Tacit Knowledge Systems – Eugene Eric Kim

I’ve been following Alex Gault‘s blog for several months now. It is an outstanding source of articles and information on collaboration and Knowledge Management. Earlier this past week, I learned that Alex had organized the program for last Tuesday’s Emergent Learning Forum meeting, “Social Networking, Relationship Capital and Expertise Management.” Both the speaker list (Spoke Software‘s Andy Halliday, Intel’s Anita Lo, and Tacit Knowledge Systems‘ David Gilmour) and the opportunity to meet yet another blogger in person were too much for me to resist. (140)

Alex kicked off the meeting with an excellent introduction to Social Networks, providing some background material (see Social Networks) and a concise overview of the current marketplace. (141)

Andy Halliday followed by talking a bit about Spoke Software, although the scope of his talk was much more general. Spoke’s tool identifies social networks within the company (including people’s contacts outside of the company) by analyzing outbound email, and then acts as a referral broker. Andy emphasized individuals’ abilities to control their profile and protect their data. Afterwards, I asked Andy whether they had identified a threshold for how large an organization usually is before it can benefit from such a tool. He answered 1,000 people, but added that Spoke’s extended search capabilities (for contacts outside of the company) increased the tool’s utility for smaller companies. (142)

Spoke is marketing the tool to salespeople, but it is clearly cognizant of the wider opportunities. Andy cited a few, including search results based on your social network (essentially Brian Lincoln‘s Collab:GrassRootsPeerReview idea) and a tool for sorting your inbox (including spam filtering). Spoke hosts a free online version of its tool called the Spoke Network. (143)

Anita Lo, Intel’s Productivity Program Manager, gave a remote presentation on Intel’s recently deployed expert locator service. There were some technical difficulties and the talk was cut short before Anita could talk in-depth about the system, but a few points caught my ear. Intel conducted an internal survey to identify its most salient knowledge management need, and expert location was the top priority. The result was a system called People Yellow Pages, based on a tool that they purchased but that Anita did not identify. The system seemed to depend on people keeping their profiles updated as well as an overall taxonomy for categorization, which was managed by a librarian and validated periodically via surveys. This approach is in stark contrast with Spoke Software‘s and Tacit Knowledge Systems‘s, so it would have been nice to discuss how well it worked and whether Intel had evaluated any tools that automatically built and maintained people’s profiles. (144)

(Seb Paquet posted some comments on Anita’s talk as well. Interestingly, Seb watched the talk remotely from his perch in Canada, and he may have been able to follow the talk more clearly than those in attendance!) (145)

David Gilmour closed out the morning’s talks. I wrote about David’s excellent Harvard Business Review article before. His talk mirrored that article in some ways — an impassioned belief in the knowledge brokering model, coordinating collaboration rather than trying to force people to work together — but he provided much more detail in several areas. In particular, he spent much time discussing his company’s emphasis on individual privacy (as had Andy earlier) and noted that Tacit Knowledge Systems had several patents on ways to protect privacy, one indication of the value the company places on it. (146)

David observed that individuals liked to use the tool to see their own profiles, which are automatically constructed based on their behavior (email, documents, Web, etc.). On the business end, he noted that pharmaceutical companies (which make up many of his clients) needed no persuasion regarding the ROI of his approach; the only question was whether or not the tool worked as advertised. (147)

Jay Cross, the CEO of Emergent Learning Forum, posted some notes on the day’s talks as well. He also mentioned Alex’s other blog, the Collaboration Cafe, which I have added to my aggregator as well. (148)

David Gilmour, CEO of Tacit Knowledge Systems, wrote an excellent (and short) essay in the October issue of Harvard Business Review entitled, “How to Fix Knowledge Management.” The gist of the article: (P3)

The problem is that most organized corporate information sharing is based on a failed paradigm: publishing. In the publishing model, someone collects information from employees, organizes it, advertises its availability, and sits back to see what happens. But because employees quickly create vast amounts of information, attempts to fully capture it are frustrated every time. Even the most organized efforts collect just a fraction of what people know, and by the time this limited knowledge is published, it’s often obsolete. The expensive process is time consuming, and it doesn’t scale well. (16) (P4)

Gilmour’s solution: (P5)

Instead of squelching people’s natural desire to control information, companies should exploit it. They should stop trying to extract knowledge from employees; they should instead leave knowledge where it is and create opportunities for sharing by making knowledge easy for others to find. This requires a shift away from knowledge management based on a publishing model, and a focus on collaboration management based on a brokering model. (17) (P6)

Tacit Knowledge Systems‘s system does this by scanning all of the email and other documents on a corporate network, and building profiles of individuals based on these behaviors. The system can then alert people to other individuals with similar interests, brokering an introduction between them. If you think there are potential privacy problems here, you’re not alone. Josh Tyler‘s SHOCK works in a similar way, but distributes control of the profile to the individual; see his paper, “SHOCK: Communicating with Computational Messages and Automatic Private Profiles.” (P7)