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. [McGee's Musings] 6:52:19 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Getting the Groove Ray Ozzie responds directly to Joel's remarks in a long and well written piece that offers a lot of insights in Groove's strategy.  A mustread for everyone who is interested in Groove. [Jeroen Bekkers] I've concluded that Groove is greedy. It's not because of Applications vs. Platforms, or that the client costs money. I see Groove as a P2P Service. The value is almost entirely in the service, not the platform and client. The clients cost money because services that look just like software are very hard to sell. I think that Groove is greedy because the total cost of deploying Groove for a large number of seats is astronomical. Imagine that you've got the Groove religion. You want to Groove-enable all of your enterprise applications and roll them out to 2000 employees in a half-dozen locations. Groove only lets you use their service for free for up to 100 seats. With over 300 employees in each office, likely to be Grooving mostly amongst themselves, you'll need an Enterprise Relay Server at each location to reduce bandwidth utilization. Having some Enterprise Management Servers seems like a requirement, otherwise your employees could install any Groove applications that they want. And you'll certainly need a few Enterprise Integration Servers to connect Groove clients to non-Groove applications. Those server programs cost $9995 to $19995 each, plus CALs. Much of the functionality they provide is free or low-cost on other platforms, but even if Groove made them free tomorrow, Groove Workspace is still more expensive than Notes or Exchange clients/CALs. In this example the price gap is more than enough to buy the Notes or Exchange server software and hardware. And Groove doesn't do email. There are compelling uses of Groove. Groove is ideal for small working groups that are distributed, and the ability to form ad-hoc working groups is pure genius. Unfortunately, the emphasis is on small. The tipping point where Groove becomes more expensive than traditional collaboration solutions seems extremely low. [Bryce's Radio Experiments] 6:29:10 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Dreams of daemons and doors.. John Robb: I have a recurring dream.  I am in college.  A person that I have seen in a couple of my classes, comes up to me and asks me if I want the "everything" drive.  I ask, what is the "everything" drive?  He whispers that it has every book, song, newspaper, magazine, and movie that has ever been published.   Everything is categorized and first quality.  It even includes a clone of Google and some new search techniques that are even more powerful.  Incredulous, I ask what the catch is.  He says, nothing,  just knowledge.  I then ask how much it will cost.  He says nothing, just the time it takes to transfer it and a promise to give it to two other people. The comment thread is creative. My contribution... I'm not sure that dream is of media so much as content. If it's media, the uberdisk assumes low ubiquity (you're going to be disconnected from the net at least some of the time) and high latency (time/cost of access). Is a local, complete, static archive better than an unreliable, always fresh and growing, just-in-time ocean of sources? I want a crafty blend of the two. My dream is to have a little daemon that hears my brain stutter in puzzlement. Before I even notice, it mumbles answers to my mind's eye. Facts, knowledge, stories, impressions flow like a firehose. The daemon strengthens my grey matter so the flow feels refreshing. RSS to the medulla oblongata. QuickTime to the cortex. Google to the ganglia. I dream of doors opening. A strongly dyslexic colleague has the world of written symbols turned off in his mind. The painful effort to read makes the Internet largely invisible to him, just something people talk about. Other people don't comprehend music, hearing only noise. I imagine that thousands of similar worlds are turned off in most of our brains. I dream we keep discovering those worlds, opening ourselves up to them. [Phil Wolff: technology] 2:32:38 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Blog space blogspace.. Jason Harlan and Chris Goad are geocoding the blogosphere with Blogmapper. Have a look at Jason's inquiry to the radio-dev list. The technical issues are deep and fascinating: Maps leverage long-lived content while blogs quickly expire content. The syndication formats can be extended, but will they be supported? Spatial data becomes free, available, and useful as more of us blog via WiFi or mobile phone, . These folks are on the right track. Send your love. [aka technology] [Phil Wolff: technology] 2:32:09 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

An Architecture for Highly Concurrent, Well-Conditioned Internet Services. Matt Welsh is done with his Ph.D. thesis, An Architecture for Highly Concurrent, Well-Conditioned Internet Services, and he's set up a SourceForge project for SEDA. [Hack the Planet] 1:05:28 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

The State of America's Children is a report produced by the Children's Defense Fund. The report offers a wide view of our American life.  It tells the grim truth about our youth and offers a variety of solutions.  The fault is that it places solvency in the hands of the federal government which has already demonstrated its inability to bring positive, effective change.  We can no longer accept the idea that our federal government has the capacity or the essential will to make a better life for our children and our future.  It inherently lacks the most basic necessity to provide for the individual and has consistently chosen to provide for the wealthy, the conglomerate.  Though it has the means to levy taxes for the purpose of redistributing wealth, it also takes the liberty of choosing from whom it will collect.  The taxpayer is our dwindling middle class.  It shoulders the burdens of this nation alone, and has been all but obliterated.  How can there be a redistribution of wealth if the wealthy never pay? We, the middle class are the backbone of this nation.  Once we are gone there will be nothing left but the spineless bureaucracy and fat cats of industry who have devoured the people who made their livelihood possible. "Just three of America's richest people have wealth that totals over 155 billion dollars and that has doubled in the last two years, increasing at a rate of 107 million dollars a day.  Their wealth alone exceeds the GNP of the 32 least developed countries in the world containing over 800 million people.  The top 5 percent of American families have more income than the bottom 40 percent--over 28 million families.  How can our boastfully wealthy nation which leads the world in gross domestic product and in the number of millionaires and billionaires tolerate and justify the impoverishment of over 13 million children?"1 They don't justify the impoverishment of our kids, they feed off of it.  The wealthy avoid paying 195 billion dollars in taxes every year and the number is climbing.  The wealthy are sheltered, the middle class is enslaved.  In fact more often the middle class is audited while audits for large businesses and the wealthy have declined.  This is not an argument for taxation, it is an argument for economic justice. Mal-nourished Fat Our nation has money, it does not have the will and intuition to spend it properly.  I am reminded of one of my clients.  She cannot  buy a home due to bad debts.  She can purchase big screen televisions, satelite dishes, junk foods and other counterproductive materials.  She needs a home with warm running water not located in crack town with room for her three children and grandchild.  She receives more money in social security than what my husband brings home in 240 hours of work.  We pay her enough to care for her family.  She hasn't the will nor the training to do so.  She is depressed and has been convinced that the solution is medication.  She is medicated accordingly to a tune of $1008 per month.  She has a void in her life.  She admits to filling it with food and expensive toys.  She says "I like to shop.  It makes me feel good."  I am sure that if she would save her money and move out of the slums she would feel even better.  She is the product of a consumer society trained to want instant gratification from the useless.  She is training her children to do the same. "All our children are targets of relentless marketing and advertising seeking to lure and addict them at early ages into a worldview based on material consumption.  Children are seen as consumers, future consumers, and persuaders of parents to purchase products rather than a vulnerable group in need of adult protection.  Buying is equated with happiness.  Things are equated with success.  Children are not just sold products, but sex, alcohol, tobacco, and violence as the way to be accepted and hip. . . .And every child inhabits a nuclear and conventional arms prison rendering human existence precarious in a world and nation that talk about peace but constantly prepare for war."2 Human beings are naturally estranged.  We come from the unknown and spend less time contemplating from whence and to where we are headed.  We lack the divine faculty of absolute truth and our compass is way off, magnetized by the waste of fruitless consumption.  Even our poor are overweight, fattened by a desperate attempt to fill the void of alienation.  We have been buying and selling our lives into a world of self-destruction.  We are estranged from the powers that be, the universe, each other and even ourselves. The result of an economy based vacuous materials and war can only be vicious and suicidal. America is not the first to fall into the hands of historical fait.  We are not impervious to delusion and failure.  Many believe this is the greatest country on earth, but have never set foot out of their state.  I have met plenty of foreigners who are just as devoted to their home as we.  The complacent satisfaction with the mediocre is our steepest downfall.  Those who are comfortable with the flux of mammoth bureacracy,  the desperation of legislative malpractice and the bliss of ignorance belong to the fire.  Quantity beyond quality shall be the American way no more.  We must not rely on bureacracy and it's business partners to bring humanity and soul to this nation.  It is impossible for such industries to have the conviction of a determined human.  And we must be a determined people.  The movement of change is sitting in the seat of your soul, if you indeed have one.  And my soul is stirred to the point of no return.  ". . .[T]hey have become great and rich . . . they do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan, . . .and they do not defend the rights of the needy . . .shall I not bring retribution on a nation such as this?   Jeremiah 5:27-29"3 1 Children's Defense Fund.  The State of America's Children: Yearbook 2000.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 2000. 2 Children's Defense Fund.  The State of America's Children: Yearbook 2000.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 2000. 3 Children's Defense Fund.  The State of America's Children: Yearbook 2000.  Boston:  Beacon Press, 2000. [Tara Sue's Weblog News] 1:01:11 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Art, economics, and time. Melancholy Elephants: a copyright parable. Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants," a prescient sf story about copyright, is online for free. This is a hell of a story about the possibility that we will run out of works that are not in copyright, a kind of proto-parable about the demise of the commons brought on by the infinite extension of copyright. Link Discuss (Thanks, Adam!) [Boing Boing Blog] I'm glad this particular parable is freely available. It's a powerful and scary story about the collision between art, economic interests, and time. Art works as a gift economy over the long term as does much of innovation. There need to be rich sources of material to draw on to fuel the creative process. But if you meter and control every source of raw material, you risk killing the system as a whole. Good systems have resilience and adaptability in them. The allow for the unpredictable and unexpected. Human systems that try to lock down every contingency are brittle. They shatter when they are stressed. And lots of people get hurt by the sharp, jagged pieces flying around. [McGee's Musings] 12:55:57 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Software Fortress Model. OK...I admit it. I'm kind of liking the Software Fortress Model. So why do I like it? Mainly because I see how it would fit very well into most enterprises today. At my current job, we have internal groups fighting over whether or not they build on top of a platform we already have in place or do they get to talk to the database directly. It is all a power play. With this model, I can say "You build what you want. We'll build what we want. Then we'll negotiate how to get my data to you." This negotiation can be a special account that we give them that has very limited access. It might be a web service, it might be .NET remoting, or it might be a good ol' fashion file that we populate and they can download it every once and awhile. What is really cool is that I can see how a lot of what is discussed in the Software Fortress Model can be easily implemented using the plethora of WS-* specifications that are coming out. The Drawbridge could be done with WS-Routing (and WS-Referral for those trusted envoys that can have direct access to a specific guard instead of going through the main gate each time). The Guard a component that checks the signature of message coming in (WS-Security and possibly WS-SecureCommunication) and then routes to the particular worker. The Envoy of course would be a component that signs the outgoing message with WS-Security. The whole Trust Rule could be defined with WS-Policy. Besides WS-Routing and WS-Security, I have no idea what the other specs look like so maybe they can't play the roles I lay out above. Only time will tell. Of course the coolest part is I like going into design meetings and using terms like Drawbridge, Envoy, Guard, Fortress, etc. :-) [News from the Forest] 12:18:18 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Marketing Info and Sales Leads Online. Find Sales Leads and Other Prospect Lists. This response to a question from a site visitor appears in our How To ... Do It with Research! section. We answer this question: Regarding research on specific industries, where can you find a listing of companies within a specific SIC/NAICS code that is either free or inexpensive? Also, where can you find detailed information (Sales, # of employees, etc) for private companies that is free or inexpensive? [The Virtual Chase] The one recommendation TVC provides is to ZapData, which turns out to be a branded offering of data giant Dun & Bradstreet. In a prior job, I subscribed to iMarket's MarketPlace product - also a D&B product. Turns out that ZapData is just the web version of iMarket - one's a desktop product and one's a web product. Odd that they'd each have a separate brand - if the data's the same and only the deliver mechanism changes, why bother investing in developing two distinct brands? Anyway, if you're looking for non-D&B data, here are some other outlets for marketing and sales info: Hoover's KnowX.com InfoUSA Lest anyone think that any of this kind of data that's "free" is worth anything, I'll quote from TVC: Information is not necessarily free. When it accurately, and in a timely fashion, adds to what you know, it has value. The sooner you accept the fact that such information incurs a charge, the sooner you can get on with your research and obtain an answer. [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog] 9:12:00 AM    trackback []     Articulate []