April 9, 2023 • 26 mins
Kurt drove away from New College of Florida for the last time with the phrase “organizational therapy” rolling around in his head. He left in his wake; many Rancid City Improvisational theater shows and an accidental college food-service boycott. He returned to DOE's Richland Laboratory to continue his work starting up the Fast Flux Test Facility, a sodium-cooled research reactor. When he drove away from the nuclear reactor for the last time, the personnel airlock was not breaking down every few weeks. The Camrol bearings rolled much-more smoothly.
Kurt has started up training programs, support organizations, planning groups, and many of the organizational and technology-development projects that flowed from them. These projects have synthesized lessons learned across the energy, high-tech, transportation, pharmaceutical, education, publishing, and political sectors. His current focus is on: Values-based decision making Infrastructures for collaborative, bottom-up conversations and negotiations Nurturing grassroot organizations, communication networks, and publishing pipelines Facilitating policy and knowledge architecture discussions Building operational solutions to speed intelligent behaviors Contributing his cello/ piccolo-bass hybrid to improvisational musical ensembles
From research reactors to research documentation, Kurt gets people on the same page and gets things rolling. The reviews tell the story. “Anyone could learn from you.” “It was like we worked together for years” “I should be talking with you more.” “You always come up with something” “It's never the same way twice.” “They play better when you're here.”
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:12):
This is Edwin k Morris,
and you are about to embark on thenext Pioneer Knowledge Services
because you need to know a digitalresource for you to listen to
folks share their experience andknowledge around the field of knowledge
management and nonprofit work.
(00:33):
Hi there. My name is Kurt Conrad.I live in Pasco, Washington.
The most interesting thing nearme, there are many to choose from.
I guess I have to pick the Doe Hanfordsite cuz it was started in World War
II to produce plutonium that was droppedon Nagasaki and has a whole bunch of
nuclear waste and a bunchof decommissioned reactors. All sorts of fun stuff.
(00:56):
Also on the site, which is kind ofinteresting is Rattlesnake Mountain,
which happens to be the tallesttreeless mountain in North America.
I love working in, I'd say,really kind of negotiations,
either verbal negotiationsor what I do a lot,
which is really negotiatingautomated systems, my work in markup,
and that is a negotiation framework.
And so I'm constantly involved in tryingto get the bots to understand what
(01:20):
we're thinking and get them to dowhat we're hoping that they do.
And I would say I envisiona future that really, uh,
rapidly reverses global extinctions.That's kind of the big problem.
And if we don't try to get a handle onit, I'm not sure what will happen to us.
Smart.
In an organization that isdealing with technological
(01:40):
advances, how do you see,
or who would you call as themost responsible party for
its internal processes?
Is it it or does it justmaterialize out of thin air?
I have to give you a standard XMLconsultant's answer. That depends. I,
I can't say I've seenone pattern. It it, well,
(02:03):
and in fact the seriousquestion. Yeah. I mean,
the serious question is who should beresponsible for policy? Okay. I mean,
this was one of the topicswe wanted to get into, right?
I picked up PaulStraussman at an early age,
the politics of informationmanagement, and he says, write out,
it's primarily an issue of politics andthe technology's all secondary. Yeah,
right. The question is, who's makingthe policy decisions? Organizationally,
(02:28):
it's supposed to be management inholistic lifecycle organizations.
You see line level people and operationsgetting involved in that as well,
hopefully. But the phenomenon that Isee coming from a technology space,
it's this often technologists mm-hmm.
that have positionedthemselves in the process where they're
implicitly making policy.
And the first time I wroteabout this back in the nineties,
(02:50):
the stories that I used as exampleswere the derivatives industry.
Cuz we just had a hugeblow up derivatives.
And the issue there was financialtechnologists were making risk
decisions for organizations,private companies,
public organizations all blew up inthat first derivative thing. Mm-hmm.
, because the managementgroup couldn't see the risk,
(03:14):
they didn't understand thetechnology, they couldn't talk about,
they didn't have the conceptualframeworks to deal with it.
It was completelyoutside of their purview.
And that allowed the technologistbasically come in and say, okay,
I get to define what the riskprofile for your organization is.
Now you're using policy in thismeaning the same as governance?
No. Okay. Can you, can you split thathair for me? I mean, sure. Because I,
(03:36):
I have an idea what governance it is, butI, to me it's like, well, it's policy.
You're saying.
It's not, and again, back to straussman,
his definition of policy is whatyou do, what your organization does,
what you do is policy.
Now governance usually comes in thatwe're trying to define norms for policy
to define policy standards. And thatwould be the result of governance process.
(03:59):
Ah, those policy standards mayor may not impact behavior.
So the actual policy organization coulddiffer from anything that's been decided
or published, at least in the way I look.
At it. So policy in this frameworkis more action. Policy is action.
Not in my mind. Yes. When yousay policy, it's regulation,
that's paperwork that'srules, it's parameters,
(04:20):
but more so it's just theoperational flow and action.
And you could say those guiding documentsare trying to align policy mm-hmm.
around a set of behavioralends or a set of objectives or other
metrics or, or.
Whatever.
Tell me where governanceshould be in this to help steer
it.
Because it sounds like what you're sayingis that the technologists have kind
(04:43):
of, what was the oldterm? The, uh, land grab.
There was kind of a land grab for theaction because they could bring a lot
of automation to bear, butwho was like the old, uh,
fox and the henhouse kind of thing? Right.
There was no oversightto what they were doing.
Very often. How.
Do you fix it?
Um, usually when I get an organization,we have an issue like that,
(05:04):
I figure out who should beinvolved in making the decision,
usually around a publishing system, right?
Bring in those stakeholders and havethem involved in the decision making
process. Open it up, get more peopleinvolved, how many get involved. Uh,
it's a function of the organization.Sometimes it's still a small group,
sometimes, you know, it mightactually span different wings of,
(05:25):
of the larger organization.
Depends on how important thosedata standards are and the, uh,
system which is being put in.
Well,
in order to have that oversight back toyour paradigm that the governance kind
of drives the policy, or at least mm-hmm.
builds the frameworkthat it should operate in.
That oversight piece is almostas kind of translucent to the
(05:47):
point where unless everybody understandsthe technology, how the widgets work,
how,
how is it that you couldhave positive at attributable
oversight to something ifyou don't know how it works?
A and that's one of the challenges.Often it, well, I'll tell you,
I'm working in markup,right? Okay. So, uh,
(06:08):
I'm thinking of one client andspecifically that had this issue,
and as I pulled the management groupand their support group together,
and we started dealing with those issues.Yeah. I gave them training in XPath.
I wanted them to actually be able totalk about the parts of the market system
that we were talking about.
And that required a little bit oftraining so people got to where they could
talk about it.
At least have some awarenessaround all the moving parts.
(06:31):
Another thing that kind of occurs to me,
it was a organization that wastrying to move into markup.
So it's kind of a startup situation,
and they had a project they were focusingon, and in the lead up conversations,
it was clear that the group didn'treally understand what they were talking
about. So they're talkingpast each other a lot. Mm-hmm.
And so when I came in to give'em two weeks of training,
the first thing actually brought thesemanagement issues in up front and I ran
(06:55):
them through a structured discussionprocess that really got them.
Then on the same page,
they were synced on what theorganizational objectives were.
They could then actually explain whatthe terminology was they were using when
they talked about thisstuff. Get on the same page,
talk about it using a shared language,be able to move forward effectively.
In the framework of today's worldwhere there's so much on the shelf
(07:18):
for software and solutions.
Maybe you're trustinganother third party source to
validate and, you know what I mean?If it's an off-the-shelf solution,
you don't have to have the awareness andunderstanding of how it all works under
the hood as long as it does the job.Is that a shift from what it was?
(07:40):
And I'm presuming it is,
is that a major shift for most industriesfrom 30 years ago where everybody
built their own solutions foreverything to now where things are
more of an enterprisesoftware is the system?
I think that depends on the marketsegment You're in, the segment I'm in.
We're still doing an awfullot of customization.
(08:01):
I'm actually doing a data conversionproject right now from an old generation
that did it to a new one. Okay.
And as the conversations haveprogressed this last week,
I've got a secondary deliverable.Mm-hmm.,
there is a need for a QAreport to be developed.
So I think it really depends onthe market segment you're in.
If you're into a commodity market exactly,
(08:21):
you're going to get pretty muchwhat comes outta the box. And there,
to go back to the previous topic,
the technologists have made the policydecisions about what capabilities you get
and what you don't,
and you judge the product based on howthat meshes with what you're trying to
do. Mm. In the world I'm working in,
we start with the commercial productsand then we're building the customization
(08:42):
on that,
really reflecting the languagethe organization uses when it
talks about this data and when itmanages these processes, it's mm-hmm.
, another term that we talkedabout last time is ontology. There's,
they're ontological aspects of thiswhere we're really formalizing conceptual
frameworks and logicsystems and worldviews,
and that stuff does not show upand out of the box software. It,
(09:05):
it just doesn't.
So who should hear this out ofall the organizational, right? I mean,
who should hear this? Who should belike, oh, I'm, I better take notes.
Is that the CEO of an organization? Is it,
is it the CTO or the tech person?
Or should HR be helping to drive this?Because it's a, it's a behavior element.
(09:25):
Okay. Edwin, fine. Who owns knowledgemanagement in the organization?
Well, chief's knowledgeofficer. Of course. What.
If you don't have one?
Well then somebody better be drivingthe train or no one's driving the train.
And I've seen models where it's top down.I've seen models where it's bottom up,
especially in markup.
You find evangelists that get pushed inthe technology for one reason or another
(09:45):
and they end up basically going out tothe rest of the organization saying,
you need to pay attention to this.If it comes from top down, sure.
That tends to make a lot ofimplementation stuff easier.
But I see many of these initiatives reallystarting out somewhere in the middle.
Hmm. Someone gets a clue and says, weneed to go in this direction. Right.
They do the study, they learnit, they go to the conferences,
(10:06):
they get people on board.
What impact does a community ofpractice have in all of this?
I think they're critical.
And in fact reminded me of kind of oneof the most impressive ones that I've
seen. It's built around theBali SAGE conference that's, uh,
can been hosted and managed byMulberry Technologies for just forever.
I got back engaged with thoseconferences a few years ago.
(10:29):
What it really reminded me ofis the idea of a fire gord,
they've held on to this cultureacross years and decades,
developed a community of practice that'sreally a functional working group.
They're still doing majorstandards development and technology development outta
that community.
Another one I had associationwith was on log that came out of,
(10:49):
uh, John Boak, U B L effort. And Imet Peter ym there. Um, he brought,
uh,
Leo Orkin as the conversation didn'treally get traction inside the UBL
L committee.
We went ahead and moved it outside andthen brought in other people that we knew
that were interested in the topic.
That committee practiceis still going strong. Uh,
(11:10):
ongoing dialogues and meetings and, uh,
they work each year with NISTon an ontology summit. So I,
I think these community practicesare absolutely critical,
especially when you're dealing withearly stage technologies and people
need to figure out waysof getting up to speed.
Let's talk about the birthplace ofa community of practice. You know,
this community effort. Uh,
(11:31):
is it just a bunch of nerdssitting around saying, Hey,
let's get together andtalk about something?
Or is it something bigger than that?
Most organizations do not formallysponsor within their framework.
Communities of practice. They don't give'em the tools to play with. They don't,
they don't let 'em fosterknowledge sharing and,
and just free range collection ofpeople that have different interests.
(11:55):
But some do.
Have you seen where an organizationjust set their organization on fire
by having a,
a splendid community of practicepractice within the company
or organization?
And then let's go back to this twoexamples you just gave and what
feeds that. It's not a corporate payout,it's not a corporate resource that,
(12:17):
you know, it's, it'sjust people that care.
Well,
and the one you reminded me of that Ithink kind of fits almost in the middle,
uh, a little bit of hybrid. WhenI got involved with training, uh,
when I was in Boeing Computer Services,
I came in actually as an entry levelproperty management clerk. Hmm.
And walked away from their strategicplanning department to become an
independent consultant. Along the way,
(12:38):
I became the first full-timeinstructor as that organization.
It really was a startup organization.And it started, I would say,
as a community of practice.
They had people that were interestedin training and it ended up teaching
courses. There was very little, if any,
organizational super structureon top of it. You know,
eventually we had a manager. But inthe early days, I don't even remember.
(12:59):
We had a manager. It was just, you know,
someone coordinated andhandled the schedule.
Somebody volunteered to drivethe bus for a little bit.
I, you know, I, I see him kind of incubatethat way. The monologue was external.
That was just people on the streetdecided, we wanna talk about apologies.
Power to the people, let's.
Go uber ontologies. Yeah. You know?
Yeah.
So is there a prescription thatorganizations should adhere to in
(13:23):
the benefit for all.
These? Well, and I, let'sgo this direction. Okay. I,
I think kind of what you're gettingat is how do you get from a group of
interested people to something thatactually has some cohesion mm-hmm.
and takes on some form oforganizational, ongoing structure. Yeah.
And I would say the primary driverfor that, at least an monologue,
and I probably you could generalizeit a bit, was a mission. Ah,
(13:45):
we had a shared mission and the firstmission that we formed around was really
providing support back to that ubl effort.
Ubl means what?
Oh, sorry. Universalbusiness language. Oh.
This was a follow oneffort that John did, uh,
a associated with Oasis to comewith XML markup vocabularies
to support e-commerce on a global basis.
(14:06):
And a lot of what drove him was he lookedat the fact that we had kind of the
insider economy and the outsider economy.
And that could be a recipe for,
well the west and the Edeveloped and undeveloped.
If you're trying to do e-commercewith someone in Nigeria,
how much effort are you gonna have toput in to pull that off? Right. Right,
right. And so this idea ofcommon vocabularies would say,
(14:27):
now we've got a language, everyonecan use a language. And now it's,
you've got a path forward. And again,
the issue is if you have a market systemthat allows some people to participate
and not others, that tends over time toyour recipe for conflict. Good point.
And if you're talking aboutmarket conflict on a global basis,
and maybe you wanna try to avoid it,and that's really what U B L was doing.
(14:47):
Peter came in from the ontology spaceand was really making the argument that
they needed an ontologicalfoundation under this.
So the vocabulary reallywould work internationally for ubl that was outside of
the original scope, huge level of effort.Nothing they could really support.
They had a few exploratory conversations,
but it wasn't anythingthey were gonna jump on.
(15:08):
I had actually taken aCisco markup project, uh,
that I got brought into and hadtransitioned it to some degree into
an ontological project because they found,
as they were trying to standardizewhat their vocabulary gonna be,
they needed metadata from otherparts of the organization.
(15:29):
There were no metadata standardsinside Cisco at the time.
And how do we standardize metadata? Andthe approach we ended up taking was,
well, let's try to do somesemantic formalization from the world of ontologies.
That was basically the approach.And coming off of that,
I saw what Peter was trying todo inside, on inside, excuse me,
U the U B L efforts. It,I think this makes sense,
(15:49):
but I also saw that it was a conversationthat the UBL folks just really
couldn't support. So Iproposed, take it outside.
Is it safe to say thatwhat we now understand
as users of the internet and
connectivity and standardizationfor the most part came from
(16:11):
a bunch of volunteers?
Yeah. That was the volunteercommittee. I mean, yeah, U B L was,
it was organized under Oasis. I mean yeah.
Some people probably had it as part oftheir organizational mission and they
were employed to go to meetings andthe rest of it. But yeah. You know,
there was no big U B L budget to paypeople to build U B L. No, not at all.
What I'm trying to get to is thatthere was no commercial sponsor of this
(16:36):
problem solving situation. It wasjust humanity coming together.
Cuz there had to be somethingestablished in order to, as you said,
deconflict the futureof how things can work.
Yeah. I, I can't say therewas no commercial sponsorship.
I didn't know where everybody came from.
Well, what I'm saying is, is that nobodywrote a check and said, Hey everybody,
(16:58):
let's go do this fix.
Go, go form this committee, goform this organization. Because.
Regardless if it's commercial orgovernmental it, what I'm hearing is I,
I understand where the sourceof the internet came from,
and it was a government dollarthat helped steer that mm-hmm.
initially.But to get it to the,
the absolute maturity levelthat it's at currently
(17:23):
took a lot of volunteers.And there was nobody driving.
There was not the US government drivingthis solution. Mm-hmm.,
it wasn't, it was just aglobal community that cared.
And I'll say this, you seethat a lot in the markup world.
Well, that's gotta be a good thing.
Individuals in groups lookat a problem and they say,
we need a data standard here, and I'mgonna invest really my life into it. Uh,
(17:47):
I, you're making methink of, oh, and Amber,
I don't know if that name's familiar.He's been working on Strat ml,
the strategy markup language,
and he comes out of federal governmentand got associated with the government
Performance and Results Act.
I bumped into that in the ninetiesand have some familiarity with it.
And he built a markup languageto try to comply to the federal
(18:08):
requirement to documentwhat your organization does.
Ah, that's.
Amazing. I can't sayit's a one man mission.
He's got a whole bunch of peoplethat are helping him. Mm-hmm.
But there's no big, you know,commercial venture behind it.
It's a group of people. Yeah. Yeah.
That share the mission and invest intrying to accomplish it. Um, one thing I,
I I thought about that was actually Ithink, uh, really important in on log,
(18:31):
a couple of factors. Mm-hmm.one was when Peter ym came in,
he brought an entirecommunications infrastructure,
the purple Wiki stuff that came outof the Engelbert community email list,
all the rest of it, that infrastructurewas there, and boom, we had it. Mm-hmm.
, you know,
my primary contribution was I led theweekly discussions and it was kind of
(18:53):
like, well, what the hell you wannatalk about this week? You know, it,
and we had ongoing topics, it's like,
and people made progress and reportedback and stuff was happening.
But the big one,
the kicker really was when wegot to invited guest mm-hmm.
speakersmm-hmm. .
And we started bringing in theluminaries in the industry to talk to us.
You know, like once a month.That drove the attention.
(19:16):
It drove the participation, itdrove greater numbers, and it was,
we are now providing something thatyou couldn't get anywhere else.
You could talk to one of the globalindustry experts in this field.
And at that point,
that was a big step when they startedworking with NIST on the ontology summits,
you know,
that gave them a real annual anchor thatreally kind of solidified what the year
(19:38):
runs like for the organization. And again,it's still volunteer based. There's,
there's really no superstructure on top of.
It. Well, let's go back to whatyou envision the future to be.
What is lacking right nowthat society of this planet
needs to volunteer tofix in a technological
solution? Similar to whatwe've just been talking about,
(19:59):
creating community practice, developstandards, things of that solution set.
Is there anything that could helpwith the slowdown of extinction, uh,
events on this planet that needs to havehappen that you have not seen happen.
Yet? I think the primary one is consensus.
We need not only to improve ourability to form consensus in
(20:20):
the age of gaslighting we're in now,
we need to understand that we doagree and can't allow ourselves be
convinced that we don't agree.
And I don't think that'snecessary technological all,
although certainly it'sa communication process.
And I can think of how youmight apply technology to that,
but it's not really a technology process.
So how does a community build, uh,let's say that was the mission.
(20:43):
The mission is to deconflictthe disinformation out there.
Kind of just,
it's interesting to me thatwith all the power and success
that humanity has had, especiallysince the internet's birth mm-hmm.
to do the thingsyou've been talking about,
it just sounds like we need a spark inthe right direction that could really
(21:06):
make a huge difference.
Well, I, I, okay. I, I thinkwhere I would go from there, and,
and maybe it's the questionof spark, right? For me,
it's the question of kindof the directionality.
You talk about information technology,we talk about communication systems.
When you get into that space,you're looking at top-down budgets.
You're looking attop-down decision making.
(21:28):
You're looking at top-downalignment processes.
And certainly in markupyou see a lot of that.
We're using markup to standardize fora group of people to be able to do
something very consistentthat that's very top-down.
One of the concerns I have isthat all of this top-down focus
has actually optimize the technologyfor those types of problems
(21:49):
and solutions.
And the challenge really is now can weget something that's more a bottom up
technology,
bottom up communications to wherethe operational optimizations,
the reality of day-to-day life,
the natural economy insteadof just the market economy,
can actually then start todrive this governance process,
this decision making process,this formation of, of consensus.
(22:14):
That is, I, what I see as the challengeis how do you enable volunteers,
individuals to actually engageform that consensus around
technology issues and othertypes of, of policy issues.
The magic spark that you've already saidit already is that you've gotta have
that common vision of a missionthat everybody says, yes,
(22:35):
that's where we're going.And what you're saying is,
is that in this most recentiteration of humanity,
the gaslighting syndrome and mass media,
torch lighting just keeps everybodyfrom reaching that unified
mission.
Well, and even more fundamentally,
I look at it from a languageengineering standpoint.
The language which has been engineeredto discuss these topics prevents
(22:59):
mm-hmm. consensus fromform, it distracts, it, camouflage,
it avoids it misdirects,
I see this as significantinvestments. And for me,
the response is don't use thatlanguage. Let's form new language.
Let's talk about shared values.
Let's look at essential humanity wherewe all agree, we all live on the planet.
(23:21):
Our human imperatives basicallyexceed almost everything else.
And if you work from that standpointand stay away from the engineering
processes, I, I, it's actually cons, Ifound consensus is pretty easy to find.
So if we could solidify, um,
some language base rules and not have
(23:41):
inflammatory words just thrownout there like it's actual news
because it's all bias and oropinion, a lot of it. And it,
it is purposeful. It is purposeful,it's selected for a reason. I,
I can't imagine it's by accident someof the headlines or content that is out
there creating morestickiness or more fuel to
(24:04):
something that it really needs justfor an emotional response more so
than a content transferof content of knowledge.
Well, suddenly there,
I'll throw in most of it I see beingdone by engineering the implicits.
When you craft a message andyou're using human language,
every term comes withwhat that term implies.
(24:25):
What's the implicit knowledgeassociated with it? And yeah,
the phenomenon I see is let'sengineer that implicit load
to drive specific behavior.
In the mass media senseis advertising money.
It, it translates into it. More.
Viewers, more advertising.To wrap things up,
I want you to explain to me whatyou think knowledge management.
(24:48):
Is.
Management is about protecting thefuture Operations are the behaviors
you engage in today to take care of today.
So knowledge management is how do youprotect the future of your knowledge
assets? First off, youprobably want to capture them.
If you don't engage in knowledgecapture, the process ends there.
You need retention, you needtransfer, you need utilization.
(25:12):
And those activities come with costs.And if you don't invest in them,
you're not managing yourknowledge now. You know,
and you can either boil that down verysmall or you can make it really big.
And on the small side,
I remember walking into a potentialclient and they wanted to talk knowledge
management. And I said, what arewe talking about? And they said,
a search engine..Okay, , okay.
(25:36):
They didn't hire me by the way.Sure. That, that, that, that,
that project did not get me, uh.
And I, I think we're, that'sa great way to end because it,
that search capabilityand or interface is,
is a slice of the overall, but it's.
It can be really important.It can be a real show started.
Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly.
It doesn't feel like a knowledgemanagement system or to me,
(26:01):
just a little tenure.
Well, thank you for being here today,Kurt. It was, uh, very informative.
I I think we should dothis on a weekly basis.
Well, given the list of topicsthat you showed up with today,
we've only hit what, maybe two or threeof them at this point. Yeah, yeah. I,
I would say, uh, this sounds likesomething that can be done again. Sure.
Well, thank you Kurt.
(26:24):
You.
Have just finished our latest becauseyou need to know a public service of
Pioneer Knowledge Services.
Please join us on LinkedInand find us@pioneerks.org.
This is Edwin k Morris,
and you are about to embark on thenext Pioneer Knowledge Services
because you need to know a digitalresource for you to listen to
folks share their experience andknowledge around the field of knowledge
management and nonprofit work.
(00:33):
Hi there. My name is Kurt Conrad.I live in Pasco, Washington.
The most interesting thing nearme, there are many to choose from.
I guess I have to pick the Doe Hanfordsite cuz it was started in World War
II to produce plutonium that was droppedon Nagasaki and has a whole bunch of
nuclear waste and a bunchof decommissioned reactors. All sorts of fun stuff.
(00:56):
Also on the site, which is kind ofinteresting is Rattlesnake Mountain,
which happens to be the tallesttreeless mountain in North America.
I love working in, I'd say,really kind of negotiations,
either verbal negotiationsor what I do a lot,
which is really negotiatingautomated systems, my work in markup,
and that is a negotiation framework.
And so I'm constantly involved in tryingto get the bots to understand what
(01:20):
we're thinking and get them to dowhat we're hoping that they do.
And I would say I envisiona future that really, uh,
rapidly reverses global extinctions.That's kind of the big problem.
And if we don't try to get a handle onit, I'm not sure what will happen to us.
Smart.
In an organization that isdealing with technological
(01:40):
advances, how do you see,
or who would you call as themost responsible party for
its internal processes?
Is it it or does it justmaterialize out of thin air?
I have to give you a standard XMLconsultant's answer. That depends. I,
I can't say I've seenone pattern. It it, well,
(02:03):
and in fact the seriousquestion. Yeah. I mean,
the serious question is who should beresponsible for policy? Okay. I mean,
this was one of the topicswe wanted to get into, right?
I picked up PaulStraussman at an early age,
the politics of informationmanagement, and he says, write out,
it's primarily an issue of politics andthe technology's all secondary. Yeah,
right. The question is, who's makingthe policy decisions? Organizationally,
(02:28):
it's supposed to be management inholistic lifecycle organizations.
You see line level people and operationsgetting involved in that as well,
hopefully. But the phenomenon that Isee coming from a technology space,
it's this often technologists mm-hmm.
implicitly making policy.
And the first time I wroteabout this back in the nineties,
(02:50):
the stories that I used as exampleswere the derivatives industry.
Cuz we just had a hugeblow up derivatives.
And the issue there was financialtechnologists were making risk
decisions for organizations,private companies,
public organizations all blew up inthat first derivative thing. Mm-hmm.
(03:14):
they didn't understand thetechnology, they couldn't talk about,
they didn't have the conceptualframeworks to deal with it.
It was completelyoutside of their purview.
And that allowed the technologistbasically come in and say, okay,
I get to define what the riskprofile for your organization is.
Now you're using policy in thismeaning the same as governance?
No. Okay. Can you, can you split thathair for me? I mean, sure. Because I,
(03:36):
I have an idea what governance it is, butI, to me it's like, well, it's policy.
You're saying.
It's not, and again, back to straussman,
his definition of policy is whatyou do, what your organization does,
what you do is policy.
Now governance usually comes in thatwe're trying to define norms for policy
to define policy standards. And thatwould be the result of governance process.
(03:59):
Ah, those policy standards mayor may not impact behavior.
So the actual policy organization coulddiffer from anything that's been decided
or published, at least in the way I look.
At it. So policy in this frameworkis more action. Policy is action.
Not in my mind. Yes. When yousay policy, it's regulation,
that's paperwork that'srules, it's parameters,
(04:20):
but more so it's just theoperational flow and action.
And you could say those guiding documentsare trying to align policy mm-hmm.
metrics or, or.
Whatever.
Tell me where governanceshould be in this to help steer
it.
Because it sounds like what you're sayingis that the technologists have kind
(04:43):
of, what was the oldterm? The, uh, land grab.
There was kind of a land grab for theaction because they could bring a lot
of automation to bear, butwho was like the old, uh,
fox and the henhouse kind of thing? Right.
There was no oversightto what they were doing.
Very often. How.
Do you fix it?
Um, usually when I get an organization,we have an issue like that,
(05:04):
I figure out who should beinvolved in making the decision,
usually around a publishing system, right?
Bring in those stakeholders and havethem involved in the decision making
process. Open it up, get more peopleinvolved, how many get involved. Uh,
it's a function of the organization.Sometimes it's still a small group,
sometimes, you know, it mightactually span different wings of,
(05:25):
of the larger organization.
Depends on how important thosedata standards are and the, uh,
system which is being put in.
Well,
in order to have that oversight back toyour paradigm that the governance kind
of drives the policy, or at least mm-hmm.
That oversight piece is almostas kind of translucent to the
(05:47):
point where unless everybody understandsthe technology, how the widgets work,
how,
how is it that you couldhave positive at attributable
oversight to something ifyou don't know how it works?
A and that's one of the challenges.Often it, well, I'll tell you,
I'm working in markup,right? Okay. So, uh,
(06:08):
I'm thinking of one client andspecifically that had this issue,
and as I pulled the management groupand their support group together,
and we started dealing with those issues.Yeah. I gave them training in XPath.
I wanted them to actually be able totalk about the parts of the market system
that we were talking about.
And that required a little bit oftraining so people got to where they could
talk about it.
At least have some awarenessaround all the moving parts.
(06:31):
Another thing that kind of occurs to me,
it was a organization that wastrying to move into markup.
So it's kind of a startup situation,
and they had a project they were focusingon, and in the lead up conversations,
it was clear that the group didn'treally understand what they were talking
about. So they're talkingpast each other a lot. Mm-hmm.
And so when I came in to give'em two weeks of training,
the first thing actually brought thesemanagement issues in up front and I ran
(06:55):
them through a structured discussionprocess that really got them.
Then on the same page,
they were synced on what theorganizational objectives were.
They could then actually explain whatthe terminology was they were using when
they talked about thisstuff. Get on the same page,
talk about it using a shared language,be able to move forward effectively.
In the framework of today's worldwhere there's so much on the shelf
(07:18):
for software and solutions.
Maybe you're trustinganother third party source to
validate and, you know what I mean?If it's an off-the-shelf solution,
you don't have to have the awareness andunderstanding of how it all works under
the hood as long as it does the job.Is that a shift from what it was?
(07:40):
And I'm presuming it is,
is that a major shift for most industriesfrom 30 years ago where everybody
built their own solutions foreverything to now where things are
more of an enterprisesoftware is the system?
I think that depends on the marketsegment You're in, the segment I'm in.
We're still doing an awfullot of customization.
(08:01):
I'm actually doing a data conversionproject right now from an old generation
that did it to a new one. Okay.
And as the conversations haveprogressed this last week,
I've got a secondary deliverable.Mm-hmm.
there is a need for a QAreport to be developed.
So I think it really depends onthe market segment you're in.
If you're into a commodity market exactly,
(08:21):
you're going to get pretty muchwhat comes outta the box. And there,
to go back to the previous topic,
the technologists have made the policydecisions about what capabilities you get
and what you don't,
and you judge the product based on howthat meshes with what you're trying to
do. Mm. In the world I'm working in,
we start with the commercial productsand then we're building the customization
(08:42):
on that,
really reflecting the languagethe organization uses when it
talks about this data and when itmanages these processes, it's mm-hmm.
they're ontological aspects of thiswhere we're really formalizing conceptual
frameworks and logicsystems and worldviews,
and that stuff does not show upand out of the box software. It,
(09:05):
it just doesn't.
So who should hear this
who should hear this? Who should belike, oh, I'm, I better take notes.
Is that the CEO of an organization? Is it,
is it the CTO or the tech person?
Or should HR be helping to drive this?Because it's a, it's a behavior element.
(09:25):
Okay. Edwin, fine. Who owns knowledgemanagement in the organization?
Well, chief's knowledgeofficer. Of course. What.
If you don't have one?
Well then somebody better be drivingthe train or no one's driving the train.
And I've seen models where it's top down.I've seen models where it's bottom up,
especially in markup.
You find evangelists that get pushed inthe technology for one reason or another
(09:45):
and they end up basically going out tothe rest of the organization saying,
you need to pay attention to this.If it comes from top down, sure.
That tends to make a lot ofimplementation stuff easier.
But I see many of these initiatives reallystarting out somewhere in the middle.
Hmm. Someone gets a clue and says, weneed to go in this direction. Right.
They do the study, they learnit, they go to the conferences,
(10:06):
they get people on board.
What impact does a community ofpractice have in all of this?
I think they're critical.
And in fact reminded me of kind of oneof the most impressive ones that I've
seen. It's built around theBali SAGE conference that's, uh,
can been hosted and managed byMulberry Technologies for just forever.
I got back engaged with thoseconferences a few years ago.
(10:29):
What it really reminded me ofis the idea of a fire gord,
they've held on to this cultureacross years and decades,
developed a community of practice that'sreally a functional working group.
They're still doing majorstandards development and technology development outta
that community.
Another one I had associationwith was on log that came out of,
(10:49):
uh, John Boak, U B L effort. And Imet Peter ym there. Um, he brought,
uh,
Leo Orkin as the conversation didn'treally get traction inside the UBL
L committee.
We went ahead and moved it outside andthen brought in other people that we knew
that were interested in the topic.
That committee practiceis still going strong. Uh,
(11:10):
ongoing dialogues and meetings and, uh,
they work each year with NISTon an ontology summit. So I,
I think these community practicesare absolutely critical,
especially when you're dealing withearly stage technologies and people
need to figure out waysof getting up to speed.
Let's talk about the birthplace ofa community of practice. You know,
this community effort. Uh,
(11:31):
is it just a bunch of nerdssitting around saying, Hey,
let's get together andtalk about something?
Or is it something bigger than that?
Most organizations do not formallysponsor within their framework.
Communities of practice. They don't give'em the tools to play with. They don't,
they don't let 'em fosterknowledge sharing and,
and just free range collection ofpeople that have different interests.
(11:55):
But some do.
Have you seen where an organizationjust set their organization on fire
by having a,
a splendid community of practicepractice within the company
or organization?
And then let's go back to this twoexamples you just gave and what
feeds that. It's not a corporate payout,it's not a corporate resource that,
(12:17):
you know, it's, it'sjust people that care.
Well,
and the one you reminded me of that Ithink kind of fits almost in the middle,
uh, a little bit of hybrid. WhenI got involved with training, uh,
when I was in Boeing Computer Services,
I came in actually as an entry levelproperty management clerk. Hmm.
And walked away from their strategicplanning department to become an
independent consultant. Along the way,
(12:38):
I became the first full-timeinstructor as that organization.
It really was a startup organization.And it started, I would say,
as a community of practice.
They had people that were interestedin training and it ended up teaching
courses. There was very little, if any,
organizational super structureon top of it. You know,
eventually we had a manager. But inthe early days, I don't even remember.
(12:59):
We had a manager. It was just, you know,
someone coordinated andhandled the schedule.
Somebody volunteered to drivethe bus for a little bit.
I, you know, I, I see him kind of incubatethat way. The monologue was external.
That was just people on the streetdecided, we wanna talk about apologies.
Power to the people, let's.
Go uber ontologies. Yeah. You know?
Yeah.
So is there a prescription thatorganizations should adhere to in
(13:23):
the benefit for all.
These? Well, and I, let'sgo this direction. Okay. I,
I think kind of what you're gettingat is how do you get from a group of
interested people to something thatactually has some cohesion mm-hmm.
And I would say the primary driverfor that, at least an monologue,
and I probably you could generalizeit a bit, was a mission. Ah,
(13:45):
we had a shared mission and the firstmission that we formed around was really
providing support back to that ubl effort.
Ubl means what?
Oh, sorry. Universalbusiness language. Oh.
This was a follow oneffort that John did, uh,
a associated with Oasis to comewith XML markup vocabularies
to support e-commerce on a global basis.
(14:06):
And a lot of what drove him was he lookedat the fact that we had kind of the
insider economy and the outsider economy.
And that could be a recipe for,
well the west and the Edeveloped and undeveloped.
If you're trying to do e-commercewith someone in Nigeria,
how much effort are you gonna have toput in to pull that off? Right. Right,
right. And so this idea ofcommon vocabularies would say,
(14:27):
now we've got a language, everyonecan use a language. And now it's,
you've got a path forward. And again,
the issue is if you have a market systemthat allows some people to participate
and not others, that tends over time toyour recipe for conflict. Good point.
And if you're talking aboutmarket conflict on a global basis,
and maybe you wanna try to avoid it,and that's really what U B L was doing.
(14:47):
Peter came in from the ontology spaceand was really making the argument that
they needed an ontologicalfoundation under this.
So the vocabulary reallywould work internationally for ubl that was outside of
the original scope, huge level of effort.Nothing they could really support.
They had a few exploratory conversations,
but it wasn't anythingthey were gonna jump on.
(15:08):
I had actually taken aCisco markup project, uh,
that I got brought into and hadtransitioned it to some degree into
an ontological project because they found,
as they were trying to standardizewhat their vocabulary gonna be,
they needed metadata from otherparts of the organization.
(15:29):
There were no metadata standardsinside Cisco at the time.
And how do we standardize metadata? Andthe approach we ended up taking was,
well, let's try to do somesemantic formalization from the world of ontologies.
That was basically the approach.And coming off of that,
I saw what Peter was trying todo inside, on inside, excuse me,
U the U B L efforts. It,I think this makes sense,
(15:49):
but I also saw that it was a conversationthat the UBL folks just really
couldn't support. So Iproposed, take it outside.
Is it safe to say thatwhat we now understand
as users of the internet and
connectivity and standardizationfor the most part came from
(16:11):
a bunch of volunteers?
Yeah. That was the volunteercommittee. I mean, yeah, U B L was,
it was organized under Oasis. I mean yeah.
Some people probably had it as part oftheir organizational mission and they
were employed to go to meetings andthe rest of it. But yeah. You know,
there was no big U B L budget to paypeople to build U B L. No, not at all.
What I'm trying to get to is thatthere was no commercial sponsor of this
(16:36):
problem solving situation. It wasjust humanity coming together.
Cuz there had to be somethingestablished in order to, as you said,
deconflict the futureof how things can work.
Yeah. I, I can't say therewas no commercial sponsorship.
I didn't know where everybody came from.
Well, what I'm saying is, is that nobodywrote a check and said, Hey everybody,
(16:58):
let's go do this fix.
Go, go form this committee, goform this organization. Because.
Regardless if it's commercial orgovernmental it, what I'm hearing is I,
I understand where the sourceof the internet came from,
and it was a government dollarthat helped steer that mm-hmm.
the absolute maturity levelthat it's at currently
(17:23):
took a lot of volunteers.And there was nobody driving.
There was not the US government drivingthis solution. Mm-hmm.
it wasn't, it was just aglobal community that cared.
And I'll say this, you seethat a lot in the markup world.
Well, that's gotta be a good thing.
Individuals in groups lookat a problem and they say,
we need a data standard here, and I'mgonna invest really my life into it. Uh,
(17:47):
I, you're making methink of, oh, and Amber,
I don't know if that name's familiar.He's been working on Strat ml,
the strategy markup language,
and he comes out of federal governmentand got associated with the government
Performance and Results Act.
I bumped into that in the ninetiesand have some familiarity with it.
And he built a markup languageto try to comply to the federal
(18:08):
requirement to documentwhat your organization does.
Ah, that's.
Amazing. I can't sayit's a one man mission.
He's got a whole bunch of peoplethat are helping him. Mm-hmm.
But there's no big, you know,commercial venture behind it.
It's a group of people. Yeah. Yeah.
That share the mission and invest intrying to accomplish it. Um, one thing I,
I I thought about that was actually Ithink, uh, really important in on log,
(18:31):
a couple of factors. Mm-hmm.
he brought an entirecommunications infrastructure,
the purple Wiki stuff that came outof the Engelbert community email list,
all the rest of it, that infrastructurewas there, and boom, we had it. Mm-hmm.
my primary contribution was I led theweekly discussions and it was kind of
(18:53):
like, well, what the hell you wannatalk about this week? You know, it,
and we had ongoing topics, it's like,
and people made progress and reportedback and stuff was happening.
But the big one,
the kicker really was when wegot to invited guest mm-hmm.
And we started bringing in theluminaries in the industry to talk to us.
You know, like once a month.That drove the attention.
(19:16):
It drove the participation, itdrove greater numbers, and it was,
we are now providing something thatyou couldn't get anywhere else.
You could talk to one of the globalindustry experts in this field.
And at that point,
that was a big step when they startedworking with NIST on the ontology summits,
you know,
that gave them a real annual anchor thatreally kind of solidified what the year
(19:38):
runs like for the organization. And again,it's still volunteer based. There's,
there's really no superstructure on top of.
It. Well, let's go back to whatyou envision the future to be.
What is lacking right nowthat society of this planet
needs to volunteer tofix in a technological
solution? Similar to whatwe've just been talking about,
(19:59):
creating community practice, developstandards, things of that solution set.
Is there anything that could helpwith the slowdown of extinction, uh,
events on this planet that needs to havehappen that you have not seen happen.
Yet? I think the primary one is consensus.
We need not only to improve ourability to form consensus in
(20:20):
the age of gaslighting we're in now,
we need to understand that we doagree and can't allow ourselves be
convinced that we don't agree.
And I don't think that'snecessary technological all,
although certainly it'sa communication process.
And I can think of how youmight apply technology to that,
but it's not really a technology process.
So how does a community build, uh,let's say that was the mission.
(20:43):
The mission is to deconflictthe disinformation out there.
Kind of just,
it's interesting to me thatwith all the power and success
that humanity has had, especiallysince the internet's birth mm-hmm.
it just sounds like we need a spark inthe right direction that could really
(21:06):
make a huge difference.
Well, I, I, okay. I, I thinkwhere I would go from there, and,
and maybe it's the questionof spark, right? For me,
it's the question of kindof the directionality.
You talk about information technology,we talk about communication systems.
When you get into that space,you're looking at top-down budgets.
You're looking attop-down decision making.
(21:28):
You're looking at top-downalignment processes.
And certainly in markupyou see a lot of that.
We're using markup to standardize fora group of people to be able to do
something very consistentthat that's very top-down.
One of the concerns I have isthat all of this top-down focus
has actually optimize the technologyfor those types of problems
(21:49):
and solutions.
And the challenge really is now can weget something that's more a bottom up
technology,
bottom up communications to wherethe operational optimizations,
the reality of day-to-day life,
the natural economy insteadof just the market economy,
can actually then start todrive this governance process,
this decision making process,this formation of, of consensus.
(22:14):
That is, I, what I see as the challengeis how do you enable volunteers,
individuals to actually engageform that consensus around
technology issues and othertypes of, of policy issues.
The magic spark that you've already saidit already is that you've gotta have
that common vision of a missionthat everybody says, yes,
(22:35):
that's where we're going.And what you're saying is,
is that in this most recentiteration of humanity,
the gaslighting syndrome and mass media,
torch lighting just keeps everybodyfrom reaching that unified
mission.
Well, and even more fundamentally,
I look at it from a languageengineering standpoint.
The language which has been engineeredto discuss these topics prevents
(22:59):
mm-hmm.
it avoids it misdirects,
I see this as significantinvestments. And for me,
the response is don't use thatlanguage. Let's form new language.
Let's talk about shared values.
Let's look at essential humanity wherewe all agree, we all live on the planet.
(23:21):
Our human imperatives basicallyexceed almost everything else.
And if you work from that standpointand stay away from the engineering
processes, I, I, it's actually cons, Ifound consensus is pretty easy to find.
So if we could solidify, um,
some language base rules and not have
(23:41):
inflammatory words just thrownout there like it's actual news
because it's all bias and oropinion, a lot of it. And it,
it is purposeful. It is purposeful,it's selected for a reason. I,
I can't imagine it's by accident someof the headlines or content that is out
there creating morestickiness or more fuel to
(24:04):
something that it really needs justfor an emotional response more so
than a content transferof content of knowledge.
Well, suddenly there,
I'll throw in most of it I see beingdone by engineering the implicits.
When you craft a message andyou're using human language,
every term comes withwhat that term implies.
(24:25):
What's the implicit knowledgeassociated with it? And yeah,
the phenomenon I see is let'sengineer that implicit load
to drive specific behavior.
In the mass media senseis advertising money.
It, it translates into it. More.
Viewers, more advertising.To wrap things up,
I want you to explain to me whatyou think knowledge management.
(24:48):
Is.
Management is about protecting thefuture Operations are the behaviors
you engage in today to take care of today.
So knowledge management is how do youprotect the future of your knowledge
assets? First off, youprobably want to capture them.
If you don't engage in knowledgecapture, the process ends there.
You need retention, you needtransfer, you need utilization.
(25:12):
And those activities come with costs.And if you don't invest in them,
you're not managing yourknowledge now. You know,
and you can either boil that down verysmall or you can make it really big.
And on the small side,
I remember walking into a potentialclient and they wanted to talk knowledge
management. And I said, what arewe talking about? And they said,
a search engine.
(25:36):
They didn't hire me by the way.Sure. That, that, that, that,
that project did not get me, uh.
that search capabilityand or interface is,
is a slice of the overall, but it's.
It can be really important.It can be a real show started.
Yeah. Yeah.
Exactly.
It doesn't feel like a knowledgemanagement system or to me,
(26:01):
just a little tenure.
Well, thank you for being here today,Kurt. It was, uh, very informative.
I I think we should dothis on a weekly basis.
Well, given the list of topicsthat you showed up with today,
we've only hit what, maybe two or threeof them at this point. Yeah, yeah. I,
I would say, uh, this sounds likesomething that can be done again. Sure.
Well, thank you Kurt.
(26:24):
You.
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