MiramarMike: Blog

Somebody out in the blogging world (I will find it later) recently said that whilst they now have greater amounts information coming to them via this computer-thingy and they feel that they know a lot more than before it's at a much shallower level. I can go with that. With my online desktop ( Netvibes ) it's so easy to subscribe to RSS feeds that I feel I have a plethora of headlines appearing before me. But that's just it, they're headlines and even when I click to read the article I'm left at the end of the day feeling I haven't really got to the bottom of stuff. And I think it's because I am reading, nearly every "news" item I go to is text based. With the wireless and televisual presentations of the news I receive sooo much more than just the words. The moving picture, of course, tells so much more than my Web based 1,000 words but the spoken expression imparts more than the words being used - the "music" behind the words supply inf

From Knowledge-at-work: Capturing corporate memory here's a typical list of issues organisations are faced with (tell me your company is any different): personal contacts, passage talk, and informal communication no longer work. Our tacit knowledge is not openly visible, we are re-inventing key stuff, vital lessons learned are falling through the cracks and new insights are not being effectively integrated. We find new employees starting from scratch with little access to corporate lore, no way to ask the right questions or find the people who may 'know'. we have key insights locked in e-mail threads, useful ppt presentations and Word docs hidden on multiple hard drives, process dos and don'ts that are not updated, useful heuristics that walk with staff turnover, business intelligence that is gathered but not sifted, collated or dispersed, vendor and customer feedback that gets lost or never relayed. The "how I work with this" has a lot to do with culture of

I only ever want to see stuff that's relevant to me at the time I ask for it and one of the main ways I find stuff is by searching and, like most, I use Google to search. It's pretty good to know that 70% of their efforts and resources go into making search results more relevant - the better they are the better they can generate revenue (think better targetting of ads and the like). And this is an example of totally relevant results. Situation : I wanted to find the Burger King website for a link in a previous post. I am writing this in New Zealand and that's about all they knew about me (I wasn't logged in so they didn't know who I was). Search : Google (defaulted to the NZ site for me) using "Burger King" http://www.google.co.nz/search?q=burger+king&btnG=Search&hs=R3U&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial Results : Totally relevant! First of all I get the three main Burger King sites, BK International,

NZKM entry: http://www.nzkm.net/communities/chch/mike-riversdale-on-blogging What is KM? Two aspects: Knowledge - Explicit - Tacit Flow - People - Communities (“networks”) All about nurturing people because ‘knowledge growth’ is a social experience requiring exchange and interaction. Knowledge is something that is in constant transition and needs to be questioned, tested and discussed but not controlled. Whilst software is an enabler of this social interaction it is to be remembered that they are ‘only’ tools aiding and enhancing this fundamental. Resources http://www.google.com/search?q=define:Knowledge+management What is Blogging? A weblog (usually shortened to blog, but occasionally spelled web log) is a web-based publication consisting primarily of periodic articles (normally in reverse chronological order). KM specific blogs are sometimes referred to as k-logs – ick! News ‘syndication’ (RSS) There is some discussion as to what RSS stands for, but the majority plump for 'Rea

Interesting comment from David Gurteen (one of the KM "gurus") regarding Wikipedia and rewards for knowledge sharing . I'm not sure that Wikipedia doesn't reward contributions - it may not do it in an obvious way (recognition etc) but I think it rewards one by making it easy ("We will do our best to remove technical hurdles because we like you"), being open (it's saying, "I trust you"), instantly showing you your contribution and not hiding it a black hole ("Thanks, and here it is") and connecting people via easy to make links ("You mentioned XXX and there's someone else in the world that thinks about that"). All fluffy and fuzzy rewards but, I believe, the ones that we all truly appreciate.

Work In Progress!! - leave a commentif you can expand on this Currently there is heated debate and quite a large amount of hair pulling (from both camps) at my workplace over how ICT people 'should' operate within the business. There is essentially, to my mind, the following two pure paradigms at loggerheads: Business driven (BD) Technology driven (TD) No-one is able to put their hand up to being totally (100%) on one side of the fence or the other ... but most of us ICT people tend to come to work leaning heavily one way or the other. And so you know where I come from, I have a (mostly) "Business driven" (BD) approach to the work world - in fact, it's probably something that I do outside as well, simply replace "business" with "Customer", "Client" or even "Person". Whilst both of these approaches interact within the culture of the organisation the BD approach is more involved ('connected', 'integral', '