Michael Fioritto: KM

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 15:53:28 GMT

KM questions. * What exacly does sharing knowledge really mean? * What are the top 5 current issues in KM? * Which 3 KM technologies are hot and which are not? * What KM strategies yield the quickest returns with the lowest... [Knowledge-at-work]

Fri, 16 Jan 2004 16:01:29 GMT

Nurturing & sustaining knowledge. If you ask what is needed to create knowledge, gather and evaluate insights, collect and synthesize new perspectives you are likely to be met with blank stares or stony silence in most KM spaces So what works for you? *... [Knowledge-at-work]

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 14:42:18 GMT

intersection of knowledge management and blogging....

Back on 19 September 2003, Jim McGee referenced a post by Jon Udell on Kimbro Staken's new science experiment, Syncato. And now - actually twelve days ago - Silicon Valley Biz Ink published a press release - Sleepycat Software Honors XML Innovators.

Sleepycat Software, makers of Berkeley DB announced results for the 2003 Berkeley DB XML Innovation Awards. XML technology consultant Kimbro Staken took the second place award for developing Syncato, a weblog or "blogging" application that combines an easy-to-use online personal idea log with advanced knowledge management and publishing capabilities. Staken's system stores each personal log as XML that can then be searched via XPath.

"Syncato maximizes the value of people's ideas and information in blogs by making them easily searchable," said Staken. "Under the hood, the Syncato weblog system is a XML fragment management system that relies on the flexibility of Berkeley DB XML to store XML natively alongside non-XML and semi-structured data."

[judith meskill's knowledge notes...]

Fri, 19 Dec 2003 18:03:22 GMT

blosxoms, bryars and blikis....

Huh, you say? Well, blosxom is a lightweight weblog implementation, created by Rael Dornfest, that describes itself as "the zen of blogging." Simon Cosens' Bryar is a modular, extensible weblog tool - more complex than 'blosxom' - primarily in its extensibility. A Bliki, according to the 'Wikipedia' is quite simply, a weblog with wiki support. If you are still saying 'Huh', then skip Simon's article and just read his conclusion excerpted below. Otherwise, in O'Reilly's Perl.com, Simon Cozens writes about 'Blosxoms, Bryars and Blikis.' - a worthy read for the 'Perl' and 'CGI' savvy.

Simon concludes with: "I consider the emergence of interest in social software to be one of the most fascinating trends in software engineering this year. Two of the most powerful and popular aspects of this, wikis and blogs, are particularly well-suited for extension and embedding, and Perl is a particularly well-suited language for achieving this.

Although part of the point of this article was to demonstrate Bryar, there were several other important points. First, that there are plenty of Perl implementations of both wikis and blogs that you can choose from; second, that Perl makes it really easy to create your own blog or wiki and customize to your own purposes, including embedding them in an existing application.

But finally, the point was to encourage you to think about good design and the power of extensible applications; if you can create a tool that is both powerful and generalizable -- just like Perl itself -- it may end up doing wildly different things to what you initially intended!"

[judith meskill's knowledge notes...]

Tue, 16 Dec 2003 15:58:39 GMT

knowledge management by factiva....

In the 15 December 2003 issue of Computerworld Singapore, in 'Squeezing value from KM,' Melanie Liew writes that, according to Clare Hart, president and CEO of Factiva, "Knowledge Management (KM) is an all encompassing approach to harnessing the knowledge within an organisation, from capturing it to sharing it. It is predicated on existing organisational intelligence, the organisational culture and the platform that is in place."

...quote...
Said Factiva's Hart, "The decision-making process toward the adoption of what is called a knowledge and information management system increasingly takes place in four phases.

Phase one comprises an enterprise information audit. What information does a company have? What does it need? This applies to both internal and external information. Archived internal white papers and sales documents are as important as wider external news."

Phase two is where the taxonomy is applied. A common language is required to enable the integration of internal and external data – structured and unstructured. This must reflect a company's culture and fit with the existing organisational vocabulary.

Phase three is where the technology is finally deployed, built to fit the company that it is designed for.

Phase four sees this technology 'cut to fit' the organisation's culture and built to evolve with the direction this company wants to head.

In fact, KM technology is expected to get smarter and easier to use. Based on information supplied about the user and the technology's own intelligence, KM technology is increasingly basing its results on who the user is, what information users have volunteered about themselves, with built-in collaborative filtering to delivering the information that the worker needs efficiently and effectively.
...quote...

[judith meskill's knowledge notes...]

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 14:42:54 GMT

Web Assistant - a KE tool. For the past two years I've been using Web Assistant - a complex knowledge space that spans the spectrum from personal publishing to community collaboration. - a true knowledge ecology (KE) Personal publishing: Most of the key affordances for personal... [Knowledge-at-work]

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 14:40:05 GMT

The Future Of Web Conferencing: Good Interviews Stuart Henshall. Stuart Henshall is an expert in the use of new media technologies in the workplace. His current obsessions are social networking tools, social software, blogging, wikis, and the revolution taking place around voice communications. I have only recently made the acquaintance with Stuart thanks to a truly creative and well thought out idea he had built around the availability of Skype as an immediate and easy-to-use-mean to interact with other, like-minded people. Sprung by curiosity I contacted him and found him to be a truly fascinating character. Stuart has strong point of views and truly rides ahead of the majority... [Robin Good' Sharewood Tidings]

Fri, 12 Dec 2003 21:49:10 GMT

"Instead of trying to cram a centralized knowledge management system down everyone's throat, you focus on helping individuals and teams do their own work more easily and more effectively. If you give some thought to how you design and shape the environment, the benefits of knowledge management sought by vendors of solutions in search of problems will emerge from the work itself. "

-- Comment from Jim McGee regarding the combination of weblogs and wikis

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:53:34 GMT

Jay Cross overview of knowledge management.

Knowledge Management. Knowledge management is a high-fallutin' buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse watered down KM's popularity as a category (although it's still a hot item in Europe). To vendors, KM became "whatever I want to sell you," be it... [Internet Time Blog]

A predictably rich and interesting review knowledge management from Jay Cross. A nice mix of links and Jay's usual insights

[McGee's Musings]

Thu, 04 Dec 2003 16:54:01 GMT

Executive blogging issues..

Robert Scoble wrote:

I keep asking executives "when you gonna start a weblog?" But, quite consistently get an answer of "way too busy." I asked Sanjay and Dan'l that about a week ago. They both ran down what their schedules look like. Nearly every minute of every day is scheduled. Dan'l told me he often is traveling and already rarely gets to see his family.

It's a tough problem. Since I don't think executives will get the time to weblog (at least not until it's so important that they are forced to by market conditions -- and we're several years away from that, if ever since they can get more leverage simply by calling up the Wall Street Journal or USA Today and asking for a chat) then internal bloggers will need to build better ties to execs and PR and marketing so that we can help solve the problem. I'm trying to do just that, and I've had some success, but my time is limited too. So, we need to figure out how to get some scale. One guy can't do it all.

The blogdev community has an opportunity to treat this as a challenge, an opportunity. What behavior, what facilities, will let someone as harried as a Microsoft executive or a single mom working two jobs squeeze blog writing, reading, and discovery into their lives?

Is it audblogging on the run? A quick speed dial on your cell for a note. Maybe audio or sms blogfodder? Great if it can be transcribed into searchable text. Blog as stream of experience.

Or do you make 200 phone calls a week? Maybe your phone bill as RSS becomes blog fodder. Basic analysis can show who has your attention (frequency, average length, total time). Further analysis could detect patterns among your network (Bob on Tuesday mornings; talks with Mary seem to follow Tim most of the time). Blog as phone pad.

Do you live in Outlook? Maybe you can default that all your outbound mail is cc'd as a draft to your weblog. That might cut blogging time to picking and choosing from the queue. Blogging as backup brain.

Maybe you live in your calendar, all meetings, all the time. Turn your calendar into blogfodder, provoking the posts before, during, and after meetings. Reverse chronology should come naturally here. Blogging as technography.

Before performance, executive culture is about trust. Execs limit conversation to trusted cliques, chains of command, and other social circles. LiveJournal-style control of who gets to read specific posts may overcome inhibitions about using the blog interface to capture your thoughts. Socially informed blogspace.

You also mentioned the role of PR. Here's a new role: beat journalist. Be the Dan Gillmor of the Microsoft marketing veeps, a development programme, of M&A. Get on their calendars for 10-15 minutes a week, ask routine and provocative questions, transcribe and post to internal blogs. Canvas internal blognets for related posts and tie the threads together. Blogs as reportage.

Are we getting closer?

[a klog apart]

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 21:28:43 GMT

Data Emergence.

Robin Good has a fascinating post on personal knowledge mapping, with a goal "to define, draft and invent tools and approaches that would facilitate a tacit knowledge creation/sharing mechanisms while not adding extra layers of work and responsibility to every knowledge worker in the organization." A quote from Snell:

Any Web site should become nothing more than a set of raw data feeds while knowledge workers would be provided with a personal software tool that would allow to:

1) maintain a database of personal information.
2) selectively share that data with anybody I choose.
3) autodiscover new sources of content.
4) completely control how I view and interact with the content sources I've chosen.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Thu, 27 Nov 2003 15:32:37 GMT

Turning mind into matter. Thomas Davenport and H. James Wilson have written an article on business and technology innovation. To quote: Any technology executive who wants to advance a slate of emerging technologies should become very familiar with ways to foster new business and... [Column Two]

Mon, 24 Nov 2003 15:30:14 GMT

New Wiki Implelementation Struggles - To structure or not?.

I am working on an implementation of several wikis. One is my personal wiki which runs on my laptop. I've often written about it here. Things are by and large going very well. I am also involved in my team's implementation of a wiki.

So far, the biggest struggle has been related to how much structure to put in place. We are using TWiki which is incredibly powerful. The trouble is that is has this neat capability to associate 'forms' with topics in a wiki that allow you to categorize and add formal data fields.

These are incredibly handy in building formal pages that group like topics, summarizing group thoughts, voting, etc... But i can't help feeling that it does break the wikiness of the wiki.

What I think we need is somesort of best practices regarding categorization. I don't want to go so far that we lose the benefits of easy editing, dynamic categories based on the text of topics, etc. At the same time, I do need to create places in the wiki where things are summarized / grouped automatically ...

Perhaps these questions are unique to Intranet deployments and the discussion belongs in Bill Seitz's Intranet Wiki forum. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated.

[Ed Taekema - Road Warrior Collaboration]

Fri, 21 Nov 2003 17:52:52 GMT

Status reports in the knowledge based enterprise.

Status Reports 2.0. At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people -- this is the moment when, if you're an early employee, that you first see... [Rands In Repose]

Some nice reflections on the potential for wikis and weblogs to address that perennial necessary evil in organizations--status reports. Comes down slightly in favor of weblogs for most organizations given the open-ended, unstructured, nature of wikis.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree, although the hybrid strategy that Ross Mayfield is pursuing at SocialText is intriguing as well. Another take to factor in is that taken by the folks at Traction Software. The start up curve appears a bit steeper, but they seem to have thought more about how to operate at the structured team level.

What I'm continuing to struggle with is how best to introduce these concepts into organizations that are just beginning to grasp the limitation of email as a management tool.

[McGee's Musings]

Using Twiki as a PIM

Wed, 19 Nov 2003 17:17:48 GMT

http://www.pycs.net/users/0000177/categories/blogtools/ For example, I have to keep track of client contact data, status reports, assorted documents and comments while I work at a client site. It was quick to setup a customer list page, create the customer page, add a link to an engagement list, status reports, etc. You can easily create page templates for creating more structured content like status reports etc.

Also, all this stuff was quickly added to my user's home page ... and all full text searchable. It is 100% better than leaving it all buried in MS Word docs in a directory structure... Wiki as a PIM ... who would have thought.

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 19:18:37 GMT

Personal Wiki PIM - Update I.

Personal Wiki PIM - Update I.

I've been using MoinMoin as my personal information management platform for the last several weeks. This had several goals. First, I needed to get my growing collection of documents under control. Secondly, I really wanted to dive into wikis a lot deeper and this gives me a great chance to do just that.

So here is a brief update about what I have found so far.

I am amazed at how useful the auto linking and document templating is for PIM type functions. It is really a snap to put some rudimentary organization on the material and then let it develop from there.

I was initially worried that what I needed was more structured database style storage for contact information and such, but doing it freeform doesn't seem to have anty real disadvantages that I have found yet.

MoinMoin has a pretty cool regex based query tool that lets you collect links to other pages. I have made good use of this to create a very low maintenance set of navigation pages so my info is only one to two clicks away. Very Handy.

Wikis really help me write ... all the fuss about how it really is designed for writers not readers is apparently true, at least in my case. I find it easier to write in my wiki than in MS Word. Perhaps less clutter? More focus on the words?

I have also made use of editmoin which allows me to use vim to edit my documents which may contribute to the ease of writing somewhat. Here is an Infoworld article noting that writers tend to work in minimal writing tools. Maybe that is partly what I've experienced.

I have had to spend sometime on buffing up the css stylesheets. This is mainly because a lot of my formal documents need to get emailed out to customers and I have been converting them to PDF and sending them that way. This required some adjustment to the styles.

[Note to MoinMoin developers: It would be cool if the print preview used a different stylesheet... Then I could highlight uncreated WikiWords in the regular view but not the print view ...]

Finally, I am using JPluck to sync the content of my Wiki to my Palm Pilot. That way all the info I need is always at my fingertips. It took some adjustments to the spidering controls to get it to focus only on what I wanted, but it has worked out very well.

So far this has been extremely successful. More reports as events warrent ;-)

[Ed Taekema - Road Warrior Collaboration]

Here's a perfect example of why Ed's blog is in my subscription list. This is excellent perspective on similar experiments I've been trying to get some traction on.

[McGee's Musings]

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 19:14:41 GMT

Wiki - KM survey..

Wiki - KM survey. Martin Cleaver and his fellow students from the Michael G. Degroote School of Business are running an interesting questionnaire on using TWiki for KM. BTW your inputs would be greatly appreciated by their class. KM surveys have become something of... [Knowledge-at-work]

Something to follow up on later this week.

[McGee's Musings]

Thu, 13 Nov 2003 15:14:01 GMT

DRUCKER ON INNOVATION.

I'm a big fan of Peter Drucker, and his book Innovation & Entrepreneurship remains in my opinion the definitive work on business innovation. Following is my synopsis of the innovation process he espouses.

Let's look at an example. The banks are trying to figure out how to get more revenue from services that aren't connected to the tight 'spread' between the rate they charge on loans and mortgages and the rate they pay account-holders and investors. Drucker would say they should (step A) consciously decide to get out of some of the lines of business that have tight spreads and hence lousy profit margins. They then calculate how much revenue needs to be made up with new, innovative and more profitable services.

A separate Innovation Team is charged with finding these new services. They look at seven sources of innovation opportunities (step B, elaborated in Fig.2 below).
Source 1: What surprises have occurred in the banking industry? Well, the success of 'virtual' banks like ING, which have no self-standing branches and hence low premises costs. The disappointing take-up of Internet banking. Scandals that have hit investment banks for hawking over-priced investments and exploiting insider information, hurting the reputation of that whole segment of the industry.
Source 2: What gaps have occurred between the perception of banks and the reality? They are perceived to focus exclusively on big corporate customers and not care about 'retail' customers, when in reality most banks get the large majority of their revenues from small business and retail customers. Customers expect banks to be willing to take a chance on them, in return for higher interest rates, when banks are very risk-averse, and prefer to leave the high-risk, high-margin accounts to secondary lenders.
Source 3: What are the weak links in the banks' processes? Customers complain that they don't have a real, human, single-point-of-contact, a Customer Relationship Manager, and when they do find a CRM they like, he or she gets transferred. Meanwhile the CRMs feel they don't get the information they need from the big 'head office' bureaucracy, to provide effective personal service.
Source 4: What's happening in the banking industry? Some banks are looking at customers holistically, instead of having different departments deal with each of the customer's financial needs.
Source 5: What's happening to customer demographics? The middle class is disappearing, the population is aging, and family sizes are shrinking, with unattached singles and single-parent families the fastest growing customer segments.
Source 6: How are customer attitudes changing? Customers feel 'nickel-and-dimed' to death by bank service charges and are angry at usurous rates charged on unpaid balances and loans with a single missed or late payment.
Source 7: What new knowledge and technologies are available? New organizations like Capital One are crowding the banks in many areas of operations using huge, sophisticated customer databases that let them market to very specific customer niches.

The Innovation Group must rigorously assemble and draw together all of the trends, findings and intelligence from these seven Innovation Sources. It's a continuous process that requires a continuous environmental scan to stay on top of.

The next step (step C, elaborated in Fig.3 above), entails two types of analysis of all the data compiled in step B:

Conceptual analysis: Studying what each of the data from step B could mean to the company -- how does it tie into the company's strengths, surfacing opportunities, how does it reveal the company's weaknesses, and expose the company to threats, and what creative solutions can be found to exploit the opportunities and counter or minimize or even capitalize on the risks. In short, does each new idea meet the nine criteria in Fig.3? Drucker talks about how to do this analysis, and other creativity experts like De Bono and Minto have produced a host of tools to help the Innovation Group with the analysis.
Perceptual analysis: This entails having the Innovation Group talking, listening, observing people in the field, on the front lines and in discussions with customers, to qualify the conceptual analysis. These are the people, mostly skeptics to be sure, who can provide the acid test of each of the ideas stemming from the conceptual analysis. And even when they've passed this acid test, the prototypes of the new ideas then need to be exposed to 'focus groups', representative cross-sections of the front-line of the organization and its customers, to be refined and perfected before the marketing people take over.

Only at the end of this rigorous process are the innovations actually implemented (step D). And even then small-scale pilots are used to ensure the market is ready, and the new product or service is ready for that market. Many innovations fail even at this late stage, and the secret is to fail early and to constantly improve the offering before a major investment is made in it.

This is of course an enormous oversimplification of Drucker's remarkable book. In the last three years business innovation has gone from business' Job One to an insignificant part of corporate strategies, as executives have become obsessed instead with slashing costs and heads in an insane race to the bottom, quality and customer be damned. Such an approach is, like seemingly everything else in vogue in the Bush era, short-sighted and unsustainable. You cannot cut yourself to greatness. It's time to start a new bandwagon for business innovation.

My comprehensive Prescription for Business Innovation and my table of contents of Business Papers provide some further food for thought and practical advice on this subject.

[How to Save the World]

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 15:41:47 GMT

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT.

In a recent post I argued that IT and Knowledge Management (KM) should merge into a combined TechKnowledgy department that would, in addition to the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and technical hardware of the organization, take on these two important new responsibilities focused on the individual 'knowledge worker':

1. Social Software Applications: Development of new social software applications for front-line employees, including:

Expertise locators - to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively.
Personal content management tools - simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual's 'filing cabinet', as a replacement for failed centralized content management systems.
Personal collaboration tools - wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person.
Personal researching and reporting tools - technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations.

2. Personal Productivity Improvement: Hands-on assistance to front-line employees -- helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service -- face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more.
I've written before about social software applications, and noted that Business 2.0 has named these applications the Best New Technology of 2003.

Now I've put together, in Word format, a downloadable Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement. I've written this so that it can be used by both:

IT/KM professions inside the organization, to get executive buy-in and resources for it, and
external IT/KM consultants who want to sell this service to organizations that prefer to outsource it.

I hope you find it useful and I would welcome comments on it. I am looking to organize a virtual collaborative enterprise of IT/KM professionals interested in providing this service, so I may also post it on Ryze/LinkedIn.

What do you think -- could people make a living doing this?

[How to Save the World]

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 18:21:45 GMT

Idea management. "Most Knowledge Management work deals with the organization and structure of information, which, when done well, helps improve productivity and reduces rework and mistakes. A company's future, though, is determined by creativity and innovation, and harnessing the resourcefulness of people... [Knowledge-at-work]

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 18:19:23 GMT

Learning templates for organising content. I've just come across Denham Grey's Information Gathering Template post. I'm not sure how I missed it before, I'm subscribed to Denham's feed. Anyhow it's really interesting.

What he's done is to publish his informal framework for categorizing information when doing research. It goes like this:

People
Places
Problems
Promises
Principles
Patterns
Products

Please read Denham's post for his excellent notes on each category. Obviously this is very similar to the approach we have taken with K-Collector.

Who
Where
What
When

to which I think it might make sense to add 'Why'. In this case our framework is simpler, conflating: problems, promises, principles, patterns, and, products into what.

Although W4 is less expressive than Denham's template we think making it simpler keeps it suitable for general use (Denham is a consultant and far more experienced than most people.)

However if we can find a way to layer additional levels of meaning without giving up that simplicity I think we will do it. It makes sense to enable users who can benefit from that extra expressability and for all users to benefit from the new relations we can build among topics. Since K-Collector's architecture allows us to do this it's just a matter of working out the best way and Paolo and I have been talking about this recently. We'll also be sounding out beta testers and customers to see what they think.

I'm keen to hear from anyone about their frameworks for collecting & organising content. I do think we have many lessons to learn and want K-Collector to reflect that learning as much as possible.
[Curiouser and curiouser!]

Fri, 07 Nov 2003 19:08:14 GMT

The issue is user created context.

"What I think may be relevant today is that new tools (weblogs, wikis, etc) are pushing forward along the dimension of context management instead of content. Perhaps what we are building with weblogs, RSS, and the rest is the infrastructure for personalizing and managing context on a new scale. "

[McGee's Musings]

Thu, 06 Nov 2003 20:52:51 GMT

BUSINESS 2.0: BEST NEW TECHNOLOGIES.

(expertise finder from Entopia's Social Networks Analyzer)

The November edition of Business 2.0 (only available on-line to subscribers) has selected Social Networking Applications as the Technology of the Year. Mentioned in the survey are Ryze, LinkedIn, Friendster, Zero Degrees, Tribe.net, Spoke Connect, and Visible Path. The magazine should be commended for this insightful choice, but they missed the companion technology that will provide the data essential to the functioning of future Social Networking Applications. That technology: Personal Content Management and Publishing Applications (notably Blogs and RSS). You can't have one without the other.

In the same edition, editor David Pescovitz lists Ten Technologies to Watch in 2004:

1    HOME NETWORKING
Ultra-wideband: Imagine a television that can wirelessly send three different programs to separate monitors. Low-power, low-cost, and with roughly 45 times the data transmission speed of run-of-the-mill Wi-Fi, this wireless technology is finally ready to debut in the living room.

2    SUPPLY CHAIN
RFID: While they've been talked about a lot, radio frequency identification tags have yet to appear in a big way in the supply chain. Wal-Mart (WMT) is making it happen: All its suppliers must use the tags for pallets and cases of merchandise by 2005.

3    WIRELESS BROADBAND
802.16: WiMax enables wireless networks to extend as far as 30 miles and transfer data, voice, and video at faster speeds than cable or DSL. It's perfect for ISPs that want to expand into sparsely populated areas, where the cost of bringing in DSL or cable wiring is too high.

4    ENERGY
Micro fuel cells: Japan's largest wireless phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo, plans to introduce cell phones powered by miniature fuel cells -- which run on hydrogen or methanol -- late next year. Look for them to also show up as expensive add-ons for high-end laptops.

5    HOUSEHOLD PRODUCTS
Gecko tape: Lizards climb walls using the mechanical adhesive force of millions of tiny hairs on their feet. A synthetic version of those microscopic hairs allows gecko tape, developed at England's University of Manchester, to stick to almost any surface without glue. Applications include gloves that allow a person to climb a glass wall, the ability to move computer chips in a vacuum, and new bandages.

6    SOFTWARE
Antispam software (that works): If you've tried filters, whitelists, and blacklists, chances are you still receive plenty of junk e-mail. "Challenge/response" technology may be the answer; it requires senders to manually verify their identity before e-mail is passed along to the intended recipient.

7    CONSUMER ELECTRONICS
OLEDs: Organic light-emitting diodes are brighter and use less power than normal light-emitting diodes. (They rely on carbon with nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen elements -- thus, the "organic" tag.) They're perfect for screens on cell phones, digital cameras, and camcorders, and even for a new crop of affordable flat-panel monitors.

8    LIGHTING
LED lightbulbs: LEDs will outrun obsolescence by moving into the home. Philips is already pushing its Luxeon line of LED lightbulbs, which can last 10 to 50 times as long as incandescent bulbs while consuming 80 percent less energy.

9    COMPUTER MEMORY
MRAM: Magnetoresistive random access memory is (in theory, anyway) more than 1,000 times faster than the fastest current nonvolatile flash memory and nearly 10 times faster than DRAM. "Nonvolatile" means it retains memory when the power is off. Add in its low power consumption, and it's perfect for use in an upcoming crop of computers and cell phones.

10    MEDICINE
Bioinformatics: Researchers, such as those at IBM Life Sciences, are finally getting a handle on building complex protein models to aid in drug discovery. The new, computationally accurate models mean that potential drugs can be identified more quickly and stand a better chance of working.

[How to Save the World]

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:39:07 GMT

Social Software for KM.

Ross Mayfield writes about the need to rethink knowledge management, pointing to discussions by Dave Pollard and Jay Fienberg.

One of the points made by Dave is about the use of social software for KM and its benefits:

The entire issue of centralized content collection and management goes away. Everyone does their own.

The intranet becomes a people-to-people connector instead of a content repository, a 'link harvester', scanning all traffic across it and dynamically identifying connections to people and their knowledge. New tools would be needed to allow such functionality. These would be Social Software tools, not KM tools.

The intranet architecture begins to look more like that of a telephone switch than that of a DBMS. It gets very skinny. There are no central databases.

Each individual's subscribable, personally-indexed weblog becomes a surrogate or proxy for the individual when s/he's not available personally.

Organizational boundaries become irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether the person you are sharing with is a work colleague, a supplier, customer, friend or advisor, an individual or a team, inside or outside the company. You share what you know with those you trust, period. Security would hence be provided at the individual level, not managed by the enterprise. The same way employees know what hard-copy documents can be shared with whom, they set up ‘subscription’ access to their blog categories correspondingly

Jay provides "a set of recommendations designed to suggest a system in which people in the company are encouraged to publish information to each other and collaborate with and through that information...I think these recommendations are worth posting here as they suggests a set of requirements that microcontent oriented systems (like the iCite net, wikis, blogs, etc.) might best match."

Summarises Ross: "We are seeing Enterprise Social Software being considered not as knowledge management, but as a better way of doing management. The knowing-doing gap is closing, but not as we expected. Facilitate doing in a social context and you gain learning and insights in social context."

The way I have been thinking about this is quite similar: how can we use the appropriate tools with methodologies first for personal productivity, and then for group productivity. Managing information is a key aspect of the first process, and sharing information is important for the second. This is the bottom-up process that enterprise knowledge management needs to focus on.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Thu, 30 Oct 2003 16:09:59 GMT

Doing Management (Ross Mayfield). Two great Knowledge Management practitioners just posted great insights about how Enterprise Social Software transforms the practice into Doing Management. Dave Pollard contributes a paper on the Future of Knowledge Management. He addresses the primary failings of traditional KM, the... [Many-to-Many]