I wouldn't say that Jim's view is overly cynical about organizations, but instead is realistic about how some individuals may react. Then again, I'm often accused of being more concerned about the unfilled portion when the half-full/half-empty debate revs up... ;-)

I fear my comments will be construed as overly cynical about organizations and power, which isn't my intent. O'Neil's comments about trust capture some of what I was trying to articulate.

Technology and organization seem bent on recapitulating C.P. Snow's two cultures argument. Both technology and organizations are marvelous inventions for extending our power and reach and enabling us to accomplish much more than we ever could as individuals. While they ought to work in concert, they are more often in conflict. That conflict will get worse as we apply technology to problems like communications and collaboration that have long been the province of organizations. Experts on both sides of the divide have generally been willfully naive and ignorant about the other.

Other pieces of the puzzle that are often ignored are the human elements (fear and uncertainty about change, job security, learning new skills/habits...) and the ever-present WIIFM. Without adequate attention being paid to these, efforts that would be in the best interest of the organization or use the best technology may be doomed to failure.

3:33:39 PM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via McGee's Musings ]

Jim's use of the phrase "audit trail" is interesting, and caused me to think of what he spoke of in his next paragraph, before I had read it. I don't doubt this accountability issue might be enough to keep k-logs out of many companies, at least for a while. Then again, I'd also be concerned about the ease of misattribution careless k-logging can bring about.

I am used to DaveW referring to Scripting News as his proof of prior art, in case of a patent dispute. He treats his weblog as a lab journal of sorts, but his writing is not just on his servers, but also being captured in various search engines, too.

If you establish a beachhead for k-logging you create a contemporaneous account of how and where ideas surface in the organization. If you then have a successful innovation, you've now got an audit trail.

If the old adage was "success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan" now you have a DNA test to establish paternity. Which suggests that one of the threats to k-logging success will be free-riders who've managed to achieve power by taking credit for others' ideas and work.

DaveW has third party 'proof' of what he's written (dated and timestamped in their cache), and if your k-log is syndicated to other workers' k-logs, that can perform a similar function. A boss might be able to have your hard drive modified to reflect the desired revisionist history. Perhaps even have the main corporate servers altered. But it would be much harder to change every possible hard drive that may have received the syndicated posting...

Add to this some technologies (key chain hard drives, XML-RPC) may make the firewalls and physical walls more permeable to data movement than some may realize....

12:16:57 AM  [] blah blah blah'd on this    [ blinked via Jim McGee: McGee's Musings - TEC924 ]