January 2004 Archives

Richard MacManus is thinking about Internal Corporate Blogging in a thoughtful entry that contains: Nevertheless, corporate blogging has potential. I forsee weblogging and wiki technologies will be most useful in enabling bottom-up Knowledge Management in my company - via our Intranet. Looking around the Web, it's quite hard to find practical...

One of the challenges with "personal knowledge management" is that everyone operates differently and has different strengths that can be supported via PKM concepts and tools. In the end, the tools need to supplement our skills, not supplant them. I met a "financial engineering consultant"* at a networking event recently. While...

Interesting 2001 article from Oilfield Review, Managing Knowledge Management (pdf) is a discussion with KM leads from Shell (Lesley Chipperfield), Statoil (Erik Åbø), Texaco (John Old), BP (Chris Mottershead), Chevron (Jeff Stemke), Petróleos de Venezuela (Rodulfo Prieto), and moderated by Reid Smith of Schlumberger (where the article is housed). The article...

A list of the 38 books I read in 2003 - not quite my goal of 40.

Frank Patrick is doing an excellent job of describing the ideas behind Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM), specifically around estimates and buffer sizing. The latest entry in the series of articles discusses some curious comments from Dr. Goldratt on the technique of using 2-point estimates for task durations. Goldratt in CC@Work...

George Siemens at elearnspace blog comments on the recent ComputerWorld article on blogging. Comment: I don't know. I'm still undecided about whether everyone has it in them to be a blogger...or if it only appeals to a small percentage of people who have a desire to connect with others. When word...

A list of subscription options for Knowledge Jolt with Jack, along with links for automatic connections to many current aggregators. (Update: Just use the links in the navigation column.)

From ITToolBox's KM Knowledge Base: Director of Knowledge Management Needed SAP America is seeking an individual with experience providing guides, maps and processes for building knowledge management across multiple organizations for their open Director of Knowledge Management position. This is in their Newtown Square, Pennsylvania offices....

Fred Nickol's "Meeting the Challenge of the Shift to Knowledge Work" was written 20 years ago, but still seems relevant.

In "Knowledge Work is a Myth," FredNickols walks us through his thinking that all work has some component of knowledge to it, and therefore a separate category of "knowledge work" is unneccessary.

ComputerWorld joins the discussion about blogging in business: Blogs Bubble Into Business Weblogs began as a personal communications medium, but they're moving into corporations as tools for collaboration and knowledge management. The article highlights two examples on how blogs are being used. One is a replacement for a paper engineering notebook,...

Ester Dyson mentions ACME Mapper that gives aerial shots of any Latitude / Longitude combination (or Zip Code or Town). It turns out that the ACME Mapper @ N 42.030215 W 87.686554, 4 m/p is almots right on top of my house....

Anna Dening at University of York in the UK is doing a research project on Cross cultural comparison of knowledge management practices in which she posits that because the languages are different, English and French speakers see KM in different ways. (This is based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which explores the...

Google definitions are handy things, as is ActiveWords.

37signals have been talking about their soon-to-be-released blog-based project management tool, Basecamp. I saw a preview at Blogginworks back in October.

Johanna Rothman in Managing Project Development gives an excellent explanation of how and why she asks for Visible Progress If I'm managing a traditionally-planned project, I have weekly status meetings with everyone on the project. (For large projects, each project lead has these meetings and I meet with the leads individually.)...

Bina Shah writes about tacit knowledge that got me thinking down another path. It's the title that did it to me. Capturing tacit knowledge: Do you know more than you think? It is widely accepted that knowledge has two dimensions: explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge can be captured, articulated and documented....

A Moveable Type Intranet describes pretty much what it says. I want to think about this for making this site more flexible and easy to handle as I develop the business side of my life. [via Shannon Clark at Searching for the Moon.]...

In ComputerWorld's Business Intelligence: One Version of the Truth, the storry suggests is that there is "one version" of the truth that can be extracted from the information swirling around an enterprise. Business intelligence systems promise to change that by, among other things, pulling data from all internal systems plus external...

It looks like Jakob Nielsen gets lost in the same hole many others do when using statistics to drive a point.

Ed Taekema of Road Warrior Collaboration has tried to replace his paper Franklin-Covey planner with a PDA. I have found the palm to be very effective at information management using tools like AvantGo, Acrobat for Palm, JPluck, Franklin Planner for Palm and the palm address manager but have found it to...

Something ate my blog database, so I've been out for the past week. The problem has been corrected, and thankfully I haven't lost any work. I've been stockpiling entries, so expect to see a bunch of new stuff over the next couple days. Oh, And in case you haven't done a...

An article from The Chronicle of Higher Education focused on dealing with the variety of tasks in the life of professorship makes sense for anyone who feels like they are overwhelmed. The Chronicle: Career Network: 12/16/2003 I resisted doing careful planning for years because I feared life would become rigid and...

EEK Speaks on "Low-Focus Thought" in Knowledge Management Systems Good KnowledgeManagement tools facilitates the discovery of these weak connections, and make us less reliant on luck. Blogging is great, because it encourages people to link, which encourages bloggers to search through old entries -- both of others and their own. This...

In the Pipeline finds fault with the US patent system.

Donald Norman spoke at Evanston Public Library, highlighting material from Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.

As I work to develop my marketing strategy for my new venture in knowledge management consultancy, I figure my blog has to fit into this picture somewhere. My hope is that my ongoing commentary will help people understand how I think as well as my range of interests. On top of...

Mary Lee Kennedy, Director of Knowledge Network Group at Microsoft, gave a presentation on The CKO Summit - "An Inside View from the Summit," which was in October 2003. The focus of the Summit this year was on developing a way to talk about knowledge management projects in terms that business...

After hearing David Ticoll talk in November, I went out and picked up his book. Transparency in business is clearly an important topic, but it wasn't until the end of the book that I got the big picture via their examples.

Next week's (19-30 January) AOK STAR conversation will be with Rob Lebow on Enabling Accountability. Here is the official introduction: AOK: Preparing for Conversations with Rob Lebow And here is a quick summary from the recent AOK K-Net EZine: January's STAR Series' moderator, Rob Lebow, has spent 20 years learning and...

Buying a laptop isn't as straightforward as it would seem. There are far too many variables and not enough understandable information. The goal of this entry is to clarify some of the confusion. I am sure this will be out of date, as soon as I submit it. I suppose the...

Not everyone thinks the days of e-mail are numbered. Robert Hamilton and Ben Bradley write in Darwin Magazine about the how ingrained e-mail is to how we work. And, rather than fight it, they suggest one direction may be in creating environments which work seamlessly with email. They focus on collaboration...

The TOC YahooGroup has been talking about Deming's Funnel, and a smart person finally asked what it was. A quick google nets a wide variety of explanations. Tampering and effects diagnosis from the QualityAmerica knowledge center was a useful verbal description. And Yonatan Reshef at the U of Alberta has a...

Interesting article from Kevin Desouza about knowledge transfer encouraged over ping pong and coffee.

My grad school roommate, Aidan, was wondering what a knowledge management consultant does. I don't know if he learned anything, but he came up with this useful information based on consulting google: "data management consultant" 530 hits "information management consultant" 1500 hits "knowledge management consultant" 2130 hits (you win) "wisdom management...

Report from the top: Overview of the CKO Summit - Mary Lee Kennedy, Microsoft Director of Knowledge Network Group at the KMPro Chicago Chapter meeting 13 January 2004. Summary: Each year some of the top CKO's from around the globe meet in Ireland for a 'CKO Summit', an opportunity to discuss...

Frank Patrick has a piece today on the Otis Redding Theory of Measurement that he got from Fast Company via some Otis lyrics, "I can't do what 10 people tell me to do, so I guess I'll remain the same." Frank's summary: "Too many measures are not only distracting, but are...

Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Weblog What the Customer Wants -- In today's piece Laurent writes... "The most important thing I learned in 15 years could well be the realization that solving someone's problem with code involves listening to that person." This goes for problem solving without code as well. And as...

As long as everything has gone correctly, I am now incorporated in the state of Illinios as "Knowledge Jolt, Inc." I'll be selling consulting services in knowledge management, focusing on the pharmaceutical and chemical industries in order to exploit my formal training in chemical engineering and my history in the pharma industry.