October 2004 Archives

Rich Teerlink spoke on People Driven Execution, based on his new book. If you ever get the chance to hear Teerlink speak, go do it, even if you aren't particularly interested in motorcycles. He has an off-beat style, and he tells a great story about how Harley-Davidson went from being a laughingstock in the early 1980's to the high performing "lifestyle company" that it is today.

Vince Serritella, CLO of Chicago-based W.W. Grainger, spoke about Finding the "Seam" in Effective Governance of the Learning Organization. The "seam" is that magical place in life where everything seems to come together. Serritella used the analogy of the perfect play in football, which he coaches, to highlight the idea. In football, that play may only happen once a game.

Dirk Tussing, John Nawn and the Executive Learning Exchange did an excellent job of bringing together people and speakers from all over the Chicagoland area. This is an index to my impressions of the conference.

The 9 November KM Chicago meeting will be host to Andy Schriever of Park Street Solutions.

Olaf Brugman found an interesting article for us. KM: have faith and ethics Knowledge Management requires personal faith and ethics, says Renata Guizzardi in her blog posting Is Faith important for Knowledge Management?. The point Renata makes, is that realizing knowledge management largely depends on our attitudes, and on our ideas...

Jeremy Aarons has been doing some interesting thinking at Dubbings and Diversions. Today he has an article on Willie Sutton and defining the task in which he talks about the fun of asking questions. This whole question brings me back to the apocryphal tale of the famous bank robber Willie Sutton....

Customer Relationship Magazine has an article in their November 2004 issue on "Knowledge management plays a key role in CRM success" by Jason Compton (online when the December issue comes out). In my mind, this is a no-brainer, but the focus of CRM and KM has frequently been miles apart. Where...

Jim McGee must be shy, so I'll mention that Ben Bradley interviews him in Darwin Magazine: "Connect - Five Thoughts About... - KM, Rushing the Technology Curve and Failing."

Bill Ives points us to APQC's report on Facilitated Transfer of Best Practices. He highlights the main message of the report as Identify or create practices and processes to be transferredDocument and validate the practicesShare and communicate the best practicesCreate a clear adoption policy as to whether the best practices are...

"'Knowledge discovery' could speed creation of new products" is a press release about chemical engineering, AI and product design from Purdue University. Go engineers!

Comments and recent discussion has me thinking about KM. Knowledge is has to be built into how organizations AND people do business -- and at that point it is almost fruitless to talk about knowledge itself. The important thing becomes questions around what drives the business or what motivates people.

Jim McGee celebrates three years of McGee's Musings.

I neglected to post it earlier, but there is a two-week discussion with Edna Pascher on Strategic Renewal at AOK. It got off to a slow start, but in the course of two days generated 50 messages around several discussion threads. If you are all interested in where knowledge management is...

Coniecto is blogging the European Conference on Knowledge Management (ECKM) and mentioned an experiment of the conference organizers.

One of my search feeds discovered another researcher who is looking into the value of blogs. Business value of blogs: My story... I am a student of Information Science and Economics from the University of Applied Science Cologne in Germany. Currently I am in Sydney, writing my thesis about "The usage...

While listening to WBEZ, the Chicago NPR affiliate, begin their non-pledge-drive-pledge-drive, I was surprised to hear a new version of the data-information-knowledge discussion. It went something like this: It's about clarity. You are overwhelmed with data from 24-hour news networks and the internet, but there is too much. At WBEZ, we...

I joined about 100 other people for the ii3 webinar, A Fresh Outlook - MS Outlook as a Knowledge Hub this past Thursday. I expected a slightly different focus, but I still learned a few things along the way. I was expecting something that focused on how organizations are developing the...

The latest Entertainment Weekly mentions that DFA Records are releasing their second compilation (3 CD's): DFA Compilation #2 on November 2. In their comments, they call it "Disco for the blogs and beer crowd," so I figured I should mention it. We have their first compilation (you guessed it, DFA Compilation...

In yesterday's KMPro panel on Blogs in Business I neglected to mention an interesting comment about the social nature of blogs from Robert Scoble. Blog searches are "purified sugar," what is really interesting are the bloggers themselves.

KMPro Chicago hosted an excellent discussion of Blogs in Business with Jim McGee, Robert Scoble, Ian Kennedy and Jon Powell. We covered a lot of ground with a focus on how blogs could be valuable both for marketing to the outside world and for building conversations within the company.

Lloyd Davis is doing some thinking at Perfect Path about what he wants to do with his knowledge management consulting practice and has decided to call it "kmanagement" instead: Kmanagement (the 'K' is silent). I very much appreciate his realization that it isn't about "knowledge management" per se, but about how...

Upcoming meeting of KMPro Chicago will be hosting a panel on Blogs in Business with Robert Scoble of Microsoft, Jon Powell of Hewitt Associates, Ian Kennedy of Six Apart, and Jim McGee of Huron Consulting.

Frank Patrick spent the month of September writing about multiproject management (TOC here), but the last entry had me from the subtitle: "It's not how much you start. It's how much you finish." Multi-Project Management and Organizational Effectiveness X Too many organizations act as if by packing the pipeline and keeping...

CIO's Analyst Corner for 21 September 2004 has a piece on KM from Laurie M. Orlov of Forrester: When You Say 'KM,' What Do You Mean? The rubric of knowledge management is as vague and hyped today as business process re-engineering was during the 1990s. Too broad to be meaningful, too...