April 2005 Archives

We talked about social software in my knowledge management class, using Stowe Boyd's description from Darwin Magazine as a starting point for "what is it." I list some additional ideas around what social software is / does.

Nimmy has some KM Thoughts. "Methinks - Knowledge Management can be a complete success only when each and every employee puts the organization before himself." One can build the systems, but how do you create the culture in which people actually want to make use of the tools to get things done?

If you can't make it to the full event for MeshForum, come for the Anne Harris concert on Sunday evening at our venue, the HotHouse (31 E. Balbo, Chicago).

Does anyone know why Norton AntiSpam 2005 seems to lock up with Outlook 2003?

I was pleasantly surprised to find the announcement for session Knowledge Management and Organizational Learning" at the 2005 AIChE Annual Meeting. There is another session on Integrating Data, Knowledge Models and Tools."

A modification of a quote from Donald Knuth: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in business."

Touching Molecules With Your Bare Hands: Scripps Research Scientists Describe New Way of Interacting with the Unseen World of Proteins and DNA. 3D printing and computational chemistry doing cool things together.

From TekFlo, Cyber Map Blog Movies. They have published some Quicktime movies based on links between blogs, particularly the mainstream blogosphere. I just spoke about network analysis in my KM class, so this was a nice find.

I'm going to be talking about weblogs tonight, and wanted to provide a list of types. This isn't as easy as I thought. Poynter gave me some good ideas, and I've built a nice list from there.

A researcher has "developed a machine-learning algorithm that automatically keeps track of tasks and associated emails, in order to build up a work flow for each task." This is a great addition to managing one's personal flow.

Adam Kolawa has a piece in the 4 April Computerworld on Reading Is Key to IT Innovation, lamenting the fact that researchers are missing current research because the traditional source, print journals, are getting less and less of the new research in IT (and other disciplines). Technically, web feeds and aggregators could provide a lot of help in solving this problem.

Susan Leandri, director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Best Practices (GBP) spoke last week at the KM Chicago meeting. She covered a lot of ground, from the need for knowledge retention, to the development of GBP, to some thoughts about how to develop your own best practices capability. The entire talk was sprinkled with examples from her own experience as well as familiar examples from the public literature.

I wrote a few days ago about my PKM System, there are some other tools in my suite that help me with the flow of my work: anagram, BlogJet, Movable Type, MindManager, Outclass, AddEmailAddress, Firefox, AdAware, SmartList to Go, Flickr, Skype and emacs.

I'm not a regular watcher of South Park, but I love the graphics. A real fan of the show has created South Park Studio to build your own South Park characters, including this vague likeness of me.

CFO Magazine's April issue has an article on KM, A Human Inventory. The focus of the article is on KM projects that are looking at filling the holes in business capabilities and competency models. It covers knowledge retention, knowledge mapping, automated expertise analysis, expertise services, and social networks.

I attended Goldratt Consulting's Viable Vision Offer Event last week. This was my first opportunity to see Eli Goldratt himself, and he certainly knows how to sell his materials. He steps you through the thought process with prodding questions and straightforward logic. In the end, he leaves you with the belief that it truly is possible to turn your company's current sales into operating profits within four years.

Firestone and McElroy published Doing Knowledge Management (pdf) in The Learning Organization, Volume 12, Number 2, 2005. In this piece the authors' goal is to answer the question, "Has true knowledge management been done?" The short answer is "yes." The long answer is "but mostly no."

Interesting find in the refereed, electronic Journal of Knowledge Management Practice. Choosing Your Knowledge Management Strategy by Knox Haggie and John Kingston. They discuss a number of approaches to knowledge management and the definitions of knowledge. Their synthesis does a nice job of combining this work into a "KM spectrum" of process types.

What do people need to know how to do to be "successful?" Michael Jones at YAFLE has a piece on the education system and teaching what is important. The focus of creating the building blocks (reading, writing and arithmetic) misses the point of education, not because these things aren't important but because these things are only part of much more interesting work.

Since I asked the students to do this, I needed to clarify my approach to some of this. I describe my general processes for dealing with PKM (lots of PIM), and then talk about some of the specific tools I use.

In my KM class, I asked the students to tell me about their personal knowledge (or information) management approach. In reading through their responses, the variety of styles and approaches was interesting. What follows are some of my thoughts as I read through the responses.

Last Sunday was LexThink, attended by 50 people, primarily a mixture of lawyers and bloggers. By the second regroup session, I was amazed to hear a common theme across many of the conversations: passion. Given that the topic of the day was around creating the next form of service firm, I think this starts to make sense.

The 7 April edition of the Chicago Tribune has an article on The Becker-Posner Blog, written by Judge Richard Posner and U. Chicago economics professor Gary Becker, which does a nice job of talking about why blogs can be valuable.

Are you in Chicago and curious about the program in which I am teaching at Northwestern? The Master's in Learning and Organizational Change program will be hosting an information session on Monday, 11 April from 6:30 to 8:00 pm.

Another business book has been released, this time from Jeff Angus, the author behind Management by Baseball, where he regularly draws lessons for business from the way baseball teams work.

Derek Lowe has another interesting find in "Don't Talk To Yourself So Much" from Francis Crick's memoir What Mad Pursuit: ". . .it is important not to believe too strongly in one's own arguments." Give voice to the idea. Make the attempt. It's the only way to find out.

Who is going to be participating in MeshForum (May 1-4)? Anna Nagurney, Valdis Krebs, Ross Dawson, Esther Dyson, Jamais Cascio, Buzz Bruggeman, Howard Greenstein, Michael Herman...

The April 12th meeting of KM Chicago will discuss best practices and setting up structures for best practices within your own firms. Susan Leandri, managing director of PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Best Practices will lead the discussion.

John Malony has an interesting discussion of push-pull on his Colabria blog. I have been thinking of this in terms of how people deal with information and how this changes as new technologies are introduced which shifts the amount of push/pull required.

Sitting at LexThink today, which is a day-long Open Space session, where the organizers have gathered 50 lawyers, bloggers, authors, and independents. I was in a morning grouping around collaboration, we touched on a variety of interesting topics around how to make collaboration happen and where collaboration makes sense in the world of business. Some of the big hits for me were trust, passion, and a unique aspect of virtual collaboration.

Frank Patrick pointed me to more sensible project management discussion at Stephen Seay's ProjectSteps. Stephen's recent "When Project Managers Attack!" highlights three basic rules of project management: Rule #1 - Team Conflict hurts Projects! Rule #2 - Management Apathy Hurts Projects! Rule #3 - Poor Planning Hurts Projects!

Bill Jensen's latest book, What Is Your Life's Work, is due out May 3rd. For anyone on the search for new work or new meaning in their life, this guides you down the path of thinking about what it is you really want to do: what do you want to leave as your legacy? Jensen is promoting the book by offering two free downloads: Chapter 4 ("Finding the Courage to Choose"), and the Field Guide for Getting Started. You need to provide your name and email to get at these files, and if you do, you will be entered in a drawing for a free, signed copy of the book. You'll also be entered if you pre-order the book at Amazon.