Introducing Synthesis 2.4

Knowledge Architecture helps architects and engineers across the country manage knowledge and information more systematically. Our flagship product is Synthesis, a social intranet based on Microsoft SharePoint, which integrates with common industry applications such as Deltek Vision, Newforma Project Center, and Axomic OpenAsset.

Synthesis 2.4 makes it easy to share, discuss, and follow the conversations you and your firm care about. We’ve borrowed concepts from leading social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter and combined them with several of our own ideas to create an intuitive, fun, and powerful platform for sharing knowledge.

Attend our webinar on November 15th at 11 AM PST for an introduction to Synthesis 2.4.

How are leading architecture firms using social media tools?

© Knowledge Architecture, 2011

You can download a PowerPoint version of this presentation here.  All of the case study examples in the PowerPoint version are hyperlinked to their source.

As readers of this blog know, Knowledge Architecture is currently three months into a six month study on web, social media, and R&D activities of over 500 of the largest architecture and engineering firms in North America. I’ve used four industry surveys to come up with the list of firms for our research: Architecture Record Top 250 Firms, Architect 50, Building Design + Construction Giants 300, and Engineering News Record’s Top 500 Firms.

I took a break midway through the research to refine our initial hypotheses, draw some tentative conclusions, and share the preliminary findings with clients and friends of Knowledge Architecture. I presented our preliminary research last week in New York at THE Marketing Event 2011, SMPS-NY’s annual marketing conference. I’m heading down to Palo Alto today to share our findings with the AIA CEO Large Firm Roundtable.

The findings of Knowledge Architecture’s digital marketing research will be released in the spring of 2012. Several of the firms profiled in Knowledge Architecture’s study will be featured via interviews in the KA Connect blog and/or as speakers at KA Connect 2012 in San Francisco, whose focus this year will be on three intersecting trends driving the future of practice — research, marketing, and technology.

I have shared the slides from my presentations above. I hope you find the survey data and the top ten trends and insights interesting. I’ll be blogging about our findings over the next few months as we round out our survey by taking a deeper look at engineering firms.

I would love to hear your questions and feedback in the comments section below.

You cannot watch this enough.

Steve Jobs :: 2005 Stanford Commencement Address

BOOK NOTES: Thinking for a Living

Tom Davenport wrote Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances And Results from Knowledge Workers in 2005. Davenport is a pioneering knowledge management theorist and academic, as well as practitioner, directing research centers at McKinsey, Accenture, CSC Index, and Ernst & Young. You can read more about him and his other books on his website.

I read “Thinking for a Living” because Davenport’s background is solidly anchored in professional services, which is unlike the majority of authors of books on knowledge management, who come from manufacturing.

I liked it, but didn’t love it. However, I’d still recommend reading it, since he provides valuable frameworks for thinking about knowledge work. Especially good, is Davenport’s notion of the types of “knowledge interventions” that are appropriate for different types of knowledge work. For example, the needs of professionals who create new knowledge (researchers, designers, and creatives) are vastly different from those who package knowledge for others to consume. Different methodologies, tools, and motivational tactics are required for each.

Also interesting, is Davenport’s review of the challenges improving the productivity of knowledge workers. In fact, one of Davenport’s main arguments is that productivity is not an appropriate measure of knowledge workers, since productivity is a poor predictor of value creation in a creative industry. (Who cares how billable or efficient your team is at producing the wrong thing?)

The reason I give “Thinking for a Living” 8 out of 10 points, is partly a function of time. Davenport’s section on appealing to the knowledge worker’s needs for autonomy, mastery, and purpose have been all the rage in business book and TED talk circles recently, most notably in Dan Pink’s book “Drive.” It just seemed so 2009…

Some of my favorite highlighted passages from “Thinking for a Living” are below. Have fun.

Specifying the detailed steps and flow of knowledge-intensive processes is less valuable and more difficult than for other types of work. This is a corollary of my first generalization about knowledge work. Knowledge workers don’t like to be told what to do, and they also don’t like to see their jobs reduced to a series of boxes and arrows.

In the early days of knowledge management, when companies were beginning to talk about sharing knowledge within and across organizations, I used to say, “Sharing knowledge is an unnatural act.” I also mentioned that, “Of course, unnatural acts are committed every day.”

Other workers create new knowledge. Examples include the researchers in a pharmaceutical firm, creative directors in advertising, or authors of books and movie screenplays. Knowledge creation is perhaps the most difficult knowledge activity to structure and improve, since much of it takes place in the brains of knowledge workers.

Packaging is often designed to make the work of other knowledge workers more efficient—we read a newspaper packaged by reporters and editors, for example, so that we don’t have to read all the wire services. Even though they do not generally create new knowledge, the editing, design, and proofing processes qualify as knowledge work. One of the things that often makes packaging less efficient than it could be is that the packagers must often wait for the knowledge to be created, or can’t rely on the creators to finish on time (it wasn’t a great surprise to my publisher, for example, to learn that this book would be late!).

Those who work professionally with knowledge management are most frequently distributors of knowledge. They create systems and processes to increase access to knowledge for others, and get it to those who need it. There may not be enough distributors in an organization to worry about redesigning their jobs, but these roles may be critical enablers of interventions involving other types of knowledge workers.

This same firm (Ernst & Young), however, learned its lesson. Just as I was leaving it, I participated in the creation of the first “Powerpack”—a toolkit on how to propose projects to clients on improving their order management processes. The goal was to speed up the process of creating proposals for clients. According to the firm’s Web site (ten years later), Powerpacks are still going strong and are described thus: It’s a compilation of outstanding proposals, presentations, competitive information, models, specialized tools, and a variety of other relevant business resources. In other words, a Powerpack contains the “best of the best” information Ernst & Young offers, which is available to employees electronically.9 In my day, Powerpacks were available only in binder or CD form, but they were still very popular. They gave consultants all the tools they needed to be successful and productive but didn’t tell them how to use the materials, and didn’t make them feel like automatons. Because each Powerpack described a specific client problem, they weren’t terribly unwieldy.

We’re growing.

I’d like to introduce you to our newest team member, Sean Mahan.

Sean will be responsible for the development of Engage, Knowledge Architecture’s website platform for architects and engineers, coming in 2012.

Prior to joining Knowledge Architecture, Sean worked as a freelance web developer and designed participatory games for museums. He previously worked in desktop support and systems administration roles at SMWM (now Perkins+Will), drawing on self-taught computer mastery gained while an English Language and Literature undergraduate at The University of Chicago. An inveterate tinkerer, Sean approaches software engineering as a creative and strategic practice.

Sean spends his free time running games like SFZero and Journey to the End of the Night, and occasionally playing music.

You can learn more about the rest of the Knowledge Architecture team here.

What is “knowledge flow management?”

I’m a huge fan of the Kindle app on the iPad and iPhone. I love the highlighting and notes features. The killer feature for me though, is “Your Highlights,” a page on Amazon.com that aggregates all of your highlights and notes into one place, making it easy for you to tweet, e-mail, and well, blog them.

You’ll find a selection of my highlights from Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work below.  Frank Lesitner, the author, is the Chief Knowledge Officer at SAS, one of the most interesting, successful, privately-held software companies in the world.

I really like what Frank Leistner has to say about knowledge management and flow. We’ve starting using his river metaphor with clients and have found it to be useful. You’ll get a taste for the book below, but I’d recommend reading the whole thing.

– Chris

“After a long time of playing with alternative terms, the one that actually fits best with my understanding is knowledge flow management, because the thing that you can manage is the flow of knowledge.”

“When I started playing with the notion of knowledge flow, the analogy of knowledge flowing through the organization like a river flowing through its bed seemed to fit for a number of reasons. Flows find their own way, but they can also be guided and stopped by barriers. You can have some individuals steering the direction of the flow on a daily level and others providing the main bed of the river by setting strategic goals for the longer run.”

“Products and solutions being offered by “KM vendors” can provide considerable value. But they are not managing knowledge. They are enablers to the knowledge flow. The information they process, store, and provide can be used to create new knowledge. Information stored in systems and repositories can be seen as representing “pointers to the one who knows.” If those using them do understand it in that way, they will be much more likely to actually go beyond the system and see the value of the knowledge that is behind that information, connected to the human who contributed the ‘pointer.’”

“I think it is very important to draw the line between knowledge and information. Knowledge is connected to all the prior experiences and exists only in the context of the mind. It cannot be managed. What can be managed are ways to enable the flow of that knowledge to others. What can be passed is information (data in context), not knowledge.”

– All quotes courtesy of Frank Leistner, Mastering Organizational Knowledge Flow: How to Make Knowledge Sharing Work

One community at a time.

The following is based on a conversation I had with a prospective client this morning.

Q: Knowledge Architecture’s intranet software looks great Chris. We think that your team has built some great tools to improve knowledge sharing. However, we’re not talking about the elephant in the room. How do we get people to share? How do we change the culture?

A: One community at a time.

Architecture and engineering firms are made up of micro-tribes—practice groups, market sectors, departments, interest groups, initiatives, and so on. We have found that focusing on meeting the needs of individual communities is easier than “fixing” the culture or the firm.

Communities have leaders, influencers, and hopefully, a shared domain of interest or practice. Communities might have two members or twenty, but they are generally a small and discrete number of individuals. When the Healthcare practice leader starts blogging once a week, sharing links or videos, and commenting on posts, his or her tribe will follow suit. Why? The leader has modeled the behavior they want their tribe to exhibit and has simultaneously given permission for other folks to do so as well.

When the Healthcare tribe starts sharing ideas and insights on a social intranet—about projects, clients, competitors, technology, or service innovation—you can bet the other practice leaders and their tribes will be watching and eventually join the movement.

At Knowledge Architecture, we believe that the most successful intranets are actually dozens or hundreds of micro-intranets, each meeting the needs of individual communities. That’s how you get people to share—practice by practice, office by office, department by department—one community at a time.

KA Connect 2012: The Future of Practice

The Future of Practice: Research, Marketing, and Technology in the AEC Industry

KA Connect 2012 is a knowledge and information management conference for the AEC industry.

Our focus this year will be on three intersecting trends driving the future of practice — research, marketing, and technology.

Thought leaders from all over the world will come together to share case studies, best practices, and ideas about how they organize information and manage knowledge in their firms.

Join us for a fun and dynamic event filled with short talks, collaborative discussion groups, and networking with some of the smartest folks in the industry.

Take advantage of early registration pricing while we plan. 

We’ll be announcing speakers, program details, and hotel information throughout the fall.  In the meantime, you can register early at our best rate.

We’ve moved the conference to San Francisco’s downtown museum district. We hope to see you at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on April 11th and 12th.

Interesting or Interested?

"It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested?"

— Advice from John Gardner to Jim Collins

I came across HOK’s interview series on The Green Workplace and Mark English’s interviews on The Architect’s Take early into our research on social media in architecture and engineering.  I believed then, and still believe now, that both are best in class examples of architecture blogs.

Looking outside of our industry, the TED conference was clearly an inspiration for KA Connect, but so were Gel, the Business of Software, and Big Omaha. I am deeply inspired by the interviews of the Paris Review. They are very long, but if the topic is right, I’ll read and read and read. I also love The Corner Office column in the New York Times, Bootstrapped, Profitable, and Proud, by 37signals, and the thought leadership marketing interview series by our friends at The Bloom Group.

What do all of those blogs, columns, and conferences have in common? The authors and editors are, or appear to be, genuinely interested in other people. They have built platforms for telling other people’s stories, not just their own.

One of the reasons that many architecture and engineering firms are anxious about starting blogs is that they are afraid they don’t have anything to say.  Here are some common fears that I hear:

“What are we going to talk about?”

“We don’t know if we have enough content to sustain a blog after we launch it.”

“We don’t have a writing culture.”

I share their fears. In fact, after blogging for two years on two separate blogs, I still share their fears. I often open up WordPress, stare at the blinking cursor, and ask, “How am I going to be interesting today?”

That’s why I think that John Gardner’s advice to Jim Collins might be the secret to the universe.

Being interested is so much easier than being interesting. There is an endless supply of fascinating people and ideas. The more time I spend outside of our firm talking to folks about their work, the more I enjoy writing.  Over the last few weeks I conducted and published three interviews with leading thinkers from the AEC industry – James Kent of Thornton Tomasetti, Alex Serriere of TEECOM Design Group, and Hobson Hogan of ZweigWhite. 

Interviewing James, Alex, and Hobson was one of the highlights of my professional career. Of course, putting over 80 people on stage and publishing their talks at the last two KA Connect conferences was pretty rewarding as well.

I’m going to tape John Gardner’s advice up on the wall in my office. The next time I’m having trouble writing a blog post, I’ll look to it for inspiration, pick up the phone, and ask someone, “What are you working on?”

Why I named our company Knowledge Architecture.

I moved to Point Reyes Station with my wife three years ago. Denise and I had always wanted to live in a small town, and at 350 people, Point Reyes Station certainly qualified. Plus it was about an hour away from San Francisco, which meant that commuting was possible, at least in theory.

I grew up in suburbs all over the country, moving every two years or so for my dad’s job as an FBI agent. Denise spent her childhood in Chicago, her teens in Arizona, and then moved back to Chicago after college, which is where I found her a little over a decade ago.

Is it true that watching old seasons of Northern Exposure from Netflix was a motivating factor in our move? Yes. We longed to be part of a community, closer to nature, and living at a slower pace. I’ll admit that we both romanticized small towns, perhaps a bit blindly, but that’s a story for another day. After a year in the country, we moved back to San Francisco in 2009 so that I could start Knowledge Architecture.

We’re in Point Reyes Station now, renting a cottage for a few weeks. It is great to be back. There’s nothing like taking a hike at lunch or walking through the wetlands with your morning coffee. Don’t get me wrong, I love San Francisco. Living in San Francisco is amazing. Our dream has always been to split our time between the two places, partly because we believe the diversity of our living and working experiences makes us more interesting people.

One of the reasons I started Knowledge Architecture was to be free to choose where and when I would work. I wanted the same thing for our employees, which is funny, because it turned out that I’m the guy that goes into the office every day while Chad, Paul, Susan, and Brian work from home full or part-time.

I came up with the name of our firm by accident. I was in my home office in Point Reyes Station, brainstorming the qualities of my dream job on a whiteboard. It was clear that I wanted to focus on knowledge sharing, technology, and stay in the architecture and engineering industry. I thought the answer was to join a mega-firm. I wanted to become a “knowledge architect,” a role which didn’t seem to exist. Clearly, I was aware of information architects, but I wanted to push the role a step further, to enter the messy and tangled jungle of knowledge management with a machete and bring some order to it.

I pitched the role of knowledge architect to a couple of mega-firms. They were interested, but the timing was tough. It was the fall of 2008 and the world was changing quickly. The fact that I was very direct about my requirements for telecommuting probably didn’t help much. I was walking home from the office, in the city, feeling a bit dejected, when I figured it out—I didn’t want to be a knowledge architect at a mega-firm, I wanted to start a company and call it Knowledge Architecture. I sat down on the nearest step, pulled out an index card, a red and black pen, and mocked up the business card below to show Denise.

I share this story for two reasons. I’ve been reflecting on the summer that I decided to start our company. I feel vindicated in taking the risk. It turned out that I had to create the world I wanted to live in, it didn’t already exist. Through amazing colleagues, clients, friends, perseverance, luck, and of course, Denise, Knowledge Architecture is alive and thriving. This is a chance to say thank you to them for helping to make our company possible.

The second reason I share this story is that I think creation stories are important. I wanted to capture ours. We’re about to hire a new employee, the first employee who wasn’t there at the beginning, when we didn’t have a product, or a conference, or a 401k plan. I’m guessing we’ll hire a few more over the next year and I want them to understand where we came from, and that includes our name.