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Thursday, October 10, 2002 |
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Some requests for comments on my experience mandating blogs as part of TEC924 have been popping up lately. The timing is good since I'm in the midst of reviewing and updating the course for the next time it will be offered come January.
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Weblogs as part of a course design
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For the design of the knowledge management course, one central perspective was that of the individual knowledge worker. I wanted students to explore knowledge management and knowledge sharing issues not only from the organizaiton's perspective but from their own perspective as knowledge workers with their own knowledge to be managed and shared. I wanted to avoid the notion that knowledge management was some sort of problem that belonged to someone else in the organization.
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Given that perspective, it was natural to include the topic of k-logs as an important development in the knowledge management field. If you happen to prefer "learning by doing" it was a straightforward step to build maintaining a weblog into the course design.
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It's also possible to take learn-by-doing to extremes and some of that happened during the conduct of the course.
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I selected Radio as the blogging tool for several reasons. Most importantly, I already used it and knew where its warts were. Beyond that immensely practical reason, I also had some other logic for my choice. Chief among those was that Radio stores weblog entries locally. Other important elements included Radio's news aggregator and subscription mechanism.
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Although I could have set up a Radio Community Server, I opted instead to rely on Radio's out of the box setup of providing a hosted account to users. As a first-time experiment, I did not want to involve Kellogg's excellent IT group. It would have introduced additional problems of support and learning curves for a group that already has plenty on its own plate. Moreover, it would have required proposals and permission. With Radio, I could run the experiment within the confines of what I could directly control.
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The one significant technical problem I encountered with Radio was that some students in the evening MBA program have limited access to computers that they are free to install software on. Students in the full-time program are expected to invest in a laptop for the duration of the program and campus net access (both wired and wi-fi) is excellent. For the evening students we had to work through a handful of problems with firewalls in work envrionments or the limits of dial-up access. Eventually all but one student succeeded in getting Radio installed and operational.
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For the upcoming second run through this course, I expect to stay with Radio. For me the locally maintained database is an advantage. While I can see Seb's point about a central server-based architecture in an educational setting, I also believe that a distributed architecture is more likely to be the case outside the educational environment. Given that MBAs are my audience I prefer an architecture that is more likely to be what they will encounter later, even if it might create support problems. |
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Friday, October 04, 2002 |
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I confess. I'm an RSS bigot as well. I've discovered that Radio's news aggregator is at least as important as it's tools for editing and posting. I find that I can more than fill up my reading time with content in the aggregator. The first thing I look for in a new site is whether there is an RSS feed available. Second choice is to figure out how to use RssDistiller (or equivalent) to generate a feed I can route into my news aggregator.
As John Robb , Phil Wolff , and others have pointed out, the combination of klogs and feeds is what makes these such compelling tools for knowledge sharing.
Join The RSS News Aggregator Cult!.
The RSS conversion
"John Gruber is going through the RSS conversion. First, you start using a news aggregator that you like, then you feel dumb for not providing an RSS feed for your Web site, and then you kind of stop reading all those sites that don't have RSS feeds. There are some sites that don't support RSS that I still follow, but the truth is that I read them sporadically at best, regardless of how good they are. That's still a better situation than when I didn't use a news aggregator at all and I simply stopped reading all personal sites for weeks at a time because I didn't make time to stroll through my bookmark list to see who was writing what." [rc3.org]
If you haven't tried an aggregator, pass go and collect $200 now. It's amazing to watch others go through the same light bulb moments I did!
Side note to libraries: note the shift in how these on the bleeding edge folks are reading web sites. It's time to start thinking about how to get YOUR news into THEIR aggregators.
Side note to John: Perceive Designs is syndicating Zeldman for us. [The Shifted Librarian]
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Thursday, October 03, 2002 |
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A substantial and excellent case study of Microsoft's intranet and the information architecture challenges that had to be addressed. Worth the time.
Boxes and Arrows: MSWeb: An Enterprise Intranet #1. Fascinating look at Microsoft's Intranet Information Architecture [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]
It’s nearly impossible to develop a successful information architecture against a backdrop of explosive content growth, content ROT, and the political twists and turns common in any organization. And, we’re sorry to say, we don’t have the Holy Grail. But we’ve had the privilege of getting up close to a large number of corporate intranets. And the best approach we’ve seen so far is that taken by Microsoft’s intranet portal (MSWeb) team....
Like Microsoft itself, MSWeb is insanely huge and distributed. Let’s use some numbers to paint a picture of the situation. MSWeb contains:
- 3,100,000+ pages
- Content created by and for over 50,000 employees who work in 74 countries
- 8,000+ separate intranet sitesIt’s nearly impossible to develop a successful information architecture against a backdrop of explosive content growth, content ROT, and the political twists and turns common in any organization. And, we’re sorry to say, we don’t have the Holy Grail. But we’ve had the privilege of getting up close to a large number of corporate intranets. And the best approach we’ve seen so far is that taken by Microsoft’s intranet portal (MSWeb) team
...Microsoft estimates that a typical employee spends 2.31 hours per day engaging with information, and 50 percent of that time is used looking for that information.
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Friday, September 27, 2002 |
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Another data point in the personal knowledge management space
Synchronicity.
This morning while taking a walk, I had the bright idea of writing a piece on "Household Knowledge Management", starting off with the pieces of paper that we stick to the fridge to argue that KM is far from an esoteric topic and boils down to very practical, everyday concerns.
Well, Stephen has beat me to it by a few hours. Digital Dashboards, Dirty Dishes, Messy Desk, Workspaces and Web Logs is a splendid essay on how we interface with the world's knowledge. Breadth, depth, and lots to relate to; Stephen again shows he's an astute (self-)observer. Which we all should strive to become. [ Seb's Open Research]
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Yet another example of organizations refusing to take advantage of knowledge sitting around available for them just for the effort to reach down and pick it up.
How To Ignore Loyal Customers [Line56: B2B News]
While we are spending endless hours and resources trolling the often unwilling and uninformed public for "the next big idea" relevant to our business, something very interesting is happening. Our own customers are contacting us through our Interaction Centers (via Web, phone, VoIP, email, etc.). And these customers are more eager than ever to offer us as much feedback as we want. All that our agents need to do is listen. We must capture it, analyze it and use it for business intelligence. But almost none of us do. We continue to view our Interaction Centers as a must-have expense designed to handle customer
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Thursday, September 26, 2002 |
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Very thoughtful reflection.
Why has knowledge management come to prominece now. I was asked the other day why has knowledge management come to prominence now. There is a short answer that is summed up in that one word called "Internet". Connectivity, capacity and access for all make it possible to share knowledge. But the point is - we always have and we always will. The Internet is change in means and mode, not a root cause. I think knowledge management's prominence has deeper roots in an individual's need to learn at this point in history. People are finding they need to become more reliant and old ways don't serve them any more. We are no longer content to take what the boss gives us and seek greater choice. We are starting to see the need to learn again and that is best done in a community. Knowledge sharing/management is a community based activity. The change we are facing is nothing new. Changes of this magnitude have happened before and will happen again (Industrial revolution anyone?). It's just this time around we have a name.
[thought?horizon :: non inferiora secutus]
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Ray's comments help me understand why the digital dashboard mock ups haven't caught my interest. I don't see any reason to believe that one single tool on my desktop is any more desirable than one single tool in my workshop.
A few comments about John Robb's liking of digital dashboards. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog]
In an era where we do more and more and more of our communications and work with others online, we need tools that help us to get that work done faster and more effectively. That means creative, innovative software, hardware, and systems. That means leveraging the power of technology with effective human and inter-human interface as the #1 goal. Different interfaces for different activities on the PC, different devices as appropriate if not. Best-of-breed, and highly-tuned.
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Monday, September 23, 2002 |
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Yes, it's a pretty good overview article. But it ignores the simpler end of the market (e.g. UserLand's Manila) where there is a lot of value for the dollar. It also is a bit short on fitting document management into a broader set of business and strategy objectives, which is what ought to be driving the investment decision
New Architect: Demystifying Document Management. Quote: "The answer is obvious, but that doesn't damn the functionality of content management systems. The technology plays a vital role in most Web-based initiatives. Rather, Jupiter's findings indicate that IT managers should weigh their options carefully before implementing any CMS."
Comment: Nice overview article for decision makers [Serious Instructional Technology]
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Friday, September 20, 2002 |
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Helpful advice on generating case studies. Always a useful tool to make the abstractions more accesible
A marketing look at case studies. Debbie Weil has written a brief article on top tips to write a pursuasive case study. While this looks at... [Column Two]
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© Copyright 2002 Jim McGee.
   
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