McGee's Musings

Knowledge Management : Development and discussion around knowledge management and knowledge work

Updated: 9/7/2002; 3:43:37 PM.

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Wednesday, August 14, 2002

Blogging in education.
Useful introduction to weblogs in education. I hate the name they gave to it: Edublogs. (On first glance, I thought they said Edublobs.)
[Paul Holbrook's Radio Weblog]
2:35:04 PM

I just finished some documentation on Radio UserLand for K-Loggers. I am going to include how to set up a Radio Community, more concepts about K-Logging best practices, and other tips soon. Let me know what you think. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]
2:32:25 PM

Snowdeal on blogging and k-logging
Another excellent compilation of sources on the topic

Tuesday, August 13, 2002

Network World Fusion Blogs finding fans in business world
"Are Weblogs a legitimate business tool, or merely the Internet's latest vehicle for personal indulgence?

Phillip Windley, CIO for the state of Utah, is among those trying to find out. In June he launched a program that encourages 2,000 IT staffers and about 18,000 other state employees to use Weblogging software for what might be called strategic noodling."

Dan Bricklin Small Business Blogging

"It is important to understand that the purpose of a blog is not always to get the largest and widest readership possible. The purpose is usually to communicate with interested individuals. Even in business, the number of those individuals may be very few, but the impact of the communications can have economic impact far beyond its cost. For example, for a business selling high-ticket items or services, one sale can make up for the time cost of a whole year of frequent blogging.

Discussing ideas like this seems to be of interest (and surprising) to many people. As blogging moves more and more into the mainstream, it will eventually be surprising when you don't use a blog."

O'Reilly Network Blogging for Dollars: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger
"What I propose is slightly different: make it a commercial endeavor and hire an experienced blogger. Engage someone who's already proven they can filter, condense, and write. Work with someone who can blog day in and day out for more than a month or two. The idea here is to find an enthusiast, empower them, and fund them, not to dump blogging onto someone's day job, or it's not likely to succeed.

Think of what some of the best bloggers could do if they were financially able to do focused, full-time blogging? Pick a topic you're interested in, now imagine someone had 40 hours per week to cover everything related to that topic, and you get the idea."

redux [04.15.02]
MSNBC Business pros flock to Weblogs
"THE EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN so successful that Javaid says he plans to expand it until virtually everyone at his 60-person company, Mobilocity, has a Weblog. Javaid's brief experience has convinced him that far from an exercise in self-indulgence, Weblogs actually can be used to increase worker efficiency.

Javaid is hardly alone. Increasingly professionals in many fields are adopting a technology that until recently was considered to be largely the province of insomniac teen diarists and technology geeks."

redux [11.19.01]
CMSWatch The Case for Personal Web Publishing
"Inside of corporations a weblog can be used in a knowledge management or market intelligence function. Every work group seems to have someone on the team who just sends links around via email to all the other people he or she works with. In an environment like that if you give them a weblog and all the sudden the resources start really working for you. Pretty soon everyone wants a weblog to share a resource they found and to annotate useful ways in which that resource can be used by the team."

"A smart company wants to have an employee who's immersed in the rest of the world. The worst thing you can have from the point of view of the management of a company is people who are basically churning your dollars on their own political infighting or whatever's going on inside your culture -- they're not making you any money by doing that. It's better to have people write publicly."

redux [11.05.01]
CW360 IBM executive urges knowledge management caution
"One of the major problems with expert communities, according to Snowden, is that they train behaviour and prevent innovation. Encouraging multiple informal communities throughout the company is a critical step toward innovation, he said.

"Identify people with like interests and pull them together. Allow people to cluster and form communities, then reinforce the ones you want." Snowden said. "Informal communities keep organisations together and make things work.""

redux [10.17.01]
Amy D. Wohl Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM?
"One of the tough tasks in KM is getting expertise located in an organization (that is, figuring out who has it on a subject by subject basis). Tougher still is validating its credibility with other members of the organization. Toughest of all is getting the experts to agree to share their expertise with others, except as part of their regular job. Employees who have spent a career lifetime enhancing their value because they "know" something others don't are logically reluctant to give away their valuable expertise and, in that process, loose some or all of their value."

"But what if the two - blogging and KM - got together? That is, what if we took the technology that allows Bloggers to quickly annotate their journeys through the web with information about the whys and wherefores with a KM system that allowed their organizational colleagues to use the weblogs as a source of expertise?"

redux [07.16.01]
Seattle Times Knowledge-sharing platform proves wise move for AskMe
"A recent study by market-research firm Gartner Group suggests companies that proactively manage intellectual assets stand to make more profit than those that don't."

"Harry Bruce, associate dean of the University of Washington's Information School, said knowledge sharing is important because information has value in and of itself in our society."

""Clearly, we're increasingly becoming aware of the complexities of trying to share and transfer information and expertise within organizations and between organizations," he said."

Release 1.0 Postmodern Knowledge Management
"People constantly exchange information, the raw material of knowledge, with co-workers, business partners and customers... but they do it using personal, unstructured tools such as email. Wouldn't it be nice if companies could benefit from their own collective intelligence? Despite this appealing premise, years of knowledge management (KM) implementations have produced mixed results."

"The fundamental problem is philosophical. KM suffers from the hubris of modernism: the belief we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. It's time for postmodern knowledge management."

"Postmodern KM avoids the deterministic view of knowledge that worked at cross-purposes with human nature. Instead, it operates within and on the basis of existing behavior patterns, mining conversation streams and relationships automatically to incorporate structure and context into the information human users already manipulate. It fosters human intelligence and interaction rather than trying to replace them. In the end, postmodern knowledge management isn't about management at all, because management implies external control. The goal of postmodern KM is simpler yet deeper: leveraging people."

redux [06.12.01]
DigitalMASS First rule of knowledge management: Knowing who needs what
"Within IBM, there's an interesting disconnect between Cooper's team and Larry Prusak's IBM Institute for Knowledge Management, a research group located just across the street from Cooper in Cambridge. While Cooper is trying to sell a sophisticated piece of software that uses automated spiders, linguistic analysis, and Bayesian arithmetic to create topical clusters of documents and identify in-house gurus, Prusak is publishing books and articles that say that the key to developing the kind of strong relationships that make companies more effective -- what he calls social capital -- has nothing to do with software.

In an article in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review, Prusak argues that virtuality -- collaborating with colleagues in an online chat-room, for example -- can eat away at the social fabric of an organization."

redux [05.28.01]
IBM Research Fostering the Collaborative Creation of Knowledge: A White Paper
""Good" HCI design practice then, is viewed here not simply as a more practical way to improve productivity on a specific job. It is conceived of as part of larger movement to use technology to foster a more community-based, more contextualized, more systems-oriented view of human knowledge. The consequences include greater chances for improved productivity in the small, but also, in the large, the consequences may include a move toward greater trust and cooperation; less feeling of isolation; more feeling of connectedness; hence, ultimately, more ecologically sound behavior."

2:31:11 PM Google It!