| |
 |
16 June 2003 |
Pete Bradshaw and Stephen Powell on "online communities for school leaders"
The community is based around learning (formal, informal and diguised learning). One of the interesting initiatives that they have started is learning communities between young students who have problems going to school because of social reasons (bullied, young maternity etc.). By connecting them through a community they can find trust in their peers and be offered a learning environment that is safe in their perspective.
My comment to this is that the learning experience may actually not come from the learning in academic sense, but merely by having students that passed the (school-)learning, back into the community to assist and facilitate. They understand the sensitive context and problems, and learning may arise from peer-to-peer trust building and helping.
This happened at 5:21:18 PM or
|
|
Alexander Hagmeister, from SAP in Germany, has given an impression of "community reward programs" in the marketing context. In their communities, which involved customers and sales leads, they use the following methods to engage participant:
- Website with webcast
- Newsletter with information
- Discussion forums with SAP experts from all parts of the organization (with email notification)
Who is the SAP community?
- decision makers (c-level)
- global and growing
- topics (CRM, technology, busin. intelligence, ent. portals, ERP)
The membership rewards program is design for commitment and incentive - with points rewarded for questions, login, filling out profile etc and ratings by other users (quality rather than quantity). At a certain level of points (1000) people can redeem their points voucher to buy goodies from SAP.
The social improvement due to the communities (on the external side) comes forward in a bi-annual survey in which 70% is content with the initiative.The SAP employees that participate are not rewarded other than the customers - and the justification of their time and effort is not part of their job. Volunteers they are.
According to Alexander, thehe SAP dedication to the community in resources, is 10 FTE. In the Q&A I asked him what the future of this community model is going to be; whether he had been considering releasing the community to the non-SAP users (giving them more ownership) perhaps turning it into an open-source-ish self-regulating community. He told me he did not know.
I think there is a great opportunity for them to do this, because they could turn a cost-center (10 FTE) into a profit-center by having the community do the market research, account work and co-development for niche markets!
This happened at 4:17:54 PM or
|
|
Denise Schilling (HP) had an interesting discussion about the pre- and post-merger communities of HP/Compaq.
She talked about merger and acquisition in general, from a business perspective, and the background of the HP / Compaq merger process. According to her, the expected cost saving was approximately 2.5 billion US$- at a combined mutual sale power of 78 billion.
She showed the process of how the communities facilitated the merger between the two companies, where she pointed out that some of the key areas for integration were procurment, supply chain, closure of administrative facilities and IT integration. Also organizationl restructuring was one of the attenion key areas of the merger.
George afterwards said that he had noticed that in the pre- and post-merger situation the focus of the communities of each of the companies has been totally different. After the merger it seems that much of the old Compaq-communities focus has vanished. I think the differences had to do with the cultures of the two companies, but I am not sure how in the next few years these communities develop to metacommunities between the two.
This happened at 1:02:18 PM or
|
|
Tim Butler talks about how collaboration brings business environments for ERP, Portal, CM and CRM together (unites them). In his presentation he calls this the collaborative foundation. According to him, the role of collaboration has shifted these isolated components from up to two, three years ago to a more cohesive environment. As a case for this he talks about "creating a cop to facilitate BPI" about their customer Rio Tinto.
Rio Tinto is a large and very global environment where each of the PG's there are different environment variables when it comes to tools, applications etc. One of their product groups, Energy, started more than a year ago with a community of practice initiative.
Now one year later you could say that the needs for the communities of practice have been very common inside Rio tinto and also throughout the different industries: email overflow, finding information, sharing new items..
One particular issues has been the problems of the different way of working with email and shared folders. Both of these methods have specific advantages, but for collaboration it has heavy disadvantages. Now with the communities, people cannot only share in a global platform but also put things in context around a document or discussion. The technology then also allows features such as unseen entries, tracking, version control.
To illustrate the communities concept in their vision, he shows the Shell EP "what do others know.." - which I think is still a quite powerful diagram to illustrate the concept. There was a little twist to it however, because the difference between the "what is already known" (the knowledge base idea) and "what do others know" (the community idea) was not conveyed in the style Shell designed the template.
Stepping out of the community and looking into KB he says : Advantages of a Knowledge base include: build a corporate asset, breaks down barriers, mitigates geographical distances, etc. Then he moves over to the essential ingredients for KM: people, process, technology.
This happened at 12:34:21 PM or
|
|
Joanne Self, from Rolls-Royce corporation:
Communities of Practice exist on a global scale in Rolls-Royce (RR);
- they support integration between indiv. members of the RR family.
- support working effectively ona global basis (share best practices)
Joanne has an interesting story from beginning to end on the communities in the last two years. How did they get started? They started off with 10 small communities in a pilot and then expanded to 40 after putting in place some improvements; guidelines were produced to support this effort. After that, some benefits were identified (time reduction, less email conversation, improved information sharing).
Their future expectation is to grow both in size and scale and have more and better participation in the community networks. When she was asked one question asked about resources she responded that in Rolls-Royce they use approximately 2 hours per week for a community on facilitation.
This happened at 12:15:35 PM or
|
|
Dave Snowden from IBM about "managing in the shadow" Dave does not use slides.
He says that "Best practice comes from the fact that in management science, for he last 100 years we have believed that knowledge is ordered (since Taylor). This is not true - it confuses properties with qualities." Then he goes really fast with some interesting and compelling observations. He continues by saying that "Ordered systems are mechanical (things happen time and time again, like a pendulum). In unordered we can look at retrospective coherence (looking back it's fine, but does not tell about looking forward in the future).". According to him then things happen by accident, not by design.
Structured (process) versus unstructured:
The analogy of the creation of a crystal like a snowflake: the shape and design of the snowflak asre driven by factors such as temperate and cohesion. Once the snowflake has been formed out of chrystals, any scienticst can deduce the origin, structure and coherence; however no-one could have predicted the shape and properties of the snowflake upfront.
Another example about structured versus unstructured knowledge through patter recognition and best practice is about the US Marines in Virginia: the marines organized and excursion to New York, to Wall Street and played with real brokers in a stock simulation program. The marines lost all the games played (as expected). Then they turned it around and the dealers came to the Marine's base to play with their (war-game) simulation tools. To Marines this time lost again which was totally unexepcted. Why did this happen? The secret is in the process and control of structure: the dealers when they played in the base in VA worked with pattern recognition: they destabilized the patters they did not want and controlled the ones they wanted. The marines on the other hand handled out of best practice.
About tools: everything in community of practice tools, blogs, etc. is written down is only partially the knowledge that exists. Another truth is that kKnowledge can only volunteerd - i.e. you cannot know when someone has given up al knowledge, but you can see when someone has someone complied with all the process.
Dave has struggled to fight the problem of addiction to email inside IBM's management, where executives are requested to respond to up to 250 emails per day. So they went to Betty Ford clinic to learn how to stop additction through detoxification then applied it to the email addiction in IBM. So, people would work less in email and more in collaborative tools - no more cc:ing on the emails and no more attachments to the email..
About Etienne Wengers book ("cultivating communities of practice") he says that his work is based on the experience of as many as 30 or 40 companies, and then made into a structural. This will not work - you take cultivated practices into best practice! You need to organize KM like you do a party for a 12-year old. Set your boundaries on what they can do and provide them tools. If they cross the boundary, you either intervene or you change the tools that enhave the group activity.
Context is everything; do you trust firemen the same way as business people?
Communities have a social behaviour: typing things into a website, for example as part of the community tools, is a typical UK-US thing and does not work in central or southern europe or asia.
Scaling of networks: a group of 15 people is maximum for sufficient level of trust to exchange knowledge (but you can be member of multiple such groups). Then a group of 150 people is the maximum for having social acquitanship with. Therefore you need to stimulate informally the 15-group and reduce the formal communities of 150 as much as you can. Do not try to scale the latter, it will not work!
Dave does not like to shift gears down and speeds up in his talk: "People are receptive to new. He discusses the Hawthorne effect and how good community ideas after a year fade away and people do not realize why this is happening - yellow pages CV updates will not work, because people are not motivated after a while to update and work on this."
He goes on about narrative storytelling.
Something that we certainly have to pay more attention to is that the stories of failure are more effective because they spread easier (context is set better) - opposed to success stories.
This happened at 10:53:48 AM or
|
|
Greg Searle is talking about communities of practice - using in his introduction the analogy to the guild networks in the Middle Ages as a knowlegde and innovation network.
Now, 500 years later, Greg elaborates on his first experience with global communities of practice initiated by the World Bank, on fishing (addressing intranational problems, such as fish parasites that can enter the food chain and caus e major health problems) - the program still exists and is called "One Fish".
About the US-Army community of practice, which staryed as a front-porch converation in Hawai and addresses the sharing of best-practices across stovepiptes in the Army. The conversation grew into a book, the book (taking the guidon) - purchased by many arrmy commanders around the world - into a community of practice (companycommand.com) and the started the revolution of Knowledge Management strategy in the US Army.
His best practices that came out of this community building exercise are:
- being pragmatic and magnetic
- invite participation
- get rhythm (for instance, using teamblog, email newsletters, regular guest speakers and chat)
- know your audience (interests, lexicon)
- delegate thoughtfully (good leadership, look for emotianal intelligence, look for alignment between individual belief and community belief; trust first and doubt later; enable mentorship)
- "arm the peasants" - put power in the hand of the coordinators and participants (empower, delegate, control)
- facilitate lurking ; it is a term for cognitive apprenticeship for legitimate peripheral participation); give lurkers FAQ, updates of activity, the chance to participate in conversation, give personalization and give community builders tools to reach the lurkers in digest
This happened at 10:12:56 AM or
|
|
©
Copyright 2005 Erik van Bekkum.
|
|
Weblog
