While there are lots of theories to support Jon’s (Udell) approach (Weblogging) – the fact of the matter is that KM has gotten a black eye in corporate circles – as the successes are harder to find than people would like. The implementations are taking too long – the benefits are escaping us – promised ROI’s are too SLOW to be realized.
Witness the repackaging of IBM’s solutions, away from the KM Mantra and towards Collaboration as its needed in today’s business climates – fast paced – internet-centric & diverse – with the need to connect many disparate groups of stakeholders in an organization as well as across the Value-chain of relationships welded by diverse organizations & their customers, suppliers, partners as well as employees groups that are project based.
Who would’ve thought that IBM would’ve gotten IM (Instant Messaging) to be a valued solution inside the corporate world? It is hard to control – & it sprang up from the success & appeal in the personal space – but it’s HERE – and delivering VALUE every day. And it’s an integral part of the Collaboration solutions today.
All this Collaboration is being done in a JIT-based world – where connections & relationships are made dynamically as needed, projects start-up without much notice & planning, collaboration is being redefined – to meet the needs of a new economy.
And the most needed form of relationships today – after all we can’t do it all in our own organizations these days – Strategic Partnerships & Alliances are suffering – not producing the value they were intended to derive for shareholders.
It has been proven that these Partnerships succeed when true & Effective Collaboration takes place. How can that happen – Effective Knowledge Sharing is a BIG part of the answer.
While the theory of KM & its discussions are centered on academic-like terms (taxonomies – ontologies – patterns) in the site mentioned below – one of many of this genre – we need rational approaches – slow going & steady paced – ones that organizations can grow with – have REAL demonstrable & measurable success with – like the approach coming to be very popular these days – Weblogging.
Another posting will come that explains a specific process that you can undertake to get a KM initiative going in the guise of Weblogging – we need this – the time is RIGHT for it. It’ll take you through the steps you need to take to get it going – at the level you want & need – as you go – not all or nothing – but rather the baby step approach – that yields immediate value propositions.
But in the meantime – we need to see that many solutions are springing up to backend the blogging – such as getting value from all the information that exists in the organization today in various forms.
One such approach that is presented here is what Google is doing to support this idea of searching & mining the “knowledge” that’s already there (inside your organization) – there are other solutions that are positioned to go find the knowledge elsewhere in the vast information superhighway – such knowledge is fine when located by search engines – ala the traditional Google – but other more sophisticated (boy I hope I don’t get slammed for this one) like IntelliSeek’s Enterprise Search… And there are others too – like IBM’s Discovery Server.
This will be the subject of another blog – but let’s just deal with this information now & take it all in – getting ready for the need to be fulfilled in our OWN organizations – and championing it if we can – at least don’t subvert it.
Now on to the articles mentioned here – the full article on Google’s solution in a InfoWORLD article referenced in the “Searching for solutions” link (by Cathleen Moore) - & then the embedded sidebar from that article by Jon Udell – included here in its entirety – because we feel so strongly that Weblogging IS the future of KM & Collaboration.
And finally – for those interested in the theories behind Knowledge Sharing – please take a look at the site referenced here – there are lots of sites dealing with KM as a whole – but we need to step back & do something NOW to get the ball rolling.
Take this on in YOUR organization – make a difference – you will reap the rewards – personally & organizationally.
GREAT BLOGGING J - contact us if you want to know more – Xceler8Concepts@attbi.com and continue visiting our blog – we will write more to get the momentum up.
Attachments & References
Searching for solutions
By Cathleen Moore
June 21, 2002 12:01 pm PT
THE PROLIFERATION of data in the enterprise is leading many organizations to pry their pocketbooks wide open in hopes of finding a reliable way to search and retrieve critical information lurking in various content repositories.
Google and Weblogs: best hope for KM
Jon Udell
If you invite Google behind your firewall, what will it see? The value of this appliance is directly proportional to the amount and quality of content that you expose to it. In-house, Google works best where writing for the internal Web is part of corporate culture. Webloggers are becoming the guerrilla warriors of a KM (knowledge management) revolution. And on both sides of the firewall, they and Google are natural allies.
Weblogs serve KM by making it cool to communicate. Before: "OK, OK, here's my status report." After: "Hey, look, I blogged my analysis of the requirements spec." The presence of Google motivates in ways that go beyond the trendy appeal of Weblogs. Of course, posted items can be found later on. But more subtly, they participate in a status hierarchy. Google's PageRank algorithm is all about finding the best document -- that is, the most relevant, most authoritative -- for each query-defined domain.
Here's an ego-surfing confession. Since starting my public Weblog in January, I've doubled my Web mind-share (the number of pages matching the query "Jon Udell"), and I have become authoritative (that is, the first Google result) for phrases such as "pipelining the Web" and "messages to spaces." PageRank is an addictive game. And it can flourish only in an ecosystem based on documents rich with hyperlinks. Weblogs are just such an ecosystem. So Google and Weblogs, together, are the best hope for corporate KM.
The knowledge effects of Weblogging, or "k-logging," go far beyond search-and-retrieval. A collection of Weblogs isn't just a pool of documents. It's also a knowledge network, where at each node human intelligence performs the routing function. The network's architecture is publish/subscribe. Its protocol is RSS (Rich Site Summary), a simple, powerful, and popular application of XML. Bloggers tune into other bloggers' RSS channels; they select and react to items flowing through those channels; they post items that also flow out on their own RSS channels. It's a kind of Krebs cycle where the input is individual thought and the output is group awareness.
The Google/Weblog synergy will surely evolve to deepen the relationships encoded in the RSS network. Recently there was a burst of activity in the Weblog world as people began to discover and apply techniques of social network analysis. These can, for example, help knowledge officers map out domain expertise. The Weblog neighborhood of one expert will lead you to like-minded experts more directly than Google's related-URL function. The trend, meanwhile, is for bloggers to expose their channels and subscribers -- in effect, their routing tables. People can latch onto this data, and so can Google, which will mine it to measure relevance and relatedness in new ways.
A first step was taken last month when Matt Griffith wondered if the HTML LINK element might enable automatic discovery of RSS channels. Mark Pilgrim and others jumped on the idea, and within four days every major Weblog tool had coalesced around the new standard. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): Take note! The outcome was new grist for Google's mill, and stunning proof of the power of a Weblog network.
-- Jon Udell
KnowledgeSharing
KnowledgeSharing
We explore and gather techniques for sharing knowledge. Started by DenhamGrey 05/16/99
What is sharing?
Asking WIIIFM (what is in it for me) before you share defeats the objective, you are starting off on the wrong foot. In the same vein, asking you to enter a password protected space with the aim of sharing should send up the warning signals. If your CEO comes back from a KM conference and sets up Lotus Notes with complex access priviledges you should question if they have really got the message. Is giving in the knowledge economy just being naive?, How about the groupware vendor that sells tools, but sponsors no work on understanding collaboration, group processes or conducts no ethnographic research?, do you believe they have collaboration at heart or are they just selling more software?
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