b.cognosco

A quest to examine, inquire, and learn.

Home · Essays · Archives · About

Recently

Monday, June 24, 2002

Doug Kaye Gives Us Things to Think About for K-Logs

1. Per Maish's comments (actually McDermott's) regarding Community of Practice, I think K-Logs don't work in quite the same way. K-Logs are great for the journeyman-to-apprentices model mentioned, but that's not community in my mind. If I write a K-Log it's because I have something to say that others may find worthwhile. That's not a collaborative CoP kind of thing. (By the way, Maish, the "Grassroots..." article is superb!)

2. Also on the CoP question, K-Logs (and certainly weblogs) are entirely voluntary. No one should ever be forced to read or write a K-Log. If I have an important corporate announcement, I'll send email. K-Logs are value- and benefit-driven. If what I have to say doesn't help you, unsubscribe or don't visit again. If it does help, blog it and tell your friends and coworkers. CoP, working towards specific objectives, are (in my mind) more structured and participation within such a group is often mandatory.

3. Re: measurement/ROI, the need for this increases exponentially with the cost (TCO) of the system. I doubt anyone measures the ROI on email any longer, although some people who didn't get it did try to do so for a time. I think K-Logs need to start below the ROI radar, with a client-only solution. Usenet works that way, so long as a corporate user can access an outside NNTP server. I mentioned the Post-It phenomenon to John on the phone last week. The inventors of this truly inferior adhesive had an application in mind but couldn't convince upper-level 3M management. So they made notepads and gave them to the executives' secretaries. The inventors thereby created Post-It "junkies" who had to have more. If people aren't allowed by IT to use K-Log clients on their desktop computers and laptops, they'll find another way. They'll use their home computers or they'll use web-UI external services. It will become part of the corporate (sub)culture before anyone looks at the ROI/measurement. If someone is looking at those metrics, K-Logs will suffer the same baggage as expensive KM solutions. Progressive IT managers or "knowledge professionals" will hopefully skip the ROI step.

4. Taxonomy. The Weinberger interview of Kevin Werbach is good. But it made me think of one important thing: taxonomies are not universal or even shared. My taxonomy isn't the same as yours. I organize information differently than you do. Just look at how differently we use email folders, if at all. Hence someone's posting about a corporate taxonomy project that failed. They all do, or they end up expensive and clumsy. I like K-Logs and weblogs because I get others' sense of order, or perhaps none at all. I can organize it for myself (and for the readers of my own K-Logs in the manner that pleases me.) Let me create my own categories and give me great search tools. That's all I need.

JOHO POMO KM

A: Knowledge management has traditionally suffered from the hubris of modernism: the belief that we can discover ultimate truths and organize the world according to rational principles using clever code. The idea was that we should capture and organize bits of "knowledge" in central databases. The people involved were relevant only as donors to the common ontology or as empty vessels into which knowledge could be poured.

read it all here. [JOHO]

Today's Rare, Useful Weblog -- Cryptome

Today Cryptome posts this e-mail message which posits that the Hollings CBDTPA was actually written to mandate the inclusion of the "already available" Trusted Computing Alliance Platform into all computers. Also questions some discontinuities between what the computer companies are saying and what they are doing.

[...] The public and the media now need to somehow, preferably soon, arrive at the next stage of realization: the involvement in the TCPA by many companies who's CEO's wrote the widely distributed open letter to the movie studios, telling the studios, or more precisely -- given that it was an open letter -- telling the public, that mandating DRM's in general-purpose computing platforms may not be a good idea, is indicative of one of two possible scenarios:

1. the CEO's of said computer companies are utterly unaware of a major strategic initiative their staff has been diligently executing for about 3 years, in the case of the principals in the TCPA, such as Intel, Compaq, HP, and Microsoft, several years longer.

2. the CEO's wrote this open letter as part of a deliberate "good cop, bad cop" ploy, feigning opposition to DRM in general computing platforms to pull the wool over the public's eye for hopefully long enough to achieve widespread deployment of the mother of all DRM solution in the market place. [...] [Cryptome.org]

I may have underestimated the nastiness in Hollings' bill, and I blithely took the PC industry execs at their word when they called such a bill "amazingly stupid". I'm just too trusting.

The Need for P2P File Sharing

I don't know what sort of user privileges and authentication are in current P2P apps, but there should be some way to regulate access so that different groups can have hierarchical access levels. There are still problems of access whenever the user is offline, but that is no worse than the dreadful versioning problems that creep into any system of store and forward for traditional doc management.

John Robb on K-Logs

Contact

       

This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:01:07 AM