Building the Knowledge Management Network

TEAMFLY

Team-Fly®

Building the Knowledge

Management Network

Best Practices, Tools, and

Techniques for Putting

Conversation to Work

Cliff Figallo

Nancy Rhine

Wiley Technology Publishing

Building the Knowledge

Management Network

Best Practices, Tools, and

Techniques for Putting

Conversation to Work

Cliff Figallo

Nancy Rhine

Wiley Technology Publishing

Publisher: Robert Ipsen

Editor: Cary Sullivan

Assistant Editor: Scott Amerman

Managing Editor: Pamela Hanley

New Media Editor: Brian Snapp

Text Design & Composition: Benchmark Productions, Inc.

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Copyright © 2002 by Cliff Figallo and Nancy Rhine. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN 0-471-21549-X (paper : alk. paper)

Printed in the United States of America.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

iii

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction ix

Part One Cave Walls to CRTs:

The Landscape of Knowledge Networking 1

Chapter 1 Knowledge, History, and the Industrial Organization 3

Our Ancestral Heritage 3

Stories, Rituals, Trust, and Culture 9

The First Mass Medium 16

The Dawn of the Info Age 21

Summary 27

Chapter 2 Using the Net to Share What People Know 29

Managing Knowledge 29

Roots of the Knowledge Network 32

A Knowledge-Swapping Community 40

Organizational Knowledge Networking 45

Summary 59

Chapter 3 Strategy and Planning for the Knowledge Network 61

Strategy and Change 62

Planning and Cost Issues 74

Summary 81

Contents

Part Two Matching Culture with Technology 83

Chapter 4 The Role of IT in the Effective Knowledge Network 85

IT and Knowledge Exchange 86

Technical Approaches to Managing Knowledge 97

Basic Tools of the Knowledge Network 103

Online Environments for Knowledge Sharing 107

Summary 111

Chapter 5 Fostering a Knowledge-Sharing Culture 113

Creating the Ideal Conditions 114

Analyzing an Organization’s Culture 116

Tapping the Mind Pool 125

Leadership: Energy from the Top 127

Self-Organizing Subcultures 131

The Challenge of Change 134

Summary 135

Chapter 6 Taking Culture Online 137

The Medium Is Part of the Message 138

Tools and Their Configuration 146

Three Dimensions of Collaboration 153

Knowing the People and the Policies 159

External Collaborative Communities 161

Summary 162

Chapter 7 Choosing and Using Technology 165

Tools for Every Purpose 166

Tools, Their Features, and Their Applications 176

Instant Messaging and Presence 191

Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Nets 192

Building Environments for Collaboration 195

Tools for Transitory Conversational Events 199

Summary 202

Part Three Practical Applications of Knowledge Networking 205

Chapter 8 Initiating and Supporting Internal Conversation 207

Cultural Preconditions 208

Where Consultants Come In 209

Selling the Idea 211

Engaging the Stakeholders 215

Incentives to Participate 216

Learning to Tell Stories 220

The Practice of Online Conversation 224

Organizing the Community 227

Spontaneous Conversational Communities 229

Transitory Conversation for Immediate Solutions 239

Planning to Reinforce Knowledge-Sharing Culture 242

Summary 244

iv Contents

Contents v

Chapter 9 Conversing with External Stakeholders 247

Building External Relationships 248

Learning about (and from) Your Customers 254

Customer-to-Customer Knowledge Exchange 262

Hosting the Customer Conversation 274

Where Customers Gather on Their Own 281

Summary 286

Chapter 10 The Path Ahead 287

Interdependence and Infoglut 288

Conversation Proliferation 290

The Sustainable Organization 294

The New Skill Set 312

Future Technical Paths 316

Summary 321

Appendix A Resources 323

Notes 327

Index 337

vii

Knowledge networks depend for their success on the right social environment.

We have worked within many such respectful, trusting, nurturing, and educa￾tional social environments, and those experiences have led us to write this book.

We both spent many years learning together with hundreds of others in building

a small, self-sufficient community in Tennessee. We applied what we learned in

that challenging social experiment to the work we did in the early days of our

first online communities at The WELL and Women.com. The members of those

communities showed us the value of lowering the communications boundaries

between management and customers. In those and in subsequent positions at

AOL, Digital City, Salon.com, and PlanetRX, we observed the value of informal

knowledge sharing through the Net. And so we thank the innumerable people

we worked with and did our best to serve for being our teachers in collaboration

in those virtual but still very personal environments.

We would not have traveled our respective paths toward community interac￾tion were it not for the support and example of our families. And so we each

acknowledge their parts in our development as leaders who look for the ways

in which people agree rather than ways in which they disagree.

Nancy: I want to thank my mother and father, Bill and Dorothy Gerard, who

have always exemplified the essential best practices of granting people the

benefit of the doubt regardless of age, race, gender, or social standing. I have

learned from them that 99 percent of the time people not only prove worthy of

Acknowledgments

that trust, but even rise admirably to the occasion. Thanks also to my three

daughters, Leah, Emmy, and Odessa, who are carrying this compassionate and

intelligent legacy of their grandparents into the new millennium. It is, indeed,

a fine way to live.

Cliff: Thanks to my parents, Bruno and Gwen, and to my kids who have kept

my attention and care on people more than technology. Thanks to my cowork￾ers through the years—whether building houses, installing village water sys￾tems, or managing online communities—for teaching me how to listen and

work together for the common good.

We’d like to acknowledge all of those who provided the information and sto￾ries that have made this book happen. Special thanks go to Tom Brailsford of

Hallmark for his generous insight into what may be the model of customer rela￾tionships for the future. And last, but not least, we express our appreciation for

the support of our development editor at John Wiley & Sons, Scott Amerman,

for gently leading us through the writing of this book.

viii Acknowledgments

TEAMFLY

Team-Fly®

ix

With this book in your hand, you’re probably looking for ways to help your orga￾nization get smarter by making the most effective use of online conversations. In

these pages we write about a basic human drive to share what we know. We repo￾sition that age-old practice at the intersection of two social environments: the

modernizing organization and the expanding electronic network.

Your company should know what this book reveals, because in this competitive

and downsized economy, you are being forced to make the best use of your current

human resource assets. You can’t afford the high cost of replacing the knowledge

of people you’ve trained and lost. You must find, harvest, and distribute current and

relevant knowledge from a wide variety of trusted human sources in order to make

decisions and innovations in today’s hyperactive marketplace of things and ideas.

Organizations today must change intelligently and constantly to survive. Ongoing,

high-quality conversation is a key to making that kind of change possible.

Though online knowledge networks can involve sophisticated technology,

this book is not, at its core, about technology; it’s more about people and moti￾vation. Though terms like application integration are important to understand

in this context, you’ll likely find terms like cultural evolution and self-governing

systems to be more relevant to the successful adoption of useful online conver￾sation as a productive process within your organization.

Even companies that value their knowledge networks can run into problems

applying what they’ve learned to their business. There is a gap between knowing

and doing. Putting conversation to work means bringing the right people with

Introduction

the requisite knowledge together and having their online interaction solve real

and immediate problems. To reach that level of practical impact, there must be

trust and commitment among the participants in addition to software and con￾nectivity. For your organization, that means leading and fostering the kind of cul￾ture that motivates people to share what they know with their coworkers.

If there’s a central theme to this book, it’s the importance of making the

appropriate match between the culture and the technology for any given situ￾ation. The cultural needs may pertain to your entire organization, specific

teams within your organization, or the constituents who are served by your

organization. In our approach, culture is in the driver’s seat for selecting and

configuring the technology, yet we also emphasize the inevitable influence of

technology on the culture that uses it.

Twenty years ago, very few people had seen, much less used, a computer.

Now there are hundreds of millions of daily computer users. Today, relatively

few people use online conversation as an essential work tool, but we see a

future where the skills and practices we describe in this book are common

throughout organizations, and where workers are engaged in multiple discus￾sions from their desktops or laptops. In that future, workers will use the Net to

share the fresh ideas and experiences that will help guide their companies.

Why This Book Now?

During January and February 2002, the Pew Internet & American Life Project

conducted a survey to gauge the involvement of people in online communi￾ties.

1 The survey found that 84 percent of Internet users have at one time or

another contacted an online group. Referring to these 90 million Americans as

Cyber Groupies, the study revealed that half of them claimed that the Internet

had helped them connect with people who shared their interests, and that the

average Cyber Groupie had contacted four different online groups.

Far from being a cold, lonely, and impersonal electronic medium, the Inter￾net described by the Pew survey is an inhabited communication environment

with a vibrant social life. People learn—through the simplicity of the Web inter￾face and from one another—how to find, explore, and sustain social activity on

the Net. Many Cyber Groupies engage with their online communities from the

workplace. Some of them find their communities within the workplace. Yet

these communities and the conversations that go on within them are invisible

to most of the companies providing the intranets on which they live. More sig￾nificantly, these communities are invisible to the leaders of those companies,

who need to know more about what their workers know and are doing.

We’ve seen the end of the first big Internet boom. The dot-com meltdown sig￾naled the end of only the first wave of commercial online innovation and exper￾imentation. But much learning has taken place since the Internet became a

commercial medium in 1993. Group communication through the Net is no

x Introduction

Introduction xi

longer the rare and esoteric practice that it was in the 1980s when we began

managing online communities. Thousands of Web sites have since provided

chat rooms and message boards. Email among groups of people has become

another common meeting place. Instant messaging has become the means

through which isolated keyboardists maintain a sense of immediate connection

with their online buddies.

Meanwhile organizations—after years of adopting expensive technologies to

keep meticulous track of operational numbers and statistics—have recognized

that numeric information alone is not sufficient to guide them in today’s fast￾changing marketplace. Last year’s sales figures don’t tell them how to change

production as new fads, technologies, and competitors suddenly crash into

their markets. Millions of records of customer transactions don’t inform them

of their consumers’ thinking after an event like the terrorist attacks on Septem￾ber 11 or a calamitous news story about their industry. Numbers about past per￾formance have fooled many enterprises into thinking they knew what the

future would bring.

The Net has speeded up both communication and change in attitudes, opin￾ions, and habits. To anticipate and prepare for the future, organizations must

learn more from their employees and from the people on whom they depend—

customers, partners, and constituents. Today we need dynamic knowledge—

current and constantly updated experience and thinking found only in the agile

minds of living human beings and revealed most naturally and completely

through human conversations.

This book addresses the modern organization at a point in time when many

trial applications for the Net have been abandoned in favor of its powerful role

as a communication medium—the purpose for which it was originally

designed. We now have a significant percentage of consumers—both inside and

outside of the organization—using the Net to connect and converse with

others. Organizations are desperately seeking a competitive edge in a world

defined by unexpected change, increasingly decentralized leadership and the

instant interconnectivity of hundreds of millions. The consumer is far more

informed than in the pre-Web days, and now expects to be able to communicate

directly—and honestly—with the companies that make the products (s)he

buys. We wrote this book now to teach organizations how to engage in the con￾versations that can make them integral parts of this new, expanding, and uncon￾trollable marketplace.

Who Should Read This Book

Chief executives make and approve strategy, and knowledge networking is a

strategic tool. This book may be too instructional for executive reading matter,

but its practical lessons should make its conceptual message more palatable to

those who lead organizations.

It used to be said that executives would be the last ones to begin using email

because they relied on secretaries to do all of their typing. They may have

learned to type since then, but it’s still true that the typical executive is the

most distanced employee from the online interaction that takes place among

the tiers of workers who long ago adopted email to help coordinate their pro￾jects and tasks. As remnants from the hierarchical model of organizations,

those tiers form impenetrable firewalls between the executives and the cre￾ative conversations that hold the potential of transforming their organizations.

The Net is the great equalizer. It undermines hierarchies because networks

don’t recognize artificial separations between organizational layers. This has

become common knowledge, but just as outdated legacy computer systems

prevent many companies from progressing to the next level of technical inte￾gration, legacy organization charts keep many companies from realizing their

networked potential. Executives should read this book to get a refresher on

the philosophy of the network revolution, but also to get a better understand￾ing of the different form of leadership that is necessary to keep their organi￾zations in sync with that ongoing revolution. Leaders must understand the

medium of online conversation to do a good job of leading people to use it

well. We suspect that most company leaders still lack that understanding.

Managers, like executives, are leaders, but in being closer to the workers and

their specific responsibilities, their role definitions are changing due to the self￾organizing influence of the Net. Because managers direct the activities of work￾ing groups, they, too, need to understand the capabilities of the technology to

support conversations so that they can begin to plan and lead their departments

and teams within the emerging online meeting place. Managers should be regu￾lar participants in online forums for planning, innovation and knowledge shar￾ing, and need to stay current with existing work-related online discussions

among the people they supervise. Managers who truly understand the strengths

and weaknesses of using online conversation as a working tool will get the

most out of it.

It’s more likely that workers and professionals have already begun to use

the available online communications media to exchange mission critical

information about their jobs or projects, but this book is for them, too. For

although leadership from the top of the organization is a necessity for chang￾ing a culture to one that values creative conversation, the best conversations

and best ideas are most likely to bubble up from the bottom of the organiza￾tional chart, where the actual work gets done and the company interfaces

most directly with its customers. We hope this book inspires the spontaneous

formation of online communities that can solve immediate problems and

inspire the widespread use of online knowledge networks within receptive

organizations.

xii Introduction