A story of how a community lost trust

Favorite It is possible for the members of a Community of Practice to lose trust in the community as an effective support mechanism. Here’s one story of how that happened. The story is from one of Knoco’s Asian clients. This community started well, with 4 or 5 questions per week

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 19, 2017

Why Yammer’s default question is unhelpful

Favorite If you agree with me that the greatest value in organisational online discussion comes through answering questions, then Yammer’s default prompt does not help. “What are you working on?” asks Yammer – as a work-related version of the Facebook question “What’s on your mind”. As a way of getting

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 18, 2017

Why Knowledge Management needs empowerment

Favorite Knowledge management needs empowerment – Knowledge provides empowerment. There is a close link between knowledge and empowerment. Let me illustrate this with two scenarios. Scenario 1.Betty is writing a policy paper. She looks online for ideas, and comes across some busy discussions from a similar organisation in another part

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 17, 2017

NASA’s 6 rules for making Wikis work

Favorite Wikis can sometimes be difficult to sustain as a Knowledge Management tool. Here are 6 rules for success. Image from Wikimedia commons I was reading a great article called “Why Wikis at NASA” by  John Verville, Patricia Jones and Mark Rober. In the article, they talk about NASA’s experience

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 14, 2017

Four quadrants of community activity

Favorite We can use a simple quadrant to remind ourselves of four areas of community knowledge activity. This diagram came out of a conversation with a community of practice leader, who was wondering what to do with his portal. He had created a massive database of community documents, and had

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 13, 2017

To which department should KM report?

Favorite Where is the best place for Knowledge Management in an organisation? This is a common question in the early stages of a Knowledge Management implementation program. It also sometimes arises later on; if you start KM with a temporary task force reporting at a high level, then when KM

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 12, 2017

Why you need pull-based community meetings

Favorite Don’t just run your community meetings as presentations; instead engage in real multi-way dialogue around important questions. Brown bag lunch, by Gloria, on Flickr I have blogged several times about Push and Pull in Knowledge Management – about the dangers of focusing only on Push (such a common strategy,

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 11, 2017

More common objections to KM, and how to answer them

Favorite Here are 5 of the common push-backs to KM you will hear from management. Be ready to answer them. I blogged a couple of weeks ago about one of the most common objections to KM you will hear, which I called the four most dangerous words; “KM won’t work

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 10, 2017

How communities of practice can help reduce staff turnover.

Favorite There are many ways in which Communities of Practice add value to an organisation, 27 of which are listed here.  Here is a 28th way. There is a really interesting analysis of Communities of practice from the Geneva Knowledge forum which looks at CoPs in several large multinationals, and which points

Read More
Shared by Nick Milton July 7, 2017