The December 13th meeting of KM Chicago will be our second annual holiday party. As with last year, we will have a speaker in the first hour (text mining), followed by a wine (and food) tasting by Randy Russell of Wine Expressions.
Following my note about Joining Dots' article on "Why is KM so difficult," I tracked down an article of the same title by Julian Birkinshaw from the London Business School. He says, "The problem with knowledge management is that most companies struggle to make it work." And then he gives some suggestions on how to make it work.
Malcolm Ryder has written a thoughtful piece on "Just what's so manageable about Knowledge Management?"
I've updated the way comments are handled on this website. Namely, I now require that commenters enter a painfully obvious pass phrase to block spam robots.
After posting about SNARF yesterday, and playing with it a bit more and reading through their community forum, it is clearly a research project and expects to have a few rough edges. However, this makes me think about organizing my inbox even more.
Jon Husband follows the process thread from Ross Mayfield with a nice piece on where he has seen "process" ebb and flow within business. And on top of that, he mentions me as one of two dozen people who have been critical to his understanding in this arena.
A number of people are commenting on Microsoft's newly-released SNARF, an extension of their email triage work. SNARF is an Outlook "plugin" that helps one decide how to deal with incoming email.
CIO Magazine published an excerpt from Why Great Leaders Don't Take Yes for an Answer by Michael A. Roberto. I like the author's focus on thinking about how to make decisions, rather than which decision to make.
Sharon Richardson of Joining Dots writes "Why is KM so difficult?" And she lists her top five reasons that all make sense to me.
Stowe Boyd is also thinking about aggregators and doesn't like what he sees. "RSS Readering: Why RSS Readers Are No Good For Me (And You, Too, I Bet)." We share hopes for the future of reading.
I like coffee, so "Coffee: A Dark History" by Anthony Wild was a pretty sure bet as a gift. This book gave me lots of information to impress the people at my local coffee roaster as well as make sad about the "dark history" of the coffee trade that survives to this day.
The front page of today's Chicago Tribune has a report from the RSNA's annual meeting on "The tall and the short of why caffeine works."
Dave Pollard has been thinking about personal knowledge management for a while. "Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) -- an Update" is a nice summary of where his thinking has come from and where he stands today.
An article in CACM highlights how an expert locator is used at a software firm, highlighting some expected and some surprising uses.
Bill Brantly has been thinking about how KM, TOC and Strategy are all related. Now he is proposing a mash-up of all these in "Knowledge Management, Theory of Constraints, and Strategy."
Bruce MacEwan found some interesting Drucker quotes in the pages of the Wall Street Journal's feature on the legacy of Drucker. At first glance Drucker and Viable Vision seem to be at odds.
Marshall Kirkpatrick gives us a very nice discussion of what he does when teaching RSS (web feeds) to people.
The WearIT@Work project has some beutifully SciFi goals for wearable computing. And they are doing something about it.
I came upon an interesting blog-based discussion rather late, as I have been busy with Thanksgiving and other activities. But when I came upon it, I had a good chunk of the blog discussion right at my fingertips.
Ross Mayfield kicked off a winding discussion with "The End of Process" in which he complains that "process" is over-used. Many others have contributed to the discussion, in case you haven't seen it.