All Life Is Problem Solving

It’s time to end this blog series. I’ll begin with a brief guide and links to each of the fourteen previous blogs and end by repeating my proposal for a National KM Center, or Knowledge Accountability Office (KAO) responsible to the Congress of the United States.

The Guide

— Part One dealt with the context of National Governmental Knowledge Management in complexity and the need to adapt to challenges, proposed a definition of KM, and examined the view that formal NGKM isn’t needed.

— Part Two covers formal decentralized KM and its advantages and disadvantages and also proposes another alternative including a National KM Center (the Knowledge Accountability Office) directly responsible to the legislative fiduciary. [Read more →]

President Obama, both in his campaign, and in his Administration, has emphasized the importance of transparency in Government. This very day, as I write, he’s running “a world wide” on-line town hall to give people a chance to answer questions, hear his unrehearsed replies, and understand at least some of the thinking behind his views and policies on various critical issues. One can’t imagine any recent President doing that with the possible exception of Bill Clinton, whose replies would certainly have been much more guarded than President Obama’s. Today’s event is part of a much more substantial, sophisticated, and almost “mentoring” pattern of open communication that we see from this Administration, which sets it apart from any other in recent American History.

Having said that, my work in Knowledge Management, over a period of many years, suggests that this Administration, like others, still likes to explain some of its choices in a non-transparent way that mis-characterizes its own reasoning processes. Let’s go back to the Bush 43 Administration for an example of the non-transparency I’m talking about, before we talk about a similar instance in the new Administration. [Read more →]

Today Naomi Wolf posted an important blog reporting on an interview with Michael Ratner, a well-known US constitutional scholar, at the Center for Constitutional Rights and Columbia Law School. Wolf interviewed Ratner, seeking his opinion on the significance of the John Yoo memos released by the Obama Administration. He replied, in part: [Read more →]

I owe the title of this blog to William Greider who, in talking about the present upsurge in populism in the US, said: “At the center of this story is Obama, who inherited the Democratic Party’s awkward straddle between monied interests and working people.” [Read more →]

The notion behind the idea of “Lemon Socialism” is that government policy creates arrangements that largely privatize the gain from economic activity if there are profits, while socializing losses, if they result. The just leaked Obama Administration plan for coping with the financial system’s “toxic assets” is another creation of the Lemon Socialists.

This weekend a flood of blogs including some from Paul Krugman, James Galbraith, Dean Baker, and Yves Smith, make quite clear that the Administration’s plan provides little chance that the public will recover its money from private-public “partnerships” to invest in toxic assets, while maximizing the chances that affluent interests in the private sector will either profit handsomely from the “partnerships,” if they succeed; or lose very little if, as asserted by the critics, they fail to re-inflate the value of assets that may be still be over-valued. [Read more →]

Maxine Waters (D-CA), in reply to a hectoring interview from Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC, related to the AIG bonus fiasco, spoke her version of the truth about how the sausage is finished in the US House of Representatives. Rep. Waters made it clear that no representative can read, or does read, all of a major Bill these days, and that what they do instead is to have their staffs break down a Bill and report to them about matters that, in the view of staff, would be of interest to the Representative or Senator. Rep. Waters, of course, implied that this process is imperfect, that staff do the best they can, but that mistakes of omission, if not commission, are inevitable and lead to nasty surprises about what is in the final version of a Bill. [Read more →]

In the aftermath of the inquisition of Edward Liddy of AIG yesterday, the commentariat is offering one of their favorite narratives, hypocrisy; and Claude Rains saying that he’s “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in this establishment,” to describe the utterances of the various Congresspersons who vented all over Mr. Liddy yesterday. Unfortunately, I don’t think hypocrisy is really the proper narrative, either for Congress’s, or for the Administration’s, “outrage.”

What’s more likely at issue is the idea that if Congress and the Administration do all they can to avoid infringing on the “prerogatives” of those firms that have become public wards or welfare cases, the firms themselves can be trusted to act responsibly and not abuse the public trust. The outrage in Congress and in the administration is not a manifestation of hypocrisy. It is about being scorned. It is about being “dissed.” It is about AIG doing business as usual after the politicians made extraordinary efforts to trust the class of financial welfare recipients by removing that provision in the stimulus bill that would have mandated constraints on compensation. And, most of all, it is about AIG risking the whole recovery and re-investment program, playing into the broader narrative that capitalists cannot be trusted to rein in their greed, even when their whole financial house is burning down, and saying, in effect, as they depart the stage:

“Screw you, ‘I’m all right, Jack’”

Thanks for your reply, Stephen. It IS “a useful alternative to traditional methods for claiming a positive return on investment,” and I’m glad you made that point in your post. One of my purposes was to point out that cases like Partners HealthCare and Alcoa could also be viewed as KM cases (even though Alcoa never used that term) that delivered risk reduction, or as you called it reduction in “critical failure cost.” [Read more →]

In his recent blog on “Defining KM In Terms of Critical Failure Cost,” Stephen Bounds says:

“What we do know is that KM implemented properly reduces risk profiles. For example, less chance of having to re-learn a process because your critical staff member just moved to Rome, or less chance of a critical failure driven by inadequate communication . . . “

And later on he says:

“KM should not be aiming to achieve “x minutes per day” style savings. Rather, our job is to save “$X million over 5 years” by reducing the number of critical incidents where problem solving failure and/or knowledge loss occur. Otherwise, Fogbank happens. There are three components to this equation for critical KM failure in an organisation:

— the current risk probability

— the level that KM can reduce that risk

— the true cost of a critical KM failure”

I agree very much with the idea that KM can reduce risk by “reducing the number of critical incidents where problem solving failure and/or knowledge loss occur.” In fact, I’ve written about the relationship between KM and Risk here, without, however, saying exactly what the relationship is. I’ll do that here. But first I need to say a few things about risk. There are two categories of risk: [Read more →]

As we watch the Obama Administration work through the very real accumulated challenges faced by the United States, it’s becoming more and more apparent that this administration is very consequentialist in its decision making, that its primary current goal is to get us out of the mess the economic system is in, and that it weights other important values much lower, at least for the time being. So, we see its avoidance of the issues of investigation and prosecution of the Bush Administration’s rather clear violations of both domestic and international law. And we also see its avoidance of the issues of economic justice as fairness in the outrageous payouts of unwarranted and profligate bonuses in the Merrill Lynch and AIG cases. Evidently, its consequentialist calculations haven’t factored in the costs of ignoring the violence done to Justice in its priorities. As Jimmy Carter once said, “Life is not fair.” But, after all, this is no excuse for people not being fair in the way they conduct public policy. The issue is: how long can one ignore considerations of Justice as Fairness when pursuing another urgent goal such as National Security, or Economic Recovery? Not forever, I’m afraid. [Read more →]