Seradigm: Knowledge Management

In season 1, episode 8, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer “I, Robot, You Jane”, Giles, the librarian comments to Jenny Calendar, the computer science teacher that what he doesn’t like about computers is the smell.

“What do you mean, computers don’t smell”

she says. Giles replies

“Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell… musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is… it has no texture, no context. It’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um… smelly.”

I first met Paul Reynolds of McGovern Online (or @littlehigh as he became known on Flickr, Twitter and other social networks), at the National Digital Forum conference in 2007. The NDF is a “a coalition of museums, archives, art galleries, libraries and government departments working together to enhance electronic access to New Zealand’s culture and heritage”, something which I learned was very dear to Paul’s heart.

I had seen Paul on TV once or twice before, and admired his insightful and engaging style. We bumped into each other once or twice a year at conferences, or walking along Lambton Quay. I regularly listened to podcasts of his ‘Virtual World’ discussions with Jim Mora on Radio New Zealand.

Many of us in the Internet, open government, and open data space spent much of our formative years in the digital world. Playing video games as kids and teenagers, hacking on early home computers, and reading cyberpunk novels. The digital world had colour, and sound, but it was garish, tinny, maybe even a bit sterile.

What I loved about Paul Reynolds was the way he brought texture and richness to the digital world. He had a unique way of connecting the beautiful, tactile, physical, and even musty nature of art galleries, museums, and libraries with the expression of knowledge in digital environments. He seemed to understand the innately human aspects of both, and bridge them in a way no one else could.

He understood the relationship between content, people, and place in the physical world, and effortlessly applied that understanding to technology, the web, and social media. He did so in a way that was wry, amusing, and both pragmatic and visionary. He explained new things in ways that were easy to understand, often simultaneously with the excitement of a 7 year old boy, and the wisdom of a 70 year old man.

Paul, with your beautiful lilting accent, your expansive mind, and your love for literature, art, culture and technology, you gave the digital world texture, smell and sound. You shall be missed.

In this fourth post on information management trends in NZ, I look at the phenomenon that is SharePoint.

NB. In this article I focus specifically on the use of SharePoint for Intranets, Collaboration, and team based Document Management. SharePoint can also be used for Enterprise Document Management, Records Management, and as an application development platform, but I don’t explore those in depth here.

The key trend I’m picking is that given the sheer number of deployments we’re seeing in NZ, and the capability of some of the solution partners and consultants, by 2010/11 we’re going to continue to see lots of very bad implementations of SharePoint, and some very good ones.

Here’s why.

I’ve been observing SharePoint implementations since the product first debuted in 2001. The software company I used to be part owner of used SharePoint’s predecessor, Microsoft Site Server, to build the first Intranet for one of NZ’s largest insurance companies. They then (after we sold the company and I went out consulting), built an Intranet product on top of the first version of SharePoint and deployed it with a number of large corporate customers.

Like most Microsoft products, SharePoint wasn’t very good in its first couple of versions. By SharePoint 2007 however, there seemed to be general consensus in the industry that the product had reached maturity, and was starting to be very good. It was feature rich, stable, and very well integrated with Microsoft Office 2007.

Why then, am I predicting there will continue to be lots of bad implementations in 2010/11? Firstly, the background context. New Zealand, by international standards has only a handful of real ‘enterprise’ size organisations (5,000-50,000 staff). Most ‘large’ NZ organisations are between 500-5,000 staff, with relatively few above the 2,000 person mark. As such the deployments of ‘Enterprise Content Management’ products and stacks (such as those from Stellent, Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, Lotus) have been proportionally fewer than in countries with larger organisations, due in part at least to cost. Many NZ organisations have therefore struggled along with shared drives, and Exchange Public Folders (shudder) for longer than their Australian, US and British counterparts. Perhaps recognising this challenge, New Zealand passed the Public Records Act in 2005. Audits begin in 2010. A lot of public sector organisations (in particular the smaller ones) are implementing SharePoint to meet their records keeping obligations. A lot of corporates are implementing SharePoint because of its strengths in collaborative workspaces, and the fact it provides a platform to on which to build useful systems and services (that is much cheaper than the big ECM stacks).

Because of NZ’s smaller scale, Microsoft has a greater penetration in the back office server space in NZ than in larger countries, where Sun, IBM and Oracle products are proportionately more pervasive. Many of the organisations in NZ that had Novell infrastructure have shifted to Windows servers and Exchange in the last few years. That means that in NZ, there are proportionally more Windows servers, and more people with experience deploying Windows infrastructure and developing solutions for the Microsoft platform, than in larger countries.

As many people will know, SharePoint comes in two ‘flavours’. Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS), which is free with Windows servers, and Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) for which Microsoft charges licence fees. Because WSS is ‘free’, and relatively easy to implement, it is to content/document management this decade what MS Access was to data management in the 90′s. MS Access was fantastic in that database applications could be built cheaply and quickly, and awful in that those applications proliferated almost uncontrollably in some organisations, becoming a management nightmare for IT and the business alike. In a similar way, where organisations implement WSS sites without some centralised strategy, governance, and configuration management (or for that matter use MOSS to do the same thing), it’s the same recipe for chaos. SharePoint is a complicated product, and it’s easy to implement poorly, from a usability, content discovery, scalability, and manageability point of view. Because of this, and the reasons above, I predict we will continue to see a great many SharePoint implementations done organically, hurriedly, or just put in by IT, without appropriate user testing, configuration management, and governance processes. This will lead to inconsistencies across SharePoint sites, silo-ed information, and user frustration. Darryl Burling, the SharePoint product manager for Microsoft New Zealand provides some views on how SharePoint skills shortages (both technical and business) in NZ are contributing to this problem.

That’s the bad news. So what’s the good news?

I also predict we are going to start seeing some stunningly good SharePoint implementations in NZ. The reasons for this are:

1. The capabilities of some SharePoint solution partners,
2. The SharePoint Elite initiative,
3. A maturing user community,
4. The work on the human and business sides of SharePoint implementation being done by a small number of NZ consultants.

A small number of solution companies that implement SharePoint have been doing so for quite a number of years. Intergen and Provoke in particular have learned the hard way, made most of the mistakes there are to make, and are now very good at tailoring SharePoint solutions to client needs, and implementing them in a usable, manageable and scalable way. Intergen also has a ‘Rapid Results‘ service where they’ve configured an implementation of SharePoint for very fast, high quality, deployments of SharePoint for intranets with up to 500 users.

In order to validate the growing sophistication and competence of a number of SharePoint implementers, Microsoft New Zealand has launched the SharePoint Elite initiative. This is a certification and training scheme to provide ‘SharePoint Elite Partner’ status to those who meet the standard. Datacom, Fujitsu, Information Leadership, Intergen and Provoke are the first companies in NZ to do this training.

There are now SharePoint user groups in a number of centres, and 2009 saw the first national SharePoint conference (for which there’ll be a followup next year). Knowledge sharing through these fora should increase the comunities’ capabilities. Ian Oliver of Provoke discusses the changing face of the implementation community and ‘raising of the bar’ of customer expections in this blog post.

Last, but not least, there are a small number of people working on the ‘softer’ aspects of SharePoint. Information Leadership provide a number of assessment methods, information design, records compliance, and training services for SharePoint. Michael Sampson, a global expert in using SharePoint for collaboration, lives in NZ. He’s written two books on SharePoint – ‘Seamless Teamwork‘ and ‘SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration‘. In both books he provides a very critical and rigorous analysis of SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses. Even more importantly, Chapters ‘4. Governance Structure, Process and Themes‘ and ‘5. Engaging the Business‘ from his second book, provide, I believe, extremely valuable guidance on how to manage the human and business aspects of implementing and using SharePoint. If followed, this guidance will help organisations avoid many of the pitfalls I predict above.

So, that’s my prediction. In 2010/11 we’ll see a proliferation of awful to barely mediocre implementations of SharePoint, a number of extremely good implementations, and not much in the middle. As to whether the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010 will make any difference to the above, I’ll let others comment.

Sidenote and disclaimer: I am not a SharePoint consultant, I’m an IM/KM/IS Strategist, so my arguments above are based on what I’ve seen in the industry, rather than through ‘hands-on’ experience implementing SharePoint. In addition, I don’t receive money or consulting work from any of the organisations mentioned above. I try, as much as is possible, to be technology and vendor agnostic. 

This is the fourth in a set of posts on NZ information management trends:

1. OpenSource ECM
2. CMIS will save us
3. Enterprise Social Computing
4. Doing Sharepoint wrong, and right
5. Structured Content
6. Toes in the mist

Next up, Structured Content.

It was late 1998. A colleague waved me over to his desk. “Look at this” he said, “it’s a new search engine”. He was pointing to a page that was mostly white background, an ugly multicoloured logo with a stupid sounding name, and a single text box. I was sceptical. This was totally different to the information dense ‘portal’ style pages currently in use by Alta Vista, Excite, Infoseek, Yahoo and others. “That’s ugly” I said. “Yes, but it delivers really good search results” he replied. And that was that. I started using Google. It was a better mousetrap. Not a fancier, frillier, more trendy mousetrap, just a better one. This is how disruptive technology happens. Sure, marketing is important, but only if its promoting a product that is actually better.

Someone just recently introduced me to Cuil. It’s a new search engine, founded by one of the architects of Google’s large search index, and a computer scientist from Stanford. Their staff are well qualified, and they’ve got good investor backing. Could they be the new Google?

I don’t think so. Here’s the reason. It’s got nothing to do with Google’s $4B annual profit, or the more than $1B they invest into R&D every year. It’s a question of philosophy. Not the “treat your employees really well” philosophy, but the “how to make search work well” philosophy.

Here’s Cuil’s claim about their point of difference:

“Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

What they’re saying, if I understand correctly, is that semantic analysis is more powerful than distributed cognition. One of the key things that powered Google’s success was that they based part of their relevance testing on the number of links that pointed to a particular page. They analysed the Web, as well as the content in each page. They figured, if lots of people link to this page, it’s probably useful.

Don’t get me wrong, I love semantic analysis. I’m an etymology geek. I get fascinated by morphemes, taxonomy, and topic maps. It’s just that I agree with James Surowiecki when he argues that (to paraphrase the Wikipedia article on ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’) “Market judgment, can be much faster, more reliable, and less subject to political forces than the deliberations of experts, or expert committees”. Distributed cognition just seems to scale better than semantic analysis. The problem with semantic analysis is that someone has to write the algorhythms that do the analysis. That person has to make judgments about how meaning is constructed in language, and in so doing they arbitrarily close off parts of the probability space. To me, within an information domain as diverse as the Web, there’s just too much variation between signifier, signified, and referent, as used by the billion or so authors and searchers, to enable semantic analysis to work as an exclusive technique.

I’ve heard Dave Snowden say many times¹ that semantic analysis has its place, but like Newtonian physics, only within boundaries. I wonder that Google’s success is because they do this, harnessing the power of both approaches.

I’ve also tried Cuil on a number of different searches, and it’s just not even close to being as good as Google at finding what I was after. Regardless of which theory of language/cognition resonates with you, in the end, it’s results that count.

[1] See this article and various podcasts on the Cognitive Edge site.

Sarah Heal presented today for NZKM in Christchurch on Records Management as a part of KM Strategy. Over the last year she has detected some unexpected and at times inconvenient signals, a growing body of anecdotal evidence that something is not quite right in information management. There have been lots of failed IM/KM initiatives, and EDRMS is the “Emperor with no clothes”. There just aren’t any really good exemplars in NZ of very successful deployments. With project budgets often ranging from $0.5 million to $1 million, this is an expensive problem.

People she’s met say that the EDRMS are “Too hard to use”, “it takes too long to file things”, “they can’t find things” – if the information design is wrong implementations start to creak after the first year or two, and the ab0ve starts happening. The implementation process has to be about getting into a stable orbit, rather than just getting the launch done.

Problems that manifest are – “Perfunctory use, overfull email inboxes, people hate it and you” OR “Wide spread use, out of control, people can’t find things”.

The way to address this she says, is to make sure that systems and processes implemented are:

1. Useable – quick to file stuff
2. Useful – how can I find stuff
3. Used – chicken and egg of use, I file we all find, others file I find (real world compliance)

On the KM front she says that KM is all about making experts in your business. It’s about managing ‘know-how’ rather than managing knowledge. Using this frame of reference it’s important to get a smooth transition between informal know-how (wikis, blogs, communities of interest), definitive self-help ‘nuggets’ (faqs, articles, lessons learned, stories, training material, discussion topics), file and find repositories (records, documents, email management), instruments and mechanisms (business processes, templates, job records, forms etc), definitive (SOI, vision, values etc). Often very records management/compliance focused projects will miss the ‘informal know-how’ and ‘definitive self-help nuggets’ aspects, but these are of most value in terms of encouraging use of the more formal aspects.

Greg, one of the participants, thought that the project mindset was often behind these challenges, rather than an iterative process that is more associated with web sites (it’s never finished, it’s always evolving). EDRMS projects can take so long they involve many different people over time, across organisational restructures, and fall over because of lack of continuity.

In the group there seemed to be an emerging understanding of the role of the different tools in different stages in the lifecycle of information from informal to formal.

While I expect some of my underpinning beliefs and theoretical frameworks on knowledge and KM differ from Sarah’s I thought she was a fantastic presenter and had a real depth of experience in the boundary between RM and KM.

The best part of the session for me though, was that we had two different groups from the same organisation in the room. They hadn’t met each other before, and were working on very similar initiatives. Seeing them talking to each other at the end of the session reinforced to me why I put time and energy into organising NZKM events.

I recently listened to an excellent podcast on Technation from Rob Levy, the CTO of BEA systems. They have software development teams in Silicon Valley, China and India. He was talking about the challenges of communicating over distance and timezones. He discusses how in conventional modes of communication you have to know who to ask, or risk spamming everyone in the company with broadcast email. Even if you do know who to ask, timezone differences can mean a 2 day delay between each post a conversation, and they might not even have the best answer to your question. With social software like wikis he says, you don’t have to know who knows what. If the knowledge community is actively using the tool, anyone who’s interested and has a useful contribution will respond.

He also talks about how if a new idea comes up, in the past the champion of the idea would have to ‘socialise’ it. This meant talking to lots of people, delivering presentations, and lobbying senior management for support to consider it in a wider forum. In the world of social software if the idea comes up, and people listen and start discussing it, that means it may well be a good idea. If they don’t, it’ll die on its own due to lack of attention. Senior management will be far more likely to fund further exploration if lots of people are already enthusiastic about it and are talking to each other across operational silo boundaries. If the idea can thrive and survive in a space mediated by social software, the argument goes, it’s more likely to be a good one.

The podcast is definitely worth a listen.