February 2006 Archives

MeshForum 2006 will be 7-9 May in Chicago. Once again, I am involved in organizing the event. Please let me know if you have any questions.

For those who read my standard feed, Eric Tsui on KM, PKM and P2P from a month ago has received some attention in an information management graduate class. Michael Goul at ASU has asked the students that are willing to take a crack at reading the article and posting their comments.

Clarke Ching links us to an Interview with Eli Goldratt from Supply Chain Digest.

Day 2 of KM in the Modern Law Firm is over, and it closed out with more energy than yesterday. There were three sessions today: Is KM morphing into Practice Support, KM and Professional Development, and a brainstorming session on Making KM client-facing.

George Siemens makes an interesting comment in Wikis at Work. "The baggage of existing thinking is a great inhibitor to blogs, podcasts, wikis, and social bookmarks."

Bruce Hoppe writes What P G Teaches and talks about how A.G. Lafley, the CEO of Proctor Gamble, operates his ship. He talks about collaboration - collaboration where people challenge one another on the validity of their ideas and plans.

The first day of KM in the Modern Law Firm is over, and I found myself fairly comfortable, even though I'm not a lawyer. The KM topics discussed today looked at deeper integration of KM (and information management) into the firm; life cycle management of information central to the business of the firm; the cultural concerns with implementing KM-like changes; and what KM can do as the firm looks outside (the panel on which I participated).

My wife has written up her effort to create a 120-song playlist to celebrate her pending birthday. Along with providing the list of all the songs, she gives her criteria for selecting artists, even justifying those cheesy songs from the 70's.

Bill Brantley has a nice writeup of a "TOC Analysis of Technology" based on the Goldratt audio book, Beyond the Goal. The key idea is that technology is beneficial if and only if it diminishes a limitation.

Nancy White links to an interesting comment about how managing your personal online reputation will be a core life skill. Imagine, teaching this alongside basic hygiene in our schools.

Nancy White has pointed the way to a Johari Window tool that let's one see how others view them. I've started my own window by selecting a number of characteristics, and now I invite you to select from that same set of characteristics and see whether I project to you what I think of myself.

At the non-billable hour, guest-writer Ron Baker says "Attorneys Aren't Knowledge Workers," based on comments of his colleague, Dan Morris. This is a great set of thoughts about knowledge work and follows very much on the original idea of knowledge workers by Peter Drucker: companies need knowledge workers more than they need the company.

Frank Patrick points to an insightful poster: The Project Breathalyzer. It's a page of nine items that act as a sanity check for whether you should be driving a project (or project management office) or not.

Clarke Ching has found an interesting (and long) report that uses Theory of Constraints to study the UK Network Rail's capacity.

Rant on: Does anyone actually like voice-recognition based "interactive" voice response (IVR) systems?

I have been interviewed by the Knowledge Management Center, a Chinese KM group, based in Beijing. The connection was made through one of my students at Northwestern.

The British Psychological Society has a blog, kept by Dr. Christian Jarrett. A friend mentioned the recent "Why do we still believe in group brainstorming?" that describes the "illusion of group productivity."

Danny Ayers found an entertaining quote on delegation by Dan Connolly, "formalizing knowledge allows us to delegate tasks to the machine." This is one of those hidden fears about knowledge managent, but it need not be.

Okay, I can't help but link to this one. He references _The Princess Bride_ for goodness sake! David Buchan tells us that "You can do more than you believe."

One of the big ideas for me in a personal approach to knowledge management is that I get to consider what's important for me and how I want to manage and use it. I get to look at my skills and preferences and consider how this fits with where I am in life, so why not apply this to the job search process.

James Robertson's latest CM Briefing includes "Search should work like magic." I like that the suggestions he provides in terms of where IT should focus their energies.

Malcolm Ryder has a recent piece that looks at Change that provides some steps to consider on the way to creating change within the organization. As I read his article, I saw some parallels to the Theory of Constraints' five focusing steps.

David Weinberger has a nice piece on Fact-based ethics for bloggers , and I think it actually adds a bit to the ideas about blogs as a vehicle for conversations.

A commonly-discussed problem in knowledge management implementations is the issue of knowledge hoarding, generally associated with the idea of "knowledge is power." Kaye Vivian sees this as a myth.

Jeffrey Phillips picked up on the WSJ article "Companies Struggle To Pass On Knowledge That Workers Acquire" and goes onto talk about some of the barriers for traditional KM, focusing on critical mass.

Does spell-checking software need a warning label? The answer is, "yes." I've known this for a long time, but then I've also made the errors this article talks about. Based on their survey of undergraduate and graduate students, people put much more confidence in grammar- and spell-checking software than they should.

"Sharing Knowledge by Design - Building Intellectual Capital in a Virtual World" by Nancy Settle-Murphy and Stan Garfield. The authors provide a set of ten ideas on how to build knowledge-sharing into the fabric of teams and into the organization as a whole. The focus is on growing the capacity for knowledge sharing in the organization, rather than on any specific KM technologies.

Oren Harari responds to an Economist article with "Knowledge Workers (That's Us!) Need a New Organization." Oren is particularly interested in the juxtaposition between what knowledge workers need and how companies approach it.

Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide's Neurolearning Blog give us some insight into blogging in "Blogs as Our Brains: Can We Escape Chaos?" They touch on a couple aspects of blogging and cognition that make things chaotic: tagging, learning preferences, and even organizational skills.

Malcolm Ryder turned up an entertaining picture of the home computer of 2004 from a 1954 Popular Mechanics Magazine in The History of the Future. They have a few things wrong.