September 2004 Archives

In relation to a discussion about time and priorities and Covey's quadrants, Matt has a fun idea: Curiouser and curiouser! Here's a silly idea: We could all offer to volunteer a blogger friend one hour a week of our time to do important tasks that they can't get around to. I...

If there is something that identifies knowledge workers from the rest of the working set, maybe it is this: That knowledge workers control how they manage their time and activities. This is more of an effect of the shift to knowledge work than a definition. Jerry McGovern has a related article...

This time the survey is on the business value one gets out of blogging. The author, Julia Habermann, is a student at a university in Germany. This is her request: As a student of Information Science and Economics from the University of Applied Science Cologne in Germany, I am writing my...

Review of an article on noetic prisms by Diarmuid Pigott and Valerie Hobbs with a particular connection to the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy.

I've found another way to limit comment spam on my site, with the ThrottleSeconds variable and some modifications sugested by Phil Ringnalda and Jacques Distler. And then I extended it some more.

So, what is it to be a knowledge worker? Lots of people have taken aim at variations of this question, and Martin Roell has taken a crack at it after blog comment conversation with Geoffrey Rockwell and Florian Heidecke. I've always thought of a knowledge worker as a person who uses...

I'm a little slow with this announcement, but Debra Amidon (Entovation) and Bryan Davis (Kaietuer Institute for KM) are the guests of honor for the September STAR Series at AOK, which started at the beginning of the week. Their topic is Knowledge Innovation Zones and Knowledge Cities - how knowledge and...

I've done my little bit to make this happen, have you? Do you get to the Wikipedia and find there is something missing that you know? Add it to the site, and see if it grows. Joi Ito: Wikipedia has just announced that it has reached one million articles. Congratulations Wikipedians!...

Brett reviews Wisdom of Crowds and I see a connection to a quote from Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it."

I was annoyed with a problem that seemed to show up in Outlook 2003 after applying the Windows XP SP2 patch to my machine. So, I did what any half-decent researcher would do, I Googled for help. I found a few things at Microsoft, but none were exact matches, and it...

A book excerpt for Friends in Low Places by Dr. James A. R. Willis is a nice portrayal of the "unconscious competence" pane of Johari's Window.

Tom Hoglund, the Chief Knowledge Officer of EDS spoke at the 14 Sept 2004 KMPro Chicago meeting on "Knowledge Management as the Engine of Business Process Improvement" (original abstract). The best thing that I heard him talk about was the clear connection between their KM effort and the overall business goals...

David Wilcox will be chairing a session on communities of practice and wants to demonstrate their value via Knowledge sharing by milling about. I like his description of what he plans to do to help people appreciate the nature of CoP's. I'd love to be there myself. In the other session...

"Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody's business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy if anything can." -- Thomas Merton

Lilia Efimova is back to thinking about personal knowledge management with a new drawing that attempts to bring some ideas together. I like Lilia's reference to awareness as a key component of this model.

Thanks to Jim McGee, I now have a drawing of the GTD Advanced Workflow.

The value of good management appears again in an article by Stephen J. Dorgan and John J. Dowdy in McKinsey Quarterly, "When IT lifts productivity" (2004, Number 4). This time they looked at manufacturing companies investing in information technology and found significantly better performance in those companies who ranked high on a management practices scale.

How KM is driving business improvements at EDS Tom Hoglund, CKO, EDS This presentation will describe how KM can be a key driver of a continuous improvement approach for business processes. A comprehensive, process-oriented knowledge portal can help you obtain repeatable results, shorten learning curves, reduce duplication of effort and improve...

Shorewalker wrotes about that Line56 article on intranet trends too, but had a very different conclusion than I did: "Intranets look vainly to knowledge management."

Marvin Rosenberg of George Washington Research is doing research into information overload and has sent a survey out to uncover people's behaviors with respect to the topic. The full introductory note is below ......

Judith Meskill points to a great article on trends in intranets by Shiv Singh at Line56.com: Intranet Trends to Watch For. I had a lot of thoughts about this article as I read through, but my first pass got lost in the ether. Here are the list of trends, which are...

The Word Spy is not your average word-a-day dictionary. They focus on modern culture words and phrases and give you some history around how they arrived on the scene. And they have several web feeds!...

Johanna Rothman continues the conversation about dealing with everything overload. Managers Manage Actions Including Decisions My colleague, a senior manager, is inundated with too much to do. Hundreds of emails, seven of hours of meetings every day, hundreds of emails, hiring the next level managers so he doesn't have to backfill,...

Knowledge Jolt: Solving information overload, one entry at a time. An article by Robin Good from March of this year talks about Information Overload: The Future Of Search And Information Access. It's a collection of several thoughts around how information is found and provided. I found his thoughts about web feeds...

Matthew Clapp in CMS Watch talks about the timing between collaboration and knowledge management activities in companies in Collaboration First, Then Knowledge Management. He stresses the importance of setting up good collaboration, so that people within an team or group can share information with one another. After this works, only then...

Knowledge Management Critical for Start-ups (realkm.blog-city.com) It might sound strange, but I think a knowledge management initiative is as important in a small and growing organization as it is in a mature global company. It's tempting to say that it is "just a couple of people" who can communicate directly everyday....

Clark Ching needed to get a little something off his chest after doing some on-line learning: Use the force. Can you imagine what learning the force would have been like if Luke and Yoda had communicated by email? Luke's starfighter is sunk deep into a swap and he wants to get...