All Life Is Problem Solving

In this post, I’ll provide a more detailed envisioning of the Information Clearinghouse, or, if you like, the external knowledge and information integration, function of a proposed Knowledge Accountability Office (KAO), established by Congress. In an earlier post, I listed the functions of the KAO as: 1) perform KM Research and Development, 2) coordinate information availability about KM and knowledge processing including information about activities and impacts performed outside the Government, 3) fund KM programs and projects across the National Government, and also 4) evaluate the impact of KM and knowledge processing activity across the decentralized, partially self-organizing clusters of KM activity. In envisioning the coordination function, it’s important to keep in mind that since the KAO also is charged with evaluating the impact of KM and enhancements in knowledge processing across the Federal Government, it will also have a mandate from Congress to command evaluation reports and data about these matters from all Federal agencies and to conduct coordination activities necessary to get the information it needs from them.

The coordination function of the KAO can be summarized as activities integrating KM practitioners and aggregating codified solutions to knowledge processing and KM problems across the distributed Federal System, and also providing the search and retrieval technology to locate and retrieve what has been aggregated. Doing these things is difficult not only because of the distributed character of explicit Federal Government and external KM activity and impacts, but also because KM activities and knowledge processing impacts sometimes don’t come with “knowledge processing” and “KM” signs on them. They come with “methodology” or “innovation management,” or ‘change management,” or “Quality Management,” or “Organizational Learning,” or “critical thinking,” or “analytical or statistical” or “mathematical,” or “computer modeling” techniques, or with still other signs on them. The coordination task involves recognizing KM activities, projects, and programs identified by another name, and integrating people, and the information they provide into the KAO. This, of course, requires a specification of what KM is that is capable of serving as a guide to distinguishing KM from other activities, whatever name has been given to the activities in question. Elsewhere, I’ve argued that both the category of KM activities that are called something else, and the category of KM activities that are called KM but are really something else may both be pretty large. So, a very important part of KM coordination activity may well be to disentangle semantics from reality, and to identify the reality of KM activity and impacts whatever they may be called.

The range of interpersonal activities the KAO will use to integrate KM practitioners and interpersonal communication is very broad. Here’s a non-exhaustive, but, I hope, representative list.

— Enabling interpersonal sharing of knowledge and information through introducing “jishuken,” a practice developed at Toyota and used in other firms practicing Quality Management. Jishuken (or “self-study”) is a cross-site team-based way of sharing knowledge. It uses “collaborative problem solving for situations in which problems are messier and the knowledge needed to solve them is not transportable enough to be written in a lessons-learned book or practiced in a training center.” (p. 255)

— Enabling Interpersonal integration (broadcasting, sharing, teaching) of solutions to knowledge processing and KM problems through:

— Implementing formal training and informal mentoring;

— Enabling cross-agency, and cross-department Communities of Practice;

— Enabling inter-agency and cross-functional teams;

— Implementing “Expert” committees;

— Creating spaces and environments enabling Friendship Group formation;

— Enabling implementing Group Decision Process Methods (Delphi Technique, Nominal Group Technique, Focus groups, Knowledge Cafés, Software Requirements and Design Facilitation Processes, Group Value Measurement Technique, Team Analytic Hierarchy Process, etc.);

— Supporting, enabling and implementing narrative elicitation events, including Anecdote Circles;

— Supporting, enabling, and implementing Open Space Events;

— Forming networks and communities of KAO personnel and Subject Matter Expert Knowledge Brokers across the Government.

The KAO will need to be part of, and to facilitate an IT ecology that will support: integrating people, aggregating codifications of KM and knowledge processing impacts across the Government, collaborating in knowledge processing and KM, and tracking knowledge claims and their performance. This ecology will need to use Enterprise 2.0 and social media technology and applications such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, collaborative tagging, RSS feeds, social networking, social bookmarking, mashups, folksonomies, and Interactive Media applications. It will also employ transactional databases, data warehouses, data marts, content management systems, narrative databases, and enterprise information portals where these are needed.

It will also need emerging Web 3.0 (semantic web) applications, as well as developing agent-based Web 4.0 applications which will be available in the next few years. This diverse set of resources and capabilities will not be effective without integration. Search technology can provide some of this integration, as can portal capabilities, data warehousing and content management systems. However, the key to comprehensive integration is an implementation of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on an Enterprise Service Bus that can make available all web-service enabled applications, content, and data sources related to KM on demand, as well as an enterprise knowledge processing system that can orchestrate web services according to the needs of users.

To Be Continued