Category Archives: Knowledge Management

Semantic Islands

Posted on by David

From :Column Two: Death of keywords:

To me, this really highlights the challenges (futility?) of the so-called “semantic web”, where everything describes itself, cross-linking happens automatically and accurately, and search engines only return useful results…

If we can’t get even simple keywords tags to work in practice, what hope is there for RDF, and the rest?

My own opinion is that any acitivity or tool that requires consistent, similar, behaviors across the entire Web (such as accurate keywording of web pages) will not happen.

However, that doesn’t mean the keyword metatag is dead. It can still be an effective tool for a collection of content whose authors/owners are willing to invest time and effort into for accurate searching and indexing. The Web might evolve into small, organized, clusters of content that create semantic islands in a chaotic sea.

Seb's Exploration of Personal KM in Research

Posted on by David

Seb’s Open Research has published Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research.

In this document, I analyze an emerging form of knowledge sharing that I call personal knowledge publishing. Personal knowledge publishing has its roots in a practice known as “weblogging” that has been rapidly spreading on the World Wide Web over the last three years. It is a new form of communication that many expect will change the way people work and collaborate, especially in areas where knowledge and innovation play an important role.

I’ve scanned the article and it looks like a very detailed and thoughtful piece on what weblogs are and how they can assist in academic research. I’ll definitely be going back for a more thorough read.

Rick Klau Starts a Klog Pilot

Posted on by David

From tins ::: Rick Klau’s weblog:

We’re kicking off a k-log initiative at my company tomorrow. I’ve identified a dozen people to serve as guinea pigs. IT installs the software tomorrow, and they’ll take a few days to get familiar with the software. Rather than bombard them with any formal training right away, I want them to be comfortable with what’s on the screen – at least that way they’ll figure out what questions they want to ask.

Good luck with the trial! I’m looking forward to reading about how it goes for them.

The Power of Facets

Posted on by David

(Originally posted on the XFML Yahoo! Group.)

The true power of faceted metadata, imho, is that you can triangulate on resources by searching with terms from multiple facets.

Let’s assume I have a thesaurus of communication disorders. One facet might be “Disorders”. By picking a term within Disorders, say ‘Dysphagia’, I can identify resoruces related to that particular disorder. However, what if I was only interested in that disorder as it affects newborn children? I could use an “Age” facet and add the ‘Newborn’ term from that facet to my search criteria. That will then help me narrow further. Let’s add a “Geography” facet and select ‘North America’. Now we have results for ‘Newborns’ in ‘North America’ that have ‘Dysphagia’. This requires accurate indexing of material to be effective.

That is what I think the biggest advantage of faceted metadata rather than just a list of keywords. The Flamenco project is a good example of how it might look in a deployed web site.

MIT OpenCourseWare Open

Posted on by David

The MIT OpenCourseWare web site debuted this morning.

I think this is great for MIT and hope more universities follow suit. Prospective students to the univesity can get an excellent idea of just what the courses are about, colleagues can critique each other’s course structure or borrow resources and methods, and the Internet public can use them as a resource and refernce that is strongly branded as MIT.

But might they not get as many students if they give away all this information? Why become a formal university student when you can get the knowledge on their web site? Well, you can only truly get the knowledge by interacting with the professor and other studnets via the course. Also, a degree from MIT still looks better than ‘I read all the MIT course notes online’.

MIT wants butts in lecture seats and lab rooms to generate revenue. Giving away this course information will draw more students than they might have had otherwise while improving their teaching and research.

Why KM Now

Posted on by David

From thought?horizon (via McGee):

I think knowledge management’s prominence has deeper roots in an individual’s need to learn at this point in history. People are finding they need to become more reliant and old ways don’t serve them any more. We are no longer content to take what the boss gives us and seek greater choice. We are starting to see the need to learn again and that is best done in a community. Knowledge sharing/management is a community based activity.

This illustrates the great opportunity that professional societies and associations have right now: to reengage their memberships by facilitating learning and knowledge sharing among the members.

As the rest of the post above goes on to say, this is nothing new. See the quote below from Principles of Association Management, by Henry Ernstthal:

Professional societies can trace their roots back to the late Renaissance, when scientific societies were formed to collect and disseminate knowledge. The earliest of these societies, the Academia Secretorum Naturai of Naples, was organized in 1560. (page 5)

Associations are a manifestation of the desire to share knowledge among individuals within a profession or discipline.

Fostering Change Without Getting Fired

Posted on by David

I found this post over on Steven Vore’s Weblog:

Sean Murphy in reply to Corporate Culture-Shifting: “Changing the culture is something I am battling with right now. We are trying to implement a Knowledge Centered Support environment, where everyone collaborates and shares for the benefit of the team. On a good day, I get comments like “They shoot collaborators, don’t they?”, but most often I feel like the message is treated as white noise. Upper management has not really bought into making the culture shift because they keep whipping the operational managers to meet numbers. How is it possible to get the shift to happen? It makes logical sense to a lot of use, but change is scary and seems like more effort will be required. I would love to hear from others on how they have effectively engineered change in their culture in a timely manner. Thanks.”

It’s a common refrain coming from the front lines. Suggestions, fellow culture-changers?

You may want to check out Tempered Radicals by Debra Meyerson. She writes about the experiences of people who have decided to create change within a work place that doesn’t match their values rather than leave the company. She focuses mostly on creating change on issues such as diversity, fair-trade products, family-friendly work hours, etc. However, I think the strategies that she discusses are just as valid and useful for trying to move an organization towards a more knowledge-based organizational culture.

Her key themes are: leading by example, small early wins, turning threats into change opportunities, and taking a long view. No quick fixes, I’m afraid.

The Non-writer Blog

Posted on by David

Phil Wolff has lots of ideas on how to enable non-writers to engage in and benefit from blog-like activity. He has grouped them in three general areas: Capture experiences and thoughts differently, Prompt with Structure, and Enterprise system streaming.

Definitely worth checking out.

We are in the process of designing a new intranet for our office and one of things I want to explore is creating a blog-like view (reverse chronological order) of activities, documents, meetings, etc. so that an employee can capture a history of their work even if they are not a strong writer. This would be in addition to the normal writing of entries. Phil’s stuff provides a lot of possibilities to explore.

I’ll be posting more information here for feedback as we get a design fleshed out.

Blog Blockers

Posted on by David

Phil Wolff explores why people don’t like to write (weblogs in particular). He gives a great synopsis of the challenges others have encountered in deploying weblogs within a company.

Most of this maps to our limited experience as well. Our deployment is still small and in the pilot stage. Of the two teams using them, the most active group of bloggers are those on our web staff. Many of us are in what is probably the weblog sweet-spot: web technologists/writers/designers with professional writing experience and/or liberal arts education. Outside of our unit there are only a few people who might fall under that description.

Interestingly, our team moved from a single, multi-author, team blog to individual blogs within a couple weeks. Some felt what they wanted to write about was too off topic for a team blog (although perfectly on topic for their job within the organization) and others thought the volume of posts was such that readers could miss important messages within the overall news. So, we each have our individual blogs now while still posting to our team blog for the messages we want our staff to see if they just want to keep up with our overall work.

The other group in our office with a team blog has remained with the multi-author model and have a much lower posting rate. They are technology folks but typically do not have writing in their background.

What I’m wondering: if your organization is team based, would a multi-author blog for that team provide a more comfortable environment for inexperienced writers to post than an individual weblog? This may not be the right lesson to pull from our experience since it is so early but there could be some validity to it.

Another thought. I’ve heard Marcus Buckingham speak twice in the last year (same speech word-for-word). He is author of ‘First, Break All the Rules’ and ‘Now Discover Your Stengths’. His core message is to focus on developing and rewarding your employees’ strengths and manage around their weaknesses. This is opposed to the usual model of identifying and remediating their weak areas and spending five minutes on what they do well. Perhaps we should enable the writers to write and find another way for the others.