Portals and KM

Is Blogging Inside the Firewall an Oxymoron?

Blogs began as outlets for personal journalism and this certainly remains the dominant form of blogs. This initial and pervasive use sets the blog “style.” For example, Dave Winer mentioned at the last Berkman meeting that he heard from those who have seen blogs both inside and outside organizational firewalls that the more interesting blogs are outside the firewall. This certainly provides more objectivity since the posts are exposed to anyone for review, comment, and correction. If the goal is objective and entertaining journalism, then I would agree completely with Dave and, in fairness, this was likely his context for the comment.

At this point, I am reminded of a farmer I knew in Nova Scotia who used to always say, “The weather is bad, but if you like bad weather, the weather is good.”

Blogs hold great promise for a number of possibilities beyond journalism, e.g., project team workspaces, learning platforms, marketing communications (both inside and outside an organization), etc. In these cases, there may be times when blogs will operate better inside the firewall (e.g. competitive business intelligence workspace) and there will be other uses where they might operate within an even more confined audience (e.g. project team workspace). Cesar Brea said recently, blogs can be considered as both a style and technology. For each objective, there will likely some unique aspects of both the technology, the functional design, and the style.

Here are some initial thoughts on different levels of audience.

Unrestricted: Personal journalism clearly benefits for total exposure. This is also true for external facing marketing communication, public relations, and other special uses such as third party software developer support (e.g. SAP NetWeaver Developer Network).

There are also other specialized uses which operate better with unrestricted access. For example, I started a family history blog as an experiment on how blogs might be used as a better alternative to the pervasive family history bulletin boards on the web that exchange much misinformation. The closer monitoring that is possible with a blog might facilitate a more accurate exchange of information with supporting documentation of claims.

Enterprise: There are several uses that will operate better inside the firewall. Obvious examples come from applying blogs to typical internal communications such as corporate communications and company newsletters. If the objective is to present the official enterprise view of topics for internal audiences, then operation inside the firewall is a requirement by definition. We can certainly debate whether these communications are boring or interesting but then they are the official view and that is useful to know. Sometimes, given enough rope, these outlets can even “hang themselves.”

There are some uses beyond the officially sanctioned news where operation inside the firewall might actually open up communication. I have seen some irreverent internal newsletters which make fun of and/or call into question enterprise policies because the writers feel free to open up the “warts” of the organization to an internal audience, knowing competitors and clients do not have direct access. Again, we can debate how really open this dialog is, but it does serve a purpose.

Another enterprise use might be internal marketing communication. Frequently, one group needs to market to other functions to gain greater use of its services within an organization. Blogs can be much better than the e-mail driven newsletters that are often used for this purpose. I have heard that IBM has set up the capability to support internal blogs and this would be a good use for the service.

More restricted audiences: Project team communication is one use for blogs that may benefit from further restrictions of the audience. This may allow the team members to be totally open on all issues. However, there may be benefits to letting the larger enterprise benefit from access to this dialog, at some point in the process, to learn from the success and failures of the team. At Ryder, we implemented team workspaces with Lotus Quickplace along with a Notes-based document repository. When someone searched the taxonomy of the document repository, they could also find links to the workspace for the team that created the document so they could learn from the context.

In general, there will likely be a balance between the “comfort level” for openness obtained through restricted access and the ability for others to learned form the content, along with the opportunity to keep the content “honest” through feedback form the larger audience.

Learning forums are a great example of the need to walk this balance of the right openness. The Otter Group has done some creative work using blogs as learning forums for small groups within an organization. Here, as with the Ryder example, the larger enterprise may benefit from the dialog generated by the learning participants, as long as this large audience participation does not compromise the goals for the target learning group.

I am still climbing the learning curve on blogs and would be very interested in any comments of these points.

Search Engine Optimization: Intelligence from The New Yorker

Disclaimer: This is another in the series of “I may be the last know” postings so if you are an expert in search engine optimization skip to the next one.

I was skimming through that high tech news source, The New Yorker, on Saturday and came across an article that articulated a topic I have been discussing a bit. I had been curious to see my modest blog appear at the top of the pile of 153,000 Google hits on – portals and km. Several people explained that this was because a number of kind readers of this blog had put in links to it in their sites and the presence of these links is one of the most important criteria Google uses to rank its search results. I am glad it is not hits.

According to the New Yorker, “Some American companies have armies of programmers toiling away in Bangalore solely to boost their Google rankings.” The writer goes on to add, “Much of what the “optimizers” do is reasonable, helping companies do a better job of presenting content, using keywords, and building pages to which others will want to link. (These are termed “white hat” tactics.)”

This was reassuring since my daughter, Sarah Ives, revealed to me over lunch on Friday that she has done work related to search optimization and my friend, Amanda Watlington, has developed such strategies for the web sites of a number of large firms. I would certainly put both of these people in the “white hat” category.

On the other hand, there are many unnamed companies that wear the black hat in this space. The New Yorker article states that some companies even set up “link farms” - interconnected Web sites that simply link to each other. A company can buy thousands of domain names, set up Web sites, and create thousands of links out of nothing. I am glad they are not going after the portals and km search string.

Google tries to outsmart these companies to keep their rankings honest and there is a constant battle between Google and the black hat optimizers. The Google moves have even gotten names, like hurricanes, and they result in counter moves and counter-counter moves.

As Cesar Brea showed me recently, you can even go to Technorati, put your url in the search field and see who is linking to you.

The Next Generation of Big Ideas

My daughter, Sarah Ives, sent me an article she recently did for the National Geographic web site that describes an event that encourages those who may bring us the Next Big Idea. The Odyssey of the Mind, a contest about creative problem solving, celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend. Students are judged on their ability to solve problems and perform in a creative way. The world finals at the University of Maryland in College Park will bring in more than 700 teams for all over the world, many from Asian countries. This would be a great event for web log reporting, perhaps there one or two bloggers will cover it.

Making Money from Blogs: Ads or Other Means?

There has been a lot of discussion about how to make money from blogs by people with much more experience than I have acquired in my few weeks of blogging. The use of ads to support blogs has been raised by many and Google promotes this through their Adsense offering. At the Berkman Center Thursday meeting last night, Dave Winer made the point that ads will not be the most significant source of money for many bloggers.

I agree with Dave’s position. It seems that blogs have primarily been used for personal journalism so far. They are now being picked up by an increasing number of the mainstream press organizations. The revenue model for much of journalism appears to be ads, but the ad revenue for most bloggers will likely be very small, especially compared to the mainstream press outlets.

I think blogs hold great promise for a number of business possibilities beyond journalism, e.g., project team workspaces, learning platforms, marketing communications, etc. Even for journalists interested in commercial opportunities, blogs may offer more opportunity as a marketing vehicle for other outlets (e.g., books, articles) than a source for ad revenue. I have been encouraging many people to add blogs as a communication means to support their business interests.

In my own experience, blogs have been very useful as a means of communication around the work I do which includes both consulting and journalism. However, much of the actual dialog on work has occurred outside the blog itself. I have chosen not to use ads to generate revenue. If I do it will be more as an experiment to write about rather than something I do with realistic expectations of financial return. Of course my blog has relatively modest readership so the ad revenue would be very, very small anyway, but I think I would make the same decision even I had much higher traffic.

This is simply a personal choice. I certainly have no problem with others who go the ad route. In the end, all of us need to make money somehow unless blogging is a hobby and we have a “day job” or some other form of income. I am very interested in the thoughts of others on this issue.

Glanceable Technology: Ambient Devices Opens a New Market

Imagine having a translucent orb on your desk that changes colors with movements of the stock market or changes in weather in your home town. Imagine having a row of these orbs that change color with the rate of defects in the production lines across your plants or the productivity on key measures in your call centers, one for each location. These subtle changes then capture your attention in the middle of other tasks so you can act in a timely manner.

Well the future is here. Ambient Devices, a start-up based on research at MIT, has brought us a practical rendition of glanceable technology where physical devices undergo changes based on digital data fed to them through a pervasive low-cost wireless network.

On Tuesday, David Rose and Joey Fitts introduced me to this unique product at their office in the Center for Innovation near MIT. It seems likely that in a few years many ubiquitous physical objects in our environment may become intelligent conveyers of constantly changing, relevant information. We may see the changing availability of seats at restaurants, movie theaters, and commuter trains and/or stock levels of key items in stores. We may see when the next bus is coming, the status of traffic congestion, or visitors to a corporate web site.

Much research shows that we can simultaneously process information in complementary modalities, such as text and pictures, but receiving multiple information threads in the same modality becomes overload. For example, text-based instant messaging diverts our attention from text on our computer screen. An ambient, analog device can complement the text-based messages we increasing receive in our environment.

I would imagine that there may be many “killer apps” for this tool and various forms of business productivity measures and alerts will form a core of these applications. These devices offer an interesting outlet for knowledge sharing and potential new tools for knowledge management that can compliment traditional forms of communication. They give us new fuel for thinking about how we structure and convey knowledge. The BBC and USA Today have recent accounts that go into more detail on the possibilities.

The Birth of Knowledge Management

Tom Davenport and Larry Prusak, provide an interesting story about the birth of the term “knowledge management” in their new book, What’s the Big Idea? It seems they were having tea in the spring of 1992 at the Boston Athenaeum, near their Center for Business Innovation office. They frequently adjourned to the Athenaeum, an old Boston private library used by Emerson and Alcott, to discuss their projects. They were working on a research project to look at how organizations could use information as a strategic advantage. Not happy with the term “information,” they discussed the issue over tea.

“While munching a tasty lemon square, Tom argued, ‘We should really be focused on higher value forms of information.’ Finally, Larry looked up and asked. ‘Don’t we really mean knowledge?”

As they say, the rest is history. In the book, Tom and Larry point out that while in some ways the long term success of knowledge management is still to be determined, it has out lasted many other “big ideas” and there are signs that its take up is increasing. They state that knowledge management appears to be headed toward pervasive adoption by organizations. Knowledge managment has certainly had it sups and downs inthe market but my own experience with clients and talking with analysts supports their conclusion.

Bill Gates Smiles Down on Blogs

Amanda Watlington introduced me to an interesting blog on the business use of blogs and to Bill Gates' new stance on blogs. Business Blog Consulting is “a site devoted to demonstrating how effective weblogs can be for communicating with customers and marketing to new customer prospects. You will find here lots of examples of business blogs, as well as resources to help you learn more about the topic.” This site is maintained by Rick E. Bruner, a consultant.

Rick mentioned that at the recent Microsoft CEO Summit 2004, a conference for CEOs, Gates raved about blogs and product-oriented communities. To go directly to Bill’s own words find the complete text of his speech at Microsoft’s Bill Gates Home Page. Rick also provides a link to the BBC’s assessment of Bill’s speech. The BBC noted that Bill said blogs have advantages over other ways of communicating such as e-mail and websites and that more than 700 Microsoft employees are already using blogs to keep people up to date with their projects.

Blogging at Berkman

Last Thursday I went to the Berkman Blog Meeting at Cesar Brea’s suggestion. It is an informal sharing session for blog writers that occurs every Thursday evening at 7PM at the Berkman Center of the Harvard Law School, 1587 Mass Ave, Cambridge MA. There are some regulars and very experienced bloggers. They were very welcoming and patient with novice bloggers like me. The purpose of the sessions is to explore blogging, answer questions, note problems, give demos, talk about new stuff, etc. The meetings last between one and two hours. After the meeting some participants go out to dinner. Anyone who wants to join is welcome.

Andrew Grumet hosted this session in the absence of Dave Winer, who started the sessions. Bob Stepho took notes. I am just highlighting a few things from my notes, building on what Bob wrote.

Andrew is now on the RSS Advisory Board and he shared some information on RSS. An increasing number of blog sites, as well as regular sites such as Reuters and the Boston Globe, allow you to syndicate them via RSS through an aggregator. Apple’s itunes also lets you get a RSS feed of their top ten tunes. On these sites there is usually an XML button, sometimes with a coffee cup. Hitting this button brings up a page of XML code. Cutting the url for that page and pasting it into your aggregator allows you to get feeds from the site whenever there is a change. This way you do not have to go back and check for changes yourself.

Andrew also demonstrated the SYO services he has created. One of these is a find that feed search engine. If provides a search field where you can enter a term like “BBC” and get all the sites related to that term that offer RSS feeds. Other SYO services include: Similar Feeds - Readers who subscribe to feed X also subscribe to, Subscriptions Like Mine - Readers whose subscription lists are like mine., How Many Subscriptions - A graph of how many people have how many subscriptions, URL Sieve - Search for feeds by XML URL substrings.

Lisa Williams writes from an Apple and shared some aspects of Apple blogging. She told us about a service, BlogRolling, that serves up her site's list of more than 100 favorite blogs. This is a capability that is added to your blog. It essence it is a “bloglet”, just as there as “portlets” provides services within a portal. As the site says: “BlogRolling is a one-stop linklist manager for your blog or journal, helping you manage your ever-evolving linklist with ease.” Andrew pointed to Syndic8 as a place to track down even more feeds for Apple systems. I am adding another posting to go into blog services and “bloglets” in more detail.

Bob Stephno mentioned how the Democratic National Convention is now allowing bloggers to apply for the 15,000 press credentials given out by the convention. He showed us the on-line application which provides blogging as an outlet category along with newspapers, radio, etc.

On the political theme, Watchblog.org is a web log that provides news feed from the perspective of Democrats and liberals, third party and independents, and Republicans and conservatives in a three column format.

Jill Fallon showed us her blog on estate planning and related issues. Shimon Rura showed us his blog that includes his blog services tool, Frassle.

One of the many blogs discussed was Boston Common - What online Boston is talking about in Weblogs and forums. See Bob’s notes for more interesting sites.

More on “Bloglets” and Blog Services

I mentioned the rise of “bloglets” and blog services in my post on Blogging at Berkman. I would suggest that “bloglets” are services or capabilities that you embed in your blog, like BlogRolling, while blog services are capabilities that help enhance your blog experience such as Andrew’s SYO applications. They operate the way “portlets” provide services within a portal. Here is a bit more.

At the Beckman meeting, Andrew Grumet introduced us to one bloglet, w.bloggar that provides a MS Word like interface for your blog writing. According to its site, “the w.bloggar is an application that targets to be an interface between the user and his blog(s), in other words, is a Post and Template editor, with serveral features and resources that the browser based blog editors can not offer. Because it's a software that runs over Windows GUI it allows the user to edit his posts without being connected to the Internet, saving locally one or more texts to be posted in the future. It can be minimized to the Tray bar as an icon and everytime the user wants to publish a new text, he just need a click and has the editor ready to work, finished the text, another click (if connected) and the post will be published.”

In the Apple world, ecto operates like w.bloggar. According to its site some of the features are “intuitive interface for creating and editing weblog entries (customizable with spellcheck, syntax-coloring, and find-replace) and full local control of recently posted entries and drafts (with search function).” According to the wbloggar site, here is even a media player blog plug-in for the Apple iTunes made by Bill Zeller.

At the Beckman meeting Shimon Rura showed his blog services application, frassle. I covered some of the blog search tools in a prior post and I will continue to cover these applications as I learn more.

Another bloglet, this one named "Bloglet." You place a subscription form on your site. Your readers subscribe through this form. Every day, readers receive a single email from Bloglet informing them of your site updates

Downloading the Dead (Legally): What’s Next?

I continue to be amazed at the knowledge archives available to us today. A friend recently sent me an e-mail that mentioned he had been listening to Grateful Dead concerts he attended in 1969, obtaining "a closeness to something that mattered" to him then. You can legally downloaded Grateful Dead shows, for non-commercial use, from 1969 and other years at www.gdlive.com

In the late 1890s my great aunt liked to listen to music but the only place that you could hear music was the saloon in her newly-organized town in the Oklahoma Territory. In her day, this place was not appropriate for young single women. Fortunately, she was the first telephone operator in the town. So she called the saloon and left the line open, getting “piped in” background music, while she worked, whenever the band played. There was an added benefit to this technology. She was able to also hear whenever a fight broke out in the saloon, a frequent activity, and notify the local police. These features, piped-in music and location monitoring, have taken on new forms and become disaggregated from her primitive phone lines.

On the document side, I am able to scan 100 year old family pictures, 200 year old illustrations, and 300 year old maps, store them as JPGs, and then manipulate and add them to Word documents. In the mid-70s I typed a rough draft of my doctoral thesis from my handwritten notes, frequently bouncing my new born daughter on my shoulder at the same time. Then I had to give it to a commercial typist for the final copy. In the 1950s in New Orleans, my mother helped support our family income by typing the thesis and papers of Tulane students and professors. This job has been disaggregated and gone the way of blacksmiths.

Post Script: Last night (June 17) I listened to a live digital feed of Cajun music from Tipitina's in New Orleans while I blogged. So it has come full circle from my great aunt.

Web Log Tool Reviews by PC Week

Here are links to reviews of some of the increasing number of web log tools. There are a few others and I will not repeat their messages as the links are below but here is a useful comparison. TypePad was the editor’s choice but Blogger has a new version with upgraded features, scuh as RSS and the ability to add comments, since this review.

Type Pad

Blooger, Blog Spot

Radio Userland

Moveable Type

Xanga

Clash of the Titans in Search: Google vs. Microsoft

Cesar Brea sent me the link to this article, “Google Moves Toward Clash With Microsoft,” that appeared yesterday in the NY Times. I also get this NY Times service in my e-mail box but I rarely get beyond the headlines. I will have to see if I can feed it in through Newsgator.

It appears that the battle over search may move into the battle over the desktop. There was saying as portals were introduced, that “who controls the desktop, has a major advantage in the battle over IT.” Portals were expected to play a key role here and they have to some extent. But then there are few pure play portal players left, as most have been bought by others (e.g. Top Tier, Epicentric).

Who thought that search, perhaps instead of, or in addition to, portals, may be a key factor in this struggle for IT control. IBM has made many initiatives into search with both internal and external efforts. It will be interesting to see how they weight in here.

In perhaps a related move, Google has released a significantly improved version of Blooger that now includes RSS and the ability to make comments as Amanda Watlington, a Blogger user and search expert, pointed out to me. This is a good move as prior to these upgrades, Blogger had the lowest rating in the PC Week evaluations of web log tools. It will be interesting to see if PC Week upgrades its ratings of Blogger.

I have also been amused at the way Google has directed some hits to my blog. For example, my posting on Groove on Location in Albania, got a hit from a Groove search “on location in Albania.” The other hits were mostly singles in Albania wishing to meet other people. For some reason the searcher went to my site and was picked up in my tracking tool. Not sure if they went to all the singles sites first as the tracking tool is not that robust.

More Blog Articles and an Upcoming Talk

I will post these for time to time.

Here is an interesting article on the social history of blogs

And another on the history of blogs from the Columbia School of Journalism

And another on the personal knowledge publishing and the history of blogs by by Sébastien Paquet.

And another on the history of blogs by Anton Zuiker, Park M.A. Fellow in Medical Journalism, Journalist, editor and weblogger

Here is a Fast Company interview with David Weinberger on blogs. He is the author of Small Things Loosely Changed: A Unified Theory of the Web , and most recently, Internet advisor for the Dean campaign.

Another Fast Company article on business blogging – “Blogs were once the domain of angst-ridden teens and doomed presidential candidates. But the likes of Verizon, IBM, Microsoft, and Dr. Pepper are all climbing on the blogwagon.”

Finally, thanks to Cesar Brea here in the Sun policy on blogs and the Groove policy on blogs. For thos in the Boston area, Cesar is giving a talk, May 27 meeting of the Public Relations Society of America's Boston Chapter on the use of blogs for marketing purposes. The talk will be entitled, "Weblogs: Affectation of the Digerati or Mainstream Communications Tool?" I am looking forward to attending.

Peer-to-Peer Learning: A Parable

I am repeating here a comment I made to Kathleen’ Gilroy's comments on egalitarian and peer-to-peer learning in the Open ACS .LRN Forum so it might reach another audience. I agree completely with her points in this forum and especially like the way she has articulated the concept. I want to share an example that occurred in 1997-1998 using the technology of the day. I apologize that this is longer than most postings and I will drop much of the context for this reason.

A large health insurance organization was changing their IT platform to web-based and, more importantly, moving to a proactive customer service business model away from the traditional transaction model. This effort involved learning new technology and new business processes and attitudes. The traditional authoritarian classroom model for training call center workers took 12 weeks and it was then still 9 months before they became fully efficient. Neither of these time frames was acceptable to transform the entire work force so we integrated knowledge management and learning to both drive down classroom time and decrease the learning curve.

So we decided to turn the traditional learning model on its head. We decided that we were not going to train people at all. Instead, we were going to put all the procedures, information, and knowledge to provide customer service and process claims in a KM system available on the job. We made the workers responsible for their own learning but gave them what they needed to do the job. However, we did not just turn them loose on customers. We put them in a two week simulation where they were given claims to process and access to the KM system to support their efforts. Other off-duty employees called in, simulating real customers. A facilitator, not a teacher, was there to answer questions. In order to graduate you needed to use the system to actually do your new job. Those who got through quickly were then asked to help slow learners, encouraging team work.

We also knew that not all the procedures would be documented in the initial efforts and not all those that were would be right. So we created a simple wizard to have employees write their thoughts on procedures they found undocumented as well as their ideas on how to do those that were covered even better. We gave them examples of how to write good procedures, in a help file, so they could better respond to this task. In the simulation they were required to use this wizard to encourage it use on the job. An organization was set up to evaluate and process their suggestions.

According to participant feedback this proved to be the most popular learning program that most participants had ever experienced. At one point when the new overall work IT system was being introduced sometime prior to release, the employees got much more excited about the KM system that we introduced along with the IT system. It even got a standing ovation after a long day of demos and employees said they wanted it right now, even if the overall IT system was not ready.

What excited business leaders was the significant reduction in classroom time and the reduction in learning curve, reducing costs and bringing forward the benefits of the major transformation of the business. What excited the employees was the egalitarian approach Kathleen discussed, although we did not have the benefit of her excellent peer-to-peer framing of the issue at the time. I have seen this occur, in part, in other places but this was the most dramatic. It would be even better in today’s tools but worked fine with the old ones. If you want more on the integration of learning and KM here is an earlier post and here is another on .LRN as well as a link to their website.

Finally, I’m Scanning the Web through Newsgator

I finally set up Newsgator to better keep tabs on the web after looking into RSS a few weeks ago. I may be one of the last to do this so apologizes for sounding like a novice but we all have to learn sometime. Newsgator is an RSS feed service that scans blogs and other sites that you list for it and sends the updates to your Outlook mail box in folders that you set up for each site. I picked it because of the Outlook connection and I am very pleased so far. Newsgator has a one time $29 charge to down load the tool.

There is also AmphetaDesk, a free, cross platform, open-sourced, syndicated news aggregator with many ethusiastic fans according to the web site full of testimonials. Feedreader is another open-source aggregator that supports all major RSS formats. It works under Windows 95 and later versions. In addition, there is Bloglines, another “free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites.”

Radio UserLand, a web publishing and weblog tool, has an integrated news aggregator. Its site says “UserLand built its first news aggregator in 1999. It was the first aggregator built on the now-popular format called RSS, a flavor of XML, which was co-developed by UserLand and Netscape. Click here to read the history of UserLand's news aggregator (by Dave Winer).”

There are also some blog search engines like Technorati and BlogPulse where you can look for stuff. Once you find some good stuff, the best bet to put all worthwhile sites into an aggregator like Newsgator so you do not have to go back on your own again.

A Few More Blogs on KM, Portals, and Blogs

I posted an initial list of articles and blogs on blogs a few weeks ago. I also have a list of KM related sites in the right column of this web log if you scroll down. Here are some more I have found in the past few weeks. Now that it is easier for me to do automated scanning with Newsgator, I am even more interested in useful sites on KM, portals, and blogs to track beyond what I list in my first posting and this one. Any suggested are welcomed.

Blog, Portals and Knowledge Management – sponsored by Myst-Technology

Seb's Open Research - Pointers and thoughts on the evolution of knowledge sharing
and social software, collected by Sébastien Paquet

Ross Mayfield's Blog. He is the CEO of Social Text. Their products include Socialtext Workspace which adapts wikis and weblogs for enterprise productivity and scale.

Kathleen’s Web Log – primarily on learning but also blogs and role of blogs in learning, sponsored by the Otter Group

Andrew Grumet is a technical expert who works with and writes on RSS and other blog related issues

Netlawblog – internet tools for lawyers

Rebecca’s Pocket – by one of the pioneers in blogging

Scripting News – run by Dave Winer – this also is a link to a history of weblogs article which has links to the rest of his stuff

Mathemagenic- by Lilia Efimova, a Russian KM researcher who writes from the Netherlands

Writing for the Web

As I mentioned in another posting, my daughter Sarah Ives, writes for the National Geographic web site and their kid’s web site. She has mentioned some guidelines for web writing on several occasions so I asked her to summarize her main principals. I added a few that I observed from her writing.

Keep your total length less than you would in another format and link to longer versions if necessary. Then the reader knows what they are getting into and wants the greater detail.

Keep your paragraphs shorter than other formats. It is difficult to read long paragraphs on a computer screen.

Keep your writing concise and snappy--it's easy for people with short attention spans to click away from your site.

Use the resources of the web--provide related links to other relevant web sites.

Cite your sources--just because you are not officially publishing something, you still can't claim someone else's work as your own and you need to back up what you claim.

Keep in mind that the whole world can see what you write. Even though your distribution is probably much smaller, the potential for anyone finding your material is present. While you should know your audience and target it, remember that you can get many unintended audiences.

Think about embedding key words if you want to get picked up by search engines for the concepts represented by these words.

Rebecca Blood, one of the pioneers in web logs, has offered some useful tips for web logs than include things to consider when writing for the web in general. She also offers provides ethical guidelines for web log writing. I am interested in any additions and corrections to the above list.

Finding Stuff and Finding Meaning: Made Better with Entrieva

A few years back I was observing the use of a knowledge management system in a call center. Those who used the system had significantly higher scores, as a group, on a number of business metrics (e.g. greater cross selling, fewer repeat calls) than those who did not use the system. In fact, many ardent users said you might as well close down the call center if you took away the KM system since everyone would then be making up their answers to customer questions. This may be a bit extreme. However, despite this obvious benefit, the KM system was underutilized. I asked why and many people said that search was difficult to use and the indexing was not intuitive to the users. Here was a significant and clear value proposition waiting for the introduction of a better taxonomy. The need to invest time in developing a clear taxonomy aligned with the business is something that has been traditionally been overlooked or under valued but it appears to be gaining recognition as the volume of content to sort through continues to rise.

Semio was one of the initial tools devoted to automating aspects of the taxonomy generation process and it continues to get better and more robust under its new name, Entrieva. Last week I had a virtual meeting with Ajay Sravanapudi and Tom Lewis of Entrieva and received a very useful re-introduction to their tool set. Along with categorization or taxonomy generation, its capabilities include: concept extraction from large volumes of unstructured data, discovery of relationships between concepts, notification of interested parties to discoveries, and finally integration of these capabilities with other software tools likes search, portals, etc. The tools can look at the same data from different perspectives. For example, different commands in the US Army use Semio, integrated with Verity, to extract meaning from the same data that is aligned with their specific objectives. The same thing could happen, for example, in commercial lines property casualty insurance where claims, underwriting, marketing, and sales would want different cuts on the same data. Using the same tool set also facilitates the creation of cross-functional enterprise-level categorization to help break down silos within the organization. Firms can even use these tools to make sense out of the content on competitors’ web sites, perhaps discovering insights that the competitor was not even aware of. I would not be surprised if our local hero, Bill Belichick, of the New England Patriots, is using it to analyze the statements and publications of his football rivals to better prepare his game plans. Next, we need the version that looks at game film and "breaks it down."

Early Encryption Technologies: Stories About Managing to Keep Knowledge Hidden Through Quilts

One of my daughters, Sarah Ives, writes for the National Geographic web site. She recently sent me an article, “Did Quilts Hold Codes to the Underground Railroad’ that provides evidence of a very smart way to encrypt messages, using the materials at hand, to prevent them from being accessed by the wrong people. In the book, Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, published in 1998, Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard suggest that slaves in the US South used quilts to convey messages to help other slaves in their move to freedom. For example, a wrench pattern meant that is was time to gather your tools and get prepared to leave. However, there is a bit of controversy over the existence of this practice since it was never written down and only discovered in interviews. There was no quick reference guide to the code because of fear that it would fall into the wrong hands. Instead, it is claimed that generations passed it down verbally.

She also writes for the National Geographic kids’ web site. One recent article, completely unrelated to knowledge management, covered the annual competition to see who can grow the world's largest pumpkin. The current world record belongs to Steve Daletas of Oregon. His pumpkin weighed 1,385 pounds. She wrote that participants mentioned that to get one this size, you need the right seed and the right soil—and a lot of hard work. One of the contestants is quoted as saying, "You have to have a lot of dedication. It takes a real commitment," he said. "It's like a baby. You look at your baby every day." Sarah has given me pointers on writing for the web which I will share in another posting.

Groove on location in Albania

This week I went to visit Tim Brook, my former Renaissance colleague, who is now at Groove. I have heard great things about Groove but had not had the chance to see it. Several Renaissance alums are using Groove and we set up a shared environment for this group in a few minutes, selecting such components as threaded discussions, IM, chat, file repository, web links, pictures, and project management from a menu of options. Thanks to Tim I now see what has generated the interest. Like Lotus Workplace and Microsoft Sharepoint, Groove provides a virtual team workspace but there are some advantages over these tools offered by its peer-to-peer approach. Since the content is simply resident on each team member’s laptop there is no need to set up a server, but then each member does need the tool. File sharing and updates are simplified as Grove automatically transmits only the changes to the shared version of the document. This approach also saves bandwidth and the related download time. In addition, it allows you to work off-line and then update other team members, as well as back-up systems, automatically when you re-connect from anywhere on the Internet. The files you share can include the standard Microsoft Office applications. If needed, you can still keep older versions unchanged on your own machine. You can also work across firewalls and have strong security through encryption at the same time.

While all these features are very beneficial in most environments, they become even more significant in areas where web services are inconsistent and unreliable. Another former Renaissance colleague, Steve Parker at Per4m, is using Groove for work in Albania where access to the web is available but more challenging. He can interact with his team members on a virtual basis and keep a current back up copy of all work at the home office in London. While you could use e-mail to send around these updates it would be much more cumbersome and error prone. Per4m is using Groove for its own work, but they are also implementing Groove-based collaborative workspace for many of their clients.

Putting Dialog into Search: Easy Ask

Plato, one of the early information technology analysts, said that text, made possible by the newly invented phonetic alphabet, was a better means to convey information than the oral tradition. The burden for storage of data and ideas was taken off the human brain and placed on text, freeing the mind for other things, like generating more information and new ideas. Besides, the mind tends to get the details mixed up anyway and text does not change on its own. This new invention made possible many breakthroughs such as modern science and the document management software industry. But Plato also said that true knowledge and understanding only comes through the dialog of viewpoints. This understanding can be as simple as getting an information provider to “understand” what you are looking for. Traditional search engines that rely on text matching miss out on this dialog and offer no ability to understand what you are looking for, putting all the responsibility on you and only offering, at best, guidelines on how you must refine your search if you get too much, too little or the wrong results.

Some of the newest search engines, such as EasyAsk, add linguistic processing to the search process, enabling a dialog between the person asking the question and the search engine offering the answer. I had a chance to see EasyAsk first hand this week with Tim Deren, their Director of Alliances. If you ask a stock brokerage site, for example “what is the charge for a stock trade?” you do not get a series of hits that have that combination of words, like you might on Google, but rather several clarifying questions like, “are you asking about commissions and fees?” which, while they have none of your words, are more like the reply a knowledgeable person might offer. This puts a true dialog, between two parties that comprehend each other, into the search process making it more meaningful and more likely to be successful. EasyAsk had some of its initial successes with eCommerce sites like Land’s End. At eCommerce sites, poor searches cost sales so there is a clear value from improving the search process. Their next generation search process recorded significant imrpovement in business metrics for such sites as the Gap, Talbots, Old Navy, and Ann Taylor. EasyAsk is now providing this capability within the enterprise, extending the capabilities and effectiveness of knowledge management and portal initiatives.

Portal/KM Mix Gains Mind Share

Here is an article, Portal/KM Mix Gains Mind Share , that looks at the role of KM in portals, issues that come into play when KM functionality is added to portals, and covers some of the vendors on both sides of this mix. It points out that portal vendors are adding KM features and the reverse, supporting KM as a possible killer app for portals.

Changing Minds: Ours and Others

Last night I went to a presentation by one of my early mentors, Howard Gardner, who spoke on his new book, Changing Minds. Howard gave me my first job after graduate school doing post-doc research at Harvard Project Zero and he continues to lead that group. Howard is known for his research on the multiple intelligences we bring to most tasks as he discussess in this CIO Magazine interview. As he frequently does with other topics, Howard has assimilated a vast amount of research and presented a useful framework for looking at the issue of changing minds. His coverage ranges from changing the mind of a nation to changing the mind of an individual close to you and even yourself. Since we are often interested in changing the minds of clients and colleagues on issues, I am summarizing the seven levers that he found to impact mind changing. There is not yet enough research yet to suggest which lever to use for which level of audience. Those who are effective at changing minds generally are good at all seven and when they lose their influence it is usually because they slip up on one or two. So this list can serve as a useful checklist of what to include, and be conscious of, as to attempt to change another’s mind.

Reason – is there a logic employed, have the pros and cons been addressed?

Research – is there data to support the position?

Resonance – do we have a good feeling about the person attempting the mind change and/or does the new position feel right to us – can we connect emotionally with the mind changer?

Redescription – do we employ different ways to present the argument that build on each other?

Resources and Rewards – while rewards are useful, if only rewards are involved the result is more likely to be a temporary behavior change and we will revert to the prior position when the reward is withdrawn and not undergo a real mind change

Real World Events – the context for considering the new position, such as the dot com boom and then the subsequent bust, can put it in a better or clearer perspective

Resistances – we need to be aware of, and address, possible obstacles to the mind change

Real mind change is generally a slow process that involves all these factors, even when there is a sudden tipping point that takes us over to the new position.

Partial List of KM/Portal Product Sites

Here is a partial list of KM and portal product providers. It is not an endorsement of any of these products and is certainly incomplete. I am simply putting this in as an easy way to find the links and I will keep adding to it. It is organized by the component that the product provider is most known for, beginning with a general category for those with multiple products in this space.

General: BEA Hummingbird IBM Kana .LRN Microsoft NewKnow Oracle SAP Siebel Sun Sybase

Collaboration: Groove Lotus Workplace Microsoft Sharepoint

Content Management: Documentum FileNet Interwoven Open Text Stellant Vignette

Portal: Plumtree

Taxonomy/Search/Visualization: Autonomy EasyAsk Entrieva(Semio) Tacit TheBrain Verity

Web Logs: Blogger Typepad

Web Log Search: Bloglines Technorati

Using the Balanced Scorecard to measure the impact of KM

Knowledge management appears to be rebounding with increasing adoptions. At least, my totally unscientific sample of recent analysts’ reports, increases in client interest, and informal conversations with product providers suggest this trend. These same sources suggest that this new wave is driven, in part, by KM implementations that are aligned with business processes and measured by business metrics as workforce productivity becomes more top-of-mind for senior executives. The Balanced Scorecard offers an excellent measurement suite to further drive this alignment. Ironically, much of the early Balanced Scorecard work was done by Renaissance Strategy Group (RSG), also one of the initial innovators in knowledge management. RSG was the only niche player in the upper right quadrant on Gartner’s first magic quadrant for knowledge management back in the mid-90s. Some of RSG’s early knowledge management work was driven by Balanced ScoreCard metrics for business processes such as the system at Cigna. Now as knowledge management efforts attempt to align with business processes, it can be useful to apply this same Balanced Scorecard approach to the KM system, itself, as well as the business processes it supports. Here is a high level sample Balanced ScoreCard for a KM system, in the first response to KM case within a panel discussion on knowledge management sponsored by HRProfessional, a publication of the Ontario HR professionals.

Can blogs re-introduce KM to eLearning?

Since the beginning of KM, advocates have talked about the connection between KM and eLearning. However, this seems to be a dream largely unrealized as the connections have been more at the commentary level than the implementation level. One reason is political, as many knowledge management activities come from IT organizations, while most individual learning initiatives come from the HR organizations. In practice, these two functions are often as “siloed” as the business units they support. Another reason is technical, as past tools have not always made the true integration of eLearning with the core knowledge repositories an easy task. Courses are more likely to have knowledge repositories within the course system than linkages to the actual KM system used within the organization. Most existing connections are simple links between KM and learning within portals.

Several years back, during my Accenture tenure, we designed an internal eLearning course on knowledge management that tried to go beyond simple linkage and illustrate the desired connection between KM and learning. As part of this course we connected the eLearning modules with a treaded discussion in the firm’s Notes-based central knowledge management system. Participants were required to post their assignments in this treaded discussion forum that was open to the rest of the firm. For example, participants had to describe possible value propositions for KM within their existing clients. This could begin to generate a database of KM value propositions by industry and function that consultants could use back on the job. Participants were also required to comment on the assignments of at least two of their colleagues to encourage dialog. However, it took some significant heavy lifting by our technology experts to get this integration between the eLearning course and the KM system to work. This connection had some modest success but the approach was not re-used in other courses. However, many other courses, both workshops and eLearning, required participants to use the KM system to complete course requirements but they did not have any technical integration. This latter approach was much easier to implement and certainly provided value to the course and promoted subsequent use of KM.

Now, a new generation of collaboration tools opens up the possibility of greater true integration of KM and eLearning beyond simple linkage. For example, the LRN tool set built on the OpenACS architecture has both web log and RSS capabilities. This provides the platform for many creative instructional design options and has the potential to facilitate a stronger connection between KM and eLearning.

Workspace Portal Realized: SAP NetWeaver

When enterprise software vendors began to purchase portal software firms a few years ago, the move could go either way. The rich features developed through a niche product could get swallowed up in the politics of a large organization and innovation could take a back seat. On the other hand, the niche tool could be integrated into the broader suite of applications to enhance the value and create a whole greater than the sum of the parts (and the associated disconnected vendors).

Perhaps the most noted example of this industry consolidation was SAP's purchase of Top Tier. Now it appears that SAP has taken some interesting strategic directions to follow the latter route with its consolidation of their portal tools with other application suites under the SAP NetWeaver platform. NetWeaver combines SAP's: Web Application Server, Enterprise Portal, Business Information Warehouse, Exchange Infrastructure, Knowledge Management, and Mobile Infrastructure. They offer these tools within a framework that will make strategy consultants proud - People Integration: Portal/Collaboration, Information Integration: Business Intelligence/Knowledge Management, Process Integration: Integration Broker/Business Process Management, Application Platform: J2EE, ABAP, OB and OS Abstraction. See their developer network site for a more comprehensive coverage of the components and this Forrestor commentary for implementation suggestions.

This combination seems to offer a way to more fully achieve the "workspace portal" concept discussed in an earlier posting. I wish we had the NetWeaver tool set when were trying to the implement process-oriented KM described in this posting.

On their web site, SAP provides a series of case studies to illustrate the current benefits of NetWeaver. Most of these cases still rely on cost savings from infrastructure improvements but a few, such as Sasol and Check Point Software, hint at the greater gains that can be made through business process improvement. SAP appears to be moving to more fully embrace these greater gains through industry and process-specific extensions of NetWeaver. I look forward to seeing the results.

Microsoft Office – Adding collaboration to our everyday applications

Last September I received a preview from Microsoft of some of the collaboration capabilities in Microsoft’s new version of Office Solutions. It has since been released with heavy promotion but I have not a chance to see many implementations. However, I think the product will have more staying power than its TV ads. What excited me at the time was the ability to better use the standard Office tools within collaborative workspaces that were formerly reserved for the tools of their big blue rival such as Quickplace. I had seen the power of these Lotus collaborative work spaces in Ryder’s use of Quickplace and SameTime linked to a Notes-based knowledge repository. Ryder created templates for these team workspaces that defined best practices to improve productivity and facilitated such concerns as ISO 9000 compliance, earniing a CIO 100 mention for 2002. Now I could do the similar things with the Office tools I use everyday. I am looking forward to a chance to see what people have done with this expanded tool set. I was pleased to see a nice summary of the capabilities at KMA Insights. I would certainly appreciate hearing of collaborative applications.

Ever-increasing ablity to implement an early vision of KM

Back in 1994 at Renaissance Strategy Group,* we were helping Cigna Insurance implement an early, but limited, version of process-aligned knowledge management. It was in the beginning days of KM and before the term had reached us. Working with Cigna experts, we first re-designed the underwriting process. Property casualty insurance is very knowledge-intensive (e.g. risks at movie theaters are different than those for drag racers). We then re-designed the applications that supported these processes. In this effort we turned the existing relationship of underwriters to IT on its head. They had traditionally viewed underwriting applications as an evil imposed by the central office to check up on them and to be avoided if possible. Instead, we linked application support to the new process we co-designed with the underwriters and they applauded this change. Next, we thought it would be useful to provide connections to the documented expertise on each market niche (again, think movie theaters and drag racers) as well as the identified company experts on these niche markets at each step within the process application. This concept was popular and we created a series of process focused "desktops" for underwriting, claims, and sale support that linked KM with process applications through a Visual Basic front end linked to DB2. Part way though the effort, the term “knowledge management” began to appear in the market press. So we said, “Hey, that’s what we're doing” and changed our descriptions from “performance support” to “knowledge management.”

I was later disappointed to see that some implementations of knowledge management were seen as document repositories disconnected from business processes and viewed as infrastructure support. I think this trend fostered the image of knowledge management as an esoteric concept that was difficult to determine a real value proposition. Part of the reason for this was the lack of tools to support the integration of process applications with knowledge management. Portals has helped and Ovum proposed the “workspace portal” term in the early days of the portal and we adopted the term at Accenture and also called the approach "desktops of the future" but they still required some heavy IT lifting. Now, it seems that SAP is taking its NetWeaver tool set in this process-oriented direction. I am cheering them on and look forward to seeing the results. I will explore their tool set in more detail in another posting soon.

*Renaissance has passed on but many of the alumni are working in the industry. Real Time Strategy is one example in the US, Per4m is one in the UK, and the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative carries on the BSC work.

SNA: Not to be confused with SNA

I have been exchanging thoughts with Cesar Brea on social networking and forwarded an article questioning the value of public social network applications like LinkedIn that I received from another friend. He agreed with the article and posted a blog which included the following along with some good observations.

He said: This morning I got the following email from the service:

"Dear Cesar,
As more professionals are actively adopting LinkedIn, you may have noticed that you are also getting more emails from people inviting you to be their connection. While this is the easiest way to build your network and a testament to your reputation as a professional, we recommend you only accept invitations from people you know and who you are willing and able to recommend to other professionals you know. To prioritize your inbox and reduce the number of invitation messages you receive, you now have the option of limiting incoming invitations to those coming from people who you already have in your address book. Turn on invitation blocking..."

Now I must have become a "social isolate" because LinkedIn did not send me the e-mail nor have I been hounded by thousands seeking to be added to my LinkedIn account. But then I stopped using the service after the first few days I made the transition to free agency last month. It initially seemed a good way to network and re-connect with people I had not spoken to recently. The novelty quickly wore off and there was only a limited sub-set of my connections I wanted to make public anyway. I resorted to e-mail to continue my networking and quickly forgot about the networking tool. In fact I had even e-mailed everyone I invited to be “linked-in” before sending them the LinkedIn invitation. It only seemed more personal and the polite thing to do. Now in fairness to LinkedIn there is one useful application that another friend pointed out. She uses it to find out who her contacts know that she did not know they knew. The she asks them to make an introduction. This makes sense and is potential value added

Finally getting to the title of this posting, I do think there is a great potential in social network analysis as I said in my own posting below but this is a different animal. I am concerned that it might get tarred by having the same acronym as social network applications.

Stories and Organizational Learning

“Sometime reality is too complex. Fiction gives it form.” Jean Luc Godard

Historically, stories have played a key role in transferring knowledge; the epic poems and ancient parables are evidence of this ageless capability. Research into great leaders suggests that a leader who truly enables change is one who creates a story; a vision that significantly affects the thoughts, behaviors and feelings of a large number of people who then become followers (Gardner & Laskin, 1995). Before text was invented, stories were the main form of knowledge recording and sharing, as the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic (Havelock, 1976). Stories provided the organizing framework for both the recorders and the receivers of knowledge. With the advent of text and storage devices such as clay tablets and papyrus, other forms of documentation became possible and stories went underground in certain contexts such as business. But stories did not lose all their power to move people and the printing press made them scalable. For example, many historians have argued that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was more instrumental in convincing the people of the northern United States of the evils of slavery than the more abstract appeals to morality by contemporary politicians. Stowe was referred to as the old lady who started the Civil War. Within business however, although stories have remained important in informal knowledge transfer, like social networking, stories have not been fully recognized for their value and have not been used to achieve maximum benefit.

While stories can be simple, they also require a broad bandwidth to convey their context and richness. Information systems traditionally focused on data. Now, with continuing increases in bandwidth and other advances, corporate stories could become more recognized as a major source of organizational learning able to be managed through technology. Stories could be managed, evaluated, documented and made accessible to the right people to increase their effectiveness. A U.S. study found that a vast majority of employees felt they gained most of their work-related knowledge by chance from informal conversations, mostly stories, and not from procedure manuals or formal training (Wensley, 1998). There seems a contradiction here that could benefit from recognition. Here is a link to more detailed discussion.

Stephen Denning (2001) is the most recognized business story teller and he writes a complement to Goddard: “Storytelling doesn’t replace analytical thinking. It supplements it by enabling us to imagine new perspectives and new worlds, and is ideally suited to communicating change and stimulating innovation.”

Denning, S. (2001) The springboard: How storytelling ignites actions in knowledge-era organizations. Boston: Butterworth Heinemann.

Gardner, H., & Laskin, E. (1995) Leading minds: An anatomy of leadership. New York: Basic Books

Havelock, E., (1976) Origins of Western Literacy. Toronto: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education Press

Roud, R. (1967) Goddard. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press..

Wensley, A. (1998) The value of story telling. Knowledge and Process Management, 5, 1, 1-2.

Social Networking in NYC

A few weeks ago I attended a session of KM Cluster in New York at the Deloitte office near Wall Street. KM Cluster is run by John Maloney of Colabria as a collaborative community that sponsors events and shares information on KM. It started on the West Coast and is now growing in the US and internationally. The theme of this meeting was social networks, a topic whose importance for organizations is hopefully becoming more recognized. Business 2.0 named Social Network Analysis (SNA) the "Technology of the Year" in November 2003. I have been convinced of its importance for years since every job I have ever gotten came from a personal connection, starting with watering a local fraternity lawn over the summer when I was ten, working at a summer camp as a teenager, operating a wind mill right out of college, and so on down to the present day.

Rob Cross of the University of Virginia, one of the speakers has a new book, Hidden Power of Social Networks (Harvard Business School Press) with the subtitle – Understanding How Work Really Gets Done in Organizations. He writes in a description of this book:

“In today’s flatter organizations, productivity and efficiency demand effective collaboration within and across functional, physical, and hierarchical boundaries. Though often concerned with external relationships, executives generally pay little attention to assessing and supporting linkages among employees within their own organizations. These “invisible” social networks don’t appear on any formal organizational chart—yet significantly affect performance and innovation.”

Rob’s talk, and his book, cover very useful ways to better understand these relationships. It is nice to see new developments in the more tacit side of knowledge management after all the work pushing the more explicit side through the new content management tools. Peter Gloor’s work, commented on earlier is another excellent example.

Valdis Krebs was another speaker with extensive research and practical applications of social network analysis. His site, orgnet.com, provides both software and services and offers a good introduction to the possibilities. I was pleased to see one of his studies recently quoted in a review of Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack (Boston Globe May 2, 2004). The review quoted a study by Valdis that found that of all the political books hitting the best seller charts, few actually gain audiences across the broad political spectrum outside of their niche. While this result is not surprising, it is refreshing to see social network analysis tools turned on the issue.

QUESTIONS: While I am convinced of its value, SNA is one of those things that some business leaders might not want to admit is important and yet everyone will want to see the results of a social network analysis on their group. I think SNA will face the same challenges that other "soft" solutions have encountered. There will be a small core of true believers, I include myself in this camp, who like innovative and intellectually interesting solutions to business issues. The most successful proponents will sell SNA on business value but it will, I fear, be an uphill battle with many business buyers. How can SNA best overcome this challenge?

Navigating the IT/HR turf wars over KM

Knowledge management comes primarily out of two disciplines, each with its own mental model: human resources and "learning" knowledge on one hand, and information systems and "storing" knowledge on the other. To no surprise, it appears that the people specialists think in terms of getting people to understand and use the knowledge, while the technologists focus on the “stuff" (the bits and bytes, the knowledge itself). This sets up conflicts which can impede successful KM implementations. A recent article in Intelligent KM discusses the issue and provides examples of success and failure in the battle over controlling the access and use of an organization’s knowledge.

Getting your eLearning and KM tools for free (almost)

Cesar Brea recently introduced me to an open source elearning and KM tool - .LRN - first developed at MIT and now used by a number of educational institutions, as well as non-profit and for-profit organizations. It supports the integration of learning and KM through a suite of tools that include a portal, course management, learning management, on-line communities, and content management. Included in the features is support for blogs with full RSS capability, blogger API support, and formatted text entry. The learning and KM tools are built on Open ACS or Open Architecture Community System used in Siemens knowledge management application, Sharenet. Cesar serves on the executive board for .LRN and he describes a number of successful applications in a recent blog. While this takes out some important costs of doing KM and elearning, I feel obligated to add that if over half the cost of a KM or elearning implementation is spent on tools, the project is doomed to failure. With this disclaimer, .LRN offers a useful alternative to spending money for a significant portion of implementation costs, especially for educational institutions and it has some great features at any price. Here is a link to the .LRN Forum within the Open ACS Community which lists 7541 members.

Aligning KM with enterprise transformation

Knowledge management can help drive enterprise transformation when it is aligned with specific business processes and their operational strategies as Tom Davenport wrote in a CIO Magazine commentary. Ryder implemented knowledge management in 2000 to support its sales force and consulting professionals as it made a transition to more knowledge intense services such as linguistics outsourcing and supply chain and logistics consulting. This transformation required a major shift in the culture and focus of the organization as it sold off its retail truck leasing and its well known yellow trucks. In fact, Ryder had to issue a disclaimer when one of the yellow Ryder trucks was on newpaper covers across the US hauling votes up to the Florida capital to be recounted in the last Presidential election. Their efforts in knowledge management continued past 2000 and the focus expanded to other business operations. Ryder received mention as one of the CIO 100 for 2002 for developing a KM center that links sales and marketing with operations and supply chain management. An article in Knowledge Management Magazine summarizes their efforts. Another summary is found here.

Interesting SNA tool at MIT

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is another potential candidate for TBNT - see Social Networking in NYC. I had the pleasure of spending time last month with Peter Gloor of MIT Sloan CCS and the Dartmouth Tuck School. Peter is the former head of the eCommerce practice for Deloitte in Europe. He and his colleagues at MIT/Tuck have developed an open source SNA tool. You can find and download it at ickn.org. The tool analyses social networks by looking at e-mail patterns. It can be used to understand the communication patterns within work groups and others who communicate through e-mail. Both functional and dysfunctional patterns can be determined and this analysis can provide guidance for corrective action to increase work group productivity. Peter and his colleagues are especially interested in the use of SNA to promote innovation.

Is RSS TNBT?

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a standard for publishing regular updates to web based content. Some are saying it is The Next Big Thing on the web. It is used by many large sites (e.g. BBC News Headlines) and smaller blogs (e.g. short and sweet movie reviews) on the web. It allows for the aggregation of updates to web sites, greatly reducing the time and effort to check favorite sites or web logs and it allows these sites more effective distribution of new content. As a user you can go to an RSS feed reader for an aggregation of all updates to all your favorite web sites and blogs without having to go to each one or getting numerous updates through e-mail cluttering up your mail box. RSS feeds are searchable and can help sites gain higher readership. A good short summary of RSS is provided at the feedburner.com site. FeedBurner is a service that "allows publishers who already have RSS Feeds to improve their understanding of and relationship with their syndication audience."

Some other recent articles on RSS that are found on the Feedburner sites include:

Aggregators Attack Info Overload
Ryan Singel Wired

Welcome to the 'new' Web, same as the old 'old Web
Christine Boese CNN Headline News

QUESTIONS: Will RSS live up to its hype? What are its best practical business applications beyond the basic benefit of more efficient web information access? Is that enough?

Some good articles on blogs and blogs on blogs

I think that blogs will find many uses within organizations and supplement portal and knowledge management efforts. I am starting to collect good articles on blogs and will post more from time to time, along with blogs of others I have found interesting. Here a few for now:

Technofile: Blogging for Business
Anne Stuart Inc.com

Small Business Blogging
Dan Bricklin

Ten Tips for a Better Weblog
Rebecca Blood

also the Groove blog policy

Description of the Harvard Law School Blog Community
Anne Stuart Harvard magazine

I found these two at jackvinson.com, a site with a blog that covers knowledge management and other topics.

Internal Corporate Blogging
Richard McManus

Movable Type for Policies and Procedures
D. Keith Robinson

Another good blog which covers blogs and other technology trends run by Cesar Brea

Here is one I recently discovered run by David French of MyST Technology - Blogs, Portals, and Knowledge Management

Finally, when all this technology gets tiring here is a good blog on movies run by my former Accenture colleague, Don Chartier who is now at SAP working on market development for NetWeaver.

QUESTIONS: I strongly feel there are great business problems lurking out there for blogs to address but this is more intuition on my part at the moment. I started this blog as an experiment to learn more about them. It is already useful for me as a means to keep track of my thoughts and aggregate links to key sources. That is sufficient for me to continue but the promise is a better means for communication, collaboration, and marketing. I am very interested in the experiences of others.

Is KM the Killer App for Portals?

Despite the past difficulties, knowledge management is now enjoying a resurgence thanks in part to portals. The extended platform provided by portals and other technology advances offers an improved vehicle for knowledge management. The other resurgence factor is that organizations are better aligning knowledge management to specific business goals. Having cut costs over the last several years, they want to increase the productivity of their downsized workforces. Knowledge management provides an answer, as it is no longer acceptable to tolerate rampant inefficiencies in accessing the information, knowledge, and expertise to accomplish a task. The alignment of knowledge management with specific business processes to overcome these inefficiencies provides the value. This same alignment can also make the benefits portals offer tangible to the organization. Here is a Portals Magazine article which explores this opportunity for portals.