Thursday, June 13, 2002

KnowledgeFarm.  Bottoms up knowledge management.  K-Logs.... >>>Knowledge management has been, up to now, largely a top-down enterprise. Driven by a concern that corporate knowledge repositories would quickly fill up with inaccurate, useless junk without rigid quality review, organizations have created small priesthoods of knowledge administrators responsible for virtually all authoring. Unfortunately, the result often has been massive bottlenecks as content generated in this centralized way sits for weeks or months awaiting review. By the time knowledge reaches its intended users, much of it has aged to the point of irrelevance. Top-down knowledge management has had limited success. KM will begin to show significant ROIs when the process is inverted. Centralized knowledge administration clearly produces higher-value knowledge -- but centralized authoring retards growth. In the coming decade, the hard dollar value of knowledge will be recognized, and everyone -- not just a small elite -- will be responsible for generating the raw materials for corporate KM. Bottom-up knowledge generation will have significant impacts on the way work, and workers, are perceived by corporations. Management will have to develop new incentives for knowledge workers to contribute high-quality content. For more traditional firms now adopting KM practices, decentralization of knowledge generation will be difficult, as it is antithetical to some ingrained management principles and habits.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

Rajesh Jain at Emergic is working on server-side digital dashboard portals using RSS, outlines, and weblogs.  This is precisely the market Manila is doing well in.  His efforts are confirmation that this space is about to explode. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

How to build an RSS digital dashboard using Manila and Radio (a low tech approach).  The concept is simple.  In addition to getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can contain data from corporate systems.  Sales data, financial data, supply data, data from partner systems, etc.  Using this method, employees could get up to the minute data from multiple applications on a single webpage -- a personal digital dashboard. So, for example, I could be a sales manager at a Fortune 500 company.  I want to track information available to me from multiple corporate applications, and I don't want to run the client software for each app on my desktop.  I only want the data.  So, in order to offer employees better access to data, the IT department is convinced to spend a couple of days to create granular RSS feeds for the main corporate apps (CRM, ERP, financial, etc.).  Here is what the feed could look like: Sale:  Customer name:  Proctor and Gamble,  Date:  June 12, 2002, Amount:  $2.3 m,  Made by:  Tom Durst, E-mail: tdurst@widget.com, K-Log:  http://tdurst.widget.com ,  Product: Widget XYZ Using Radio I merely subscribe to the feeds I want to monitor form a list on the Intranet (using the news subscription page).  Every hour I get all the latest data from each of the apps.  Further, I can take any of this data, add an annotation/comment/POV, and publish it to my K-Log.  Sweet.  I could also create published views of this data using the Multi-author tool for Radio (this tool lets me select the feeds I want to group and publish them to category specific weblog).  Manila works in a similar fashion.  I can publish feeds I want to subscribe to using a simple macro.  Using Manila, create a new page for your site (a story), place the macro below in the "source view" of the editing box.  Here is the macro: {viewRssBox ("http://www.nanotechnews.com/nano/rdf", boxTitle:"Nanotech News", align:"center", width:200, frameColor:"#000000", titleBarTextColor:"#ADD8E6", titleBarColor:"#FFFFFF", boxFillColor:"#FFFFFF", timeZone:"PST", hspace:0, vspace:0, maxItems:20)} Note:  replace the URL for the RSS feed I have in the above with the feed you want to monitor, change the name, and presto.  You now have a page on your site with the data from the RSS feed.  In fact, using Manila you could build a complete portal of aggregated newsfeeds without much technical knowledge. If I was really motivated, I could use Radio's outliner to build a directory of aggregated feeds. Digital dashboards should be something anybody can create, customize, and control.  Don't let your IT department launch into a multi-million $$ universal application portal when a simple approach like this could be accomplished in days for short dollars. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

David Carter-Tod's weblog is getting really interesting in the last few days. I read it every time it updates. David is a longtime member of the Frontier community, an educator who has deep knowledge of instructional technology. [Scripting News]

Today, an application for Radio's outliner that will be new for many. We've brought a feature from Manila into Radio Community Server, making it possible for people to create Yahoo-like directories that appear in their Radio weblogs. These directories can include other directories. They're built on an open format, OPML; which can be created in any compatible outliner, including Radio's outliner. Viewed another way, directories are hiearchic blogrolls. When you start getting hundreds of links in your blogroll, and start categorizing them, it's time to look for something richer, and that's where directories come in. Screen shot of the XML-RPC directory edited in my outliner. Several real-world examples of OPML directories. Rick Klau has a directory of law weblogs. Yes! [Scripting News]

Russ Lipton's RadioDocs, on-line, ready for UserLand. [Scripting News]