Sometime ago I posted some commentary about this study by Doctor Nicholas Christakis and Doctor James Fowler, who used network analysis to aid understanding of obesity. I also posted some commentary on this study on using network analysis to aid the understanding smoking behaviour. Both studies were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This time Doctors Christakis and Fowler have published a study on happiness in the January 2009 edition of the British Medical Journal, or BMJ for short.

The study design is a longitudinal social network analysis of 4,739 individuals followed from 1983 to 2003. Interestingly happiness, or unhappiness, extends to three degrees. That is to say if you are happy your friend’s friends are also likely to be happy. Unfortunately the reverse also applies! I found this finding of most interest: ...

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About a week ago the database that drives this website became corrupt for reasons unknown. This meant the site would not render as it should. Fortunately I had a backup, but less fortunately the backup was about eight weeks old. Old lessons are always learnt the hard way! ...

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Yesterday I identified the value and contribution of my research, but I did not give any context. Today I will identify the knowledge gaps, specify the primary research question, list my assumptions and propositions, and outline my ideas. The relationship between these is shown in the diagram below, but first I will identify the knowledge gaps I found in my review of the literature.

The identified knowledge gaps pertinent to my research are: ...

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The title of my PhD thesis is ‘Visualising Collective Knowledge to Manage a Portfolio of Projects’. It contributes to the bodies of knowledge in the project management, knowledge management, and network analysis disciplines by proving a methodology that elicits the capacity of an organisation to effectively engage in its activities. The methodology, which I have called business network analysis and registered as BNA®, allows managers to examine quantitatively, qualitatively, and graphically, macro and micro linkages between nodes, where nodes are individuals, projects, project teams, business units, entire organisations, or even business functions, policies or documents.

In particular my research has:

• established the utility of managing a complex project, or a portfolio of projects, by mapping artefact, social, organisational and knowledge relationships;
• provided a methodology that allows managers to visualise and weave their artefact, social, organisational and knowledge relationships, thereby enabling knowledge worker and organisational productivity; and
• provided a complete end-to-end example of a knowledge management intervention, which is replicable in other organisations.

The importance of these contributions should not be underestimated. Project failure is an expensive commercial reality, often costing millions and sometimes billions of dollars. ...

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A change in jobs back in May saw the frequency of my blogging drop off. I've also been neglecting my thesis, to the point where I need to write 1,000 quality words or more a week if I am to submit in November 2009! Somehow I need to find the discipline and time to do both, so it occurs to me that the compromise might be to combine both activities.

The first problem is the academic style is more formal, however the blogging style is easier to write and hence edit at a later stage. Where I have written part of the thesis I plan to publish it in this blog almost as is, noting there are University rules and regulations that place some restrictions on just what I can publish in this medium. Where I am writing from scratch I will use the blogging style. Either way I invite your comment and criticism.

Anyway let's see where this experiment goes. If nothing else it means the essence of my thesis will be read by more than three examiners, and I have an offsite backup! Tomorrow I will begin with the value and contribution of my research.

Regards Graham

The blogging community I follow is playing around with a website called Typealyzer . Allegedly by inputting the Knowledge Matters™ URL the underlying engine can determine the site-author's personality, using a psychological text analysis - the famous Myers Briggs. A sister site called GenderAnalyzer can determine the gender of the site-author, and another called oFaust compares the site-author's writing style to the great authors.

Here are the results: ...

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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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