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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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)...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
Referent to Tom Davenport's wrap-up of his knowledge work series for CIO Magazine, "Putting It All Together Again - The New Work Order."
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
Interesting back-and-forth between Jim McGee and Tom Davenport around Davenport's series on knowledge work in CIO Magazine.
Read the full article.
Session report for CLLC - "Improving Collaboration Using AI-based Tools:" Bringing in Outside Knowledge, Improving Internal & External Search, Improving Collaboration.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
Bio-IT World in July 2003 has an article on moving to PDA-based recording, rather than the traditional patient diaries.
Read the full article.
Teleos and the KNOW Network announced the 2003 Most Admired Knowledge Enterprises for Asia at the World Knowledge Forum in Seoul, Korea.
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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....
Read the full article.
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."
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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);...
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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....
Read the full article.
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:...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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...
Read the full article.
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.
Read the full article.
Mark McClellan, the FDA's new director has released his strategic vision for the agency. FDA: Strategic Plan Advancing America's Health We are moving toward a science-based, "life cycle" approach to assuring the safety of food products. This approach, also based on the principles of efficient risk management, will enable us to...
Read the full article.
A brief interview with Angela Hector of the Law Society of England and Wales in the KMPro's October 2003 KMProfile newsletter (pdf), page 3: Every organisation has its own unique knowledge needs, and The Law Society is no exception. As a not-for-profit organisation with a public-facing, accountable role, effective KM needs...
Read the full article.
A follow-up to the demonstration I attended for "Electronic R&D." There was a question of data mining in an electronic R&D environment. With an data management system there is the potential for it to hold data from a wide variety of instruments and reports. Wouldn't it be great if one could conduct exploratory data mining across all the data sets?
Read the full article.
After we had seen a number of examples throughout the day, someone asked, "How do you search for blogs? Is there a directory somewhere?" Today, the answer is no.
Read the full article.
"Corporate blogging isn't exactly sweeping the world." But it is gaining interest. Even more interesting, a number of companies are using blog tools as content management, rather than the standard online diary. Coudal Partner's own website is managed via MoveableType, and we saw a number of examples through the day where...
Read the full article.
While discussing the typical features of blogs, someone asked a related question. "What do you do about summarizing long discussion/comment threads?" As always, it depends, but if a business blog of some sort is generating that much discussion, then there is a need for a summary at some point. This might...
Read the full article.
There was some discussion of how to write for the web. Nothing too new to me, but the conversations during the workshop were interesting. And the examples on the bad end always provide plenty of laughs. During discussion of writing for the web, the inevitable question of copyright came up. With...
Read the full article.
There was a good discussion of identity and credibility with respect to blogs. I heard something different: Businesses - or the business people posting to blogs - can only get value out of blogs if they bring traffic to the company and keep the organization in the minds of people.
Read the full article.
Blog software "is a tiny, but mighty, content management system." This was a big aspect of the day's discussions and examples. The community is learning how to use the tools to do interesting things that have been painful in the past. In particular, the ability to easily generate and publish content...
Read the full article.
Rather than diving into details about what blogs are and how they work, the workshop took us through a number of ways people and businesses are using blogs full of examples and discussion around the utility of blogs in these areas. Many of these are familiar to regular bloggers and some...
Read the full article.
Friday's BloggingWorks workshop focused on how businesses can and are using blogs and blog tools as their primary engine for delivering content to both the public and to internal groups. To me, the biggest aspect of the workshop was the idea that blog tools are a means to an end. As...
Read the full article.
iWire: iMax: AWSOME The Guardian's Online supplement today has a rather nice article about office e-mail; nice not least because of a lengthy quote from iSociety's own Max Nathan. Its all sensible stuff rejecting that man from Phones4U who decided to ban office e-mail as a poorly disgused PR stunt (surely...
Read the full article.
NuGenesis organized a seminar to demonstrate how their product can interoperate with other companies' products to form a solution for electronic R&D.
Read the full article.
The Satir Change Model, as explained by Dale H. Emery, is change in response to a foreign element that creates chaos while I figure out how to deal with the change. Ideally, the end state leaves me in a higher perfroming state than where I started.
Read the full article.
judith meskill's knowledge notes: weblogs & km in the news... Guardian Unlimited :: Why blogs could be bad for business In this Guardian article Neil McIntosh points out that while companies might not be rushing out to embrace weblogging as a corporate interface to their customers that they would be well...
Read the full article.
Blogger Con: The Rule of Links The Rule of Links is that you link when it's appropriate to do so. Linking is an art. It's a choice. You don't link from every word or even every noun, or from the subject of every sentence. But when a reader reasonably would want...
Read the full article.
As a chemical engineer by training and someone who likes to cook, it is good to know that scientists like to ply their skills in the kitchen.
Read the full article.
KJolt Memberships
