Theme 4 "KM made in Europe-30 terms for 30 countries": fourth weekly digest.

This is the fourth and last weekly digest of the fourth month's theme dedicated to the terminology in Knowledge Management. The main objective of this theme was to define the conditions and the basements to build a kind of unified terminology in Europe. The objective of this glossary will be to promote the knowledge management all over Europe, particularly among the SMEs.

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Key events:

This fourth week of the theme 4 was dedicated to the unified terminology in action. The question was to understand better how this unified terminology should be applied in order to reach the initial objectives. These objectives concern the diffusion of KM ideas in SMEs. Three events were planned to present and discuss these different issues:

• A key note presentation by Richard Wout, KM consultant at KPMG, with many customers from SMEs, was planned on the 25th of March,


• A Workshop to discuss how to make the unified CEN glossary of interest for the whole KB, with all the KB community, but particularly with SIG editors, was planned on the 26th of March,


• A CEN workshop was arranged on the 27th of March to discuss the current status of the CEN glossary.

Unfortunately, the first two events have been cancelled because of a lack of participants. After the theme completion, we will have to investigate why so many events have been cancelled due to lack of interest. A first answer can be given by considering that the work arround the KM glossary is nothing but a meta KM issue. The KB community is probably more interested in KM itself, which means KM application, KM best practices, KM deploiment,KM business etc.. The definition of a KM glossary doesn't really address any of these important issues. On the contrary, the definition of a KM glossary focus on the KM introspection and how we make this area more diffused, more consistant, and more visible. The definition of a KM glossary requires a teaching approach. Many people prefer learning and exchanging their own experience. The definition of a KM approach requires definitely an introspective and rigourous approach. Many people feel more confortable with KM as a free and virgin area, where rules and formalism (and glossary!) are not welcome. This is a typical behaviour in new, complex, multidisciplinary and multicultural area. Moreover this behaviour must be taken into account before submitting the KM glossary to the KB community, in order to avoid some rejection phenomenon.
Fortunately the few people interested in this area are very motivated and play a dynamic role in the definition of the KM glossary as shown by the numerous and very fascinating comments on definitions.

The CEN workshop:

5 attendees.
the workshop transcript is available on knowledgeboard (click here)
The discussion addressed the following issues:

Status:
A rapid status of the diffusion of the CEN glossary through KB has been made by Philippe PEREZ. All the glossary is now available on KB (clik here). Some definitions are still missing, some alternative definitions have been provided.Definitions "hits" could give a good assessment of the KB community interest for the different concepts. A survey is still available on KB to evaluate this interest.

Discussion about the CEN glossary content:
David Skyrme raised some tricky issues: why some KM practices and general management activities are previlegiated in this glossary and not others? David insists on the necessity to take into account evolutions and on the "fitness for purpose" necessity:The requirement defines the content.
Mounib Mekhilef the responsible of the CEN glossary remind the adopted process: collection of KM glossaries and counting the concept occurrences, comparison with usual terms in KM publications,inputs from contributors and brainstormings. The KM glossary definition process is still open and ongoing.A conceptual representation is required. However, the CEN must adopt the mental model expected by SMEs.
David Skyrme believes that the content analysis is really useful, but CEN must pay attention to the completeness of the analysed sources.
Philippe Perez insists on the necessity to have some interactions with SMEs before freezing the glossary.
David Skyrme indicates that too theoritical terms should be avoided for SMEs. Answsering to a Anne Jubert's question, David thinks that the standardization of a glossary is not possible "what I have found is that you can't standardize. It is like dictionaries [...]they report usage and show the origins.";Moreover, the selected concepts must help SMEs to understand the main KM big ideas.CEN must definitely adopt the SMEs'slant "Really trying an get under the skin of your reader and how you want them to respond to your content."
Anne Jubert believes that the KM glossary must be kept as simple as possible.

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Result of the poll:

the question asked in the last week poll was
What do you expect from an unified terminology:
The result is the following:

• 44% said "A better diffusion of KM concepts",


• 33% said "a better understanding of KM",


• 6% said "More business",


• 17% said "nothing".

More than three quarters (77%) of the KB community said that the main purpose of an unified terminology is to improve the understanding and the dissemination (both are related) of Knowledge management.Then the role of an unified terminology must be definetely "teaching" people.
17% believes that an unified terminology is useless.

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Result of the survey:

The survey gave to KB community the opportunity to vote for or against tricky KM concepts. "Should these concepts pertain to the KM glossary which is being defined by CEN?"
The result was the following (results have been sorted by descending order):
52 people participated to this survey.
The following list shows the percentage of people who are in favour of putting the related concept into the CEN's KM glossary:

• information: 94.2%


• knowledge workers: 90.4%


• Organisational Culture: 88.5%


• Learning Organization: 86.5%


• Organisational KM: 84.6%


• Data: 78.8%


• KM technologies: 73.1%


• measuring: 71.2%


• Story-telling: 65.4%


• KM role: 59.6%


• Chief Knowledge Officer: 55.8%


• Skills: 53.8%


• Personal KM : 51.9%


• Customer Relationship Management: 34.6%


• Extended companies: 28.8%

These results have been sending to the CEN group that will take them into acount for the definition of their KM glossary. We can see that 13 concepts out 15 obtain more than 50 %, which is quite big. "Information" is at the top of this ranking. The strong conceptual relationship between "Information" and "Knowledge" explains this good position.
On the other side, we can be surprised that "Skill" is only in 12th position though it could have been seen as a very important KM concept. In some definition, KM is described as nothing but a concentred management of "Skill" within an enterprise.
"KM role" and "CKO" are not really in good position (10th and 11th). This indicates definitely that the Organizational aspect of KM withtin an enterprise and related positions are not a priority. We can notice that "Personal KM" is in 13th position though "Organization KM" is in 5th position.
Abstract concepts such as "knowledge worker", "Organisational culture", "Learning Organization",... which promote the knowledge-centric company vision, are in good places in this ranking.

Conclusion:
The theme is now over. The results could be quantitatively summarized as follow :

• 8 key events have been organized: 2 keynote presentations, 5 workshop, one forum event. (including four that have been cancelled because of a lack of participants!). These events made a total of 30 persons talking about KM terminology,


• 4 weekly polls and one survey with more than 50 answers,


• 32 new documents have been put on line, including 22 sets of definitions (each is related to one key KM concepts). All these documents generated more than 11 000 hits and brought about 50 comments(assesment made three weeks after the theme completion).

The qualitative results are even more valuable:

• The CEN KM glossary has been made visible to the whole KB community (about 900 hits),


• Many recommendations has been provided by the KB community either through events or knowledgeboard comment facilities. A summary of these recommendations will be provided soon.


• Thanks to the survey, and the definitions hits, the CEN can assess what the CEN glossary content should be and what will be its impact in the KM community.

A final report will summarize all the theme 4 achievements and the different related results.