Knowledge Musings

TRASH Your Emails!

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:26:00 +0000

OK – sometimes that how we feel, but as we see later TRASH is an acronym for how to process your emails.

Sorry for the lapse in keeping this blog up to date, but I have been rather busy with client assignments recently. Even though consideration of ECM (enterprise content management) systems is a core topic, everyone understands that this a strategic investment requiring significant investment. However, one topic always comes up as a relatively quick win these days – and that is of email management.

Essentially, if people follow good practice guidelines for email they can improve their personal productivity as well as making the recipients of their email more receptive and productive. It is reckoned that every (non-spam) email send is read by an average of seven people. Therefore, a bit of planning at the front-end by the sender can create efficiencies at the back-end by the recipient. Some experts estimate that good practice throughout an organisation can save each person 30-45 minutes a day in reducing the amount of time spent managing email.

In outline there are five areas to tackle and three prongs of attack:

1. Thinking about what you are trying to communicate and whether email is the best method.

2. Composing your email – there is lots of guidance on this aspect, e.g. on subject headings, structure, clarity

3. Sending your email – targeting it appropriately

4. Processing your incoming emails – this is where you TRASH them. A key point is to batch your processing (don’t be distracted by the little “you have a new email” pop-up). There are really only five things you can do with an incoming email (some people say four as you’ll see below):

T – Trash it – read (or skim) and delete

R – Redirect – forward it to someone else to deal with

A – Act – process it (e.g. reply) there and then

S – Save – for future reference

H – Hold – for processing it in future

(though every email you hold is an email you will have to process twice, so this action is often eliminated).

5. Managing the information - if emails have lasting value, then they should be filed somewhere, either in well organized personal email folder or perhaps in your organization's ECM system; either way you'll need a good search tool for efficient retrieval.

The three prongs of attack are:

1. Process and Protocols – having set procedures for handling and filing emails; protocols could for example be team specific e.g. use of subject line, action needed by those cc:ed, how to allocate priorities.

2. Technology – especially the use of rules and filters; for example I don’t have a single inbox but 20 in-folders where my rules pre-sort emails into these folders based on sender and subject contents.

3. Good practice – adopting ways of using emails that suit your preferences and personality, and also that others can expect.

There’s no need to labour these points here. There are plenty of useful sources on the internet. While you are reading this website have a look at our Effective Email Guide that I wrote 10 years ago and which has generally stood the test of time. Here are some additional more recent sources:

Emailogic – an email consultancy company whose website including 10 top tips See www.emailogic.com
Mesmo – some useful articles and tips by Monica Seeley www.mesmo.co.uk
Peter Kenworthy – see his resources section at www.email-help.co.uk
Stirling University – a good example of a practical guide for use within an organization www.rec-man.stir.ac.uk/documents/ManagingEmail-GoodPracticeGuidancev3.pdf

Voting for Knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 09 May 2008 12:58:00 +0000

We've recently had local elections in England. That got me thinking about voting and knowledge. In Britain's first 'past the post' system you weigh up what you know about the candidates, but since you can't vote on each issue, you consider them and their parties in the round. What do they stand for? What are their core principles? Forearmed with knowledge about voter intentions (opinion polls) you might resort to tactical voting, where you don't vote for the person whose views most closely match your own, but since they are unlikely to win, you cast your vote for someone else who with additional votes from people like yourself can beat an opponent whom you would rather lose.

Voting in some respects is like other decisions that individuals and managers make day-in day-out. You assess the situation, pooling knowledge from many perspectives, then go through a mental process of evaluating the plusses and minusses of various options. Sometimes this can be a lonely decision: I have to reduce headcount, so who do I fire? If I bid too high a price, I lose the opportunity to make money. If I bid too low, I lose money anyway.

Within organisations, there is often something akin to collective decision-making. Although the chairman may make the final choice, he or she may ask for a show of hands on how to tackle an issue. There are groupware decision support systems that let users vote on various options. When prioritising options in a KM action plan, I often give a group of senior executives 3 votes each which they allocate however they please to the 10 or so options available. In these situations you are not just averaging knowledge, you are assessing the collective will and commitment to one choice or another.

Now consider the case of where the choice of decision should be factual rather than judgemental. A party of three people on a trek come to a junction. One way leads down to base, the other into a wilderness. They decide to vote which direction to take. The person who actually knows the way out is outvoted 2:1. There is also the classic case in recent British history where prime minister Margaret Thatcher was accused of being out of step with her 12 European counterparts. Her response was that she was going in the right direction and that they were all wrong. Only in hindsight or with a deeper delving into the situation is the right choice finally clear - even then you can rationalise your original choice based on the knowledge available to you at the time.

What conclusions can we draw from these situations?

decisions may improve with better knowledge but a vote is not necessarily a reflection of the validity of the knowledge on which it is based
collective decisions provide a greater pooling of knowledge - however, in many situations they tend to converge on the most conservative and conventional thinking - not too good for breakthrough innovations
voting for something is a demonstration of your commitment; therefore even if the resultant decision is not necessarily the best, it may well do better because more people are committed to its succeed
on the other hand those whose votes were not for the resultant decision might feel overriden or their views ignored and therefore not fully committed to something they did not vote for
voting may provide the initial direction of travel, but every good practitioner should continually review progress, make micro-decisions along the way, and - although painful - perhaps admit that the wrong initial decision was made, go back and take an alternative course.

So should you vote on knowledge? You may feel the need to adopt voting so that if things go wrong there is collective blame. However, the smart manager will not offer colleagues such simplistic A or B choices (unlike political elections). He or she will work to explore why there are differences - probing more deeply to get from surface knowledge to fuller understanding and insights, suggesting other options, teasing out assumptions. He or she may stimulate further discussion and open up new opportunities by planting what seem like outrageous ideas (a good way of getting away from conventional complaceny and into innovation mode).

In other words, decisions based on consensus, deep knowledge, smarts and weight of argument, rather than on weight of ballot papers.

Spring clean your knowledge

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 13:27:00 +0000

Spring (supposedly) is on its way. Now is a good time to reflect on what knowledge and information you hoard and what you can safely dispose of. What prompted me to write this piece was an article I wrote on knowledge auditing, that has been reprinted on KnowledgeBoard under the title Cleaning Out The KM Closet. Complete with a picture of a broom, it prefaces the article by pointing out that organizations often overlook what knowledge and information they already hold. It's not the heading I would have given the article, but it did prompt me to think about spring cleaning my knowledge!

First, let me say that I'm pleased that KnowledgeBoard regular emails have started again, under the new editorship of Louise Druce. It really is one of the best KM portals and their emails help keep you informed of developments - beyond the technical promotions that many so-called KM websites pump out.

Coming back to auditing, several that I have carried out typically reveal two contrary situations:

duplication of information - how many customer databases does your organization hold?
key information that people need - but which isn't there or difficult to find.

Information is continually being created. As volumes grow, it becomes increasingly costly (in time and resources) to store and retrieve efficiently. When we create a document, do we think through the lifetime ramifications - how long it should be kept, when it should be reviewed or disposed of. We may give it cursory attention, but when the time comes we're usually too busy doing something new.

Like many people, my email files have grown and grown. I have many emails that are more than 10 years old. I do occasionally go through a folder or two, keeping only ones that may be relevant in future (it's amazing how management approaches I used 20 years old have stood the test of time!). An alternative strategy would be to do a wholesale deletion of email folders relating to completed projects, ideas that never got off the ground, past visits etc. This would certainly improve the 'feel good' factor, until a day or two later someone asks a question and you knew you had just what was needed only it was dumped.

So is there anything we can learn from physical spring cleaning? Have a look at others tips and see how you might adapt to your office/PC environment - see Tips for Spring Cleaning and Ten Spring Cleaning and Organizing Tips. Here are some things to try:

Be tidy in the first place - think logically about where things should be kept
Distinguish work in progress from final results - I treat many emails as transient and do not tag them; at a project milestone I file tagged emails
Things can only go in three piles - I use it (keep it), I never use it (sell, give away or destroy), I'm not sure (I'm unlikely to use it but it may have historical value or there may be legal or social ramifications if I don't preserve it)
If you don't want to make a bad decision, then try putting it in the attic (a temporary archive file); then you can delete it after a few years anything you haven't retrieved, or when you depart, someone will ditch it for you!
Don't generate so much rubbish in the first place!

The big question is - do you do a room (file) at a time, or go the whole hog and do everything together? A lot depends on personal preference. Either way, it does take time, so you should allow for it, either 10-15 minutes a day, or take a few days out. As the Wikipedia entry on spring cleaning says "a person who gets their affairs in order before an audit or inspection could be said to be doing some spring cleaning." A knowledge audit should be the spur to do this housekeeping.

What are your tips for keeping your office and online files tidy this Spring?

T5 Knowledge Holes

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 08:12:00 +0000

I'm currently involved with a couple of projects where a crying need is for reliable consistent information; where people can be assured that they are accessing the most up to date and authoritative version.

Think of the poor people at Terminal 5 (T5) at London Heathrow airport who lack such information (my daughter is travelling out of there tonight, so I have a personal interest). One person on the radio this morning, having come early to get a replacement flight for one that was cancelled yesterday, said that on arrival this morning (where the indicator boards now seem to use the euphemism "Inquire Airline" rather than "Cancelled") had to phone her destination (Glasgow) to find what was going on.

I recall my travelling days. If you knew at the outset that a flight was delayed 4 hours, you could make other arrangements. But too often it was "more information in an hour". It's the same on any public system. If information provision is poor or misleading, rumours spread, people get frustrated and it does nothing for customer service "I will never fly BA again - ever" said the lady this morning. I more or less made that vow about five years ago, when what was once an excellent airline seemed to lose the plot, thinking they could fleece business people for fares several times that of economy, but where the basic standards were declining. After all, the front end (business and first class) end of the plane always lands a few seconds later than the back end anyway!

And travel is not the only domain where lack of, misleading or inconsistent information upsets customers. Most of us can think of situations where customer-facing staff give out factually wrong information or give out information with a "take it or leave it" attitude.

Therefore up to date and reliable information should be at the heart of customer service:

Don't deny the situation (the Heathrow website at the time of writing prominently displays terminal 5 and the pleasures and comfort of the new terminal; even its hot news is dated 8th January!)
Think: what does the customer need to know when things go wrong
Customers want certainties, not maybes; to know about alternatives, and even get help with remedial measure (booked on a non-BA connecting flight last year that got cancelled, the airline automatically rebooked us on a rival flight while we were still in the air on our first leg)
Best deliver bad news and improve on it, rather than keep making incremental promises that cannot be kept (I was delighted when the new sofa that was going to take another month arrived within two weeks)
Ensure that those with the authoritative information have good channels to get the information to customers and customer-facing staff (you don't want your staff saying "you know as much as I do")
Bring back scenario planning - it's what we used to do quite a lot of; "what if the government changes?" "what if the oil price reaches $200 a barrel"; "what is the worst disaster that can strike our company?" (in 1985 our managers came up with some apparently whacky off-the-wall ideas on that one; some ideas that with today's terrorist tactics are not unusal today).

All of which means that you have clear information policies that can cope with sudden change. And that you have in place the mechanisms to gather and rapidly update key information. But most importantly of all that you have ways of moving it quickly to those who need it, and that you customer-facing staff are properly trained to assess it in terms of what it means to different categories of customers.

Putting the I back in IT

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:05:00 +0000

Ever since knowledge management took off, organisations have looked to IT to provide a 'silver bullet'. All along I've stressed the need to put back the I (Information) into IT. Now a recent report from TFPL and Cap Gemini (see the Information Opportuntity Report) says the same thing in a slightly different way. They want to put the I back into CIO (Chief Information Officer) "or else companies will suffer".

Their key point is that "the information culture is broken", "information management is poor" and "by not sharing information, organisations are suffering financial loss". One of the reasons, they say, is that more money gets thrown into the technology rather than working out what to do with the information.

I recall at least of couple of past assignments that I have labelled 'rescue missions'. Some persuasive enterprise solutions salesperson has sold a perfectly good piece of software, often with many 'bells and whistles', more than most users can take advantage of. Then as roll-out approaches, there is this stark realisation that too little attention has been given to such things as:

how do our users actually work; how does it fit into the way they do their job?
who is responsible for verifying and maintaining the quality of this information?
how should it be characterised; what metadata should be used to describe it?
what is the publishing process: what rules are there for checking before publication?
how do users find the authoritative, most up to date version?

Of course, IT vendors will say that the technology can take many of these decisions out of the users hands, with auto-tagging of content with metadata and built-in workflow. However, as a recent case study of Christian Aid's intranet indicated, the last thing you want to do is "automate a mess".

Every time you even think about implementing a new solution, why don't you think carefully through all the information process issues, the tasks, decisions and business processes that the information informs, but above all the hapless user who is often not consulted until a technical decision has been made.

It behoves anyone who has 'information' in their title, whether they are a technical guru or not, to remember the words of business executive William Pollard: "Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit."

So make sure that your technologists remember to put the I back into IT.

The Virtual Economy

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 09:38:00 +0000

With all the turmoil in finanical markets, I recall an article written by Peter Drucker in the mid 1980s. Credited with coining the term 'knowledge worker' Drucker has been very perceptive on many management issues. He wrote back then that the financial economy was becoming too disconnected from the real economy in that the amount of trading of financial instruments (e.g. foreign currency) was 30x more than that of foreign trade itself. He said that some multiplier, say three times, was OK and needed for liquidity, but 30x he really questioned.

As I was returning from a day with a client in London yesterday, I read an article that trading in oil was running at 2 billion barrels a day, yet only 85 million barrels comes out of the ground - thus re-emphasising Drucker's point.

In my book Capitalizing on Knowledge (2001) I wrote that financial intruments were examples of knowledge products, being purely the fruits of human creativity. I even cited Enron as an example of creative innovation in knowledge products. But you can take creativity too far - especially in financial accounting - and we now know what happened to Enron! Even earlier in Knowledge Networking (1999) I wrote about the need for better knowledge ethics and governance. At that time Long-Term Capital Management had just collapsed, having traded heavily in financial derivatives. I asked:

"What value does such trading bring to furthering a true knowledge society where desirable outcomes are successful businesses of all sorts and quality of life for citizens? ... Intervention is needed in financial markets to halt computer trading when price swings get too violent. Will knowledge markets evolve in the same way, needing bodies to govern them, analagous to the Securities and Exchange Commission?"

The fact is that trading in such highly leveraged financial instrument is really just betting on future prices. Even betting on horses, it seems, is less risky! And who are the losers in such heavy derivatives trading? Usually those in the real economy - who trusted their hard earned money to banks in the first place!

Will the gap between the real and virtual economy identified as an issue over 20 years ago ever narrow to sensible levels, or will we keep repeating the mistakes of the past and present?

Whatever happened to ...?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 14:57:00 +0000

I was asked last week by Jerry Ash, editor of InsideKnowledge, to contribute an article on IT as an enabler of KM. He drew my attention to an article of mine written in 1998, saying "it just needs a little updating". The article in question is 'Knowledge Management: The Role of Technology'. Although most of the concepts are the same, and technology has improved somewhat (but not spectacularly), two main types of change caught my attention:

Change of language - old-fashioned terms we don't use anymore
Disappearance of some favourite products - for several reasons.

Anyway, curious to know what happened here's the results of what I found:

Whatever happened to the term ...?

Groupware - we tend now to use the term "collaboration software", though the term lives on in a number of open source products;
P2P (peer-to-peer) - it didn't catch on in the mainstream and these days one tends to refer to the software's function e.g. streaming, file sharing, and if used it is usually spelt out in full
KM suites - all the rage as document management and other companies tried to relabel their products and jump onto the KM bandwagon; however, most vendors (Eloquent is one exception) dropped the term and the more generic term of EDRMS (Electronic Data and Records Management System) is now more common;
Computer conferencing - once meant a variety of synchronous or asynchronous methods of messaging over the internet (other than email), such as bulletin boards; today the term conferencing is most commonly used for videoconferencing or webconferencing (even here webinar is more common); perhaps the most common term today is 'online forum' which are web browser based anyway;

Whatever happened to product...?

Lotus Notes - once ubiquitious in KM circles, Lotus was taken over by IBM and whereas Notes once referred to either server or client, the server is now called Domino. Notes (or at least Domino) is apparently very much alive, now on version 8, and IBM claims more people using it than ever before. One 2005 article described it as "a program used by 120 million people, of whom about 119m hate it." Perhaps that's why I don't hear about it much these days in the KM community?!
COPE - a fascinating concept mapping software developed by Colin Eden. It has been visually improved and is now sold as Banxia Decision Explorer alongside other specialised products.
Themescape (Cartia) - this excellent visualisation software for knowledge mapping was bought by Aurigin and became part of its patent analysis software. Aurigin went bankrupt in 2002 and its patent software assets acquired by Micropatent (part of IHI) who incorporated it into it's Aureka software. In turn IHI was taken over by Thomson Scientific and Themescape carries on as a patent mapping tool within Aureka.
Groove - a great peer-to-peer collaboration tool developed by Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes (so a good pedigree). Groove Networks was bought my Microsoft in 2005 and the product marketed (in quite a low key way) as Microsoft Groove. With Groove 2007 now being part of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite (enterprise edition) we may hear more of it again.
Semio (including Semio Map and Semio Tagger) - a fascinating set of software for taxonomy visualization and semantic indexing, Semio was acquired in 2002 by Webversa who then changed their name to Entrieva. Entrieva's main thrust is now its internet advertising targetting service ClickSense, in which Semio's technology (now fairly invisible) helps with the contextual targetting.

What this article illustrates is that many good KM software solutions often start as niche. There then seems to be three directions of evolution:

They remain niche, though are often grouped with related products for marketing purposes
They become mainstream (e.g. Groove, Lotus) but never quite have the leadership they showed when they were new innovations.
The technology is subsumed into vertical applications, a segment of the market which continues to grow.

I'd be interested to hear what happened to your favourite software and terminology.

Where's the Oil?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 13:48:00 +0000

I've just been reading an interesting article in Time Magazine by former UK Chancellor of the Exchequer (and before that Energy Minister), Nigel Lawson, entitled Darkness Looms. In it, he argues that all our concerns about getting environmentally-friendly energy sources come up against the practicalities of an energy short-fall in the coming decades. Most of Europe has not replaced its ageing (and dirty) coal-fired power stations, nor its (clean but problematic) nuclear power stations. And where is the oil? In parts of the world where security of supply depends heavily on political forces and the prevailing diplomatic moods, like the Middle East and Russia.

But in the KM context, the phrase "where's the oil?" reminds me of BP's approach to knowledge management. When he led the KM team, Kent Greenes, would always ask this quesiton of any planned initiative. If KM could not translate into helping BP find oil better, cheaper, faster, or the efficiency of its overall supply chain, then what is the point of KM. At the moment I am helping an organisation put into place a KM strategy and action plan. One of my starting points is the approved 5-year corporate plan. By examing each objective in turn, I am asking:

what are the knowledge inputs (i.e. to achieve this objective what do need to know, and what information must be readily accessible?
what are the tasks, business processes and core decisions that contribute to this objective, and as a consequence...
what are the KM activities that support these processes, finally..
what are the knowledge outputs, e.g. reports, guidance, database entries

Already it is clear that there are some recurring themes, such as a virtuous cycle of knowledge development, where new knowledge is created, evaluated, shared, refined and developed, applied and lessons learned, which in turn are fed into an evolving knowledge base. Many of these processes are generic, fine-tuned only for stakeholder / user needs and the categories of knowledge (by topic, format, usage etc.)

So, wherever you are in your KM action plan, think of your organisation's product or service, and keep asking this probling question:

"Where's the oil?" (or whatever product or service is your most valuable).

Eco-Friendly KM

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 16:13:00 +0000

Knowledge is weightless - so it ought to exhibit a low carbon footprint, right?

Well perhaps not, if you have to travel widely to gain or impart knowledge. Tacit knowledge, in particular, is not something that you can just download from the Web. In my younger days as a computer analyst and sales person in the 1970s, I would think nothing of hopping on a plane, often more than once a week, for meetings in Geneva, Munich, Paris or even shorter hauls like London to Manchester. Of course, in those days, airports weren't the hassle they are now and carbon footprints were what your colleague created when stamping out his or her cigarette in the office!

Yet - even though we now have the technology for virtual working, there seems a great reluctance to take advantage of it and reduce travel. I recall the early days of BP's knowledge management initiative where desktop webcams were installed so that staff could videoconference. Instead of flying out to an oil rig off the shore of Scotland, experts in the south of England could have a sensible online face-to-face dialogue. Further, if there were practical problems, and oilfield engineer could point the camera at the offending machinery and both parties could work out a solution online. It might take a little longer than if there in person, but all the time was quality time - not rushing from car park to bus to plane to taxi and so on. A finding that came out of BP's early experience was that a commitment made over videolink was more likely to be honoured than one made in email. In other words, it developed a level of trust close to that enjoyed through physical face-to-face presence.

Well eco-friendly business activities are now core issue for companies to grapple with. A recent article (Computing 7th Feb) on 'going green' aimed at IT professionals highlighted five tips for eco-friendly IT:

increase server and storage in data centres - modern kit is less energy consuming than oder kit
install energy efficient PCs and monitors
print fewer documents
enforce poser management (i.e. turn off your PC at night)
telework

It was the latter that got me into knowledge management. In the late 1980s I had initiated several telework (US translation - telecommuting) projects in my organisation. We identified benefits not just in terms of cost and time savings in travel, but office space (hot desking), more motivated employees (getting a suitable work-life home-away balance), higher productivity (not being interrupted all the time by phone or ignorant colleagues!). One of my tasks was to map different kinds of knowledge work and what environment suited it best. We found that the design of many offices was not ideal, and that by good planning and support sytems an employee need come into the office only occasionally. One of the main barriers to implementation was management culture - managers who were not confident of managing by output but who gauged employees by their input - the amount of time spent at their desk.

So think about it. Why doesn't your organisation telework more, especially using videoconferencing and webcams? And when you think (unless you are in a gas guzzling vehicle or plane) the energy stimulating your neurons adds very little to your carbon footprint, and may generate some new valuable knowledge.

Tick Box KM

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Two recent things prompted me to address this topic. One is for a voluntary organisation I work for where one of our supporters would like our volunteers (people like me) to become accredited advisors. After all we would "tick all the boxes". However, since there is no demand from our beneficiaries (out of work managers and professionals who we help) and to become accrediated would cost us the equivalent of year's rent of the premises we use, I question its value.

Another is an interesting article (Computing, 7 Feb 2008) by software professional, Peter Merrick, who says "it is not project management that is of interest, but project delivery. The fact that a project is well managed and ticks the right boxes, does not mean it will deliver a working system".

I recall when pushing companies to achieve ISO standards for customer quality was in vogue. Even though a company could get accredited, it did not mean it could deliver exemplary customer service, simply that it adhered to the procedures and standards it set for itself.

Unfortunately in bureaucracies - and that's what many large corporations and public sector organizations are today - there is a tendency to say that processes are in place and rules have been followed and to take the eye off the ball about what is really important. I've had a running argument with one such public service recently who keeps hiding behind "our minimal legal obligations" rather than thinking about the needs of the customer.

So far, most KM initiatives have succeeded using necessary but 'light touch' procedures. But with IT playing a major role in many KM initiatives, it would be a pity if too much attention was given to ticking the right boxes in the project management methodology and not enough to the essence of the project. Another danger lurking is that if the movement to KM standards and professionalisation movement were to enforce unrealistic 'standards', then KM might itself become too bureaucratized. Fortunately, the British Standards Institute has realized this and at the moment feel that KM is not mature enough for highly specific standards, so it issues 'guidance on good practice'.

Delivering KM should be similar to what Peter Merrick describes as a delivery framework for IT, i.e. one that "prioritizes the business community stakeholders, senior management, middle management, project management and users". I commend his PrinceLite delivery framework as an approach for knowledge management projects. It may not seem 'lite' enough for some KM practitioners (in that there are mandatory requirements) but its merit is that it is stakeholder-focussed, something every project manager ignores at his or her peril. As Peter himself says: "it does not tell you exactly what to do, but does give you some very strong hints".

What Price Books?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:28:00 +0000

I happened to be doing a search on Google yesterday, found a link I was interested in, and lo and behold - up pops a page of my book (Knowledge Networking) from Google Books. Two opposite immediate thoughts came to mind:

1. Why should people be able to read my book for free and deprive me of roylaties?
2. That's nice - I know it's difficult to get hold of now - so at least others can read it.

On the first, since it was published in 1999 I don't get many royalties now and anway I think it's out of print, since links on both Amazon and publisher's wesbite point to an expensive audio version. In any case, I don't think many readers will persevere with the media. It's not like a PDF you can download - you have to laboriously scroll from page to page. I found a chapter in someone else's book I was interested in and while fine for browsing a few pages, is not ideal for serious study. Further, it seems that books are incomplete and I think there are limits on the number of pages an individual can view (more on this in Google books FAQs).

On the second point, it's certainly useful to be able to point people at specific sections, without having to extract or risk violating the publisher's copyright. I was in the process of doing a 2nd edition a few years ago, but instead decided that writing books - unless you create a best seller - is not really very profitable, so I have focussed on packaging my knowledge in the form of shorter more specific guides and reports (see my K-Shop).

So how much is a book worth? It all depends on how you the reader values it. I get a lot of content from the web these days for free - and am quite happy to browse a long report on my notebook PC. Would I pay for such material? Yes - if I felt it really useful to me and I couldn't get the content anywhere else - but I would need to be convinced, typically by the comments of colleagues or independent reviewers. Certainly Google Books allows you to preview - as they say it is "designed to help you discvoer books, not read them from start to finish". That leads to my other point on value. There is nothing like the convenience of paper. So if there's a book I'm going to use a lot in different places, then its worth buying. Of course, I'm always looking for deals, and when I've finished with it and want it no more, there are many ways to recycle it - and not just in the recycle bin, but through others in my network, Amazon marketplace, book stalls at fetes and so on.

Talking of value what I do resent is paying very high prices - like $100 or more - not for unique in-depth research - but for books that because they are published through an academic imprint, cost three times more than what they should. Regrettably this has also happened to some peer reviewed KM journals, which when launched cost only a few hundred dollars a year subscription but are now over $1,000. But's that's another story (or blog!).

Ideopolises - An Idea Fit For Purpose?

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 19:25:00 +0000

While updating my research for an update supplement to the report Public Sector - Public Knowledge I came across the Ideopolis research programme of the Work Foundation (see this report). It draws on the term coined by two US commentators - John Judis and Ruy Teixeira (see WordSpy for citations) in 2002 - to describe a knowledge-city region. The idea is that a city which is knowledge-intensive (e.g. more than around 25% of workers in knowledge intensive jobs) will act as an economic powerhouse for the surrounding region. Much is predicated on having universities, high quality research etc.

In theory, all very good. But to turn theory into practice (i.e. positive economic outcomes) requires several things to be in place, not least vision and leadership. Even before the term was coined there have been many examples of such initiatives. One familiar to me is the city of Austin in Texas, which in the 1980s was a backwater. With leadership from people like entrepreneur George Kozmetsky, it has turned itself into a world-class knowledge city, with many knowledge intensive companies, and also start-ups like Dell, which is .. well.. no longer a start-up!

Another theme that comes out of all such successful initiatives is that of connectivity. I would go even further than the authors of the report venture and stress also the need for deep collaboration. This is a critical factor is turning all those academic and other ideas into real knowledge-intensive products and services of economic value. Studies of knowledge commercialization (happens to be the title of a book I wrote!) in R&D provide good examples of what works and what doesn't.

The pity to me is that many people who write and practice at the city-region macro-economic level demonstrate little real understanding of the application of knowledge management as used in corporate settings. Or sometimes they stumble across almost by accident, key factors and practices that are well understood in the corporate KM community. As good as it is, the Work Foundation report draws little from this pool of existing knowledge. Of course, it is important to draw on existing regional development and other knowledge. I just wish there was more connectivity - and collaboration - between researchers and practitioners who operate in these two different spheres.

Then perhaps the concept of Ideopolis will be truly fit for purpose.

Old Blog

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 18:39:00 +0000

In fact, I published more than I thought - too much easily to move across. So follow this link for a number of postings, including:

Knowledge is neutral
Quick Thinking = Bad Knowledge
The Power of Visualization
Knowledge Fatigue

Enjoy!

Back to Basics

noreply@blogger.com (David) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:10:00 +0000

What use is a blog that has only two postings - both dated 2004? Not a lot, you say - and I agree.

One of my 2008 New Year resolutions was to blog more regularly, and here mid-February I am just starting to act on it. 2008 is also the year when I bring my website up to date, probably for the last time before full retirement. It's still a major resource for many KM practitioners and students around the world and has had several new items of content added over the last year - see What's New.

Right now I am semi-retired, mixing a (very) small amount of paid knowledge management consultancy with significant amounts of volunteering (e.g. I'm webmaster of www.cprehampshire.org.uk) and pursuing other interests (chess, astronomy, photography, rambling).

For posterity, the next two postings will be my first two blogs from 2004. They were written on the original blogger and I seem to have missed the easy migration path to the Google host.

Thought for today: "the value of knowledge lies in the mind of the recipient"