AskAPhD.org

Using Twitter I found a user named AskAPhD, as a PhD (to be) that seemed interesting so I had a look at what this was all about. Turns out that the guys at this website have launched a forum where PhDs can sign up to answer questions from each other but also the general public.

I reckon this is a cool concept and although still in infancy stage now, it deserves recognition from the research community. I hereby ask all of you that are doing a PhD, or are generally academically inclined in one way or another to sign up at: askaphd.org. Thanks!

Responsible data policies in Universities

Now that Google is getting a foot in the door at British Universities, offering far superior mail-systems than Universities are able to offer, the question of data policies is becoming a real one. Universities have a tradition of care and diligence when it comes to research data, but that tradition does not necessarily extent to the way e-mail is managed and governed. Not only e-mail, but data released through Virtual Learning Environments is increasingly hosted on servers that are outside the property-domain of Universities (and colleges, schools etc.).

Squeeze on data security?

This move is understandable, external parties can offer specific advantages unatainable by the University. Each student an e-mail box with gigabytes of storage? It is only possible through using a service like Google which has petabytes of storage available all over the world.

But it does beg the question: What happens with potentially confidential data? Google will scan the Gmail account to build a profile of the account-holder so they can target their ads specifically. But what else do they do? Do they ensure a bulletproof safety from hackers?

The simple answer is no, it is impossible, therefore Universities will have to educate their students and staff to understand the risks involved with online storage. A new age of responsible information literacy is dawning and Universities better make sure that they embrace the challenge.

I am in favour of outsourcing services like e-mail and hosting of low-grade sensitivity. But when it comes to research data, grades and personal details there has to be a significant red line between internal and external hosting.

Furthermore, Universities will have to start thinking how this material (whether it is of high or low sensitivity) is protected under intellectual property laws. Are we signing off part of that responsibility? How about a Creative Commons model where the end-users decide?

Plenty of questions, few answers (yet).

Help! Dissertation coming up!

This guide aims to help you, the Masters student, to get going properly with your Dissertation. It is aimed at students of the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield, but a lot of the advise can be applied generically at any level, department etc.

Lets start with a disclaimer: This guide is not perfect, last year I did my own dissertation and felt there could be more support out there which is why I made this guide. As I work as a librarian for the University of Sheffield it will contain practical pointers specifically for this Library Service, but if you are at another University I am sure your Library will be more than happy to help out! I also work as a Research Assistant at this University, which gives me a growing knowledge of Research Methods (One hopes!).

Getting Going

Your primary concern is to choose a topic that interest you, and gosh, there are many of those, or maybe there are not. You might worry tremendously about your topic, but really, all you need to worry about is whether it is something that truly interests you. After three months of hard work you will be grateful for having chosen something you wanted to do, rather than something you thought might be better for your career or because you wanted to do a dissertation with a specific lecturer. I assume you are doing a Masters because you are interested in the topic, if you came in with a certain idea about what you wanted to achieve, the dissertation is the ideal time to capitalise on that.

Talk to lecturers about it, they are researchers as well as teachers and have experience in the field you are studying. If you like Web 2.0 go talk to the lecturer that taught you about it, if you are interested in Knowledge Management go for that appropriate lecturer. Tell them about your ideas, conceptualise them and get something down on paper, even if it is only one A4.

Got the idea, what next?

Once you have the general concept it is time to start thinking about ways to move forward. This is a good moment to start reading on your topic. If you did a module on it, or are doing one on it now, go through the reading lists. At the UoS they are available through Muse (provided your lecturer put them up). Frequently you will be able to work out which authors are important in the field, based on this list. For example when you talk about the Internet, you have to read Manuel Castells “The Internet Galaxy” (1999), which is generally accepted as one of those seminal works about the impact of the Internet on our lives.

Start reading Journal Articles on the topic, ask your lecturer for advise on which articles to read, or alternatively go to the Library and ask your Subject Librarian for their advise. There is also an excellent Library Guide available for your department which contains further links to the various sources appropriate for your field.

The reason you should read Journal Articles is because they reveal potential ways of doing research. If you read Qualitative and Quantitative (more on this later) papers you will discover which type suits you best. You will also get an idea of how to structure your dissertation, this is actually very valuable. It would pay off if you sat down and analysed the structure of a (number of) previous dissertation(s) or paper(s), just so that you get a feeling for the way Academic Literature is structured.

Method: Aaaargh!

Choosing how you go about your research is difficult. Effectively there are three options, Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed Method. The ethos of Qualitative and Quantitative is fundamentally different, with Qualitative research you will generally not have a pre-conceived hypothesis that you want to test, with Quantitative research you generally will want to test what you think. I say generally because that is not always the case, but I don’t want to confuse you too much so we will leave that out of the picture. Each approach has a different set of tools to achieve the end-result, in practice students choose a method based on these tools, if you want to do a questionnaire you are likely to be doing a Quantitative study where the numbers of responses have to proof your point. If you want to do interviews, you will be taking a Qualitative approach, interviews offer open endings by default (if you design them well )!

Don’t be put off by either methodology. You will have a natural inclination to one type anyway, if you are assertive and chatty you will probably prefer interviews, if you are mathematically minded, good at numbers and methodological, you will probably prefer questionnaires. There are other things you can do as well though, you could choose to do Focus Groups, a full Literature Analysis, Bibliometric analysis, Surveying and so on! The key is that you choose the methodology that suits your topic and you.

To be continued!

Knowledge and e-mail: Codification pur sang?

In the OrganiK project we have finished most of the data collection to assess criteria for the new Knowledge Management system we aim to develop. One very interesting factor kept coming up during various visits, the use of Outlook to store work-related knowledge.

Several interviewees send e-mails to themselves with working tasks, snippets of information they picked up on and links to websites they find useful, they also send these mails on to colleagues when they think this is useful.

In essence they are using e-mail as a codification tool, effectively making knowledge available in written down format with the aim of recovering it when appropriate.

This is by no means a new ‘discovery’ MS itself is aware of the potential of Outlook as KM tool, the question then of course is; why do they not exploit that potential further?  And, as a Thunderbird user, why is Mozilla not all over this weakness in Outlook and trying to improve on it?

The interesting player in this respect is Google who, with an ever expanding toolkit, are offering brilliant ways of using Gmail as a codified information repository. Time to steal ideas Mozilla!

The problem with definitions in a social context

Currently I am writing on a State of the Art review with three main parts, Knowledge Management, Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web.

Of these three there is only a solid definition of the Semantic Web. Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management are based on discussion and defined by O’Reilly as:

“Not having a hard boundary, but a gravitational core.”

A star exploding, empty core!

As the image above shows, this could indicate that there is not a real centre for the definition, a highly contested area, circled by numerous, partial, definitions, shapes and forms. This ‘paradigm’ is what needs to be caught in any document discussing the topic, in the case of O’Reilly this is a problem to describe Web 2.0, for me the problem is related to describing Knowledge Management.

Wish me luck, when I come up with the ‘definite’ definition I will post it here.

Data collection in London

Last week I have visited London city-centre for the first time. The reason of the visit was to collect data for the requirements analysis with one of the SME-partners of the OrganiK project. Obviously I can’t say much about the data collection (confidential, not analysed properly yet) but I can write a bit about London.

My wife is from Northern England, born in Liverpool, raised in Manchester. If you are not English it is perhaps hard to understand how that affects the opinion on London. In one word: A LOT. Oh, that is two words, but you get my drift. I have the same with Amsterdam, which is a horrible city, but only to me it seems. London however was interesting, not in the least because of my colleagues. I went with one of the Greek partners and as he had never been before either, it was a reason to be… touristy. He even had a camera that he normally never has .

Anyway some pictures I took with my HTC 710 phone :

The fact that all these pictures were taken around the same area means two things: We didn’t have a lot of time and it was getting dark and I am not really interested in taking pictures of everything. The South Bank was nice though, and seeing Big Ben, the changing of the guard, Prince Harry and Prince William arrive at the opening of the Quantum of Solace, discovering that there are Wetherspoon pubs with decent prices, Trafalgar and Picadilly squares and the West End… was all rather eventful for a two-three hour visit.

We didn’t find Harrods, we missed Downing Street although we probably crossed it and we never really found any shopping precinct or anything so we must have missed that as well. Altogether it was fun though, as my colleague says: Work is Fun.

More on networking

In a previous post I discussed the value of LinkedIn as a networking tool. I expressed my surprise that there is no real culture of networking in the UK. In the Netherlands it is one network event after the other, here it is all more formal, networking for networking sake seems to be out of order.

No matter whether I am right or wrong about this, I think it is my duty to write about networking the Dutch way so that I can educate the English. I know I am arrogant like that…No really, I have a different interest and that is that I think Web 2.0 features are going to push forward the concept of social networking in a large way throughout the World.

Read this blog on Yahoo to get an idea about what networking is when applied to face to face situations. Where Web 2.0 is actually helping us to understand this concept better and better, as well as helping us to get better at it, it is no substitute for ‘real’ networking events. In a sense the technology gags us, as shown by this excellent picture:

thanks to noblelglobel@Flickr

At the University of Groningen network events are commonplace, lets make this part of the Sheffield culture as well!

Part of my networking affliction stems from the fact that I have a broad knowledge rather than a specific knowledge, I am always painfully aware of shortcomings in, let’s say, my programming knowledge. Knowing the people I know however I can almost always find the answer to questions (once I decided how to best formulate them!).

This is the essence of good knowledge management, knowing what you know, and knowing who knows what you don’t. There is no codification effort that can replace that basic stance, there are however codifications (of knowledge) that help find the knowledge you need. It is this area of codification I am currently investigating in the OrganiK project, on which there will be more info in later blog posts.

Knowledge management in SMEs, non-existent?

Quite a number of authors argue that knowledge management can not effectively contribute to operations in Small and Medium Enterprises. This is an odd statement related to the misunderstanding of Small and Medium Enterprises as well as the misunderstanding of knowledge management.  This is not an unusual combination, SMEs are notorious for having a diverse character (ie. it is hard to describe types of SME or even to define their precise markets) and knowledge management has to be one of the most ambiguous fields of research out there as Wilson demonstrated in 2002.  Wilson however comes from a field that was once as ambiguous and hard to define as knowledge management and considering that should perhaps have demonstrated a bit more patience for the topic.

It is easiest to state that knowledge management is joint to information management at the hip, where information management deals more with systems (Not just information technology, but the wide range of systems like P. Checkland describes.) Knowledge management is more involved with the actual interaction of people between people. Although this can be defined as a system, the specific nature of the theory of knowledge transfer differentiates knowledge management from information management, that and the understanding that knowledge is different from information, described in the now famous DIKW triangle.

Once one starts seeing knowledge management as broad as defined in the (too) brief paragraph above, it becomes feasible to see that this ‘management fad’ can potentially occur in any environment where knowledge gets transferred.

Where I draw the line is where people start considering any micro business, from coffeeshop to toilet-lady as an environment where KM is relevant, that is simply over the top, the only purpose that serves is to make the concept of KM broadly acceptable.

I am pleased to be working on a European funded project called OrganiK that is looking to assist the development of KM practices in SMEs through the use of Web 2.0 tools. Soon I will start blogging on this in some more detail, at the moment I am waiting for the project website to come online, so I can link to that.

Informal Networks: Pt 2

In my previous, brief post, I declared that informal networks are important for organisations. In this post I hope to elaborate on that point as I feel it is an under-lit area in management literature. One of the inspirations for this post was the discovery of an excellent book by John S. Brown, Stephen Denning, Katalina Groh and Laurence Prusak. Brown and Prusak are big names in knowledge management literature, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that they wrote a book on the power of the narrative in organisations. The book is called Storytelling in organizations: why storytelling is transforming 21st century organizations and management. Click here for a Google Books preview of the book.

What the book highlights is that in the current day and age we have a tendency to limit communication. We do this by using email, phone, secretaries etc. etc. But what all that does is destroy the strength of the narrative. The story one tells face-to-face. This narrative can be regarded a knowledge transfer as highlighted by Sveiby, yet another KM guru. He argues that knowledge transfers are valuable to an organisation that is interested in sustaining a good level of knowledge but that there is too large a focus on technological solutions to unleash full power of knowledge transfers. Each time an individual gains knowledge from another individual, a system or whatever, that knowledge is effectively present twice within the organisation. A massive benefit to the organisation one might say.

In the Netherlands there are Heidagen (loosely translatable as peat or bog-days) where a unit, team or board of directors gets whisked of its feet and brought to some desolate place to engage in communication exercises. This has been going on for a long time now, and I always felt they were without purpose, people get fed-up with them and they can interrupt important work. However, when I read Storytelling in Organizations I all of a sudden realised why these days should happen. Perhaps not as frequent as happens in the Netherlands, but certainly every now and then. Encouraging communication between staff has plenty advantages for any organisation.

Informal Networks

Writing a masters dissertation is arguably one of the most daunting tasks in academia, bar writing a PhD. However, now that I am sort of halfway I feel it is also very rewarding, mainly because i have been able to pinpoint some really poignant issues at the organisation where I am doing my research.

One of the key-factors identified is the strength of the informal network. I thoroughly believe that in modern management the accent should be on developing, guiding and strengthening informal networks among the floor, but maybe even more important; with other organisations as well. Network organisations have a strong benefit over any other organisation, they make employees happy. This is down to the intrinsic reward that people gain from feeling important and appreciated in their workrole. To achieve this it is crucial to allow informal networks to blossom, people gain by knowing who to ask what. It increases their efficiency significantly.

Now that I have mentioned knowing, I can also mention knowledge management. Many people, even experts, still regard it a fad, one of those things that managers embrace to keep themselves busy. In my opinion it is one of the basic elements of organising a network and forming a solid chain of knowledge through experts in their subject field. I am hoping to make this a focus of my academic work. But first I have to finish my dissertation, only three more weeks to go!