I’ve chosen to use Archimate as a modelling language, and as I develop the model offline I will be posting views of it to pages liked from this wiki page.

Harold’s model looks like this:

As I began to unpick Harold’s seven processes I realised that although they are primarily focused on “self”, one key aspect to understand them is to identify the different roles that “self” (and “others”) play. This aspect of the model so far is shown in the Introductory View :

Alongside the work of developing models for each of the processes, I began to develop a view of the key information artefacts manipulated by the PKM processes.

I’ve also created pages on the wiki for the first iteration at modelling the  individual processes, linking them down to a core set of application services, and over the next couple of weeks I’ll write blog posts for those.

Comments welcome to help refine this modelling effort.

• How To Add iTunes Artwork To MP3 ID3 Tags Using iTunes:

  Keywords: MP3, iTunes

• SourceForge.net: OpenKM: Open Document Management System:
  OpenKM is a Document Management System (DMS). Useful for small and large enterprises intended to organize and share your (or your company) documents.
  Keywords: CMS, Java, KM
• Set-Based Concurrent Engineering:

  Keywords: Agile, Lean, ConcurrentEngineering

• A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

  Keywords: Mythology, JosephCampbell

• MySQL Optimization Hints:

  Keywords: MySQL

• Royal College of Psychiatry CPD Podcasts:

  Keywords: Podcast, Psychiatry

• Go to the source or use your imagination:
  David Anderson reckons development already ‘goes to the source’ through the use of Personas, Snapshots and Usage Scenarios
  Keywords: Development/Lean, Requirements
• Perfecting Your Personas:
  A persona is a user archetype you can use to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions, and even visual design. By designing for the archetype you can satisfy the user requirement
  Keywords: Development/Requirements, Requirements
• Wink:
  Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots of your software, use images that you already have, type-in ex
  Keywords: Flash, Software
• iTunes Music Store Queries:
  Searching the ITMS by using web services
  Keywords: WebServices
• Making Flash demos using Open Source Software:
  Documents using vnc2swf to record a Flash movie of a remote session.
  Keywords: Flash, OpenSource,, Software, VNC,
• Lifestyle Snapshots:
  A lifestyle snapshot is a ‘day in the life of’ a persona
  Keywords: Development/Requirements, Requirements
• vnc2swf – Screen Recorder:
  A screen recording tool for X-Window (X11), Windows and Mac OS Desktop. Vnc2swf captures the live motion of a screen through VNC protocol and converts it a Macromedia Flash(TM) movie (.swf).
  Keywords: Flash, Software, VNC
• Mathemagenic Processing and Ernie Rothkopf:
  Rothkopf highlighted the fact that it is something that learners do in processing (thinking about) learning material that causes learning and long-term retention of the learning material.
  Keywords: KM, learning, mathemagenic

In that post I was drawing on conversations with (amongst others) Earl, Taka, Jon  and Ton about the apparent conflict between the desire we all feel as empowered, “wierarchical” knowledge-workers to have systems that support a collaborative and improvisational working style, compared with the rigid, dehumanised processes that many companies see as a necessary corollary of delivering consistent service.

The particular paradox is that some of us (ok, me!) have on many occasions required companies (typically suppliers of services) to demonstrate those sorts of processes in order to satisfy our demands for clarity and measurability, even though we recognise that we may at the same time be preventing them from delivering the sorts of innovation that would truly delight us.

I find that the Davenport model helps me understand what is going on here – the underlying assumption of companies that apply prescriptive processes seems likely to be that the work involved is on the left-hand side of Davenport’s diagram – the Transaction and Integration models.

The underlying assumption has to be that the nature of the problems that are faced in these areas do not require interpretation, rather the application of rules and standards, possibly requiring multiple areas to work together but always within a set of rules. This is almost exactly the model under-pinning frameworks such as ITIL.

The other thing that strikes me as I read the contents of the boxes in the model are that they match closely with some of the criteria that are used in job grading systems. The boxes at the left of the model contain descriptions which are usually associated with lower-graded roles. This would seem to support my assertion from experience that companies which base their core competency around deployment of such rigid processes are primarily concerned with containing costs and at the same time guaranteeing minimum levels of service from a transient workforce.

Work that can be described by the right-hand side of the model (e.g. Collaboration and Expert models) is typically well-rewarded by job-grading schemes, pragmatic evidence that such skills are in relatively short supply. Professional services firms typically focus on reserving the efforts of these people for critical projects of areas requiring significant interaction. Such firms often also have (or desperately need) a core competence in taking the intellectual products of the right-hand side and “operationalising” them, i.e. turning them into formal processes and standards that can be scaled up and applied by the more numerous group of people paid lower wages to work “in the left-hand side”.

So far, so good – perhaps not a comfortable conclusion, but it would seem that the model works at least acceptably in certain situations. There is a certain basic business logic in reserving your most highly-skilled people for problems that need their attributes, whilst at the same time finding ways to manage the routine at a lower cost.

So where does the paradigm break?

I think there are at least two areas worthy of further exploration:

• There is an assumption that the market such firms supply will largely pose routine problems which are amenable to a rules-and-standards approach – where does this break down?
• Secondly, underlying the concerns that were expressed in the earlier conversation is a belief or hope that by finding a more integrative approach to knowledge work then there is the potential of finding ways that are more rewarding in either a commercial or human sense.

 Ideas for later posts…

They start by referencing Davenport’s classification structure for knowledge-intensive processes, which analyses knowledge work along the two axes of complexity and interdependence:

Davenport’s classification structure
(From Davenport (2005) via Aarons (2006))

However they then go on to criticise this as an analytic model on the grounds that much complex work often fits into more than one box. In particular, they suggest that work which (by the Davenport classification) is largely within the Integration Model often has elements requiring significant precision and judgement from indivduals – in other words mixes in work from the Expert model.

They suggest then that a more appropriate guiding framework is Burstein and Linger’s Task-Based Knowledge Management, which considers knowledge work as an inherently collaborative activity which mixes pragmatic “doing” work into a conceptual “thinking” framework. In this approach the focus is on supporting rather than managing knowledge-work. The authors express this using the following diagram:

A task-based model of work
(From Aarons (2006)

The rest of the paper is devoted to a case study within the Australian Weather Service which supports the mixed approach, and yields examples of failed business systems which focussed only on the forecast-production aspect of the forecasting task. These are compared with a successful and hugely-popular system which started as a maverick, ground-up project and which expressly addressed and supported the creation and maintenance of conceptual models of weather. This system, which is now the system of choice, only addressed the production of output forecasts as a piece of auxiliary functionality.

So far the only paper I’ve had a chance to read is Business Strategy Patterns for The Innovative Company, which is a set of patterns derived from “Corporate Imagination and Expeditionary Marketing” (Hamel and Prahalad, 1991). In this Allan derives:

• Innovative Products
• Expeditionary Marketing
• Seperate Imaginative Teams

Apart from the patterns themselves there were two things I found interesting about this paper:

Firstly, Allan describes a rather rough ride he received at VikingPLoP 2004, where apparently a lot of negative attention was focussed on whether there was “prior art” for these patterns in the pattern field. I think there is something here that any autodidact will feel an empathy towards. Whereas the scientific community (rightly) puts a lot of emphasis on whether something is new knowledge, in the world of applications there is at least as much value in “new-to-me” knowledge, or even “applications of existing knowledge in a new context”. To me patterns and pattern language fall firmly into the camps of education, application and transference between domains; not the camp of new knowledge creation. Given that, an over-obsession with “prior art” would seem to be rather inward-looking.

Secondly, Allan goes on to elaborate how his understanding and view of patterns has developed and changed, especially as a result of reading “The Springboard” (Stephen Denning, 2001), and “Patterns of Software” (Dick Gabriel, 1996) and that he now sees them as a particularly-structured form of story about a problem domain. I find this an appealing viewpoint, as it harks back to the fundamental way that human beings pass on knowledge, through the telling of stories. Of course, the nature of stories is that each person who retells a story does so in a subtly different way, and over time the story changes. Extending the simile, patterns too will change over time in a two-way exchange of knowledge between the pattern and the environment of the current user, so to say that a particular pattern is derived from (but not the same as) an earlier pattern is merely to state that evolution has occurred.

Update: Allan’s latest paper Strategies for Technology Companies has more on his interpretation of patterns as stories.

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  Distortions in how we see reality
  Keywords: Psychology
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  Tool for managing your sprints and backlogs
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  It’s all about context – without it documents are rarely re-usable…
  Keywords: KM, mycomments
• Another comment on Information Archtecture as Scaffold:
  Not only is it about capturing context, but it’s about making that easy…
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  Keywords: WordPress

Earl Mardle posted about Information Architecture as Scaffold based on a conversation with Ton (More on Ton’s position here). The gist of the view expressed by Earl and Ton is that all this “knowledge” that companies are seeking to “manage” is really only accessible through relationships, and once the relationship is established then the information that was part of the initial exchange is no longer relevant:

And that, my friends is what information does; it provides the scaffold that bridges the gap between people. A bridge that we call a conversation. And once you have built the bridge, you can take away the scaffold and it doesn’t make any difference, the conversation can continue because it no longer has any need for the information on which it was built, it has its own information; a history of itself, on which to draw and whenever the relationship is invoked, it uses any old bits of information lying around to propagate itself.

Earl then expands his view that in the real world of work, when you need to create some kind of output, you do it based on your own knowledge and the knowledge of your team, rather than through re-purposing some previous piece of corporate “knowledge”.

Several of us joined in the conversation in support of the view – in particular I made the point that the key thing that stands in the way of re-using the typical corporate knowledge artifacts (i.e. documents) is the lack of contextual information about why they were created in the way they were. A good provider of context would be a record of the conversations that happened around the document creation (e.g. through blogs and wikis) but that is still too difficult to add on if it requires people to learn new tools.

As a good counter to all this virulent agreement, Taka disagrees strongly with the concept of information as scaffolding around conversations – in his view the information is the conversation, the scaffolding is the network of relationships that enable the conversation. That’s probably a difference of opinion over the meaning of words, where it gets interesting is what Taka goes on to say:

This is what I call the McDonalds question: how do you get low-skilled, inexperienced trainees to consistently produce hamburgers and fries to an acceptable level of quality? Process. And it’s the same thing in a corporate environment: how do you get people, who generally don’t really give a toss about what they’re doing, to write proposals and reports and all the other guff to an acceptable level? Document templates and guidelines.

Coporate KM and other such initiatives are our typically short-sighted attempt to find technical solutions to what is actually a people problem. There are plenty of people selling solutions and processes and methodologies to “fix” the information management issues that exist within companies because it’s an easier problem to tackle than the real underlying issue: how do you get people to actually give a damn about what they’re doing?

Which Earl extends and restates;

Underlying what I was talking about in the other post is to make explicit that very fact; organisations that think of their people as fungible will be lead inexorably down the path of document management and “knowledge capture” solutions that will not help them survive, and they don’t deserve to.

The kicker for all this came from Euan Semple the other night who told me about a company rep who asked him, “how do you stop corporate knowledge leaving with the person?”

So, to reiterate a point that might have been a bit buried in the verbiage, organisations with a future do not need KM systems because they have active, engaged people who know what the hell they are doing.

And that is where I did the metaphorical forehead-slap.

Because I’m all for work practices based on conversation and shared context where they involve me or my colleagues – of course we are wonderful knowledge-workers who thrive in such an environment! But, as I realised, when it comes to speaking with suppliers of IT services, or designing how our organisation should inter-operate with their organisations, it’s always about process.

In part that’s about how they work, and when I am in that purchasing role it’s not directly my concern about how they can deliver good consistent service to the company I am representing, rather a matter of being sure what they deliver, but I’m sure we throw out quite a lot of baby with that bath water. We struggle to find ways of getting the sort of human, responsive service we want at a price we are prepared to pay.

So why is this a problem? The clue is in the words I used – “good, consistent service”. The whole world of out-sourced services companies is about consistency. The way services are usually measured –  “x% of faults fixed within y hours” – is about aggregation, statistics, removing variability. The companies who supply these services, in their turn, are looking for ways to meet those contractual arrangements that allow them to make a profit. The major costs in any service are the people who deliver it, so inevitably there is downward pressure on salaries and a drive to make everything a process that can be automated as far as possible.

In that sense, modern out-sourcers truly are the last bastions of Taylorism. Almost as a foregone conclusion, there is low job satisfaction in these bastions of “service”, leading to high turnover of front-line staff, leading in turn to increased management pressure for process and consistency.

I think there are several conflicts at work here:

• Be consistent v. Delight the customer
• Maximise productivity by using low-skilled staff v. Maximise productivity by supporting people to use all of their skills and knowledge
• Protect the service against staff turn-over v. Protect the service by creating an environment where people want to stay and grow
• Get the lowest cost service from suppliers v. get service that truly helps your business
• and probably some more…

The simple answer to all of this seems to be “work in small teams” and only use small suppliers, but it’s not clear to me how that scales. When I think about small teams, I can see how a wirearchical approach works when there are several companies involved (in the limit, several individuals), but again, I feel various mental blocks when I think about scaling that. I’m still struggling with these, and other dichotomies, which is probably a good sign that it’s time to draw the CRT! Food for a later post I suspect.

• Making Sense of Social Bookmarking Offerings:
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  Article by L. Michael Hall promoting a scientific and non-cult-like approach to NLP and Neuro-Semantics
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  Robust Project Design is the practice of creating models (representations) of real projects, models that yield unbiased estimates of project duration, with minimum uncertainty in those estimates.
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Although the core of the product is an aggregator, it’s a lot more than that as it offers a number of ways of inter-acting with the flow of information through the tool, both manually and in various automated ways. It also offers the facility to add “channel hooks” – plugins which carry out specific actions on selected channels.

Having installed the product, I must admit the first learning hurdle was to get used to a thick-client aggregator rather than my normal approach with Bloglines.

The next challenge was finding an easy way to blog using the tool. Although Earl recommends a workflow using Qumana, I’m not sure that’s the right one for me. I think that reticence is a little about Qumana: I’ve tried the tool before, in its earlier days and didn’t stick with it, so maybe I am transferring that to the latest version. Also, Earl’s proposed method involves using the Workpads and Reports in Awasu – functionality that I have played with, but not yet got to grips with fully. There have been a couple of funnies which might be bugs or might be configuration problems.

I shall keep experimenting with different methods of using the tool and integrating it into my work, and may well come back to the approach earl suggests. In the interim I have taken advantage of the easily-configurable User Tools menu in Awasu to call up the normal WordPress posting page for this blog within the Awasu main window, pre-populated with key content from the source page.