Collab.klog.km

Great post from Rick on some issues with weblogs in the business environment. A lot of thought has been going into this lately, as numerous grassroots advocates try to find the value proposition that clicks. I can't wait to see Rick's report on the internal blogging effort. And I'll be adding Ross' weblog to my subscription channels.

Weblogs and Leaky Pipes.
Ross Mayfield writes:

1) The time cost of email is driving adoption of other modes of communication like blogs and online communities like Ryze.

2) Blogging is at the early adopter phase. Today the majority of users are programmers or writers. For blogging to cross the proverbial chasm, the whole product needs to support the needs of business users with leaky pipes in information management.

The great thing is that some customers realize they can both fix the pipe and scale plumbing expertise. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]

Ross identifies a couple of big issues that persist in the weblogging-as-KM arena. One is that the market is ripe for a solution - e-mail is creating far too much noise. But the second point - that blogging is really geared to writers - is one that needs work. I'll be posting my own observations as we just wrapped up a month piloting an internal weblog project at my comany, but I think the hammer-in-search-of-a-nail problem is real with respect to weblogs.

It's also nice to see Ross adopt the "leaky pipes" mantra from Geoffrey Moore (at least that's where I got it from!). The leaks are real. Weblogs may be an answer, but they need to more specifically address those leaks rather than take a more generic "we'll make things better" approach.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Building an Information Supply Chain

4:40:19 PM

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I like this paper from Deloitte. It's a nice overview of important strategic and business considerations in content management, eschewing strict technical analysis for a focus on usefulness, value, and planning. As Martin recommends:

This report is only a fraction of the length of the Content Management Bible, but it should be a potent weapon for any manager faced with senior managers who can't (or won't) grasp the value of content management.

One of my favorite quotes from the paper:

Smart organizations have realized that success rests not on getting content into a database, but on getting the right content out [...]

I had trouble getting through the Deloitte site with either of my non-standard browsers -- Opera and Phoenix -- and finally had to resort to MSIE to actually get the paper. But it's well worth the free registration and highly recommended.

Deloitte perspective on content management. This is the 100th blog entry. Well over 100 of you are reading the blog on a regular basis, which is gratifying, and makes the effort of creating the entry well worth while. My subject for today is enterprise content management. [...]
[...] One of the final paragraphs reads "In today's highly competitive and continuously evolving global marketplace, how you manage information will make or break your business. Content management can no longer be regarded as an offshot of IT. Rather, your content management approach must be indivisible from your company's overall strategy. An intelligent approach to content management integrates content assets and workflows into an overarching enterprise-wide information supply chain that can be adopted by employees, utilized by suppliers and understood by customers".
And that is a very good way to end blog entry 100. [Intranet Focus Blog]

Guerrilla KM

2:11:35 PM

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GuerrillaKM looks to have some very useful content, but the blue links on red and orange backgrounds vibrate my eyeballs something awful. The Case Studies section has a useful relevancy ranking to guide the reader. And there are a number of interesting-looking papers in the Thought Leaders section, again with relevancy rankings.

Guerrilla knowledge management. I've just become aware of a website created by Greg Searle devoted to Guerrilla Knowledge Management. This consists of a weblog, articles and other resources around growing the use of Communities of Practice. There's a fair bit of good stuff... [Column Two]