Hong Kong as a Knowledge Capital

December 1, 2009 at 9:48 am · Filed under Education, Hong Kong, Knowledge management

When I first encountered this term ‘knowledge capital’ a few months back I had no idea what it meant. That was part of the ‘Knowledge Cities’ conference held in Shenzhen, China in November. I didn’t attend that conference but I did catch Jay Chatzkel seminar on 9 November, “Hong Kong as a Knowledge Capital”. Knowledge Cities are cities that deliberately go about making themselves sustainable based on what they know and how they use what they know. An example of a knowledge capital was Lisbon in the 15th century when it became the centre for exploration and eventually the establishment of the Portuguese mercantile empire. Knowledge on what was out there beyond the horizon made that empire possible. It seems to me that a knowledge city needs to have a vision, purpose, education and goals. Jay Chatzkel was very impressed with what he had seen in Shenzhen and learned about other cities in China which visibly made the Hong Kong audience cringe in their soft chairs in a wood-paneled tiered lecture hall. This was Jay’s first trip to China and Hong Kong (same country different place) and he didn’t understand that here in Hong Kong praise for China is very seldom given. He went on to propose that Hong Kong needed to integrate itself more and more with China if it was going to succeed. Take a look at his website here.

This point has been made many time before by others. There are massive infrastructure projects to link Hong Kong and the Perl River Delta; from bridge to Macau and Zhuhai to electronic smart ID cards to make for fast access between Hong Kong and the mainland. I suspect many outside Hong Kong don’t know that the border with Hong Kong is still very real and mainland Chinese need visas to enter and remain in the city.

Maintaining a separate Hong Kong is still the order of the day. This is partly because we must maintain our British inherited legal system. This legal system makes Hong Kong unique among Chinese cities as a place where a business contract can be adjudicated in a court with a very good chance of non-interference from government interests. However, the main reason to maintain a separate Hong Kong is that Hong Kong people don’t like mainlanders. They like them enough to take their money when they come for shopping and visiting the much maligned Disneyland but not enough to remember that almost everyone in Hong Kong is a refugee from China, myself included. It is a very strange state of affairs. It is the most extreme example of city-folk not liking country-folk that I’ve ever seen.

I’m still not sure exactly what one of these ‘knowledge cities’ is but it seems that Hong Kong is failing in many respects. It lacks leadership – this is not surprising for those of us who live here and know our Chief Executive Donald Tsang and his team of toads, sorry Executive Councillors, – it lacks a coherent education systems – it is laying off primary school teachers so class sizes remain around 40 and at the same time has a new program to spend 100’s of millions of HK$ to support foreign (read not mainland Chinese because rumor is that mainland Chinese are not eligible for this program) PhD students studying in Hong Kong universities. This is part of the problem of Hong Kong – it only sees itself in relation to something outside of China and preferably something European. Twelve years after the handover and Hong Kong is still an outpost of northern Europe perched on the coast of southeast China.

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Future Centres

November 4, 2009 at 8:31 pm · Filed under Definitions, Dreams, Hong Kong, Knowledge management

I went to a half-day seminar at the Hong Kong Science & Technology Park about Future Centres.  Four main presenters, Prof. W.B. Lee from HKPolyU, Mr. Hank Kune from the Netherlands and associated with the Dutch Future Centre network, Dr. Ron Dvir from Sweden and associated with Innovation Ecology and Prof. Leif Edvinsson founder of the Skandia Futures Centre and well-known for his work on intellectual capital.  This was prelude for the Knowledge Cities Summit starting tomorrow in Shenzhen, just across the boarder in China.  The summit will go on for 2 days and now I’m sorry I will miss it but I must concentrate on my school work.  Back to the future centres.  The HKSTP is very impressive; built on the waterfront of Tolo Harbour, a collection of about a dozen low by HK standard glass and steel towers on a green campus.   Its been a work in progress for years and rumor has it that it is having a hard time getting tenants.   There were quite a lot of people around at lunch but many of the towers looked rather empty.  It is a bit difficult to actually get to but by bus, train and bus I was there in just at an hour.  This is not bad considering I’m coming from Discovery Bay on Lantau Island which is about as far away as one can get in Hong Kong.

So what is a Futures Centre?  It seems to be a physical place which is outside of normal experience.  Hank Kune said “it is a place you can think outside of your normal mental patterns.”  It is not just meeting rooms but really different physical places, with unusual colours, unusual furniture – just generally unusual – sometimes quite jarring.  The concept is that by putting people in a new, different and unusual environment they will think about the future more easily.  Well ok, I guess this may be true.  The analogy is that most inspiration happens when people are doing something like hiking, going to the theatre, taking a shower and so on.  Somewhere it was decided that Future Centre meant Innovation Centre.  I’m not too sure when that happened but it was never questioned by the group.  Can we re-create and facilitate this sort of spontaneous innovation space and call it a Future Centre?  From the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Finland and the UK they gave us examples of Future Centres.  Typically associated with government bureaus and departments but there were a few examples from banks and the like.  Places where people could have the time to think about what may happen.  There were some impressive results – start-up companies formed, conflicts eased between bureaucrats and   construction industry , faster and more consolidated public service and so on.

Dr. Ron Dvir talked abou the Operating System for Future Centres and what that OS is made up of.  You can find a short list on his website here.   He came up with a much longer list so I’ll list them all again here.  Think how all of these can come together to create a space where people while embrace the future – lots of Nonaka’s ば, ba, here.

  • Value proposition
  • What are future centres
  • Building blocks
  • Models
  • Metaphors
  • Future centre as BA – ば
  • Organizational perspectives
  • Methodological perspectives
  • Physical perspectives
  • Technological perspectives
  • People
  • Results & Impact
  • Lifecycle
  • Business models
  • Permanence management
  • Visit
  • Play
  • Meet
  • Watch
  • Prototype
  • Innovate
  • Futurize

Prof. Edvinsson asked what would be the opportunity cost of not doing a Future Centre.  DaVinci entertained his patrons with his games, puzzles and ideas and used that income to fund his serious work.  It seems as reasonable as any other explanation, although I do think DaVinci made some money in building war machines for some Italian princes.   Prof. Edvinsson left us with a new word ‘actuality’ defined as what will happen in 0-12 seconds – apparently this is via Prof. Nonaka.

We toured the HKSTP briefly and saw some very well-kitted out rooms with science museum like games and activities.   A brain-storming center with a dozen laptops and a 4 huge screen overheard where participants could ‘brainstorm’ quickly and efficiently.  I don’t think my comment that 2.5 million HK dollars (my quick mental arithmetic on the kit) was needed to build something that could be done with post-it notes and a white board was well-received.   It was impressive and it would give almost perfect anonymity to the brain-storming participants.  Some of the other kit, like the brain wave game, was purely fun.  Are these rooms a Future Centre?  Most people agreed that the rooms were not the critical factor but rather the facilitation of using the rooms is what would make them become a Future Centre.  Now they are just rooms with fancy kit.

I spoke to a senior manager at the HKSTP at the end and it was revealing that  most of the 300 or so companies in the complex do not have any explicit knowledge management role in their organizational structure.  The HKSTP doesn’t have any group who facilitate knowledge management for the complex as a whole.   This is disappointing because the HKSTP is one of the most knowledge using intensive places in Hong Kong.  Maybe it will change in the future.

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CM, IM, KM, LS, RM – Is there any difference?

October 27, 2009 at 10:48 am · Filed under Definitions, Education, Knowledge management, Technology

I am inspired to blog about this after reading Patrick Lamb’s blog here.
A list of my acronyms.

  • Content Management – CM
  • Information Management – IM
  • Knowledge Management – KM
  • Library Science – LS
  • Records Management – RM

I’ve wanted to blog about the CM/IM/KM/LK/RM divide for months.  For me, a long time records manager, they are all so inter-related that I can’t really recognize them as separate disciplines – different facets on the same subject area seems like a more reasonable perspective.  Academically, Library Science and Information Management are the most common in university programs.  Most of the time, IM straddles somewhere between information technology and business management.  Increasingly, library science programs are described as information management programs.  Library Science programs produce academic librarians and organizational libraries.   Academic libraries are now heavily computerized and give many traditional library services on-line.  Organizational librarians seem to often morph into information managers and knowledge managers because they deal with electronic records and online services and want to distance themselves from the vision of the dusty under-used library.  Content Management should be about managing all sorts of content; hard-copy records, electronic records such as email, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, small and large databases, web-pages, moving and still images.  In practice, in the job market it almost always means internet/portal design and management.  There is nothing wrong with this but it may be more practical to just advertise for intranet or portal managers and avoid the confusion.  Records Management is about keeping organizational records needed to run the organization and comply with regulations.  It has existed in one form or the other for centuries and its processes are embedded in organizational structures.  This does not mean the processes are necessarily good or effective but there are embedded processes that can be very difficult to change.  Knowledge Management takes bits from all the above; explicit knowledge from Records Management, technology from Information Management, classification and taxonomy from Library Science, the wide scope from Content Management and then adds one of its own many flavors of tacit knowledge identification, decision-making, story-telling and complexity, among others.

RM and LS are old school disciplines that existed before computers.  CM, IM and KM are new school disciples in the post-computer age. This is at the core of why they often don’t communicate well with each other.  They speak different languages and have a high level of mis-trust.   Many Librarians and Records Managers learn about information technology but are blocked from applying what they know to real-world problems.  Content Managers, Knowledge Managers and Information Managers spend too much time re-inventing the wheel because they haven’t learned basic library science and records management concepts.  So much of the time when I see approaches devised by CM, IM, KM managers to solve problems I wonder, ‘why don’t they just learn a little bit of library science and records management methods and techniques?’  By the same token, I see KM managers who seem to have no understanding and amazing even less wish to learn about web-pages, electronic repositories, databases and system design.  It is not reasonable to call yourself a Knowledge Manager and have no understanding of the technology of managing information (call it explicit knowledge).  It is not reasonable to call yourself a Content Manager and have no understanding of how classification and taxonomy can be applied.  There are too many examples of extremely naive classification systems being put into place to manage intranet and portals simply because there is a lack of knowledge of what librarians and records managers have been doing for centuries.  It is not reasonable to call yourself a Records Manager and have no understanding on how to assign value to records.

Specifically, here are some examples.

  • When KM talks about building electronic repositories it is doing a kind of RM.  KM repositories all to often have no concept of expiration and retention and then become overly full of expired and untrustworthy knowledge.
  • When RM talks about assigning retention periods based on business value it is doing a kind of KM.  How do you decide what is important?  What is needed to make a better decision?  KM has real value to offer in these areas.
  • When CM talks about keeping content current it is doing a kind of RM.  The concept of retention periods only seems to exist in records management and it needs to become pervasive across all the facets.
  • When IM talks about managing information it disregards anything that isn’t electronic.  There are then huge holes in the scope of information being managed.

If you are going to be involved in CM/IM/KM/LK/RM then you need to accept that you will need to become reasonably competent in each of these facets.   Spending time on demarcating the differences is not worthwhile.

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More on failure, learning and decision making

October 22, 2009 at 1:37 pm · Filed under Dreams, Education, Knowledge management, Technology

Dave Snowden makes this point often in presentations, podcasts and publications, “Tolerated failure imprints learning better than success”.

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, “Experience is the name that everyone gives to his mistakes.”

The problem is that we have to acknowledge failure before we can learn from it. That acknowledgment is best when it is ‘to yourself’ but it doesn’t hurt for someone to simply say, “this is wrong, a mistake, a disaster”. I’ve been confronted constantly over the years with people who have an obvious failure but just don’t acknowledge it to themselves and no-one will tell them for fear of seeming rude, insensitive, over-bearing and the list can go on and on. Obviously, no effort is then made to try to fix it, try to understand it, etc. This applies to small and huge failures. An example of a small failure are webpages that don’t work but could easily be fixed with a bit of redesign or just simple editing the html code. An example of a big failure are complicated computer systems that don’t work but could be analyzed and assessed before banging in the next big system which is likely to fail for almost the same reason. Failure is fine if we can learn from it but what is all too common is that the failure is ignored, forgotten and repeated. I’ve posted on this earlier about how to make it easier to acknowledge failure here.

Take a look at the video from Daniel Kahneman. The Nobel Laureate says organizations should think of decisions like any other product, and apply quality controls.

more about “Daniel Kahneman on behavioral economi…“, posted with vodpod

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Going Apple

October 19, 2009 at 3:42 pm · Filed under Technology

I switched over to an Apple Macbook in early 2007. I’d wanted to do this for years but hesitated because I thought I would be blocked from my important Windows applications. What was I thinking? There is so few applications that don’t transfer across that it doesn’t make much of an impact. For me, the only application I miss is EWallet from Ilium Software here. They can’t seem to get a OS10 version together so I am stuck with my old PalmPilot until I spring for a iPhone. I run Office for Mac and iWorks and I never have any problem with opening the documents, spreadsheets and presentation files. I used Firefox in the beginning until early 2009. I then switched over to Safari for a while, then back to Firefox and now I’m back to Safari. The reason is that I’ve discovered that Firefox add-ons and updates can cause creeping problems like being unable to download files, sudden crashing, hanging and so on. These issues require carefully removing add-ons, testing, updating and so on. I figure if Safari works then I’ll lose a few niceties of Firefox like the colour tabs add-on and save myself a few hours a month in being a bug-fixer. There are occasional problems with both Safari and Firefox and some webpages, which most of the time have something to do with flash objects. I’m not sure what this really means but in some cases a flash object won’t work under Safari or Firefox. After 2 years of using this Macbook I did notice it was getting a bit slow. I followed these guidelines from a Lifehacker post here and I downloaded and paid my US$20 for Hazel to keep things a bit cleaner. I installed Snow Leopard last month and the upgrade to 10.6.1. I may have had a few problems with hanging and unexpected shut-downs in the last month but I can’t be too sure. I deleted Guest Profiles when I read they could delete files when activated so hopefully that solves that issue. I read that disk permissions should be repaired so I ran Disk Utility today and ‘repaired permissions’ even though the scan said they were all ok. My point is that the Macbook does require some basic maintenance not unlike a Windows pc but it is so much more forgiving. The Apple environment is so much more convenient and easy to use that it seems amazing that so many people continue to struggle on with Windows. When I go back and use a Windows pc I’m shocked at every click and close. I saw Windows 7 over the weekend and it is so obviously a reverse engineering effort from OS10 that I’m amazed there are not going to copyright battles between MS and Apple. Have these MS people no shame at all? I’m looking forward to the Google Chrome OS but most of all I think Apple should bite the bullet and simply write its own OS for Intel pcs and see how that fares in the market place.

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KM Standards

October 13, 2009 at 10:17 am · Filed under Education, Knowledge management

Peter Drucker had started to use the term ‘knowledge worker’ in conversations and lectures in the late 1950’s and by 1968 used the terms ‘knowledge worker’ and ‘knowledge society’ in  The age of discontinuity.  Nonaka’s knowledge spiral was first described in 1991 without the now famous and often-times maligned diagram, “The knowledge creating company”, Harvard Business Review, followed by the full-fledged SECI model in 1995, The knowledge creating company and finally the ‘Ba’ model in 1998, ‘The concept of ‘Ba’’, California Management Review.  Thomas Davenport and Laurence Prusak published Working Knowledge in 1998.  Cynthia Kurtz and Dave Snowden published their paper, ‘The new dynamics of strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world’ in IBM Systems Journal 2003.  These seminal works represent a continuum from concept, Drucker, to theory, Nonaka and his co-writers, thru to codification and the beginning of a body of expertise on how to ‘do’ knowledge management with Davenport and Prusak and refinement of theory and practice with Kurtz and Snowden.

When a field of expertise begins to become mature it wants to set boundaries on membership.  One way of setting these boundaries is to make rules for membership in the group; e.g. members must pass exams.  Another way to set boundaries is to make rules for how to do things in the field; e.g. use this terminology, use this model, follow this path.  One advantage to rules, standards, guidelines is to improve the ability of members of the group to share knowledge efficiently and effectively.  Since sharing knowledge is a core goal of knowledge management it is logical to see standards and guidelines appearing in the knowledge management field.

KM practitioners have become interested in developing ‘standard ways of doing things’, ‘guidelines of practice’, ‘criteria for validating membership into KM groups’ ‘qualifying examinations and degree programs and so on as the field has matured, diversified and grown.  Most simply put these are attempts to make knowledge management a ‘profession’.

Here are some examples;

CKIM™ – Certificate in Knowledge and Innovation; from the KMCI – Knowledge Management Consortium International,

MSc Knowledge Management; from HKPolyU ISE department,

CKM®/CKEE™ – Certified Knowledge Manager / Certified Knowledge Environment Engineer; from the Certified Knowledge Management Certification Board

Here is a good web-page which lists some KM organizations that are involved in standard setting in the United States.

There is obvious conflict and disagreement among various KM groups and organizations on what constitutes these standards.  David Skyrme mentions a few of the conflicts here back in 2002.  This is another sign of the relative immaturity of the KM field.  Debate is helpful if it produces clarity and consensus.  It remains to be seen if the debate in knowledge management standards is going to produce clarity and consensus.

I took the Cognitive Edge course a few weeks back and am now a ‘certified Cognitive Edge practitioner’.  This is described as an open-source certification meaning that once you have attended the course you can use the methods and tools and are encouraged to participate in a network of others who have also taken the course.  There is more information here.

It seems to me the various attempts at standard setting in KM can be classified into 3 groups; qualification focused, guideline focus and road-map focus.  US KM standards emphasize training, certification and qualifications.  This may be because the US organizations are making money by selling training and related qualifications.  Notice the heavy use of intellectual property protection in the certified KM programs.  Australian and British KM standards emphasize guidelines that reflect divergent opinions on how to do knowledge management.  European KM standards emphasize road-maps to follow and to measure ones own organizations against in order to judge success and progress.  The academic program I am now taking, the MSc program in KM at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, gives us a qualification in knowledge management which is closer to the Australian and British guideline than the US certificate qualifications.  We have a broad-based KM qualification that can be applied in a variety of ways using a variety of methodologies and theoretical frameworks.  In other words, we will be able to apply KM concepts and practices and maybe contribute to evolving KM standards.

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We have a long way to go on social networking …

October 7, 2009 at 9:09 pm · Filed under Dreams

From a dear friend in New York City who has made the leap into using pc/mobile/blackberry/fbook/twitter and notices what so many of us won’t say …

“attended a social networking seminar last night . linked in fbook and twitter … hosted by a “search engine optimizer’ . conclusion ? the net is in its’ infancy as a cultural/economic phenomenon . needs diapering .”

There is so much said that this is all so useful when actually some of it, maybe half or more of it, is terribly infantile.  Twitting about the day, the weather, the meal just eaten – Photos shared 3rd hand – Odd names for someone who really is just taking your coat.  The world didn’t start when you all ‘got connected’ it existed a long time before and that world isn’t going away anytime soon.  I read recently that Tom Davenport said, “The absence of participative technologies in the past is not the only reason that organizations and expertise are hierarchical.”  (see Stewart Mader’s blog here) I think this was in the context that social networking tools are going to make hierarchies go away in organizations.  Good for him for saying the obvious – the tools are not going to change much, as those of us know who went from memos on typewriters, newsletters and meetings to email, intranets and networking.  It is what we are doing that will make a big change and what is now done with social networking seems rather thin and vacuous.  Yes, it still needs diapering and probably for quite some time into the future.

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Another 2×2 Knowledge Box

October 6, 2009 at 7:26 am · Filed under Dreams, Knowledge management

As has been pointed out by many people, putting everyting in 2×2 boxes is an obsession with management consultants.  I thought I would try my hand at it with the old ‘knowledge’ chestnut.  This helps me notice that ‘technology’ and ’social networking’ are in the same quadrant.

Knowledge 2x2

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Cognitive Edge Course – Days 2 & 3

October 1, 2009 at 2:46 pm · Filed under Knowledge management

I finished the course yesterday.  Day 2 was a full-on day of using the CE methodologies.   We got a chance to try and apply what we had learned to someone’s real project.   We used a hypothetical school project I’m working on about a police agency facing staff change because of retirement.  This was useful and at the same time very frustrating.  There was so much we had learned in a compressed amount of time that it was difficult to turn it around and apply it out into a real solution.  We tried to apply techniques from Butterfly Stamping, Anecdote Circles and The Future-Backwards.  It may have been more useful to use Social Network Stimulation was the critique from the other group.   Day 3 was for learning how to use the Sensemaker software.  This makes it possible to collect anecdotes, analyze them for patterns and link back to the ‘raw data’ through the patterns.  It can be a very powerful way of seeing the insider’s perspective on the issue.

I recommend anyone who is interested in organizational behavior, decision making, real-time data-collection and pattern recognition to take these Cognitive Edge course and learn how to use the Sensemaker software.  The payback for 3 days is very good.  I’m hoping I can apply these methodologies to my school work this term and later on in the real-world of work.  I can see so many ways they will be useful.

This TED talk from Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce can point you in the direction of what Cognitive Edge is on about.

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Cognitive Edge Course – Day 1

September 28, 2009 at 11:10 pm · Filed under Education, Knowledge management

Today I began the 2-day Cognitive Edge accreditation course which will be followed by a 1-day Sensemaking software course.   Upon completing the accreditation course one can join the Cognitive Edge network.  The network uses the methodologies developed by Dave Snowden and the Cognitive Edge group.  The Sensemaking software is a propriety level tool developed by Cognitive Edge.   The methodology has interested me for this past year because it has clearly many hooks back into ethnographic research.  The roles of participant observer and native informer and the importance of collecting the natives point-of-view through the collection of their myths, narratives and day-to-day events and tasks.  Cognitive Edge doesn’t describe what they do like I have here; explicitly in terms of participant observer and the native.  However, the approach uses many aspects of classic emic-based ethnographic research methodology.

The cast of characters is made up of 2 trainers from the Singapore HQ of Cognitive Edge and 1 trainer from a Sydney based training firm.  The students are myself, unemployed HK based American corporate warrior, a HK based Scottish woman doing independent organizational development and management consultant, a HK based Canadian woman doing independent management consulting and management coaching, 2 Chinese women who are HKPolytechnic graduate students at the PhD level, 1 Chinese woman who is a HKPolytechnic graduate student at the Masters level, 1 Chinese woman who is a member of the HKPolytechnic KMRC (a research and consulting centre), 1 Australian man who does consulting primarily to the education sector in Australia and 1 Thai man from a comunications consulting background.  The Thai man took the course about 4 years ago and is taking the course for the 2nd time.  The rest of us are taking the course for the first time.  Its a good mix of people.  I had been worried there would only be 4 or 5 people so it is nice to have 9.

What did we do?  First, we split up into 2 tables and listened to a theoretical lecture on the Cognitive Edge approach.  The approach is about looking at the organizational issues with the purpose of getting the people in the organization to reveal to themselves their problems and solutions.  They use the Cynefin framework (Cunevin Framework) which has 5 domains; Simple, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic and Disorder.  Simple and Complicated are ordered domains.  Complex and Chaotic are unordered domains.  The domain of disorder (sounds like something from a fable, doesn’t it?) sits in the middle of these four domains.  You can read all about in the papers of Dave Snowden which are widely available and  many can be found on the Cognitive Edge website here so I’m not going to go into this much farther.   We then spent the rest of the day doing exercises and learning how these could be used in an organization so that the ‘natives’ to reveal themselves and how we could be good ethnographic participant observers.

This explanation of the Cynefin framework (Cunevin framework) used by Cognitive Edge and developed by Dave Snowden and Cynthia Kutz is from Shawn Callahan.  Shawn’s explanation is good, simple and to the point.  He should have mentioned the fifth domain in the middle, Disorder, but his explanation of the four other domains is better than anything I could offer up.

Yes, its quite good and I’m looking forward to tomorrow and the day after.  I don’t want to describe the actual tasks here because I feel I would explain them poorly and most probably irritate the Cognitive Edge people who are running this accreditation course for profit.

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