Communication is the responsibility of …

Corporate Knowledge Management (KM) is hard. Hard to introduce, hard to teach/coach, hard to require, hard to create. Which, added all up together, often make it hard to use. It may sound like unfounded pessimism, as the Internet is loaded with examples of successful collaborative sites that aggregate and repackage knowledge - it's been doing that for years, ever since there were Compuserve forums and bulletin boards. Unfortunately (for the corporate environment), the Law of Large Numbers takes care of…

The Joy of Programming, the Challenge of KM

alternate title - Techs Managing Techs; not Required, but it Helps This evening, catching up with my RSS feeds, I happened upon this old screencast from Jon Udell, looking over the shoulder as he and Anders Hejlsberg take a look at LINQ, a work-in-process set of extensions for the .NET framework. Udell captured my curiousity with this description of the session ... You have to be a certain kind of person to enjoy watching Anders run LINQ through its paces,…

Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem

16 April, 2007
Purposeful Innovation, Knowledge Management
0 Comments

I've talked with a couple of IT leads that are thinking about putting in an enterprise search capability. It always seems to come down to two basic options; search integrated with a collaboration / portal platform, or a dedicated appliance, pointed at the G: Drive. You know the G: Drive - every corporation has one (ok, sometimes it's the F: drive, or the Common folder). I'm pretty sure the name is a throwback to the late 80's, when DOS was…

Search as the Killer KM App – Three Benefits for Knowledge Management

5 November, 2006
Knowledge Management
0 Comments

Knowledge Management (KM) may sound amorphous, but here are three specific examples of real business value generated when basic KM principles are applied.

War Stories from the Change Management front

Stories make our ideas real and relevant, and are helpful tools when introducing change. This article has a few examples of stories - all around the topic of introducing change.

Flexible intranet search does not have to mean a single search interface

Trying to provide a simple, flexible search capability for your organization's reams of historical documents? Using a project process that generates the typical stacks of documents, databases full of status reports and issues, and other "stuff"? It's important to think about the knowledge we are generating, and the best way to capture that knowledge – and not worry too much about how we’re going to search through those deliverables. There is no one way to capture / store different kinds…

Hand writing recognition – harder than colored bubbles

As I sit in meetings, I find myself thinking through "process" of what we are doing at this moment, as much as I think about what the meeting is about. Then I am writing these short notes to myself for future blog items. Good? Bad? Psychotic? It makes me wish for easier tools to convert notes to complete text - but look at this chicken scratch ... I like these pseudo-postings for process think because I am lazy at heart,…

Implementing Intranet on Speed: An Uh-Oh Moment

The outgoing intranet was nice, in that it gave content owners the ability to control what was visible / available. Unfortunately, we've come to discover that a number of corporate services areas (Safety, HR, Transportation, etc.) in our organization used the intranet but never took part of the content management (CM) - it all came "from above". Basically, these folks are about to get a "crash course" in CM and Knowledge Management (KM), albeit in small bites. When you read…

Implementing Intranet on Speed: The Beginning

This week, we're kicking off a new project, implementing an intranet / portal for our newly independent company. I'm fascinated at how the "state of the art " has moved forward so much since the "old days" of the 90's. This is actually my third or fourth cut at an application like this (depending on how you define "portal"), and I'm sure it's going a bit faster simply because we're skipping over some portal design and admin process "dead ends"…

Heisenburg KM

On this site, I've implemented multiple blogs (thoughts, essays, updates) - and it's not because I see many nails for my shiny new hammer. I'm trying out blogging for a couple of different applications / uses ... for example, I'm playing with the updates blog as a test for project status blogging at work. It's a fairly common request - "please keep us up to date with changes, additions, etc." - but that can be labor intensive, and I'm looking…