Recently in Knowledge Management Category

I'm watching John Seely Brown's plenary address at the 2006 Collaborative Technologies Conference, which is a wide ranging and fascinating talk on ways and forms of collaboration. Lots of good stuff and plenty of blog activity around this and the other talks - but in many ways echoing (in a good way) what is rapidly becoming the conventional wisdom in our brave new world...mashups, Second Life, "honouring the emergent", etc. Something that did make me think though, was his description of how an Asian apparel company (Li & Fung) has a large number of suppliers (10,000+) that it has organised into loosely coupled supply and innovation networks where knowledge, practice and process are shared between companies. Hmm...now the way I've generally thinking about collaboration, sharing, security, etc, has been fairly simplistic: there are essentially 2 situations - you're inside a firewall, or you're on the outside. Most available tools focus on the external world (technorati, del.icio.us, etc). Some companies are starting to think about replicating these tools and services within organisations (an external service probably cannot subscribe to, tag or bookmark internal content). But how do we facilitate sharing and collaboration across a number of different companies ? The partners don't have access each other's internal space, and using an external service reduces their ability to reuse internal content (unless they want to copy it to an external service, and then keep it up to date - yuck). It also maybe implies a need to agree on a common set of tools (good luck !) - and suddenly they're not very loosely coupled anymore. So, is there (or will there be) a need for something like a reverse proxy architecture that allows proxying of interesting internal content (feeds, web content, web service calls) to authorised external services ? Or am I making up solutions to problems that don't exist ? Or, even worse, am I misunderstanding something ? [tags]ctc2006, collaboration, internal, external, collaboration, proxy[/tags]

Piers Young at monkeymagic...

I'm beginning to get a little weary of the top-down vs bottom-up divide. It's a small point, but isn't the real paydirt what you might call the side-to-side?

My italics and bold..but what an important point. There is a lot of focus on point-source blogs - where often a single blog is used as a communication channel, allowing, for example, a CEO to "connect" with employees, and to get some real and direct feedback.

Yeah - that's interesting, and for some companies it's even a breakthrough - and I'm speaking from my own consulting experience here with some recent work. But, and here's the point that needs to be emphasized - the CEO blog should be the thin end of the wedge, not the end-goal. Getting senior members of the company blogging should result in more understanding and adoption of blogging, with the aim of creating an internal blogosphere. Why is that good ? Because that's when you start to reap the benefits of being able to aggregate, tag, subscribe, connect, datamine, and share all that information (sometimes known as knowledge) - and not in a formally mandated ("here's your KM template form to fill in to share knowledge") way.

[tags]internal, blogs, CEO, blogging, enterprise[/tags]

Panel about the do's and don'ts of corporate blogging. Struan Robertson - tech lawyer at Pinsett Masons. "Lawyers can give you plenty of reasons why this is a bad idea - here are some of them

• the risk of defamatory material being posted. "best blogs are a little bit edgy"
• negative comments - referenced the mini-microsoft blog "does bill gates or other shareholders want to be reading negative comments - what does it do the share value"
• lots of other stuff

all of which is applicable to almost any kind of communication. Referenced outlaw.com their technology law website - positive impact - demonstrates tech law credibility, makes them seem more approachable, and has generated business. Phillipe Borremans - IBM Blogging internally for 4 years, over 5,000 internal blogs, proactively asking e'ees to blog. Have internal blogging platform - any e'ee can "and should" blog. Blogs, wikis, podcasts are treated as a set of tools that co-exist with other tools (like Notes teamroom). Guidlines are important - talks about the process for creating the IBM blog guidelines. Bloggers wrote the guidelines - these guidelines were posted on a wiki and comments/changes invited. Then handed over to legal. "If you don't have guidelines, don't blog." Don't impose the guidelines - they should be created by the blogging community and then given to lawyers". Blogging depends on a culture of openness. Need to educate, it's not as easy as it is perceived to be - especially internally. Genie Lutz -Partner @ PWC PWC started blogging internally 18 months ago, and 8 months ago externally. 16,000 e'ees in UK - 10% per annum e'ee turnover. Have a number of external blogs. "We sell intellectual property" - the purpose ofthe blogs is to personalise the information. Surprised about the level of readership they've got, and the level of commentary the external market is providing - real sense of dialogue with the market. They are a regulated business - which constrains what they can do/say. Terms and Conditions on everything - FSA have guidelines on what can be said on websites. Philippe Borremans sums it up - "It's about trusting your people and showing common sense..." Technorati Tags: blogging4business

OK – I seem to be turning into a bit of a Euan Semple fanboy – but this article about him is great.

Running the unusual line between rebelling against senior-management expectations and over-delivery on objectives seems to be Euan Semple’s forte. Since his appointment as head of KM solutions at the BBC, he has jumpstarted collaboration and knowledge sharing among employees on a budget that would make most software vendors squirm.

 

Anyone know if the upcoming London KM Cluster event is actually happening or not ? Link to sign up page still doesn’t work, and lots of linkage to last year’s event.

Worrying – I think I might just bail on this now as I have other committments. Ah well, I guess I’ll see many people at Les Blogs.

Course topics for a KM Course at the University of Texas. Looks really interesting, and the plenty of resources and links and material on the UT site.

1. Review of Knowledge Management Concepts
2. Foundations of Knowledge Management
3. Knowledge Management and Technology
4. Social Networks
5. Knowledge Management Infrastructures
6. Email
7. Personal Information Management
8. Personal Knowledge Management
9. Intranets, Portals and Organizational Knowledge
10. GroupWare: Facilitation & Cooperation
11. Collaborative Filtering & Recommender Systems
12. WiFi, UbiComp & Smart Mobs
13. Agents
14. Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval
15. Knowledge Management Systems Synthesis and Analysis

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