Another break in our regular programming for the arrival of Hogarth Gordon Vinson on March 27th. Time to introduce v1 to his baby brother.
Dinesh Tantri makes an interesting link between the Freakonomics' discussion of incentives and that of incentives for sharing in a recent article.
I've just learned that my blog is being studied in group assignment on knowledge taxonomies in a class at McGill. One of the students just contacted me with some questions about my process. This is my response.
For anyone who feels they have the time, Caroline De Brun in the KM group at the U.K. National Health Service is building a KM glossary and is asking for help. Here are some stabs at additions.
Kevin Rutherford has taken me literally and has some ideas for defining and quantifying personal goals. He has an idea (untested) for a mechanism to define and quantify personal goals.
Sharon Richardson at Joining Dots had a piece on "Investing in knowledge" a few weeks ago. Sharon provides a suggestion for how to think about how an organization values knowledge and where current projects fall with respect to people, information and data.
Martin Dugage has a relevant piece for me today: "Collaboration tools for communities of practice." An email discussion group I belong to vanished and is rebuilding itself in two directions: either as email discussion or a message board.
I stumbled upon Beth Shankle's piece on Google's reputation system. I'm not so interested in Google or disembodied reputation systems, but I have to mention the surprise I had when Quicken started asking me to rate the people in my checkbook register.
Malcolm Ryder has another great essay on KM, this time "How Not To K.O. KM." I can't help but appreciate the way Malcolm synthesizes what has to happen in the world around the worker for "knowledge management" to be successful.
Dale H. Emery defines Information as "Data that reduces uncertainty." I particularly like the link to uncertainty because most people don't like dealing with uncertainty in making decisions.
Martin Dugage writes about a blogging executive, who has built social/trust capital via a weekly forum he has written for three years.
In "Social Software: Knowledge Management Redux?" Mike Gotta draws the connection between knowledge management and social software that I have seen as well.
An entertaining manifesto from by Tony Dratz, "Technologist Manifesto..., or Things Everyone in IT Should Know." He lists a dozen items that are either "to do" or "not to do" with respect to IT projects.
Dave Chu has proposed an Organizational Knowledge Model, where Organizational knowledge results from processes that enable people to transform information.
Bill Brantley has written a paper that combines knowledge management and theory of constraints, "Strategic Knowledge Management: Using the Theory of Constraints for Better Knowledge Management." Rather than designing a KM system to scratch an itch in the organization, Bill suggests that KM is best used in support of the strategic process for the organization.
Too Busy Being Unproductive to Learn to Be Productive is another of Dave Pollard's pieces on the topic of finding the right work environment.
This AP story has made the rounds in the last few days. "Some coffee drinkers risk a real jolt" because they a genetically predisposed to retaining caffeine in their systems, and the caffeine plays havoc with the heart.
Merlin Mann has "2 ways to make RSS readers smarter:" 1. Per-feed expirations and 2. Smarter Dinosaurs. The readers are getting there.
The March 14th KM Chicago meeting will play host to Stan Garfield of Hewlett-Packard's Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management organization. He will talk about the KM program in the consulting organization.
Ron Baker has an interesting pair of articles in which he presents the underlying problem that he has with inordinate focus on the billable hour at law firms. He talks about a problem that is familiar to anyone who uses efficiency as their primary measure: it severely inhibits growth. He also presents some good arguments on a path out of this situation.