I've been reading a lot about management, knowledge management and project management lately. Instrumental accounts of management are dominant in the literature. By this I mean management is viewed as a rational technical activity consisting of the skilled application of authority and "scientifically-based" techniques to achieve a desired end purpose. One definition of management could be:

"Management is a trans-disciplinary approach that integrates tools, techniques, and strategies to retain, organise, share, analyse, improve, and apply business expertise (Groff & Jones 2003, p. 2). It is disciplined, deliberate, purposeful, and conscious, and of necessity involves the design, implementation and review of processes to improve knowledge creation and sharing behaviours" (Standards Australia 2005, p. 2).

Now here's the problem. The definition above is actually for knowledge management, but how does it differ in any way from management? Now insert the word project: ...

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Every now and again I come across a website or blog that grabs my attention. Working Wikily is one such site. It is the site of the Monitor Institute and is dedicated to network analysis. Specifically their objective is:

"to describe the new ways that people are applying network theory and networked technology to do the work they've always done in a more collaborative form and also to begin working in new ways altogether". ...

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I was introduced the other day to the SMART framework , which I am applying in my current work. SMART stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely. I'm using the framework to assist in the development of key performance indicators that pass the clean child indicator test .

The SMART framework seems to have immediate appeal to senior management - they like the mnemonic and they like the structured thinking it forces upon them. Sometimes the simplest things matter!

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I've just finished two days at KM Singapore 2008. The first day included awards, prizes, book launches, a knowledge cafe, and a panel discussion. The second day consisted of four workshops. It was a pretty good event, but I was struck by the invisible nature of knowledge management. Not one person in the panel or in open discussion was prepared to call the discipline knowledge management! Why?

Well the stock answer was it's perceived by senior management and workers as a fad, or something that adds to their burden, so if we call it something else and disguise the fact we are trying to do knowledge management then we can do what we want to do. Even the professor chairing the panel, who runs a knowledge management course, was not prepared to call it knowledge management! This really is a bit sad and some might even argue downright dishonest.

I think the real problem is we claim almost anything to be knowledge management. We can play games and that's knowledge management. ...

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"Would you tell me please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the cat.
"I don't much care where," said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the cat.

This quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland sums up knowledge management for me - it's a frustrating discipline! It's frustrating because as a discipline it seems to be directionless. It's frustrating because some practitioners claim almost anything to be managing knowledge. I often liken these practitioners to Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty who said in a rather scornful tone, "When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less." It is precisely a lack of shared understanding and common meaning that causes so many problems.

So what's the solution? One way of solving this problem might be to position oneself in a ‘school of knowledge management'. But what are the schools? Yesterday I came across an article by Professor Michael Earl which answers this question. It's titled ‘Knowledge management strategies: towards a taxonomy', and was published in the Journal of Management Information. Despite being published in 2001 it's well worth a read.

Earl says knowledge management approaches can be positioned into three primary schools - the technocratic, economic, and behavioural. Each of these schools has distinct attributes, philosophies, focuses and units of analysis. I don't agree his attribute and philosophy rows, which I think should be reversed. My take, which is otherwise true to his article, reverses the attribute and philosophy rows and substitutes the term attribute for approach. It is shown in the table below.

School

Technocratic

Technocratic

Technocratic

Economic

Behavioural

Behavioural

Behavioural

Philosophy

Systems

Cartographic

Engineering

Commercial

Organisational

Spatial

Strategic

Approach

Codification

Connectivity

Capability

Commercialisation

Collaboration

Contactivity

Consciousness

Focus

Technology

Maps

Processes

Income

Networks

Space

Mindsets

Aim

Bases

Directories

Flows

Assets

Pooling

Exchange

Capabilities

Unit

Domain

Enterprise

Activity

Know How

Communities

Place

Business

Earl does not privilege one school or attribute over another, nor does he say they are mutually exclusive, but he does say one is dominate. ...

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Two weeks ago I purchased a new computer, which came with Microsoft® Vista Business loaded. I haven't gotten used to Vista yet and I am not sure I really like it. That said I've always liked Excel, and Excel 2007 seems better than ever. One of the really nice add-ons is Microsoft .NetMap , which installs a template capable of doing some rudimentary network analysis. Consider the diagram below, which is my email traffic, displayed using a Fruchterman-Reingold force-directed spring algorithm.

The add-in analysed Outlook 2007 and identified all 532 unique vertices and the corresponding 994 unique edges that make up my e-mail network. It also identified the density of the network as 0.004, which is quite sparse given 1.000 is the possible score. Consider now the same network displayed in a spiral format. ...

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I've just finished reading Methodological Pitfalls in Social Network Analysis by Nicholas Marschall. The central theme is that current methods produce questionable results, which is precisely why I read the book.

Running to 86 pages the book is an easy one-sitting read. For what it is it's also expensive. The book is a translation from German so in some places the English is - well unusual. Looking beyond this small problem, it appears to be a student or scientist research justification, or perhaps a short synopsis of a PhD, which means the style is very academic, but it is interesting!

Marschall quite rightly says data collection approaches colour results, and are full of implicit assumptions. He comes to the conclusion that size reduction and transformation processes, which are quite common in published studies, can significantly change the results of an analysis. ...

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Next week I am attending KM Sinagapore 2008 . I am presenting a seminar and workshop called Using BNA™ Techniques in Project Management .

I am also participating in the knowledge café as a presenter. I will be presenting Applying the RAAAKERS™ Diagnostic to Understand Management Stress Points and Assure Project Delivery in a Large Health Organisation . The RAAAKERS™ framework (Responsibility, Authority, Accountability, Awareness, Knowledge, Experience, Resources and Systems) was used as an analysis tool to assist in understanding the main management stress points, and data was presented as a visual analysis . This work, co-authoured with Doctor Mark Burnett, will be published in the coming months in the Journal of Military and Veteran's Health .

If you are in Singapore next week do look me up.

Regards, Graham

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I haven't been blogging lately - sorry! The reasons are I have been quite ill and have only just gotten over it; I am overwhelmed at work; and I have been trying to write my PhD thesis. I have neglected the thesis for most of the year, and decided it was getting away from me, so my discipline is to write something every day, which means blogging takes a back seat. Today I thought I would share with you a concept I call the Philosophical Trinity.

Choosing an appropriate research strategy is difficult. It requires a deep and honest reflection of one's own beliefs. It requires commitment to the relationship between the philosophical trinity, the research paradigm, and the research methodology or methodologies. The philosophical trinity answers the questions ‘What exists?', ‘How do I know?', and ‘What is valuable? Each question is a discipline in its own right, respectively known as ontology, epistemology and axiology. The philosophical trinity is depicted below.

Ontology is the philosophy of the world view of reality. Sometimes, and in particular in the systems thinking schools, world view is called ‘weltanschauung'. The seminal ontological question for a researcher is - ‘Is there a "real" world out there that is independent of our knowledge of it?' The answer to this question firmly positions the researcher into one of two schools. The first school is often known as the essentialist or foundationalist school, and the second rather unimaginatively as the anti-foundationalist school.

The essentialist school argues that there are fundamental and enduring differences in social phenomena that exist in all contexts and across time. Such a position means that social phenomena can in essence be decomposed to constituent parts. ...

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Some months ago I engaged in a somewhat vitriolic discussion with David Snowden on the worth of surveys . My position was, and remains, that surveys have their place in research. David's position at the time was - "I do think that in the vast majority of cases randomly completing surveys has equal validity to attempting honesty ...". Now I do try to be honest when completing a survey and I diligently respond to almost every survey I receive. However last Friday I adopted the David Snowden random completion method! Why? ...

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As a junior officer in the Australian Army I was taught many principles. These included the 10 principles of warfare, the six principles of administration, and the seven principles of medical support. These principles were supposed to be enduring, and used as guides against which plans were tested. Now it seems we have 12 principles of knowledge management , or at least the US Army does. Their principles are:

• Principle 1. Train and educate KM leaders, managers, and champions.
• Principle 2. Reward knowledge sharing and make knowledge management career rewarding.
• Principle 3. Establish a doctrine of collaboration.
• Principle 4. Use every interaction whether face-to-face or virtual as an opportunity to acquire and share knowledge.
• Principle 5. Prevent knowledge loss.
• Principle 6. Protect and secure information and knowledge assets.
• Principle 7. Embed knowledge assets (links, podcasts, videos, documents, simulations, wikis...) in standard business processes and provide access to those who need to know.
• Principle 8. Use legal and standard business rules and processes across the enterprise.
• Principle 9. Use standardized collaborative tool sets.
• Principle 10. Use Open Architectures to permit access and searching across boundaries.
• Principle 11. Use a robust search capability to access contextual knowledge and store content for discovery.
• Principle 12. Use portals that permit single sign-on and authentication across the global enterprise including partners.

Now this is a pretty interesting list, especially when I compare them to the TARDIS principles used in one part of the Australia Defence Force, and developed five years ago. The TARDIS principles were: ...

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In the coming weeks I am presenting to diverse groups on topics ranging from Business Network Analysis™, to ethics and leadership, and the RAAAKERS™ framework. In keeping with my open sharing practice I will post all papers and presentations to this website, if I haven't already done so.

This week I am presenting to the Australian Medical Students Association (AMSA) on leadership and ethics. AMSA is the peak representative body for medical students in Australia. I expect them to be a challenging group, but in turn I intend to challenge them by using the 1994 Rwandan genocide as my case study. My presentation will build on the theme that ethical dilemmas create leadership challenges and poor decisions create ethical dilemmas.

The following week I will be giving two presentations to the Defence Operations Research Symposium, which will be attended by Defence scientists from ...

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Although Pat Byrne and I have gone our separate ways we still do a good deal of collaboration. Pat recently presented our Defence BNA™ case study at the 5th Annual Project Management Australia Conference in Melbourne, Victoria. (We are indebted to Mark Blackburn who has allowed us to put this case-study into the public domain). You can view the presentation at this link , and his commentary on the conference at this link . It is substantially the same as our presentations earlier in the year to the Project Management Institute in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra, and our presentation to the Australian Institute of Management.

Last week I co-presented it with Cheryl Durrant (no relation in case you're wondering) to the Knowledge Management Roundtable in Melbourne. We modified the presentation a little, but it is substantially the same - the differences in the slides being at the start and finish.

Now it is interesting the reactions we get from our audiences. So far it has been mostly positive. The project managers tend to see it as another tool in their armoury, but ...

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I've not blogged for almost a month for several reasons. First my current employer has some restrictions concerning blog topics, and I've been working out just what this means. Second I'm so connected that I'm paralysed!

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