CoPs - building to formality

I just had a great chat with a couple of blokes from an international mining company (they're Aussies, a place near and dear to my heart) who are building their community effort as we speak. For several years as the mining industry consolidated and rode economic slow downs with cost cutting measures, these gentleman have fostered an "informal infrastructure" for their communities (they call them forums). Now that the industry is experiencing a huge upturn (fueled by demand for iron and coal in China, among other things), the company is struggling to meet capacity because of talent shortages and repercussions from previous downsizings. So, they are primed to evolve their informal infrastructure into something more structured and focused. We talked for nearly 2 hours about how to position communities, where to have the community center of excellence "sit" in the organization, and how to focus their efforts for maximum gain. Sounded like they were primed for success as the company has invested in an operational excellence group that reports to the CEO - a wonderful place to establish core community processes and tools.

The struggle, of course, is how to reconcile new, more formal CoP processes with the current methods of working that many like and enjoy. We talked about doing an assessment of key stakeholders and specific communities to discover the best of the current program as well as gaps that need to be filled. Additionally, they have an opportunity to link communities to the talent management issues (finding expertise, linking it together, identifying and embedding best practices, and improving personal networks) and growth needs (bring best practices to bear anywhere, anytime with greater efficiency if people are connected and content is appropriately collected). I think they need to focus on creating a few formal communities where it makes sense according to these two drivers and continue to support those informal groups that wish to keep operating.

One interesting question they had that I would like to get an answer to as well - are there any studies/metrics on how participation in CoPs affects retention of individuals inside an organization? APQCs study on CoPs last year asked study participants to survey their CoP members on their perceptions of value of the community. We had about 800 respondents, mainly from the best practice organizations we studied, so the results are very positive. I wrote an article that will come out in the March KM W0rld issue on the results of this - some of the info is below. However, we didn't get a clean look at how participation affects retention - anyone have anything out there?

• 93% said their CoP has a clear, compelling business value proposition for participation,
• 84% said their CoP has a senior sponsor,
• 88% said business/line management supports the time spent on CoP activities,
• 88% said business/line management recognizes the value of CoP output, and
• 70% said their CoP has a communication strategy to promote outputs and results of CoP to outside stakeholders

Consumer Electronics and KM - Where Are They

I have been working with my colleagues and IBM to launch an industry benchmarking council for the consumer electronics industry vertical. The intent is to focus on collecting metrics around 10-15 KPIs related to the service after sales process and then have the group continue to meet, share best practices, etc. around other pressing topics. As I was preparing, I read some amazing stats in "Irresistable! Markets, Models, and Meta-Value in Consumer Electronics" (by George Bailey and Hagen Wenzek) about the industry - it's expected to hit $130+B in revenue this year but their product margins are razor thin (in the 0.4% to 3% range). My favorite passage in the book said something like - global electronics companies have changed the landscape of the world by making communication ubiquitous and instantaneous, but now they have to change their business models to fit the landscape they created.

This got me to thinking - in 8 years of studying and working with organizations from Fortune 500, govt, and associations, I've never read about or worked with a consumer electronics organization on KM. Sure, HP, Microsoft, and Dell get written up, but I'm thinking about the Sony's, Pioneers, Ericssons, etc. My guess is that most are very engineering driven, innovation oriented companies, so where's the KM? I would imagine that the industry is facing many of the same pressures that Big Pharma is today with outsourcing, globalization, specialization, and compressed cycle times. Sounds like a perfect environment for communities of practice, best practice transfer, and expertise location to me. I'll be interested to find out more as we get organizations inside the walls here in the next few months.

The Leadership Crisis and KM - Huh?

As we're preparing for another best practice study on Leadership Development Strategy, one of my colleagues, Darcy Lemons, shared a research brief just released the by Hay Group and Chief Executive magazine on "The Best Companies for Leaders." The following quote, as usual, caught my eye:

• In fact, there is an impending leadership crisis facing large and small businesses across all sectors: According to a recent report on National Public Radio, 50 percent of the management workforce can retire in just five years. As 46 million members of Generation X step into 76 million baby boomers’ shoes, today’s leaders are justifiably concerned about how to identify and prepare their successors. Considering these demographics, the issue is quantitative as well as qualitative: The question for companies isn’t simply "Do we have good leaders?" It’s also "Do we have enough leaders?"

KM'ers have long been concerned about retaining valuable knowledge in the form of technical skill and expertise - sales skills, specific technical domains, knowledge of "the way things work," etc. We haven't spent as much time talking about how knowledge management approaches can impact/improve leadership. As one of the generation that has to attempt to fill the shoes of the Greatest Generation, I'm looking for any edge I can find. Experience suggests that communities of practice can provide a wonderful link to both leadership development and talent management programs inside organizations.

Community leadership provides a unique opportunity to learn leadership skills that seem more and more important every day - leading disparate types of people across time zones, virtually, and outside of your direct report sphere. Effective community leaders at Schlumberger, for instance, have repeatedly taken advantage of the talent management aspects of the position - they are recruited into the role, put their participation into their performance goals, are rated by peers and leaders on their ability to achieve results collaboratively. Ultimately they are rewarded/moved into new roles. As of 2003, all of the initial wave of community leaders (the InTouch variety), had rotated into a role of their choosing upon completion of their term (no mean feat at an intellectually elite organization like Schlumberger). Further, you can use community participation to drive better development programs for future leaders - communities (and their participants) typically sit at the juxtaposition of daily business and thought leadership. What better way to identify the kinds of knowledge and the kinds of people that leaders will need to understand in order to lead their part of the organization into the future?

An intriguing topic - one I hope we learn more about in our study and personally over the next few months.

Day 2 of the Virgin Blogger - Thoughts on the future direction of KM

Over the last few weeks, I've had the chance to think a lot about where organizations are taking KM. I participated in a study APQC just completed called "Leveraging Knowledge Across the Value Chain" that caused me to examine some of the ways we've been thinking about KM. My number one takeaway - sophisticated organizations don't have stand-alone knowledge management anymore. Instead, they've begun to integrate...with their organizational learning initiatives (talent management, leadership development, training and development), their process improvement programs (6Sigma, lean, Baldrige), and their supply chain management areas. We coined the phrase "Performance Program" to describe this - focusing knowledge management, process improvement, and learning tools to improve process performance and the performance of the people who engage in those processes. I don't know if that's a good phrase or not, but it seemed to capture the mood.

I found it particularly intriguing that the KM practitioners of old who have survived and thrived are concentrating on helping the process performance of the entire value chain - internally of course, but also with suppliers, customers, regulatory agencies, academic partners, and other vendors. KM may not be the right answer for every situation (we all know this intuitively) - so these people have pulled together an "awesome set of tools" (one of my favorite quotes from Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High") to focus on driving business performance. We actually revised APQCs Stages of Implementation KM roadmap based on these findings - we'll discuss and hope for feedback on our KM community call on February 28 at 10am central. I'll be interested to hear other's thoughts.

On another note, as we bask in the beautiful spring-time weather in Houston (yes, we can have good weather here...in February, no less!), I've had a few days without intense project work to catch up on articles on organizational learning, marketing in associations, and developing leaders virtually. It reminded me of how important it is to occasionally stop, step back, and fill up your head with new thinking - it's certainly helped me regain some perspective that I lost in the last 6 months of working on tons of projects and traveling all the time. I've found that content feeds like BNETs leadership, human resources, and supply chain newsletters have helped me find relevant information without having to remember to search. Here is a link: http://nl.com.com/view_online_newsletter.jsp?list_id=e805

I'd love other people's suggestions for sources of relevant business information outside of the traditional Fortune, Business 2.0 etc.

Blog Transition and Musings on CoPs and Content

Our previous blogger extraordinaire, Farida Hasanali, has bequethed me her blog...she's moved on to an exciting new role at Expediant Solutions. I'll do my best to continue to provide something of interest and look forward to your comments and input.

Today's thoughts - last week I worked with a large client that is rolling out a community of practice for its global Black Belts. They're attempting to create regional chapters of the community of practice (a "federated" model) because their geographical spread and lack of funding for face-to-face meetings precludes having everyone get together. Since they didn't have a history of sharing or knowledge capture, they are putting together monthly conference calls by region (and with the regional chapter heads as a group) to push interesting project findings, identify common source problems, and establish relationships. They'll be using a typical repository/discussion tool to facilitate ongoing dialogue between meetings. We spent a lot of time trying to craft the right messages to drive participation - communication is so difficult with time-zones and different native languages. They had a successful launch - but I wonder if anyone has created successful ongoing communication plans for such groups? In an article in in the 12/05 issue "Association Now" magazine I came across these 5 tips for framing messages from Rebecca Leet:

1. What action do you want to affect?
2. Whom must we motivate to achieve that action?
3. What desire of theirs is met by taking the action we want?
4. Where does our desire overlap with theirs?
5. What do we say so that they hear their desire will be met by
taking our action?

Each of the region CoP facilitators is working on putting together 2 tracks for driving participation - identifying 2-3 goals that the regional BBs can work on across sites to drive better performance and mining the group for "hot topics" that they can discuss anytime, anywhere to solve problems. I like their approach...in a disciplined project environment like 6Sigma, more structure seems to work better than the more organic communities we see in other places.

On another topic - we're seeing more and more interest in how organizations are using content and document management tools to impact the way they comply with regulatory issues (like SOX and HIPAA, etc.) as well as respond to lawsuit subpoenas. With the ever expanding capability to "hide" the damaging memo or piece of content on thumb drives, CD, hard drives, email, IM, etc, it looks like more and more organizations are struggling to manage their processes for discovery and compliance. KM processes and technology have an immense impact on this...so, APQC will launch a best practice study on the topic in June of this year to see what we can discover - should be an interesting topic.

More later...

Farida's New Adventure

Hello all,
Hope you are doing well. I wanted to send you all a note about my latest escapade. It's probably one of the most dangerous ones I have undertaken lately. No, its not boating in Bali, nor bungee jumping in the Amazon, I am leaving APQC (home) to venture out into the big bad world to try my hand at strategic planning and IT related consulting.

As some of you know, APQC has been home for me for the past thirteen years and having this blog for the past two has been amazing. Since I started this blog with APQC's name on it I feel compelled to leave it here as I move on to newer and scarier things.

Of course I will be starting my new blog shortly and you will find me on the blogosphere soon. My new e-mail is fhasanali @ xpediantsolutions.com

Meanwhile don't give up on this blog. Its being taken over by Wesley Vestal, APQC's lead KM guru. Wes has been consulting in KM for the past 8 years and has some great experiences and insights to share with you all. He has implemented KM, scorecards, measures, leadership strategies, etc. etc. You name it he has done it. Although I am very sad to leave this blog for now I am also very excited that Wes is taking it over.

Again, when I get my new link, I will post it on this blog for you.

You all now have my new e-mail, please fix the spacing and send me a note.
to all of you
take care
farida

Relationship between knowledge management and information management

All,
For those of you having a holiday season, I hope you are enjoying it. Although I am working this week this time is very precious for me. There are no customers calling and no one is asking me a million questions so I get time to catch up on reading, strategizing and getting energized for the new year.
Part of the reading catchup took me to this listing where Liz Orna posted this description about her thoughts on the relationship between KM and IM. This is an SLA listserv so these people work with information everyday and I figured she knew a thing or two about it. Here is her post. It made sense to me and gave me a way of looking at both the relationship between KM and IM and the longevity of KM when coupled in this way with IM.

" is right to say that 'knowledge is a process and a way of life, not
represented by a db. So, the combination of IM and KM works for me, but not
KM by itself'

KM got overblown because there wasn't enough thinking about what
constitutes the knowledge that needs to be managed, how it differs from
information, and where the two are interdependent.

The distinction and the interdependence lie in the fact that knowledge
lives inside individual human minds. Only human beings can know, and what
each of us knows is invisible and inaccessible to other human beings until
we've turned it into another form - which we call information - and put it
into the outside world. Once it's there, other people can get at it, assess
whether it's useful, and, if it is, transform it back into knowledge inside
their own minds.

So each of us has to be the knowledge manager of our own knowledge. If we
understand that, we can then define what KM in organisations has to do.
Its role is to:
support individuals in managing their own knowledge;
minimise the intellectual and financial costs to them and the organisation
of contributing their knowledge to the organisation's information resources;
promote knowledge exchanges under conditions of mutual trust;
help individuals and the organisation to define and keep their knowledge
obligations.

KM can't fulfill that role without IM, which has the essential complementary
job of:
acquiring, storing, co-ordinating and making accessible information to
maintain the knowledge the organisation needs;
providing new information resources to meet changes in the knowledge needs
of the organisation;
managing the information that emerges from knowledge exchanges
using the ICT infrastructure innovatively to support interactions among
people about knowledge, and the finding, diffusion and communication of
information

Those roles mean that KM and IM have a shared territory too; it includes:
organisational policy and strategy for using knowledge and information to
support business processes; the value added by using knowledge and information
monitoring changes in the internal and external environment for K and I
implications bringing the results into central strategic decision making.

Liz Orna
http://freepint.willco.com/forum/bar/read.php?i=32166

Unfortunately this post was not carried any further.

Role of Blogs in Knowledge Management and Communications

All,
Bill Ives recently presented on the Role of Blogs in Knowledge Management and Communications within the Enterprise at one one of my KM community meetings. The presentation was excellent. I recorded it and am sharing it with you all. To get the presentation you must register on the KSN - there is of course no charge to register. If you are already a member please contact me to find out how you can attend these calls for free.

Here is a brief description of what the call covered:

"Blogs are hot, but what do they really bring to business communication and knowledge management? How are successful early adopters using them? These are questions the presenter asked 70 well-known bloggers at firms ranging from IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and SAP, to many small businesses in a variety of industries as part of research for his new book, Business Blogs: A Practical Guide. The combination of accessibility, transparency, and archiving that blogs provide has the potential to enrich business communication. This session summarizes the insights gained from the interviews and addresses the use of blogs for knowledge management, as well as internal communication and collaboration."

Here is the link: to the registration which will get you to the recording and the powerpoint.

Also, I apologize to those whose questions I have not yet answered. I promise I will report on other measures I use for the KSN.

Measuring the effectiveness of portals

The last quarter of 2005 is about to start and like last year I am starting to panic about measures again. Before I know it the ill fated e-mail will come from my boss saying "lets sit down and review your annual performance" which in my world equals word-to-word as "the performance of your site."
No sweat! This year I am not as unprepared as last year. And this is because of many factors some of which I will discuss as I explain to you what I have in place.
First - there are two major components of my measurement scorecard. 1) Impact on Revenue, 2) Increased site activity
This post will cover the 1st measure.
Strangely enough in my case the impact on revenue is the easier one to calculate. Be warned! it is a primitive method used very infrequently these days, its called "talking.":-)) In the past we had always focused only on the customer...lets get the information from the customer. Here is my lesson learned. The customer's response was always circumstantial, sometimes accurate but usually it was a narrow answer like " I thought I could benefit from the study topic." or "the KSN will be a good resource for the company."
Here is what we did this year to get a better sense of the customer's reason to buy.
We put together a small survey with one or two questions and NOTE - instead of asking the customer we ask the account managers. There is only one main question. What factors do you think influenced this customer's decision to buy an APQC membership? The options we gave them are our major product areas such as KSN, OSBC, Events, Consortiums, and Consulting. The account managers are given a 100 points. They divvy up the 100 points between these product groups. The logic behind this is that the account managers are the ones that have been courting the customer for a while, they have proposed all our products and services and we hope that our members find each and every one of them valuable but there is always one that triggers the decision. The account managers weight that point the most heavily.
We follow exactly the same process for renewing members. If an account manager has been doing his/her job it means they have been in touch with the member regularly. They know what the member(s) has been involved in and they know whether or not that member is going to renew next year. Having them fill out the same survey for their renewals tells me how valuable the KSN is in impacting a renewal and it tells my boss how much his account managers know about their customers. Pretty cool! huh!
We started this in January this year and I am pleased to say that the KSN has consistently stayed over the 50 point mark. Isn't that incredible. Of all the members that have signed on and of all the members that have renewed, on an average the KSN has impacted 50% of those decisions.
My goal this year is to finish collecting this data for the rest of the year and then make a business case that says if the KSN impacts membership revenue by 50% - don't you think my budget should reflect the same:-)) Of course I don't want 50% of the revenue as my budget I just want to have a solid basis for saying give me more money so I can improve one of our most important products.
I hope that some of you can adapt this to your organizations and use it to monitor impact on revenue. If you all have any questions, feel free to write. Any suggestions to add would be greatly appreciated.
Activity measures on my next post. Stay tuned....

Finally, a face to face meeting

Some of you may remember my ramblings about wanting to try out a face to face meeting for my KM virtual community. Well that has finally happened and I have put together my first Wine N Cheese get together for my Houston members. About 10 people are signed up and although it seems small I am actually happy that many more did not since I wanted to keep it small so I can really get to talk to most of these folks. Its being held on October 5th at our campus in Houston.
If your organization is a member of APQC and you would like to attend please let me know. If you don't know whether your company is a member or not, check to see if your company name is on this list.
There is no charge, its just an informal get together being held for local Houston folks.
I will definitely keep you posted on how it goes because I think face to face meetings are very important for communities to bond. I know that there are many very successful completely virtual communities out there but I strongly believe that if those virtual communities were given an opportunity to meet each other they would have an even stronger bond and maybe be more successful.
Please feel free to share your thoughts with me on this matter.
thanks
take care
farida

Rita scared the life out of us and then just whizzed right by

Hi all,
Wanted to let you all know that all is well here at the APQC. Since Hurricane Rita kind of decided to leave us alone and only bestowed some heavy winds and rains on us we are generally ok.
I of course was one of the "evacuees" you saw on TV. It took me 16 hours to get to Dallas. The first 6 of which was spent trying to move 4 miles ahead. I can walk a 15-18 minute mile so that should give you some perspective as to how slow it was. But I was in it for the adventure so I hung in there, did not run out of gas, and got to Dallas at 1:00 am in the morning after which I think I slept for two full days. Or at least it felt like that.
Coming back yesterday was half the time. Still 2 1/2 times what it takes normally but when you spend 16 hours on the road going in, 8 hours coming back all of a sudden seemed not too bad. Its all a matter of perspective.
Hindsight, should I have stayed. Of course, but then hindsight is always 20/20:-)
It was one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't situations. If I had not left and something major had happened to Houston everyone would be like "you were warned, why didn't you go?" and now because I left I got comments like "we knew nothing was going to happen, we were the smart ones, we stayed."
Funny part is when I spoke to my friends in Houston (from Dallas) they were dying of boredom. Everything was closed, they couldn't go anywhere, some ran out of food because they ate all day since they had nothing better to do, and of course no stores were open to replenish supplies. Those who stocked up on DVDs were probably smart.
I of course was having a good time in Dallas visiting friends and I even went out to the lake and got some sun. So something good usually comes from hardships and I am thankful for that.

I want to thank you all for reading the blog and thinking of me during these trying times and I will add a separate post on other activities going on within my community and my Web site later today.
take care
farida

Hurricane Rita and new uses of Blogs

Hi all,
I think I have been jinxed by the rain bug. I went to India last month and got stranded in Dubai for two days because the Mumbai airport was flooded. Being there during heavy downpours was not much fun either but I made the most of it. If I ever figure out what is blocking my ability to post pictures I will post some pictures of my trip to the Taj Mahal and some glorious palaces in Jaipur.

So I come back and Katrina hits. More rain and as you know a major impact on Houston due to Louisiana's evacuees.

Well we are still reeling from Katrina and now Rita is about to hit Houston. I wanted you all to know that we are going to be closed here most likely starting tomorrow.

But here is the interesting part. My IT folks came and said, hey Farida! your blog is the only offsite Web site we have. If our servers are down can we use your blog to post messages to our employees. There is a unique use of a blog (offsite one), used in cases of emergency:-))

So, I am hoping all will be well and I will be back here Monday smiling but just in case its a while before I can write, its been great writing and I plan to pick it back up as soon as things smooth over.
You all take care and please bear with us if we end up using this site as our means of communication.
thanks
farida

Copyright and Ownership Issues for Blogs

Hello all,
Recently someone had brought up the issue of "what the company you work for owns" in terms of "the work you do." My team member Anne forwarded me this very interesting post on her Bus-Lib listserv about blogs, intellectual property rights and copyrights. I think its valuable for us bloggers to know some of this.

The Editorial by Lesley Ellen Harris in Volume 2005,
Issue 1, The Copyright & New Media Law Newsletter,
deals with copyright ownership in blogs - it is
reproduced below. For further information on this
print newsletter, see www.copyrightlaws.com www.copyrightlaws.com/>.

Editorial - Copyright Ownership in Blogs

The Internet continually forces us to test the
application and flexibility of current copyright law
to new modes of communications and media. The Internet
has already spawned debate and lawsuits about
hyper-linking, P2P file sharing, and the removal of
copyright management information and technological
protections. A newer Internet activity, blogging
resulting in Weblogs, is now being discussed in the
copyright arena. A blog is basically a stream of
consciousness discussion available to the public at
large. Individuals keep these blogs on every topic
imaginable. Blogs are original material, and once they
are fixed in some form, saved digitally or in a print
out, they are protected by copyright in most countries
around the world. In fact, they would be protected for
50 to 70 years after an author's death - much beyond
the life of any blog itself.

Blogs are becoming more popular amongst professionals,
and certain employees are even encouraged to create
blogs based on their work. This raises interesting
issues concerning copyright ownership in the blogs. If
an organization requires blogging as part of the
duties of an individual, it is likely that the
employer owns the content in the blog, just like the
employer owns other copyright-protected works created
by that employee in the course of employment.

However, if the blog is initiated by an individual
though it may discuss work-related issues, outside the
scope of his employment, who owns the content in the
blog? This is comparable to the situation where a
professor writes a book related to, but outside the
duties, of his instruction. This is often a gray issue
in the academic world. University policies that
specifically deal with such issues can help clarify
the situation. Also, a professor approaching his
university prior to writing the book, may be able to
clarify the situation, prior to a confrontation.

Many companies have yet to develop Weblog Policies,
similar to their other integral policies. Thus,
employees who discuss work-related activities are
generally held to the rule of "good taste" in their
discussions, and of course, not spewing any
confidential information. As is the case with many
Internet-related activities, would a written Weblog
Policy contradict the free flowing nature of
information in a blog, and perhaps weaken the
effectiveness of these blogs?

With ownership comes the issue of who may authorize
reproduction of the content in a blog. Generally, only
the owner may authorize others to reproduce a work.
Would this be an organization or an individual? Or
should the whole notion of obtaining permission in
relation to blog content be mute, since the whole
point of the blog is for as many people as possible to
access and read it? The blogs by Sun Microsystems
employees at blogs.sun.com take what I call a
compromise position. These blogs are subject to a
Creative Commons License. Thus, the blogs are
protected by copyright, however the rights are
conveniently set out in a hyper-linked license and are
broader than those rights attached to most
copyright-protected works.

To date, there are no lawsuits relating to ownership,
reproduction or re-distribution of the content of
blogs. This in itself may be helpful for organizations
and individuals who are determining "policies" in this
area. And for those bloggers who want their content
read as widely as possible, they are free to put a
statement on their blogs to the effect that the
content may be freely used without permission.

Are blogs another way to publish content?

Folks,
The people from the blogging survey asked this question of me via e-mail. Read my answer below. I would love to see you all add to this answer with your thoughts and ideas.
thanks
farida



Question: Please rate your blog's impact on the following factors in your company.

Another way to publish content and ideas was the top answer to question eight in survey.

Do you think this answer means that companies did not have the place to publish certain ideas and content, or that a blog is just another place to publish the same type of content you might publish on your corporate website?

Answer: If I had to pick I would say the latter for sure. But the reason why organizations could use another publishing medium is in part due to saturation of existing media and in part due to a change in how we work. An analogy that best describes this is television. Product companies have realized that the effectiveness of their television advertising has dropped considerably. Are people watching less TV? I wish! The availability of on demand television through Tivo and DVRs have led to a drop in "commercials" watching. People record their shows and fast forward through the commercials. So product companies have had to think of other ways of getting the message out and an example of that which everyone recognizes is the partnership with TV shows like The Apprentice. Pontiac sold more cars and Burger King sold more burgers because the show used those products in their competitions.

On a similar note, how we work has changed. We are more collaborative now than ever before. We have access to more information, we have access to higher data speeds, we need more information these days to deal with the global environment than we did before. These changes are leading to the search for more effective means of communicating and blogs is one of them. Its low barrier to entry and ease of use makes it an easy tool for people to collaborate and share. In my opinion Web sites and Intranets are still effective mediums for sharing information but I think they are not getting the credit they deserve because people may been jaded from past experiences of sites that were either not populated with content or stale sites where content never changed.

Farida

Results of Blogging Survey

Hey all,
The final results of the blogging survey held by Backbone Media are published. There are some lessons learned for corporate blogs that are worth reviewing. You can access the survey here.

farida

Employee Intellectual Property Rights

Hey all!
Comment posted yesterday..

Farida wrote: "..but at the end of the day you still "work" for the company and everthing you do and accomplish belongs to them."

I think this is an underlying assumption that is not necessarily "true." Is it possible that everything you do and accomplish does not belong to "them?"

To address this question that someone sent it yesterday I did some research so as to have my facts in order. I agree with your comment...I did make an underlying assumption but it was based on my knowledge of employee intellectual property rights since I am in an environment where our knowledge is the organization's intellectual capital.

This blog for instance is a good example. No one at APQC puts any effort in this blog other than me. I rarely even use APQC physical resources (explicit content written by me or others in the company) when writing this blog but my experience comes from working with APQC customers. So I consider this blog to be APQC intellectual property and if I leave APQC I would leave the blog behind and start a new one wherever else I go.

Anyone, if I am mistaken about this assumption please speak up.

So back to the research...I looked on the SHRM Website for some guidance and in an article called "Whose Knowledge is it anyway" from their October 2001 issue they state, and I quote:

"The U.S. Copyright Office defines work made for hire as “work prepared by an employee within the scope of employment; or a work specially ordered or commissioned in certain specified circumstances. When a work qualifies as a work made for hire, the employer … is considered to be the author.” Recent court cases in this area, including the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision in The New York Times Co. v. Tasini (No. 00-201), have focused primarily on freelancers and could have been resolved with sound employment contracts."

I interpret this legal jargon as "if you create something when you are employed by a firm and that something is within the parameters of your daily job, then it belongs to the firm."

So having said that, I must mention that this article had a few other interesting points. One was that of the future struggle that employers are going to have with this issue of intellectual property because some employees are starting to get creative and their creativity is making money for the company but the solutions are outside the norms of intellectual propoerty.

For example, Fortune magazine recently reported that several Wall Street brokers had set up a web site outside their firm to attract and advise clients. The initial reaction would be that this was a clear violation of Securities and Exchange Commission rules, the site should be shut down and the employees fired. But are not such enterprising employees what you want? What if the top 20 percent of salespeople at a company had their own web sites? Who owns the customer relationship—the employee or the firm? Remember, all of these employees are working to enhance the bottom line of their employers. For all those “customer-centric” companies, is this not the exact behavior you want from your employees?

The article then goes on to mention that because of these new ways of working (Web sites, employee-owned businesses) HR is going to have to reformulate the old rules of work product ownership in order to encourage employee creativity and increase employee retention.

I think that's exciting stuff. As I mentioned this information came from the SHRM site at shrm.org. There are two articles I referred to, one titled "Whose Knowledge is it anyway" and the other one is called "Inside Job in the same edition.
If this topic interests you and you have a SHRM membership check these out.

Happy July 4th

hello all,
Before leaving for the weekend I wanted to wish you all a very happy July 4th, that is those of you living in the States and have the day off of course.

I wanted to bring up a couple of things that you might want to think about or review if you have a moment this weekend.

1st, we are getting ready to kickoff a consortium study on "KM across the Value Chain," the delivery model is just like the one I did on CoPs, remember went on site visits and reported to you all. If you are interested in participating in this study please check out this proposal. The study has a cost associated with it but if its something you are battling with in your organization its well worth it.

Also if you have feedback on the scope don't hesitate to write and I will send it to the project team.

2nd, this whole discussion we have been having on funding models for communities. I have requested one of my writers to take all that discussion, get some material from our past studies and create a short white paper on it. If any one would like to contribute to the creation of this white paper please let me know.

That's it. I'm off now, I hope you all will have a wonderful weekend.
take care
farida

Funding for Communities of Practice

Recent question to Dinesh,

Thanks for the insights about joint funding. What about the community of practice members donating money to fund their own endeavor?

Or, what about the members creating a parallel funding organization?

Farida's Comments

I am sure Dinesh will reply to this question, so thanks Dinesh. Just a couple of comments from me.

Members donating money to fund their own endeavor would surely in my opinion be a community with a cause so passionate that members would be willing to put money into it themselves. In that case I would think it shameful for an organization that does not recognize that passion and provide for the community.
On the bureaucratic front however I am not sure how that would work. Especially if the community is related to your job and you get paid to do your job and you in essence almost paid the company back to be part of a community? That would somehow not work out in a large organization especially with the finance side.
We have seen many instances where members put in their time and effort at no extra cost to the organization. They meet with their communities for dinner and pay themselves and spend the evening with co-workers. That could be considered funding a community in a way but when it comes to needing actual dollars to do something, a specific project I don't see how the "membership funding" would work.

A parallel funding organization would hold all the same opportunities and barriers as Dinesh has described. We come back again to the fundamental point of funding=ownership. Whoever that parallel organization is, would want some ownership in the outcome of the community. If that is mutually acceptable by the community, the funding organization, and the host organization then its possible to make such a model work. Again that follows the same scenarios as Dinesh has described.

Have any communities been funded from external sources?

"In your studies of Communities of Practice, have you ever seen an informal community generate funding outside of the formal organization?

In other words, when a community of practice gets to a point in its growth when it needs resources to continue to develop, are there options outside of fighting for funding from the traditional sources in the organization? "

Farida's comments

In my research so far I have not seen any communities that have been funded using external sources. One of the main reasons for that in my opinion is that the information shared inside communities is sensitive to some degree. Members of a CoP where trust is securely established will share their dirty laundry in hopes of being helped by their peers. The very notion of going to an external source for funding would mean that the funding source would own some of the community or at least some rights to it and that may not be in the best interest of the organization.

For example, Fluor Corporation always gets inquiries from its customers wanting to know if they can be part of Fluor's communities or if they can get access to data and Fluor has decided against it since the information shared in their communities is what gives them the competitive edge.

What I have seen are "shared service" models for communities. Chargebacks are a means of funding and several organization go that route. The Core CoP group is self sustaining in that it stays in business if it can provide value to its customers through the implementation and support of communities.

To Dinesh, thank you for your valuable insight. I am sure my readers are thrilled.

Jamming communities under the radar

"When APQC goes into organizations to study them, who do you talk with? Who do you spend the most time with? Is it the formal organization to include the CoP function people? Or, do you talk to the community of practice leaders who are passionate about the practice that they are part of and are taking action to improve?

Because your entry point into the organization is the formal organization and the CoP function people, you may be skewed from the get go towards the formal interpretation of reality.

I wonder what would happen if you conducted a clandestine study of the most JAMMING communities of practice--communities that the formal organization might not even know about. "

Farida's comments:

You all are making me so happy by responding to my posts. We may have hit upon something with this topic.

To address your questions - You are absolutely right! We do go in through the formal organization and we do talk to the people "in charge" of CoP implementation whom I will refer to as the CoP Core Group. But....
Very rarely have I come across an organization where the management team sat down and said "Hmmmnnn....let's develop a CoP strategy. You, you and you, go forth and make CoPs." The reality has typically been that informal communities that have formed over the years suddenly come upon some innovative idea (process or product) that ends up saving the company money. All of a sudden they get management attention and a manager's first thought is "how do I replicate this?"
That's when CoP strategy happens and the people who were successful in their first CoP typically get "promoted" (I use the word loosely) to become part of the CoP Core Team or to lead it.
Having said I also admit that there are companies that sit down and say lets put a CoP strategy together. These companies are the ones that move cautiously when new approaches surface. Their management is searching for improvement approaches, maybe they participle in one of our studies or attend a conference, hear about CoPs and they go back and look for them in their organization. Now here's the point of contention.
Do they find jamming communities "under the radar".... they might, depending on your definition of jamming. If the communities are jamming because they just enjoy each other's company then yes one can say that they stayed under the radar. But if jamming means that the CoPs' interaction positively benefits the organization then I don't see how they could have managed to stay under the radar for long. In this day and age management is looking through a magnifying glass for opportunities to cut costs and increase revenue.

In both our studies during site visits we talk to not only the CoP core group but also to community members and leaders. In the latest study we actually created a separate survey for community members and leaders only. No core group. We asked questions like does your CoP help you in your work? Do you get other tangible/intangible benefits from it, does your management recognize your contribution? Etc. The survey was anonymous and we had over 600+ responses from 8 partner organizations.
In a nut shell CoP members and leaders thought their communities were Shangrila. Everything was wonderful in their world. A few responses were along the lines of our management does not recognize our efforts, or our CoPs are not as well aligned to the organization as we would like them to be, but by far majority of the responses were POSITIVE.
Well you can interpret that however you want, either its true or not. Because of the subjective nature of the survey we had never intended to make the survey public or make any deep conclusions based on it. It was just shared among the study participants. But I just wanted to mention that we look at all angles.

So last but not least, if there are jamming communities under the radar I am sure they would not want to talk with us because they would certainly lose their "ghost" status and suddenly become visible to the world.