Friday, August 09, 2002

Klogging vs. the 11 Deadly KM Sins.. Klogging overcomes previously experienced problems. The Eleven Deadly Sins of KM Not developing a working definition of knowledge Emphasizing knowledge stock to the detriment of knowledge flow Viewing knowledge as existing predominantly outside the heads of individuals Not understanding that a fundamental intermediate purpose of managing knowledge is to create shared context Paying little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge Disentangling knowledge from its uses Downplaying thinking and reasoning Focusing on the past and the present and not on the future Failing to recognize the importance of experimentation Substituting technological contact for human interface Seeking to develop direct measures of knowledge ("Drift or Shift", Fahey and Prusak, 1998) How does "Klogging" avoid the quagmire? 1. Not developing a working definition of knowledge The best exercise is the one you do. The same is true for KM tools and practices. People klog. It's easier to edit than write. The best way to define knowledge is to start from experience; klogging gives you that experience. More data points loosely scattered. 2. Emphasizing knowledge stock to the detriment of knowledge flow Klogging is all about flow. Freshness, updates, syndication, aggregation, linking. Part and parcel. 3. Viewing knowledge as existing predominantly outside the heads of individuals Klogging is conversational. Content-rich klogs help you find the right people to chime in on a question. 4. Not understanding that a fundamental intermediate purpose of managing knowledge is to create shared context Klogging illuminates context. Context of time. Of geography. Of social connection. Of topic. By reading your colleague's klogs, you crawl inside a little of their day. 5. Paying little heed to the role and importance of tacit knowledge Klogging creates a tacit source. I may not be conscious of documenting my knowledge. I may just be telling the story of an encounter with a customer, a staff meeting, a thorny problem. It is there, or clues to it, just the same. 6. Disentangling knowledge from its uses Klogging puts knowledge in context. Expose the experience of applying knowledge by klogging your After Action Reviews. 7. Downplaying thinking and reasoning Klogs' conversational nature encourages people to share their train of thought and explain their conclusions. 8. Focusing on the past and the present and not on the future Klogging won't help, yet. Unless you klog your plans, visions, scenarios, coming events, trends... 9. Failing to recognize the importance of experimentation Can't help you there. You either reward the effort so people try new things, or you don't. 10. Substituting technological contact for human interface Klogging complements face time. That which can be electronically mediated, is. That which needs real space (decisions, brainstorming, bonding) gets it. If you are a virtual team, widely dispersed, klogs augment conference calls and email. 11. Seeking to develop direct measures of knowledge Nike: "Just Do It." The U.S.M.M.A motto: "Acta non verba" (action, not talk) Forest Gump: "Knowledge is as Knowledge does." You can measure klogging. Operational health, user activity. Hits, posts, by user, by category. But klogging is not about chunking knowledge (although "the post" is almost an atomic expression of an idea). Real knowledge is created by multiple authors, in multiple posts, over time. Klogging tools help you uncover the threads that tie them together. The indirect measures are most important: Improvement in sales, cost containment, employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, speed, quality. One path to success is to learn from the mistakes of others. Do you want to be good? Free of failure and temptation? Klog for your virtue. Sin no more. [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] 6:37:37 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Klogging 101: What, Why, and How.. Explaining klogging to the gang at the office? To your user group? Here's a little html slide show you can use. Klogging 101: What, Why, and How. Talking points for 15-20 minutes. Not included, but may be useful: a demo session. Bring your favorite blogging tools (some of the slides mention UserLand products). Write to the web Open an edit page. Write a post. Publish it. See the results on the web. Comment on incoming news and data Look at the news aggregator. Comment on one. Publish your comment and see the results. Suggestions? <A title="Add Phil Wolff to your AIM Buddy List" href="aim:addbuddy?screenname=evanwolff">AIM Y! @Ryze [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] 6:36:43 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Dear Cameron Marlow:. Hi, Cameron. I read your http://web.media.mit.edu/~cameron/ pages. Your posts and my responsa.   I'm interested in better ways for work to find workers. I mean more efficiently, effectively, and well matched than our labor information systems do now. In this age of the information revolution, it is my belief that all of humanity should be enlightened by the limitless amounts of data that become available to them every day. Unfortunately, this process is becoming seemingly harder and harder as time progresses; many people have labeled this problem the "information explosion," and are predicting a Borgesian end with infinite information sources and no way to locate anything. Indeed, with the exponential growth of internet web resources, we will start seeing the demise of our indexing systems; this is my call to arms. My call comes from a similar problem. Millions of employers and jobs and workers moving their metadata to the net. Soon to be billions. The reality described by the data changes every minute, as we live and work. So most of the resumes and job descriptions are stale when used. Navigating the fluxing work-space is nigh impossible and getting worse. Bad data is rife. Workers describe themselves shallowly and inaccurately, are infrequently and incompletely described by their behavior and accomplishments, and rarely by other observers. We are notoriously poor at discovering for ourselves what we want, need, and will accept from a potential job, let alone express those needs clearly. The flip side of the transaction, describing work, workplaces, offers and opportunities, is similarly bollixed up by a twisted culture of advertising and personnel compliance.  Wading through stacks of partial, vague, old, wrong, culturally biased, sales-oriented material is no one's idea of fun. But this happens a hundred million times every year. Most ongoing research in this domain focuses on the information system as a provider. However, as the number of people using such systems increases, it becomes apparent that it is nearly impossible to meet the demands of every individual. At this point, most resort to methods resembling collaborative filtering, pleasing the largest number of possible individuals by focusing on similarities. But whenever this type of comparison is made, there will always be a group of disenfranchised folk who do not fit the mold. It is my belief that if we focus on the individual instead of the provider, we can attain the same goals without compromising individuality. The net from the bottom up. Niching is one of the labor market's responses. You get thousands of directories and job boards around some mix of geography, occupation, and industry (Three ultrasound job boards!). But it still forces all the players into neat little boxes defined by strangers. This leaves most people badly served. How do we evolve a system that respects the shape of individuals? My research focuses on the individual as a consumer, creator, and editor of information. On the first front, I hope to build tools that help people find, navigate, organize, and remember the world that they perceive. As providers of information, I want to help individuals convey the meaning that they intend with technologies for organization, expression, and distribution. Finally, I hope to create systems that bring people together in an effort to navigate this world collectively. By drawing from the disciplines of computer science, philosophy and the social sciences, focusing more directly on issues in information retrieval, artificial intelligence, linguistics, and cognitive psychology, I hope to accomplish some of these goals. Ambitious. It looks like the right focus for the problem. I suspect it is also the right focus for addressing the labor market's fundamental problems. People are amazing accumulators of things. As our collection grows, it becomes difficult to find individual possessions, so we organize our things categorically. As our possessions are very personal, so is our categorization; just by looking at the way a person arranges their books or CDs, we can learn quite a bit about how they think about their belongings. This applies to how people describe themselves. Ask people to describe what they know, what they've done, their capabilities. The language used, organization, and relationships among them vary from person to person. People rarely answer a question the same way twice. Computers have become an important part of our daily tidings, and along with them comes a host of digital media. The emails, pictures, mp3s, and bookmarks that clutter our desktops are the personal possessions of the digital age. The intent of the catalyst project is to build tools which enable people with better digital classification systems, and utilize their behavior in such systems as a lens into their understanding of the world. Might this be a direction for understanding individual perception and internal models of the world of work?  Online directories (Yahoo, ODP, etc.) all assume that there is some form of universal categorization of the world, whether decided upon by standards organizations or merely assumed by conglomeration of independent views. Sometimes, categorization is merely a matter of personal understanding. To Americans, CNN is a source of national and international news, but to people from other countries, it might be seen merely as an American perspective. HR-XML and SIDES (industry standards for exchanging resumes, jobs, and related transactions) work as intended. They both suffer from the universal categorization fallacy. They are stiff, perpetuating "best practices" of the 1990's United States. The taxonomy, conceptual model (What is a "job"?), and nomenclature not only vary from culture to culture, they change rapidly in time and from person to person.   Utilizing email and bookmark categorization, we can learn the way that an individual looks at their media. We can use this understanding as a tool to help present information in a more personal way, and help people of different persuasions understand each other. In turn, we can take some of the pressure off of information providers by allowing them to focus on generality instead of appealing to the majority. Blogspace, email traffic and archives, and other sources of tacit knowledge will provide raw material to help people describe themselves and shape their professional brands.  I'm following Cameron's work eagerly. See also: Cameron Marlow @Ryze. Cameron Marlow (electro publisher, mit media lab) masters thesis blogdex [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] 6:35:45 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Klogging Project Risk.. All project management is risk management.  My article: lists the six parts of a risk, explains why your project team should blog risks, lists more than 50 IT project risk factors, and provides an Excel template to help you compare and triage risks. May your projects all come in on schedule, within budget, and to spec without turning your hair grey. Klogging for project communication [aka project management] [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] 6:34:41 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

From a Universal Talent Record to a CareerQuake Toolkit.. Elaine Orler, of the Talent Market Group, and Ed Newman, of the newman group, provoked me with their Spring 2002 ERE Expo presentation. They mentioned the idea of The Universal Talent Record. Taking this farther, what tools do you need? The toolkit has at least five major parts: CareerQuake Campaign Planner Employer Relationship Management System Peer Relationship Management System Profile Content Creation System Controlled Content Publishing System I explain what these do, why they matter, and summarize benefits. Read all about the Universal Talent Record and the CareerQuake Tool Framework. More about "CareerQuakes" and "Resumequity". [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] 6:33:59 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Drucker plugs Adecco, PEOs, and free agency.. USA Today's Bruce Rosenstein reviews Peter Drucker's new book Managing in the Next Society. Rosenstein observes Drucker taking note of the explosive global growth of PEOs (professional employer organizations), such as Exult and the Swiss company Adecco, which provide workers as needed. Such companies no longer offer just clerical temps, but managers and other knowledge workers. They hire, fire, train and promote. They take care of record keeping and government requirements. Drucker even says the force behind their growth is "the growing burden of rules and regulations for employers." "But who is then the 'boss' of these outsourced employees? If the PEO makes the hiring, firing, placement and promotion decisions, how can an executive function?" He quotes a BP Amoco executive whose workforce is from Exult: "... Exult has three obligations — to me, to the company and to the employee — and if it does not satisfy the employee, he or she will leave." Managing that balance is the difference between good and great PEOs. [diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology] 6:31:58 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Blogrolling.com supports OPML. Jason DeFillippo's Blogrolling.com now supports OPML. If you use Blogrolling.com for your blogroll, you can use Radio's radio.macros.blogroll macro, or Manila's opmlBlogroll macro to add the blogroll to your site. Optional parameters for these macros let you control the appearance of links to recently updated sites. [Jake's Radio 'Blog] 6:29:03 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

One Good Referral Deserves Another. Blogging for Fun and Profit is doing a good job of summarizing many of the issues floating around the blogosphere; that is, why to do it, how to do it, and so on. [Radio Free Blogistan] 6:27:25 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Tonight's first movie: Sadie McKee. All I do the whole day through is dream of you. And with the dawn I still go on and dream of you. You're every thought, every scheme, every dream I ever dreamed. Summer, winter, autumn and spring. And were there more than 24 hours a day, They'd be spent in sweet content dreaming away. When skies are gray, skies are blue Morning, noon and nighttime, too All I do the whole day through is dream of you. [Dave's Handsome Radio Blog!] 10:22:41 AM    trackback []     Articulate []