Monday, October 27, 2003

Idea management. Denham Grey has written a blog entry on idea management, a branch of knowledge management. To quote: Recently idea management has seen attention and activity as a forward-looking component of KM. A focus on sharing ideas, gathering converts, embellishing, vetting... [Column Two] 10:53:19 AM    Trackback []

Visualize blogspace.. DiceLaRed ("The Network Says") helps its customers see and understand. For example, here is a picture of a real time graph, shown in the browser, that shows Spain's political parties by share of the current news cycle. In real time. Clicking on a wedge lets you dive into the news stream. The flow of news and blogs is beyond understanding. The headlines alone are overwhelming. So we need machines to helps us make sense of the flow. DiceLaRed creatively blends news crawling + lexical analysis + data mining + data visualization + customization + alerting. Apply this to your customers' weblogs, your industry magazines, and local newspapers for an environmental scan. Apply this to job board postings. Understand labor market demand across the usual dimensions. Then stretch to discover new buzzwords and "terms of art". Can you say competitive analysis? How about strategic recruiting? Apply this to medical discussion boards. Look for spikes in conversation about symptoms to detect outbreaks and public health problems. Look for swings in interest to retarget investment in health education and social programs. Apply this to your citizenry, to understand what political issues are emerging in importance, and with whom, in real time. We are much closer to a dashboard that helps us understand and respond, sooner and with more precision. Thank goodness. [a klog apart] [a klog apart] 10:45:39 AM    Trackback []

Knowledge Centrifuge. As we get closer to release I've found myself explaining what Paolo and I are doing with K-Collector, what the product is about. So far the best explanation I have come up with is: Realtime Knowledge Management What I've been trying to do is make the case that knowledge management and document management aren't the same thing. Most knowledge in a company begins life as a granule of information, micro-knowledge. It exists for a time and, if not exploited, likely dies away to be discovered again later if needed. Quite often the inertia that has to be overcome in order to turn such a granule into the sort of document you would load into Livelink, Documentum or some equivalent product is overwhelming compared to the perceived value, at that moment, of the knowledge itself. It is only when the cost of repeated rediscovery begins to bite that someone finally does the decent thing. The corrollary to this is that the benefits of knowing that you know this information are not felt until quite late in it's lifecycle. I would guess that, by the time a lot of information is formally documented, it's probably well on the well to being out of date or irrelevant (is this your intranet?) By contrast the K-Collector approach collects information while it is still fresh and combines it with other related information before presenting to users for them to see if it meets their needs. That which is good can be promoted to a more appropriate place (for example a Wiki) Things which don't make the cut fade into the background but, crucially, are not lost. I imagine K-Collector as being a kind of knowledge centrifuge, spinning together all kinds of different bits of information and separating out the good stuff for you. At the heart of K-Collector and determining what makes 'the good stuff' are topics. Topics act as markers for points of interest around which information can be clustered. The Who, What, Where, When metaphor we have adopted is - we think - a really simple way of considering what is important to us all (although, prompted by Stuart Henshall, I have been wondering about Why as a 5th W). I think of K-Collector as a kind of multi-dimensional database where each topic slices through the available information. We're working on some pretty cool topic related trickery for future versions that will take this idea and make it a lot more powerful. I'm hoping to get back to writing soon and share more about what we are doing. I hope this is useful in the meantime. [Curiouser and curiouser!] 10:39:08 AM    Trackback []

Chandler and the New Desktop. Technology Review (via WSJ) writes about Mitch "Chandler" Kapor's "new, more intuitive computer interface puts all the information we need to manage our digital lives at our fingertips, no matter what form it's in": the software promises to put all related e-mail messages, spreadsheets, appointment records, addresses, blog entries, word-processing documents, digital photos, and what-have-you in one place at one time: no more opening program after program looking for the items related to a specific topic. It takes the core functions of Microsoft Outlook, the Palm Desktop, and other personal information management programs and integrates them with the rest of your PC and the Internet. All the information you need to complete a given task or project is grouped on-screen, organized around the one function -- e-mail -- Mr. Kapor sees as the central conduit of our electronic lives. Because Chandler presents information in its logical context -- displaying all related items together -- and not in the separate folders and application windows of the traditional desktop computer system, you can think of it as a new way into your computer. At stake is a new, more intuitive way of handling information that could be as revolutionary as the replacement of the text-based, command-line interfaces of the earliest personal computers with graphical computer desktops. The "to-do" screen, for example, could be a context, with e-mail mixed in with related task items. So if you're planning a party, Chandler might put a calendar with key dates on it (when to pick up a cake, say), the invitation form, RSVPs, a task list, and even a budget on-screen at once. When a guest's e-mail request for veggie hors d'oeuvres arrives, arranging for them would automatically be added to your to-do list. Contexts will mean Chandler can reorganize the screen every time the user shifts between projects, as if she were replacing her desk with a new one. That's a far cry from today's software, which forces people to dig through applications and file folders to find things, and to print them out if they want to see everything in one place. Driving some of Chandler's flexibility will be a technology with a checkered past: software agents. These are small pieces of code typically designed to perform individual tasks, such as beeping when an e-mail message arrives. Definitely something to watch. What makes it even more attractive is that Chandler is open-source. [E M E R G I C . o r g] 10:27:48 AM    Trackback []