knowledge management

When the Right People and the Right Information Come Together, Expect a Masterpiece

“All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections.”

The remarkable man who said this quote, Arthur Aufderheide M.D. (1922-2013), certainly lived by these wise words.

Dr. Arthur Aufderheide

Dr. Arthur Aufderheide

Dr. Aufderheide was a medical school professor at the University of Minnesota who founded an entirely new area of scientific research: paleopathology – the study of the spread of disease through the forensic analysis of mummies (think of it as CSI: Ancient Civilizations!). He actively pursued his research with true passion for over 30 years, traveling the globe locating mummies, establishing best practices for their proper examination and extracting key specimens.

Dr. Aufderheide’s ground-breaking research was the perfect combination of his medical expertise with his personal passions for archaeology, outdoorsmanship and native world cultures. Simply put, he absolutely loved his work. His excitement and passion for his innovative research inspired his students and earned him widespread recognition from the global scientific community.

Dr. Aufderheide’s life work helps drive home two key points about successful, meaningful work and life:

First: Organizations with genuine passion for their mission will utilize technology and share information far more effectively than other companies.

Dr. Aufderheide’s career as a medical school professor was not his first. He had worked for decades as a hospital pathologist, a job he no longer found fulfilling. Had he opted to just count the days to early retirement, his remaining life work likely would have been mediocre at best. Instead, at the age of 55, he made a career change into academia, resulting in one heck of a “second act”: a highly fulfilling career and life.

Aufderheide’s tremendous passion for his work was key to successfully discover new insights from many far-flung sources of information that had been waiting for centuries to be discovered. Anyone else doing similar work just to blithely earn a paycheck surely would have made very few – if any – meaningful discoveries, much less establish a brand new field of scientific research.

Similarly, organizations with true passion for its mission will uncover more, better and faster business discoveries by collaboratively gaining new insight from big data analytics, enterprise search, enterprise knowledge management, and other silo-busting technologies. While dysfunctional organizations might actively resist sharing information, workers in enlightened companies are actively empowered by leadership to ask new questions about the business, while also being provided the advanced technology resources that enable them to find new answers.

Far from hoarding information, Aufderheide intentionally built a huge referenceable knowledge base of his work, including over 5,000 mummy specimens – the largest database of its kind in the world. And so Dr. Aufderheide’s work lives on today, enabling scientists to reconstruct the ways diseases behaved in antiquity, which can be helpful in controlling those diseases today.

Second: Organizations with a culture of genuine passion for their mission will outperform competitors that don’t.

Leaders with a true passion for their organization’s mission will insist on an open, positive company culture that enables everyone to pursue that mission to the fullest – free from company politics, turf wars or internal arguments.

Passionate leaders will also only hire people who will share their passion. At a recent roundtable event, startup exec John McEleney emphasized the need for start-ups to “have the right people on the bus” and keep mediocre players out of the organization by requiring any new potential hire to be referred by an existing employee.

Without a supportive company culture and proper hiring practices, an organization will reap what they sow, and end up with people who are just working for the money.

This all reminds me of Simon Sinek’s fantastic viral TEDx presentation – a must-watch (and well worth watching again!):

Well, that definitely describes the kind of organization I’d love to work for. How about you? 😉

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How Collective-We Firms Eat Exclusive-We Competitors for Lunch

Poorly managed organizations are likely to function – or, I should say malfunction – with frequent use of a divisive verbal tactic called the exclusive “we” (sometimes called the royal “we”). When someone uses the pronoun “we” to refer to everyone – except the person being spoken to – they are using the exclusive we, typically to single out that person and stifle communication.

collective-we-cartoonFor example, I’m willing to bet most people have heard a so-called “leader” make a cutting remark like this:

“We don’t do things that way here.”
“Will you stop asking so many questions? We don’t tolerate ‘fishing expeditions’ around here!”

This kind of behavior is also a sign of a dysfunctional company culture, in which information sharing is discouraged in favor of information hoarding. Hardly a recipe for business success. 

Successful companies use the word “we” a lot too – but in a much better way:

“What should we be doing that we aren’t doing now?”
“These questions are important. We need to be able to answer them.”

Now that’s more like it! This time the speaker is invoking the collective “we” to equally include everyone in the room to foster open communication.

True leaders are builders of a collective-we culture, actively encouraging and supporting information sharing and collaboration. A collective-we organization is therefore much more likely to utilize knowledge management (KM)/enterprise information management (EIM) tools effectively. Doing so enables the organization to not only solve problems more quickly, but also proactively find problems before they turn into a crisis.

Know What You Don't Know by Michael RobertoIn his excellent book Know What You Don’t Know, business school professor Michael Roberto urged organizations to develop problem finding skills.

Michael Roberto recently discussed three key ways KM/EIM solutions can enable the collective knowledge, the collective-we, of your organization:

1. Organizations must answer, “Why did we fail?”

Take a hard look at a failure that took place in the organization. Ask yourself… How could we have seen this coming? Were there some telltale signals we missed? Why did we miss them?

Such an unflinching self-assessment after a business failure will often reveal misinformed decisions caused by incomplete information that did not include critical business signals. These signals usually do not reside within structured data sources such as data warehouses; rather, they are often found within unstructured content: text-based information buried within documents, customer notes, wikis, email, news and websites.

A modern KM platform will integrate and harmonize disparate enterprise data sources – structured and unstructured, internal and external – for fast, on-demand access by knowledge workers. This capability is a key prerequisite to becoming a collective-we organization capable of effective problem finding.

2. Boil large quantities of information down to what really matters.

If you write a 100-page report, no one is going to read it. The answer is not a big report… The most important thing is boiling it down into key bullets… and technology can play a role to effectively share those key takeaways.

A unified KM/EIM system will index, find and present the key takeaways from every “100-page report no one is going to read” on demand, so users can utilize them whenever they are needed to help directly address any given matter at hand.

In a real world example, a level 1 IT support rep for a leading financial services firm resolved, in the first call, a critical stop enterprise application failure incident with no known workaround. The rep used the company’s KM system to search for a possible resolution. Success! The system found the answer, extracted from a 100-plus page application development transitional document written by one of the original programmers.

Few people had probably ever read that entire document, or even knew it existed; and yet, the company’s unified KM/EIM platform empowered the company’s collective-we from halfway around the world to solve a serious problem, by finding and presenting the key points from that document precisely when it was needed.

3. You can’t chase down every piece of information yourself… so ask for help! 

Part of the job of the leader is to recognize that you have talent around you that can help you. But you have to actively seek out that help.

The most effective companies, particularly global companies with people spread out around the world, are using new tools to get people sharing their expertise and information across different silos.

The same financial services firm mentioned above also added to their KM system useful information about their own employees, including each worker’s areas of subject matter expertise. Through such “expert finder” capabilities, a worker within a global organization can find and seek help from co-workers, whether they’re down the hall or anywhere else in the world – once again, empowering the organization’s collective-we to cross international boundaries.

Collective-we organizations fully leverage the power of KM/EIM to fully leverage the collective intelligence of the entire organization. They find business problems well before they become serious issues, as well as seize new business opportunities before the competition even knows they exist. How about you?

Back to the Future of Business Intelligence with H.P. Luhn

When was the term “business intelligence” first coined? You might assume it was first conceived in the late 1980’s; coinciding with the initial emergence of companies offering visual analytic software, but the term was first used decades earlier by visionary IBM technology scientist Hans-Peter Luhn in his groundbreaking 1958 research paper, A Business Intelligence System.

Hans-Peter Luhn’s life work at IBM did not include quantifiable, structured data. That realm of BI would not become practical and cost effective until the advent of mainframe systems later in the 1960’s. Rather, H.P. Luhn focused on the unstructured content of his day: documents, letters, research reports and manuals. So too, the business intelligence system Luhn envisioned focused on computer-automated document processing: auto-abstraction, auto-indexing, selective dissemination of information, and information retrieval.

It’s plain to see that Luhn was well ahead of his time, envisioning critical technology components that set the stage for knowledge management and enterprise search today. And now, Luhn’s insights are more relevant to today’s business intelligence than ever before.

For example, Luhn demonstrated a keen awareness of the roles communication and collaboration play in the effective use of business information. The system would “channel a given item of information to those who need to know it” and find co-workers “whose interests or activities coincide most closely with a given situation,” using action point profiles of each person’s interests and activities. Luhn’s BI system would therefore quickly answer three vital overarching questions: what is known, who needs to know, and who knows what.

Who knows what - 3 key questions

Now over six decades later, it is remarkable how well Luhn’s insights remain a very solid, results-oriented description of BI. What is also striking to me is how early the silos separating unstructured content and structured data emerged.

Business analytics analyst and consultant Seth Grimes, who has written and presented on Luhn’s contribution to BI, sums up this issue of structured and unstructured silos well:

[For decades,] business intelligence detoured around the estimated 80 percent of enterprise information locked inaccessibly in textual form … So BI thrived crunching numerical, RDBMS-managed data… and delivered findings via tables, charts and dashboards that focus more on numbers than on knowledge.

~ Seth Grimes, BI at 50 Turns Back to the Future

Today it is widely recognized that BI based on structured data alone is not enough. Structured data and unstructured content must be integrated and harmonized together to create a complete analytic picture capable of revealing new breakthrough business insights. Again quoting Grimes, “in the last few years, BI has headed back to the future foreseen by Luhn in 1958.”

What is known? Who needs to know? Who knows what? These three timeless, mission-critical questions Hans-Peter Luhn asked in 1958 require unified information — data and content — to fully answer. And these key questions have become easier than ever to effectively answer and act upon by leveraging new digital transformation technologies capable of integrating and presenting analytic-ready data drawn from all relevant data sources, whether structured or unstructured, internal or external.