Lilia has pointed me at Knowledge work as craft work an article from April 2002 by Jim McGee which is most pertinent given my new focus on visibility.

It's a good read.  Of particular interest to me was where Jim talks about how, with the advent of purely digital methods of working, only the finished product survives.  This implies that it is only the finished item, and not how it was derived, that has value.  But we know that's wrong, our experience tells us that seeing the production is how we learn.

Another key aspect to visibility into a process is what you do when the finished item turns out to be wrong.  If you need to backtrack and try a new direction, what are you working from?

Fetch delivers on the enterprise streaming side of klogging. 

• Server pulls SQL data from sources, on schedule, outputs RSS feeds. 
• Clients grab feeds, scroll news in a task bar UI.

Note the variable query frequency: pulled more often for rapidly changing data, presented more prominently for more important data.

Why isn't this database bridge part of Radio or Manila?

[a klog apart klogs]

[a klog apart]

» An interesting light weight RSS client that scrolls headlines and gives a click through to more info.  Reminds me of PointCast (who now seem to be InfoGate, "enabling leading media companies to offer turnkey premium subscription services to their clients").

As Phil mentions there is no reason why Radio/Frontier couldn't act as the FetchServer part of a Radio based enterprise RSS streaming network.  Although the Radio client would need a lot of work to be as functional in that context.

The strength (and weakness) of the Fetch client is that it is always visible, docked to the taskbar.  With headlines scrolling continuously.  However I can imagine that it also becomes a distraction, or an annoyance, especially if you are subscribed to a lot of channels.

I don't know where to start, so I'm just going to start.

Keys problem in my efforts to define services for klogging have been:

• Blue Sky - Klogging is a better tomorrow, golden path, etc...
• Scattershot - Ooh it does this, and this, and this, and...
• Where do I fit in?  "He doesn't look like a real consultant.  Quick! Don't let him get away!"

Well I've seen the light ladies and gentlemen.  In the time left to me, before the great job in the sky beckons, my approach shall be:

• Klogging as an applied business tool.  How much money will this save you today, tomorrow, this week, next week
• 1 problem at a time
• I am providing consultancy, implementation and product.  I may not look like a consultant but I know how many beans make 5.  Also this is a non-existant market, there's nobody else doing this stuff to make me look bad.

Only when I've got some success from this approach will I broaden it out, leveraging case studies and satisfied customers.  Sound sensible?

I'm open to suggestions about what people think is the most fertile ground to start on but my own preference right now is visbility.  I choose this because it is:

• a recognised problem, I don't think anyone claims that visibility within companies isn't an issue for them anymore (or do they? I don't want to kid myself again)
• affects all companies large and small, in all markets and sectors, i.e. universally applicable
• klogging provides a unique and, hopefully, compelling solution

I'm going to try and flesh this out into a proper paper/article/story in the next couple of days but here is the main gist.

Organisations have difficulty knowing what is going on both internally within their own systems and at their edges (in interaction with customers, partners, suppliers and so forth).  The tools most commonly used to address this are (in no particular order):

• e-mails
• mailing lists
• bulletins
• magazines
• news letters
• web pages
• meetings
• telephone calls

Each of these can under the right circumstance be an appropriate tool for improving visibility, but they are not a general solution and as organisations have discovered they have many shortcomings and pitfalls.  In short they don't address the real problem.

The issues I have identified are:

• Asynchronous / Synchronous
• Passive / Interruptive
• Self-archiving / Self-destructing
• Lateral / Hierarchical
• Deep / Opaque
• Public / Secret
• Connected / Disconnected
• Matrix / Linear

There may be more formal, well known terms for each of these, and I will explain more later to allow people to guide me.  It may also be that there is considerable overlap here.  But what I've tried to do is think about the various attributes of the problem and solutions and come up with axes that describe them and allow judgements to be made.

In my opinion, for improved visibility, the left hand choices are important and the right hand choices lead to solutions that, whilst they may be effective in specific cases, are generally sub-optimal.

It is also my opinion (although this may be self-fulfilling prophecy at work) that k-logging fulfills all of the left hand choices.

Hopefully I will get enough down tomorrow for you to judge for yourselves.