(I've been meaning to do this for months - probably years, actually, but been too lazy/busy. When I upgraded my Radio Userland software recently, the WYSIWYG editing no longer worked. Lazy/busy won out yet again, but this time it was easier to move the blog.)
11:39:47 AM    
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Thanks Mike Gotta, for asking me to come out to play. The blog-tag game was started by Jeff Pulver as a way to get to know bloggers beyond their standard blog postings. Sounds like fun to me.

Part 1 of the game is to divulge five things that few blog readers know about me:

1. I'm a high-school drop-up, now with a BS and Masters degree. Maybe I shouldn't dissuade you from thinking I was some kind of child prodigy for jumping into college without finishing high school, but it wasn't that big of a deal. Too often we assume things are "laws of the universe", when it turns out that almost everything is negotiable. You just need the imagination and courage to ask for what you want. Life Lesson: Creativity requires taking risks.

2. My first post-college job was as system administrator for the Cromemco miniframe that my government consulting company ran its business on. Here's my big confession: I DID peek at salaries. Everything IS negotiable, but here I learned that some people were stellar negotiators... and that I was not one of them :-( Life Lesson: Know your weaknesses; maximize your strengths :-)

3. The best decision I ever made in my life? Marrying my best pal over two decades ago. OK, so that's not really much of a secret. But it's just working out so well :-) Life lesson: invest in your passion!

4. I have a fortune cookie fortune taped over my desk that says: "Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." I'm not exactly sure what it means. Some days it seems so encouraging, other times it's just insanity talking. Maybe there simply is no recipe for success, so... Life lesson: Make your own Luck!

5. I haven't blogged in a month... because... I'm... addicted... to YouTube. Play is fun, and can be a really serious learning environment. That's one of the foundational concepts of the tech start-up I've been working on. It blends the fun of social networking with government agencies' education and outreach mandates. Wish me luck that this entrepreneurial effort lets me embrace the life lessons ab ove. I'm supposed to make my own luck, I know, but you can never have too much luck, can you? Life Lesson: there's always more to learn.

Part 2 of the Blog-tag game is tagging five more people. I have to pass on that one, as my short list of folks have already been tagged while I was busy YouTubing.
3:18:32 PM    
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"Besides wanting the usual attributes of low crime, great schools, and a thriving job market, members of the creative class want to be in a place that is exciting and challenging, is open to new ideas, and values them as individuals." says Blogger Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The Flight of the Creative Class, and public policy professor at George Mason Univerisity, in an interview by Realtor Magazine Online (Nov 1, 2006).

Top spots include San Francisco; Seattle; Boston; New York; Chicago; Denver; Silicon Valley, Calif.; Austin, Texas; and the Research Triangle in North Carolina, or see the more recent list of Fast Cities from Fast Company. What can a Wannabe City do to move into these lofty ranks? In his speech on IT Conversations, Dr. Florida makes the case that it's not as easy as creating a good job climate..

OK, Wannabee City, take note: the triad of work-live-play can't stand without all three of its legs. Take a look London, Canada's Creative City Task Force for a bit of inspiration on improving culture.

6:57:55 PM    
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New research on Breaking Barriers to e-Government is coming out of Europe, and the tie in between eGov and adopting collaboration is becoming more clear. 

Effective collaboration using Internet-enabled tools (virtual collaboration) supports communication across geographically separated locations, positively impacting Barriers 4 (poor coordination), 5 (workplace and organizational inflexibility), and 6 (lack of trust).

Barriers 2 (financial inhibitors), 3 (digital divides), and 7 (poor technical design) are also barriers to adopting virtual collaboration. Addressing these issues as a technology adoption project may provide a lower-risk lever for solving the larger context for each of these issues.

Then there's Barrier #1, Leadership failures. [Insert dramatic pause here.] Solving that one is much more difficult. One starting point is to assist in leadership awareness of the drivers and new demands of the knowledge economy. This is an education issue, but with the busy schedules of most executives in government as well as in commercial organizations, education will need to come through as many avenues as possible, including the media.

more info:

The seven barriers to success in eGovernment were identified as: 1) Leadership failures; 2) Financial inhibitors; 3) Digital divides; 4) Poor coordination; 5) Workplace and organizational inflexibility; 6) Lack of trust and 7) Poor technical design.

The most prevalent issues mentioned in a survey of e-Government experts and users were: Coordination across central, regional and local levels of government; Resistance to change by government officials; and 3) Lack of interoperability between IT systems;

I haven't had time to explore this yet, but there's lots more info at http://www.egovbarriers.org/ (the website for the 3 year research program).

9:44:29 AM    
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Just how worried should organizations be about the potential "brain drain" as the workforce ages?

In Beating the Boomer Brain Drain Blues (CIO Magazine, 1/15/2006) Suzanna Patton highlights the use of knowledge management systems to combat the coming wave of baby boomer retirements. She quotes  David W. DeLong, author of Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce: "Federal and state government, as well as industries such as aerospace, defense, energy and utilities, will be hit hard by the large-scale retirement of skilled workers. " Yes, the concerns are very real.

But things may not be as bad as they seem, if its true that "60 is the new 45". EJ Mundale explains (Healthday News, 8/30/2006) why organizations shouldn't count baby boomers out so quickly. Expect longer lifespans and healthier aging to change the age at which people stop contributing to the workforce, but don't relax yet!  The evidence shows a growing trend in older workers to find work that is meaningful and flexible. Will those gracefully aging Boomers stay with your organization?

Organizations must respond to the trend with an array of initiatives aimed at retaining older workers through their productive years, attracting new workers, and facilitating the transfer of knowledge between outgoing and incoming workers.

Moving beyond these survival tactics, leading organizations will look outside their own organization to incorporate external knowledge - from customers, partners, academia, and even competitors. Knowledge Management systems are an important part of the equation, but implemented alone, they will fail. As a living system, organizations can't must also update the processes, policies, and procedures as well as the corporate culture to support their overall objectives.

2:23:58 PM    
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Are you a knowledge bridger? That's someone who takes expertise from one field and applies it to solve a problem in a completely different field, thereby creating a breakthrough product or service. Wharton's David Hsu and National University of Singaporee's Kwanghua Lim looked at knowledge bridging in biotech startups and concluded that among the possible strategies to increase knowledge bridging in an organization, the trick was simply to "hire the right people and give them the freedom to follow their curiosity".

If it were only that easy. Just look at the first part, "hire the right people". What would the job posting on Monster look like? And as with any hire, how do you know that you've hired a solid performer rather than an impressive interview performance? Then there's that pesky problem: superstars behaving badly. Will your latest talent turn into a disruptive prima dona? Then there's the availability issue. If you are lucky enough to find the right person, can you win them away from competing job offers? If you "win" them over now, how do you keep them?

These are central issues for the knowledge economy. One approach is to grow your own superstars. Give them resources and opportunity to succeed individually and also take steps to open your corporate culture. Ideas include creating wide transparency across the enterprise; encouraging cross-training, continuing education, and sabbaticals; encourage a sense of community in both physical spaces and electronic ones (via today's collaboration and social software); make sure your innovation process is the best possible; and of course be ready to embrace your distributed knowledge bridgers, wherever they may live or travel.

You can even look for inspiration by being a knowledge bridger... take, for example, Management by Baseball.

4:22:53 PM    
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