  It’s easier to remember Jackson and Einstein moonwalking on your front porch than it is to remember the three of clubs and the five of spades.  Or so says the book: my attempts didn’t go very far, but I didn’t work at it very hard, either.

As for me, I’ll stick with the knowledge base.  But it’s inspiring to know that a journalist who can’t remember his grocery list can turn into a memorization champion.  Oh, except, unless he applies these techniques, he still forgets his grocery list.

ps – “Menlo Park” is where Edison invented the light bulb.  And, as every student of US history knows, Millard Fillmore was inaugurated as US president on July 10, 1850.  So, to remember all the details for our upcoming KCS workshop, just think how astonished President Fillmore would be to use an electric light to read the KCS Practices Guide!

Summer Reading! Join the Club

By: David Kay 0 Comments
22 Jun

Ah, the club.  After 18 perfect holes of golf (after all, we’re not counting the three you shanked into the water on the fifth hole…you were still warming up), there’s nothing better than coming inside to the A/C, taking those silly soft-spikes off, and opening up more great summer reading.

Although, honestly, I think Times writer Tina Rosenberg is talking about a different kind of club.

Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Change the World.  Tina Rosenberg. (@tirosenberg) We know peer pressure can make people do bad things.  But Rosenberg’s optimistic book shows us that it can make people do good things, too.  Whether it’s creating a new life for Dalit (untouchable) women in rural India, overthrowing a dictator, getting sick patients to take their meds, or improving the performance of minority college students in calculus, what Rosenberg calls “the social cure” can help by creating a community that holds each member accountable for doing the right things, and encourages a spirit of belonging.  Lecture teens about the evils of smoking, and nothing’s likely to happen; make them a part of a fun, self-directed group that’s exposing the dirty tricks used by Big Tobacco marketing, and you might get their attention.

This book is a must for KCS coaches and program managers!

ps – speaking of peer pressure, do you have any peers you wish were more well-versed in KCS Foundations?  If so, it might just be time to apply peer pressure to get them trained and certified.

 

 

Summer Reading! The Intention Economy

By: David Kay 6 Comments
20 Jun

This blog has no mandatory terms of service, installs no beacons or cookies (that I know about), and vends no third party ads (I hope—let me know if you see one.) That’s just fine with our second Cluetrain Manifesto co-author of the summer reading list, Doc Searls.

(I do plug our workshops, but I think Searls would be OK with that.  I think.)

The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge.  Doc Searls. (@dsearls)

Doc Searls is the leading light behind Project VRM, a movement designed to tip the balance of power away from vendor companies and back towards the customers they serve.  (VRM is a twist on CRM—vendor relationship management rather than customer relationship management.  We should be managing the vendors, rather than the other way around.)

Searls is a keen and wry observer of all that is absurd about the current situation.  He takes particular aim at big data efforts designed to collect information to target advertising to us—leaving aside the privacy invasion, it’s not at all clear that we want or respond well to targeted ads.  He also delivers a withering criticism of “contracts of adhesion,” the “click to accept” terms and conditions we acquiesce to at every turn that we don’t have time to review and that the vendor can change at will.  There’s a terrible imbalance of power, and customers are being badly treated. Amen.

If this book’s intention had been to draw attention to the problem, I’d give it full marks.  Unfortunately, he’s also proposing a solution, in the form of a scattershot of ongoing VRM projects.  When stacked up against Facebook, Google, Acxiom, and Apple, VRM looks like pretty weak beer indeed.

Searls clearly believes that the unbalanced relationship between vendors and their customers is bad for the vendors, and that enlightened self-interest (coupled with some good hacks on the technology side) will cause vendors to lower their drawbridges, fill in their moats, and embrace customers as equal partners in value creation.  The book is full of inspiring phrases like “free markets require free customers”—a fact that’s so blindingly obvious to Searls that it requires no further justification.  Ironically, he cites the notoriously secretive and intentionally non-transparent Trader Joe’s as just this new kind of company.  (Who really makes that Trader Darwin’s vitamin pill?  They aren’t saying.)

The thing is, no serious vendor I know buys this.  None is looking for new ways to cede control to their customers.

Searls’s defenders would say that this is unfair: that it’s early days for VRM, and revolutions take time.  But I think the premise is fundamentally flawed.

Fundamentally, Searls is betting on individual consumers to care more about their rights and the personalization of their experience than they care about their convenience.  From what I’ve seen, betting against customers choosing price and convenience first is wrong 100% of the time.  He’s also imagining a time when Apple, or whatever company takes its place, is going to be open to negotiating legal terms with customers.  I’ve worked with Apple Legal, and…no.

I’d deeply love to be wrong about all this.

I’d personally love a world where VRM was a reality.  I’d also like a world with unicorns.  Given the pace of genetic engineering, I’m guessing I get the unicorns first.

Summer Reading! Thinking, Fast and Slow

By: David Kay | Tagged: Behavioral economics 0 Comments
19 Jun

Let’s top up that frosty adult beverage, reapply our sunblock, and head back poolside for some more great summer reading.

Thinking, Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman. (@DanielKahneman) I’m fascinated by behavioral economics—all the instances in which humans make decisions that make no objective sense, and do it again and again.  (The wonderful Dan Ariely cites many surreal examples in his TED talk.)  Kahneman is co-founder of this discipline, and in this book, he has compiled all of the systematic irrationalities documented by himself, Ariely, and other researchers into an overarching model of human behavior.  He posits two modes that the brain can work in, which he calls “Systems 1 and 2,” and explains how the irrationalities are natural side-effects of some of the shortcuts that System 1, our pre-logical brain, evolved to keep us alive—one step ahead of the saber tooth tiger that was chasing us.  Of course, we think that we spend most of our lives in the rational, conscious System 2…but we’re wrong.

After reading this book, humans just make more sense to me.

In other hands, this could be dry, but Kahneman treats it like a mystery story—a whodunit in which our brains are the investigator, the criminal, and sometimes even the victim.  It’s a great read.  At least, I think my System 2 thinks so.

ps – speaking of poolside, did you know you can take a KCS Foundations Workshop from poolside?  If your wireless works there, anyhow.  Check out our August 13-16 Virtualshop.

Summer Reading! Too Big To Know

By: David Kay 2 Comments
18 Jun

Well, we’re done with the Hunger Games, and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is so 2011.  But backyards and beaches beckon—what’s a knowledge geek to read in the sun?

Plenty, as it turns out!  Over the next week and a bit, I’ll be sharing one favorite book a day that I’ve read in the past few months (although some have been out for longer.)

I’m going to start with my absolute favorite: “2b2k.”


Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room.  David Weinberger (@dweinberger). 

I admit it: I generally don’t like books about knowledge.  As an every-day-in-the-trenches knowledge practitioner, I generally find them either hopelessly academic or breathtakingly obvious.  So I was gobsmacked by this book, both deftly written and profound.  It would have been excellent entertainment, except for the fact that it upended a lifetime’s worth of assumptions about knowledge, and especially authoritative knowledge.

The book’s premise is that the way we have approached knowledge is an unhelpful hangover from a world of scarcity.  The filtering mechanisms we use to whittle the world’s information down to the very most authoritative knowledge have far more to do with the limited supply of paper and shelf space than the way that knowledge works in the real world.  Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Weinberger argues that accepting the inevitability of information overload, and developing mechanisms to filter forward the most relevant, is the only productive way of engaging with the world.

In a Too Big to Know world, curation is replaced by an unbounded network of links: links from assertions to the facts that support them to the sources for those facts. And also, links to the assertions’ counterarguments and their networks of facts. He explores the implications of abundant knowledge in in many disciplines: policymaking, science, books, and leadership, to name a few.

As a KCS advocate, the idea of moving from scarcity to abundance, and from authority to relevance, is satisfying and nearly self-evident…in knowledge bases.  And “the world’s knowledge is doubling every X years” is a familiar theme.  Still, applying these same big ideas to the wider world is unsettling.  I’m looking forward to reading this again next year after a little soak time—it’s an excuse for more time at the beach, right?

ps – It’s not QUITE like being at the beach, but at least it’s bicoastal.  If there’s someone on your team who should get the KCS bug, especially if they’re near Silicon Valley or Boston, check out our July 10-12 workshop.  New: get KCS Practices Certified before you leave!

New Offerings! (Or, A Blog Post That’s All About Us)

By: David Kay 0 Comments
31 May

Regular readers of this space know we generally like to talk about the interesting things other people are doing in the world of knowledge management, self-service, and social support.  But we’ve been busy working on a number of new offerings, and we wanted to celebrate their launch today.

KCS Practices v5 Certification is now part of every KCS Foundations or KCS Design Workshop DB Kay delivers.  The question we get asked most about our workshops is, “can I get certified now?”  Prior to now, there wasn’t a very good answer.  But now that the CSI’s KCS Academy has launched this new certification for program managers and line managers, we’ll leave time at the end of each workshop for a review session and the proctored exam.

A KCS Foundations Workshop, Bi-Coastal Style.  It’s great to get the whole team on the same page, but sometimes that’s hard with distributed teams and tight travel budgets.  We’ve teamed up with The Vergis Group to deliver a simultaneous KCS Foundations Workshops in San Francisco / Silicon Valley and Boston, July 10-12.  You now have an opportunity for multiple members of your organization to attend the workshop closest to where they are located, while at the same time gaining the same knowledge, similar experiences and collaborating with local attendees. Learn how KCS can improve your current KM processes and transform your organization.  Both classes will meet the same days and, on the final day, we will collaborate on our capstone exercises.  You will get the benefit of two certified KCS v5 Trainers, two groups of attendees, and one tremendous experience.

A Virtual Classroom version of the KCS Foundations Workshop, starting August 13-16.  We’ve had excellent success delivering KCS workshops to clients using virtual classroom technology, so we’ve decided to apply the same approach to our open enrollment workshop.  Using web meeting software and a conference bridge, attendees interact with an experienced KCS v5 Verified instructor without ever leaving their desks. This allows everyone to gain the benefits of this KCS Foundations Workshop without impact to travel budgets.

KCS Publisher Certification in a Box.  Whether you’re looking to reinvigorate your KCS program, motivate your team, recognize your stars, or just get everyone on the same page, KCS Publisher Certification gives your KCS program a boost.  But, it can be complex to administer, and without the right refresher training, even experienced KCS staff are likely to fail the certification exam.  DB Kay provides process management, communications, exam-prep training, review sessions, and proctored exam delivery, all for a simple per-person fee.

We hope you can join us for training, certification, and KM success.  Let us know what you think!