Blogs increase the surface area of organizations

I'm often criticized for using biological metaphors for organizations, but I think they're very effective sometimes.

Seb's Open Research

Blogs increase the surface area of organizations

Jon Udell has got a keen eye for biological metaphors for information systems, and here comes up with a nice one for how weblogs change the shape of organizations:

Think of an organization as a single-celled animal. Blogs increase the surface area of the cell, help nutrients flow across its membrane, and promote multicellular cooperation.

I'm on the road with low bandwidth and was spending too much time commenting on my blog to think of something original to blog today. Instead I have quoted one interesting person quoting another interesting person. Sorry if you already saw this today, but it was the most interesting thing I could find through my quick zip through my RSS feeds today.

[via Joi Ito's Web]

And I'll just daisy-chain this post on through - like Joi, I've been consumed with non-publishable stuff (in this case, working on

the conversion from Radio to Movable Type). This is a great metaphor for how blogs can improve knowledge sharing in an organization.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

The ABC's of Personal Knowledge Management

Who would have thought that one of the most powerful personal knowledge management tools available to us is the simple alphabet.nbsp For a while now I've been using the ideas of David Allen and his Getting Things Done (GTD) process for organising oneself.nbsp His ideas for keeping track of projects, ideas, actions and reference materials is personal knowledge management to the quick. nbspFor me and others has helped to quieten down the background noise of reminders for those things not yet done.

One of the simplest yet most powerful ideas within GTD is the reduction of noise in a personal filing system.nbsp How do you file your own reference materials?nbsp Two parameters drive the system.

1) It must be easy and fun to file materials otherwise you won't

2) It must be easy and fun to find materials otherwise you won't trust the results of step 1.

This is the beauty of the alphabet.nbsp Simply categorise what you have in your hand (and I mean simply), put it in a manilla folder, label it and file it under the first letter of the label.nbsp All in order and quick to retrieve.nbsp When you need something, what you have filed will be on only 1-3 places.nbsp My gas bill will be under G for Gas or T for TXU my supplier.nbsp I can find it quickly and so can my wife if I'm not around.

A complicated system may have had me filenbspmy gas billnbspunder Bills -> Home -> Utilities -> Gas.nbsp Far to difficult to recall and far to difficult to initially categorise because I have to keep the categories and their rules in my head.nbsp Hence, nothing gets filed and it all piles up.

I came across the General Reference Filing tip before the book had arrived (Amazon isn't the quickest on postage across the Pacific) and implemented it straight away.nbsp Read the tip a couple of times and buy a labeller.nbsp It makes all the difference.nbsp Scanning consistent and well printed text is much quicker than reading handwriting.nbsp Itnbsponce tooknbspa while to read all the folder labels for my gas bill which were not ordered alphabetically, were handwritten and not always in the same place on each folder.nbsp Just now I found it in under a second.nbsp My filing cabinet is now more useful than the 4-drawer box it was.

This morning I re-organised my Outlook folders the same way.nbsp I now have a Reference Filing file (separate from my mail .pst file) and within it a long list of alphabetically ordered folders.nbsp Within five minutes I had most material refiled under the new system.nbsp That itself shows how quick the filing and retrieval can be.

This afternoon my Palm Pilot is going to get a good re-organisation as well.

[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

New RSS feed from Corante led me to their IdeaFlow blog. Several interesting pieces on the site that warrant follow-up reading. The first to catch my eye was this piece on idea management. Making idea creation and management explicit is something well worth doing. There's a whole range of thought on facilitating structured innovation. (One example is Robert G. Cooper's Stage Gate methodology, profiled in Product Development for the Service Sector.) A good KM system should intuitively reinforce both effective ideation (idea creation) and efficient development of good ideas. But designing in such capabilities isn't as simple as collecting documents or messages. This Idea Management resource listing is a good place to start the thinking process for building such a system.

Creativity + Knowledge Management = Idea Management

OK. Let's assume you're creative and innovative, and so are your employees. So what do you do with all of this creativity, all these ideas? You manage them, perhaps with the help of the concepts and software emerging from the growing subset of innovation management known as idea management. Idea management can also be thought of as the crossroads where innovation intersects with knowledge management. As usual, Chuck Frey at InnovationTools.com is already on this: he's launched an Idea Management Resource Center that's worth checking out. [Corante: IdeaFlow]

[b.cognosco]

(SOURCE:"teledyn")-One of the reasons blogs will succeed is because of their bottom up nature.
<quote>
The tools for knowledge management haven't appreciably improved in the last 20 years; email integration and shared folders are the only significant features Outlook delivers that Sidekick didn't have in 1984. And while tons of VC dollars have been spent on intranets and portal creation software, the whole concept of centralized knowledge management feels wrong to me. Attempting to create a consistent vocabulary and taxonomy across an entire enterprise is misguided. It should be obvious that everyone is unique in the mental models that they create to structure their knowledge. What's more the knowledge that workers create must be portable, for no matter how much companies would like to lock employees' ideas away as intellectual property, the cross-pollination that occurs when people move from company to company is critical to innovation. We should be building tools to encourage innovation and collaboration, not to constrain it or control it. This seems a domain where open data exchange standards, P2P technologies and powerful desktop computing are the right models. The integration of personal and published web content, content and concept sharing, RSS aggregation and publishing, blogging, email filtering/storage/extraction and powerful collaborative searching is bringing a real revolution in knowledge working productivity into view. It is a revolution that no amount of VC could have spawned as it is the gestaltic thoughts and conversations across hundreds of developers and knowledge workers in constant casual collaboration that is driving this revolution.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

(SOURCE:bloggers unlimited email list)-
<quote>
Easily create outlines on the web using just a browser. Dynamic List is excellent for storing and sharing information.
* Collect and organize useful information. Store it online.
* Prioritize tasks. When priorities change, update your lists quickly.
* Organize your bookmarks, and access them using any browser.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

<quote>
Ideagraph is easy-to-use software for creating visual maps of ideas, that can work with web pages, documents and images.
</quote> [Roland Tanglao: KLogs]

Surrounded by new opportunities.

Ray Ozzie on ZDNet : Surrounded by new opportunities

Even though our current use of PCs, productivity tools, e-mail and the Web seems quite sophisticated, we've only just begun to understand how to apply them and effectively realize their benefits. The next 10 years will find us moving decidedly from an era of personal productivity to one of joint productivity and social software. That will involve a move from tightly coupled systems to more loosely coupled interconnections. It will be an era of highly interdependent systems and relationships, with technology continuing to reshape the nature of organizations, economy, society and personal lives.

[Jeroen Bekkers' Groove Weblog]

Ray Ozzie is busy thinking about the kinds of problems we'll want computers to help with five to ten years from now. Groove, or something like it, may well be part of that answer. Certainly, the focus on collaboration and social software will be a major element of what's next.  That's certainly what I expect someone like Ozzie to be thinking about.

At the same time, I think it's an overstatement to claim that many of us are realizing the personal productivity promise of today's technology. While I might not go as far as Alan Kay's claim that the computer revolution hasn't happened yet, I do think that both individual knowledge workers and organizations could be doing a lot more to take advantage of the tools we have.

In the mid-1980s, the Harvard Business School was one of the first MBA programs to require incoming students to buy PCs. One of the things I got to participate in as a doctoral student at the time was to help deliver the training to incoming MBAs. We spent three days teaching them the basics of the IBM PC and how to use Lotus 123.

How much training does the average organization offer new hires about the technology environment? An hour? Thirty minutes? Some of that is a testament to the overall improvements in usability and in general knowledge of technology. But I can't think of anyplace that invests any time in how to use the tools effectively. One interesting item (by way of Sebastien Paquet) is a white paper by Tommaso Toffoli at Boston University titled "A Knowledge Home: Personal knowledge structuring in a computer world." (pdf version)

The fundamental challenge, and opportunity, is that we've been content to focus on increasing the power and flexibility of our technology tools while assuming that knowledge workers will figure out how to take advantage fo that power. As knowledge workers it's our responsibility to do more of that figuring out. We need to stop counting on the marketing promises of technology vendors and start learning how to use the tools we've already got.

[McGee's Musings]