March 2004 Archives
I received a couple personal emails in response to my earlier article on the topic of best practices. As people who have been reading in this area for a while know, the topic of best practice and railing against it has been going on for several years. Plenty of reading and thinking is available on both sides of the fence.
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Gantthead's latest newsletter, included an article by George Ball on KM: Supply vs. Demand First, KM is a complex process. Its form and function is very much dependent on both the specific organizational/operational goals and the people that it serves. Second, because it is a people-driven process, the outputs of which...
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In doing market research at the library on the consulting industry, I came across the journal Consulting to Management, a quarterly journal focused on the kind of company I am creating. Archives only available to subscribers - or at your library. There was an interesting article by Milan Kubr in the...
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Blogs give people the opportunity to develop a narrative of how they think and what influences them over time. Readers of this type of blog will learn more about the person, and I suspect will understand how their ideas and opinions developed over time. The result for the writer and readers will be more common understanding and higher trust levels.
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Who is right, Voltaire or common parlance: "The good is the enemy of the best" (anonymous). "The best is the enemy of the good" (Voltaire).
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I may be in trouble. Ton Zijlstra has a recent piece on signal vs. noise in which he says: Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: Every Signal Starts Out As Noise Why do we call information and data coming to us noise? Because we know not all that stuff is useful, we label the...
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Does anyone know of published research on the children's game of "telephone?" A friend was curiouis after my recent discussion of fun with email and interpersonal communications. The result of the game is usually gales of laughter from children when they realize how badly they mis-hear verbal phrases.
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You have to love a guy who can combine bicycle racing and knowledge management. Anjo Anjewierden: The Ultimate Blunder Sometimes having "too much" knowledge results in the ultimate blunder. Perhaps the most amusing and best documented example is Erik Zabel's "near" victory in last Saturday's traditional cycling race Milan - San...
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Wiio's Laws are a somewhat humorous take on human communications. Think of Murphy's Law applied to communications.
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ActiveWords have come up with a new tagline: "One word is worth a thousand clicks." ActiveWords saves me all sorts of time and annoyance throughout the day. All the websites I visit on a regular basis are at my fingertips, much faster than even my bookmarks or other means of access....
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Along with handling my own e-mail well, I must also help others deal with their e-mail. Bruce Karney of HP Services posted his list of 10 Rules for Asking Others to Share Knowledge, and he's given me permission to repost them here.
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The latest David Allen Productivity Principles newsletter contains a Coach's Corner on Keeping Your Inbox Real by Julie Daniel. In this note, Daniel talks about the six types of email she sees sitting in people's inboxes. The list is in reverse order of value. Read and no need for followup and...
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Anu Gupta at scale|free turned up an interesting article on ROI. I hear a little theory of constraints in it. scale|free: Rethinking ROI in KM initiatives Rethinking ROI: Managing Risk and Rewards in KM Initiatives - a very interesting article about measuring ROI. Unlike many other articles I've seen on the...
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A McKinsey Quarterly article on the difficulty coffee-growers are having in the current market.
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Johanna Rothman and Denise Robitaille have written the Corrective Action Handbook. Here's a blurb from Johanna's announcement: Managing Product Development Corrective action involves defining the problem, gathering data (quantitative and qualitative) to understand the root causes, developing a plan (and obtaining buy-in for that plan), executing the plan, verifying that the...
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Janne Jalkanen talks about the human form of thrashing: ButtUgly: Trashing You know how computers start trashing when they run out of memory? They just keep hitting the hard drive all over again, trying to swap between tasks, but end up using most of their time moving bits in and out...
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Data, information and knowledge can be approached from many directions. This paper focuses on the limits of the traditional economic theory approach and rounds out the concepts with views from sociology, information theory and information physics.
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In doing some other research, I ran across the Open University of Catalonia - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC): The Virtual University. Right on the front page, they have a "knowledge network" with links to recent faculty articles in the knowledge management arena. (links below take you to abstracts, then to...
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For those who really need to know, I've switched my blogroll back to something slightly less elegant than what is provided by Bloglines, since I have switched to NewsGator for my aggregation. I picked up MT-Outliner that reads an OPML file, and exported my OPML file from NewsGator. What I don't...
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Okay, I know that our phone number is publicly listed, but how in the world do I get off the political please-elect-our-candidate list? Today is the primaries in Illinois, and they are still calling. Today we had Jan Schakowski (my US Congress), Barak Obama (Democratic US Senate hopeful and current state...
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Ton Zylstra poses an interesting question in his Ton's Interdependent Thoughts: How We Might View Organisations: What happens when an organisation is first founded? Is it individuals joining (their networks) together, or is it a box to be filled with employees? He adds to this some drawings of the implications. From...
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Ton Zylstra comments on my review of Bob Hiebeler's KMPro talk last week. Specifically he is concerned with missing opportunities by relying too heavily on best practices.
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While maybe a strange title, it is a critical aspect for anyone who relies on "bits" as a central part of their worklife. The discussion of personal knowledge management talks about this, but it generally misses the discussion of what we are supposed to do.
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The next AOK STAR Series discussion will be with Dave Pollard over the next two weeks. This follows on the heels of an excellent discussion with David Gurteen on interpersonal knowledge management. Dave Pollard will be speaking on Personal Content Management and Social Networking -- particularly on the tools that make...
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Realization's March 2004 issue discusses the results of their survey of whether people are using the 50/90 task duration estimation scheme. CC@Work 90% of Realization's customers are not using 50/90.In multi-project operations, 50/90 is not only useless but also harmful. Buy-in of the teams needs to be achieved differently.Meanwhile Realization will...
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Comments on KMWorld article on the costs of not finding information. Until software can start reading my mind to extract context, our librarians and our friends can be excellent resources that we should not forget in the push to automate everything.
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BioIT World reports that Eric Neuman has become their new head of Knowledge Managment.
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For those that don't read M2M. Hilarious fun. The Orkut Song (mp3). Found via Clay Shirky at Many to Many For people outside the United States, this is sung in the style of a Sesame Street children's TV show song....
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The best nugget from the evening is Hiebeler's new definition of best practices: "An example of the best way to perform a process." It used to be "The best way to perform a process."
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Ben Fry, a student at MIT is working his fingers off on a couple of data/information visualizaton projects. One of them is valence: I'm interested in building systems that create visual constructions from large bodies of information. The methods used in designing static chunks of data: charting, graphing, sorting and the...
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One of my MeshForum colleagues introduced me to The Augmented Social Network, which I have seen referenced before. I just haven't connected with it. The Augmented Social Network is a proposal for a "next generation" online community that would strengthen the collaborative nature of the Internet, enhancing its ability to act...
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Reading blogs and writing this one gives me the opportunity to toss out ideas and thoughts to an ever-changing and growing conversation.
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Small pet peeve: I'm always amazed when I come across different spellings for plurals than I learned when I was in school. I learned the Latin-style pluralization, and those are no longer preferred terms. personae has become personas fora has become forums consortia has become consortiums You get the idea. Then...
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I have been having fun with life instead of making time for blogging. The fun includes being woken at 1:30 am by a very upset cat. His front, right paw isn't working. It turns out that he has severe spondylosis (spinal osteoarthritis) in which the spinal bones are bridging together. The...
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I had an interesting email conversation from a master's student who is writing a thesis on "Knowledge Management Approach for Curriculum Management" in Indonesia.
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Gantthead has a fun article about project management as exemplified by the Discovery Channel's Monster Garage, where a team is challenged to deconstruct a motor vehicle and reconstruct it into a fully operating something else, like a Mini Cooper converted into a giant snowmobile. Lessons from the Monster Garage (Part 1)...
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Richard MacManus is looking at building blogs and wikis into his organization. Read/Write Web: The Passion of the Information Flow I've begun the push to introduce wiki and weblog technologies into the company I work for. As I wrote in my last post, I'm aiming to enhance Information Flow within my...
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Here is a fun problem. If you use Movable Type and you happen to have Norton Internet Security 2003, don't turn on the Ad Blocking feature. It somehow messes with the CGI's for MT and kills pretty much anything MT does. Fortunately, the scripts die after saving to the database, so...
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Brian Kennemer touches on the issue of timesheets and project management in projectified: Timesheets. Yes you REALLY do need to fill this in! Please?! [at the end] 10 mins a week is all you will be asking of your resources. They are grown ups. They can handle it. Explain to them...
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As in any project, we need to know all the expectations before they can be met. Hidden agendae remain hidden and lead to resentment - or worse - later on. Two different articles talk about expectations recently, and from rather different perspectives. Brian Kennemer recounts the traditional conflict between Sales and...
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Kim Black takes Stephen Covey's Rocks-Pebbles-Sand analogy about first things first to the next logical step. Agile Business Navigator: Boulders, Rocks and Pebbles Have you ever felt trapped by a business situation, it saps your energy, weighs you down and has grown far beyond being enjoyable? Yet, you still continue to...
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Graham Clements has some interesting things on his Research Notes blog, but it's missing both contact info and an RSS feed....
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Amy Gahran jumps into the discussion of blogs as brain-augmentation tools. Blogging for Brain Augmentation: Contentious Weblog My brain is not enough! Too often, thoughts occur to me, or connections become apparent, that I very much wish to remember and use... but then along comes a flood of additional thoughts, and...
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