January 6, 2025 • 39 mins
Elizabeth McLean is the founder and Chief Knowledge and Information Strategist at Knowsaic, her consulting practice based in the Washington DC area. Liz was an early adopter of web collaboration and content collection solutions to pioneer knowledge exchange and expertise connections for domestic and international enterprises. Liz is inspired to seek out and amplify knowledge flow and knowledge continuity with a focus on how project teams and experts can create or improve frameworks and culture for deeper knowledge exchange, experience capitalization and learning.Ms. McLean has recent work experience with the United States Agency for International Development’s as a knowledge manager in the Knowledge Services Center located in Washington, D.C. There, Liz met with global agency and implementing partners to assess program team needs and select tools and practices for enhanced collaboration, learning and innovation.As collaboration amplifier, Liz promoted and contributed to the agency’s global enterprise social network. Liz facilitated several communities of practice and participated in agency-wide blogs. She was the content curator and tool administrator for Developedia, an internal wiki for process knowledge and information exchange.Also at USAID, Liz was a facilitator of the KM Reference Group, a community of practice designed for shared learning on challenges and outcomes of KM practitioners from USAID and other international development actors such as The World Bank, The Inter-AmericanDevelopment Bank, the U.S. State Department, Johns Hopkins’ Jhpiego, implementing partners such as Save the Children, and independent consultants.Liz convenes knowledge exchange conversations for the Virtual Events Committee of an international non-profit organization. She provides non-profit and social enterprise organizations with knowledge and information frameworks that create value for their mission and capabilities.Over her 20 years of experience, Liz created and managed systems of record and collaboration tools for corporate, executive branch of government and non-profit executives and directors in the fields of satellite telecommunications, telecommunications, venture capital, renewable energy, law and charitable foundations.
Liz participates in these learning and professional groups:
Association for Independent Information Professionals
The Knowledge Management Community of DC (KMDC)
KM4Dev
SIKM
KMI Alums Slack Channel
DEVEX
Society for International Development-Washington DC (SID-W)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
There is an old adage, one that you
might have heard from a grandparent
or village wise person. The one that says,
you get out what you put in, meaning
your efforts are matched to some degree by
the results or the output.
Now take our nonprofit,
Pioneer Knowledge Services, who delivers this cool program
that you're listening to right now takes a
(00:22):
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We hope that you obtain value from our
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reason. Here is where you come in. You.
Yeah. The listeners.
Make our efforts rewarded.
Consider donating to keep us moving forward.
Visit pioneer
dashks.org
and click on donate.
(00:54):
Pioneer Knowledge Services welcomes you to the next
because you need to know. I'm your host,
Edwin k Morris. I serve as president and
founder of this organization, and we are thrilled
to offer this educational program. These design conversations
bring you people's experiences
from all over the globe in field of
knowledge management,
nonprofit work, and innovation.
(01:22):
Hi there. My name is Liz McClain, Elizabeth
McClain on LinkedIn.
I live in Huntingtown, Maryland, which is, outside
of the Washington DC region, very close to
the Chesapeake Bay,
which means Maryland blue crabs,
Old Bay,
Calvert Cliffs, Miocene Fossils,
and depending on where you are,
(01:44):
Orioles baseball or Nats baseball.
I absolutely
love working on knowledge management for international development.
I have had experience with international development for
a number of years and it is a
model that I love because it's really focused
on collaborative
learning and adapting for innovation.
(02:05):
The field that I work in is knowledge
domain modeling.
This has been an evolutionary
process, and I'm sure Edwin will tease that
out. And the thing that I've learned about
myself is that I am a third generation
information sharer.
My grandmother was married to a White House
press correspondent and she was very well read.
(02:25):
Whenever she saw articles that she saw thought
so and so would need,
she clipped them out and sent them in
letters.
My mother did the same thing,
and it took me a while to realize
that every time I saw something
that I thought someone needed that they didn't
necessarily want me to send to them.
So
(02:46):
so I have to curtail
my natural third generation instincts of information sharing
to some degree.
I've also learned that I am never not
learning,
but it's not just for the sake of
learning. It's for problem solving with knowledge flow.
I create value by facilitating
knowledge flow and knowledge sharing. So this
(03:09):
first glimpse
of what a concerned
citizen can do with knowledge
to help others
is a, a not self serving
mentality.
It is other directed.
Where did she get that knack? Where did
she get that? Grandmothers have special powers, you
know. So give me grandmother's name. Grandma Anne
(03:29):
Grandma Anne
was
conscientious
and thoughtful
in developing
people's knowledge.
Correct. And what did they not know that
she needed to help them figure out? How
was that received at that time? Do you
know? Do you know how because I can
just imagine some people would be like, hey.
Hey. Hey. Who who are you to tell
(03:49):
me anything? You know, I don't know how
extensive her practice was in those years. I
just know I would get a letter, and
they would be folded up newspaper clippings. That
is so cool. And I would think to
myself,
well, I'm not really sure how this applies
to me. Yeah. But thanks, grandma.
So she must have just loved
I I almost wanna relate it to, like,
(04:12):
gardening. Right? So she is just Oh, yes.
Constantly
fostering. Uh-huh. And you're and you're saying it
not always was a like, wow. This is
a little out of left field, maybe. Sometimes.
Yeah. It wasn't always straight on. So she
must have been mindful enough to think, well,
this might be associated.
I better send it. Right. Oh, she had
(04:32):
all sorts of angles, I'm sure, because these
are the same ones that I have. Like,
oh, you should you should really spool up
on this topic. You you know, this is
so related to what you were talking to
me about the other day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So I have learned to to make money
from this and not necessarily to foist it
on people. Although you might feel that way
if you follow my LinkedIn profile.
(04:54):
The way it developed for me was just
a natural, this is what we do. We
share these tidbits. They could be great. They
could be off. My point of departure for
how this really got to be my whole
reason for being is that I have an
amazing amount of empathy
and I worked at a very formative place.
It was a satellite telecommunications
(05:15):
startup and I was responsible for circulating
every day was do or die. $6,000,000,000
every day was do or die. We didn't
have intranets or extranets. We have fax machines.
And if I didn't have what I needed
to get to the right people at the
right time, which is the old adage for
Kilometers,
it was painful.
(05:36):
And so that's kinda where my pain point
roots of my sharing started. Alright. So let
me just flip this. So I know your
background, your official
college training is around library sciences. Correct? I
have a master's in that. My undergrad is
in music. Oh. It is. So what's your
musical forte? What do you what do you
do? Voice. But mine was performance and
(05:59):
performance major at James Madison University
School of Music was really immersed in music
analysis and theory, even though I had so
much information about the macro
and the micro. Mhmm. And so leading you
know, we could we could have a lot
of points of departure on that one. So
from music and the word I'm hearing in
(06:20):
what you just described is synthesizing
That's it. If you're traveling from different areas
in order to comprehend.
So an expert might just stick in one
hemisphere,
but more of a synthesizer
or a generalist will
dance all over the place
and be a butterfly to collect bits
to understand more or at least
(06:41):
try to understand more. Yeah? Yeah. I mean,
I have been traditionally a boundary spanner, so
I will have multiple things that I sort
of monitor. And as I get more and
more specialized and in-depth with the field that
I'm pursuing
in taxonomies, ontologies,
and knowledge graphs, and Gen AI tools,
it's still helpful to be a boundary spanner.
(07:02):
So, again, it's that macro
and then the micro, and how do they
come together and how do they shift. In
your opening, you talked about knowledge domains. Yep.
So I quickly found the Empire State University,
and they have a nice little page here
on knowledge domains.
And see if you agree with this. I
don't know if we're talking the same thing.
(07:24):
Different knowledge domains are declarative,
procedural,
strategic,
self knowledge,
tacit knowledge,
and integrated knowledge.
Does that the domains you're speaking of? No.
Not particularly.
When I talk about a knowledge domain,
we're talking about being in a given entity,
like an enterprise
(07:45):
or or an NGO,
nonprofit,
you know Got it. Yeah. Organizational knowledge domain.
Got it. Well, it's funny because strategic self,
tacit, and integrated,
procedural, and declarative, they all kinda work here,
you know, it it it works in that
bucket. It's pretty cool. What out of the
(08:05):
world of an internal
structure of knowledge for an organization
do you find is, like, the weakest link?
What seems to be the big bucket of
divots
that doesn't
work well? Great question.
Siloing, which is,
something that is is becoming more and more
(08:26):
of an Achilles' heel for organizations
because
they have these repositories and they have these
databases and they have structured and they have
unstructured content.
And all of these things live and don't
talk to one another. So I would definitely
say that's one of the biggest ones. Okay.
So I'm gonna back up the train here.
I think silos
I think in the the idea of how
organizations
(08:47):
are split,
silos are those things that are usually tied
to people and structure.
But you're pushing it down to the data
repository
systems and that sort of digital structure. Yeah?
Yeah. Well, it starts there because we don't
want it to be micro, micro, micro. We
want the ability
through the use of, say, a knowledge graph
(09:09):
to be able to pull those disparate sources
together semantically.
And then rather than worrying about where this
came from and which repository or which tool,
be able to query
semantically
with richer and more contextually
complex
queries
that pull from all of these data, structured
or unstructured,
(09:30):
pull and make meaning make much more semantically
rich meaning
from using these graphs. K. So I'm gonna
go to, for the listener, the IBM definition,
ibm.com,
of a knowledge graph is
also known as a semantic network, represents a
network of real world entities such as objects,
(09:50):
events, situations, or concepts,
and illustrates the relationships between them. Well, isn't
that an ontology?
Yes. Ontologies make that happen. Mhmm. Okay. So
you're saying that in this day and age,
of
all the enterprise level tools you'd ever wanna
see,
(10:11):
we're still in this bucket of things don't
connect.
That's it. Well, what the heck are we
doing? What what's the problem?
I mean, it's not, hey. Every salesman's got
the solution for this. What is the problem?
Those systems aren't connected.
Let's all be the bridge, shall we? We
will be the bridge. So is the problem
(10:31):
because of
archaic systems
and or disparate systems, meaning that, oh, that
division just went out and bought their own
stuff regardless what the rest of the organization
was doing, and now
they're stuck in that bucket unless somebody at
the top says, oh, hey. We're getting rid
of all these little pieces, and we're doing
this one master enterprise level solution.
(10:54):
That's part of it. But is it also
a matter of standardization?
Are there standardization issues across
old and new and and that sort of
thing? Mhmm. Can you go into that? Yeah.
Yeah. So this is definitely a multipronged thing.
I would say, first of all, none of
the nirvana
of semantic tools
can work if the data isn't enriched with
(11:16):
metadata and using standards. So you have to
have those building blocks, and that is a
big one.
But really, it comes from both the executive
strategies. You know? What is the overarching mission?
What is the drive? What are we why
are we building capacity
for so that we have the impact that
we want to have? So you have to
(11:37):
look at at it from, do we know
what we know? Do we know what we
know when and and how we know it?
What don't we know to do what we
need to do? Those are big overarching strategy
things.
But from the bottom up, you do need
those metadata standards. You do need clean data.
And so those it's it's a multiprong problem.
(11:57):
Who owns that problem?
You've talked about a couple of different things.
I started with the chief technology officer, then
that moved over to the chief knowledge officer.
Then I'm like, well, we need a chief
cognition officer
or somebody that kinda combines all the pieces.
Yes. And the pieces are, again, multipronged or
multifaceted.
Another zinger of a word for attack on
(12:20):
this.
But, no, all everyone owns the problem. Who
is in charge of the strategy before achieving
the mission or the organization or the enterprise?
But somebody's gotta be accountable for it, though.
I mean, everybody can own it, but who's
accountable? Who who's in charge? Okay. Let let's
just stick to the let's stick to the
(12:41):
quest
who's accountable? The people who run the company.
So that's not just the CEO. That's the
communications offer. That's the human resources offer. That's
all of the stakeholders
that wanna align the enterprise
with how are we managing our knowledge assets
so that we do what we do better
(13:02):
and find out what we aren't doing that
we should be doing.
I'm just looking up something. So
I had a bit of a pushback using
the language of knowledge asset in the last
couple years. Oh, yes. I'm not.
Yeah. Alright. So let's let's dig on that.
So is it an asset or not?
If you look at the book by Douglas
Laney from Gartner
(13:24):
talking about infonomics,
he looks completely at the world of data
as an asset, as a competitive intelligent
advantage. Mhmm. And so his work focuses on
information and data assets. It doesn't focus on
knowledge assets, but we know that we have
to be able to show our work with
both the data and the content. I will
(13:45):
always argue that these are knowledge assets, whether
they are data information or
captures and conversations,
storytelling.
I will always argue that if you don't
have your arms around and have a way
to leverage and harness
each of those elements,
then you are missing a huge asset.
Absolutely. I would agree with that. I took
(14:08):
a look at Cambridge. Take a look at
their dictionary on what knowledge asset is. And,
actually, I love this definition. Cool. Knowledge asset
is information or skills within a business that
makes it more valuable
or competitive. That's exactly it. Yeah. Right? But
why is that such a hard sell?
Because I've been on the fence. You know,
I I see it as an asset just
(14:28):
because of that definition. I've always seen it
as knowledge as an asset,
and there are some that push back and
push back on that language.
But then I also have seen it as
I come from a natural resource
background,
managing timber and timberlands and and forestry and
all that. So
I also think of knowledge as a resource.
(14:51):
But if you look up natural resource, it's
all geological. It's nothing to do with or,
you know, atmospheric. It's nothing to do with
what we're talking about. I still feel knowledge
is a resource also.
As a taxonomist,
how do you split these hairs and why
do people care so much? I'm not sure
I follow your question. The different terminologies.
You know, it's either this or it's that
(15:12):
or it's either. No. No. So I wouldn't
look at it as a taxonomist in this
case. Okay. So a resource is definitely
what I characterize these these
let's call them resources, not assets, just for
argument's sake. It's that environment of how do
we get to what we do know? How
do we get to what people know? How
(15:33):
do we socialize and how do we communicate
and how do we have those cultures?
So you can call it a resource.
You can call it research.
You can call it any number of things.
I like to call it an asset because
when you use what you have to innovate
and learn
and grow and it's a journey, How could
that not be an asset? I'm
(15:55):
with you. Going off the asset base, can
we make the leap to a knowledge economy?
Oh, sure.
Everything now is this journey of innovation. How
do we get our arms around what it
is that we have? Do we even know
what we have? Do we have what we
need to do better?
Do our bureaus of child labor over on
this side talk to our food bureaus and
(16:17):
what are the intersections? What are the patterns
that emerge?
You know, this is a really simplistic way
of saying it, but not knowing what you
do know
and not knowing what you don't know
is completely
an economy.
It's an economic
impact on what you're doing, whether it's a
humanitarian aid, whether it's an enterprise, whether it's
(16:39):
a nonprofit. What would be your advice to
a
organization,
say small to mid,
that is trying to figure out if they
should bother
worrying
about their knowledge assets. The answer is don't
worry, do.
Get your metadata standards in order and make
(16:59):
it make it work for you. You don't
have to apply a large organization
enterprise
solution to get more of what you have
if you're calling
things what your stakeholders and what you need
to do to communicate across those silos. I'm
gonna throw back to your
past history as an intern at the World
Digital
(17:20):
Library. Yay. Hey, everybody. If you go to
the World Digital Library, which is the Library
of Congress's
outfit, you're gonna find all kinds of things
you can't believe. And
somebody somewhere said, you know, maybe we should
digitize this stuff. Maybe somebody could use it.
Maybe there's some value to this. Maybe it's
an asset to somebody.
(17:41):
Yeah? So tell me I think we're the
hashtag.
Let's go back to that experience because,
in your LinkedIn, you talk about
synthesizing,
identify, locate, review, and synthesize
these materials
and objects.
That's what we're saying organizations
(18:02):
should be doing
at any level. Right? You're you're saying, hey,
you gotta have some somebody's gotta be accountable
for all this stuff you got. If you're
not, then that shows you have no
it doesn't align
to anybody's vision that this stuff matters. Well,
that's it for the meaning of it, not
for the sake of doing those things or
learning from what has been
(18:24):
gathered and made explicit, not just to have
it in catalogs and search
intranets and those things to make it usable
and reusable. You'd it's not to say save
everything.
No. Because there's there right? Because eventually, you're
gonna kill yourself with lack of storage. But
(18:44):
there has to be a policy in place
to say what's in, what's out. Oh, yeah.
You save this for 7 years and delete
it.
Right? The records management stuff. Mhmm. So can
you kinda give us a give the listener
kind of an overview of what this,
interim was like for you at the World
Digital Library. Yeah. Happy to do it. It
was a phenomenal
opportunity since I do live nearby, and I
(19:05):
was at the time, I was at Catholic
University for library and information science.
But what was going on with this that
I was working on, which at the time
was a really big deal,
was finding ways to work with Wikipedia and
Wikimedia and
find ways to surface what the World Digital
Library was doing
(19:26):
by adding links in articles about these artifacts
and objects
to point back to the World Digital Library.
So it wasn't just sitting somewhere in a
server in the World Digital Library.
It was being put into places where people
wouldn't know that the library
existed, but that they might be looking it
up on Wikipedia and say, oh, I never
(19:47):
knew that. Let me go read more, not
knowing that there was a World Digital Library.
Give us an overview
for those that may not be library
savvy.
The distinction between what you just described, the
the Library of Congress, and then what this
must have been I don't know. How long
ago did this digital library become an entity?
(20:08):
And then how did it grow? It's been
quite a while. I was there in 2010,
and
that World Digital Library is no longer growing
or
extant. It is now just a piece of
the Library of Congress writ large. It was
a
consortium
of world libraries all over the globe, the
Egyptian library or the the library in Alexandria,
(20:31):
those major major UNESCO world libraries. The question
again was,
what's the difference between
So if we're talking about
organizations
that see how adoption and innovation
have to happen,
I would assume the Library of Congress probably
sat on their hands for a while waiting
to see what the Internet was gonna be
(20:53):
until they started you know, maybe we should
do you know, I I just think the
percolation process for
something as historic or culturally bound as a
library system
to adopt a digital way
must have been a slow
wheel turn, I I'm guessing.
I don't really know the answer to that,
(21:14):
unfortunately. Okay. But everything was very becoming a
digital library at that time around the world.
Mhmm. It's a UNESCO, you know, mandate. It
was like, let's get this going. Let's put
these thing these resources together, meaning resources of
the different world libraries. So I wasn't there
for the buildup. I was there to do
my internship,
which was to surface and increase the the
(21:36):
audience. What I just did was, just to
clarify,
the digital library
was launched in 2009,
which which sounds like pretty recent history. Yeah.
It's it's you know what I mean? Not
to me. But yeah.
So alright. Well, we'll drop that little thread
there. So thanks for sharing that. Oh, sure.
(21:58):
So we've talked about problematic areas, and it
all sounds very basic when we're talking about
just basic records keeping skills of an organization.
Is there any resource you would suggest for
an organization, such as a a text that
you liked or some some source that's freely
available that could give them kind of a
(22:18):
self help kind of a better way? That
just depends on the the scale that I
wouldn't wanna give a one size fits all
recommendation for that. The things that I am
reading now are the Kilometers Graff
Cookbook by Andreas Bloomer and Helmut Nagy,
or Nej, I think he says it, n
a g y. I'm also in the middle
(22:40):
of I'm jumping in and out of the
AI enterprise
by Seth Early.
Not all enterprises
are ready for
that kind of a scale, and so
it depends on the size, the purpose, the
mission. Is it enterprise? Is it is it
nonprofit? Is it an NGO?
(23:00):
I think the most important thing that we
could say for one size fits all is
that
you have to pay attention
to embedding any asset
with good metadata.
You don't need to necessarily read about the
good metadata,
but you need to
put yourself in the position of being able
to care and
(23:21):
steward. It's steward. It's like
the care and feeding of a garden. You're
constantly
making sure that the metadata is ready to
go and make it data ready
so that when you do get to the
point that you can turn on some of
these more sophisticated
approaches,
you'll be ready to have data that works
for your organization
and out in the world as linked data,
(23:42):
which enriches semantic complexity. Okay. So I'm gonna
walk the listener through kind of a how
what what does this mean to them, to
an individual? Good. I looked up the definition
of metadata, and guess what it says? Data
about data. It's the data of data. So
the simple
idea of what that would be to a
regular person on the street was using your
mobile device to take a photograph.
(24:04):
Yes. Good idea. The photograph itself is an
image of whatever that image is.
But associated with that are date and time,
sometimes location.
There could be other metadata that's automatically generated
at the point of click
that now becomes part of the image that
most people don't look at. It's not, you
(24:26):
know, in the forefront.
That metadata gives you the availability
to have machines
in order to connect with the image in
different ways. Would that be a good explanation?
That's a really good explanation.
Metadata
comes in descriptions
in metadata properties. Like, it's an image, it's
a file, it's a in this format, it
(24:47):
has this date. It was created by
more descriptions
that are different styles of descriptions that you
add yourself because, you know, at the end
of the day, I would like to be
able to associate
this piece Right. With this piece to bring
together in a new collection because they were
both at the Hollywood Bowl,
in 1924,
whereas they may not be housed together. Would
(25:08):
it simply be referred to that function tagging?
That's,
Is that tagging? Tagging is considered to be
a more informal thing. When you are doing
metadata and metadata standards,
you know, you're tagging, but you're doing it
less It's more of a cat cataract is,
Categorization
classification.
(25:29):
You're good. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I don't
book these after lunch. Alright.
I should have known.
Would the was the tagging concept more fall
into a folksonomy? It has the connotations of
that.
There are various levels of control,
and tagging
by the person
is ability to make it more user oriented.
(25:51):
Right. Whereas, if you're coming at it from
a text message or a librarian, you want
controlled vocabulary.
Tagging can be in the generation
or in the the general direction of the
spectrum Mhmm. Word folksonomy.
That's a good good way to put it.
Everybody wondered what you would decide to be
your definition
of knowledge management.
(26:12):
I'm so glad you asked. Yeah. Good.
Knowledge management for me is is not any
one discipline. It's a series of complimentary
disciplines with the communication,
the culture,
the strategy. To me, knowledge management is just
under the strategy for the mission.
Whatever it takes to advance that strategy, whether
(26:35):
it's technology,
I prefer to pick people first,
people and their processes and their stakeholders.
So you've got the need to keep them
easily able to access and discover what they
need to know, to do what they need
to do, and to do it better.
So for me, that's the general knowledge management
umbrella, and it has multiple flavors and implementations
(26:58):
and strategies.
But as a knowledge manager for myself,
I am
working with people first
to derive frameworks
and models of what they know and how
they need to access it and discover it
so that they can improve and learn and
collaborate
as knowledge management participants.
In that framework,
(27:19):
would it be safe to say you're designated
a
organizational learning environment? You wanna have that behavior,
right, from the people that they're gonna the
culture, the the they're gonna participate. They should
participate.
Can you can you technology
that away?
Can you can you just
buy the technology that makes everybody play? No.
(27:42):
No. It's it's top
top down, middle middle across, bottom up. Everybody
has to understand that if they
have a tool, if the tool doesn't work
for them or it hasn't been engineered for
their needs and their workflows and business processes,
nobody will use it. It's a mindset.
It's an understanding that we're doing this so
(28:04):
that we can get here. It's a journey.
How do you foster that culture? Well,
I am not in the business of having
to foster that culture.
It's an all hands on deck situation through
change management,
organizational
development,
learning organizations.
For me, I foster it
(28:25):
by understanding
why people call things the way they call
them. Is that how
different stakeholders can access it, or how can
I make multiple ways of of discovering
those things?
I am part of breaking down the tech
so that humans can take advantage.
I'm sorry. I I am not necessarily the
person that fosters that that culture from top
(28:47):
down to bottom up. I do it where
I'm at. So you're you're grandmother? That's right.
And my mother. And your mother.
My poor husband.
Quit your fostering. You don't have to foster
everybody you talk to. Yeah. My god.
I know. It was a lot easier when
it was just little newspapers or parts of
a book. You know? Now it's it's everything
(29:08):
everywhere all the time. What is the future?
I won't say for the field of knowledge
management because I don't think we're cohesive enough
to say we have anything to stand on
other than an ISO.
But what's the future? I couch that with
this. I still see in here
there's a downslide
of Kilometers,
(29:29):
and I also see an uptick
in Kilometers.
And it's not industry specific. I I think
I've seen organizations try it and do it,
and then they're like, yep. We're not doing
it anymore. And then other ones pick it
up. It it we just can't get around
the fact that the information is just pumping
out exponentially, and now we we can't really
get our arms around it from the the
AI part. But I'm very pro developing
(29:52):
the human critical thinking skills,
empowering
people in their business processes
to understand
how to use special Gen
AI conversational tools
or other tools that are like knowledge graphs,
but they're more to the scale.
The future for me is making sure that
people don't stick their head in the sand
(30:13):
and that they come around and they understand
what the impact and the benefits are for
them to be proactive
by getting wherewithal to not be afraid of
using these tools.
I think a lot of people are, you
know, oh, I give up all the tech.
I give up. I I was feeling that
way a couple years ago, and I realized
I can't. I have to make this work
(30:33):
for myself and help other
people. Because if you don't get that human
piece in the human in the loop really
clear about what you should do, what you
shouldn't do, how you as a SME are
gonna know if it's a good answer or
not, how to use the tools within the
best way that they were intended to be
used.
Those types of things, the future for me
(30:55):
is to make sure that people
show one another the best way to use
these things to save themselves time and not
feel left behind. That's kind of a shorter
term future, but
it's all about how do we raise the
human impact. The human impact is a challenge,
as you said. There is a point where
you're tired of treading water
(31:16):
and you just say, alright. I'm done. And
I've hit that wall a few times.
And I will say it'll probably come more
and more as I spend more time on
this earth. But
there is that inquisitive
piece of, like, I wanna learn. I wanna
I have a desire to understand. Yes. That's
great. That's right? So that's the only thing
(31:37):
that keeps me in in the lane. Mhmm.
But not everybody has that. The frustration piece,
I just talked to somebody yesterday that's still
dealing with a flip phone.
And I'm like,
oh my god. I can't even back myself
up
20 years to think of what was just
that.
There's a comfort zone. Totally. So they don't
(31:57):
wanna get outside of their their fear or
they're they're just done. They're like, I'm full.
I've learned enough. I'm gonna go watch TV.
See you later. Oh, yeah. Do you see
that across any enterprise in particular that,
in a industry or something like that? Is
there worse industries than others?
The saturation
(32:17):
of next? Well, I do see it in
government.
I do see it government.
I am not in a sector
primarily. My sector primarily is international development, and
so people know they have to keep learning.
And I would like to be able to
take people as best I can and say,
okay. What are you working on right now?
What is this business process, and how can
(32:38):
I show you how to save yourself some
time Mhmm? And do this to the degree
that will really add value to your product?
Take you from being reactive or my head
in the sand to proactive.
How can you see patterns, things emerge, etcetera
Mhmm. That you couldn't see before. You keep
talking this international space.
(32:58):
Is there a nationality? Is there a geographical
region
where the people are just
like natural Kilometers
adaptive people? What a great question.
I can't answer that in particular.
Again, it's a matter of understanding
more,
giving the voice to the locations and the
(33:18):
municipalities
and the local regions rather than pushing Kilometers
down from above from an NGO or from
funders.
And so we're finding that local
indigenous knowledge communities
don't wanna share per se until they are
shown what the benefits are for them. A
very large emphasis in international develop now is
(33:40):
to raise those voices,
equip those people with more ways to talk
to one another across regions
and start to sow the seeds of
natural kms, storytelling,
cultural preservation,
also digital preservation.
It's a very growing and new direction and
priority.
(34:00):
There's not one culture you can say is
just really
genetically
set to do this. Yeah. I I wish
I knew more about that, you know, but
I I know you could talk to Gladys
Kimboi.
She is a Kilometers rock star.
She has done tremendous work in Africa Mhmm.
In Kenya, and she could tell you a
little bit about how she sees it. I
(34:21):
asked that routinely just because I would like
to hear somebody say, oh, the folks in
the Netherlands
or Holland, they're they're all you know, I
don't know. Where wherever that place may be,
there there seems to be,
you know, as a personality
trait of a people,
there seems to be, I I would think,
an easy, oh, yeah. These folks are not
(34:42):
good, and these guys are Irish.
Yeah.
My grandmother was Irish. So
I think you've got a fabulous question there.
Okay. And I think it would be something
you could encourage lots of people to talk
about. Well, thank you. I'm unfortunately very boring
and not don't have a good answer for
you on that. I think the bigger question
(35:03):
is is that, you know, of all the
things that humans study,
and we know that in anthropology and other
domains,
civilizations
are looked at
to a very large depth of understanding.
And with everything I know about the behaviors
of what it takes to be a good
k m'er
and somebody who cares about knowledge and helping
(35:24):
others and learning
in a very rudimentary way, these are all
tribal
activities. This is this is a Very much
so. Right? It's an indigenous
tribal
mentality
of Yeah. Strengthening
all, strengthening the the capacity and the proficiency
of others
through knowledge.
Beautiful. Yeah. Mhmm. So maybe we're just a
(35:46):
Kilometers tribe all of ourselves, and it doesn't
matter your background or or creed. I don't
know. I I've met so many different people
in your seat that
all have a different story how they landed
or got into knowledge management and not in
any one straight line has it ever happened
that I can recall.
It didn't happen that way for me. There
(36:07):
seems to be a thread of similar personality
traits.
Oh, that's so cool. That's my that's my
perception.
That's that's my anecdotal
observation
that there seems to be a level of
caring
that is not a trainable skill set. It
is usually rooted in family or society or
somewhere in the upbringing that makes that part
(36:29):
of their person.
That's fascinating.
You you would have a a really good
view of all of that because of all
the conversations that you've had. That's really fascinating.
Alright, my friend. Any last words of wisdom
from Ireland or anywhere else?
No. I got into knowledge management because I
found a tool
(36:49):
to share
documents.
I started
deploying
extranets before they were called that. You know,
nobody was on a shared network drive. Nobody
had the ability to email, really.
As these tools emerged, I could immediately see
that we could connect people that weren't on
a connected network to get those documents to
them. And so that was my gateway drug
(37:10):
to becoming a knowledge manager. That's that's usually
the thing. Right? It's some something that you
see the value of. How was it? And
isn't it disappointing
as a seer of this that those that
do not see?
And it's like, how can you not see
the value of this? Yes.
Are you passionate about that? I mean, do
(37:32):
you does your blood pressure come up and
you're like, what the heck? What what's what
do you not see here? So I was
so convinced that this tool that I wanted
to deploy
would answer that mail
so resoundingly
successfully
that I just deployed it without asking permission
at a law firm.
So
and they loved it.
(37:54):
I know.
And I wonder sometimes,
where did the,
gumption go? Because, you know, now it's not
that easy. Don't press that button yet. Wait
a minute. We haven't we haven't talked to
everybody.
You know, I was just because I would
I knew it was the the answer, and
that's why I didn't Where does that confidence
come from? Because of it solves the problem.
(38:16):
Yeah. But where does that confidence come from?
Not every person on the planet
has the wherewithal
to press go to hell with the circumstances
or what's gonna you're right. I mean, not
everybody has that. So where does that confidence
level come from? Is that a family trait
also? I don't know. I think I was
pretty insane now looking back, but
(38:36):
it changed the course of my career, so
in a good way. Maybe we change that
word of insane to just super confident and
and call it call it a day. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright, my friend. Well, thank you for
joining our little community here across the globe
of knowledge people. Thank you. I enjoyed our
conversation so much.
(39:00):
Extraordinary journey, and we hope the experiences gained
add value to you and yours. See you
next time at because you need to know.
If you'd like to contact us, please email
byntk@pioneerdashks.org,
or find us on LinkedIn.
(39:28):
Thank you for listening to Because You Need
to Know, the reference podcast in knowledge management.
My name is Soni Tonebe. As an art
administrator,
Cause You Need to Know has been my
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(00:54):
Pioneer Knowledge Services welcomes you to the next
because you need to know. I'm your host,
Edwin k Morris. I serve as president and
founder of this organization, and we are thrilled
to offer this educational program. These design conversations
bring you people's experiences
from all over the globe in field of
knowledge management,
nonprofit work, and innovation.
(01:22):
Hi there. My name is Liz McClain, Elizabeth
McClain on LinkedIn.
I live in Huntingtown, Maryland, which is, outside
of the Washington DC region, very close to
the Chesapeake Bay,
which means Maryland blue crabs,
Old Bay,
Calvert Cliffs, Miocene Fossils,
and depending on where you are,
(01:44):
Orioles baseball or Nats baseball.
I absolutely
love working on knowledge management for international development.
I have had experience with international development for
a number of years and it is a
model that I love because it's really focused
on collaborative
learning and adapting for innovation.
(02:05):
The field that I work in is knowledge
domain modeling.
This has been an evolutionary
process, and I'm sure Edwin will tease that
out. And the thing that I've learned about
myself is that I am a third generation
information sharer.
My grandmother was married to a White House
press correspondent and she was very well read.
(02:25):
Whenever she saw articles that she saw thought
so and so would need,
she clipped them out and sent them in
letters.
My mother did the same thing,
and it took me a while to realize
that every time I saw something
that I thought someone needed that they didn't
necessarily want me to send to them.
So
(02:46):
so I have to curtail
my natural third generation instincts of information sharing
to some degree.
I've also learned that I am never not
learning,
but it's not just for the sake of
learning. It's for problem solving with knowledge flow.
I create value by facilitating
knowledge flow and knowledge sharing. So this
(03:09):
first glimpse
of what a concerned
citizen can do with knowledge
to help others
is a, a not self serving
mentality.
It is other directed.
Where did she get that knack? Where did
she get that? Grandmothers have special powers, you
know. So give me grandmother's name. Grandma Anne
(03:29):
Grandma Anne
was
conscientious
and thoughtful
in developing
people's knowledge.
Correct. And what did they not know that
she needed to help them figure out? How
was that received at that time? Do you
know? Do you know how because I can
just imagine some people would be like, hey.
Hey. Hey. Who who are you to tell
(03:49):
me anything? You know, I don't know how
extensive her practice was in those years. I
just know I would get a letter, and
they would be folded up newspaper clippings. That
is so cool. And I would think to
myself,
well, I'm not really sure how this applies
to me. Yeah. But thanks, grandma.
So she must have just loved
I I almost wanna relate it to, like,
(04:12):
gardening. Right? So she is just Oh, yes.
Constantly
fostering. Uh-huh. And you're and you're saying it
not always was a like, wow. This is
a little out of left field, maybe. Sometimes.
Yeah. It wasn't always straight on. So she
must have been mindful enough to think, well,
this might be associated.
I better send it. Right. Oh, she had
(04:32):
all sorts of angles, I'm sure, because these
are the same ones that I have. Like,
oh, you should you should really spool up
on this topic. You you know, this is
so related to what you were talking to
me about the other day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So I have learned to to make money
from this and not necessarily to foist it
on people. Although you might feel that way
if you follow my LinkedIn profile.
(04:54):
The way it developed for me was just
a natural, this is what we do. We
share these tidbits. They could be great. They
could be off. My point of departure for
how this really got to be my whole
reason for being is that I have an
amazing amount of empathy
and I worked at a very formative place.
It was a satellite telecommunications
(05:15):
startup and I was responsible for circulating
every day was do or die. $6,000,000,000
every day was do or die. We didn't
have intranets or extranets. We have fax machines.
And if I didn't have what I needed
to get to the right people at the
right time, which is the old adage for
Kilometers,
it was painful.
(05:36):
And so that's kinda where my pain point
roots of my sharing started. Alright. So let
me just flip this. So I know your
background, your official
college training is around library sciences. Correct? I
have a master's in that. My undergrad is
in music. Oh. It is. So what's your
musical forte? What do you what do you
do? Voice. But mine was performance and
(05:59):
performance major at James Madison University
School of Music was really immersed in music
analysis and theory, even though I had so
much information about the macro
and the micro. Mhmm. And so leading you
know, we could we could have a lot
of points of departure on that one. So
from music and the word I'm hearing in
(06:20):
what you just described is synthesizing
That's it. If you're traveling from different areas
in order to comprehend.
So an expert might just stick in one
hemisphere,
but more of a synthesizer
or a generalist will
dance all over the place
and be a butterfly to collect bits
to understand more or at least
(06:41):
try to understand more. Yeah? Yeah. I mean,
I have been traditionally a boundary spanner, so
I will have multiple things that I sort
of monitor. And as I get more and
more specialized and in-depth with the field that
I'm pursuing
in taxonomies, ontologies,
and knowledge graphs, and Gen AI tools,
it's still helpful to be a boundary spanner.
(07:02):
So, again, it's that macro
and then the micro, and how do they
come together and how do they shift. In
your opening, you talked about knowledge domains. Yep.
So I quickly found the Empire State University,
and they have a nice little page here
on knowledge domains.
And see if you agree with this. I
don't know if we're talking the same thing.
(07:24):
Different knowledge domains are declarative,
procedural,
strategic,
self knowledge,
tacit knowledge,
and integrated knowledge.
Does that the domains you're speaking of? No.
Not particularly.
When I talk about a knowledge domain,
we're talking about being in a given entity,
like an enterprise
(07:45):
or or an NGO,
nonprofit,
you know Got it. Yeah. Organizational knowledge domain.
Got it. Well, it's funny because strategic self,
tacit, and integrated,
procedural, and declarative, they all kinda work here,
you know, it it it works in that
bucket. It's pretty cool. What out of the
(08:05):
world of an internal
structure of knowledge for an organization
do you find is, like, the weakest link?
What seems to be the big bucket of
divots
that doesn't
work well? Great question.
Siloing, which is,
something that is is becoming more and more
(08:26):
of an Achilles' heel for organizations
because
they have these repositories and they have these
databases and they have structured and they have
unstructured content.
And all of these things live and don't
talk to one another. So I would definitely
say that's one of the biggest ones. Okay.
So I'm gonna back up the train here.
I think silos
I think in the the idea of how
organizations
(08:47):
are split,
silos are those things that are usually tied
to people and structure.
But you're pushing it down to the data
repository
systems and that sort of digital structure. Yeah?
Yeah. Well, it starts there because we don't
want it to be micro, micro, micro. We
want the ability
through the use of, say, a knowledge graph
(09:09):
to be able to pull those disparate sources
together semantically.
And then rather than worrying about where this
came from and which repository or which tool,
be able to query
semantically
with richer and more contextually
complex
queries
that pull from all of these data, structured
or unstructured,
(09:30):
pull and make meaning make much more semantically
rich meaning
from using these graphs. K. So I'm gonna
go to, for the listener, the IBM definition,
ibm.com,
of a knowledge graph is
also known as a semantic network, represents a
network of real world entities such as objects,
(09:50):
events, situations, or concepts,
and illustrates the relationships between them. Well, isn't
that an ontology?
Yes. Ontologies make that happen. Mhmm. Okay. So
you're saying that in this day and age,
of
all the enterprise level tools you'd ever wanna
see,
(10:11):
we're still in this bucket of things don't
connect.
That's it. Well, what the heck are we
doing? What what's the problem?
I mean, it's not, hey. Every salesman's got
the solution for this. What is the problem?
Those systems aren't connected.
Let's all be the bridge, shall we? We
will be the bridge. So is the problem
(10:31):
because of
archaic systems
and or disparate systems, meaning that, oh, that
division just went out and bought their own
stuff regardless what the rest of the organization
was doing, and now
they're stuck in that bucket unless somebody at
the top says, oh, hey. We're getting rid
of all these little pieces, and we're doing
this one master enterprise level solution.
(10:54):
That's part of it. But is it also
a matter of standardization?
Are there standardization issues across
old and new and and that sort of
thing? Mhmm. Can you go into that? Yeah.
Yeah. So this is definitely a multipronged thing.
I would say, first of all, none of
the nirvana
of semantic tools
can work if the data isn't enriched with
(11:16):
metadata and using standards. So you have to
have those building blocks, and that is a
big one.
But really, it comes from both the executive
strategies. You know? What is the overarching mission?
What is the drive? What are we why
are we building capacity
for so that we have the impact that
we want to have? So you have to
(11:37):
look at at it from, do we know
what we know? Do we know what we
know when and and how we know it?
What don't we know to do what we
need to do? Those are big overarching strategy
things.
But from the bottom up, you do need
those metadata standards. You do need clean data.
And so those it's it's a multiprong problem.
(11:57):
Who owns that problem?
You've talked about a couple of different things.
I started with the chief technology officer, then
that moved over to the chief knowledge officer.
Then I'm like, well, we need a chief
cognition officer
or somebody that kinda combines all the pieces.
Yes. And the pieces are, again, multipronged or
multifaceted.
Another zinger of a word for attack on
(12:20):
this.
But, no, all everyone owns the problem. Who
is in charge of the strategy before achieving
the mission or the organization or the enterprise?
But somebody's gotta be accountable for it, though.
I mean, everybody can own it, but who's
accountable? Who who's in charge? Okay. Let let's
just stick to the let's stick to the
(12:41):
quest
who's accountable? The people who run the company.
So that's not just the CEO. That's the
communications offer. That's the human resources offer. That's
all of the stakeholders
that wanna align the enterprise
with how are we managing our knowledge assets
so that we do what we do better
(13:02):
and find out what we aren't doing that
we should be doing.
I'm just looking up something. So
I had a bit of a pushback using
the language of knowledge asset in the last
couple years. Oh, yes. I'm not.
Yeah. Alright. So let's let's dig on that.
So is it an asset or not?
If you look at the book by Douglas
Laney from Gartner
(13:24):
talking about infonomics,
he looks completely at the world of data
as an asset, as a competitive intelligent
advantage. Mhmm. And so his work focuses on
information and data assets. It doesn't focus on
knowledge assets, but we know that we have
to be able to show our work with
both the data and the content. I will
(13:45):
always argue that these are knowledge assets, whether
they are data information or
captures and conversations,
storytelling.
I will always argue that if you don't
have your arms around and have a way
to leverage and harness
each of those elements,
then you are missing a huge asset.
Absolutely. I would agree with that. I took
(14:08):
a look at Cambridge. Take a look at
their dictionary on what knowledge asset is. And,
actually, I love this definition. Cool. Knowledge asset
is information or skills within a business that
makes it more valuable
or competitive. That's exactly it. Yeah. Right? But
why is that such a hard sell?
Because I've been on the fence. You know,
I I see it as an asset just
(14:28):
because of that definition. I've always seen it
as knowledge as an asset,
and there are some that push back and
push back on that language.
But then I also have seen it as
I come from a natural resource
background,
managing timber and timberlands and and forestry and
all that. So
I also think of knowledge as a resource.
(14:51):
But if you look up natural resource, it's
all geological. It's nothing to do with or,
you know, atmospheric. It's nothing to do with
what we're talking about. I still feel knowledge
is a resource also.
As a taxonomist,
how do you split these hairs and why
do people care so much? I'm not sure
I follow your question. The different terminologies.
You know, it's either this or it's that
(15:12):
or it's either. No. No. So I wouldn't
look at it as a taxonomist in this
case. Okay. So a resource is definitely
what I characterize these these
let's call them resources, not assets, just for
argument's sake. It's that environment of how do
we get to what we do know? How
do we get to what people know? How
(15:33):
do we socialize and how do we communicate
and how do we have those cultures?
So you can call it a resource.
You can call it research.
You can call it any number of things.
I like to call it an asset because
when you use what you have to innovate
and learn
and grow and it's a journey, How could
that not be an asset? I'm
(15:55):
with you. Going off the asset base, can
we make the leap to a knowledge economy?
Oh, sure.
Everything now is this journey of innovation. How
do we get our arms around what it
is that we have? Do we even know
what we have? Do we have what we
need to do better?
Do our bureaus of child labor over on
this side talk to our food bureaus and
(16:17):
what are the intersections? What are the patterns
that emerge?
You know, this is a really simplistic way
of saying it, but not knowing what you
do know
and not knowing what you don't know
is completely
an economy.
It's an economic
impact on what you're doing, whether it's a
humanitarian aid, whether it's an enterprise, whether it's
(16:39):
a nonprofit. What would be your advice to
a
organization,
say small to mid,
that is trying to figure out if they
should bother
worrying
about their knowledge assets. The answer is don't
worry, do.
Get your metadata standards in order and make
(16:59):
it make it work for you. You don't
have to apply a large organization
enterprise
solution to get more of what you have
if you're calling
things what your stakeholders and what you need
to do to communicate across those silos. I'm
gonna throw back to your
past history as an intern at the World
Digital
(17:20):
Library. Yay. Hey, everybody. If you go to
the World Digital Library, which is the Library
of Congress's
outfit, you're gonna find all kinds of things
you can't believe. And
somebody somewhere said, you know, maybe we should
digitize this stuff. Maybe somebody could use it.
Maybe there's some value to this. Maybe it's
an asset to somebody.
(17:41):
Yeah? So tell me I think we're the
hashtag.
Let's go back to that experience because,
in your LinkedIn, you talk about
synthesizing,
identify, locate, review, and synthesize
these materials
and objects.
That's what we're saying organizations
(18:02):
should be doing
at any level. Right? You're you're saying, hey,
you gotta have some somebody's gotta be accountable
for all this stuff you got. If you're
not, then that shows you have no
it doesn't align
to anybody's vision that this stuff matters. Well,
that's it for the meaning of it, not
for the sake of doing those things or
learning from what has been
(18:24):
gathered and made explicit, not just to have
it in catalogs and search
intranets and those things to make it usable
and reusable. You'd it's not to say save
everything.
No. Because there's there right? Because eventually, you're
gonna kill yourself with lack of storage. But
(18:44):
there has to be a policy in place
to say what's in, what's out. Oh, yeah.
You save this for 7 years and delete
it.
Right? The records management stuff. Mhmm. So can
you kinda give us a give the listener
kind of an overview of what this,
interim was like for you at the World
Digital Library. Yeah. Happy to do it. It
was a phenomenal
opportunity since I do live nearby, and I
(19:05):
was at the time, I was at Catholic
University for library and information science.
But what was going on with this that
I was working on, which at the time
was a really big deal,
was finding ways to work with Wikipedia and
Wikimedia and
find ways to surface what the World Digital
Library was doing
(19:26):
by adding links in articles about these artifacts
and objects
to point back to the World Digital Library.
So it wasn't just sitting somewhere in a
server in the World Digital Library.
It was being put into places where people
wouldn't know that the library
existed, but that they might be looking it
up on Wikipedia and say, oh, I never
(19:47):
knew that. Let me go read more, not
knowing that there was a World Digital Library.
Give us an overview
for those that may not be library
savvy.
The distinction between what you just described, the
the Library of Congress, and then what this
must have been I don't know. How long
ago did this digital library become an entity?
(20:08):
And then how did it grow? It's been
quite a while. I was there in 2010,
and
that World Digital Library is no longer growing
or
extant. It is now just a piece of
the Library of Congress writ large. It was
a
consortium
of world libraries all over the globe, the
Egyptian library or the the library in Alexandria,
(20:31):
those major major UNESCO world libraries. The question
again was,
what's the difference between
So if we're talking about
organizations
that see how adoption and innovation
have to happen,
I would assume the Library of Congress probably
sat on their hands for a while waiting
to see what the Internet was gonna be
(20:53):
until they started you know, maybe we should
do you know, I I just think the
percolation process for
something as historic or culturally bound as a
library system
to adopt a digital way
must have been a slow
wheel turn, I I'm guessing.
I don't really know the answer to that,
(21:14):
unfortunately. Okay. But everything was very becoming a
digital library at that time around the world.
Mhmm. It's a UNESCO, you know, mandate. It
was like, let's get this going. Let's put
these thing these resources together, meaning resources of
the different world libraries. So I wasn't there
for the buildup. I was there to do
my internship,
which was to surface and increase the the
(21:36):
audience. What I just did was, just to
clarify,
the digital library
was launched in 2009,
which which sounds like pretty recent history. Yeah.
It's it's you know what I mean? Not
to me. But yeah.
So alright. Well, we'll drop that little thread
there. So thanks for sharing that. Oh, sure.
(21:58):
So we've talked about problematic areas, and it
all sounds very basic when we're talking about
just basic records keeping skills of an organization.
Is there any resource you would suggest for
an organization, such as a a text that
you liked or some some source that's freely
available that could give them kind of a
(22:18):
self help kind of a better way? That
just depends on the the scale that I
wouldn't wanna give a one size fits all
recommendation for that. The things that I am
reading now are the Kilometers Graff
Cookbook by Andreas Bloomer and Helmut Nagy,
or Nej, I think he says it, n
a g y. I'm also in the middle
(22:40):
of I'm jumping in and out of the
AI enterprise
by Seth Early.
Not all enterprises
are ready for
that kind of a scale, and so
it depends on the size, the purpose, the
mission. Is it enterprise? Is it is it
nonprofit? Is it an NGO?
(23:00):
I think the most important thing that we
could say for one size fits all is
that
you have to pay attention
to embedding any asset
with good metadata.
You don't need to necessarily read about the
good metadata,
but you need to
put yourself in the position of being able
to care and
(23:21):
steward. It's steward. It's like
the care and feeding of a garden. You're
constantly
making sure that the metadata is ready to
go and make it data ready
so that when you do get to the
point that you can turn on some of
these more sophisticated
approaches,
you'll be ready to have data that works
for your organization
and out in the world as linked data,
(23:42):
which enriches semantic complexity. Okay. So I'm gonna
walk the listener through kind of a how
what what does this mean to them, to
an individual? Good. I looked up the definition
of metadata, and guess what it says? Data
about data. It's the data of data. So
the simple
idea of what that would be to a
regular person on the street was using your
mobile device to take a photograph.
(24:04):
Yes. Good idea. The photograph itself is an
image of whatever that image is.
But associated with that are date and time,
sometimes location.
There could be other metadata that's automatically generated
at the point of click
that now becomes part of the image that
most people don't look at. It's not, you
(24:26):
know, in the forefront.
That metadata gives you the availability
to have machines
in order to connect with the image in
different ways. Would that be a good explanation?
That's a really good explanation.
Metadata
comes in descriptions
in metadata properties. Like, it's an image, it's
a file, it's a in this format, it
(24:47):
has this date. It was created by
more descriptions
that are different styles of descriptions that you
add yourself because, you know, at the end
of the day, I would like to be
able to associate
this piece Right. With this piece to bring
together in a new collection because they were
both at the Hollywood Bowl,
in 1924,
whereas they may not be housed together. Would
(25:08):
it simply be referred to that function tagging?
That's,
Is that tagging? Tagging is considered to be
a more informal thing. When you are doing
metadata and metadata standards,
you know, you're tagging, but you're doing it
less It's more of a cat cataract is,
Categorization
classification.
(25:29):
You're good. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I don't
book these after lunch. Alright.
I should have known.
Would the was the tagging concept more fall
into a folksonomy? It has the connotations of
that.
There are various levels of control,
and tagging
by the person
is ability to make it more user oriented.
(25:51):
Right. Whereas, if you're coming at it from
a text message or a librarian, you want
controlled vocabulary.
Tagging can be in the generation
or in the the general direction of the
spectrum Mhmm. Word folksonomy.
That's a good good way to put it.
Everybody wondered what you would decide to be
your definition
of knowledge management.
(26:12):
I'm so glad you asked. Yeah. Good.
Knowledge management for me is is not any
one discipline. It's a series of complimentary
disciplines with the communication,
the culture,
the strategy. To me, knowledge management is just
under the strategy for the mission.
Whatever it takes to advance that strategy, whether
(26:35):
it's technology,
I prefer to pick people first,
people and their processes and their stakeholders.
So you've got the need to keep them
easily able to access and discover what they
need to know, to do what they need
to do, and to do it better.
So for me, that's the general knowledge management
umbrella, and it has multiple flavors and implementations
(26:58):
and strategies.
But as a knowledge manager for myself,
I am
working with people first
to derive frameworks
and models of what they know and how
they need to access it and discover it
so that they can improve and learn and
collaborate
as knowledge management participants.
In that framework,
(27:19):
would it be safe to say you're designated
a
organizational learning environment? You wanna have that behavior,
right, from the people that they're gonna the
culture, the the they're gonna participate. They should
participate.
Can you can you technology
that away?
Can you can you just
buy the technology that makes everybody play? No.
(27:42):
No. It's it's top
top down, middle middle across, bottom up. Everybody
has to understand that if they
have a tool, if the tool doesn't work
for them or it hasn't been engineered for
their needs and their workflows and business processes,
nobody will use it. It's a mindset.
It's an understanding that we're doing this so
(28:04):
that we can get here. It's a journey.
How do you foster that culture? Well,
I am not in the business of having
to foster that culture.
It's an all hands on deck situation through
change management,
organizational
development,
learning organizations.
For me, I foster it
(28:25):
by understanding
why people call things the way they call
them. Is that how
different stakeholders can access it, or how can
I make multiple ways of of discovering
those things?
I am part of breaking down the tech
so that humans can take advantage.
I'm sorry. I I am not necessarily the
person that fosters that that culture from top
(28:47):
down to bottom up. I do it where
I'm at. So you're you're grandmother? That's right.
And my mother. And your mother.
My poor husband.
Quit your fostering. You don't have to foster
everybody you talk to. Yeah. My god.
I know. It was a lot easier when
it was just little newspapers or parts of
a book. You know? Now it's it's everything
(29:08):
everywhere all the time. What is the future?
I won't say for the field of knowledge
management because I don't think we're cohesive enough
to say we have anything to stand on
other than an ISO.
But what's the future? I couch that with
this. I still see in here
there's a downslide
of Kilometers,
(29:29):
and I also see an uptick
in Kilometers.
And it's not industry specific. I I think
I've seen organizations try it and do it,
and then they're like, yep. We're not doing
it anymore. And then other ones pick it
up. It it we just can't get around
the fact that the information is just pumping
out exponentially, and now we we can't really
get our arms around it from the the
AI part. But I'm very pro developing
(29:52):
the human critical thinking skills,
empowering
people in their business processes
to understand
how to use special Gen
AI conversational tools
or other tools that are like knowledge graphs,
but they're more to the scale.
The future for me is making sure that
people don't stick their head in the sand
(30:13):
and that they come around and they understand
what the impact and the benefits are for
them to be proactive
by getting wherewithal to not be afraid of
using these tools.
I think a lot of people are, you
know, oh, I give up all the tech.
I give up. I I was feeling that
way a couple years ago, and I realized
I can't. I have to make this work
(30:33):
for myself and help other
people. Because if you don't get that human
piece in the human in the loop really
clear about what you should do, what you
shouldn't do, how you as a SME are
gonna know if it's a good answer or
not, how to use the tools within the
best way that they were intended to be
used.
Those types of things, the future for me
(30:55):
is to make sure that people
show one another the best way to use
these things to save themselves time and not
feel left behind. That's kind of a shorter
term future, but
it's all about how do we raise the
human impact. The human impact is a challenge,
as you said. There is a point where
you're tired of treading water
(31:16):
and you just say, alright. I'm done. And
I've hit that wall a few times.
And I will say it'll probably come more
and more as I spend more time on
this earth. But
there is that inquisitive
piece of, like, I wanna learn. I wanna
I have a desire to understand. Yes. That's
great. That's right? So that's the only thing
(31:37):
that keeps me in in the lane. Mhmm.
But not everybody has that. The frustration piece,
I just talked to somebody yesterday that's still
dealing with a flip phone.
And I'm like,
oh my god. I can't even back myself
up
20 years to think of what was just
that.
There's a comfort zone. Totally. So they don't
(31:57):
wanna get outside of their their fear or
they're they're just done. They're like, I'm full.
I've learned enough. I'm gonna go watch TV.
See you later. Oh, yeah. Do you see
that across any enterprise in particular that,
in a industry or something like that? Is
there worse industries than others?
The saturation
(32:17):
of next? Well, I do see it in
government.
I do see it government.
I am not in a sector
primarily. My sector primarily is international development, and
so people know they have to keep learning.
And I would like to be able to
take people as best I can and say,
okay. What are you working on right now?
What is this business process, and how can
(32:38):
I show you how to save yourself some
time Mhmm? And do this to the degree
that will really add value to your product?
Take you from being reactive or my head
in the sand to proactive.
How can you see patterns, things emerge, etcetera
Mhmm. That you couldn't see before. You keep
talking this international space.
(32:58):
Is there a nationality? Is there a geographical
region
where the people are just
like natural Kilometers
adaptive people? What a great question.
I can't answer that in particular.
Again, it's a matter of understanding
more,
giving the voice to the locations and the
(33:18):
municipalities
and the local regions rather than pushing Kilometers
down from above from an NGO or from
funders.
And so we're finding that local
indigenous knowledge communities
don't wanna share per se until they are
shown what the benefits are for them. A
very large emphasis in international develop now is
(33:40):
to raise those voices,
equip those people with more ways to talk
to one another across regions
and start to sow the seeds of
natural kms, storytelling,
cultural preservation,
also digital preservation.
It's a very growing and new direction and
priority.
(34:00):
There's not one culture you can say is
just really
genetically
set to do this. Yeah. I I wish
I knew more about that, you know, but
I I know you could talk to Gladys
Kimboi.
She is a Kilometers rock star.
She has done tremendous work in Africa Mhmm.
In Kenya, and she could tell you a
little bit about how she sees it. I
(34:21):
asked that routinely just because I would like
to hear somebody say, oh, the folks in
the Netherlands
or Holland, they're they're all you know, I
don't know. Where wherever that place may be,
there there seems to be,
you know, as a personality
trait of a people,
there seems to be, I I would think,
an easy, oh, yeah. These folks are not
(34:42):
good, and these guys are Irish.
Yeah.
My grandmother was Irish. So
I think you've got a fabulous question there.
Okay. And I think it would be something
you could encourage lots of people to talk
about. Well, thank you. I'm unfortunately very boring
and not don't have a good answer for
you on that. I think the bigger question
(35:03):
is is that, you know, of all the
things that humans study,
and we know that in anthropology and other
domains,
civilizations
are looked at
to a very large depth of understanding.
And with everything I know about the behaviors
of what it takes to be a good
k m'er
and somebody who cares about knowledge and helping
(35:24):
others and learning
in a very rudimentary way, these are all
tribal
activities. This is this is a Very much
so. Right? It's an indigenous
tribal
mentality
of Yeah. Strengthening
all, strengthening the the capacity and the proficiency
of others
through knowledge.
Beautiful. Yeah. Mhmm. So maybe we're just a
(35:46):
Kilometers tribe all of ourselves, and it doesn't
matter your background or or creed. I don't
know. I I've met so many different people
in your seat that
all have a different story how they landed
or got into knowledge management and not in
any one straight line has it ever happened
that I can recall.
It didn't happen that way for me. There
(36:07):
seems to be a thread of similar personality
traits.
Oh, that's so cool. That's my that's my
perception.
That's that's my anecdotal
observation
that there seems to be a level of
caring
that is not a trainable skill set. It
is usually rooted in family or society or
somewhere in the upbringing that makes that part
(36:29):
of their person.
That's fascinating.
You you would have a a really good
view of all of that because of all
the conversations that you've had. That's really fascinating.
Alright, my friend. Any last words of wisdom
from Ireland or anywhere else?
No. I got into knowledge management because I
found a tool
(36:49):
to share
documents.
I started
deploying
extranets before they were called that. You know,
nobody was on a shared network drive. Nobody
had the ability to email, really.
As these tools emerged, I could immediately see
that we could connect people that weren't on
a connected network to get those documents to
them. And so that was my gateway drug
(37:10):
to becoming a knowledge manager. That's that's usually
the thing. Right? It's some something that you
see the value of. How was it? And
isn't it disappointing
as a seer of this that those that
do not see?
And it's like, how can you not see
the value of this? Yes.
Are you passionate about that? I mean, do
(37:32):
you does your blood pressure come up and
you're like, what the heck? What what's what
do you not see here? So I was
so convinced that this tool that I wanted
to deploy
would answer that mail
so resoundingly
successfully
that I just deployed it without asking permission
at a law firm.
So
and they loved it.
(37:54):
I know.
And I wonder sometimes,
where did the,
gumption go? Because, you know, now it's not
that easy. Don't press that button yet. Wait
a minute. We haven't we haven't talked to
everybody.
You know, I was just because I would
I knew it was the the answer, and
that's why I didn't Where does that confidence
come from? Because of it solves the problem.
(38:16):
Yeah. But where does that confidence come from?
Not every person on the planet
has the wherewithal
to press go to hell with the circumstances
or what's gonna you're right. I mean, not
everybody has that. So where does that confidence
level come from? Is that a family trait
also? I don't know. I think I was
pretty insane now looking back, but
(38:36):
it changed the course of my career, so
in a good way. Maybe we change that
word of insane to just super confident and
and call it call it a day. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright, my friend. Well, thank you for
joining our little community here across the globe
of knowledge people. Thank you. I enjoyed our
conversation so much.
(39:00):
Extraordinary journey, and we hope the experiences gained
add value to you and yours. See you
next time at because you need to know.
If you'd like to contact us, please email
byntk@pioneerdashks.org,
or find us on LinkedIn.
(39:28):
Thank you for listening to Because You Need
to Know, the reference podcast in knowledge management.
My name is Soni Tonebe. As an art
administrator,
Cause You Need to Know has been my
go to podcast and has helped me hone
my management skills. Please consider sponsoring the podcast
with your business.
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