October 2003 Archives

Drool. It sounds like I need to get to the library. Joy London points to a David Gilmour article that suggests taking advantage of our natural tendency to hoard knowledge. Make that work really well and then set up a system to help people broker that knowledge. I hear strains of...

To Talk of Many Things has an entry on What if Clients Were to Pay for Knolwedge Management that focuses on legal KM. The "aha" moment is that inhouse counsel should cause their outside counsel to create "debriefings" at the conclusion of most large matters. Such debriefings would require some or...

The focus of this post is RSS and knowledge, but he provides an interesting description of what you get with freedom of knowledge. ICTlogy :: The four kinds of freedom of free knowledge Let me adapt the GNU project definition of the four kinds of freedom of free software: The freedom...

Mindjack has a writeup after attending KMWorld. He sees KM fading from the marketing, but possibly still working in the background. Is KM becoming a basic competency? Mindjack - Deconstructing Knowledge [The] momentum seems to be dead and buried, if the recent KM World-Intranets Convention in Santa Clara, California (Oct. 14-16)...

Interesting discussion in a small construction contractor forum. When I saw this the first thing I thought of was the five+ years it takes to build a new pharmaceutical API manufacturing facility. I have to believe it doesn't need to take this long. JLC Online: Is Our Industry Antiquated?. Check the...

In the current AOK STAR Series with Melissie Rumizen, Bill Hall made an excellent contribution to my understanding of the data-information-knowledge issue that gets discussed in KM circles. Fortunately, he also pointed to a web reference of the material from 1998. I've seen some versions of this before - that talk...

I am in the middle of reading The Axemaker's Gift: A Doubled-Edged History of Human Culture by James Burke and Robert Ornstein. I find it an interesting dovetail into my thinking about knowledge mangaement and the concerns we frequently hear about the over-selling of technical solutions to the general issues of...

Just in case it isn't clear to you how important team building and other human behavior aspects are to successful projects, this article describes the limits of hell that disfunction brings. halfass.com: Happy Family No Longer on halfass.com We used to be a happy family here at the technology arm of...

Referent to Tom Davenport's wrap-up of his knowledge work series for CIO Magazine, "Putting It All Together Again - The New Work Order."

Darwin Magazine has an article on how email is being used by the prosecution in some high-profile court cases. The trail of email gave the prosecutors plenty of room in which to argue their cases.

Interesting back-and-forth between Jim McGee and Tom Davenport around Davenport's series on knowledge work in CIO Magazine.

Session report for CLLC - "Improving Collaboration Using AI-based Tools:" Bringing in Outside Knowledge, Improving Internal & External Search, Improving Collaboration.

Kevin Cookman of The Chalfont Project talked about ROI from a different perspective than we usually hear. A lot of what The Chalfont Project does is taking the principles of psychology - human behavior - and building methodologies around them to help organizations with behavior and change.

Bank One needs to train office staff and bank tellers at bank branches all over the country while at the same time dealing with a down economy and big cutbacks in travel and training. As with Rockwell Collins and Grant Thornton, they had to battle entrenched ideas about the nature of "training," which was off site, classroom-based education.

The bulk of Leandro Herrero's talk at CLLC focused on the paradox of the Designed vs. the Emergent organization. All enterprises have both, and the claim is that to continue learning and innovating enterprises MUST create space for the emergent activities without trying to control them.

Bob Dean described the development of "Grant Thornton University" in the past few years of growth at the company and significant change in the economy.

The opening talk of the CLLC focused on how Cliff Purington built the learning approach for Rockwell Collins from a heavily classroom-based environment at the Cedar Rapids headquarters to an environment where people are able to access learning materials online through a variety of media from offices around the world.

The 2nd Chicagoland Learning Leaders Conference was a great success, from the quality of the speakers to the size of the crowd packed into Bank One's meeting rooms to the networking opportunities to the vendors present.

Bio-IT World in July 2003 has an article on moving to PDA-based recording, rather than the traditional patient diaries.

Teleos and the KNOW Network announced the 2003 Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises for Asia at the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea.

Interview with Don Reinertsen ~1997: When you understand this [queueing theory], you see that idle time in development is not 'waste', but rather a tool that prevents your resources from being blocked 100 percent of the time. This gives you insight as to why a company like 3M builds 15 percent...

J&J has a corporate knowledge management effort, led by Mike Burtha, the Executive Director of Knowledge Networking for the company. Burtha has focused heavily on communities of practice, specifically attempting to help the varied companies of J&J understand the value of networking and teaching the leadership how to build the environment...

Madanmohan Rao wrote an in-depth review of Verna Allee's latest book. destinationKM.com: The Future of Knowledge In addition to knowledge, organizations of the future need to tap value from interrelated networks of employees, partners and society at large for creating prosperity. So says Verna Allee, author of The Knowledge Evolution and...

Hal Macomber reports an idea from a PM discussion group in Warning: This is NOT an accurate representation of how the project will unfold (quoting Amy Schwab of True North pgs): Here is an example of a forward looking statement disclaimer I recently ran across in a news release about a...

Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog: What's in Your Strategy That first presentation I made was done in traditional "work the plan" Powerpoint style, slamming my message into the brains of my audience through carefully crafted slides building my message. For my second talk, I shifted to a hyperlinked process flow chart...

simpler > social" href="http://www.headshift.com/archives/000433.cfm">Headshift points us to Library and Information Update magazine has a piece this month about encouraging information literacy among staff The article describes information literacy and how it has become more important to organizations as they become "flatter" and information technology plays a larger and larger role...

There have been a number of articles / blogs talking about where learning is going with all the technology we have today. This article from George Siemens does a nice job of summarizing some of the issues, focusing on the fact that learning is much more than what happens in a...

Ran across another free Myers-Briggs test, thanks to Richard Gayle, who is ENFP. I tend to score on the borderline of these tests - none of my scores are above 63% in any direction. Last time, I believe I was INTJ. ENTJ - "Field Marshall". The basic driving force and need...

For those that don't read Judith Meskill, she beat me to the punch on advertising the next aok star series - melissie rumizen... Quoting the announcement from AOK: In her discussion beginning Monday, Melissie would like to play the role of "Knowledge Curmudgeon," which she defines as someone who is stubbornly...

This webinar, primarily presented by Ann Rockley (and Arbortext and Documentum). The slides are available (pdf). The goal of the presentation was to provide people with information around developing integrated approaches to records and content management. Records are generally considered to be the documentary evidence of business decisions and business actions....

Summary of Paul Tedesco's talk at KM Chicago's 14 October meeting, where he discussed "Achieving top level CRM by using an Advanced Forms of Knowledge Management."

Derek Lowe's In the Pipeline is an interesting peak into drug discovery. Picking and Chosing ties into my interests in project management: Which projects are worth working on? I'm going to answer that in a very narrow sense: which ones would I want to work on myself (or have my lab...

This Management by Baseball* article reflects an idea I ran across when looking into the KM program at Novartis. If you are going to make a change, then you need to get the idea of the change in front of the people in your organization, through both internal and external communications.

Frank Patrick wrote an excellent article about the importance of tying project management to the organization strategy. This also reflects strongly the opinions expressed in Kendall & Rollin's Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO that I reviewed recently.

Built to Learn - 2nd Chicagoland Enterprise Learning Leaders Exchange Conference An engaging grass-roots exchange for corporate learning executives interested in sharing best practices and exchanging proven success stories that positively impacts business results. Speakers include: Cliff Purington (Rockwell Collins); Bob Dean (Grant Thornton); Dr. Leandro Herrero (The Chalfont Project, UK);...

There's an interesting exercise making its way around the blogosphere. "The Interview Game" consists of a process of volunteering to answer five questions posed by someone who has done so themselves. The questions can change along each link of the interview chain.

Denham provides a nice little list of tools that people can use in response to a question on Brint: Tools for annotation. These include wiki, AskSam, blogs, personal databases, Biblioscape, QuickTopic. He also adds some items to consider around where the notes will be kept and who needs access to them....

E-mail reveals real leaders: Network analysis maps companies' informal structure. Want to know how your organization really works - who speaks to whom, who holds the power? Then study the flow of internal e-mail, say scientists at global technology firm Hewlett-Packard. The idea is familiar to people doing social network analysis:...

An interesting aspect of online self-subscription networks / communities has come up on the com-prac (communities of practice) Yahoo Group in the last few days. At least two financial advising firms have begun creating collections of experts to help them with advising their clients (mutual and hedge funds): Circle of Experts...

For regular readers, I've been fiddling around with the site tonight. And running from the television in extra innings. [Trot, trot, trot.] D'oh! Poor Cubbies. I've added the Waypath tool that tells you about potentially-related postings in the rest of the blogosphere. (It essentially looks for similar words and phrases for...

In David Gurteen's latest Knowledge Letter, he points people to the KMEurope website, where they have interviews with their keynote speakers. All are excellent reads.

Dilbert and CIO Magazine share similar viewpoints with respect to IIT. How Resourceful Is Too Resourceful? - Aug 21, 2003 - CIO Opinion - CIO As a senior manager at IBM, I have found it more easy to work with , especially with grads from the IIT who seem to be...

The Innovation Superhighway, Debra M. Amidon, 2003. (Amazon link below). I came to this book expecting to read about how to build innovation into my business or enterprise. I was disappointed to find that its goals were much loftier and therefore disconnected from my interests. It didn't help that there are...

National (U.S.) Mole Day is 23 October 2003. Celebrated annually on October 23 from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m., Mole Day commemorates Avogadro's Number (6.02 x 10^23), which is a basic measuring unit in chemistry.