May 2004 Archives

It may not look like anything has changed, but my blog database got corrupted this weekend and I had to rebuild everything. Besides losing time on this one, I lost a bunch of trackback pings, primarily of stuff from last year. I've decided to make the jump from number individual archives...

My new baby got in the way of the one-year anniversary of my blog. A lot has happened since that first posting: consulting, baby, blogging and connecting galore.

I came across this article quoting Bill Gate's on the future of business and productivity. He talks about blogging, rss and communities.

Michael Hammer's Harmer's new blog suggests that project managers report the weather: Nerdherding for Beginners: Good project managers tell us about the weather One of the things a project manager should do for her team is to tell them about the weather. Is it sunny (we're running to schedule with a...

I'm sitting in on some sessions with large vendors at my current client. We are primarily looking at content management systems, but when asked about "the future of KM" one of them talked about syndication and another talked about weblogs as a new directions in corporate KM. Of course, they also...

Clark Ching has found a great TOC quote for those that don't like to call it "theory." Call it "reality of constraints" instead. We can choose to manage the constraints or choose to allow the constraints to manage us. Conversely we can choose to ignore the constraints, but rest assured that...

Frank Patrick is involved in this effort, and has asked his friends to pass on the information. Since I now have a child, it makes sense to promote this cause. Graham will probably have his own website by the time he gets to grade school. Global Virtual Classroom Contest 2004 Global...

Taking a break from knowledge management to announce the arrival of Graham Ivan Vinson at 7 pounds (3.18 kg) and healthy as can be.

Joyce Wycoff is trying a new definition of innovation: Good Morning Thinkers!: Defining Innovation Innovation requires: People using new knowledge and understanding To experiment with new possibilities And using sound collaborative decision making tools In order to choose and implement new concepts That create new value This version is an update...

Tom Collins at Knowledge Aforethought had some interesting thoughts about "best practices" two weeks ago. Here's the last paragraph of the article: Knowledge Aforethought: "Best-yet" practices - DO NOT RE-FREEZE If we "re-froze" the prior experience into the organizational "best practices" would anyone even look for the newer, better solutions? His...

I just met Mark Turrell of Imaginatik Research on Tuesday at the local KMPro meeting, and what should turn up in my "knowledge management" custom feed from Waypath but his blog, The Innovation Agenda. In our after-meeting conversation, it sounds like Mark and I came out of similar interest areas, though...

Bill Ives points to one of his articles in Intelligent KM IntelligentPortals: Getting Full Value from KM Knowledge management comes primarily out of two disciplines, each with its own mental model: human resources and learning knowledge on one hand, and information systems and storing knowledge on the other. It appears that...

In a Darwin Magazine article, John Baldoni covers several aspects of the question, "why?," from the value of well-placed questions to caution for not over-using it. Why comes up in many methodologies, whether it is your favorite problem solving / investigating technique (a la Kepner-Tregoe) or POOGI or several others.

George Siemens turned up an interesting quote on information overload from an article by Dean Paton in the May 10, 2004 Christian Science Monitor: elearnspace: Information Environmentalist Here's a sign of the times: Information Environmentalist: "The newest polluters are not chemical manufacturers leaking toxins into the air. Neither are they logging...

"Happiness is paying estimated tax payments" - for a consultant, this means all sorts of nice things....

Emery's Ironclad Test of Best Practices: "For something to be a best practice, it has to be practiced, and it has to be best." I love it. In relation to recent discussions of "best-yet practices," Dale acknowledges the multitude of problems with best practice systems in this simple statement. The written...

Dave Pollard discusses a Dave Snowden article in Dave Snowden on Knowledge Management. What interests me is the juxtaposition between my belief in what they are saying and what I hear business requesting. One of my peers in the badly-named discipline of Knowledge Management is IBM's complexity guru, Dave Snowden. Last...

Accenture's Kaspar de Boer gave an interesting talk this evening on portals and information architecture. I particularly appreciated the review of the basic architecture concepts around portals and content management systems in light of my current engagement.

here have been a number of articles recently that reinforce an idea I have that projects of any type are much more than they seem on the surface. Projects, ideally, are part of a much wider array of activities associated with changing and improving the way that particular part of the business operates.

Menasclerk is running through some interesting discussions of how to staff projects, based on the complexity and time horizon of the project. He is focused on IT project management, but, as discussed in the comments, this applies to any project. The basic idea is to look for project managers who have...

Clark Ching has been talking about impending layoffs at his organization. They are now happening, and he reflects on what happens when they (or he or both) are gone. I think not, baby puppy: It's the people I'll miss Whatever happens to me, these people are friends. But, since I don't...

Carla Verwijs says that Knowledge management is (more than) technology. Of course it is, so why do so many people still so strongly connect the two? I suspect that the "technology solutions" are such obvious components of the whole picture that it seems like KM is the technology. With my current...

Valdis Krebs has posted an updated version of his political book map, based on Amazon buying habits. Political Patterns on the WWW -- Divided We Stand -- May 2004 The big difference between this network map and the previous two are the number of books in the middle. The release of...

Kasper de Boer, Accenture Global Learning & Knowledge Management Practice, will be talking at the upcoming KMPro Chicago meeting on 11 May 2004. Information to be posted shortly: Portal & Information Architecture Lessons: Does your portal software implementation live up to the promises the vendor made when you saw the demo...

Our wonderful, old cat left this world yesterday. He has been slowly fading over the past few months starting with ringworm, then to arthritis and spondylosis, and finally cancer.

Cutting Through points us to some work of Jonathan Briggs on what he would have liked to know before starting his business, instead of learning-by-doing. 10 things to know before you start Understanding cashflow is the first important lesson to learn. The cheque is never in the post. Clients will always...

Bill Ives is now blogging at Portals and KM. He's recently left Accenture for greener pastures of his own consultancy. And given his publication track record, I fully expect to see some interesting thoughts roll through my aggregator from him....