knowledge management

The impact of the freelancer on the organisational knowledge use & development

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
A recent article in MIT’s SLOAN review indicates that three quarters of respondents to their 2020 global survey of 5,118 managers now view their workforces in terms of both employees and non-employees (https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-future-of-work-is-through-workforce-ecosystems/?og=featured).  The workforce eco-system has become more complex than the long term employee who builds on a linear career in line with company expectations.
For example, some organisations offer development opportunities not only to their own employees but also to those in their greater ecosystem community.
Freelancing is not for outliers anymore. Some countries, like the Netherlands, have a specific legal framework defined for them (ZZP – Zelfstandig Zonder Personeel). This has an impact on organisations, the way they work, engage and value knowledge acquired or generated over time when working and interacting. Fending off the opportunities made available by these itinerant workers is not an option.
According to Eurostat, that is collecting data from the European member states, people who were self-employed in 2018 amounted up to 14% on average. Professionals make up nearly a quarter of the self-employed in Europe. According to  Statista.com a large 55% of freelancers in Europe work in IT and marketing and communication.  IT makes up for a quarter of the freelancers in Europe ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/946967/freelancers-in-europe-by-sector/ ). For the period between 2000 and 2011 their number nearly doubled according to the https://freelancersmovement.org/ .
Although there is no clear definition of what a freelancer is, Stephanie Rapelli defines freelancers as ‘self-employed workers, without employees, who are engaged in an activity which does not belong to the farming, craft or retail sectors. They engage in activities of an intellectual nature and/or which come under service sectors’.
In an outlook on what next freelancers look, Forbes predicts the diversification of the freelance population and integration in a mixed corporate knowledge network: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonyounger/2019/05/04/what-the-next-generation-of-freelancers-will-look-like/#39b7994353ad. They will cover more domains, choose to freelance earlier in their career than current freelancers.
The need to realise more complex projects or business goals for which organisation will contract them, it introduces links and relations that are rather based on coopetition rather than that they are pure competitors. When posting for a job, freelancers are each others competition. Once the contract obtained and the job started they are imbedded in teams with other freelancers or company employees. They may have similar, overlapping or complementary knowledge and expertise. They become colleagues.
These continuously shifting relations demands flexibility but also opens options for networking and sharing. Freelance networks with like minded professionals even competing for the same assignments are not contradictory as their offering is not scalable (one can only take one mission at the same time, an hour can only be sold once). Once on a mission referring a new request to a co-freelancer in the network will help all parties involved in the staffing process.
See also Stowe Boyd in his keynote speech for the Social Now Europe 2015 when he talks about Deep Culture where more stress is put on loser connections with a need for more creativity – combined with agile (self steering teams).
As also recalled by Amy Edmondson and Jean-François Harvey in their book Extreme Teaming, the cross-pollination that happens at the interstices of knowledge domains, experience sets and frames of reference are most inspiring and a source of radical innovation. Newly formed, temporary teams assembled from members form various backgrounds often set the stage for knowledge recombination and innovation. Social network theory suggests that highly diverse teams can obtain valuable knowledge from interpersonal relations outside the team.
This mixing of people from different back-ground and experience will stress the need to pay attention to the interactive skills and openness to share ideas in a continuous search for adding value, growing a process or service provided, in a context of continuous innovation.
According to https://www.websiteplanet.com/blog/freelance-stats/ about 60% are looking for a stronger community and more chances to collaborate.
Is this shifting knowledge ownership to professions or corporations? In reality this is already the case as a knowledge corpus is often owned by a group of professionals, acquired through education and reinforced through experience. It is based on common understanding, experience and general information and communication shared and studied. Product communities and certainly Open Source Software initiatives can be considered as communities sharing a common interest and related knowledge and know-how. The latter have also a common goal and purpose. Product communities however are vendor led and facilitate the sharing of product and specific technical knowledge, leading to different sub-communities with their own specific interests in mind. Broader communities addressing more or less specific roles exist as well. They may limit themselves as content sharing platforms requiring subscription as www.techrepublic.com/ , addressing a technical public or more interactive virtual groupings like www.mindtools.com or www.12manage.com . These highly curated platforms thrive, more peer oriented networks are harder to find and when they exist they have a hard time persisting.
Still, the majority of companies consider freelancers as temporary workers and are not considered as a member of core staff. Once the contract is terminated the freelancer is revoked access to the systems of the company they were working for. They are not part of the internal social network with whom they shared information and knowledge during the period in which the contract was active. From a legal and competition point of view this is completely understandable. There is a risk that by accessing internal information they can divulge this knowledge with the client they are currently working on. On the other hand isn’t  the reason why you engage freelancers to introduce experience, insight and knowledge so it can cross pollinate and enrich the already existing company insights.
All newcomers, be it employee or freelancer, come with sector or technical experience during other assignments with your competitors. Also, mobility of employees has increased.  Both trends lead to a more volatile strategic advantage for companies. Unless you want to limit their input to execute what is told, you would better open up. Encouraging knowledge sharing platforms covering both technical topics in the style of mindtools or 12manage and why not generic sector oriented communities can certainly speed up evolution and innovation in a guild like manner like https://www.businessarchitectureguild.org/ focusing on informed, creative and connected membership. The common frame of reference is also to be considered as a a point of reference for quality.
As an organisation or company you can profit from setting up alumni communities. It offers opportunities to have regular contacts with them, curate the information shared, tap ideas. More permeating borders allow current employees and freelancers to interact on this platform increasing the interaction and flow of ideas. Of course some of these will pass over to other alumni communities of competing organisations, however this goes both sides. At moments you will be on the sending side at others you will be on the receiving side.
Working with knowledge from freelancers is used in an opportunistic task oriented manner. A lot of knowledge is available for those who want, dare and can access it. It may not be without risks or bring undivided advantages, but it will guarantee a fresh influx of ideas and experience.

The one trick pony syndrome and shorter shelf-life of knowledge

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
Attracting talent with efficiency in mind may back fire on the long term in a context of higher flux and need for differentiation based on innovation, evaluating the need for specialisation.
When looking at the majority of recruitment advertisements for both in-house and freelance jobs a lot of attention is given to experience. Focus is on acquired experience and tasks well performed in the past by the job candidate, on efficiency and specialisation, confirming the key of modern organisations operating as a well oiled machine. Once on the job, focus goes to a particular job.
This is stressed by the tendency for specialisation and the related engagement of specialised freelance or independent workers, staying only a short period until the job is done, acting in multi-disciplinary teams. This agile or ‘lean’ talent is pushed for specialisation and specific jobs where the experience obtained is repeated at every engagement. This however may lead to narrow mindedness and lack of oversight or even sense of overall purpose. As is illustrated by the banking experience. Now that the need for innovation and customer orientation is increasingly central to the success of a product or service, specialisation will hamper the definition of a broader answer to a customer’s need.
In an economic environment with the instability we know and a growing life expectancy this model may not be sustainable in the future.
The average life expectancy in the Western world hovers around 75-80 years and is expected to continue to increase. Higher education levels make that we spend more time at school. Depending on the education culture more people are coming on the labor market at 23-25 with at maximum student working experience. Under pressure of previous economic downturns and the need and/or will to mobilise youth, retirement age in Western Europe came earlier, in the late 50s on even 50 or 55. This leaves us with 25 to 30 years of economic activity and about 55 years of economic inactive life, of which some 30 years living of state pension or retirement fund. In light of the increasing percentage of elderly, this places an increasing burden on a decreasing group of economic active of which a part will be involved in the care for the elderly. They will have to provide for the funds needed to support retirement pensions.
Added to that, figures of Forbes, McKinsey and Oxford university indicate that the top jobs in demand of 2010 did not exist in 2004 and that nearly half of current jobs are under pressure of automation. This would stress the shorter period of economic activity.Screenshot 2020-09-14 at 15.33.29
Looking at skill deployment and the structure of job groups it is remarkable that most of jobs are generational. A job is learned in school or shortly after graduation. New disciplines or new jobs get introduced together with new groups of graduates. It is commonly held that you will continue this job until retirement or when it goes out of demand. Given evolution of economy, technology and the job market the latter is increasingly the case.
In the context of an increasing shift to freelance employment participating in specialist tasks as they are engaged by companies on project basis, seems to lead to a dichotomy in the work force. The company manages direct employment contracts with management and coordination profiles. Technical specialists are engaged from an increasing pool of freelancers, consultant and temporary working via agencies. This may result in increased agility on company level and the products or services provided, but it risks to be at cost of organisational sustainability. This trend is in line with increasing specialisation, due to technical complexity or driven by efficiency.
The one trick pony syndrome or at least the expectation of people hiring somebody for a specific task or skill and being convinced that this is and will be the only trick the hired person has on his sleeve is untenable for the future society. Can we permit people having ever shorter careers. In light of the economic and technological evolutions and the concept of stable specialisation (as described above), it is to be estimated that the active period of an employee, freelancer or independent professional is to end far before they come to the age of 50, leading to an active life of less than 20 years. Even when society manages to have enough income for its citizens not to work and provide us all with a basic income, the psychological need of being busy and useful will result in a need for successive re-skilling and learning.
Shouldn’t we be looking at more agile talent as advocated in the HBR interview with John Younger leading to more sustainable organisational, company or team agility. Engage the people that work for an organisation and focus on skills and competences will lead to longer relationships regardless the contractual relationship. People are involved in tasks that evolve with the needs of the organisation and its customers. They need to adapt and learn through time responding to contextual needs.
In their article ‘How Work Will Change When Most of Us Live to 100’ Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott  paint a picture of life where we go through as a succession of working and learning periods. After a few years of career we re-enrol to school, college or university to learn new things. The structure of a linear life of growing up and getting through school by the age of 25, working and then retiring will cease to exist. It certainly will have an impact on the definition of wage  and career policies and perceptions but also on recruitment and the way we organise and fund education.
Structured education as presented by schools and institutions will and already are not the only sources of gathering knowledge. Already, new skills and trends are not exclusively taught at school. Continuous learning through interacting and observing the environment where we live in, is a corner stone we should look for when staffing organisations and jobs. Experience still matters but will be much less defined by ‘having done the job for a number of years’ and more by being able to englobe experiences and bringing them in the job at hand. A focus on underlying skills and competencies to adapt to new situations and the capability of incremental learning will (have to) end up weighing more. The availability of different learning experiences and possibilities provided by the employer will be included in the evaluation when choosing whom to work for in a still tight and maybe even tighter pool of knowledge workers and professionals.

Search – Find – Retrieve

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
All we do is talk about searching. Finding is what we should be talking about. Hence the interest for the findability idea with content publishers on the world wide web as it leads people to their web site. Authors motivated by earnings as in content marketing environment will adopt a specific writing style influencing search engine algorithms giving them a higher ranking in the search results. Inside the company a lot of content is written in the context of a specific business process or satisfying the execution of a task, and when is does not concern marketing, the author does not tweak his texts for easy finding, discovery and retrieval. The information contained by the content, however, can have extreme high knowledge value in times of efficiency and stressing the innovative capacity of organisations.
The search and search experience
However not all searches are equal. We often refer to google as the search experience of reference. You often hear “Why can’t we have a google at the office, then we would find the information we need”. There might even be a full text engine already available in that organisation. What makes that we are  that happy with the finding capability of google?
We list some elements:
The boundaries of the ‘collection’ – in the case of the use of google, with which most of us are familiar, we search the internet, a vague concept when looked at it from the point of view of a library or repository. The internet as such has vague boundaries. We have no idea of the content available. The amount of information is huge. As a consequence, the statistical chance of finding something interesting and/or relevant is high. In a corporate environment we are talking of a well circumscribed library of content with a relatively small amount of information artefacts (at least compared to the world wide web).
Related to the boundaries of the collection there is also the group of contributors, that is fairly limited, whilst rather endless on the internet not counting the free services provided by volunteer groups as in the case of wikipedia, who summarise information about most general topics.
Search coverage – Often not all information sources in an organisation is indexed or accessible using the same search engine. Whilst this is largely irrelevant for information available on the internet given its vague boundaries and sheer volume of information available.
The context of the search performed – generally speaking internet searches are there to get acquainted or informed about a certain topic. In a business context, searches are much more targeted, often driven by the execution and deadline of a specific task or case oriented.
This leads us to the goal of the information search – in general when searching the internet our attitude is more of the nature of ‘I want to know something about …’. A number of internet sources are specifically geared toward these ‘what about’ questions. In contrast majority of requests in the corporate environment are very targeted, aimed at confirming factual data. The find expectation is very targeted at a specific result. In a number of cases, we are looking for confirmation or proof, having the document or information artefact in mind. We however forgot the specific wording or document reference.
The feedback model which is strongly related with the earning model in the case of google is pushing them to deliver. The more targeted the search result is, the more likely one will click on it, visit the site and google gets paid for associated publicity. Internal search engines are generally licensed on a server based licence. There is no incentive included based on the quality of the services provided.
Optimising Search and Discovery is a challenge that is not really taken up by search technology providers. Majority of solutions are driven by and inverted file index, listing all keywords used in indexed content with a reference to the source as you will find in the back of a book with a search interface running against it. Basically the search request is mapped with the entries available in the index.
Although precision and high relevance of the search results are highly appreciated by people searching for information there is a balance through volume. The higher the volume of information the larger the result set requires a higher level of precision in indicating relevance in the result set. While in smaller sets the diversity in the result set may be higher the decrease in precision while going through the result list is more visible for the searcher.
In a context of limited content volume introducing the notion of synonym rings, a list of terms having similar meaning,  may ensure recall or a somewhat more important search result list, giving value to searches in a multi-disciplinary environment using different terminology or in a multi-lingual environment. Setting up the synonym lists requires important effort. In a similar effort, enhancing search results, the introduction of semantic web applications controlling vocabulary certainly helped search result quality. It makes navigating the collection possible through the use of a controlled vocabulary whilst not requiring extensive human indexing effort. Alternatively upstream tweaks, at the intake of content, as through automatic classification try to take over the work of the human indexer by automating it after a training period.
The use of clustering on the level of presenting search results helps searchers target the information needed. While the overall search result may be long, topical grouping will guide him or her to obtain the information required faster. Think of requesting information on “Milan”. The search cluster will inform you whether the clusters cover tourist information on Italian city and capital of Lombardia, people having Milan as a first name (with their last name as lower level sorting order) or AC Milan the soccer club.
Characteristics of corporate context
This focus on the content index for searching denied characteristics of corporate context in which the employee is looking to find information. Contrary to the generic web search we know a lot about the person launching the search. Like Google and other public social platforms, as Facebook, we can work with the search and response history when tuning search results. Which items of the result list were visited? Is there a pattern in the visits?  Coupling the search results to content ratings evaluating information found on corporate networks can be used to define the domain of interest.
Unlike on the internet content types with associated meta data can be identified. In the corporate environment adding meta data can be much more controlled, supported by value lists established in a specific business or process context by trained business analist. This does not prevent that additional free tags can be added to content items. Belonging to the same organisation and specific department will per definition enhance external qualifiers or content attributes. All people live in the same terminology cloud defined by their practice, corporate culture and corporate speak. Although slightly modified to unit or team adherence, vocabulary coherence is much higher than used by the widely scattered internet population.
Completely dissimilar to the internet, organisational and functional data is available on the user launching his search. We know in which department, team, project the person works, what the main focus of activities is. For each of the organisational units it is possible to indicate the semantic field of activity, linking the corporate directory to the semantic map declared and maintained in the corporate triple store.
Building these elements into the relevance ranking algorithm combined with the capacities of big data, of AI and the use of probabilistic reasoning and learning from previous search and retrieval behaviour and occasional feedback on content, search results can be targeted much better reducing searcher frustration even with a smaller library and the fundamental different search motivation in corporate contexts. Combined with already existing technological solutions this can lead to superior search and retrieval experience.
Thesauri and ontologies can both standardise language while also added flexibility to searches. Relationships built into the model can take variations into account as they are created on the author side or on the side of the searcher who may use sub vocabularies as created in sub-domains or teams. Some discipline oriented thesauri are available, customising them to the in-house dialects is time consuming and costly, the same goes for specific once when the material is not available. Feedback on the use of search queries and the interaction with the proposed result lists, that are built by the search engine, combined with big data and AI may kick start this process.
km-search
Example implementations, not necessarily covering all elements of the model are:
Open Semantic Search (www.opensemanticsearch.org)
Nuance in the medical sector (https://www.nuance.com/healthcare.html)

Knowledge Maturity Modelling

Posted on By Koenraad Seys
When reading the last release of the APQC knowledge management maturity model and related KM Capability Assessment Tool, that is part of the march APQC content update on knowledge management. As for the majority of maturity assessment approaches, focus is on the management and rather institutional aspects. The levels indicated in the model indicate a focus on the knowledge management practice to be evaluated in isolation as a formal process. The knowledge management process, its standardisation and roll out of it is placed at the center of the evaluation.
In current society with a stress on innovation, routine and replication is less important than in an era or environment of industrial production where quality and productivity were and are central points to address. In a context of commodity however the traditional maturity models have proven to be valuable. They reflect the need for and value of reuse in different contexts scaling to the complete organisation, thus most valuable to large organisations.
Another angle on the maturity modelling could stress the cultural and intrinsic knowledge value. It would stress knowledge creation, sharing, dissemination, cultural openness and position knowledge as creative asset in relation to organisational and corporate value creation.
Although the same approach would be followed and similar stages will be identified others would be specific.
Proposed levels
Level 1 – Growing awareness on the value of knowledge for the organisation’s performance and growth.
Level 2 – First approaches for sharing knowledge both on the level of organisation and infrastructure mostly confined in existing silos.
Level 3 – Cross unit/discipline sharing of knowledge experience and ideas. The organisational fabric and information sharing and collaboration infrastructure and culture permits sharing of knowledge across the board.
Level 4 – Valuing of knowledge as a core asses: in this phase people are appreciated and  encouraged for coming up with ideas and sharing them. It becomes part of the evaluation and promotion
Level 5 – Knowledge is used to innovate and to innovate the knowledge pool in the organisation. Thinking further and being innovative creates a vibe in the organisation so that value is added to products, the product portfolio and the group does not suffer from the Red Queen effect.
However comparable to the APQC model, we stress, if only through wording, the knowledge that is managed, less on the management process and the related standardisation. Ultimately we strive for dynamic knowledge and related knowledge dynamics. Progressing through the stages focus is more on sharing and generating rather than managing and controlling knowledge, giving more room for emergence. Taking knowledge value up as an asset in the corporate balance is an ultimate stage but difficult to achieve when it comes to measuring knowledge value.