Bridges To Knowledge: A Blog by Barry Camson

Touch Points and Deliberations: Cal Pava Meets the 21st Century

What does Cal Pava's groundbreaking work on Deliberations in organization redesign have to tell us about analyzing touch points along the customer journey as part of a design process? Are there other contemporary models that can be illuminating in analyzing touch points in the process of design?

This article will review these models and then arrive at practical and theoretically sound questions that can be used as a basis for analyzing and redesigning touch points as part of a customer journey and the surrounding ecosystem of value co-creation. This falls within the approach that I have been describing in previous posts about adaptive design for collaborative ecosystems.

Adaptive Design For Collaborative Ecosystems

This article sets out a working description of a collaborative ecosystem in which value is co-created. It describes what needs to be attended to in the process of adaptive design for the ecosystem. It sets out a path forward in pursuing adaptive design for a collaborative ecosystem.

Are you an Ecosystem?

Being an ecosystem involves recognizing all those engaged in the co-creation of value and in ongoing relationships with one another constituting a larger network. This is qualitatively different from seeing your organization plus all of the business relationships it has with its different providers and stakeholders. It is different from seeing your customer or client as the recipient of the goods or services that you develop.

Changing Business Models: Noticing The Winds Of Change

The way we do business and the business models that support this in the three important areas of health-care, law and higher education are undergoing significant change and will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. What was already a fast moving world has moved into hyperdrive due to the Internet and now the impact of social networking. This presents challenges for those of us who spend a good deal of time working to be successful in our day-to-day efforts.

Six Important Conversations To Have To Bridge The Enterprise 2.0 Cultural Gap

There appears to be a growing recognition that successfully dealing with cultural issues is a critical success factor in the deployment and adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools and the changes in ways of working related to these tools. Many of the presenters at the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston spoke of the importance of culture in Enterprise 2.0 deployment in organizations. A common comment was, "it's not about the tools, it's about the culture."

The change management challenge is to move the organization deploying Enterprise 2.0 tools from what may be a traditional, hierarchical, command and control culture to one that is less hierarchical, and more collaborative, agile, open and transparent - characteristics which are more congruent with Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Here are six conversations that I recommend occur in your organization that will help your organization bridge the cultural gap between the status quo and the organization as an effective user of Enterprise 2.0 tools. This builds on a previous post where I stated that "to optimize the technology and achieve improvements in organizational effectiveness...a focus on the overall organization is important."

5 Helpful Tips: To Avoid Searching For Knowledge In The Same Old Places

How can you ensure that the knowledge you are getting is enabling you to successfully respond to the challenges of today and tomorrow?

A dilemma that I imagine many of us deal with is how to avoid coming up with yesterday's solutions to deal with today's challenges. There is certainly a tendency to build our solution to today's challenges on knowledge and approaches developed to deal with past situations. How can we position ourselves to take a forward-looking view of challenges and seek out contemporary knowledge?

Wonderful Opportunities

 

I recently ran a workshop for a client on the topic of "Networking." This workshop was for a group of people whose jobs will be impacted by an organizational reorganization and who, therefore, need to be adept at identifying future work opportunities.

One topic that we discussed was the upside of having to look for a new job after fifteen or twenty years in the current job.

A Thought About Context

People, Cultures and Context

Every once in a while, I stumble across something which appears to be just a simple part of daily life but which turns out to still be quite profound. What I "stumbled" across most recently was a group conversation which again showed me the power of a cross-cultural group to arrive at and understand the deeper meaning of knowledge.

All of this occurred when I recently delivered a presentation to an interesting group of Knowledge Management professionals. My topic was the transfer and absorption of knowledge across cultures. As I usually like to do when dealing with this topic, I showed up with several examples of music designed to be familiar to some and quite unfamiliar or even strange to others. For me, music is a form of knowledge and also knowledge which strongly reflects its cultural context. I like to say that the content knowledge of music is integrated with its cultural context.

Experience As A Teacher In Improving Knowledge Management

When I was first asked by the Knowledge Lab at the Defense Inteligence Agency (DIA) to develop and deliver a workshop on Cross-Cultural Knowledge Management, I was told of the importance of making the workshop experiential. Rather than utilizing stand-up training in which participants are lectured to about sharing knowledge across cultures, they wanted something that would provide unique experiences to people that would advance their learning and improve their future actions. The ultimate workshop did just that. It provided a variety of experiences to people that helped in a deep way to improve their skills in the realm of what I call sharing and absorbing knowledge across cultures.

The experiences in the workshop were developed to respond to issues identified in our data gathering in DIA as well as in a number of other US intelligence agencies. This post will refer to specific issues identified in the diagnosis, the experience that people gained at the workshop and how those experiences have enhanced knowledge sharing and absorption capabilities among participants.

A Bifurcated Relationship

The integrated focus on content and personal interaction in traditional collaboration is changing to a more bifurcated focus in a Web 2.0 environment where sharing content and personal interaction can exist separately. This has ramifications in terms of what are appropriate actions to support collaboration in a Web 2.0 environment.