Tuesday, June 25, 2002

I am now taking a Management Strategy class and had my first class tonight.  One of the last topics discussed by Professor Marciano was the three layers of firm performance which she describes as: Positional Value:  when the value of the firm can be retained despite the total replacement of all of its resources.  An example given was Krispy Kreme (sp? I hate donuts).  Positional Value is derived from assets owned by the firm's shareholders. Resource Value: when the value of the firm is tied to specific resources within the firm and then those resources are matched to opportunities pursued by the firm.  Examples given included Law Firms and Consulting Firms. Structural Value: which is when the value of the firm is equally divisible between he owners assets and the specific resources. This "layering" of firm performance got me wondering how one would go about designing a knowledge management tool for each type of firm.  If you exam each type of firm, the motives for the employees are vastly different between an employee of a positional firm and that of a resources firm.  Therefore, in order to design an effective knowledge management system, one would first have to identify the type of firm that the system was being designed for and then identify the best way to encourage the employees to use that system. For example, take the Piper Rudnick team, they were trying to design a system for a resource firm.  By definition, the partners of the firm are the resources which add the incremental value to the firm.  As such, to encourage the sharing of knowledge, the management team should incent the partners based upon each lawyer's willingness to share their knowledge with the rest of the firm.  There should also be an educational component to the system so the partners understand how their sharing of knowledge will benefit them by educating others (especially the associates who generate the revenue) and making the others more efficient. ABN/AMRO may be in a different situation because many of the divisions are positional in nature and the resources are more of commodities that can be replaced.  As such, the employees should be incented more along the lines of how well the company does as a whole (profit sharing, stock options, etc.) because no one employee can have that great of an impact on the overall profitability.  However, if the sharing of information across the company makes that company more profitable then everyone benefits. What do ya think?            11:32:29 PM

Wednesday, June 12, 2002

I thought that everyone did a nice job this evening in presenting their various projects.  I guess my future recommendation for Jim's next class is that he make the powerpoint presentations and/or papers due the second to last week of the quarter and charge the project leaders with posting the presentations to their Weblog.  Then I would recommend that Jim ask all of the class participants to come the last week prepared to ask questions about the other group's presentations and that all of the class participants all come with questions re: the other presentations.  This would facilitate more dialogue about the projects versus a monolgue by the presenters.     12:03:28 AM

Tuesday, May 28, 2002

Initial research on my earlier hypothesis: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottish-19th/#1 While the key focus is not on knowledge management, it does contain some lively debate on how best to approach the "project of the 'science of the mind'": On the side of the first is Hume, whose skeptical conclusions arise from the Berkleyan presupposition asserted in the very first sentence of his Treatise of Human Nature All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS. The difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness with which they strike upon the mind. (Hume 1888: 1) On the other side is Thomas Reid, for whom the errors of Hume result from the boldness of his starting point. It is genius, and not the want of it, that adulterates philosophy, and fills it with error and false theory. A creative imagination disdains the mean offices of digging for a foundation, of removing rubbish, and carrying materials: leaving these servile employments to the drudges in science, it plans a design, and raises a fabric. (Reid 1997: 15) The problem as Reid saw it was that a highly theoretical philosophy was trying to run before it could walk, because in sharp contrast to subjects that are "really sciences" -- mechanics, astronomy and optics are the examples he gives -- when we turn our attention inward and consider the phaenomena of human thoughts, opinions and perceptions, and endeavour to trace them to the general laws and first principles of our constitution, we are immediately involved in darkness and perplexity. And if common sense, or the principles of education, happen not to be stubborn, it is odds but we end in absolute skepticism. (Reid 1997: 16) 11:24:42 PM     IT MEETS PHILOSOPHY It seems that this initial comment on knowledge management seems to be gnawing at Jim's subconscious ever since I made it in class.  Could it be that we are struggling with an issue "Knowledge Management - How to Capture and Quantify It?" that could be more easily solved through the application of philosophical principles versus economic principles?  While we have been focused on ROI and defining Knowledge Management, have we been overlooking the answer by looking to the wrong science - -  and yes, I now believe that philosophy is a science.  It would be interesting to analyze how other business, political and social issues were solved through the application of philosophical principles.  Unfortunately, I did not pay attention to my college philosophy course as much as I should have and do not have the answer but I would be interested in your thoughts!  I will also try to conduct some research into this issue and let you know what I have found.  10:52:20 PM

Saturday, May 18, 2002

Final Post of the Night  . .. In response to the Jim's post re: Apprenticing, I would suggest that he consider asking some of his better bloggers from our class to act as mentors to future classes.  Not only would the new students benefit from those who have gone before but I think that current bloggers could also learn from the questions and experiences of future bloggers.     10:54:21 PM     On May 14th, Jim posted A learning motto instead. In his post, he agrees with the statement "It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them."  While I agree with the premise that "If you enter the argument with the eye toward developing deeper understanding and willingness to abandon your initial hypotheses, then you're learning and you're doing science."  He loses me when he equates this to "the intent of the argument".  To me, one must look to what the argument participants seek to achieve.  For example, if they seek a solution to the problem and neither participant understands the subject matter of the problem then the debate will be predicated on misinformation and incomplete hypotheses and a true solution may never be found.  However, if one person knows a little about one area of the subject and the other person knows a little about a different area of the subject then I agree that through spirited debate and the willingness to be open to new ideas and info both will gain a greater understanding of the subject.   10:31:30 PM     Further Commnetary to the Fuzzy Blog In the Fuzzy Blog's post entitled "What a Brave New World Blogging is Building", I question his assertion that blogging is "real Knowledge Management".  He admits that he put his marketing materials on his home page and then e-mailed someone in Norway and Italy letting them know that the materials were posted.  Wouldn't he have achieved the same result by creating a word document and then e-mailing that document to the same people.  I guess my point is that the people did not find the marketing materials through their own blogging efforts - - the Fuzzy Blog notified the people of the materials existence.  Now, had a person been blogging, reviewed Jim's home page, jumped to the Fuzzy Blog's home page and then reviewed the marketing materials I think that would be a better testimonial to the power of blogging. Don't mind me, I guess I'm just in a cynical mood!  10:16:05 PM     On Thursday, May 16th, Jim posted the Secrets of a High Volume Blogger which I read with great interest since I am having trouble finding time to Blog.  While the secrets were instructive, they only appear to be effective if you have access to your computer 24/7.  The Fuzzy Blog acknowedges that he works from home, has two computers and uses one for blogging while he is working on the other.  Unfortunately, we do not all have this luxury.  I blog from my home computer (not a laptop) and have been traveling a fair amount of time over the past couple of weeks.  As such, I would like to have Radio develop the capability of remote accessing a home page. It seems that I am not the only one with this problem since Russ Lipton comments "yes, I'm back form Austin, armed and dangerous" in Radio Demystified.  This comment leads me to believe that Russ could not blog because Radio is on a computer that is not mobile.  The work around that I have developed is to print of interesting postings, read them thoroughly and then write comments in the margins.  Then when I return home, I post my comments on my home page.  Rather inefficient don't you think?  I would also recommend that if Jim is going to offer the Knowledge Management class again, that he inform potential students that they will need a laptop on which they can install certain programs to effectively participate in the blogging experience. 10:01:58 PM

Wednesday, May 08, 2002

BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: On April 30th, Jeb Trowbridge asked: If you could co-chair an eLearning and Knowledge Management club at a leading business school, what would you want to do with the experience?   Woud you promote eL and KM issues with guest speakers and panel discussions on campus?  Would you try to link up with other MBA programs?  Would you organize off-campus visits to corporations to see eL and KM in action?  Send me your ideas! -JBT 3:58:55 PM     I guess that I would want to work on refining the process for diagnosing a company's specific Elearning and Knowledge Management needs.  While Knowledge Management has been around for some time, I do not think that it has become part of the main stream business culture so a lot of companies do not understand what it is they seek to achieve when they undertake an eLearning/Knowledge management initiative.  Much like anything, I would like to gain greater experience practicing (maybe by offering free consulting services) diagnosing various company's E-learnin/Knowledge Management needs. The other thing that I believe would be worthwhile is to link up with other school's MBA programs to brainstorm how to address various eLearning/Knowledge Management issues.  I would especially like to partner with an International School so that we could gain a culturally diverse perspective.     9:14:59 PM

Tuesday, May 07, 2002

Okay, back to knowledge management.  In class this evening we discussed whether there can ever be a shrink wrapped knowledge management product that could be marketable across several different sectors.  While I did not offer an opinion at the time, I continued to go back to our discussion with our first guest speaker which focused on how to define knoweldge management.  I think we came to the consensus that until you understand how the client defines knowledge management, you cannot offer any solutions to their knowledge management needs.  However, driving home I was thinking about this issue and determined that it isn't necessarily the knowledge managment solution that you should be going for but how to define what the client's knowledge management needs are.  Couldn't you create a program such as Turbo Tax that walks the client through a series of questions designed to determine what that client seeks as far as a knowledge management system and then have the program offer several solutions based upon the answers?  For example, one company may only want to catalogue all of the product offerings made in the last year, the people who were invovled in those product offerings and how that product offering faired.  In that case, the solution might be as easy as document imaging, syncing the names of the people involved (Jim had a better term for it but I don't have the powerpoint slides yet) and gathering and organizing the sales data (like the Lockheed example Jim used tonight). Although this sounds simplistic, I think you could create the list of questions much easier than trying to create a vanilla knowlege management tool.    11:35:39 PM     In class this evening I got into a spirited but short-lived debate re: the state of our civil legal system.  I have to say that many people I speak with share the same belief as our naval classmate - -  that it is the attorneys that have perverted our system.  I would be interested to hear what you have to say on the subject since liability claim handling is one of the focuses of my job.  I know that I become quite frustrated when I go to mediations or court ordered settlement conferences and am told that I should pay something to the plaintiff because it will cost money to take the case to trial.  Isn't this extortion?  I file suit so pay me money?  I postulated that it was not the attorneys but the jurors (yes, that's right you and me) that are to blame.  Afterall, isn't it the verdicts like the McDonald's coffee case that plant the seed that our court system pays out better than the Lotto?  Is it really a chicken and egg debate?     11:08:38 PM

Monday, April 29, 2002

Various Papers Written on KM  http://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/is/malavi/icis-97-KMS/  10:03:11 PM     FOR SOME REASON THE FULL POSTING DID NOT APPEAR IN LAST NIGHT'S POSTING Universities with KM Initiatives - - We're Not Alone: We discovered last week that our blogging adventures were being watched by other business schools.  I stumbled across the following Universities that are venturing into the KM world.  Here are the ones I've found so far and a cursory overview of those sites: http://www.bus.utexas.edu/kman/#top : not a lot of analysis but very good links to written materials and product resources. http://www.ckm.ucsf.edu/ : this appears to be healthcare related.  Its stated goals is "to advance health care research and instruction through the collection, development, organization, preservation and dissemination of the world's health sciences knowledge base." http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc_data/org_learning.html : this site was developed by the School of Education not the business school so it offers a different perspective on KM and the utility for KM. http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is213/s99/Projects/P9/web_site/about_km.html hate to say it but extremely well organized.  It contains an analysis of KM and provides lots of useful links to KM resources. http://www.csu.edu.au/research/kmg/ : here is what the Aussies have to say on the subject.  There are three categories of projects: Knowledge-based Projects in Viticulture Knowledge-based Projects in Information Management Knowledge-based Projects in Libraries http://www.ucl.ac.uk/kmc/ : this also appears to be healthcare related.  The Knowledge Management Centre is part of the School of Public Policy in London.   9:57:29 PM     KM Information While muddling through some KM info on the web, I found the following general purpose site:  http://www.cio.com/research/knowledge/edit/kmabcs.html. It has articles that address each of the topics that we have discussed in class.  I thought the authors did a good job of summarizing what a KM initiative should seek to achieve: Consequently, an effective KM program should help a company do one or more of the following: Foster innovation by encouraging the free flow of ideas Improve customer service by streamlining response time Boost revenues by getting products and services to market faster Enhance employee retention rates by recognizing the value of employees' knowledge and rewarding them for it Streamline operations and reduce costs by eliminating redundant or unnecessary processes Last week many of us seemed to focus on how to measure ROI and several of the items above recognize that it is not as much the direct impact of KM, i.e. a measurable ROI, as it is an indirect impact (fostering innovation and employee retention) that makes KM a worthwhile venture. 9:17:21 PM

© Copyright 2002 Carol Stark. Last update: 1/16/02; 1:27:18 PM.