Status Reports 2.0. At a start-up, there are two organizational inflection points which drastically change communication within the organization. The first change occurs around fifty or so people -- this is the moment when, if you're an early employee, that you first see... [Rands In Repose]

Some nice reflections on the potential for wikis and weblogs to address that perennial necessary evil in organizations--status reports. Comes down slightly in favor of weblogs for most organizations given the open-ended, unstructured, nature of wikis.

Overall, I'm inclined to agree, although the hybrid strategy that Ross Mayfield is pursuing at SocialText is intriguing as well. Another take to factor in is that taken by the folks at Traction Software. The start up curve appears a bit steeper, but they seem to have thought more about how to operate at the structured team level.

What I'm continuing to struggle with is how best to introduce these concepts into organizations that are just beginning to grasp the limitation of email as a management tool. [McGee's Musings]

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT.

In a recent post I argued that IT and Knowledge Management (KM) should merge into a combined TechKnowledgy department that would, in addition to the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and technical hardware of the organization, take on these two important new responsibilities focused on the individual 'knowledge worker': 1. Social Software Applications: Development of new social software applications for front-line employees, including: Expertise locators - to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively. Personal content management tools - simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual's 'filing cabinet', as a replacement for failed centralized content management systems. Personal collaboration tools - wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person. Personal researching and reporting tools - technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations. 2. Personal Productivity Improvement: Hands-on assistance to front-line employees -- helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service -- face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more. I've written before about social software applications, and noted that Business 2.0 has named these applications the Best New Technology of 2003. Now I've put together, in Word format, a downloadable Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement. I've written this so that it can be used by both: IT/KM professions inside the organization, to get executive buy-in and resources for it, and external IT/KM consultants who want to sell this service to organizations that prefer to outsource it. I hope you find it useful and I would welcome comments on it. I am looking to organize a virtual collaborative enterprise of IT/KM professionals interested in providing this service, so I may also post it on Ryze/LinkedIn. What do you think -- could people make a living doing this?

[How to Save the World]

More spot on insight from Dave Pollard. This ties in nicely with several lines of thought I've been exploring. Take a look at Is Knowledge Work Improvable? for example.

The key challenge here is that success depends more on leadership than on management.

[McGee's Musings]

Weblogs as status reports - It can work but the barrier is cultural not technological. (SOURCE:Rands In Repose: Status Reports 2.0 via McGee's Musings)- We've tried over the last 2 years to replace status reports with blogs at a e-commerce company I do consulting for. Success has been mixed. Even though most of the people are engineering staff (i.e. technical people who should have no problem with the 'geekiness' of today's blogging tools), getting them to document in real time what they do has been more difficult than I anticipated. Transparency, even internal status transparency, is a new and hard thing for today's business culture. I think this will shift in time as people become more used to the idea of making themselves more transparent. Not only will the tools get easier to use, but the idea of being transparent (internally at least) will become more and more common just as the idea and culture of email took a while to take hold. Remember the executives who got their email printed out by their secretaries? Just as this is perceived as being quaint today, so too will today's resistance to internal transperancy be perceived as quaint in the future.

QUOTE

There needs to be some creative incentive for individuals to write stuff down. For the Wiki, there is the promise that if you write it down, maybe you can avoid future lame redundant questions. For the weblog, the timely conversational style of the medium keeps the content focused on news of the moment and that's really the question; is news of the moment interesting to an engineering organization?

What I'm curious about is if anyone has had any success using web-based collaboration tools as a means of augmenting or replacing status reports. I know Wikis have successfully emerged as semi-structured information repositories... have they evolved into anything? How in the world can I get out of writing Status Reports?

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Roland, of course, is spot on about the problems being cultural. And with the notion that the transition is becoming more comfortable with transparency. Time to move David Brin's The Transparent Society to the head of the reading queue.

My current hypothesis is that you have to start with the individual knowledge worker and work from the bottom up. What I haven't cracked to my own satisfaction yet is what the organizational support requirements need to be.

Current status reporting requirements are still rooted in industrial assumptions about projects and processes. Key to those assumptions is the notion that variation is bad. Things are supposed to go as planned. In a knowledge economy those assumptions are inverted. You still need to plan. But now the plans are to help you recognize which variations are important, which are trivial, which are bad, and which are good. Status reporting should become more about discovering and understaning the implications in those variations.[McGee's Musings]

Google is far and away the top search vehicle, especially for the law firm managment company Altman Weil.  In a recent Altman Weil Online Poll, 81% of respondents indicated they use Google as their primary search engine. Something to think about when developing a Search Engine Optimization strategy for your website.
http://www.altmanweil.com/news/pollarchives.cfm?&;;showresults=SearchEngine
[LawMarketing Blog by Larry Bodine]