Saturday, August 23, 2003 :::
 
http://mbawire.blogspot.com/

This is a really cool site for MBA people.

::: posted by Hook at 6:44 PM



Monday, September 23, 2002 :::
 
The 3Cs of Knowledge SharingOne of the challenges of knowledge management is getting people to share their knowledge. This article explores some of the barriers and offers pointers to overcoming them.

I think blogs are able to impact many ofthe barriers discussed in the article:
1) Not invented here syndrome (draw on knowledge, solutions, and ideas of fellow bloggers within the organization)
2) Not realizing the value of personal knowledge (let others determine what is valuable for themselves... not what other people think should be shared)
3) Lack of time (since blogs can be an intricate part of the way people already work)
4) Trust (blogs create a new level or truct, recognition, and de facto expertise)

::: posted by Hook at 4:19 AM



Friday, September 13, 2002 :::
 
There may be corporate pushback on effective knowledge management tools like blogs. However, one thing I have learned is to not bet against Peter Drucker. He is the father of modern management theory. Companies that did not adopt his methods faltered and failed when faced with competition from well managed "Drucker" companies. Now, there are few companies that do not use his methods to some degree. So, when Peter says we are going to move to a knowledge economy (and society) that treats workers more like peers due to their expertise and mobility, I believe him. Those companies that still cling to the boss/peon relationship will have a tough time recruiting good people and getting the productivity improvements they need to survive from their employees.

Clearly, the way blogs will enter most companies will be the same way PCs, e-mail, and Instant Messaging arrived in corporations: it will be brought in by brave individuals and small innovative workgroups. Over time entire companies will adopt the technology because of the benefits it brings. Eventually it will become mainstream. The benefits are too great to ignore.

There is lots of innovation going on out there. You have the option: bemoan potential problems with powerful new tools -or- deploy those tools, face the opposition, and reap the benefits.

::: posted by Hook at 3:21 AM



Thursday, September 12, 2002 :::
 
Blogs: Get Your Words Out

Software and services for updating blogs offer some basic content management features at a negligible cost. Blogging is an effective and simple way to share and store strategies, experiences, and plans. In fact, software developer Macromedia has started using blogs as an informal way for its managers to communicate with customer-developers.


::: posted by Hook at 8:55 AM



Wednesday, September 11, 2002 :::
 
ZDNet: Tech Update: Enterprise Applications / Simulation may be the
e-learning "killer app"

Enterprises that have invested in e-learning have told Gartner that their biggest payback occurs when they include simulation as part of their overall e-learning curriculum. Simulation will evolve to become the "killer application" for e-learning.
Gartner has identified seven categories of simulation:
* Animation or spatial simulation
* Role-playing
* If-then process simulation
* Hands-on practice
* "What-if" interactive models
* Virtual reality or immersive simulation
* Games

::: posted by Hook at 8:41 AM


 
Reload - The Blog Days of Summer - - Darwin Archive - Darwin Magazine

...the fact that this form is becoming more popular among the public means that smart businesses will, and should, see if they can find a use for blogs.


::: posted by Hook at 8:29 AM


 
www.KMWorld.com Magazine Archives

Over the last two years, I have been heavily engaged with federal and state agencies that are attempting to harness the power and practical value of KM. In many cases, the problems are monumental and will require significant resources; others are a matter of relatively simple organizational workflow and process changes. In all cases, leadership is paramount in driving the needed change. The following is a summary of the most critical problems now facing government organizations.

::: posted by Hook at 8:24 AM


 
Business 2.0 - Web Article - Blogging for Dollars

Business blogs are more likely to be focused on projects or teams than on their individual creators. For instance, a marketing team at Verizon uses Traction software to track market conditions and competitive intelligence. Members of a product development team might use a private weblog to which they contribute notes and ideas regarding the development process. Customer service reps could contribute problem fixes and customer notes to a collaborative weblog and refer to it later - kind of like a continuously evolving user manual. For personal blogs, as Traction CEO Tim Simonson puts it, "it's all about me - it's a personal publishing orientation. In business, on the other hand, the orientation is about the subject, or the product, or the business issue."

::: posted by Hook at 6:21 AM


 
The Economist. November 1, 2001

Peter Drucker paints a picture of how we will transition to a knowledge society.

One cannot help but think that this new knowledge society and the knowledge-based corporation envisioned in this article will be helped by blogs (Weblogs as Knowledge Management Tools). The best way to tap into the insight and views of a knowledge worker is throught the use of a blog system. Using a blog, a knowledge worker can review digital data, analyze it, annotate it with the analysis, and then publish it to a corporate Intranet. By publishing this knowledge, it then becomes a part of the corporate knowledge pool (which is particularly important in a fluid workplace environment).

This is also important in decentralized organizations or firms with a large percentage of part-time knowledge workers (as evisioned by Drucker). A blog also allows experienced workers to keep their ties to organizations intact after a departure to part-time status (which is particularly important given the aging of populations in the US, Europe, and Japan). It organizes the flow of the knowledge they contribute in a way that easily understood and usable by everyone in the organization (via Intranet search). This is in contrast to limited reach and poorly self-organizing attributes of e-mail, instant messaging, digitial documents, and face-to-face communication.

A knowledge worker using a blog system would also have the ability to route contributions to many firms using categories. Given the excessively competitive marketplace envisioned by Drucker, people are going to need to think much more about working with multiple organizations simultaneously (since no individual organization may be able to pay enough to support a given knowledge category). For example: a small organization may need 1/3 of an HR representative or 1/4 of an HTML programmer. Fractional hiring is the wave of the future. In order to make this work, these workers must ruthlessly document their activities and transfer their knowledge to corporate Intranets so it can be archived.

We need a system that allows people to put their expertise online (daily, hourly, and minute by minute). Blogging is the system to make this happen.

::: posted by Hook at 6:01 AM


 
The Evolution of Blogs in the Coroprate Space

1st Generation. Blogs as a server-based Internet service. These basic Weblogs used a centralized services model to enable people to publish to the Web. There were a variety of vendors that provide this capability. However, most companies do not want to store vital corporate data outside the firewall. Also, based on the economic situation, there was a growing fear these services will suddenly stop working and vital data will be lost.

2nd Generation. Packed blog server software. This solution solved some of the problems with the services model by providing corporations with packaged Weblog software that they could install on their Intranet. However, this solution has the same problems with scalability, cost, and flexibility that plague centralized solutions we see in the Web world. Also, centralized software cannot easily take advantage of data stored in desktop applications or provide individuals with a fast loading mobile copy of their critical data.

3rd Generation. Desktop blog software. This is the point we are at today. Desktop blog software solves the scalability and personal storage issues by decentralizing blog development and publishing. Core functionality on this generation of software includes: publishing, categories, RSS headline aggregation, community data aggregation (recent updates for example), bookmark lists, directories, and file uploads. This decentralized approach provides people with a desktop archive of all information (aggregated or posted) as well as an ability to use the tool in a P2P framework.

4th Generation. Fully integrated desktop blog software. This is the generation where blogs challenge the current 1980's desktop productivity suite for dominance. This software includes the core functionality included in the 3rd generation but also: outlines, structured instant messaging, full e-mail integration, and P2P file/data transfer. Also, this software will fully integrate with corporate Webservices to allow employees to gather important information that can be then posted to his/her blog (for example: a service that provides sales figures at the end of each day). This tool is the end-point that can be fully customized by corporations to fit their needs. It allows an employee to aggregate dozens of data sources, analyze that data, and post it with an annotation to a blog (or multiple blogs based on categories). It breaks down data silos and puts otherwise random data into context that has meaning and structure. That posted knowledge can be searched, sorted and used by all employees with the appropriate access to improve their ability to do their job.

::: posted by Hook at 5:49 AM


 
Knowledge management has traditionally suffered from the hubris of modernism: the belief that we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. The idea was that we should capture and organize bits of "knowledge" in central databases. The people involved were relevant only as donors to the common ontology or as empty vessels into which knowledge could be poured.

Life - and business does not work that way. It is messy, complex and subjective. Real workers have the disturbing habit of being human, so they refuse to change their behavior or to contribute metadata into a shared pool. And universal taxonomies are worthless if divorced from the subjective experience of those who use or generate that information.

Enter postmodern knowledge management.

The following is a fantastic writeup at JOHO, David Weinberger's journal (Co-author of the Cluetrain Manifesto). He
interviews Kevin Werbach on postmodern KM.


::: posted by Hook at 5:42 AM


 
Communities of Practice (CoP)

Communities of practice are a good idea. It is a way for people with similar specialized knowledge to share insight on ways to improve the application of that knowledge. They function very much like guilds did in pre-industrial society. A blog network for a community of pactice would make the two-way transfer of knowledge easier and much more effective. Blogs would also allow this two-way transfer within communities of practice to span organizational and national boundaries.

::: posted by Hook at 5:37 AM


 
Knowledge Worker Productivity and Information Silos

A major reason companies are cutting back on IT spending is due to a lack of measurable productivity improvements that can be linked to investments in technology. Why aren't knowledge workers more productive now, given that they each have a computer and lots of productivity software? A major reason is that most of the work people do with computers is done in relative isolation. This results in information silos that are difficult if not impossible to share and organize to productive advantage. The net result: people spend as much time getting value out of their technology than time saved using it.

What specifically is an information silo? Office suite documents. E-mail. Calendars. Outlines. PIMs and to-do lists. Have you ever seen someone with 10 k e-mails in their inbox (or the converse: how many hours a day does it take to keep e-mail organized in directories no one sees but you)? Have you tried to find a document on a file server and gotten horribly lost? Are people in your group writing reports that no one reads? These are some of the symptoms of technology out of control.
Blogs provide some of the answers to these problems. They include:

1) Knowledge development. The ability to quickly find important information that has the necessary context for understanding. Knowledge rises to the top with blogs: good stuff is pointed to by other bloggers and can quickly be found by using community tools that map the blog knowledge network (hotlists, blogdex, etc.). Compare this to the needle-in-the-haystack approach with e-mail inboxes and document directories on file servers.

2) Shared organization. The ability to create an open archive (on the Intranet) of organized information, so other people in the company can benefit from one individuals effort to organize resources. For example: a Web accessible directory of important file and doument URLs that are project specific (so you do not have to remember convoluted path names on files servers), a directory of important e-mail conversations displayed as Web pages, or a simple well-organized bookmark directory. Contrast this to a situation where a well organized team member cannot share his/her e-mail and directory organization with a co-worker sitting five feet away.

3) Connected content. The ability to make a post to a blog that eliminates the need to develop an office document. Also, to link that post to relevant directories or blogs that have additional relevant information that is accessible within the same environment (the browser).

4) Collaborative content. The ability to post to a project blog collaboratively with each team member making a contribution. Contrast this to the tug-of-war that often develops over who owns the latest copy of a project document.

5) Intelligent information routing. The ability to route information via RSS newsfeeds and categories to specific groups and individuals automatically. Compare this to ad-hoc way e-mail-bound information is produced and routed.

Let's not look for solutions that automate a broken process. Let's look for solutions that reinvent the process to achieve lasting productivity improvements for knowledge workers.

::: posted by Hook at 5:33 AM


 
The Rebirth of Public Communication

In traditional discussion, topics and their responses are contained and organized within a centralized database. The relationship between topics and responses is generally maintained in a manner specific to the nature of the database - that is, in newsgroups the messages might be related by Message-ID hyperlinks or crudely by title, in Notes they are related by the $REF hyperlink, and so on. Summary-level "views" are generated through database queries. And that has been the general architectural design pattern of public discussions for quite some time.

But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it is the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online.

The downside? Well, part of why people like getting together is that unintended consequences can be quite rewarding. And there is a danger the self-selecting environment of a given blogging community might limit unintended outcomes. But, then again, one could argue quite the opposite: in a traditional public discussion, a good idea might get lost in the noise.

::: posted by Hook at 5:03 AM


 
Who is Ray Ozzie and why does it matter in relation to blogging?
- Founded and led Iris Associates, to create what has become Lotus Notes, the defining enterprise "groupware" and email product used by more than 85 million people at corporations worldwide for collaboration within large enterprises.
- After coming to the conclusion that server-based architectures (Web, Notes) fundamentally could not address the dynamic collaboration requirements of a decentralized business environment, founded Groove Networks to create personally-empowering, secure, mobile, ad hoc, decentralized desktop collaboration software for both individuals and enterprises.
- Active blogger

::: posted by Hook at 5:03 AM



Wednesday, August 28, 2002 :::
 
Newsweek

::: posted by Hook at 5:49 AM

ARCHIVES :::

LINKS :::
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JOHO

This blog is dedicated to locating and documenting blog references in the media. Commentary and insights will generally reflect the value-add of blogs in a corporate environment.