IT Knowledge Management: First Conference and General Picture
Say what you like, and knowledge management (KM) still remains in the IT community a sort of strange beast: It seems to be clear that knowledge is power (c), but usually this means some personal knowledge, personal experience, training pumped skills. General corporate knowledge management systems are rarely thought out, sluggish, and, in general, do not understand what value knowledge of a particular developer can carry throughout the company. Exceptions, of course, are. And the same Alex Sidorin from CROC recently gave an excellent interview . But this is still a single phenomenon.
Here and on Habré there is still no hub dedicated to knowledge management, so I write my post in the hub of conferences. It is quite reasonable that if, on April 26, thanks to the initiative of the “Oleg Bunin Conferences”, the first conference in Russia about knowledge management in IT, KnowledgeConf 2019, was held .
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I was lucky to work in the Program Committee of the conference, to see and hear a lot of things that turned my cozy world of knowledge management manager to some extent, and to understand that IT had already matured before knowledge management. It remains to understand which side to approach him.
By the way, on April 10 and 17-19, two more conferences about knowledge management took place: Quorum CEDUCA and II Youth Conference KMconf'19 , at which I happened to act as an expert. These conferences had no bias in IT, but I have something to compare with. In my first post I want to talk about the thoughts on which I, a knowledge management specialist, prompted participation in these conferences. It can be considered as tips for future speakers, and for those involved in knowledge management by occupation.
83, Carl. This is not a joke . Despite the fact that this is the first conference, and very few people are engaged in IT management in a centralized way, interest in the topic has been great. The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that by the deadline for submission of applications, 13 of the 24 slots were already occupied, and the speakers probably believed that the most interesting thing is just beginning with the deadline, so in the last couple of days we filled almost half of the applications. Of course, 12 days before finalizing the program, it was unrealistic to work with every potential speaker at a high quality level; therefore, it is likely that some interesting reports were left out because of uninteresting abstracts. Nevertheless, I believe that the program included strong, deep and, most importantly, applied reports with a lot of details and practices.
And still I want to draw certain conclusions from the analysis of all applications submitted. Perhaps they will be useful to someone from the readers, will give a new understanding of knowledge management. All that I will write further is the cleanest water IMHO, based on six years of experience in building a knowledge management system in Kaspersky Lab and communicating with professionals in the field of CM.
At the youth conference, each speaker, be it a methodologist, university professor, or speaker, who is directly responsible for knowledge management in his company, began with the question “What is the knowledge that we are going to manage?”
I must say that the question is important. As the practice of working in the KnowledgeConf 2019 showed, many in the IT field believe that knowledge = documentation. Therefore, we often hear the question: “We already document the code. Why do we need some other knowledge management system? Isn't documentation enough? ”
No, not enough. Of all the definitions that the speakers gave to knowledge, the definition of Evgeny Viktorov from Gazpromneft is the closest to me: “knowledge is the experience gained by a particular person in solving a specific task”. Please note no documentation. A document is information, data. They can be used to solve a specific problem, but knowledge is experience in applying this data, not the data itself. As with postage stamps: you can buy the most expensive stamp at the post office, but it acquires value for a collector only after it has been stamped. You can try to further disclose: documentation = "what is written in the code," and knowledge = "why it is written exactly as this decision was made, what goal it solves."
It must be said that initially, among PC members, there was no consensus about documentation and knowledge. I am writing this fact down to the fact that people of various spheres of activity really got in the PC, and everyone was involved in knowledge management from various sides. But we, as a result, came to a common denominator. But to explain to the speakers why their report on documenting the code is not suitable for this conference was, at times, not an easy task.
Also an interesting aspect. Especially in recent days we have received a lot of reports about training. How to teach soft skills, hard skills, coaching, etc. Yes, of course, learning is about knowledge. But which ones? If we are talking about external coaching or “as is” training, is this included in the concept of corporate knowledge management? We take expertise from the outside and apply it where it hurts. Yes, specific people have gained new experience (= knowledge), but nothing has happened on the scale of the company.
Now, if after completing the training, the employee came to the office and held a similar master class for colleagues (fumbled knowledge) or transferred his impressions and key ideas that he gathered into some kind of conditional internal knowledge base - this is knowledge management. That's just about this bunch usually do not think (or do not speak).
If you take personal experience, in our department after the conference it is customary to describe impressions, keynotes, ideas, list recommended books, etc. in a special section of the internal portal. This is the case when there is no opposition between the concepts. Knowledge management, in this case, is a natural extension of external learning.
Now, if colleagues who filed presentations on coaching, for example, would describe how they share their practices in their coaching community and what benefits it brings, it would certainly be about KM.
Or take the other side. There were also reports about how the company created a knowledge base. Point. Finished thought.
But for some reason they created it? The collected knowledge should work? Outside of an IT hangout, which is still more practical and practical, I often come across the story that knowledge management project executives believe that it is enough to buy software, fill it with materials, and everyone will go there to use it if necessary. And then they are surprised that somehow the CM does not take off. And such speakers were also.
In my opinion, we accumulate knowledge so that on their basis someone could learn something and not make some mistakes. Internal learning is a natural extension of the knowledge management system. Take the same onboarding or mentoring in teams: after all, mentors share internal information so that the employee quickly joins the team and processes. And if we have an internal knowledge base, where does all this information lie? Isn't it a reason to unload the mentor and speed up the onboarding? Moreover, knowledge will be available 24/7, and not when the timeline will appear. And if the company comes to this idea, the opposition between the terms can also be removed.
In my practice, I just do this: I accumulate knowledge, and then, on the basis of the collected materials, I do training courses of varying degrees of detail for colleagues from different departments. And if you add another module to the knowledge management system to create tests to control employees' knowledge and skills, then you get a perfect picture of that corporate knowledge sharing: some shared information, others processed it, packed it and shared it for target groups, and then we checked the assimilation of materials.
The moment is also interesting. Often, if a designated employee is engaged in knowledge management (HR, L & D), then his big task is to sell KM ideas to company employees, creating value. Everyone has to sell the idea. But if knowledge management is handled by a person who solves his personal pain with this tool, and does not fulfill the task of leadership, then he usually maintains a focus on the applied aspects of the project. And an employee from the development of personnel often has a certain professional deformation: he sees how to sell it, but doesn’t really know why it is that way. And a report is submitted to the conference, which is a half-hour purely marketing speech, about what the system brings in buns, and does not contain a word about how it works. But after all, this is the most interesting and important! How does it work? Why so? What incarnations did she survive, and what did not suit in past implementations?
If you create a beautiful wrapper for a product, you can provide it with users for a short time. But interest will quickly fade away. If the executor of a knowledge management project does not understand his “meat”, thinks in numbers and metrics, and not real problems of the target audience, then the recession will come very quickly.
Coming to the conference with such a report, similar to a handout, you need to understand that it will not be interesting "outside" your company. The people who came to listen to you already bought the idea (they actually paid a lot of money for participation!). They should not be convinced that, in principle, it is necessary to deal with the CM. They need to be told how to and how not to do it, and why. This is not your top management, your bonus does not depend on the audience in the hall.
Nevertheless, it’s also two parts of one project, and without good promotion within the company, even the coolest content will remain yet another one Sharepoint. And if you tell how you sell the KM idea to your colleagues, which chips come in and which ones don't, and why, then the story will be very, very valuable.
But another extreme is possible: we made the coolest base, used such advanced practices, but the staff did not go there. Therefore, we were disappointed in the idea and stopped doing it. We also had such applications. Why employees are not supported? Perhaps they really did not need this information (this is the problem of studying the target audience, you need to write a separate post about it). Or maybe they just badly communicated? How did they do it? The knowledge management manager is also a good PR person. And if he knows how to keep a balance between the promotion and the usefulness of the content, then he has a great chance of success. You can not talk about one thing, forgetting about the other.
And finally, about the numbers. In the memo of the speaker of one of the conferences (not KnowledgeConf!) I read that the audience loves exclusive information - numbers. But why? Before that conference, I just thought for a long time, how can my figures be useful to the audience? How will it help my colleagues that I managed to improve some kind of N% employee productivity through knowledge management? What will my listeners do tomorrow if they find out my numbers? I came up with only one argument: “I liked your practice alone, I want to implement it in my house, but I have to sell the idea to the manager. Tomorrow I will tell him that in company X, she has led to such an increase in indicators that he “bought” this idea . ” But not all of my performance indicators are applicable to any other business. Maybe you can offer some other arguments in favor of numbers in the reports? But in my opinion, spend 10 minutes of a report out of 30 on numbers, when you could spend them on practical examples or even a small workshop with an audience, IMHO, so an idea.
And we also filed reports full of numbers. After the first discussion, we asked the speakers to talk about the practices that led to such results. For those of them who, as a result, went to the final program, the reports differed from the initial version almost completely. As a result, we have already heard a lot of feedback on the vast practical base that the conference has given. And no one has said so far that “it was interesting to know how much X saved by managing knowledge.”
Concluding this longrid, I want to once again rejoice that the IT world has realized the importance of knowledge management for itself and, I hope, will soon begin to actively implement it, optimize and tune it for themselves. And on Habré there will be a separate hub dedicated to knowledge management, and all our speakers will share knowledge with colleagues there. In the meantime, you can fumble practices in messengers, facebook and other available means of communication. All only useful reports and successful performances!
Here and on Habré there is still no hub dedicated to knowledge management, so I write my post in the hub of conferences. It is quite reasonable that if, on April 26, thanks to the initiative of the “Oleg Bunin Conferences”, the first conference in Russia about knowledge management in IT, KnowledgeConf 2019, was held .
')
I was lucky to work in the Program Committee of the conference, to see and hear a lot of things that turned my cozy world of knowledge management manager to some extent, and to understand that IT had already matured before knowledge management. It remains to understand which side to approach him.
By the way, on April 10 and 17-19, two more conferences about knowledge management took place: Quorum CEDUCA and II Youth Conference KMconf'19 , at which I happened to act as an expert. These conferences had no bias in IT, but I have something to compare with. In my first post I want to talk about the thoughts on which I, a knowledge management specialist, prompted participation in these conferences. It can be considered as tips for future speakers, and for those involved in knowledge management by occupation.
We had 83 reports, 24 slots and 12 days to make decisions.
83, Carl. This is not a joke . Despite the fact that this is the first conference, and very few people are engaged in IT management in a centralized way, interest in the topic has been great. The situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that by the deadline for submission of applications, 13 of the 24 slots were already occupied, and the speakers probably believed that the most interesting thing is just beginning with the deadline, so in the last couple of days we filled almost half of the applications. Of course, 12 days before finalizing the program, it was unrealistic to work with every potential speaker at a high quality level; therefore, it is likely that some interesting reports were left out because of uninteresting abstracts. Nevertheless, I believe that the program included strong, deep and, most importantly, applied reports with a lot of details and practices.
And still I want to draw certain conclusions from the analysis of all applications submitted. Perhaps they will be useful to someone from the readers, will give a new understanding of knowledge management. All that I will write further is the cleanest water IMHO, based on six years of experience in building a knowledge management system in Kaspersky Lab and communicating with professionals in the field of CM.
What is knowledge?
At the youth conference, each speaker, be it a methodologist, university professor, or speaker, who is directly responsible for knowledge management in his company, began with the question “What is the knowledge that we are going to manage?”
I must say that the question is important. As the practice of working in the KnowledgeConf 2019 showed, many in the IT field believe that knowledge = documentation. Therefore, we often hear the question: “We already document the code. Why do we need some other knowledge management system? Isn't documentation enough? ”
No, not enough. Of all the definitions that the speakers gave to knowledge, the definition of Evgeny Viktorov from Gazpromneft is the closest to me: “knowledge is the experience gained by a particular person in solving a specific task”. Please note no documentation. A document is information, data. They can be used to solve a specific problem, but knowledge is experience in applying this data, not the data itself. As with postage stamps: you can buy the most expensive stamp at the post office, but it acquires value for a collector only after it has been stamped. You can try to further disclose: documentation = "what is written in the code," and knowledge = "why it is written exactly as this decision was made, what goal it solves."
It must be said that initially, among PC members, there was no consensus about documentation and knowledge. I am writing this fact down to the fact that people of various spheres of activity really got in the PC, and everyone was involved in knowledge management from various sides. But we, as a result, came to a common denominator. But to explain to the speakers why their report on documenting the code is not suitable for this conference was, at times, not an easy task.
Learning vs. Knowledge management
Also an interesting aspect. Especially in recent days we have received a lot of reports about training. How to teach soft skills, hard skills, coaching, etc. Yes, of course, learning is about knowledge. But which ones? If we are talking about external coaching or “as is” training, is this included in the concept of corporate knowledge management? We take expertise from the outside and apply it where it hurts. Yes, specific people have gained new experience (= knowledge), but nothing has happened on the scale of the company.
Now, if after completing the training, the employee came to the office and held a similar master class for colleagues (fumbled knowledge) or transferred his impressions and key ideas that he gathered into some kind of conditional internal knowledge base - this is knowledge management. That's just about this bunch usually do not think (or do not speak).
If you take personal experience, in our department after the conference it is customary to describe impressions, keynotes, ideas, list recommended books, etc. in a special section of the internal portal. This is the case when there is no opposition between the concepts. Knowledge management, in this case, is a natural extension of external learning.
Now, if colleagues who filed presentations on coaching, for example, would describe how they share their practices in their coaching community and what benefits it brings, it would certainly be about KM.
Or take the other side. There were also reports about how the company created a knowledge base. Point. Finished thought.
But for some reason they created it? The collected knowledge should work? Outside of an IT hangout, which is still more practical and practical, I often come across the story that knowledge management project executives believe that it is enough to buy software, fill it with materials, and everyone will go there to use it if necessary. And then they are surprised that somehow the CM does not take off. And such speakers were also.
In my opinion, we accumulate knowledge so that on their basis someone could learn something and not make some mistakes. Internal learning is a natural extension of the knowledge management system. Take the same onboarding or mentoring in teams: after all, mentors share internal information so that the employee quickly joins the team and processes. And if we have an internal knowledge base, where does all this information lie? Isn't it a reason to unload the mentor and speed up the onboarding? Moreover, knowledge will be available 24/7, and not when the timeline will appear. And if the company comes to this idea, the opposition between the terms can also be removed.
In my practice, I just do this: I accumulate knowledge, and then, on the basis of the collected materials, I do training courses of varying degrees of detail for colleagues from different departments. And if you add another module to the knowledge management system to create tests to control employees' knowledge and skills, then you get a perfect picture of that corporate knowledge sharing: some shared information, others processed it, packed it and shared it for target groups, and then we checked the assimilation of materials.
Marketing vs. Practice
The moment is also interesting. Often, if a designated employee is engaged in knowledge management (HR, L & D), then his big task is to sell KM ideas to company employees, creating value. Everyone has to sell the idea. But if knowledge management is handled by a person who solves his personal pain with this tool, and does not fulfill the task of leadership, then he usually maintains a focus on the applied aspects of the project. And an employee from the development of personnel often has a certain professional deformation: he sees how to sell it, but doesn’t really know why it is that way. And a report is submitted to the conference, which is a half-hour purely marketing speech, about what the system brings in buns, and does not contain a word about how it works. But after all, this is the most interesting and important! How does it work? Why so? What incarnations did she survive, and what did not suit in past implementations?
If you create a beautiful wrapper for a product, you can provide it with users for a short time. But interest will quickly fade away. If the executor of a knowledge management project does not understand his “meat”, thinks in numbers and metrics, and not real problems of the target audience, then the recession will come very quickly.
Coming to the conference with such a report, similar to a handout, you need to understand that it will not be interesting "outside" your company. The people who came to listen to you already bought the idea (they actually paid a lot of money for participation!). They should not be convinced that, in principle, it is necessary to deal with the CM. They need to be told how to and how not to do it, and why. This is not your top management, your bonus does not depend on the audience in the hall.
Nevertheless, it’s also two parts of one project, and without good promotion within the company, even the coolest content will remain yet another one Sharepoint. And if you tell how you sell the KM idea to your colleagues, which chips come in and which ones don't, and why, then the story will be very, very valuable.
But another extreme is possible: we made the coolest base, used such advanced practices, but the staff did not go there. Therefore, we were disappointed in the idea and stopped doing it. We also had such applications. Why employees are not supported? Perhaps they really did not need this information (this is the problem of studying the target audience, you need to write a separate post about it). Or maybe they just badly communicated? How did they do it? The knowledge management manager is also a good PR person. And if he knows how to keep a balance between the promotion and the usefulness of the content, then he has a great chance of success. You can not talk about one thing, forgetting about the other.
Numbers
And finally, about the numbers. In the memo of the speaker of one of the conferences (not KnowledgeConf!) I read that the audience loves exclusive information - numbers. But why? Before that conference, I just thought for a long time, how can my figures be useful to the audience? How will it help my colleagues that I managed to improve some kind of N% employee productivity through knowledge management? What will my listeners do tomorrow if they find out my numbers? I came up with only one argument: “I liked your practice alone, I want to implement it in my house, but I have to sell the idea to the manager. Tomorrow I will tell him that in company X, she has led to such an increase in indicators that he “bought” this idea . ” But not all of my performance indicators are applicable to any other business. Maybe you can offer some other arguments in favor of numbers in the reports? But in my opinion, spend 10 minutes of a report out of 30 on numbers, when you could spend them on practical examples or even a small workshop with an audience, IMHO, so an idea.
And we also filed reports full of numbers. After the first discussion, we asked the speakers to talk about the practices that led to such results. For those of them who, as a result, went to the final program, the reports differed from the initial version almost completely. As a result, we have already heard a lot of feedback on the vast practical base that the conference has given. And no one has said so far that “it was interesting to know how much X saved by managing knowledge.”
Concluding this longrid, I want to once again rejoice that the IT world has realized the importance of knowledge management for itself and, I hope, will soon begin to actively implement it, optimize and tune it for themselves. And on Habré there will be a separate hub dedicated to knowledge management, and all our speakers will share knowledge with colleagues there. In the meantime, you can fumble practices in messengers, facebook and other available means of communication. All only useful reports and successful performances!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/450918/
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