grassroots adoption strategies for corporate knowledge sharing
DESCRIPTION
This is the talk I gave at KM World 2014 in Washignton DC at the Grand Hyatt. Concerns my experiences with corporate wikis and SharePoint as vehicles for knowledge sharing. Based on Ikujiro Nonaka's theory of dynamic knowledge creation.TRANSCRIPT
C202 Migration to SharePoint:
A Grassroots Perspective
Elizabeth Turner, M.I.S., M.L.S.
First Command, Fort Worth Texas
In a nutshell…
The same concepts that make wikis, intranet, and
corporate stories successful are what make
SharePoint implementations successful
Grassroots adoption takes intent and planning,
with varying levels of formality
The more complicated your site sprawl gets, the
more you need a controlled vocabulary
The Knowledge Society - Nonaka
Knowledge’s use and purpose increases as it
is shared and refined
Social interaction and sharing culture –
“working out loud”
Capture and organization of information vs.
sharing knowledge
From underground to solid wiki ground
Getting started Launched with sandbox server and
MediaWiki toolset (free)
Developer, Tech Writer, and PM (me) seeded the original pages
Created categories and tags for starting point, loose controls on categories
Paid interns to archive senior programmer’s “email advice” as tips & tricks
Used native stats pages, played with add-ons like tag cloud
Getting buy-in Bought t-shirts and lunches for show-
and-tell
Maintained sandbox page for ANYONE to practice
Used CEO’s photo on laminated job aid for basic syntax & login
Used file cabinet versus scrapbook analogy to navigate repository hurdle (more on this)
Trained all the dept admins on basic wiki functions
Filing Cabinet versus Scrapbook
Images copyfree/shared with permission
The role of corporate storytelling in KM
Stories versus lore
Mentoring and teambuilding
Narrative + experience = context
Frame lessons learned
All stories have a point – build morale, share wisdom,
raise esteem, sway an opinion
How do you capture and preserve stories beyond the oral
tradition?
Giving Content Proper Context
Artifact or
Procedure
Narrative or Dialog
Content
Essential Questions for Site Sprawl
Who owns this content?
Where does it live?
Who maintains/freshens/weeds this content?
How do we find it?
Taxonomy ideas
Analytics
Navigation paths
Term store – capture user-entered keywords
Frequency analysis of search logs
Ticket logs
Timecard logs
Outlook folder screenshot
Dueling whiteboards
Evaluating the Knowledge Landscape
What are we missing? Rely on CoP
Seed stub pages
“Coming soon”
What doesn’t belong?
Either everyone owns/flags
Or Content Owner removes
Who am I and what do I see?
Locked down versus open - depends on formality and
finality of content, and audience
How do you create communities of
practice?
Corporate-led training is often formal and learning
evaporates in the classroom
Develop interpersonal relationships and build trust
(change agents)
Mentorship vs. sharing – 2 people isn’t sharing!
Transparency – what is the business case?
Raise overall awareness – branding, messaging
Supplement concepts for deep understanding
How do we measure success?
Determine criteria for your own organization. Is it…
Not a lot of people badmouth SharePoint
Navigation paths to the contact page are less popular than nav paths to content
# of tickets turned in to CoE
One site owner per department
Sufficient metrics to indicate adoption
Something else?
Thank you!
I’d love to discuss with you further…
Liz Turner
@lizenlair (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook)