June 2003 Archives

Since I may be quiet for the next week or so, I give you something to play with.

Nancy Dixon is the STAR Series lead for a conversation on "Creation and Reuse of Project Knowledge." Interesting connection to the issues of trust and making virtual teams work.

The best companies have aligned their IT projects with the overall direction of the business. They pursue those projects that are going to move the company toward its vision.

Dave Pollard puts together a proposal for what business weblogs should do. He makes the case for ease of use and describes how many of the typical knowledge mangement functions translate into the social software realm. This is something to bookmark and think about again.

A set of KM definition links that come via a long path to my friend, Noreen Kelly.

A presentation on dysfunctional projects. Most attributes are symptomatic of organizations that have placed little emphasis on their project and portfolio management efforts.

Two data points - financial data especially - don't give you a lot of information. And it certainly isn't a basis upon which major decisions should be made. But how frequently do you read in the newspaper or journals that first quarter sales/GDP/housing start are up/down 5% and how great/bad that is for the company/industry/country?

I have always believed that information tools should be able to do: help us see what is happening NOW in our organization, or manufacturing factility, or sales organization. Not just what did happen and what might happen. But what is happening now.

In "Big Brother" Michael Schrage worries about the impact of a trend he sees, where companies use their increasingly-electronic records to monitor their employees for bad behavior.

In case you haven't run across this elsewhere, Plumb Design makes an excellent graphical thesaurus.

Some thoughts on the CIO Radio interview with Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister around their new book, Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects.

Happy Fun Pundit's Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek.

Quick thoughts on a list of recommendations for helping with knowledge retention.

In a loop back to the Mark Clare discussion, Richard Gayle proposes a very familiar definition of KM.

This article in the June issue of BioIT World talks about Infinity Pharma setting up a fully wireless network in their labs and offices in Boston. I wonder if blogging can enhance the knowledge transfer?

My company just had a party honoring a large cadre of people who have been here for 25 or more years -- this group is over 10% of the employee base. Is there any chance that the company can do something to ensure that it retains as much of their expertise and knowledge as possible?

Erik Schonfeld reacts to the Oracle hostile bid for PeopleSoft with a discussion consolidation in the industry, conculding that we don't need it.

Tom Davenport writes about the new "big thing" in relation to his new book, "What's the Next Big Idea." He promises a number of columns in future issues. I like his focus on knowledge processes.

Jim McGee doesn't agree with Mark Clare's idea of the need for a knowledge definition. There was some vigorous discussion about this topic at the event in question.

A great example for the importance of holistic thinking in any business.

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.

Adam Curry's essay, "Copy-Paste Culture," details his thoughts on how humans are geared to learn by copying and the relation to weblogs.

Frank Patrick has some excellent resources on critical chain project management, as that is a big component of his business.

I was catching up on some back reading and came across "The impact of knowledge repositories on power and control in the workplace" by Peter H Gray in Information Technology & People v14n4 from 2001. The article turns on the head of most other articles on KM: KM repositories create more power for management rather than less.

Phil Windley's description of Dave Winer's comments about blogging connected immediately for me. What if we started talking about KM by discussing the personal or business problems that need to be solved, rather than a great new piece of software.

I have always been interested in how technology can be a tool to make things easier. The fact that knowledge management consists of much more than technology didn't strike me until the last several years.

Don Mezei has been hard at work in defining knowledge management and holding interesting discussions on Brint. His latest is a graphic on the dynamics of KM.

A train of blogs gets to McGee's comments on ActiveWords from a USA Today article. ActiveWords and PersonalBrain are the tools that are always running on my machine (along with Outlook).

KMPro Chicago announcement of the upcoming meeting with Mark Clare on June 10th.

On the Community of Practice YahooGroup, John Smith raised the idea of looking at the community of software users in considering a big software purchase. Ending with this excellent piece of advice: "If you're in the market for software, look for the community around it." Software companies don't tend to let...

Maybe I am overly sensitive, but why is it that chemical engineers show up on this side of the equation? One of the WTC bombers in 1993 was reported to be a chemical engineer. And I remember another terror circumstance in which the bad actor was a chemical engineer.

AKMA has started a "Digital Bodies" conversation that follows on David Weinberger's thoughts about how we perceive our online presense. Namely, David is concerned that we are going all "Matrix" with our willingness to consider our online personnae (bodies) the same as our real world bodies.

A down and dirty definition of "What makes a weblog a weblog" from Harvard's Dave Winer.

David talked about how and why blogging matters, similar to the earlier discussion at Seabury. This time I heard much more about the idea of blogs being another representation of self.