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Tuesday, June 25, 2002

The Internet Isn't Cable TV

Jenny points us to a survey on what American's think of broadband. I hope Senator Earnest Hollings' office gets deluged with copies of this report.

The Honorable Earnest Hollings
1835 Assembly Street, Suite 1551
Columbia, SC 29201

Internet As Library. Will sends along a special excerpt from The Broadband Difference: How Online Americans’ Behavior Changes with High-speed Internet Connections at Home (PDF): "In sum, emailing and information searching are most popular among broadbanders. This is not too surprising, since most Americans view the Internet as an information resource like a library. When asked what the Internet is like, 51% of all Americans in the Pew Internet Project's March 2002 survey likened it to ... [The Shifted Librarian]

Of CIOs and Information Stewards

What if KM initiatives weren't under the domain of senior IT executives, but were instead sponsored, driven, and controlled by a Chief Information Steward?

I don't (yet) have any hard data to back this:

Seems most KM installations (especially large-scale) have been disappointments, achieving little of their projected ROI, suffering poor user adoption, and generally failing to meet the company's goals. Obviously, these specifics correlate in some way to management's approach to KM, but I'm curious if they correlate in any way to specific management?

Any initiative is going to reflect the priorities and ideals of its senior sponsor and driver. So who is most commonly the senior executive in charge of KM? I will guess (until I get some proof) that it is usually a CTO or CIO. And that may be the real root of KM's failure.

There is a huge cultural conflict inherent in this situation. CIOs/ CTOs are usually educated, experienced and successful software or computer engineers. As such, they will almost always have the primary interests normal to all IT executives -- availability, reliability, backup, disaster recovery, user support, protection of confidential and proprietary data, etc. Theses issues are important -- vitally important -- to KM systems.

But they aren't the reason for KM, they are implementation necessities. And making them the most important aspect of a KM implementation will likely kill any chance of a user-friendly, inviting, accessible system. Yet, when push comes to shove in budget, planning, and project meetings, you can bet the CIO/CTO will rate these issues as more important than usability and accessibility.

Contrast this with having KM run by an Information Steward -- someone whose interest in technology is secondary to her interest in promoting the flow of information. Someone who is excited by what technology can accomplish -- not by technology itself -- yet understands that sound technology is critical to success.

Such a person would likely place usability and user adoption as the top priorities, forcing IT to justify overly onerous control mechanisms, and balancing the needs to be secure, reliable, and available with the need to be useful.

An Information Steward might take her lead from public librarians, whose only goal is making information accessible to people, and presenting it in a form they will use. She might even seek out librarians to provide guidance on system organization and function. And once she knew how to get people into the system, and how to guide them in getting things out, only then would she turn to IT to make it happen. In short, the KM initiative would be turned upside down. Technology would be serving the optimal flow of information, not vice versa.

With weblogs, and k-logs, we have the beginning of such a system. If we can only get information stewards into positions of power, the work of being a knowledge worker will become a lot more interesting.

More Secure IM Products

The market for secure, business-grade instant messaging software is picking up steam, with several start-ups now offering packages that automatically encrypt real-time chat sessions between users. [Network World Fusion News]

Information Stewardship

All this talk of k-logs, POMO KM, etc spurred a conversation tonight with a friend on the dismal failures of most companies (in our experience) to manage people and technology to encourage, rather than discourage, information contribution. KM, in almost every sense, has been about forced extraction, control, and containment.

What should be occuring is a conscious effort to promote the flow of information within a company, to seed it, shephard its growth, to spread its benefit to every sector of the company and its audience. The term my friend used to describe this process was "Information Stewardship."

In this piece titled Sharing with Yourself, Jim McGee points out that stewardship starts with each of us. By preparing our own work in a way that will make sense to us in the future, we have taken the first step toward having it make sense to someone else. [McGee's Musings] (Thanks! David Gurteen.)

Today's Rare, Useful Weblog -- McGee's Musings

I'm going to have to drop the word rare from this daily description. I'm afraid I've worked my way through the noxious layer of blogging digi-sputum and begun to mine the plethora of valuable weblogs. Someone pass me the crow...

Now go take a look at McGee's Musings. Smart guy, lots of experience, keen insight. Go see.

Thanks to David Gurteen for pointing me to yet another oasis from the noise in the blogosphere.

I Bet I Can Lose More Money Than You Can

Buy.com is now selling books, and is taking on Amazon in a price war. Amazon has quietly raised its retail prices several times in the past year and will likely respond with cuts of its own. What, exactly, does Buy.com expect to win here?

There are already several online book resellers that beat Amazon on price, and if you're any kind of savvy book shopper you already know who they are. Likewise, there are better sources for hard-to-find and out of print books. I like Buy.com and I occassionally purchase electronics from them. But I can't imagine savvy shoppers moving over there just to buy books. Buy.com has yet to prove itself a viable, profitable business. It's unlikely they'll be able to replicate anything close to the Amazon user experience. And if someone is going to shop Amazon and then switch for price, is that really a customer Buy.com can afford to acquire? Maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Amazon's stock dropped on the news. Despite having the higest gross margins in book retailing the company still can't make a profit. And its penchant for beating the living daylights out of publishers for deep, deep discounts and murderous return policies haven't made it any friends in the industry.

Two money-losing Internet giants beating each other up. Somebody call Vince McMahon. This could be a Pay-per-View special.

Buy.com takes on Amazon with 10 pct book price cut. iWon Jun 25 2002 4:38PM ET [Moreover - Book publishing news]

Feeling secure with IM

IF YOU TRANSFER FILES using your instant messaging application, you might want to switch to a more secure software one. NetLert, for example, provides instant messaging that you can host inside your company. So, instead of connecting to a third-party server, like oscar.aol.com, your company hosts the NetLert instant messaging server. Java-based NetLert also allows users to protect their conversations with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.

If you don't want to give up your AOL, Yahoo, or MSN accounts (or if you need to contact clients using each of these services and don't want to have three different applications running on your task bar), then download Jabber, Version 1.7. Jabber is an open source application that, like NetLert, has its own instant messaging with the added convenience of branded instant messaging services like AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or even ICQ. Jabber uses a SHA-1 hashing algorithm to authenticate users so that login passwords can't be intercepted. The latest versions allow users to select SSL encryption. However, messages sent to users on AOL, Yahoo, MSN, or ICQ will not be encrypted (as those services do not use SSL).

Tying IM, Blogs, and KM together

I tend to think the term IM means Intruding Menace. But I used to think something similar about "blogs". Now rethinking the use of IM to stay informed of changes to key log sites and RSS feeds. Something to watch.

Blog updates via MSN Messenger. BlogToaster: A web-service that spims your MSN Messenger account every time your favorite blogs update. [Boing Boing Blog]

A Fellow Radio Newbie and K-Log Aficianado

David Gurteen has launched a Radio weblog and is starting up the steep end of the learning curve. I sense in his postings some of the same frustration I have felt myself over the past few days. Hang in there, David. It does get better.

Gurteen's formal weblog is far more developed than his newborn Radio effort, and contains good sources for k-logging and Post Modern KM information. I found this link to KmBlogger, among others, on Gurteen's site.

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This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:01:08 AM