There is a growing debate in China about the allegedly harmful effects of youthful addiction to Internet games and cyber cafes. [New York Times: Technology]

How to boost employee productivity by using a news aggregator. [klogs]

A small change in the way we work could shave 45 minutes off of the average workday.  That small change is to use a news aggregator to get news instead of gathering it by hand.  Applied across a 200 person company, that 45 minutes of savings could be worth $1,650,000 a year.  The wild part is that the cost to implement this is only $8,000 and requires little if any support from the IT department. 

If we are going to really boost productivity, we are going to need to focus on those improvements that provide the most bang for the buck.   Small changes in work habits can have amazing results.  To get at these nuggets, companies need to spend time really watching what people do with their time.  If they did, they would find that much of the time they spend is wasted on simple tasks that could easily be automated. 

Other things to focus on:

1) Auto-categorization of e-mail.

2) Integrated search (desktop, LAN, K-Logs, Web) with all proprietary doc formats revealed as HTML.

3) Voice mail on the desktop PC. 

4) Accurate K-Logging of current activities:  status, thinking, plans, projects, etc.

5) Online presentations, to-do lists, project plans via outlines. 

6) K-Log personal portals that integrate all connection info (e-mail, IM, phone, address, bio, resume, picture).

Very simple stuff can yield big results. [John Robb's Radio Weblog]

>>>Knowledge management has been, up to now, largely a top-down enterprise. Driven by a concern that corporate knowledge repositories would quickly fill up with inaccurate, useless junk without rigid quality review, organizations have created small priesthoods of knowledge administrators responsible for virtually all authoring. Unfortunately, the result often has been massive bottlenecks as content generated in this centralized way sits for weeks or months awaiting review. By the time knowledge reaches its intended users, much of it has aged to the point of irrelevance.

Top-down knowledge management has had limited success. KM will begin to show significant ROIs when the process is inverted. Centralized knowledge administration clearly produces higher-value knowledge -- but centralized authoring retards growth. In the coming decade, the hard dollar value of knowledge will be recognized, and everyone -- not just a small elite -- will be responsible for generating the raw materials for corporate KM.

Bottom-up knowledge generation will have significant impacts on the way work, and workers, are perceived by corporations. Management will have to develop new incentives for knowledge workers to contribute high-quality content. For more traditional firms now adopting KM practices, decentralization of knowledge generation will be difficult, as it is antithetical to some ingrained management principles and habits.<<< [John Robb's Radio Weblog]