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NZ BB Analysis before 16/9

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 11:09:00 +1200

Analysis of NZ Broadband before the 16/9 government announcement

So, we are about to make the largest single public investment in telecommunications ever in our nation's life - $1.5 billion ? we may be wrong - still a big number !

We think this is excellent, as the Government's decision to invest $1.5 billion to bring fibre to the home (FTTH) for 75% of New Zealanders is fundamentally important to achieving our economic and social development goals.

However, anyone in the least interested and informed about the issue will know that this is a very complex issue.

We have been working in this field since 2001 and recently we applied our minds to just one aspect of this business - regulation.

Read our views in this paper (19 pages, easy to read)

Project Success

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 07:47:00 +1200

In the domain of Project Management, it is important to reflect on what is meant by project success. An article on Gantthead says technically a project can be successful if the answers to the following questions is a YES:

Has the project satisfied the business requirements of the primary stakeholders?
Were the deliverables produced on time and within the budget (as amended by formal change control)?
Do the business owners believe the project was successful?
Has the project delivered the business value promised?

Well, we are not convinced.

We have found, that in most situations, projects have secondary stakeholders who are not business owners or direct users but other business people, peers, superiors and indeed the general public.

Unfortunately, if these groups think a project has failed, then very often it becomes the "believed truth".

In today's world, where information and opinion moves at light speed, the "believed truth" can have quite a major impact. Indeed such truths can become stories and turn into self-perpetuating "facts".

So we think that the management of the above dynamic is critical to ensure that a project is successful - and seen and believed to be successful, particularly amongst its secondary and even tertiary stakeholder community.

This, in our view comes down to communication and expectation management - both internally and externally.

The project communication needs to be set up so that it lends itself to multi modal and multi target audience communication to obtain buy in, from the onset, through the project and beyond the project. All the standard methodologies (PMI, PRIMCE2, IBM etc.) tell us how crucial project communication is, but we have seen this aspect of projects often the most neglected and not close to the heart of the owners and sponsors. This is an area that the Project Manager must drive incessantly.

What do you think?

KM Governance

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 18:29:00 +1200

Governance of the KM function is a much debated subject in the Information and Knowledge Management community today.

Knowledge culture is quite intricately tied to Governance and over the last year or some seminal work has been published in this area. I have of course being (as employees and managers) practiced Governance. I have also consulted on Governance - in public, private and not-for-profit environments

In recent times, we have considered the contemporary thinking and we think that the work by Prof Suzanne Zyngier of La Trobe University (arguably the contemporary expert on KM Governance in the world today) is quite insightful and of practical use in organisations.

Prof Zyngier has carried out a global survey of almost 180 or so KM professionals and published the results in "KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT GOVERNANCE: SURVEY RESULTS, SUZANNE ZYNGIER, SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, VICTORIA 3086, AUSTRALIA" (please contact Prof Zyngier for a copy).

In setting out her work, Prof Zyngier states:

"Knowledge is not a series of artefacts to be managed. It is leveraged through organizational processes that include the management of both explicit and tacit knowledge resources."

I agree, and herein lies the constructive tension between the classical view of (IT artefact based) Governance regimes and what is appropriate for the KM domain.

In the same publication, Dr Zyngier has also shared the findings in respect of definition of KM - makes an interesting read.

The bit from the work that I find most insightful is the examination of the relationship between the seat of KM governance and benefits realised. Prof finds that the top four "seats" of governement that correlate positively to KM benefit realisation are:

CEO/Managing Director
Chief Knowledge Officer/IP/Learning Officer
A stakeholder group
CIO

I think that the the seat of KM Governance can easily be determined by answering the following question:

Is KM a strategic priority for the organisation? and if so how do we Govern OTHER strategic initiatives?

What do you think?

So what is this Web 2.0 anyway?

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 14:48:00 +1200

So what is this Web 2.0 anyway?

The other day I wanted to get a website built and called up a few web developers around the world, NZ, Australia, India and the Philippines to be precise. Like many businesses (this was an experiment) we had this fantastic website in mind, no written description of course and there was one thing we were clear about - we wanted a Web 2.0 site.

Well, all the developers - after talking to us for 60 minutes (on Skype of course) offered to build us a Web 2.0 website - it would seem that none of them will build us anything other than a Web 2.0 website at all.

We thought, goodness gracious - what were we doing all these years ! So we took a deep breath and got together to develop some clarity of understanding on this Web 2.0 thing. We took journey of learning from peers and found this wonderful video.

In our view, Web 2.0 is actually quite simple:

"A Web 2.0 is a website that allows its users, who may be anonymous, to contribute content that can become a part of the website, instantly"

(ok - we have simplified it - but that is the point of it all!)

So let us consider the Management, Technical and End User point of view (POV):

Management POV: This presents a conundrum, on one hand there is the attraction of obtaining "real" input from the end user of the website and indeed foster a "branded " community of opinion (social computing!) ,however this is a genie once let out of the bottle is kind of hard to put back in. Web 2.0 end users give generously and in that giving they have expectations of what someone will do with their contributions- the organisation needs to be very careful in setting the expectation.
Technical POV: This presents the opportunity to deploy some interesting technologies, however it presents issues of scalability and resilience. One simple issue is, how much server and bandwidth grunt does one allow? How does one deal with a deluge of contribution? There are many other technical dimensions, but we think the issue of good old RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) takes on particular significance in Web 2.0 public facing websites.
End use POV: This appears extremely empowering but then who ends up owning the content that I just contributed and what control do I have over its use? Proof point - consider this from Google: "By submitting, posting or displaying Content on or through Google services which are intended to be available to the members of the public, you grant Google a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to reproduce, adapt, modify, publish ... Google reserves the right to syndicate Content submitted, posted or displayed by you on or through Google services and use that Content in connection with any service offered by Google..." full text

So while the concept, use and of course the technology is quite straight forward, there are commercial and legal issues to deal with with. More on each of these in future posts.

Of course this post only focused on public facing Web 2.0 websites.

Inside the corporate "Cloud", in our opinion, Web 2.0 is a once in a life time opportunity to harness the collective knowledge, wisdom and capabilty of the people the commercial and legal risks are significantly less.

What do you think?

Knowledge Management Culture

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 05:56:00 +1200

Over the years, working with our clients as well as being employess of global knowledge intensive organisations such as IBM, Ernst & Young, Brookers and of course the Government, we have found that there are three common behaviour patterns that act as strong barriers to knowledge sharing in organisations. We have found that unless the root causes of these behaviours are unearthed and serious attention paid to lower their incidence, it is rather hard to obtain ROI from knowledge management investments - such as technology or process. We call these:

The FIND syndrome, the HOARD syndrome and the OVERLOAD syndrome. Three images below illustrate my characterisation of these behaviour patterns.

FIND

HOARD

OVERLOAD

In most cases, organisations that have addressed these have done so by asking and answering two questions:

What formal and informal incentives are present to foster a culture and encourage behaviour that maximises knowledge sharing?
What are the natural consequences at individual, team, group and business unit levels for behaving in a way that poses a barrier to fostering a culture of knowledge sharing?

These are difficult questions as answering them usually leads to the heart of prevalent performance management regimes in place. Hence, even posing the questions causes a bit of stir.

I think that unless these two questions are asked and answered, it is quite hard to evaluate other KM investments - and thus even harder to make a case for continued investment.

What do you think?

mysite blog

NZ BB Analysis before 16/9

Analysis of NZ Broadband before the 16/9 government announcement

So, we are about to make the largest single public investment in telecommunications ever in our nation's life - $1.5 billion ? we may be wrong - still a big number !

We think this is excellent, as the Government's decision to invest $1.5 billion to bring fibre to the home (FTTH) for 75% of New Zealanders is fundamentally important to achieving our economic and social development goals.

However, anyone in the least interested and informed about the issue will know that this is a very complex issue.

We have been working in this field since 2001 and recently we applied our minds to just one aspect of this business - regulation.

Read our views in this paper (19 pages, easy to read)

Project Success

In the domain of Project Management, it is important to reflect on what is meant by project success. An article on Gantthead says technically a project can be successful if the answers to the following questions is a YES:

Has the project satisfied the business requirements of the primary stakeholders?

Were the deliverables produced on time and within the budget (as amended by formal change control)?

Do the business owners believe the project was successful?

Has the project delivered the business value promised?

Well, we are not convinced.

We have found, that in most situations, projects have secondary stakeholders who are not business owners or direct users but other business people, peers, superiors and indeed the general public.

Unfortunately, if these groups think a project has failed, then very often it becomes the "believed truth".

In today's world, where information and opinion moves at light speed, the "believed truth" can have quite a major impact. Indeed such truths can become stories and turn into self-perpetuating "facts".

So we think that the management of the above dynamic is critical to ensure that a project is successful - and seen and believed to be successful, particularly amongst its secondary and even tertiary stakeholder community.

This, in our view comes down to communication and expectation management - both internally and externally.

What do you think?

KM Governance

Governance of the KM function is a much debated subject in the Information and Knowledge Management community today.

Knowledge culture is quite intricately tied to Governance and over the last year or some seminal work has been published in this area. I have of course being (as employees and managers) practiced Governance. I have also consulted on Governance - in public, private and not-for-profit environments

In recent times, we have considered the contemporary thinking and we think that the work by Prof Suzanne Zyngier of La Trobe University (arguably the contemporary expert on KM Governance in the world today) is quite insightful and of practical use in organisations.

Prof Zyngier has carried out a global survey of almost 180 or so KM professionals and published the results in "KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT GOVERNANCE: SURVEY RESULTS, SUZANNE ZYNGIER, SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, VICTORIA 3086, AUSTRALIA" (please contact Prof Zyngier for a copy).

In setting out her work, Prof Zyngier states:

"Knowledge is not a series of artefacts to be managed. It is leveraged through organizational processes that include the management of both explicit and tacit knowledge resources."

I agree, and herein lies the constructive tension between the classical view of (IT artefact based) Governance regimes and what is appropriate for the KM domain.

In the same publication, Dr Zyngier has also shared the findings in respect of definition of KM - makes an interesting read.

The bit from the work that I find most insightful is the examination of the relationship between the seat of KM governance and benefits realised. Prof finds that the top four "seats" of governement that correlate positively to KM benefit realisation are:

CEO/Managing Director

Chief Knowledge Officer/IP/Learning Officer

A stakeholder group

CIO

I think that the the seat of KM Governance can easily be determined by answering the following question:

Is KM a strategic priority for the organisation? and if so how do we Govern OTHER strategic initiatives?

What do you think?

So what is this Web 2.0 anyway?

So what is this Web 2.0 anyway?

Well, all the developers - after talking to us for 60 minutes (on Skype of course) offered to build us a Web 2.0 website - it would seem that none of them will build us anything other than a Web 2.0 website at all.

We thought, goodness gracious - what were we doing all these years ! So we took a deep breath and got together to develop some clarity of understanding on this Web 2.0 thing. We took journey of learning from peers and found this wonderful video.

In our view, Web 2.0 is actually quite simple:

"A Web 2.0 is a website that allows its users, who may be anonymous, to contribute content that can become a part of the website, instantly"

(ok - we have simplified it - but that is the point of it all!)

So let us consider the Management, Technical and End User point of view (POV):

So while the concept, use and of course the technology is quite straight forward, there are commercial and legal issues to deal with with. More on each of these in future posts.

Of course this post only focused on public facing Web 2.0 websites.

Inside the corporate "Cloud", in our opinion, Web 2.0 is a once in a life time opportunity to harness the collective knowledge, wisdom and capabilty of the people the commercial and legal risks are significantly less.

What do you think?

Knowledge Management Culture

The FIND syndrome, the HOARD syndrome and the OVERLOAD syndrome. Three images below illustrate my characterisation of these behaviour patterns.

FIND

HOARD

OVERLOAD

In most cases, organisations that have addressed these have done so by asking and answering two questions:

What formal and informal incentives are present to foster a culture and encourage behaviour that maximises knowledge sharing?

What are the natural consequences at individual, team, group and business unit levels for behaving in a way that poses a barrier to fostering a culture of knowledge sharing?

These are difficult questions as answering them usually leads to the heart of prevalent performance management regimes in place. Hence, even posing the questions causes a bit of stir.

I think that unless these two questions are asked and answered, it is quite hard to evaluate other KM investments - and thus even harder to make a case for continued investment.

What do you think?