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Knowledge_Solutions
Data, Information, and Knowledge Solutions
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Saturday, August 02, 2003  |
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(SOURCE:"jrobb")- Thank goodness John Robb is back blogging excellent stuff like this again!<QUOTE># K-Logs break down information silos. ... # K-Logs simplify finding information. All information posted to K-Logs is made to the Intranet where they can be easily searched by standard search engines. ... K-Logs are your internal business card). # K-Logs radically increase the possibility that meaningful information and knowledge will be captured and archived on the Intranet. There isn't another system that even comes close. K-Logs provide employees with a system that is easy to use (virtually zero training), immediate benefits, and enhanced personal prestige/value. Additionally, K-Logs can be used continuously on an ad hoc or project by project basis, as a result they are very flexible and horizontal in their utilization (increases the potential that they will be used). ...</QUOTE> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Friday, July 04, 2003 |
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Don't forget to KISS.
Web logs as KM (Con't). I've been struggling with this whole "what is going to make Web logs use successful" question for a while as the idea is getting more an more interest here. The bottom line, I believe is acceptance by classroom teachers as a useful technology. ... [McGee's Musings]
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| Thursday, June 12, 2003 |
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There continues to be great dialog on wikis in the mix of knowledge work in organizations. Ross Mayfield, of socialtext, has an excellent summary post on Group Voice that makes a good point to pick up this thread.
Its not a choice between one or another. The temporal structure of weblogs and logical structure of wikis are a complement for lasting effects. One of the more powerful patterns in an organization is how an opportunity is published in blog, possibilities are swarmed upon in blog conversation and then driven to consensus and outcome in a wikified document. After the outcome, the knowledge and its social context remains.
Both tools together create powerful effects for publishing, communication and collaboration.
Denham Gray calls attention to the key differentiating aspects of wikis in a comment he posted. His key distinctions:
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- The power to contribute BOTH to content and structure - other genres require you post within a predetermined structure (blogs, bulletin boards, guestbooks, IM....)
- True equality - blogs have an implicit posting hierarchy - some get main board status, the rest are relegated to buried comments (if allowed)
- Collaborative writing at the most fundamental (text) level - this is very different from annotation, editorial commentary or letters to the editor!
- Open edit - you can change anything at anytime - no attributation, notime/ date stamps in wiki- just pure flow
Stuart Henshall recommends a look at NexistWiki and also offers several interesting reports on the use of wikis in working sessions (see The One Hour Wiki). Doug Holton at Ed Tech Dev offers a pointer to Tiki (and other CMS tools) for Teaching. One curious thing I've noticed is that wikis appear to be very popular in the Smalltalk/Squeak community. Here's one directory, for example, of Smalltalk Wiki Webs.
Next steps for me will be to begin frequenting a few wikis, installing a wiki somewhere I can play with, and looking for appropriate group opportunities where I can apply wikis. As if I had spare time I was desparate to fill :).
(part 1 and part 2 of my original posts on wikis) [ McGee's Musings]
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Part of me is missing the Weblogs and Business Strategy conference in Boston, despite the excellent liveblogging going on from so many of the participants ( topic exchange channel and Denise Howell in particular). My aggregator is overflowing with great input from the conference. On the other hand, the distance and the need to focus on my work at hand also provides a valuable filter for processing that input.
While my last several large posts have focused on wikis (part 1 , part 2, part 3) and the social dimensions of knowledge work, I want to shift back to the personal level of blogs. There's a thread to the use of blogs inside organizations that I want to spend some time exploring.
As blogs and news aggregators move from fringe activity to leading edge phenomenon, it becomes possible to talk about the design of knowledge work. Tom Davenport, for example, has a column in the most recent issue of CIO Magazine [via Internet Time Blog] that says it's time to look at improving the effectiveness of knowledge workers. He talks about a new effort by the Information Worker Productivity Council to study knowledge work tasks with an eye toward how Accenture and HP and Xerox can help (possibliy with an eye toward selling us something). That's great and I'll be following their work with interest. They've certainly assembled an all star list of researchers. I wonder if they'll be blogging their efforts?
Meanwhile, I'm interested in following the radically decentralized action research program now underway in the efforts of all of us knowledge workers beginning to narrate their work and share in their collective experiments at making knowledge work more effective.
Some of us are lucky or talented enough to roll our own tools. Moreover, they've been willing to invite the rest of us in as co-designers . Now, many of the tools already in our toolkits theoretically allow us to participate in a design process. They've been built by programmers, after all, and programmers almost always prefer to solve general problems with tools rather than provide highly specific solutions to specific problems.
Unfortunately, most of those programmers work in organizations where the marketing staffs graduated from the "have solution, will travel" school of marketing and really aren't terribly interested in having active customers who actually are interested in co-designing their tools.
In the blogging community, however, the offer to participate as co-designers is serious. Blogging tools represent my favorite class of tools--ones that can be abused in interesting ways, even by ordinary users. They grew out of their developers needs to solve their own problems. What becomes interesting now is the alignment between the problems of developers and the rest of us doing knowledge work.
Taking advantage of that alignment does demand that we take an active role in the design process. Knowledge work is craft work brought into the 21st century. As many have observed, knowledge workers own their own means of production. If we are craft workers and we are judged by the quality of what we create, then we have an obligation to be mindful about how we use our tools and how we fit them to our own needs. To be most effective, we need to take design responsibility for our own knowledge work environment. I'll grant that we are still only at the Visicalc stage of blogging and aggregators. But that does not absolve us of the responsibility to understand and capitalize on what today's level of technology can do for us. [ McGee's Musings]
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KMPro with Mark Clare. Mark Clare argues that KM needs to step back and define knowledge before plunging forward with the "next wave" of knowledge management approaches or applications. [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]
I disagree.
I think that most efforts to define knowledge get hopelessly bogged down. The reason this happens is that the discussion is locked in an assumption that there needs to be a centrally managed agreement (at a minimum) about the definition.
I take a different approach. Focus instead on knowledge workers and knowledge work. Work on eliminating friction and hassles in their ability to do whatever it is they think matters. Attack the problems that are preventing knowledge workers from being as effective as they would like to be.
There's an old story that I've heard described as a Russion proverb. It says that if each one of us takes care of sweeping the sidewalk in front of our own home, we won't need streetsweepers. It's worth thinking about how that might apply to the world of knowledge work, both on the level of being an individual knowledge worker yourself and on the level of helping make the other knowledge workers that surround you more effective. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Sunday, June 08, 2003 |
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(SOURCE: Blogging Alone)- If your organization doesn't communicate in real time and keeps its knowledge bottled up in people's heads then you will not survive in the long term. Blogs and wikis are one of the best ways to help your organization communicate in real time and can therefore help ensure your organization's long term survival!<QUOTE>Blogging Alone discovers a vibrant and complex information ecosystem just beneath the formal org chart. We ask people what they are doing when they are doing knowledge work. What most of them told us was they search, acquire, store, retrieve, combine, buy, sell, transfer and share knowledge each day. Management practices for understanding knowledge work have been built using the factory metaphor where you assemble knowledge from raw materials. What we are finding is that a better metaphor would be a knowledge bazaar. These new discovers will lead to answers for these new questions. * What is the difference between the consumer and the producer in the knowledge creation process in the bazaar? * What draws people to be interested in, excited about and motivated to share knowledge and build on their ideas of others? * What are the conditions underwhich people choose to share their knowledge and become a knowledge trader in the bazaar? Companies face an information explosion. In order to survive some are adopting flexibility in a rapidly changing market place while others are going extinct. The company reorg is a signature of the latter where faced with challenges they simply shift the job descriptions of a few individuals and call that management. For survival new strategies are emerging, a fundamental rethinking of how companies process information in order to support good decisions.</QUOTE> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Thursday, May 29, 2003 |
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One unexpected fringe benefit of falling way behind in responding to all the fascinating posts accumulating in your news aggregator is that you get a chance to pull multiple items together into an integrated post. I did one recently on weblogs and knowledge management that a number of people found helpful. The backlog of posts shows no signs of abating, so it's time for a follow up.
Rick Klau sets a nice context by reminding us of Gartner's hype cycle and its application to blogs:
We are almost certainly in the trough of disillusionment when it comes to blogs.
Lots of critical comments, much confusion over their "true" benefits, etc.
Yet hundreds of thousands of people continue to use their weblog as a way of cataloging their thought.
And companies are starting to explore how they might use weblogs for other purposes.
My prediction: we will emerge from this trough into the "slope of enlightenment" during which it will become
obvious that personal weblogs can be tremendous tools for capturing ad hoc knowledge and
archiving it for future use. Furthermore, businesses will figure out that blogs can serve as
both a content management system as well as an internal knowledge sharing platform - a much different
use from the personal application, but a critical one for the business world to adopt weblogs
with enthusiasm.[tins:::Rick Klau's weblog]
Dina Mehta is relatively new to the blogging world. She offers some helpful fresh perspective on the challenges of
introducing weblogs into corporate environments. Thinking about the problems of knowledge management and how weblogs may fit, she says:
I'm not really sure that KM is being adopted in a really useful or effective manner in many organisations here.
More importantly, while its great to have a system in place as a talking point, i'm not really sure what real
value is being created and disseminated. They tend to be led by the HR department and are usually
one-way monologues that not many participate in - (but this is really a topic for another post).
There is a constant generation of content in an organisation - via email, via IM, through documents,
presentations, training workshops and seminars, and sometimes through discussion boards.
KM systems tend to be slow and heavy in capturing and disseminating this content - in the process,
the value may be lost[Conversations with Dina]
Like many of us, she sees that blogs may be the answer, but isn't sure how best to make the case to those in a position to make a decision.
Part of that case will hang on the availability of some concrete examples of weblogs in use in organizations.
Two areas that are generating some early examples of weblogs in organizational settings are project management
and marketing. Both are naturals for the technology, being high-paced and communications intensive.
On the project management side, Jon Udell at Infoworld is a regular source of good insights into weblogs in organizational
settings. Here's a post he ran on the use of weblogs to improve project communications plus the corresponding article at
Infoworld (Publishing a Project Weblog).
The value of a project Weblog has a lot to do with getting everybody onto the same page -- literally.
You want to deliver a manageable flow on the home page, drawing attention to the key events in the daily life
of the project. To do this well, think like a journalist. ...
The newspaper editor's mantra is "heads, decks, and leads" -- in other words, headlines, summaries, and
introductory paragraphs. These devices are, in fact, tools for managing a scarce and precious resource:
the reader's attention. A well-written title (or subject header if you happen to be composing an e-mail message)
is your first, best, and often only chance to get your message across.
There's a particularly useful diagram Jon reproduces in another Infoworld post on blogs, scopes, and human routers
and drawn from his his equally useful book, Practical Internet Groupware. It captures a notion of the multiple
overlapping groups that we belong to in the pursuite of knowledge work.
Jon has also talked about the notion of what he calls the conversational enterprise and how weblogs will serve
as a key source of the raw materials for knowledge management in organizations (Technical trends bode well for KM);
What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time.
The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader.
But in the real-world enterprise, most people don't tend to write these narratives naturally, and
the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it.
There is, however, a certain kind of person who has a special incentive to tell the story of a project:
the project managers, who are among the best power users of Traction Software's enterprise Weblogging software,
according to Traction co-founders Greg Lloyd and Chris Nuzum (see “Getting Traction”).
Traction certainly is powerful software, although the power does come at the expense of a somewhat steeper learning curve
than systems like Radio or Moveable Type whose origins were in personal weblogs rather than enterprise.
Actually, it might be better to think in terms of a steeper implementation curve, rather than learning curve.
Setting up Traction in terms of project structures and tags takes some thought to get full advantage of the tools.
Using them on a day-to-day basis is pretty straightforward.
The use of weblogs in marketing settings is also drawing attention. Some of that is in the form of early, and
rightfully ridiculed, examples such as the faux-blog Raging Cow, which tried to force its traditional marketing
strategy through a blog format.
Others have made more sensible progress (I suppose that makes me terminally boring). Inc. Magazine ran a
recent piece on Blogging for Dollars (link found via Blogging News), for example, that highlights some examples
of the real use of blogs as a marketing tool.
Gary Murphy at TeledyN offers up a couple of interesting examples of KM in organizational settings in a recent
post on Walmart's KM rocks.
Both searches were initially pointless because, for very good reasons, both the sought after data
items did not exist in the superficially logical locations. This is probably the number one flaw with
most dead-robot KM systems: They fail to accommodate how Reality is inherently messy!
The only possible method to locate either the ribs or the cards was to do what humans have done
since the dawn of archives, ask someone who knows. In both instances, we needed someone who knew
where the target was, and who could refer us to someone who knew how to extract it.
Murphy provides the critical link here between weblogs and organizational need. It is the realization that
KM in organizational settings is primarily a social phenomenon and not a technology one.
Most prior efforts to apply technology to KM problems in organizations have been solutions in search of a problem.
They have been driven by a technology vendor's need to sell product, not an organization's need to solve problems.
Weblogs are interesting in organizational KM settings because weblogs are technologically simple and socially complex,
which makes them a much better match to the KM problems that matter. One thing that we need to do next is to work
backwards from the answer - weblogs - to the problem - what do organizations need to do effective knowledge management.
We need to avoid the mistakes of other KM software vendors and not assume that the connection is self-evident. [ McGee's Musings]
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James Robertson of Column Two consistently provides useful insight and resources on knowledge management
and information architecture topics. Recently, Robertson had a series of posts that compiled an inventory of
available standards on knowledge management.
[ McGee's Musings]
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Wikis are now on the radar screens of many of us grappling with using technology effectively in knowledge work. Ward Cunningham's book, The Wiki Way:Quick Collaboration on the Web, has been on my bookshelf for some time now and I've visited a handful of public wikis. Lately there's been a spate of posts in the blog world about wikis. I've gathered up and made a first pass at organizing the ones I've encountered into what might be a reasonable order (based on my current level of ignorance).
One thing that did help me get a better grasp on wikis was listening to David Weinberger's talk at Seabury Western two weeks ago. David was drawing attention to the collaborative effort to produce the Wikipedia, which is essentially an open source model effort at creating an online encyclopedia. I had always been puzzled by the free-for-all editing capability inherent in the wiki technology. The analogy that finally made it clear for me was to a whiteboard in a conference room. Those frequently become shared design spaces as markers change hands. Wikis are the same idea moved to the web, which suggests to me that they are likely to be more useful inside organizations than elsewhere.
- Why Wiki Works - [link courtesy of Corante: Social Software, which has been following the Wiki discussion in depth]
- Why Wike Works/Not
- Why I Don't Like
Wikis Email - [Also from Corante: Social Software] - Some interesting observations about visual presentation in wikis and email vs. better laid out web pages and how this interferes with the usefulness of wikis (at least on the public web).
- Email Doesn't Self-Organize - [from Ross Mayfield] - quoting Ward Cunningham
Cunningham also points out that you can go away from a wiki and come back at any time to pick up a conversation without much inconvenience, which isn't the case with e-mail-centric group discussions. "E-mail doesn't self-organize," he emphasizes.
- The Cunningham quote comes from What's a Wiki? an overview article by Sebastian Rupley at Extreme Tech.
- Wiki as a PIM and Collaborative Content Tool [via Sebastian Fiedler] - which appears to be a good overview with lots of links.
- From the other Seb in my aggregator (Sebastien Paquet at Seb's Open Research) comes Why Meatball Matters.
Meatball Wiki is a little-known gem in the jungle of online community-related material on the Web. What is it about? A whole lot of fascinating stuff - in founder Sunir Shah's words:
It philosophizes about the nature of hypertext, government, and identity. It talks about user interfaces, community building, and conflict resolution. But it also contains technical analyses of indexing schemes, wiki architecture, and inter-wiki protocol design. Sunir has recently been busy writing up a nice summary of what's significant about Meatball, as part of a work portfolio he's preparing to get into the Knowledge Media Design Institute at the University of Toronto.
I believe Sunir understands Wiki philosophy better than anyone else I know. His contributions to framing the concept and patterns of soft security that underlie the social architecture of Wikis are what made me an early convert to Meatball. If only Sunir had kept a blog instead of a home-brewed diary page, he'd surely be well-known in social software circles today.
Hopefully, as the Wiki way slowly seeps into the mainstream Internet mentality, its perceived weirdness will subside and collaborative hypermedia communities like this one will get the recognition (and linkage) they deserve. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Sunday, May 18, 2003 |
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Another stream of recent posts has focused on weblogs as a tool for knowledge management both to capture and share knowledge. They include a mix of posts focusing on individual knowledge workers and on knowledge workers within organizations.
Lou Rosenfeld, author of the excellent Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, has a good post on blogging k-logging.
Dave Pollard has generated a great set of posts on weblogs as knowledge management tools. His weblog in general has become a must read for me.: Blogs in Business: The Weblog as Filing Cabinet
Weblogs could be a mechanism to coherently codify and 'publish' in a completely voluntary and personal manner the individual worker's entire filing cabinet, complete with annotations, marginalia, post-its and personal indexing system. A Weblog-Based Content Architecture for Business (this post also has some excellent diagrams of how weblogs fit within the entreprise)
The fundamental difference between this and traditional enterprise-wide content architectures, is that knowledge under this model resides with and is controlled by the individual. The knowledge of the community is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of the community members (within any shared categorizations the community members decide to establish, and pushed to other community members by the weblog's 'subscription' functionality. The knowledge of the enterprise is simply the sum of the knowledge residing in the weblogs of all employees, made accessible through the weblog's publishing and subscription functionality, using the tools present in the weblog itself. Theoretically, depending on the robustness of the company's networks, the Intranet could be slimmed down to nothing more than a set of organized links, with no actual 'content' whatsoever. Blogs in Business: Finding the Right Niche
Weblogs can be effectively pitched to senior management of major organizations by explaining how they help solve the six problems:
They make contributing knowledge simpler, easier, and more automatic
They make it easier to update knowledge on a timely basis
They make knowledge more context rich
They allow the authors of key business knowledge to build and retain 'pride of ownership'
They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'
They make contributing knowledge more fun, since it becomes more like 'publishing'
Each individual's 'collection' of shared knowledge is easy to define and assess at performance evaluation time
They make knowledge easier to route, to 'subscribe' to, to canvass and to 'mine'
Dave Sifry, creator of Technorati, and Doc Searls did a piece for Linux Journal on Building with Blogs. One key excerpt:
As weblogs account for more and more of the traffic in knowledge about a given subject, they become powerful instruments for hacking common wisdom. In many categories, they are moving ahead of mainstream journals and portals and building useful community services where over-funded dot-com efforts failed spectacularly.
Sébastien Paquet adds a piece on "towards structured blogging" where he starts to think about how to begin adding a next layer of metadata to collections of weblogs.
Right now what we have, globally speaking, is pretty much a huge pool of blog posts, each implicitly tied to a particular weblog author and with a date slapped on.
Donald Luskin makes the following observation in his weblog (pointers courtesy of Scripting News and Roland Tanglao)
At the dinner table I explained what a blog is. There was the usual polite, partially feigned fascination with anything having to do with the Internet. But when I said that blogs have completely transformed my utilization of media and the way I acquire information about the world -- that I basically get everything from blogs now -- everyone stopped being polite. One fellow at the table was utterly shocked that I would trust any information I acquired online. I asked him if he trusted information he got from politically biased mainstream newspapers like the New York Times, or for that matter, from any commercial media biased toward at least some degree of sensationalism, if not some particular political view. I asked him if he had ever, once, read a newspaper account of some event of which he personally had expert or eye-witness knowledge, and found it to be accurate. I asked him he had ever once been interviewed by a reporter who quoted him accurately or in context, or who didn't already have the story written before the conversation even began? Well, no, he had to admit... but still... "...not the Internet! You can't be serious!"
Roland is always a source of good observations and links about blogging in knowledge sharing and knowledge management contexts. Some recent commentary via his blog include
Blogging is too difficult but it will get better. Like I always say we are at the VisiCalc stage of blogging. Compare and contrast Excel and VisiCalc; lightyears better and people in 2003 understand spreadsheets. Same thing will happen with blogging; we need years of experience and iteration to get from the VisiCalc of blogging to the Excel of blogging.
and this pointer to Value Creation by Communities of Practice
Blogs encourage cross-functional disruptive thinking.
I read a great quote that, like a magnet of meanings, pulled together layers of my thinking into a surprising pattern of possibility. Here it is: "Here is the paradox: You need a great team of people with diverse skills to perform a symphony well, but no team has ever written a great symphony! ... While cross-functional teams are key players in defining and implementing incremental innovation projects, cross-functional disruptive individuals tend to be key players in defining radical innovation projects."
That should cover it for tonight, although there are still a bunch of good posts on this topic filling up my aggregator. [ McGee's Musings]
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Informal Learning – The Other 80%. I don't know how to emphasize more that this - rather than classroom-based learning - is where we should be focussing our efforts. As Cross writes, "Informal learning has always played a larger role than most people imagined, but it’s becoming increasingly important as workers take responsibility for their own destinies. Formal learning consists of instruction and events imposed by others. When a worker chooses his path to learning independent of others, by definition, that’s informal." This is an outstanding article, clearly documenting the importance of informal learning, defining it, and showing how organizations can make the most of it. By Jay Cross, Internet Time Group, May 8, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
This is just one of many pointers to Jay Cross's excellent piece on why we should be focusing on informal learning. Accomplishing this boils down to an issue of leadership over management. From a management perspective it's easy to see why formal learning dominates, especially in organizational settings. There's stuff you can point to, there's stuff you can measure, and you can put someone in charge. The only problem is that all this activitiy doesn't make much of a difference.
It takes a huge act of leadership to acknowledge where the real learning takes place and to start figuring out how to better support that learning. First, it takes a huge act of trust in believing that your people can figure out on their own what they need to learn. Second, you need to start helping them get better at doing that figuring out. They may still be under the illusion, perpetuated by your training systems, that they should be looking for classroom courses or looking for their slick e-learning equivalents.
Most of us are products of educational systems that leave us confused about how and when we learn best, partly because those systems are dedicated to preserving themselves. It takes time to develop skill at self-managed learning. It also takes time to learn how to tap into the informal systems that are out there to support you (another of the huge advantages of weblogs, BTW). Some resources I would recommend here would be Ron Gross's books, The Independent Scholar's Handbook and Peak Learning, Peter Vaill's Learning As a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water, and Roger Schank's Coloring Outside the Lines : Raising a Smarter Kid by Breaking All the Rules.
My stop is up next, so I'll pick this up in another post later. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Sunday, May 11, 2003 |
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The ABC's of Personal Knowledge Management
Who would have thought that one of the most powerful personal knowledge management tools available to us is the simple alphabet.nbsp For a while now I've been using the ideas of David Allen and his Getting Things Done (GTD) process for organising oneself.nbsp His ideas for keeping track of projects, ideas, actions and reference materials is personal knowledge management to the quick. nbspFor me and others has helped to quieten down the background noise of reminders for those things not yet done.
One of the simplest yet most powerful ideas within GTD is the reduction of noise in a personal filing system.nbsp How do you file your own reference materials?nbsp Two parameters drive the system.
1) It must be easy and fun to file materials otherwise you won't
2) It must be easy and fun to find materials otherwise you won't trust the results of step 1.
This is the beauty of the alphabet.nbsp Simply categorise what you have in your hand (and I mean simply), put it in a manilla folder, label it and file it under the first letter of the label.nbsp All in order and quick to retrieve.nbsp When you need something, what you have filed will be on only 1-3 places.nbsp My gas bill will be under G for Gas or T for TXU my supplier.nbsp I can find it quickly and so can my wife if I'm not around.
A complicated system may have had me filenbspmy gas billnbspunder Bills -> Home -> Utilities -> Gas.nbsp Far to difficult to recall and far to difficult to initially categorise because I have to keep the categories and their rules in my head.nbsp Hence, nothing gets filed and it all piles up.
I came across the General Reference Filing tip before the book had arrived (Amazon isn't the quickest on postage across the Pacific) and implemented it straight away.nbsp Read the tip a couple of times and buy a labeller.nbsp It makes all the difference.nbsp Scanning consistent and well printed text is much quicker than reading handwriting.nbsp Itnbsponce tooknbspa while to read all the folder labels for my gas bill which were not ordered alphabetically, were handwritten and not always in the same place on each folder.nbsp Just now I found it in under a second.nbsp My filing cabinet is now more useful than the 4-drawer box it was.
This morning I re-organised my Outlook folders the same way.nbsp I now have a Reference Filing file (separate from my mail .pst file) and within it a long list of alphabetically ordered folders.nbsp Within five minutes I had most material refiled under the new system.nbsp That itself shows how quick the filing and retrieval can be.
This afternoon my Palm Pilot is going to get a good re-organisation as well.
[ tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
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New RSS feed from Corante led me to their IdeaFlow blog. Several interesting pieces on the site that warrant follow-up reading. The first to catch my eye was this piece on idea management. Making idea creation and management explicit is something well worth doing. There's a whole range of thought on facilitating structured innovation. (One example is Robert G. Cooper's Stage Gate methodology, profiled in Product Development for the Service Sector.) A good KM system should intuitively reinforce both effective ideation (idea creation) and efficient development of good ideas. But designing in such capabilities isn't as simple as collecting documents or messages. This Idea Management resource listing is a good place to start the thinking process for building such a system.
Creativity + Knowledge Management = Idea Management
OK. Let's assume you're creative and innovative, and so are your employees. So what do you do with all of this creativity, all these ideas? You manage them, perhaps with the help of the concepts and software emerging from the growing subset of innovation management known as idea management. Idea management can also be thought of as the crossroads where innovation intersects with knowledge management. As usual, Chuck Frey at InnovationTools.com is already on this: he's launched an Idea Management Resource Center that's worth checking out. [Corante: IdeaFlow] [ b.cognosco]
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(SOURCE:"teledyn")- One of the reasons blogs will succeed is because of their bottom up nature.<quote> The tools for knowledge management haven't appreciably improved in the last 20 years; email integration and shared folders are the only significant features Outlook delivers that Sidekick didn't have in 1984. And while tons of VC dollars have been spent on intranets and portal creation software, the whole concept of centralized knowledge management feels wrong to me. Attempting to create a consistent vocabulary and taxonomy across an entire enterprise is misguided. It should be obvious that everyone is unique in the mental models that they create to structure their knowledge. What's more the knowledge that workers create must be portable, for no matter how much companies would like to lock employees' ideas away as intellectual property, the cross-pollination that occurs when people move from company to company is critical to innovation. We should be building tools to encourage innovation and collaboration, not to constrain it or control it. This seems a domain where open data exchange standards, P2P technologies and powerful desktop computing are the right models. The integration of personal and published web content, content and concept sharing, RSS aggregation and publishing, blogging, email filtering/storage/extraction and powerful collaborative searching is bringing a real revolution in knowledge working productivity into view. It is a revolution that no amount of VC could have spawned as it is the gestaltic thoughts and conversations across hundreds of developers and knowledge workers in constant casual collaboration that is driving this revolution. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE:bloggers unlimited email list)- <quote> Easily create outlines on the web using just a browser. Dynamic List is excellent for storing and sharing information. * Collect and organize useful information. Store it online. * Prioritize tasks. When priorities change, update your lists quickly. * Organize your bookmarks, and access them using any browser. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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<quote> Ideagraph is easy-to-use software for creating visual maps of ideas, that can work with web pages, documents and images. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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Surrounded by new opportunities.
Ray Ozzie on ZDNet : Surrounded by new opportunities
Even though our current use of PCs, productivity tools, e-mail and the Web seems quite sophisticated, we've only just begun to understand how to apply them and effectively realize their benefits. The next 10 years will find us moving decidedly from an era of personal productivity to one of joint productivity and social software. That will involve a move from tightly coupled systems to more loosely coupled interconnections. It will be an era of highly interdependent systems and relationships, with technology continuing to reshape the nature of organizations, economy, society and personal lives.
[Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]
Ray Ozzie is busy thinking about the kinds of problems we'll want computers to help with five to ten years from now. Groove, or something like it, may well be part of that answer. Certainly, the focus on collaboration and social software will be a major element of what's next. That's certainly what I expect someone like Ozzie to be thinking about.
At the same time, I think it's an overstatement to claim that many of us are realizing the personal productivity promise of today's technology. While I might not go as far as Alan Kay's claim that the computer revolution hasn't happened yet, I do think that both individual knowledge workers and organizations could be doing a lot more to take advantage of the tools we have.
In the mid-1980s, the Harvard Business School was one of the first MBA programs to require incoming students to buy PCs. One of the things I got to participate in as a doctoral student at the time was to help deliver the training to incoming MBAs. We spent three days teaching them the basics of the IBM PC and how to use Lotus 123.
How much training does the average organization offer new hires about the technology environment? An hour? Thirty minutes? Some of that is a testament to the overall improvements in usability and in general knowledge of technology. But I can't think of anyplace that invests any time in how to use the tools effectively. One interesting item (by way of Sebastien Paquet) is a white paper by Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University titled "A Knowledge Home: Personal knowledge structuring in a computer world." (pdf version)
The fundamental challenge, and opportunity, is that we've been content to focus on increasing the power and flexibility of our technology tools while assuming that knowledge workers will figure out how to take advantage fo that power. As knowledge workers it's our responsibility to do more of that figuring out. We need to stop counting on the marketing promises of technology vendors and start learning how to use the tools we've already got. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Sunday, May 04, 2003 |
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(SOURCE:"mcgee")- McGee nails it! People don't want to narrate their personal and business lives using blogs and other tools because they are afraid that their narration will be ignored and considered uncompelling. Call me an optimist but I think everyone has a compelling story to tell in both their personal and business lives. And this story can and should be shared!<quote> Conventional wisdow says it's because people are worried that someone will steal their ideas. I think that's a rationalization. I think the real fear is the fear of being ignored. The fear that the knowledge I share is so obvious or trivial that no one will care. What's the old maxim from Mark Twain? "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." The issue may still be fear, but it's a fear that we need to address in a very different way. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE:"mathemagenic")- Which archetypes best describe you? There are alot of Avoiders out there but conversely that means we just have more work to do to figure out how to help the Avoiders become Seekers and Sharers. Life is full of challenges! <quote> * The Knowledge Seeker (e.g. R&D, marketing) - "motivated by the job itself; focuses on the big picture; finds detail tedious" * The Knowledge Sharer (e.g. manager, trainer) - "regards knowledge as a common currency; distinguishes between stewardship and ownership of knowledge; more interested in transfer than retention of knowledge" * The Knowledge Keeper (e.g. finance, personnel) - "screens knowledge selectively; ascribes equal importance to the retention and transfer of knowledge; forms strategic alliances" * The Knowledge Avoider - "distinguishes between official and unofficial knowledge; regards official knowledge as inherently suspect; considers knowledge-sharing a lure to entrap staff into unnecessary activities" </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE: A Father and his two girls)- Excellent service<quote> This site was created with one goal in mind. To give you the opportunity to "try out" some of the best php/mysql based free and open source software systems in the world. You are welcome to be the administrator of any site here, allowing you to decide which system best suits your needs. The administrator username and password is given for every system and each system is refreshed on the hour, every hour. This allows you to to add and delete content, change the way things look, basically be the admin of any system here with no fear of messing anything up. I hope opensourceCMS.com is useful in your quest to find the right software system for your needs. If you're looking for hosting, OpenSourceHost supports every system here. OpenSourceHost will even install the system of your choice for free when you sign up for an account. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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Pitching Blogs part 2.
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I met Todd, a banker, tonight at our friend Paula's party. His job is to fund knowledge based industries. I was stunned to find out that he doesn't know what a blog is! I figured that bankers would know based on especially after Google's recent acquisition of Blogger and Neoteny's (who are VCs) funding of TypePad. Don't all bankers and VCs know each other :-) ?
Just goes to show you that blogs are far from mainstream. I need to continue to cultivate my pitch.
Because bottom line: a) we don't have a business model that I can pitch to bankers and VCs although I think we are getting closer b) blogging is new!
But I do know that blogs are a big part of the future of the web and if we don't make lots of money off of it somebody else will. And to me, it's not all about money (but of course that's a big part of it); it's about making the world a better place by enabling better communication through blogging.
Todd: I suggest you come to one of our DisruptiveThinking Meetings and we can discuss blogs, demo blogs and start one up for you.
In the meantime here are some links for Todd to investigate about blogging:
[ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Monday, April 28, 2003 |
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George Siemens points to an interesting view on the basic components of an innovative community of practice (CoP). The weblog, run by Erik van Bekkum, is part of the business site for efios, described as follows:
"efios is an independent consultancy company that focuses on implementations of web based collaboration inside the enterprise. The efios organization was established in 2002, but brings in years of experience with virtual team working, communities and communities of practice." This whole site appears to be built and maintained in Radio Userland. It's very well done. Has some very nice modifications to a basic Radio template, and is one of the best small consultancy sites I've seen anywhere. I really like it. It's worth going there to have a look around.
Innovation Community Ecosystem. Innovation community ecosystem Details the basic ingredients of innovation in a community of practice: context, sharing, diversity, debate.... [elearnspace blog] [ b.cognosco]
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| Sunday, April 27, 2003 |
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I'm planning to attend OSCOM at Harvard in May. It would be nice to get a chance to see TypePad around the time of the conference. It would provide a good reference point.
TypePad will lead CMS revolution.
Content Management Systems are becoming mass-market, according to this story by Ben Hammersley about TypePad after an exclusive peak:
The features are remarkable: there is a very powerful, but extremely simple, template builder. Users can redesign their weblogs and create fully compliant XHTML pages, with out knowing what that last phrase means. There is a built-in photo album, built-in server stats, so you can see who is coming to visit you and from where, built-in blogrolling (listing the sites you like to read), and built-in listing for your music, books and friends, producing a complete friend-of-a-friend file for every user. In short, with Typepad, SixApart has embraced almost every advance in weblogging over the past year, and wrapped it into a product my dad could use. It raises the bar for the personal publishing world in a way that the Blogger/ Google buyout promised but has yet to deliver. [...] [E M E R G I C . o r g] [ b.cognosco]
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| Sunday, April 20, 2003 |
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(SOURCE:"escapablel")- Wow another Britt must read! Here are some juicy excerpts (bold mine!) Go Britt and Ming go!: <QUOTE> Like blogs, kindword/frustration/evaluation comments can be helpful but they share a failing we've discovered about blogs, which is why people are trying to leverage them into knowledge management systems: non-explicit, anecdotal text is quotable but otherwise unusable. Here's a report just in from Jason Calacanis on how his company's venture capital database overtook the previous market leader, which was a blog about venture capital: That is the big lesson I think.. blog + database + research reports = big business, blog plus nothing = a hobby. (author's emphasis) Reputation is too important to be a hobby. ... The operative word is require. A reputation system is worthless if it captures ratings only at the whim of the buyer, or worse, at the whim of participants in a forum, as in this example, where the comments do not necessarily relate to a particular task. They can be too vague to benefit the next customer. Therefore it's imperative to require that a grade and comment be recorded within a specified period after presentation of a completion report or invoice. ... Have you ever had one of those projects which seemed simple, but once you got into it, you discover non intuitive requirements embedded in your initial enthusiasm? Such a discovery is like pulling a string out of a sweater. Actualizing the Xpertweb meme is a little like that. ... Here's what happens when you think seriously about a useful reputation system: ... Fair enough, those forms could be designed in an afternoon. But there are other considerations. Once completed, where should their data be stored? Today, such information is kept by the seller. Naturally, the seller will yield to the temptation to excise the unflattering remarks. The data could be kept on a central server, but then what happens to reputations built through blood, sweat and tears if the central servers go out of business? It's not like the W3C is gonna store this info for us. Just as bad, any centralized system may not scale as needed or worse, is corruptible, as described in the HumanTech Parable. The only answer left standing is that both the buyer and the seller must keep the information, which must be identical to be valid. That means that both parties must have a web site with space and programming for the reputation system. Ratings so mirrored are demonstrably valid. If there's any divergence, the ratings cannot be presumed to be valid. The ratings are only useful if subsequent users can access the reputation data. Conventional wisdom says the data should be a mySQL data base with a CGI. Then, of course, each user would need an XML-RPC or SOAP routine to access reputation data from all the other sites. That's a load which is sure to overload the requirement for user-maintained data. (Visionary doesn't have to mean stupid?there are some experts who think Xpertweb is silly enough already!) The obvious but counter-intuitive answer is to post all data as pure XML in plain sight on each user's Xpertweb site with known paths to the data. As Doc reported on Thursday, these requirements seem implicit if you're serious about a useful reputation system, sort of like seeing the horse in a block of marble and removing all the marble that doesn't look like a horse. In fact, as Doc also related, a useful reputation system seems to me to be implicit in the XML spec. Though enterprises seem to be using XML primarily as a serialization routine (like SOAP) to connect legacy data systems, XML is fine as a data format, if you're willing to live with its verbosity. As a data format hosted on a web server, XML is readable by search engines, a skillion parsers and certainly by a thin-client purpose-built script like the one we're building for Xpertweb. We're even on the cusp of a promise dormant since the spec became a recommendation in February, 1998: An XHTML page can contain explicit links to bits of XML data and, without any programming display linked data when the page is opened. XML is truly data for the rest of us, because it frees us from CGI programming and the hidden data that only CGIs can talk to. ... I see a reputation engine as a kind of internal combustion engine. Even if it's a two-banger, you still need quite a few moving parts to get it to turn over. I think we have a pretty good design and built-in means to re-engineer it while it's running. That's why I welcome dogma slayers, but note that there's more to a reputation engine than it seems at first. [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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Commercial programming is clearly a craft. Unfortunately, the failure of our profession to recognize this has allowed two profound problems to grow. First, programmers almost never work to a plan. All craftsmen exercise their skill within a context well defined by detailed, written descriptions of the desired ultimate form. These plans are typically devised and drawn by an architect, a role rare in the software world. Architectural plans are necessary to ensure that the work of multiple craftsmen dovetails together, and that it meets the buyer's expectations. Most contemporary programmers work only from a list of features and a deadline.
Second, programmers are almost never supervised. Craft is by nature detail-focused and deeply involving. Good craftsmen regularly work in a state of flow, so they must depend on others to make sure their efforts merge with those of other craftsmen. The supervisors aren't there to keep craftsman from dodging work, but to ensure that the big picture is tended to. A well-crafted building, for example, is more than an assemblage of sturdy walls; the walls must connect properly. The craftsmen can do this, but they rely on someone else to coordinate their work.
[Visual Studio Magazine - The Software Architect - The Craft of Programming]
Excellent food for thought from Alan Cooper. While he is focused on programmers, I think his points are more broadly applicable to a variety of knowledge work settings. He helps identify some of the critical dimensions along which knowledge work as craft differs from industrial work and how those differences have important implications for management. Thanks to Roland for the pointer.
[ McGee's Musings]
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James Thurber. "It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." [Quotes of the Day] [Seb's Open Research]
Too many knowledge management systems think they are about answers when they ought to be about questions. Yet another reason why weblogs are critical to the future of knowledge management. [ McGee's Musings]
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One critical feature of most first generation knowledge management efforts is that they were designed and implemented following the standard corporate approach of top down, centralized, resource planning and implementation. In an industrial environment you can maybe get away with planning processes that treat all resources as fungible. Then centralized processes might be adequate, although you would think that the failure of Soviet style centralized economies would give more corporations pause.
Knowledge work, on the other hand, depends on extracting maximum advantage out of the unique characteristics and experiences of each knowledge worker. Knowledge management, from this perspective, has to be a decentralized, grassroots, activity. If you accept that premise, the promise of weblogs in knowledge management becomes clearer. Weblogs operate on grassroots assumptions by design. [ McGee's Musings]
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(SOURCE:"curious")- Not sure what to make of this. But I think it will lead to some good. Will be watching, waiting and trying to figure out where I can help.<quote> We are proud to announce the launch of the Social Software Alliance The brainchild of the pioneers at SocialText the alliance is intended to be a place where the developers & users of social software can come together to create open standards, and, contribute industry best practices. Our initial aims are: * aid discovery of developers working on synergistic projects and standards * assist in shaping open standards that mesh well with other alliance and Internet standards * help promote each standard to gain wider adoption </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Friday, April 11, 2003 |
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(SOURCE:"mcgee")- Summary: weblogs are better and more compelling for the general public because they foster thinking in public; wikis and other media require thinking together and thinking together is harder than thinking in public.<quote> My problem is this. Most of the technology tools for supporting thinking together (e.g. discussion forums, threaded discussion, wikis) depend on skills and norms that I've found to be rare in practice and challenging to promote. My intuitions tell me that there are important differences with weblogs that address at least some of these issues. ... One of the primary reasons that thinking together is hard is that it requires both that we think in public and that we think collaboratively. I suspect that thinking together fails at least as often because we don't know how to think in public as it does because we don't know how to do it collaboratively. Further I think that order matters. You need to learn how to think in public first. Then you can work on developing skills to think collaboratively. Thinking in public is a precursor skill to thinking collaboratively that's been ignored. We want to get to the fun stuff (ooh, brainstorming!) and skip over the hard part. Weblogs make the hard part easier. They make it possible and permissible to go public with an idea while you're still working it out. Their structure of time-ordered, generally short, posts feels less intimidating than having to produce a finished, completely worked out, properly structured report. Their organized, permanent, structure of archived posts give you something to go back to and to build on. Pulling it all together under the umbrella of an individually identified place makes it visible and sharable with others without forcing it on anyone. Finally, syndicating the results via RSS makes it available to those who are interested in a way that enables dialog without demanding dialog. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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Amen! Preach it!<quote> First of all, how cool is that? Second of all, the subtitle really nails it: "What Happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can Be a Writer." I'll say it again, the connection of Web logs and journalism is just too important to miss. It's valid to argue what form of journalism Web logs take, but there is no denying any longer that it's a form we're all going to have to start taking seriously as a source of information. And that means teaching our students the good and bad about the genre as well. I have a number of new "sources" that I trust, and I've left behind many of the traditional media sources that I used to rely on. The more I read Web logs and the more I find intelligent, articulate filters and thinkers, the less I believe the stream of pre-packaged pablum that Big Media want me to consume. And that's significant as I have been immersed in the study of media almost all of my professional life. If you would have told me just a couple of years ago that I would stop buying newspapers and not watch the evening news I would have laughed in your face. Seriously. But here I am. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE: Scripting News)- Weblogs can be the memory for the project.<quote> OK, here's the method for making sweeping, positive social change. FIRST, everybody gets a project. Join one or start one, but the project has to be directed toward making things better. That's what's called a "positive vector". SECOND, everybody talks with everybody else about their projects. That's "talks with", not just "talks to" or "talks at". This sets up a "field of communication", with information flowing in all directions. It's very important to the process, and we now have the tools (the Internet and the phone system) to make communication available without much hierarchy. THIRD, be prepared to change your project based upon what you learn by communicating about it. This is also very important. It "closes the feedback loop" by making the communication consequential, and, with everyone's good sense, sets up a "converging system" in the general direction of the vector. That's it. Act, especially in concert with others, communicate and re-evaluate. Repeat as often as possible. Oh, yes - keep records of what you try and what happened , both good and bad. The system needs an element of memory to function. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Friday, April 04, 2003 |
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(SOURCE: Scripting News)- 'nuff said! Preach it! <QUOTE> Blogs are organized with items appearing in reverse chronological order (the most recent postings appear first). Typically they include links to other Web pages on the Internet. As an application, they look something like a combination of e-mail, Lotus Notes and a free-form discussion group. Sometimes blogs form rings, which connect sites with like topics together, so a reader can see different sides of an issue. Some important technology visionaries are already using blogs. Pioneering veterans such as Dan Bricklan, Mitch Kapor and Ray Ozzie have active sites. Given that these are the inventors of spreadsheets and groupware, that's an impressive list. For certain types of communications, especially those overloaded with e-mail and voice mail, blogs could be heaven-sent. Rather than attaching comments about a topic and 15 documents to one e-mail and then sending it to 35 people who might care, the information could be posted to a blog and appropriate parties could add relevant comments. With a blog collecting all the comments and information about a topic, it could be easier to focus on one topic at a time. It also could be helpful to projects, especially development projects. A developer could attract customers and put in feature changes before an application enters the beta stage. </QUOTE> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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Reminder. Paul McCann asked me to remind him (and other Chicago-area bloggers) when the upcoming presentations by Jim McGee and David Weinberger were scheduled, and this morning I got a message from Eric Sinclair renewing the plea for that reminder. So here we go: Jim will come to Seabury on Thursday, April 10, to talk about sharing knowledge via blogs (the title of his presentation will be, “Thinking in public — Can you do that? Is it safe? Is it wise? Weblogs in organizations.” He’ll be in the Seabury Lounge, I think, and the presentation will start at 7:30. David Weinberger... [AKMA’s Random Thoughts]
I'm flattered that AKMA was kind enough to sandwich me between David Weinberger and Ben and Mena Trott who presented last month. Hanging out in such company has to be a good thing.
I'll be sharing some thoughts, observations, and questions about how weblogs are beginning to be used as one more tool to help make knowledge work more effective inside organizations. The perspective I've been poking at for some time now is what happens when you begin to revisit the idea of knowledge management from the point of view of making individual knowledge workers more effective.
Think of it as knowledge management with a small k. The wave of solutions offered under the rubric of knowledge management prior to weblogs was largely driven by vendors with a centralized, top-down, organization centric view of the problem. At best they were attempting to solve the problem of knowledge management (whatever that might be) from the perspective of the organization, not the perspective of the knowledge workers doing the knowledge work. A good portion of the resistance to these knowledge management efforts is sensible resistance to extra work that has no demonstrable payoff for me as a knowledge worker.
I started experimenting with weblogs and precursors to weblogs several years ago and began to publish a public weblog about 18 months ago. I've found the notion of weblog as backup brain to be a powerful metaphor for finding the value of weblogs to the work of an individual knowledge worker within an organization.
One of the central things that occurs with this strategy is that you have to start learning how to think in public. That certainly can feel like a risky thing to do. In some organizational settings it might well be risky. But I'm increasingly convinced that developing that skill will be an important aspect of what organizations must learn to do to survive and thrive in today's world. If you're going to be near Evanston next Thursday night, do drop in. If you're lucky AKMA's wife will provide molasses cookies again. Then it won't matter whether I have anything useful to say or not. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Sunday, March 30, 2003 |
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(SOURCE:"curious")- Good list of steps when trying to boostrap a blogging culture in a corporation.<quote> Change Management is all about getting people to do different things, or things differently. In business, the guru of the moment on this subject is John Kotter. In his book Leading Change he describes the eight steps to getting people to do different things or things differently, and they are irrefutable: 1. Establish a sense of urgency 2. Form a powerful guiding coalition 3. Create a vision 4. Communicate the vision 5. Empower others to act on the vision 6. Plan for and create short-term wins 7. Consolidate improvements 8. Institutionalize the change The underlying principle here is that, in business as in real life, you don't bring about sustained, meaningful change by edict. You need to persuade, enthuse, and engage people in sufficient numbers to change behaviours, laws or processes. If you want to do this in your business, buy Kotter's book, since that's what it's focused on. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE: John's Jottings)- Part 2 and Part 3 are also worth reading. I don't understand why they are using Contribute to replace Front Page. What's wrong with Movable Type (since they decided to use Movable Type for other parts of the intranet)?<quote> A week or so a go I got to a pretty big milestone down at the hospital. We launched a newly architected and redesigned Intranet. It was a whole lot of work, especially for a team as small as ours. Not that there still isn </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Saturday, March 29, 2003 |
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InfoPath in design mode |
Gathering XML data |
A streamlined view of the data |
A minimal view of the data | The next version of Microsoft Office is, among other things, a family of XML editors. I have discussed the XML modes of Word and Excel (see XML for the rest of us and "Exploring XML in Office 11"), and described the newest member of this family, InfoPath 2003, a tool for gathering XML data (see "Ten things to know about Xdocs"). Now that I've had a chance to work with InfoPath, its role and value are becoming clearer. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] ... [ Jon's Radio]
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| Saturday, March 22, 2003 |
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Very helpful discussions lately on weblogs in knowledge management contexts. Matt Mowers starts by taking me to task with the observation that:
I don't think that weblogs do anything and I'm increasingly of the opinion that the benefits that we are seeing at the moment are simply those of tapping into a particular type of personality, i.e. the enthusiastic early adopters who will do something with anything you throw at them.
So far I'm not seeing the kind of evidence that weblogging (in whatever form you name it) offers a particularly unique solution to the KM problem generally. Those solutions are going to have to come from us, in how we apply what is, after all, just another technology. Otherwise I predict in 12-18 months time, articles about "how weblogging has failed us."
In my opinion, we do have an opportunity to use the current wave of popularity for weblogging to get people to experiment with this new medium, try to change some working assumptions and the practices that go with them and move things on a little. [Curiouser and curiouser]
Stephen Downes, whose initial post started this round of discussion, continues by observing that:
I've been weblogging for the last five years. I've long since solved the input problem, the one Jim McGee talks about. But using this information is still a pain, despite a fair bit of thought and work around the problem of information retrieval from weblogs (what do you think my [Research] button is? Most weblog software hasn't even addressed the problem, much less solved it). [OL Daily]
So Downes has already discovered what I've only started to suspect after a little over 18 months of weblogging. We're still in the early, early stages of understanding how to help knowledge workers be more effective at doing knowledge work.
This is the essential perspective that I believe has been largely missing before the advent of the current round of tools, despite their limitations.
I've had a continuing conflicted opinion about the role of technology in making knowledge work more effective. I'm not as anti-technology as my friend and former colleague and co-author, Larry Prusak. There are times when he can sound like a total luddite and he's certainly a proponent of the social dimensions of knowledge management.
Many of the challenges of knowledge management are either created or aggravated by the information and technology that comprise so much of our organizational context. As technologies like email let us operate organizations of much greater scale and scope, they also create a demand for knowledge sharing across timezones and oceans that we haven't had to address before. And, as I've argued before, these technologies have also complicated our information and knowledge lives by making our work less visible. To the extent that technology has helped create our knowledge management problems, it also needs to be enlisted in solving those problems.
Weblogs by themselves don't do anything more than any other tool. Someone has to pick up the tool and put it to use. What is it about this particular category of tool that has persuaded someone like Stephen Downes to maintain and evolve a weblog over the past five years? All innovations have early adopters. Successful innovations build on the lessons learned from those early adopters and evolve the innovation in ways to make it more suited to the needs of those who follow on the adoption curve.
I heard a story the other day about a computer science class that assumed that mainframe computer systems were developed by scaling up from the "first" computers, which were the PCs developed in the late 70s and early 80s. I'm old enough to know that it worked the other way and to remember the rhetoric around PCs as the "great equalizer" that was going to shift power from faceless corporate data centers into the hands of the individual. Apple's marketing is still built around that myth.
Organizations took that general purpose, universal tool and shaped it toward their own specific needs. It's my contention that those needs were rooted in industrial models of organization and information processing and largely ignored those aspects that make knowledge work different.
Weblogs are one technology component of an important shift in perspective from the organization to the individual knowledge worker. For production work and for much routine information work this shift is irrelevant. It is the increasing percentage of of knowledge work relative to the total work of the organization that is changing the discussion.
Paolo Valdemarin has an excellent post today on the potential contribution of weblogs to building social capital inside (and across) organizations.
...Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I believe that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept help explain the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging.
Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships.
This is interesting also for k-logging (or "business journalling"): if a country with a better community is richer, then also a company with a better developed trust and efficiency amoung its workers is going to be better off than others.
So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing. [Paolo's Weblog]
Right now, a relative handful of early adopters are playing with and experimenting with this new tool of weblogs. It's a tool whose strengths are well matched to a changing shift in emphasis toward a greater role for knowledge workers in organizations.
There are always new tools and innovations promising to solve problems. I've been disapppointed by many and helped by a few. My intuitions and my experience tell me that weblogs fall in this second category. Those early adopters and leaders such as Stephen are already figuring out how to solve the next round of problems. But those are good problems to have. They are the problems that surface after you've decided to take personal responsibility for managing your own knowledge and learning. That may be an unnatural act for many inside organizations who would prefer that the world not change. I'm convinced it is changing and that most of us will have to start learning what Stephen has. It's not something that you can wait until everything is already figured out. You'll be better off the sooner you can get started. [ McGee's Musings]
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(SOURCE:"marcc")- Right on Paolo! Investing the time in blogging results in better business in the near future due to increased networking and trust.<quote> Besides using "social capital" to measure countries' economic power, I belive that the same concept can be applied to any community. Applied to the weblogs community, this concept helps to explain the huge power that has been unleashed by blogging. Reading other people's weblogs creates trust and efficiency, and it's an excellent base to build businesses and relationships. This is interesting also for k-logging (or "business journalling"): if a country with a better community is richer, then it's also true that a company with better developed trust and efficiency amongst its workers is going to be better off than others. So, no, we are not wasting time writing on our weblogs, we're investing. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog] </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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Jim nails it again. It's worth adopting weblogs sooner rather than later in order to get the benefits NOW (or sooner than your competition)!<QUOTE>
Right now, a relative handful of early adopters are playing with and experimenting with this new tool of weblogs. It's a tool whose strengths are well matched to a changing shift in emphasis toward a greater role for knowledge workers in organizations.
There are always new tools and innovations promising to solve problems. I've been disapppointed by many and helped by a few. My intuitions and my experience tell me that weblogs fall in this second category. Those early adopters and leaders such as Stephen are already figuring out how to solve the next round of problems. But those are good problems to have. They are the problems that surface after you've decided to take personal responsibility for managing your own knowledge and learning. That may be an unnatural act for many inside organizations who would prefer that the world not change. I'm convinced it is changing and that most of us will have to start learning what Stephen has. It's not something that you can wait until everything is already figured out. You'll be better off the sooner you can get started.
</QUOTE> [SOURCE: McGee's Musings] [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Tuesday, March 18, 2003 |
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Stephen Downes responds to my recent post on weblogs and passion with the following observation:
Weblog tools are just another input device. Great. With a lousy search and user interface. Weblogs get data into the system, but that's never been the problem with knowledge management: no, the problem is in using the data in any meaningful way. Will weblogs help with this? Not until something thinks seriously about the other end of the equation, thinks of the harried user rather than the inspired blog writer. [OLDaily]
While I agree that the current generation of weblog tools have some serious limits in terms of search and user interface, I disagree with his contention about where the problems lie in knowledge management systems. In the organizations where I've struggled to make knowledge management work, one of the fatal flaws has been the notion that knowledge management is somebody else's problem. The silver bullet is out there in someone else's head and "if only that lazy SOB had recorded the knowledge in the first place, then I'd be sitting fat and happy."
I've concluded that one of the root problems with knowledge management is that I'm that lazy SOB. Until I start to do a better job of managing my own knowledge, why should I expect anyone else in the organization to do so? Weblogs are the first tool I've found that start me on the process of making my own knowledge more useful to me.
Here's where the explicit vs. tacit distinction made so often in knowledge management discussions is misleading. Sure, the knowledge that has become so central to my work that I don't have to think about it is a source of great power, is difficult to capture, and more difficult yet to share. But a huge amount of the knowledge important to me remains explicit and never ends up making the cut to tacit. That doesn't mean I can't make it a more useful resource to me.
Here's a little test you can run on your own PC. Search for all the document files, spreadsheets, or powerpoint presentations stored on your machine. How many have a filename something along the lines of "final draft xx.doc" where xx is some number between 1 and 10? Can you tell what's inside that file without opening it? If there was a diagram you used in a presentation last year that you wanted to use tomorrow, how many presentations would you have to open and scan before you found it?
The problem with getting more leverage out of knowledge work isn't somewhere out there in the organization. It's looking back at me in the mirror every morning. Worse than that, it's that lazy slob I was looking at in the mirror six months ago who was too busy then to put a halfway decent name on a file or save that really great diagram as its own file.
What does this have to do with weblogs? Weblogs put the emphasis where I believe it belongs; on the individual knowledge worker. It encourages them to begin thinking about their own knowledge work more explicitly and systematically. It helps them realize that they are the problem and the solution. You have to learn how to share knowledge with yourself over time before you can begin to share it effectively with others. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Monday, March 17, 2003 |
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(SOURCE:)- Yes! This is what we do! And convincing people that the effort of articulation is worth it will greatly accelerate blog adoption in organizations. <QUOTE> What k-loggers do, fundamentally, is narrate the work they do. In an ideal world, everyone does this all the time. The narrative is as useful to the author, who gains clarity through the effort of articulation, as it is to the reader. But in the real-world enterprise, most people don't tend to write these narratives naturally, and the audience is not large enough to inspire them to do it. There is, however, a certain kind of person who has a special incentive to tell the story of a project: the project managers </QUOTE> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Sunday, March 16, 2003 |
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Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they'll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents. Full story at InfoWorld.com Here's Edwin Khodabakchian's take on InfoPath, an example of the kind of "XML-savvy application" I had in mind:
Infopath is a kind of Blog++: the manipulated data is rich and structured (expense report, travel request, hotel reservation, employee review), meaning that when the data is published back to the server can be processed by an array of services, processes, agents. [Collaxa's Take] Exactly. Collaboration tools have to move heaven and earth to mine knowledge and infer social networks from email traffic. While it is notionally private, many email exchanges -- "here's the revised version with the changes we discussed" -- are really semi-public in scope. The same holds true for many voice interactions. ... [ Jon's Radio]
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I had an opportunity to listen to Mena and Ben Trott talk about Moveable Type last night courtesy of AKMA at Seabury Western. They sparked a good discussion around the role of weblogs in creating and sustaining community (two good live blogged accounts from AKMA and Gabe Bridger by way of Mike Marusin).
At least some of the power and energy behind the weblog phenomenon has to come from passion of the creators of weblog tools. All of the products supporting weblogs are labors of love; all grew out of individual efforts to scratch personal itches--Blogger, Moveable Type, Radio.
This is why weblogs will become important to knowledge management and knowledge sharing in organizations and why the big software players haven't been a significant factor yet.
Organizations have recognized that knowledge is an essential part of the value that they create. Knowledge management efforts on the other hand have largely been a disappointment because they have tried to force knowledge into a product metaphor; trying to force what is fundamentally a product of craft into an industrial model of reusable parts (see knowledge work as craft work).
Discussions about knowledge management in organizations always raise the issue of sharing with the argument that people will be reluctant to share out of fear that their efforts will be appropriated by others. This is rooted in a industrial product metaphor of knowledge. See knowledge work as craft, however, and the sharing issue dissolves. Craft workers exist to share the fruits of their creating. A true knowledge craft product embodies something of the soul and personality of its creator. You share it with others not so they can copy it but so that they can find inspiration in using it in their own craft.
Weblogs hold so much promise in the organizational realm precisely because they amplify this connection between craft and creator. Your record is there to be seen and to be shared.
This is also why weblogs are so confusing in the organizational realm. You have to move beyond the notion of reusable and reproducible product as the putative goal.
I had a conversation with Alan Kay a while back about Smalltalk and object-oriented programming that I now finally think I understand (conversations with Alan can be that way for those of us who are mere mortals). He was disappointed that the early commercialization efforts around Smalltalk and OO emphasized the idea of reuse. His goal had always been (and still is, take a look at Squeak and SqueakLand) to make it possible for developers to express what they were trying to do faster and more effectively. He was trying to make computers a medium for expressing certain kinds of thinking.
Weblogs accomplish something similar for knowledge workers. They lower the barriers to sharing ideas far enough that it becomes possible for nearly all of us to do so. Bring that inside organizations and you have a powerful tool for being effective as opposed to merely productive. Scary to the established order? Sure. But if value does truly depend on how well and how fast organizations can create and share new knowledge, then the winners will emerge from those who commit to making it work. [ McGee's Musings]
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| Thursday, March 13, 2003 |
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(SOURCE:"wirearchy")- Publish or perish/blog or die/engage in conversation or die! <quote> The big question in the not-so-distant future may be whether or not companies are willing to allow public discussion to flourish on Weblogs. A failure of nerve on the part of firms determined to stick with more timid, one-way communication may allow other, braver companies to achieve more "mindshare" by engaging the public. As Dornfest told NewsFactor, "Discussion is going to break out. Might as well have it break out where you can see it." </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE:"wirearchy")- I can do this too! Contact me by clicking on the envelope if you are interested.  <quote> A great deal of casual surfing goes on in most offices with a broadband connection. This activity can be turned into a company asset, merely by diverting such efforts into a series of online diaries known as 'weblogs'. In a process somewhere between a writing seminar and a driving lesson, I can educate key members of staff in the functional use of semi-private weblogs that, due to the unique nature of their treatment by databases such as Google, can be used as a powerful search engine optimisation tool for your site, or those of your clients. This consultation includes recommendations regarding choices of weblog interface and hosting solutions, plus assistance in the arming and seeding of weblogs (in order to bring in the initial audience and some solid search results). </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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(SOURCE:"ming")- Excellent provokative stuff.<quote> What is sharing? Asking WIIIFM (what is in it for me) before you share defeats the objective, you are starting off on the wrong foot. In the same vein, asking you to enter a password protected space with the aim of sharing should send up the warning signals. If your CEO comes back from a KM conference and sets up Lotus Notes with complex access priviledges you should question if they have really got the message. Is giving in the knowledge economy just being naive?, How about the groupware vendor that sells tools, but sponsors no work on understanding collaboration, group processes or conducts no ethnographic research?, do you believe they have collaboration at heart or are they just selling more software? If you share, do you really give knowledge away? Sharing knowledge does not lessen your store, often it gets you more. Sharing plays a key role in relationships and bonding, happens in small steps and is assisted through community membership. </quote> [ Roland Tanglao: KLogs]
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| Sunday, March 09, 2003 |
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Asynchronous interaction is a key component of loosely coupled systems. Here's an example I've found helpful to explain its implications:
Synchronous Interaction
To illustrate the differences between the synchronous and asynchronous styles of interaction, let's use the analogy of holiday gift shopping. Here's the situation: You have a list of three people for whom you want to purchase gifts, and you've got two choices. You can head for the shopping mall, or you can shop online. For the sake of the analogy, think of yourself (the buyer) and the clerk or online store (the merchant) as a pair of distributed systems. The figure below illustrates the interaction of these systems when you shop at the mall.
The shopping-mall model is synchronous because it's composed of a series of predictable steps that cannot be re-ordered. Specifically, you and the sales clerks alternate roles: You select a gift, a clerk sells it to you, and you repeat the process for the remaining gifts. Your actions are synchronized with those of the clerks, and you won't move on to the next clerk before completing the exchange with the current one.
Asynchronous Interaction
Next, let's examine the interaction between the two systems when you shop online, as illustrated below.
This is an example of the asynchronous interaction model, which differs from the synchronous model in two ways. First, the three ordering actions are predictable, but the three shipping actions are not. The shipments are initiated at seemingly random times and out of sequence, take different lengths of time, and arrive in yet another unpredictable sequence. Second, in the asynchronous model you can place all three orders, one immediately after another. The merchants send email acknowledgements in response to your orders, but you don't need to wait for one order to be acknowledged before placing the next. In other words, the buyer and merchant are no longer synchronized.
[Excerpted from Loosely Coupled--The Missing Pieces of Web Services.] [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies]
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| I work at CH2M HILL, Inc. |
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