Getting people to use Web 2.0 takes more than just having a great new tool – the buzz around social media is key to its success. And while access to GCpedia may be limited to public servants, discussion of it certainly is not. Most of the buzz around GCpedia is positive, but more importantly, a slice of the discussion offers TBS and users some very concrete ways to improve the Wiki in terms of what went right and what needs to change in the deployment of future Web 2.0 tools. That’s why the public service needs to pay attention to what people are saying about GCpedia – especially outside of its walls.

Here are the top 5 things to know about how GCpedia is discussed on the web:

1- Wikipedia’s take on its GC cousin – Oddly enough, the Wikipedia article on GCpedia is an orphan, as “few or no articles link to it.” It is also tagged as a stub – there isn’t much about GCpedia on its closest public analogue. As is Wikipedia’s aim, the language about GCpedia is neutral – so, one has to wonder why TBS hasn’t taken advantage of what is potentially a good, and at least a cheap and easy opportunity to tout the goals of GCpedia. (Who cares about GCpedia outside of the public service? Taxpayers, quite possibly,)

2 – GCpedia will save the public service!  – David Eaves makes the point that GCpedia is an excellent way to capture all of the tacit knowledge that will walk out the door when senior management  retires in droves. Used properly, GCpedia could serve as a wealth of go-to information for those who will advance to mid-level and senior positions. Government departments and agencies need to be willing to endure the temporary pain of dedicating staff to interviewing almost-retirees and posting the findings to GCpedia, to avoid a longer term consequence: losing the collective intelligence getting ready to exit the public service.

3 – GCpedia remains the domain of GCgeeks? – Peter Smith is worried about how well GCpedia lends itself to use by newbies. The level of technical knowledge necessary to using GCpedia is one of the reasons Eaves cites for why soon-to-be-retirees aren’t likely to post what they know themselves. Smith is right – the interface is confusing, and could easily intimidate anyone with techno-trepidation. What is the solution? One is likely more training than what is largely available thus far, especially if TBS is sold on the MediaWiki platform.

4 – Lots of talk on Twitter – Interestingly enough, many public servants have turned to Twitter to talk about GCpedia. This isn’t surprising, just important. Remember that Twitter may well be the easiest real-time resource for anyone who wants to take the pulse of the Web-2.0-crowd’s feeling about GCpedia.

5 – Mostly love, but some concerns, too – Overall, the talk about GCpedia is overwhelmingly positive. And where challenges are discussed on the Web, so are solutions, which gives GCpedia’s owners and users an opportunity to engage in in-depth and strategic discussions about the role of this communication channel. That discussion is vital if GCpedia is going to live up to its potential.

While not the mainstream, despite what advocates would like to think, web2.0 technologies are occupying more and more of government workers’ attention!  The potential of these tools to help in communicating and sharing knowledge with colleagues, and in engaging partners and citizens across the firewall has gotten a large number of us enthusiastic and passionate about their use, and has prompted some executives to exclaim “there is no going back”.   At the same time there is an emerging question as to whether the knowledge created in these technologies is valued and captured as a government asset.

Knowledge management and Web2.0

Knowledge management types are generally interested in social media, seeing them and often describing them as knowledge management tools.  There are a few good reasons for this. 

First of all Web2.0 tools are open and allow for broad participation and contribution.   Government departments can tap into the collective knowledge and intelligence of their workers on a much larger scale and share knowledge, whether its forestry scientists mashing up maps to plot boreal forest research or GCpedia users ‘crowdsourcing’  an issue of common interest. 

Second, and I think more fundamentally Web2.0 tools aim at capturing thoughts, considerations, decisions and points of view as they evolve and change.  A good example is a wiki page on a new policy that not only contains the policy itself but also the discussion page which records the background discussion and exchange of ideas.  Extend this out and there may be Twitter feeds and blogs that provide ongoing input and commentary on the same policy.    

Taken collectively not only do you have the final result but also a rich source of information containing considerations, discussion, debate and decision, in other words the stuff of knowledge management.  Contrast that with traditional office tools that are focused on the creation of final documents and not on valuing the in-between or ‘transitory’ versions.  While knowledge managers may be one of the biggest beneficiaries of Web2.0 tools there is a significant challenge:

There is a little recognition given to the value of web2.0-created information and knowledge – few recognize, for instance, that a Twitter feed or a blog post would be considered a knowledge resource that needs to be preserved and managed as would any other record or document.  There are cases already of groups and individuals using the new tools and approaches to create communities and generate knowledge only at the end of the process to find that the results have not be considered as assets to be integrated into the government knowledge and information repositories.

Instances particularly worth noting are those where tools have been used to conduct conferences and internal consultations and at the end of the process it is not clear that the information and knowledge has been preserved.  In fact, in a few cases where external services have been used, rights to access this information may have been lost when the service is no longer under license.

While the government is taking steps to recognize the value of knowledge created through Web2.0 such as new policy instruments like the Government of Canada’s Directive on Recordkeeping, there is mindset that has to change.  What we should do first and foremost is recognize that we ARE creating valuable knowledge resources via these technologies and take steps to ensure that the resources be preserved as part of the government of Canada’s historical record.    

Several months ago I found a copy of s+b on the table of my Edmonton hotel room.  Inside was a jewel of an article by Sally Helgesen on The Practical Wisdom of Ikujiro Nonaka.  Early in the article Nonaka, an expert in the field of Knowledge Management, points out that Knowledge Management is different than other aspects of IT management:

“Companies and leaders who treat knowledge management as just another branch of IT don’t understand how human beings learn and create,” he says.  Unlike land, capital, energy, labor, and technology – the conventional “inputs” into business practice – knowledge is innately self-renewing.  “It is produced and consumed simultaneously.  Its value increases with use, rather than being depleted as with industrial goods or commodities.  Above all, it is a resource created by humans acting in relationships with one another.”

Helgesen does an excellent job of describing Nonaka’s concept of creating knowledge through a cyclical interaction of tacit and explicit knowledge, and how this interaction drives innovation within an organization.  What struck me was how this concept applied to Enterprise Architecture and the journey of self-discovery and continuous improvement in service delivery!

Tacit knowledge is not written down.  It is based on personal experience, observation, and gut feeling.  It can be a difficult thing to put your finger on, as it is unspoken and not formalized.  It is instinctive knowledge, and represents an innate, almost subconscious understanding.  Explicit knowledge, on the other hand, is structured and formalized knowledge that can be attained through academic study.  Explicit knowledge allows us to apply a learned theoretical concept to solve a real-world problem.

What I found interesting about this article was Nonaka’s description of how tacit knowledge is turned into explicit knowledge through a cyclical process.  This approach is driven by social interaction of human beings as they gain tacit knowledge through personal experience, convert this knowledge into formal ideas and language, combine this knowledge with other explicit knowledge, and apply and internalize this new knowledge.

These stages reinforce one another. Nonaka quotes Katsuaki Watanabe, president of Toyota, as saying that “it is the continual dynamic synthesis of actual experience and abstract expertise [meaning tacit and explicit knowledge, respectively] that enables an organization to sustain innovation.”

There are parallels here to developing Enterprise Architecture maturity.  Organizations developing an EA program must go through a process of self-discovery.  This requires extracting the tacit knowledge within the organization and converting it into explicit knowledge.  This journey follows Nonaka’s knowledge creation process.  The conversion of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge allows an organization to apply this knowledge to improve operational efficiency.  It is important to realize that the cycle does not end with explicit knowledge – it is the interaction of explicit knowledge with tacit knowledge creates an atmosphere for innovation, creativity and self-improvement.

Another concept presented in the article is that of ba.  Ba is an environmental context for the open flow of ideas within a group of people that enables knowledge creation.  Helgesen sums up:

Ba is never solitary; it exists among two or more people. As Nonaka says, “In ba, there is no you or me, there is only us, sharing a here-and-now relationship.” Ba can occur in a work group, a project team, an ad hoc meeting, a virtual e-mail list, or at the frontline point of contact with customers. It serves as a petri dish in which shared in­sights are cultivated and grown.

Advances in Enterprise 2.0 and social computing technologies provide opportunities for social interaction that transcend traditional physical and temporal boundaries.  This type of ba lacks the face-to-face interaction of real-world personal contact, but enables communication and collaboration among individuals who might not otherwise be able to meet in person.  The ba provided by social computing will increase collaboration and the creative flow of ideas, and create additional possibilities for innovation.  I am sure Nonaka would have more to say about this, and I can’t wait to learn more!

Quoted sections reprinted with permission from strategy+business. Published by Booz & Company.  http://www.strategy-business.com/press/article/08407?pg=0

At GTEC 2008, I presented a seminar called “Managing Corporate Memory in Public Sector”.  The well-attended session explored the pending shift in workforce demographics as the Boomer generation approaches retirement age. Sectors at most risk included government, utilities, engineering, transportation and manufacturing. I sought to explore how IT and IM professionals could play a strategic role as our workplace transforms and to minimize risk of information and knowledge loss.

Though this is no longer a new topic challenging public sector management, the situation continues to grow in urgency and awareness.  Over the weekend, I noticed that Gartner Research VP, Jeffrey Mann, had twittered about a recent spike in his customer inquiries precisely on this topic.  He “tweeted”:  “three of this morning’s 4 calls are on knowledge management (two on capturing experience of retiring employees) who says KM is dead?”. Whether we call it knowledge management, corporate memory preservation, succession planning… whether the project is led by IM/RM, Human Resources or IT…  regardless of the tools we use to capture the intrinsic knowledge held in the brains of our most senior valued employees – we know it must be done. Public Sector is a knowledge-economy enterprise. Information, policies, and programs:  services are delivered to the citizens, residents, businesses within our jurisdiction to provide a stable infrastructure for social, commercial and political activities.  To not pay attention to prospect of losing mentorship, best practices, and institutional culture is to do a disservice to the investment we’ve made in cultivating depth and breadth of public sector experience.

We all have our “keep me up at night” moments. Mine is a story told to me at the annual ARMA Conference in 2006.  I was conducting a workshop on this topic of “Managing Corporate Memory” and a woman from an academic institution came up to me, very pleased to see the research I had done on the topic. As part of her Records Management responsibility, she was tasked with capturing the legacy paper and physical records of the scientists and engineers who retired from her institution. She told me the story of a scientist who upon his departure handed to her a large box of ore samples. He said to her very intently, “make sure you hang on to these… they are very very important”. And so she took them. And put them on a shelf, documented with the date and location and name of the scientist who left them behind.  She looked at me rather sadly, and admitted that she had no idea what those rocks meant, or WHY they were so important. There was no corporate memory preservation mandate to ensure the samples got to a new researcher who could continue the work. So to this day, they sit on a dark shelf.

Was the cure for cancer in that box of rocks? Did they tell us something about our world that could make our lives better? We may never know.

To learn more about this topic of Managing Corporate Memory, click here to listen to a recorded educational seminar we hosted earlier this year. Any comments or feedback welcomed.

Now that we have the internal NRCan Resource Wiki hitting its stride, a growing and active blog culture, and a vibrant video community of practice, where does NRCan go from here?  Do we add new technologies such as professional networking in order to provide even more ways for employees to collaborate and share knowledge?  Do we explore the potential of crowd sourcing to tap into the wisdom of our community?   Do we begin to turn outwards in order to engage citizens and clients in new ways?

The answer is all of the above.  However, we believe that underlying the implementation of collaborative technologies is a foundational need to integrate them with our traditional tools in order to create a comprehensive knowledge base for the whole department.  In other words, our priority these days is to mashup all our sources of knowledge. 

The reasons for this are obvious.  Collaborative technologies are increasingly being used by employees to discuss issues and share ideas, to provide status updates on key files, and to capture considerations and decisions around our projects and initiatives.  At the same time we continue to create studies, reports and datasets using our traditional tools such as word processing and document management systems and databases.  By bringing together new and traditional sources via an integrated knowledge base we can create synergies and provide a more comprehensive and complete picture of the work we do. 

Imagine being able to easily access all the sources of information on ‘climate change’ at NRCan.  You would find a wiki page describing the topic and current status of activities, scientific and policy studies present and past, blog discussions on the latest policy developments, videos of our scientists talking about their findings and a network of expertise with responsibilities in this area, all of this and more from a single point of access. This is what we are aiming for by mashing it all up.

 In order to achieve this objective NRCan has articulated two basic principles: 

1) Information and knowledge should be openly available.  That means putting information and knowledge into shared spaces so that they can be accessed by everyone;

 2) A common and basic level of information classification should be applied to all our sources of knowledge to enable better integration and improve findability.

Most importantly, we are also rolling out an enterprise search engine to search across all these knowledge sources.  Currently it searches wikis, blogs, discussion forums, the intranet and our departmental phone directory.  Over the next few months we will extend the search to content and document management spaces, our growing catalogue of videos and eventually to our legacy shared drives.  All of this taken together will lay the foundation for NRCan to make its information and knowledge broadly accessible, first to our employees, but potential beyond to other government departments and to Canadian citizens.   Now that’s a mashup!