TEAMFLY

Conversation to Work
Cliff Figallo
Nancy Rhine
Wiley Technology Publishing

Building the Knowledge
Management Network
Best Practices, Tools, and
Techniques for Putting
Conversation to Work
Cliff Figallo
Nancy Rhine
Wiley Technology Publishing
Publisher: Robert Ipsen
Editor: Cary Sullivan
Assistant Editor: Scott Amerman
Managing Editor: Pamela Hanley
New Media Editor: Brian Snapp
Text Design & Composition: Benchmark Productions, Inc.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trade-
marks. In all instances where Wiley Publishing, Inc., is aware of a claim, the product names
appear in initial capital or all capital letters. Readers, however, should contact the appropri-
ate companies for more complete information regarding trademarks and registration.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2002 by Cliff Figallo and Nancy Rhine. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning
or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States

Our Ancestral Heritage 3
Stories, Rituals, Trust, and Culture 9
The First Mass Medium 16
The Dawn of the Info Age 21
Summary 27
Chapter 2 Using the Net to Share What People Know 29
Managing Knowledge 29
Roots of the Knowledge Network 32
A Knowledge-Swapping Community 40
Organizational Knowledge Networking 45
Summary 59
Chapter 3 Strategy and Planning for the Knowledge Network 61
Strategy and Change 62
Planning and Cost Issues 74
Summary 81
Contents
Part Two Matching Culture with Technology 83
Chapter 4 The Role of IT in the Effective Knowledge Network 85
IT and Knowledge Exchange 86
Technical Approaches to Managing Knowledge 97
Basic Tools of the Knowledge Network 103
Online Environments for Knowledge Sharing 107
Summary 111
Chapter 5 Fostering a Knowledge-Sharing Culture 113
Creating the Ideal Conditions 114
Analyzing an Organization’s Culture 116
Tapping the Mind Pool 125
Leadership: Energy from the Top 127
Self-Organizing Subcultures 131
The Challenge of Change 134

iv Contents
Contents v
Chapter 9 Conversing with External Stakeholders 247
Building External Relationships 248
Learning about (and from) Your Customers 254
Customer-to-Customer Knowledge Exchange 262
Hosting the Customer Conversation 274
Where Customers Gather on Their Own 281
Summary 286
Chapter 10 The Path Ahead 287
Interdependence and Infoglut 288
Conversation Proliferation 290
The Sustainable Organization 294
The New Skill Set 312
Future Technical Paths 316
Summary 321
Appendix A Resources 323
Notes 327
Index 337

vii
Knowledge networks depend for their success on the right social environment.
We have worked within many such respectful, trusting, nurturing, and educa-
tional social environments, and those experiences have led us to write this book.
We both spent many years learning together with hundreds of others in building
a small, self-sufficient community in Tennessee. We applied what we learned in
that challenging social experiment to the work we did in the early days of our
first online communities at The WELL and Women.com. The members of those
communities showed us the value of lowering the communications boundaries
between management and customers. In those and in subsequent positions at

viii
Acknowledgments
TEAMFLY

With this book in your hand, you’re probably looking for ways to help your orga-
nization get smarter by making the most effective use of online conversations. In
these pages we write about a basic human drive to share what we know. We repo-
sition that age-old practice at the intersection of two social environments: the
modernizing organization and the expanding electronic network.
Your company should know what this book reveals, because in this competitive
and downsized economy, you are being forced to make the best use of your current
human resource assets. You can’t afford the high cost of replacing the knowledge
of people you’ve trained and lost. You must find, harvest, and distribute current and
relevant knowledge from a wide variety of trusted human sources in order to make
decisions and innovations in today’s hyperactive marketplace of things and ideas.
Organizations today must change intelligently and constantly to survive. Ongoing,
high-quality conversation is a key to making that kind of change possible.
Though online knowledge networks can involve sophisticated technology,
this book is not, at its core, about technology; it’s more about people and moti-
vation. Though terms like application integration are important to understand
in this context, you’ll likely find terms like cultural evolution and self-governing
systems to be more relevant to the successful adoption of useful online conver-
sation as a productive process within your organization.
Even companies that value their knowledge networks can run into problems
applying what they’ve learned to their business. There is a gap between knowing
and doing. Putting conversation to work means bringing the right people with
Introduction
the requisite knowledge together and having their online interaction solve real
and immediate problems. To reach that level of practical impact, there must be
trust and commitment among the participants in addition to software and con-
nectivity. For your organization, that means leading and fostering the kind of cul-
ture that motivates people to share what they know with their coworkers.
If there’s a central theme to this book, it’s the importance of making the
appropriate match between the culture and the technology for any given situ-

nificantly, these communities are invisible to the leaders of those companies,
who need to know more about what their workers know and are doing.
We’ve seen the end of the first big Internet boom. The dot-com meltdown sig-
naled the end of only the first wave of commercial online innovation and exper-
imentation. But much learning has taken place since the Internet became a
commercial medium in 1993. Group communication through the Net is no
x Introduction
Introduction xi
longer the rare and esoteric practice that it was in the 1980s when we began
managing online communities. Thousands of Web sites have since provided
chat rooms and message boards. Email among groups of people has become
another common meeting place. Instant messaging has become the means
through which isolated keyboardists maintain a sense of immediate connection
with their online buddies.
Meanwhile organizations—after years of adopting expensive technologies to
keep meticulous track of operational numbers and statistics—have recognized
that numeric information alone is not sufficient to guide them in today’s fast-
changing marketplace. Last year’s sales figures don’t tell them how to change
production as new fads, technologies, and competitors suddenly crash into
their markets. Millions of records of customer transactions don’t inform them
of their consumers’ thinking after an event like the terrorist attacks on Septem-
ber 11 or a calamitous news story about their industry. Numbers about past per-
formance have fooled many enterprises into thinking they knew what the
future would bring.
The Net has speeded up both communication and change in attitudes, opin-
ions, and habits. To anticipate and prepare for the future, organizations must
learn more from their employees and from the people on whom they depend—
customers, partners, and constituents. Today we need dynamic knowledge—
current and constantly updated experience and thinking found only in the agile
minds of living human beings and revealed most naturally and completely

prevent many companies from progressing to the next level of technical inte-
gration, legacy organization charts keep many companies from realizing their
networked potential. Executives should read this book to get a refresher on
the philosophy of the network revolution, but also to get a better understand-
ing of the different form of leadership that is necessary to keep their organi-
zations in sync with that ongoing revolution. Leaders must understand the
medium of online conversation to do a good job of leading people to use it
well. We suspect that most company leaders still lack that understanding.
Managers, like executives, are leaders, but in being closer to the workers and
their specific responsibilities, their role definitions are changing due to the self-
organizing influence of the Net. Because managers direct the activities of work-
ing groups, they, too, need to understand the capabilities of the technology to
support conversations so that they can begin to plan and lead their departments
and teams within the emerging online meeting place. Managers should be regu-
lar participants in online forums for planning, innovation and knowledge shar-
ing, and need to stay current with existing work-related online discussions
among the people they supervise. Managers who truly understand the strengths
and weaknesses of using online conversation as a working tool will get the
most out of it.
It’s more likely that workers and professionals have already begun to use
the available online communications media to exchange mission critical
information about their jobs or projects, but this book is for them, too. For
although leadership from the top of the organization is a necessity for chang-
ing a culture to one that values creative conversation, the best conversations
and best ideas are most likely to bubble up from the bottom of the organiza-
tional chart, where the actual work gets done and the company interfaces
most directly with its customers. We hope this book inspires the spontaneous
formation of online communities that can solve immediate problems and
inspire the widespread use of online knowledge networks within receptive
organizations.

local rules through which, Johnson says in an interview, “the intelligence of the
colony comes into being.”
In our earliest experience with online community at the WELL, one of the
groundbreaking experiments in group conversation among home-based per-
sonal computer users, we imposed only a few very simple rules, otherwise pro-
viding the members with access to the discussion tools to make with them what
they would. Among other things, they built a knowledge-sharing community,
broken down into hundreds of separate topic areas formed around personali-
ties, expertise and relationships. We got to spend most of our time as system
managers keeping the technology functioning, providing support for new mem-
bers and paying the bills. The content and the database of conversations was
created and owned by the members—the knowledge sources and the knowl-
edge seekers who swapped roles constantly.
The traditional business world is gradually beginning to release control like we
did, allowing the emergence of new culture, new social practices and new ways
of organizing from the bottom up. Flattening the hierarchy and empowering the
collaborative workplace is threatening to the traditional role of leadership and it
presents a prospect of the future that is new and untried. Few executives, no mat-
ter how open-minded, want to follow the model of ant colonies in changing the
cultures of their companies. But the Net represents the new collaborative envi-
ronment, and in networks these ant-like organizing effects not only work well,
they are natural social behaviors and thus are difficult to suppress.
The Net, looked at as a whole, is a demonstration of emergent behaviors.
Most of the content on the Web has been created outside of any overall plan or
leadership mandate. Most of the communities have been formed because there
was an opportunity and need, rather than a directive from on high. Literally bil-
lions of Web pages have been produced based on the simple rules of HTML and
Internet software.
To the modern organization, the most valuable thing about emergent behav-
ior is its ability to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. A look back at the

ability to manage knowledge, it being the experiential content of the human
mind. By the end of the year 2000, knowledge management had evolved into a
quest for more effective access to tacit knowledge—the experiential human
understanding that didn’t lend itself to quantification or to management.
Organizations stand to lose tacit knowledge whenever an employee leaves
the company or when an employee has no means or motivation to reveal what
(s)he knows to others. We had seen years of voluntary and enthusiastic
exchange of tacit knowledge in the online communities we managed, and rec-
ognized the importance and relevance of what we had learned about groups in
conversation through the Net—that tacit knowledge is shared readily where
there is trust and the recognition of mutual benefit in the exchange.
As millions of people have learned how to access and use the Web, they have
realized its power as a communications channel between them and their families,
associates, and fellow enthusiasts in a myriad of hobbies and interests. Such
communications account for more of their time online than any other pursuit,
including information searches and shopping. Interpersonal informal communi-
cation has proven to be the most compelling use—the “killer app”—of the Net.
In this book, we apply the best practices of online conversation to the needs
for effective knowledge exchange, which forward-looking organizations now
recognize as their most compelling application of electronic networking tools.
In the following chapters we describe how the mechanistic and hierarchical
models of business operation and organization are being transformed into more
decentralized and as some describe it, “messy” models composed of indepen-
dent links between individuals and their self-organizing groups. And as we lead
you through these descriptions, we provide you with proven ideas, suggestions,
and examples for transforming your team, your department, your organization
into one that is smart, alert, and ready to deal with the challenges of these excit-
ing and unpredictable times.
How This Book Is Organized
The drive to share what we know is as old as humankind itself, but using the

company is leading the evolution of the marketplace. We wrap up the book with
educated musings on the future knowledge networks and online knowledge
sharing, noting that the future is already here, but is being practiced by very few
organizations.
The following paragraphs, moving from history toward the future, describe
the contents of the chapters of this book.
Chapter 1: “Knowledge, History, and the Industrial Organization.”
Human history is filled with conversation and knowledge sharing. Though
communication was much slower in the past than it is today, we got to
where we are now in terms of technology, culture, economy, and govern-
ment through the exchange and distribution of new ideas. This chapter
establishes our heritage as natural collaborators where common goals are
recognized. It also illustrates how the medium—whether oral tales, clay
tablets, papyrus, or parchment sheets, or the wonder of the printed page—
affects the spread of knowledge and its influence on society. Until the
dawn of the industrial age, most people passed along their experiential
working knowledge personally, to apprentices and coworkers. The transi-
tion to the assembly line reduced the number of workers whose skills
could be defined as knowledge and introduced the idea of the worker as a
cog in a machine. We are still dealing with this mechanistic model of the
organization and its workers, which is why many companies have failed to
recognize the importance of worker knowledge.
xvi Introduction
Introduction xvii
Chapter 2: “Using the Net to Share What People Know.” This chap-
ter looks at the evolution of modern management theories, spanning the
transition from worker-as-cog to worker as holder of key knowledge. Mov-
ing from Industrial Age mentality to Information Age mentality, the accom-
panying transformation of management philosophy has been jolted by the
widespread adoption of the Internet and the Web. Information manage-

and thereby increase human productivity, there are important reasons for
at least beginning with the simplest tools that will enable measurable
improvement in knowledge exchange. One reason is cost. Another is in
facilitating the building of a good working relationship between the IT
department and the people looking to build the online knowledge net-
work. Such collaboration is crucial if the knowledge network is going to be
able to incrementally improve its working environment. The more people
converse, the more prone they are to discover new ideas for making their
conversations richer—whether those ideas demand the addition of new
technical features or whole new technical platforms. The role of IT should
be to aid in tool selection, initial installation, and maintenance and the
integration of relevant information applications within the company that
will support the cultivation of knowledge.
Chapter 5: “Fostering Knowledge-Sharing Culture.” Conversational
knowledge sharing can (and will) only take place in a supportive social
atmosphere. Such a persistent environment is what we call a “culture.”
The knowledge network exists, first, within the organization’s greater cul-
ture, yet it may grow out of a more local subculture—that of an area of
expertise or a functional division within the organization. It will probably
develop an even more unique subculture once it goes online. An online
knowledge sharing culture requires certain conditions and nutrients just
as an orchid can only grow within certain ranges of temperature, humidity,
and soil conditions. Yet, unlike an orchid, an online knowledge network
can adapt to changing conditions through its conversations and technol-
ogy. So we describe method that can be used to provide ideal conditions
for the germination and early growth of the knowledge network inside of
your organization. These conditions include tolerance for diversity, incen-
tives for sharing what people know and for learning the skills necessary to
do that sharing, and leadership that makes it clear, in no uncertain terms,
that the creative energy of employees is valued.


how-to chapter describes a process of analyzing what you’ve got in terms
of knowledge needs, culture, and existing internal communities, and then
clearly stating your goals. From that point, you can choose from the avail-
able options to design the most appropriate social and technical structure.
We recommend practices based on our experience and those of other
experts in the fields of knowledge networking and online community. Our
recommendations will provide you with some shortcuts to effective inter-
nal conversation, but you may find the most value in our warnings against
certain social or technical pitfalls that can doom the knowledge network
before it can reach cruising speed. Some organizational prerequisites need
to be in place if your company is to have a chance of learning from its own
workers. And different techniques for sharing knowledge can be applied
under different social or work-related circumstances, storytelling, and
conversation facilitation being two of them. We describe three different
models of knowledge networking communities: spontaneous, strategic,
and transitory, each requiring different approaches to management and
technical support.
Chapter 9: “Conversing with External Stakeholders.” Perhaps the
greatest difference between today’s organization and that of a few years
ago is the increased dependence on the external stakeholder that is the
result of the Net. Because those stakeholders—consumers, customers,
business partners, supporters, and investors—can now communicate so
easily and repeatedly through email and the Web, they are more informed
and willing to share what they know about your organization or your com-
petition. The conversations about you are probably already happening,
and your mission—should you decide to accept it—is to be a part of at
least some of those conversations. The choice of meeting ground is not
yours to make, though some pioneering companies have successfully
invited consumers to join them on their home sites to help them under-
stand the needs and preferences of customers. We describe the differences

knowledge networking initiative, a checklist for framing a strategy that
includes knowledge networking, a short training course for community man-
agers and facilitators, links to relevant software tools, and a discussion board
where readers can interact with us and with one another.
xx
Sair Linux and GNU Certification Level I: System Administration
Cave Walls to CRTs:
The Landscape of
Knowledge Networking
The first three chapters of this book bring us up to date with the status of
knowledge networking as we enter the 21st century. Chapter 1, “Knowledge,
History, and the Industrial Organization,” is meant to remind us that sharing
what we know is an important part of our human heritage. Our current efforts
to rediscover and reactivate these ancestral skills have been complicated in
large part by the hierarchical management philosophies that grew out of indus-
trialization and its emphasis on feeding the demands of mass markets. Chapter
2, “Using the Net to Share What People Know,” takes us through the transition
from Industrial Age mentality to Information Age mentality and the accompa-
nying transformation of management philosophy that has come with the wide-
spread adoption of the Internet and the Web. Information management has
become a necessity, and as the tools and connectivity have advanced, the con-
cept of knowledge networking has been born. Chapter 3, “Strategy and Plan-
ning for the Knowledge Network,” considers the many challenges that
organizations face in changing their cultures, perspectives, and habits to sup-
port the smooth and efficient flow of knowledge and competence among their
workers using the new tools of the Net.
One
PART
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