Bring on the Trumpet

At a recent presentation to a team of IT leaders, I was asked what Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management (KM) had to do with my role as a Learning Technologist – and the answer is of course, it has EVERYTHING to do with learning! Our role as learning professionals is surely to enable our people to have access to the knowledge and tools they need to do their job. Personally, if that makes me a digital publishing company or a provider of Electronic Performance Support systems then it doesn’t actually matter as long as the end result is an engaged and productive workforce.
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Consider the following 2 definitions:

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“A Community of practice is a community of people who care about the domain, thus creating the social fabric for learning, sharing, inquiry & trust.”

Source: Wenger, McDermott, Snyder, Cultivating Communities of Practice, (Boston, Mass: Harvard Business School Press, 2002) 

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 and

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 “A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organizations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, sexual relationships, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_graph

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 Not a lot of difference really – what these statements do highlight is that the success of what we used to call “Communities of Practice” and the newer “Social Networks” is all about like minded people being involved. We used to say in the eLearning world that “Content is King” – in the world of informal learning, the King is dead and there is a now a new King on the block called “Context”!

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 But where does Knowledge management fit into all of this? Some of you will believe that KM is the domain of the IT Community. Others will think of it as being owned within the Corporate Communications team. But the reality is that ensuring there is a culture that encourages the free sharing of knowledge is a People problem – IT systems are simply enablers.

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Those of you that have read Nonaka & Takeuchi’s 1995  work “The Knowledge Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation” will be familiar with the “Knowledge Spiral”. The challenge here is to capture Tacit Knowledge and move this around the organization, enhancing and improving at as it  matures and creating new knowledge from the combination  of what we know now with new information from outside of the organization. Many of the tools that are frowned upon in some organization can actually be of real benefit here, especially when looking to add to what we know from new and often external sources.

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The Knowledge Spiral - Nonaka & Takeuchi

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The sharing of tacit knowledge does of course happen – often known as the “water cooler culture” and of course, Web 2.0 brings a new dimension to this with sites such as Twitter being used very effectively for sharing knowledge – and now, not just 1-1 but 1-many. For those of you who work in the Learning & Development world, the weekly LRNCHAT on Twitter is an absolute wealth of useful information!

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If we map some of these tools onto the Nonaka model, we can see that the technology really can enable a knowledge sharing culture:

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(TLN Communities are internal Communities at L&G – this could equally be a Yammer Community for example).

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At the heart of this though are the communities or social networks – and if you hire me, you hire my network at no extra cost!

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At Legal & General, we implemented an LMS that included Community features and this gave us an advantage in that the LMS can provide the context that is vital for communities to thrive! Most of our communities were in fact formed without any corporate-led initiatives and were the result of staff seeing what others had done and understanding the art of the possible. The video on “Wikis in plain English” from www.commoncraft.comhas been widely used to show how you can use a Wiki for more than just an on-line encyclopaedia!

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It was the use of communities for distributing meeting agendas and managing meeting minutes that fired up many of the newer groups. One group in particular decided to use a Wiki instead of email for gaining sign-off on critical documents. Instead of the process taking a week as the emails went around, they have achieved sign-off in ½ day!

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Of course, not all communities will thrive – and some will have a natural lifespan as either the people or the topic moves on. One example we found was a community called “Blue Sky Thinkers” – you might be tempted to think that was a great idea to have a community especially for people who want to be innovative. Sadly, that wasn’t the case! The community was setup and nobody came. This was further proof for me that if there is no context for a discussion to take place then it won’t! Context really does make a community work.

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But this isn’t just about enabling our people – every night, all of our tacit knowledge walks out of the door and we hope that it all comes back the next day! In these days of rightsizing and outsourcing, that isn’t always the case though. Add to that natural turnover and retirements, and this could mean that over the next 5 years, some 50% of the current implicit knowledge held by our people walks out of the door and doesn’t come back. Ever.

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It doesn’t have to be this way though!

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If we get the culture right and encourage our people to share what they know, we can capture more of this knowledge whilst they are still here.

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-         Blogs, Wiki’s, discussion forums
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If we implement a culture of trusting our people with the Web 2.0 tools such as Twitter, Blogs and Facebook, we may still have access to them after they have gone.
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-         My LinkedIn.com contact list contains a large number of current and former colleagues. (and I suspect, some future ones too!)
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-         Make some of our eLearning Public Domain – if the Defence Acquisition University can do it, so can we! If we expect to receive then we must be prepared to give. (DAU content is on Itunes)
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In summary, I can’t put it all much better than this quote, attributed to Al Gore:
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“Our challenge is to process data into information, refine information into

 knowledge, extract from knowledge understanding, and then let understanding ferment into wisdom”.
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Of course, technology to assist in knowledge sharing isn’t new and organisations will already be looking to deploy such tools. So, who is best placed to create the context, which to me, is fundamental to the success of any collaboration or Knowledge sharing programme? The answer to that lies in understanding the sort of communities that would add value to our people such as:
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• People with the same job – sharing success and ideas across locations & borders
• People with the same competency requirement – helping each other to achieve competence quicker
• People in the same location – adding the social aspect by way of location specific knowledge sharing
• People attending the same training event – adding value to existing classroom activities by including collaboration outside of the classroom, changing learning from an event to a process. (very successful in the UK with the Open University)
• Communities that are created dynamically based on these and other criteria – you don’t have to look for the group, the group finds you!

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I don’t believe that this can be as effectively done outside of the HCM space as the source of the data to support this sort of dynamic environment exists in one place – your Human Capital “eco-system” of LMS, HRMS, Talent & Performance systems.

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At a recent industry conference, Thomas Otter, Research Director for Human Capital management at Gartner suggested that we should “Work on your strategy for social software in HCM and Learning now.“ I have to agree fully with this viewpoint to avoid being second in the race behind IT and/or Corporate Communications!
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If this truly is a “People Problem”, then it requires “People Solutions” to fix it!

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(Excerpts from this article have been used in earlier blog posts but having had a discussion last week with a colleague around the Knoweldge Spiral, I thought the entire article was worth an airing!)

Peter Green, founding member of Fleetwood Mac

Over the weekend, I caught a late night documentary on Fleetwood Mac – many of you will remember them for “Albatross” and others for their later albums which were a different direction musically. This set me thinking about how bands like this deal with the loss of a key member and what “succession planning” might look like in their world!.
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The sound of Fleetwood Mac that many of you will recall today is possibly more related to their 1977 album, “Rumours” than “The Green Manalishi” which was the last single recorded with Peter Green. The various changes in personnel that followed over the years don’t appear to have been planned and each one looks like a reaction to the most recent loss. In one case, whilst on tour, one player went out to buy a magazine and never came back! (He joined the “Children of God”!). Peter Green was persuaded to join the tour to enable them to fulfil obligations but this was only temporary.
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Now, does that not sound familiar? How many reading this have not seen examples of an employee leaving and being taken back as a contractor or temp?!
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A totally different example though comes from my all time favourite band, “Yes”.

The definitive "Yes" lineup from 1977

Like Fleetwood Mac, they too have seen changes over the years. Most fans would probably agree though that the definitive “Yes” lineup would probably be: Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White and Rick Wakeman.
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To quote Steve Howe in the sleeve notes for their 2003 DVD “Live at Montreux”, “We love to play certain Yes songs just like the audience love hearing them”. Which of course, becomes a problem if the distinctive voice of Jon Anderson isn’t available! And in 2008, that is exactly what happened! John was admitted to hospital following a severe asthma attack and advised not to work for at least 6 months.

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To maintain that distinctive “Yes” sound though  needed someone who sounded like Jon Anderson. So, where else would you look than a Yes tribute band! Benoit David, from Canadian tribute band “Close to the Edge” toured with the band during 2008 in North America  together with another new boy – Oliver Wakeman. You see a pattern here? – I saw them at Hammersmith in 2010 and the band still sounded like the Yes I remember.

Of course, the band had lots of other changes over the years too but the difference for Yes was this apparent underlying desire to maintain the “Yes” sound rather than a permanent change of direction as was the case with Fleetwood Mac.
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So, what can we learn from all of this?

• We need to have plans on what to do if a key staff member leaves – particularly if they have unique skills that are part of a Unique Selling Proposition.
• We could consider a total change of direction depending on who we recruit as a replacement – “get the right people on the bus and see where it takes us”
• Keep  tabs on former key staff – you may need them back at some point and they will have gained fresh experiences along the way.  You might even benefit from someone they know so don’t be too quick to remove them from your LinkedIn or Facebook lists! (I knew we’d get back to Social Networking eventually!) .

Butlins Contest

A few weekends ago, I had the pleasure of attending the Butlins Mineworkers Brass Band Contest held in chilly Skegness!

This post though isn’t about the music but more about the contest as a metaphor for what we in Corporate Learning teams are trying to do.

A band, like an Orchestra, consists of a number of different sections, all of which need to work together to achieve the best performance. But, like any Corporate, they need direction. And that direction will vary depending on the man in the middle – think of the Musical Director/Conductor as a CLO (Chief Learning Officer), directing the different divisions to work together towards the central goal. In the case of the band performance, that goal is simple: Perform the musical work according to the interpretation that the MD is giving. If only all goal setting was as clear!

The history of the brass band in the UK is interesting – band players would have traditionally been less likely to attend a music college or university (although that has of course changed) and one of the ways they developed was by healthy competition, hence the concept of the brass band contest. For bands though, there is just the one performance assessment – and inevitably, there is much discussion after the event as to whether or not the judge was right. Some people do go for a 360 assessment and these were much discussed in the bars of Butlins over that weekend!

On this occasion, I was there as a performer with my good friends of Brighton & Hove City Brass but as a conductor myself, I have prepared bands for many such competitions. Whilst musical ability is clearly a core competency, when working with amateur players, you also have to be a great communicator, motivator and leader. Indeed, there are some great conductors whose musicals skills are not as good as their leadership skills. (did your CLO come from an L&D or HR background?)

This was truly a weekend of great teamwork – be that in the rehearsals, the final performance or the post contest activities. My thanks to Matthew and the team for the opportunity to work with them at this event.

There are some interesting comments here on further musical metaphors.

http://www.managementunplugged.com/?p=19

In recent months, we have started to see more and more QR Codes – for those that don’t know what they are, here’s a brief description from http://www.qrstuff.com/:

“QR Codes are a cell phone readable bar code that can store phone numbers, URL’s, email addresses and pretty much any other alphanumeric data. Storing up to 4296 characters they are internationally standardised under ISO 18004. Think “print-based hypertext links” and you’ll start to get the idea. “

In short, a way of getting content of various kinds onto a mobile device such as an Android or iPhone simply by using the phone’s built in camera!

If you’ve not seen one before, they look like this: (This is a link to my blog!)

But what role do they have to play as far as my day job is concerned?  Currently working in a Financial Services Organisation, that isn’t at first obvious! But here’s just a few ideas that I have already come up with:

• Adding a link to a video in printed sales training materials to enhance the printed material without needing a PC or Video
• Making item specific learning available at the point of need – imagine having the user manual for that complex telephone on your desk available simply by pointing your handheld at the QR code!
• Having a vCard on you business card – scan the code and put the contact details straight into your contact list
• Deeplinking to just about anywhere in our LMS
• Adding the ability to listen to an MP3 version of a printed document for the visually impaired.

Imagine having your contact details printed on your T-Shirt or a baseball cap at the next Conference you attend! (I have a T-Shirt on order hopefully in time for the 2011 Learning Technologies Conference!)

Creating them is easy too – there is a great free tool at http://www.qrstuff.com/ which will create links to websites, your social networking profile, vCards, vCalendar events and even simple text.
An alternative site which gives free high resolution images is http://app.qreateandtrack.com/#/create/url - you will need high resolution if you want the QR code to be displayed on some printed items.

Saba Customer Excellence Award

As we come to the end of 2010, it also heralds the end of my time at Legal & General – and what a great time it has been!

I was also interviewed by KM World in October - you can read the article here.

Straight No Chaser at Forest Row Festival

As we move into 2011, a little time to reflect on the musical high’s of 2010!

It has been a real pleasure this year to work again with Straight No Chaser and The Tony Strudwick Orchestra and am looking forward to working with both again in 2011.
I hear there may be another Cyprus tour next year with Tony and am already booked for a Hassocks Hotel gig with SNC – a great trumpet section there and some cool charts too. This is not your average rehearsal band!

Hooking up with Tony again has also been fun – I spent nearly 10 years as his lead trumpet back in the late 80′s /early 90′s.

On the Orchestral front, this has been another busy year with The Sussex Symphony Orchestra - it’s a shame I wasn’t around for the Mahler concert though as the Violin soloist on the programme, Ben Baker, was someone I had fixed through by then boss! The Beethoven 9 helped to make up for that and of course, the opportunity at Christmas to get the Fanfare Trumpets out for the Nigel Simmons Christmas Carol charts!

The Sussex Symphony Orchestra

Looking forward to next year, we have a rare opportunity to perfrom the Berlioz Grande Messe Des Mortes together with the Southern Festival Chorus.

Another first for me this year was performing Stabat Mater by Karl Jenkins with the Sinfonia of Arun & The Billingshurst Choral Society. as a result, a CD of this is now in my car! (available from Amazon.co.uk !)

Finally, my work with brass bands has continued with Uckfield Concert Brass – resurgent now under new MD Nick Morris.
Looks like it might be another busy year in 2011!

At a recent symposium I attended in London, one of the discussion points was – why should Learning & Development have anything to do with Social Media/Collaboration tools? I found myself in somewhat of a minority on this one as I firmly believe that they should! So, today’s blog post will explain why that is the case!

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The session abstract for my recent session at the Saba People 2010 Conference is a good starting point:

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  “Most organizations already have social tools- but they don’t connect people inside the firewall on issues of import to the company or the people that work there. Companies will need to change behaviour and reward knowledge sharing to maximize the value of enterprise social networking. It’s a people challenge, not an IT or communications problem and HCM is the key to success for knowledge sharing and collaboration projects. This session looks at why HCM applications are the natural home for collaboration and social technologies”

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For any initiative to succeed, there has to be a business case – the introduction of new social media tools is no different! Having had a strong background in studying Knowledge Management over the last 10 years, I looked at the business case in a slightly different way to many of my peers. In a nutshell, I can’t put it better than this:

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  “an organisation’s knowledge walks out of the door every night – and it might never come back.”

SOURCE: Kevin Abley (Cap Gemini) in OR Society Conference on Knowledge Management, London, Nov 1998

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To put that into perspective, we know both what our current staff attrition rates are and when people are due to retire. The worse case scenario could be that up to 50% of the people in your organisation today, may not be there in 5 years time – and of course, their tacit knowledge will literally “walk out fo the door and not come back”.  That to me is a not only a strong case for action but also and indication that this is indeed a people issue! We have to provide our people with tools and a new culture where knowledge sharing is actively encouraged.

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But it’s not just about KM thinking – let’s also consider this definition of Social Networking from Wikipaedia:
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  “A social network is a social structure made of nodes (which are generally individuals or organisations) that are tied by one or more specific types of interdependency, such as values, visions, ideas, financial exchange. friendship, kinship, dislike, conflict or trade.”

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Where the HCM space has a role to play in this is for me, quite clear! If we are to promote knowledge sharing in an on-line environment, we also need to create the context for people to want to be part of  a collaboration community. With the knowledge we alreay have of our people in our HRMS /HCM systems, we have the ability to build these communities and connect people by bringing the community to them instead of them having to seek it out – some examples of this are:

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• People with the same job
• People with the same competency or skill requirement
• People in the same location
• People attending the same training event

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Another part of this is also to enable us to find experts we have never met – from the data we hold about the competence/performance/skills of our people, we should be able to identify subject matter experts and make them available to help other community members. Even if you are not a Saba customer, the messages in their promotional video “The Ask” bring this aspect to life. 

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Here’s another view on Collaboration – this time from Elliott Masie:

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Collaboration requires several key components: 
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• Trust
• Need/Motivation
• Shared Aspirations
• Traditions
• Listening
• Courage
• Critical Thinking
• Time
• Tolerance of Diversity
• A Shared Language

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I don’t see much in that list that tells me that IT are the right people to be defining how we deal with Collaboration!

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But it’s not just me saying this! At an event earlier this year, Thomas Otter from Gartner suggested “  Work on your strategy for social software in HCM and Learning now!”. And of course, we are starting to see the Learning vendors including social tools – I guess they agree with me too!

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Wherever you stand on this, Social Media isn’t going to go away and whilst we in the HCM space have an opportunity to influence how it is deployed in our organisations, then we should step up and do it!

Thursday 4th November

They may well have saved the best til last – today’s keynote speaker was Jason Averbrook from Knoweldge Infusion. There was so much good stuff in this keynote that I didn’t get to make enough notes so thankfully, will be able to watch this on “catch up” in the Saba Customer Community.

One item that interested me was the Social Technographics Ladder from Forrester: (where do YOU fit on this?)

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Some key Soundbites from this session:

• Be Brave!
• HR must own the HR System Strategy
• Think “Workforce Technology” and not “HR Technology”
• If your organisation blocks Facebook or Twitter, they are blocking Collaboration
• There are more social networking accounts than there are email accounts!
• The future of HR technology products is a perpetual beta

He also used a great interactive tool within his slide deck to take instant feedback via sms text messages. Neat!

Well worth following on twitter – @jasonaverbrook

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Final session of the day for me was Jim Lundy’s wrap up. Once again, loads of useful content in his session – the wisdom of the crowd, “Crowdsourcing“, spotting the high potential people through social network analysis, idea generation.

To summarise where I think Saba are today, their own promotional video does a pretty good job:

This was a highly energising event – thanks to the organisers for the invite to present.

Wednesday 3rd November

Well, what a way to start the day – a highly entertaining keynote from Gary Whitney from the Intercontinental Hotel Group.

• “To have customers live your brand have to engage your people”
• “A brand is delivered by the people at the front line.”
• “if you want people to love your brand, you had better love your people!”
• “It’s the first follower who makes the leader”

The last point was very amusingly demonstrated by the use of the video below – this came back to haunt us later that day during dinner when Jeff Carr started the dance in the restaurant!
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Next up, the Saba Customer Excellence Awards – I am delighted to report that Legal & General were awarded the Collaboration & Social Media Power Award for our use of the Saba Collaboration tools within Saba Learning. This is another well deserved tribute for the team – well done team!

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The next session was led by Saba founder, Bobby Yazdani and featured 6 young  entrepreneurs – I wasn’t quite sure what to expect but this turned out to be a great session! Here’s some brief notes and links from this session:

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• Qwiki - this is a really cool way of delivering content – go visit the site to get the true experience of this. Pure genius!
• Meet Seymour, the AI Concierge courtesy of Cleversense
• Get your customers to add themselves to a web based CRM system – from the people who bought you webs.com, this is contactme.com.
• We saw him last night with Fitz and the Tantrums, this  morning he shared his work in creating music for advertising . newmath.tv
• A moving story which led to the creation of 1000 Memories.com, a place to remember loved ones.

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Next session up was my own session – I’ll be devoting a separate post to cover my material for that shortly.

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The next couple of sessions I attended were product related – firstly, as we are just about to upgrade to 5.5, a session on product improvements which included:

• More support for blended learning
• Informal learning can now be used to close competency gaps
• Tasks can be assigned to all types of learning
• Ad Hoc reporting
• Mentors can be assigned in your profile

The next session was on the mashup portlet – as we have already deployed something similar from our friends at Comenius, I was interested to see the difference. The only addition is the ability to use Javascript as well as XHTML.

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Final session was on Content – a few new things to consider apart from the social aspects which have already been mentioned:

• Saba Publisher 10 is now GA
• Detect and fix – regress SCORM to find errors.
• Export Centra to flv, mp4, mp3
• Saba “Webster” – a new free tool to tag informal content on your intranet
• Sabasociallearning.com

David Koehn of Saba was predicting that there will be less formal learning but it will become higher value.

To finish the day, another great summary from Peter Olguin.

It’s always a re-energising experience attending a conference and this one was no exception!

Monday 1st November

The event started off on Monday with a “Town Hall” meeting of the global Saba user group – most of this discussion was around support related areas and was a good first opportunity to meet other customers. This was followed by 2 separate special interest groups – I went to the Collaboration group which was well attended and resulted in a decision to keep the group active using Saba Live. If you haven’t yet seen Saba Live, perhaps this video might give you a clue as to what the fuss is all about!

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The day ended with a networking event and a session with the EMEA team and fellow EMEA customers – we already have a good informal network in the UK so this was another opportunity to catch up!

Tuesday 2nd November

Jeff Carr from Saba opened the event with a highly entertaining look at the birth of the American Revolution and how that might have looked had Web 2.0 tools been around! First major keynote of the conference was delivered by Gary Hamel – he had some great content – here are some key soundbites from his session:

• “We are not limited by our resources, we are limited by our aspirations”
• “passion, creativity, initiative- new skills for the knowledge economy”
• “it’s not so much work sucks, it’s more management blows”
• “most important invention of human time in last century is management . It is the technology of humankind”
• “The flows of knowhow are becoming more important than the stock of knowhow”
• “Be Bold”! (a recurring theme during the conference!)

Gary’s presentation will be available on the Saba Live Customer Community along with all the others from the event – recorded using Saba Centra. More about Gary’s thinking can be found on his blog: http://www.garyhamel.com/.

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My next session was also about collaboration – Saba made a great hire in poaching Jim Lundy away from Gartner where he led the Social Software & Collaboration team. Much of this session focussed on an area that I have been talking about for a number of years – the power of community conversations to power innovation. This aligns very closely to my own thinking on where Knowledge Management meets Learning and was a good omen for my own panel session with Jim later in the day.

The next sessions were mainly about product enhancements plus a few items I gleaned from the solutions centre:

• 3 functions now JSR286 – include Search, In progress learning & Approvals in any JSR286 compliant portal.
• Saba Anywhere - off-line player which doesn’t need a special off-line version of the course to be created.
• Centra 7.7 pm iPad.
• They have hired some former Google staff to improve the search function.

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Next up was a customer presentation from Hitachi Data Systems – some good examples of how they have used Web Services to “Make Saba their own”. One example is how they use this to extract data into an interim database which then feeds into a Business objects Universe or similar.

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The day finished with a panel discussion on “Collaborating in your Enterprise: Managing Change”. I really enjoyed this panel working with Janice Watrous-McCabe from Allina Hospitals, Nick Howe from Hitachi Data Systems, Alice Harkin from Saba and facilitation from  Jim Lundy.  A great question at the end got these responses from the panel:

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Q: What is the business case for collaboration?

1) 50% of your people will be gone in 5 years time
2) novice2expert
3) power of connectivity

The evening ended with a customer appreciation event at the Museum of Science featuring a live performance by Fitz and the Tantrums. (They have a free mp3 download on the site!). One highlight of the evening for me was the opportunity to meet again with Mike Fitzgerald, formerly Global Head of Learning for RSA, who was responsible for recruiting me into a role in the eLearning space – I remain in his debt for introducing me to the best jobs I have had in my career!

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Another old friend, Peter Olguin, from Deloitte was making a video diary of the event – his day 2 summary will give you a flavour of the event!