Saturday, September 07, 2002

Knowledge sharing, knowledge logs, and the unexpected One of the pleasures of a vacation at the beach is a chance to do some serious reading. Among others, I had a chance to work throuhg a recent book by Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe, Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity. If you're interested I've posted a brief review. Their essential argument is that organizations need to become more mindful in two ways. First, they must become better at anticipating the unexpected. Second, they must become more adept at containing the unexpected. Containing might either mean keeping a small error from mushrooming into a disaster or seizing and running with an opportunity before others do. Their arguments dovetail nicely with the recent discussions around the role of knowledge logs or klogs as a tool for knowledge sharing. The essence of dealing with the unexpected is in separating weak signals from the background noise and then understanding who in the organization has the requisite expertise to deal with the signal. The knowledge sharing enabled by the effective use of k-logs is squarely focused on precisely these two issues. A loose network of knowledge workers maintaining weblogs represents that early warning system for an organization. Weblogs applied to organizational knowledge problems provide an outlet for picking up early signals of the unexpected and amplifying them so they can be better heard. They also serve as a system for surfacing diverse expertise in the organization that may bear on how to respond effectively to those signals. More formal and structured knowledge management systems are focused on getting more mileage out of known solutions to known problems. That has a place, particularly in large and dispersed organizations. But all organizations today are also faced with the problem of responding effectively to the unexpected. Weick and Sutcliffe make a compelling case that this is the more important problem for most organizations. And they offer a series of prescriptions for increased mindfulness to respond to that problem. For me, they provide the puzzle piece that links my intuitions that knowledge sharing and k-logs are an essential element of effective knowledge management to the critical items on the strategic agenda. 1:39:36 PM

Friday, September 06, 2002

The coming era of notebook computing Bob and Dan are dead-on:  The browser has served us well.  It has provided a means by which we can have universal access to applications, transactions, and published information.  But in the meantime, the PC has become a powerhouse: cpu, gpu, storage, price.  The Great Conversion to notebook computers is well under way, and it's now clear that the most wildly successful wireless mobile productivity device won't be the 3G phone, or even the BlackBerry, but the ubiquitous and inexpensive WiFi notebook.  In a shape and size to suit every need. And as we deal with more and more PCs in our lives, and as we use them in more and more locations, we're finally beginning to realize again why we need upgrades to our systems and application software that bring them into an era of ubiquitous computing and communications.  We need to prepare for, and to embrace a whole new generation of system and application software that leverages this powerful hardware specifically and tangibly to increase our personal productivity, and to increase our business agility.  To enable us to spin more plates; or to keep them up in the air in a more measured manner. Software that embraces mobility, synchronization, security, and manageability as transparent core attributes.  Software that recognizes "people" as being just as important as "documents".  Software that recognizes transparent peer communications as being equal in importance to server communications.  Software with a new model that synchronizes applications and activities, not just data or documents.  We need to use multiple devices as seamlessly as we use one device; we need to be able to use them collaboratively as intuitively as we've used them alone. Servers and browsers are like two peas in a pod, and the Web has largely run its course.  In terms of the value that we can get from our own personal computers and the Internet, however, we're still at the dawn of a new era.  An era in which software matters, and architecture matters. [Ray Ozzie's Weblog] Having lived as a notebook user now for nearly 10 years, it will be a pleasure to start seeing applications and services that take the notion of portability and connectivity seriously. Lotus Notes was the first system that understood those needs and Groove is probably the second. Most other software is built by developers who are essentially chained to their cubicles and don't really appreciate how mobility works for knowledge workers. 9:34:03 PM

Tuesday, September 03, 2002

Weblog as my backup brain Blog This at Con Jose. Towards the end of the panel, Bill Humphries said "The web log for me is a research tool," and pointed (verbally any way!) to Cory Doctorow's reference to Dorie Smith's explanation of her web log as her "Backup Brain." Teresa Nielsen Hayden said "One of the reasons I have a web log is to keep track of all the things I find incidentally." The Live Journal folk said the same thing, and so I'm going to point (yes, again) to the commonplace book as a close relative if not a distant ancestor of the web log. [Instructional Technology] This nicely captures some of my key goals with keeping this weblog. It's the primary reason that I tend to take advantage of Radio's news aggregator to post mostly complete copies of the items that I want to remember. I also use Mark Paschal's Kit tool to search my weblog archives. I can usually manage to remember some fragment or key phrase about something I've posted. I can then usually find the original item in my archives. The notion of personal knowledge management hasn't been explored enough. Maybe I'm sensitized to it because of my aging brain cells and general absent-mindedness. But I can't see how organizations are going to progress with knowledge management unless the individuals in those organizations learn how to unpack what they know. Think back to the heyday of expert systems in the mid 1980s. The show-stopper was not the limitations of the AI technology (although that was an issue). It was the huge challenge in getting experts to figure out what they were expert at and make it accessible. 10:08:28 PM

Thursday, August 29, 2002

KM - what if?. Jim McGee has write on track with his response to 'we can't make people smarter'. Actually, what if we wanted to make people dumber! No jokes please. I blog to get my thoughts out of my head. I can assume that they'll be there for review in the future. So I've allowed myself to clear out some memory for new ideas. Effectively - I've freed up extra space in RAM..... hmmm - re-stating the obvious. [How do you know that?] 4:09:59 PM

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

Site update: more topics added. I have grown to really like liveTopics. Converting from Radio's categories to liveTopics has been cumbersome (as it matures, I imagine Matt might offer a conversion utility), but worth it. You can now browse a topical outline of all posts on this site here; it is now complete for July and August. I will periodically go back and add past months as well. Even if you're not very interested in sharing your topics (you can keep them entirely private), I've found they're a great way for keeping track of past posts. When I want to pull up a post I made in the past, I just need to open the allTopics.opml file on my desktop and can immediately see when I made the post (and link to it from the file). Of course, the advantages to your readers - if you're interested in giving people an easy-to-navigate road-map to your posts - are big as well. In all, liveTopics is a great tool. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 10:27:42 PM

XTM export of a weblog. Anyone with an interest in XTM want to check this out? It's my weblog + topics exported as a topic map via liveTopics.  I'd be interested in any opinions as to the correctness of my XTM implementation, use of tags etc...   [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:26:41 PM

Tuesday, August 27, 2002

To Michael Rogers. To Michael Rogers who asks how frequently a person writing a weblog should update (I hate calling these people bloggers, as Rogers does, that's a trademark). My answer is As frequently as something happens and you have the time or inclination to write it up. Rogers then says something provocative: "The kind of article that a writer produces after a week of thought is fundamentally different than one produced after a few hours." True. But you can keep lots of ideas in your head, and think about them for hours, days, weeks, months, years or decades; and even repeat them and expand on them, and (rarely) change your mind about something. Even great writers like Hemingway repeated themes. People who blog do this even more. It helps fill the space. Every event is an opportunity to "prove" ones' pet theories. I do this a lot. It's okay because everyone else does it too.   [Scripting News] 4:55:57 PM

Monday, August 26, 2002

Making people smarter isn't the point You cannot make people smarter. Curiouser and curiouser! raises some unresolved Klogging issues: Klogs can overlap with existing formal systems - does klogging means that the same thing is not reported in formal way? Decentralised klogging vs. organisational trends to control.  Does klog makes it easier to control you? As klogs are not really secure, could you post anything anything sensitive? Are big-KM vendors missing the point? I love this issue popping up again and again: how control and formal structures can coexist with natural informal networks. I'm not sure that I want to tackle the whole issue, but at least I want to look at the learning side of it. [from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning. [Mathemagenic] » Thanks to [DG] for putting me on to Mathemagenic. "You cannot make people smarter." I believe this to be true.  However I also think that: Not every organisation believes that, e.g. the amount of money spent each year on training that doesn't work. Not every organisation cares how smart it's people are (no matter how much they spend on investors in people logos) All that downsizing.  All those drives for efficiency at any cost.  They have created environments of paranoia and hostility where there is no interplay between individual and organisation. My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them.  Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management.  I don't want to be a part of that. [Curiouser and curiouser!] The question of whether you can make people smarter or not isn't the point. That suggests that only smart people can benefit from knowledge management or other initiatives? I don't think that's the point, although I've been known to be less than smart about things myself over the years :). I think you absolutely can demonstrate and be a model for behaviors that are more effective than others. That it happens rarely in formal training or that some organizations pay only lip service to learning are secondary issues. There are lots of issues tangled up under the broad rubric of knowledge management or knowledge sharing. That's one of the reasons that progress has been so difficult to make. Weblogs in general, the notion of klogs (whatever we end up calling them), and the recent discussions going on in blogspace are all contributing to my developing a much deeper understanding of the issues. It's Alan Kay's old point - point of view is worth IQ points (the actual number being in dispute as is the relevance of raw intelligence to the discussion). Maybe it's a philosophical point. For me, if you're still alive, you're learning. If you're learning, you're at least potentially getting smarter in some practical sense. Granted most organizations do a piss-poor job of helping people learn intelligently (I include schools as organizations in this context). That doesn't mean that those organizations and those individuals who can do it should quit trying. As for insecure and fearful managements, I suspect that the market will take care of them for us although perhaps not quickly enough. Call me a Pollyanna, but I think healthy organizations dominate statistically and economically. But as the norm, they are less visible in places like the media. We seem to be much more inclined to see and hear stories of trauma and problems than ones of normalcy and health.   4:39:57 PM

Knowledge needs to be shared before it can be managed If taken in an organizational context, successful KM depends in part on people sharing the right information. And because different individuals have different skill sets and different experiences, it's unlikely that one individual would know what another would find valuable. This compounds Phil's comments: not only can't you dig ideas out of people's heads, but you wouldn't necessarily know which ones you would want to pull. (Which I guess means knowledge isn't like pornography: you wouldn't know it when you saw it.) One of the advantages to blogs is that they make it easy to simply jot down some thoughts. You don't need to give too much thought to what is valuable and what isn't - not only wouldn't you know, but value to one individual is worthless to another. The key is to ensure a simple, reliable way for capturing the ad hoc thoughts. Blogs make capturing this info about as simple as it can be. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog][emphasis added] Rick adds some more insight to the question of getting knowledge shared in the first plac e so that you might have an opportunity to manage it in an intelligent way. To me this discussion is finally beginning to address the first issues that need to be thought about - how do we make sure there is something worth managing. It's easy and all too tempting to gloss over that issue, but my experience has been that it's critical. 4:20:29 PM

Solving the right problem Digging Ideas Out of People's Heads. Dave McNamee is doing a good job on his weblog of narrating his work and keeping his co-workers updated about where his head is at on any given day.  Good work Dave! I worry sometimes about the public expression of information that should be kept confidential, but I worry more about the exponentially worse problem of keeping confidential that which should be publicly expressed.  I can think of ways to solve the first problem, but I can't dig ideas out of people's heads.  They must be expressed to be used.  [emphasis added] [Windley's Enterprise Computing Weblog] Phil Windley is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads. I wish that more executives in organizations were as wise as he is. Nothing about knowledge management or knowledge sharing can accomplish anything until you focus on this. 9:56:20 AM

© Copyright 2002 Jim McGee.