A Stroll Through Patent History. Petra Moser, an M.I.T. assistant professor, has examined the historical relationship between patents and innovations and come to some surprising conclusions. By Teresa Riordan. [New York Times: Technology]

8:10:20 PM    

Exercise in social change (applying game theory to have more fun). After looking for a decent technical support forum I one day stumbled upon a site called Tek-Tips. The web site which I highly recommend for IT professionals is a place where anyone can go with a technical questions and receive answers from talented volunteers worldwide. The site is divided in forum for different programming languages and computer programs and uses a positive feedback channel called the star system. To give a star all you had to do is press a button and it showed to that person that their answer or post was helpful to you. The stars each individual receives is added up and counted by the site owners to create the list of each forum's top experts. Being in a forum top expert list is a much coveted distinction and silent competition happens to reach top spot. My brother and I decided to analyze the dynamics of this web site and see how we could beat a system in the fastest time possible. This story explains our attempts to reach top spot in our favorite forums. [kuro5hin.org]

5:49:11 PM    

Mighty Brew for the Do-It-Yourselfer. How long does it take to find an Internet site that would satisfy a yearning for a cup of dark, strong coffee so assertive that it risks assault charges? By Michelle Slatalla. [New York Times: Technology]

8:24:12 PM    

Turbo 10.  Here is something interesting.  A search engine that lets you search deep data Web sites (defined as any site that requires you to search a topic specific database to adequately access).  Check out the collections page. [John Robb's Weblog]

5:21:26 AM    

Klogging case study: Blogging in Corporate America..

via Roland Tanglao: Michael Angeles presentation on Lucent Technologies' intranet blogging at a Usability Professionals Association meeting. Download presentation slides with notes, PDF. (5 MB) While he doesn't reveal number of intranet bloggers (my obsession) he describes the range of tools, categories of users, and the nature of blogging.

Michael, an experienced blogger in his own right (see IAslash, urlgreyhot) also shows deep understanding of how blogs fit into his enterprise's IT architecture. Creating blogfodder via RSS from corporate databases. Providing tools for search and discovery. Supporting knowledge workers and communities of practice.

If you're coming to my BloggerCon Sunday session on workplace blogging, this should be on your reading list.

[a klog apart]

2:01:02 AM    

Mower musings: 5 blognet justifications..

Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication. 

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes.

[a klog apart]

 

[a klog apart]

1:59:16 AM    

A Good Question About Management. A Good Question -- Taken out of context from Jim McGee, but worth asking anyhow...

"All the evidence I'm familiar with says peak performance depends on 'flow.' So why is so much of the practice of management day to day about control?"

hmmm...Perhaps the real role of management is to "facilitate" flow and throughput, and stop worrying about "controlling" (with the linguistic implication of "limiting") it. What deserves "control" is the range of things that get in the way of flow. [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

7:27:13 PM    

Another new content management blog.

New content management blog.

Ideas in Technology and Publishing is a great new blog covering content management, XML and other publishing related technologies. It's less than a month old so it's still possible to read through the archives in full, which I've just done and recommend to anyone with an interest in content management.

[Simon Willison's Weblog]

Another new blog looking at content management. Here is the RSS Feed.

[McGee's Musings]

5:09:03 AM    

Models of Collaboration. Overvew of five major models of collaboration: library, solicitation, process support, community and team. What I like about this outline is that it extends beyond the idea of collaboration as merely involving person to person communication and looks also at the important intermediating role of content resources. This is what allows, for example, a network of blogs to be viewed as a collaborative network. By Timothy Butler and David Coleman, Collaborative Strategies, September, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily] [Handheld Instructional Technology]

12:45:57 PM    

Here's an eye-roller...company where the lowest 5% get fired every year (!) - employee at the bottom this year has a desperately ill child and needs the insurance. Should you fire him/her? The author of this article actually seems confused about the ethical answer to this question. (Probably wonders why corporate America gets such a bad rap, too.) Cisco gets points because the boss there knows right away, showing that some of us in large organizations still have an intact set of brain cells.

When should pity stop a firing?

5:34:33 PM    

Good article...when you meet a knowledge hoarder, remember this line from the piece below: "Those who feel compelled to hoard their knowledge do so because of the meagerness of their holdings, not because of their riches.

Dolly Levi as the patron saint of the knowledge economy.

Apropos of the gift economy of weblogs, here's a great little story courtesy of David Gurteen on courtesy among scholars.

The scholar's courtesy. A few weeks back I met with a very interesting woman called [Shane Godbolt] who works for the National Heatth Service (NHS) in the UK.

As she valued my website and newsletter - she brought me several 'knowledge gifts' in return as a 'thank you'. This is just what I love about Knowledge Sharing - you get back as mcuh as you give - if not more []

Amongst these gifts was a beautiful little story about the importance of acknowledging the sources of your ideas - regardless of whether they are in 'print' or not.

I received an early lesson about acknowledging others from my mentor George Spindler. The Spindlers were houseguests visiting me after I took a full-time academic appointment upon completion of doctoral studies. I eagerly shared an early draft of a chapter I had been invited to write, tentatively entitled "Concomitant Learning".

Spindler was up early the next morning, but to my disappointment I found him looking through materials he had written (my library contained many of them) rather than reading my new draft. He had already read and enjoyed my article, he explained, but he expressed disappointment at my failure to credit him as a source of inspiration for the concept that provided my title and rationale. He had been searching for the citation I should have made. "But you've never written about it ," I explained, reaffirming what I already knew and he was beginning to suspect. "I got the idea from you, but you only suggested it in a seminar. There was no publication to cite."

Technically (and luckily ) I was correct, as his search revealed. That wasn't the entire lesson however. "No matter where or how you encounter them," he counseled, "always give credit for the sources of your ideas. It's so easy to do so : so appropriate to good scholarship ... and so appreciated."

Never again have I limited my acknowledgements only to people whose ideas are in print. And I, too, have "so appreciated" that courtesy when extended to me!

Harry F. Wolcott, Writing up qualitative research, 1990, pp.72-73). Quoted in Blaise Cronin, The scholars courtesy, the role of acknowledgement in the primary communication process. Taylor Graham 1995, p122. [Gurteen Knowledge-Log]

Naïve though it may be, I continue to believe that knowledge hoarding and information hoarding are fundamentally pathological behaviors that have little chance of surviving in the face of healthy organizations. People who really know stuff are always willing and eager to share their interests and knowledge with others. Those who feel compelled to hoard their knowledge do so because of the meagerness of their holdings not because of their riches. Dolly Levi is the patron saint of the knowledge economy not Ebenezer Scrooge.

[McGee's Musings]

6:25:39 AM    

Willful ignorance.

Hylton Jolliffe of Corante pointed me to this great post on one of Corante's weblogs that I don't frequent. Very helpful in understanding issues I encounter every day.

'Tis Folly To Be Wise

I came across an article in my files today that I thought I'd share. It's by the late Calvin Mooers, an information scientist. He addressed his colleagues on the question of why some information systems got so much more use than others - often with no correlation between the amount of use and how useful the tools actually were.

"It is my considered opinion, from long experience, that our customers will continue to be reluctant to use information systems - however well designed - so long as one feature of our present intellectual and engineering climate prevails. This feature - and its relevance is all to commonplace in many companies, laboratories, and agencies - is that for many people it is more painful and troublesome to have information than for them not to have it."

When I first read this, I experienced that quick shock of encountering something that you feel as if you'd known all along, without realizing that you knew it. Of course. It's not a new idea, but we keep having to learn it over and over. Mooers again:

"Thus not having and not using information can often lead to less trouble and pain than having and using it. Let me explain this further. In many work environments, the penalties for not being diligent in the finding and use of information are minor, if they exist at all. In fact, such lack of diligence tens often to be rewarded. The man who does not fuss with information is seen at his bench, plainly at work, getting the job done. Approval goes to projects where things are happening. One must be courageous or imprudent, or both, to point out from the literature that a current laboratory project which has had an extensive history and full backing of the management was futile from the outset."

Oh, yes. Yes, indeed. I've seen these examples made real right in front of my eyes, and more than once. Have I mentioned that Mooers wrote all this in 1959? The problem has not lessened one bit since then. If anything, our vast information resources and the powerful tools we have to dig for it have made things worse. Just try being the person who finds a patent claim that stops a project in its tracks, one that was missed while the work went on for months. Or find out that a close analog of the lead compound was found to be toxic twenty years ago.

We're supposed to be able to find these sorts of things. But everyone assumes that because it's possible to do it, that it's been done. Taken care of: "Didn't we see that paper before? I thought we'd already evaluated that patent - isn't that one one that so-and-so found? It can't be right, anyway. We wouldn't have gone this far if there were a problem like that out there, clearly."

My rule, which I learned in graduate school and have had to relearn a few times since, is to never take anything on faith when you join a new project. Go back and read the papers. Root through the primary literature. Look at the data and see if you believe it. If you let other people tell you what you should believe, then you deserve what you get when it comes down around your ears.

[Corante: In the pipeline]

 

I don't think we can afford this kind of behavior any longer either as organizations or as individual knowledge workers, although there's no question we continue to reward it. Two things have changed.

 

One is that the excuse that it is too difficult or expensive to track down and check relevant information is no longer tenable. The problem has changed. The risk today is that the potentially relevant information is too vast and easily obtained and threatens to overwhelm you. This can be managed with modest investment in learning how to search.

 

The second thing that has changed is a requirement to understand what kinds of information pose the greatest risks to an initiative. You may be reluctant to go searching for the "ugly fact" but your competitors may not be so hesitant.

 

What's tricky is that you still operate in an environment of imperfect information. One of the entries in my personal collection of quotes worth thinking about comes from Samual Butler; "Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises." More information may be available but you still have to make a decision and there's always a timetable. But you now have to think explicitly about what information to seek out within the limits of the time available. The old excuses are gone.

[McGee's Musings]

4:25:32 PM    

May I  suggest "Who cut the cheese?", a takeoff on this that's very funny...if occasionally unintelligible.

Friday Fun: Cheezy book. Friday Fun: Cheezy book -- An excellent review/interview about a certain business best-seller. A brief excerpt...

"I'll try to put a positive spin on this. Who Moved My Cheese? is beyond any shred of doubt the worst and most useless thing in print. It's trite, dull and insulting. So far this year, I can say with some confidence that I've learned more from Snapple bottle caps and Eminem album lyrics."

My sentiments exactly.

(via Internet Time Blog, which is quickly earning a spot on my blogroll.) [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

3:31:29 PM    

Jim McGee.  A shift from managing knowledge to coaching knowledge workers.  Excellent.

The fatal flaw in thinking in terms of knowledge management is in adopting the perspective of the organization as the relevant beneficiary. Discussions of knowledge management start from the premise that the organization is not realizing full value from the knowledge of its employees. While likely true, this fails to address the much more important question from a knowledge worker's perspective of "what's in it for me?". It attempts to squeeze the knowledge management problem into an industrial framework eliminating that which makes the deliverables of knowledge work most valuable--their uniqueness, their variability.

[John Robb's Weblog]

3:42:30 PM    

Eric Raymond on cognitive stress and knowledge work.

A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have. A Taxonomy of Cognitive Stress: I have been thinking about UI design lately. With some help from my friend Rob Landley, I've come up with a classification schema for the levels at which users are willing to invest effort to build competence. The base assumption is that for any ... [Armed and Dangerous]

Somehow, I missed this when it first appeared in May from Eric Raymond. I find his RSS feed erratic at best. It shows up at a good time, however, as I'm thinking through the implications of shifting focus to knowledge workers instead of knowledge management. Raymond is focused on user interfaces, but I think his perspective can be generalized to the challenges of doing and coaching knowledge work.

[McGee's Musings]

3:37:12 PM    

James Roberston on the laws of nonsense.

Three laws of nonsense. I just had yum-cha to celebrate a cousin's birthday. The food was good, but much better were the discussions I had with my uncle, Noel Thompson. He has been working for many years in large organisations (such as BHP and... [Column Two]

A profound way to grasp much of what I see inside organizations. These are the laws that Robertson quotes:

1. The source of nonsense is that for every piece of nonsense there exists an irrelevant frame of reference in which the item is sensible.
2. The persistance of nonsense comes from rigorous arguments from inapplicable assumptions.
3. The diffusion of nonsense results from the fact that people are more specialist than problems.

Robertson offers them as a way to better understand knowledge management. I see them as more broadly applicable to most of what I run into inside organizations.

[McGee's Musings]

7:08:21 AM    

So you want to start your own web hosting company. Web hosting can be a great way to work from home and put your internet skills to good use. As a full-time college student, I've been running a small web hosting company since June of 2002 that has grown to include customers in Canada, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the United States. This article shares the lessons I've learned and my advice to anyone considering going into the business. It isn't a comprehensive guide, but provide enough information to get started in your search. The focus is on business and logistics aspects, rather than the technical nitty-gritty of system administration. Read on for more information. [kuro5hin.org]

7:04:32 PM