Mobilizing knowledge in the Canadian Forest Service

Through its Policy Framework for Information and Technology, Treasury Board has made it clear that information is an essential component of effective management across the Government of Canada.  The availability of high-quality, authoritative information to decision makers supports the delivery of programs and services, thus enabling departments to be more responsive and accountable to Canadians.

Accordingly, within Natural resources Canada, much effort is put into ensuring that the department’s information services, like the intranet, the wiki, and online databases, provide quick and easy access to information. Still, the uptake of research results by policy and decision makers may be lower than desired, not because of any shortcomings in a set of research results or the dissemination strategy used, but because potential users are unwilling or unable to exploit the opportunities presented to them.

Decision-making and management activities must integrate various types of information in a complex environment comprised of political, economic, and social factors.  The challenge is how to acknowledge and integrate social, economic and political context into knowledge systems. We must go beyond simply aiming to provide a “one-stop shop for information.”  Instead, what decision makers and policy analysts need is not just the facts, but, a set of solution options that are informed by research-based knowledge within the decision context

Much work has been done to look at ways to improve the uptake of research outputs by decision- and policy-makers in the health sciences field. For example, Lavis and colleagues (2003) identified three methods to enhance research utilisation by policy-makers: producer push, user pull and knowledge exchange. A similar framework for knowledge management, described as learn before, learn during and learn after, has been advanced by Collison and Parcell in their 2001 book Learning to Fly.

The paradigm of producer push, user pull and knowledge exchange includes knowledge transfer and knowledge translation, which are usually seen as a unidirectional flow of knowledge. But it also includes iterative knowledge exchange. In contrast to knowledge transfer and knowledge translation, knowledge exchange involves bringing together researchers and decision makers and facilitating their interaction, which starts with collaborating on determining the research question.  The ongoing exchange and knowledge transfer ensure that the knowledge generated is relevant and applicable to stakeholder decision making as well as useful to researchers.

Phipps and Shapson (2009) incorporated these three methods together with the concept of knowledge that is co-produced between researchers and research users to define knowledge mobilization.  They define knowledge mobilization as a suite of services using a diverse array of strategies that connect researchers and research users to enhance research utilization.

While not explicitly working in the area of knowledge mobilization, the Forest Knowledge and Information Management Division (FKIMD) of the Canadian Forest Service (CFS) is attempting to find ways to enhance the impact of CFS scientific research outputs for decision makers, policy analysts and advisors who seek quality scientific information that is relevant to their work and will impact decisions while being accessible and understandable in the shortest possible time.  The objective of FKIMD's activities is to ensure the discovery, use and dissemination of all information of business value created by the CFS for the delivery of the sector's programs and services.  As well, the division seeks to ensure that IM practices within the the sector are compliant with the Directive on Recordkeeping (as required by March 2014), and that information management standards are aligned with government standards, such as the Standard on Geospatial Data. Finding the right tools and services to effectively mobilize the organization’s knowledge is a complex problem that will evolve.

The Division has not previously described its work in terms of knowledge mobilization, but it may be useful to set the division's work in the context of the four established knowledge mobilization methods (producer push, user pull, knowledge exchange and co-production) used by Phipps and Shapson (2009) to describe the knowledge mobilization services of York University’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit. In this way, the work of FKIMD can be compared with an established knowledge mobilization unit.

The comparisons suggest that the activities being undertaken by FKIMD are consistent with Knowledge Mobilization activities undertaken by other science-based organizations and should help the CFS mobilize its knowledge to ensure that decision makers and their support staff have access to quality information that is relevant to their work and that impacts decision making.  The only notable exception to this is the relatively limited role of activities in knowledge pull, characterized at York University by the "help desk", where knowledge brokers help facilitate the introduction of a knowledge requester to a knowledge producer and support any emerging conversations that might lead to collaboration.

KMb Method	FKIMD activity	Notes
Producer Push	Plain language research summaries	Plain language summary that provides a concise summary of the key S&T messages or findings of an S&T publication using simple language that would be appropriate for an audience of non-technical experts in the subject of the publication.
	Knowledge retention interviews	Interviews of departing employees and presentations and discussions by departing employees with peers
	Directory of expertise	An online tool to allow knowledge users to find subject matter experts in NRCan
	Publications database	An improved database of publications that provides access to all CFS publications
User Pull
Knowledge Exchange	Communities of practice	Fostering communities of practice as stewards of knowledge
	Project-level knowledge exchange strategies	Pilot studies to adapt the Results Map process to bring together knowledge producers and knowledge users to co-create knowledge products
Collaboration / Co-production Infrastructure	Simplified disposition authorities	Reducing the number of disposition authorities in NRCan from 64 to about 10 and expanding their coverage from about 60% of all information to 100%
	Centralized digital repositories	Implement GCDocs as a central digital repository for all digital files of business value that will replace shared drives and SharePoint.  Could have collaborative functions in the future
	Paper Legacy Information Strategy	A strategy to enhance the search and retrieval of CFS’ unmanaged and semi-managed paper legacy documents
	Foogle - Integrated data sets	An online tool to catalogue, integrate and access CFS digital data sets
	Social media to support collaboration	Although not a product of FKIMD, the department and the GoC does have a full suite of social media tools including blogging, wikis, forums, SharePoint.  In addition, new Guidelines for External Use of Web 2.0 encourage employees to use social media tools like Twitter and Linked In.

For more detailed information, read my draft paper, Characterizing the work of Forest Knowledge and Information Division within the context of Knowledge Mobilization.

To get people to learn, you must give them a reason to care

I stumbled across this recent blog post about "Learning as Care" by Nick Shackleton-Jones recently.  In the post, Shackleton-Jones makes the point that the most important part of getting anyone to learn something is getting them to care.  Here are some highlights from his post:

• if people really cared about something we would have no work to do. And if we can't make people care, then we have usually done no work
• we disseminate information without giving people a reason to care
• we fail to provide learning resources to people who do care
• don't tell people what is important, tell them?why, tell the story
• care is the central mechanism at the heart of all human learning - it governs both how we store information and how we subsequently use it

This is very timely information for me as we prepare to find new ways to get staff to manage their paper documents properly, a topic that our surveys show staff care about, but are intensely frustrated by.

Three behaviours exhibited by knowledge users and how collaborative tools can help them

I have made a couple of updates to my map of collaborative tools available in my workplace, but I still welcome any comments.

Part of the impetus for creating this map was that I have been asked to provide input on the ways that collaborative tools can be used to engage employees. Now, I am not sure what specifically is meant by this, but since I work in a science-based policy organization, it's probably fair to assume that this is about either engaging scientists more in the policy development process, or in bringing the two sides together to co-create policy solutions.

Either way, it caused me to think about how people use knowledge while doing their work and how they might use collaborative tools to help them.

As I stumbled my way through this thought experiment, I came upon a knowledge management framework presented by Chris Collison in a slide show on knowledge transfer. I've adapted his framework to describe the types of behaviours knowledge users exhibit before, during and after working on a problem as well as the specific actions they could take with the collaborative tools available in my workplace.

Collison's framework is pretty straightforward; individuals or teams start with a goal, they then apply knowledge to work on the issue, ultimately arriving at some result. As they move toward realizing their intended outcome, they have opportunities to learn before, during and after the process of using their knowledge to address the issue. The behaviours associated with learning before, during and after using the knowledge, I have called "knowledge pull", "interactive" and "knowledge push" to represent the principle way that knowledge flows between the person or team doing the work and the captured knowledge base. The specific actions I have listed are from the perspective of a policy analyst working in my organization with the online collaborative tools at their disposal. All this is of course qualified by the caveat that online collaborative tools are not the only way to interact with the knowledge contained in people and networks. One could, after all, walk down the corridor and talk with one's colleagues. However, since I have been asked to provide input on the ways collaborative tools could help engage employees in my workplace, that is where I have focused my thoughts. As usual, any comments or questions are welcome as this is still very early in its draft stage.

What can collaborative tools help me do?

I've occasionally heard people comment that they feel overwhelmed by all the different online collaborative tools now available in the workplace. More specifically, I think they mean that with so many different tools available, they don't know what they would use each tool for. Without understanding the purpose of a tool, or the task that it could help them accomplish, they are unlikely to invest the time to learn about it.

So, I tried to organize the tools available in my workplace into themes with a specific emphasis on some of the tasks each tool can help you accomplish.

This is still draft, but let me know if I have forgotten anything or if it could be arranged in a different way.