By Jeff Lewis | Photo By Jason Pratt
It’s difficult to nail down exactly how Patti Anklam makes a living. She’s a Massachusetts-based consultant, yes, and her resume includes stops at Nortel Networks and the corporate predecessor to Hewlett-Packard. Among her clients there is a pharmaceutical firm, a telecom provider, the U.S. government and an electronic learning solutions company. That much is straightforward.
More confusing is the mélange of job titles and expertise that shows up under the “about” section on her Web site. At Nortel, Anklam was director of knowledge management. Her specialties include Orwellian-sounding skills like social network analysis, value network analysis and – warning, this one’s a whopper – knowledge management systems strategy and architecture.
In short, she helps businesses gauge the effectiveness of their internal and external communication strategies. I phoned Patti to find out how businesses can leverage social networking in a hyper-connected age. As it turns out, the water cooler still matters.
Jeff: What is a knowledge manager?
Patti: It’s actually a collection of disciplines that are related to helping organizations tap into what people know, and to do that in a fairly structured way. Initially it started around trying to understand how to manage documents.
Jeff: Like an archivist?
Patti: Right, and that’s kind of how it started. But it became much more oriented towards trying to help people learn how to collaborate. The real knowledge is in what people know, and a really important piece of understanding how to manage that knowledge is making sure that people have ways to share what they know.
Jeff: How does that help businesses?
Patti: What’s important is figuring out how to connect people. What organizational network analysis lets us do is take a set of people in an organization based on the work that they do or organization decision making structures and then map how they’re really connected. Apart from the formal organization chart we have all of these ways that people get work done through people that they know. [It] allows us to uncover those hidden networks and help people work more effectively.
Jeff: Can you give me an example?
Patti: I just did a project this spring with a global company that has expertise in industrial cleaning equipment. They had people in the U.S. They had people in Europe. They had people in the Far East. They had people in Australia. They were all working on the same types of equipment, but if somebody in Asia comes up with a really cool idea or some new technique for working with a customer, they had no way to be sure that that knowledge would spread to other parts of the world. The maps that we can generate from [network analysis] help us understand both how knowledge is currently moving and give us some ideas about what we can do to help it move better.
Jeff: How can networking platforms like LinkedIn help?
Patti: First of all it helps you find people. People have profiles like they would have on Facebook or LinkedIn and people will be able to go to their networking platform and say, ‘I want to find somebody who knows something about x, or somebody who’s worked for customer y’. In seconds they can see a list of people who have that kind of expertise or who have had that experience. They can just email or call each other right of the bat. That’s one way that the networking platforms really help in knowledge management – finding expertise quickly.
Jeff: How can you be sure that social networks aid productivity?
Patti: You can’t measure it. This is a question that came up in the very early days of knowledge management – I’m talking about the mid-1990s. How do we tell whether it’s having any impact at all? First of all, people are starting to trust anecdotal evidence … and the evidence is quite overwhelming. People are really pointing to improved overall efficiency in the organization. They’re actually getting data from employee surveys that show higher retention rates, employee satisfaction is higher. They’re looking at a whole range of things, not just cost savings from using a particular tool, but the whole systemic change in how the organization operates.
Jeff: Network analysis doesn’t sound like something a bakery owner would be interested in.
Patti: The small organization is a little bit tougher, I would agree with you, partly because everybody in a really small organization is in the same building or on the same floor of the same building. You run into people a lot. A lot of the technologies are useful particularly when people don’t have the water cooler or the coffee pot opportunity to interact. I think there is less evidence that in a small company that these things can be very useful. But one of the areas I think that’s emerging, and I don’t think there’s a lot of people doing it yet, is using the social technologies for connecting with customers. I think that’s one of things that over the last three to four years in particular people have become much more aware of the power of the networking technologies to reach out and make the customers a part of your business.
Jeff: Like a bakery putting out its daily specials via Twitter?
Patti: Exactly. Things like that, or just staying aware of and actually not just putting their stuff out but making sure that they’re doing regular scans of these technologies to find out what their customers are saying about them. What you really want is to tweet questions and get your customers to tweet back. What do you think if we put chocolate-pumpkin frosting on cupcakes? It’s a good way to get feedback for ideas or soliciting new product ideas. What’s really interesting about the social media technologies is the way it’s really bringing this customer focus to the networking space, rather than focusing only on networking internally.
Jeff: Is there a risk that companies can become overly dependent on digital networks at the expense of traditional ones?
Patti: The only risk is that you would introduce technology that people would not use. The annals of knowledge management are littered with people who put up their whiz-bang platforms that have a lot of bells and whistles and they’re too complicated for people to learn how to use.
Jeff: Are managers hesitant at all to adopt new technologies?
Patti: The big pushback is ‘email works just fine – I’m perfectly happy doing what I’m doing.’ That’s the first pushback. I’m working with a really tiny startup and there a couple of issues that we’ve been hammering out and I said, ‘We should really put all of this in wiki and document what we do.’ I wrote everything in the wiki and then they translated it into a Word document.
Jeff: That kind of defeats the purpose.
Patti: That’s the kind of thing that will happen. The biggest barrier is just people reverting very quickly to what they know.
Category: Work
Leave a Reply
