July 2005 Archives

The results are in, and I'm still about as geeky today as I was in January.

"A computer is just a tool. It's just a hammer. Let's get these tools to as many people as possible, let's teach them how to use it, give them an idea of what they can do with it, and then let 'em go. And that's really exciting." - Leo Laporte

Joy London at excited utterances points to an Interview: Former CKO at Kirkland & Ellis from a knowledge management class at George Mason University. It turns out the professor has posted all the interviews, including mine.

Jim McGee 's latest piece in Enterprise Systems is "Building Your Knowledge Workshop." Given Jim's ongoing analogy of knowledge work as craft work, it only makes sense to think about the craft person's workshop.

This is a wonderful rememberance from Chris Carmichael on just how bad things had gotten for Lance when he attempted to come back to the professional peloton in 1998.

I found Carol Kinsey "Goman's Five reasons people don't tell what they know" from June 2002. The short version is: power, insecurity, trust, fear, and "no one else does it."

The March/April 2002 issue of Ivey Business Journal had a piece by Nancy Dixon, "The Neglected Receiver of Knowledge Sharing." Dixon presents a helpful perspective to the concept of knowledge sharing, and one that I've heard in pieces previously. The discussion also makes it clearer why best practice databases have such a hard time of it in the KM community.

A review of Andrew Hargadon's "How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate." I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in the general topic of innovation as well as for Hargadon's insights on how people interact and even a few comments about knowledge management.

Jason has an interesting piece on "How the lack of constraints killed the quality of Star Wars." He says, "Constraints drive innovation and forces focus. They are to be embraced, not removed."

The Intranet Journal has an article from Paul Chin on "Dealing with Information Overload." He's got some interesting comments about the effect of having all this information available, primarily it looks like attention deficit disorder.

USA Today has an opinion piece from Matthew May on Lance Armstrong's final bid for the Tour de France's maillot jaune (yellow jersey). "Innovative Armstrong changes the way we compete."

Brian Livingston wraps up his series in IT Management on Picking The Best RSS Client with the entry on desktop-based aggregators. With this entry, he has discovered the same thing I've found.

An interesting paper by Sveiby et. al., "Knowledge Management and Growth in Finnish SME's," shows a positive correlation between KM and long-term sustainable growth of the companies.

Malcolm Ryder discusses the importance of collaboration and analytics for decision making in the operations environment: "Collaboration and Analytics: driving production with intelligence."

Last week Euan Semple said that KM is hogwash. This is an ongong discussion in the KM community and the larger community of skeptics.

Dave Pollard and some friends have developed Seven Principles of Social Networking. Throughout the article, he suggests that because of these principles, social networking applications have been going about the problem from the wrong angle.

Dinesh Tantri of Organic KM found "KM survey results-Economist Intelligence Unit." Dinesh found this interesting for the use of the word "actionable." I find this interesting as an expert in knowledge management and after spending my first week in Goldratt School.

I have been enjoying using Lektora for reading web feeds for the last week or so, and have some more comments. As I've said, the metaphor they use is the idea of the newspaper. You pick up the paper every so often, and toss it the recycling when done.

US Airways have done a nice job with the reservation system, reducing the headache of selecting flights and checking fares.

At the Wired NextFest in Chicago several weeks ago, I had my face scanned at the Direct Dimensions / Hanson Robotics booth. Pretty cool picture.

Brian Livingston at IT Management has published the second of his three-part series on web feed aggregators, which compares Bloglines, My Yahoo and NewsGator Online. He picks NewsGator as the best of the three.

At KM Magazine, Judith Lamont writes that "Law firms reinvent KM." The article describes KM initiatives at a number of different approaches to doing knowledge management, most of which have technology as important components.

I've been using the aggregator Lektora exclusively for the last week or so. I find myself drawn to the different way Lektora sets up the reading experience.

Duane McCollum, the information auditor, stumbled upon two interesting references about information disasters and the cost of them in his "Great Information Disasters?" An additional information "disaster" in my mind is that people get lost in analyzing the data and lose sight of the goal.

Mart T found an interesting article about Belgium's Kafka red-tape cutting initiative. It's already saved $281 million. And it looks a little like KM.

I've decided to make the plunge and take Goldratt School's TOC Supply Chain Expert training course in preparation for participating on a viable vision project as an Application Expert. The course started today.

Arnie Zullow is a MLS student in the UIUC distance education program, and he interviewed me as part of his interest in knowledge management.

Brian Livingston has an upcoming set of articles on aggregators, starting with this week's overview of the current marketplace, RSS Readers: Narrowing Down Your Choices. I'll be looking for his forthcoming articles on web-based and desktop-based readers.

Brian continues thinking about aggregators, Aggregation Control Spectrum. He suggests a thought excercise, wondering how to combine classic aggregation with web feed search tools.

Grant Robinson has created Guess-the-google that lets you guess what single term was used to find a set of 20 pictures via a Google image search. Fun game.

Ron Friedmann at Strategic Legal Technology mentions some (legal) KM Trends that result from a recent presentation he did with Tania Daniels. I particularly like the comments about baking KM into the business.

My friend, Andy Boyd, is looking for an Intranet-based RSS Aggregator. Oh, lazyweb, what do you know?

Gil Friend quoted himself from a recent speech, "Change is made more difficult by deep and pervasive errors in thinking..." This mimics what Goldratt has been saying for over 20 years.

My thoughts about looking at the JetBrains' Omea Reader for blog aggregation.

My thoughts about looking at the Lektora browser-based aggregator.

Here are more about my experience with RSS Bandit.

Michael Pokocky's manifesto proposal at ChangeThis: Building The New Knowledge Web Manifesto.

Kevin Desouza of The Engaged Enterprise will present on "Plug-n-Play Knowledge Management" at the July 12th meeting of KM Chicago.

As I mentioned earlier, I've decided to switch to RSS Bandit because my old aggregator self-destructed on an upgrade.  I wasted an entire day on it and would rather waste my time other ways. Reading may be a little faster, particularly with me getting comfortable with scrolling through the newspaper view,...

Michael McLaughlin writes "The Worst Thing About Best Practices." In isolation, I absolutely agree with McLaughlin. However, if they are part of an intelligent process, such as he suggests at the end of the article, best practices can be quite helpful.

This is a test.

It's a good thing I found this today. My aggregator has completely blown up. "Anyone who has kids will appreciate this (video), and anyone who doesn't have them should see it."

Chuck Martin has a set of 7 Tips for Getting of Control of E-mail at this week's Darwin Online, many of which I've advocated before.