DPR at 3:55 PM [url]:

Did you try Google?

It happened again. I told a friend about a new program. He wants a URL. I say "Did you try Google?" and he says "oh ... yeah." He doesn't need a URL.

Maybe it's just that we're used to having difficulty finding information about things. So few people have absorbed that Google creates a shared context that is bigger than all of our brains, so we humans don't need specific pointers most of the time anymore. We're slow learners.

But now when I sit in a meeting where I have an Internet connection, or conferencing on the phone in my office, I'm Googling all the time. The context it creates is immense and useful. Somebody might make an allusion to some literary idea - and I'm no longer in the dark. Somebody might mention a product or service - and I can order it immediately, or bookmark it.

When someone can't remember a fact or a name, I can usually get it quickly enough to be useful.

Google is my other memory. If it isn't yours, it probably will be eventually. [SATN.org: Comments from Frankston, Reed, and Friends]

Another obvious component in a personal knowledge management strategy.

8:28:53 PM •  • comment  

Guest speaker: Burton (Buzz) Bruggeman buzz@activewords.com

§ Created eight main functions for most PC users.

§ Active Words is a “front end knowledge management tool.”

§ Sounds like a lot of customized short-cuts. Is it new knowledge? Or is it just a time saving device? Return on investment calculated by multiplying time saved by cost of user’s time. Potential for significant time (and $) savings. My opinion: I think it depends on what specific activities you do daily. More applicable for some types of jobs than others. Attorneys, maybe, since it requires significant document creation. I think this is a cool technology that I wouldn’t be willing to pay that much for. It might take me longer to memorize all the shortcuts than to just go through the keystrokes.

§ McGee students can get active words software for free.

• People who have it want to keep the competitive advantage
• Users don’t want to be “tech support” for new users who “don’t get it”
• Many execs don’t get the importance of the savings. They see implementation problems.

§ Outlook agent – allows user to sync with all outlook users. (All users? Or just users you have put in there? I think just your own contacts.) Calls up useful information about these people. Address, phone, title, kids names, etc. Saves the number of key strokes it requires to open outlook and search for the person on your own. My opinion: This doesn’t seem like a huge time savings to me. A matter of seconds. Most people have their Outlook open all the time anyway.

§ It’s hard for me to buy into this as a knowledge management tool. Maybe a ‘personal knowledge management’ tool if you stretch the definition to mean easy access to stuff you created before and use all the time. Like a good filing system.

§ What’s in it for me? (WIIFM) If managing knowledge makes you more productive, better team member, etc. – that’s what is in it for you.

§ Example: BOR = 3,000+ characters. My opinion: Buzz calculates his time savings based on this. But can’t you just use copy and paste (ctrl c, ctrl v) That’s 2 key strokes. Or at most 5-7 if you need to open a file. Sorry to sound so skeptical. I guess I would have to use it for a while to be convinced.

§ You can build all the shortcuts you want. “have it your way” Highly customizable. Some prescripted shortcuts for common functions. Many for Outlook. “Tool for smart people to unleash their imagination.”

§ Scripting – allows you to create shortcuts that will create an e-mail with template text. It will open a new message, tab down, and insert the appropriate text.

§ Clichés – abound because they are true. “Hitting head against the wall…” Kind of like navigating the MS maze. Active Words lets you avoid the maze.

§ Three most important advances in technology today:

• Weblogs
• WiFi
• Webservers

All 3 are about managing knowledge.

• KM – institutional knowledge management
• km – the individual knowledge worker

I'm still trying to grok Activewords. Having Buzz there to demo the tool in action certainly goes a long way to helping that process. At the same time, Courtney's initial reactions provide some insight into the marketing challenges Buzz faces.

Certainly, a central aspect of Activewords's value is that it works across all applications. Instead of tailoring each application to your needs and idiosyncracies, you invest in one tool that spans them all (wasn't this the initial logic behind the first incarnation of Usertalk?). It does present the challenge and the opportunity of paying attention to how you work and where you might go about eliminating friction. In that sense, Buzz is on a mission that is quite similar to what Kris Hammond and his team is doing at the Intelligent Information Lab.

7:43:54 PM •  • comment  

My notes and thoughts from 6/4 class:

Prof. McGee Lecture:

§ Evolution of knowledge management in organizations:

§ KM in craft organizations is tacit

§ Industrial orgs thrive on explicit knowledge

• Perceive, frame, design, then build, operate, improve cycle
• A few brains and lots of hands

 
• Perceive, frame, then design, build, operate, and improve cycle
 
• All brains required
• The business problems have changed
 

§ Generic process for knowledge management

I heard Courtney's keyboard clicking away during class. Glad to see that she was practicing real-time blogging as opposed to something else.

7:34:12 PM •  • comment  

Managing My Knowledge

As we conclude the final week of the final quarter of the final year, I've certainly learned quite a bit this year about knowledge management.  I've probably thought more about it than I've ever wanted to.  However, I'm still not sure I have a very good method for managing my own knowledge.  I've learned an immense amount in the past 12 months - far more than I expected to.  However, it will be clearly difficult to draw on my own knowledge base and to actually apply what I've learned.  Models, frameworks, concepts, etc. are all interesting to study but only useful if you can actually apply them. 

I for one am terrible at remembering who did what study, specific terminology, descriptions of models, etc.  I can apply it all in real-time as I am learning it, but it quickly leaves me.  Thus, I'm very conscientious about keeping course summaries that I can refer back to.  My hope is that I will remember that I once learned something about a given topic and that I'll know where to go to get it.  But even that may be a challenge.  If anyone has any good advice for holding on to what we've learned here, I'm listening.  It is amazing the toll that time takes on a memory.  In the end, the most enduring thing I think I will leave with is a refined ability to think, challenge, and critique - and a new found humility that there is still so much that I don't know.  School for me has been analagous to training for a mental marathon.  Training for a marathon, you continually push yourself far beyond your limits and find you can do even more.  Then when the race comes you fully exhaust yourself.  However, you only retain the physical condition if you keep on running.

I think my is in the best condition of my life - now I have the challenge of keeping it from atrophy; it can be a difficult challenge when you work in a task-oriented world, but I will certainly give it a try.

[Greg Harmeyer's KM Weblog]

Business schools now routinely require that their students have a PC. Perhaps they should also require that students start a weblog (if they haven't already done so) and provide some guidance and support about how to do both information management and knowledge management at a personal level.

My oldest son is now in middle school. One of the things we discuss with his teachers is the quaint notion of "study habits." "Study habits" makes sense in an educational world with a defined knowledge universe and an expectation that the goal is to prove that you've acquired a working knowledge (pun intended) of that universe. If, however, you believe that an education should be preparing people to cope, and thrive, in the world after/outside school, then we'd better be talking about personal knowledge management strategies and learning how to learn.

"Learning how to learn" has become another one of those vacuous phrases that are hard to argue with. Who wouldn't want to learn how to learn? The critical question is what the hell that might mean in this world we're creating for ourselves. That's a bigger debate than I care to delve into right now, but let me suggest a couple of useful thinkers to check out as you put together your own answer:

• Alan Kay - formerly of Xerox PARC, recently of Disney Imagineering, now founder of Viewpoints Research Institute. Start with The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet and then check out Squeak and SqueakLand.
• Roger Schank - Roger founded the Institute for the Learning Sciences at Northwestern and has since moved on to Carnegie-Mellon and is CEO of Socratic Arts. Start with the Story-Centered Curriculum.
• Tim Gallwey - author of The Inner Game of Tennis and The Inner Game of Work among others. A brief overview of The Inner Game concept is one starting point or you can work with one of the books.
• David Allen - author of Getting Things Done. Also check out his company's website and a good profile in Fast Company - Sensei for the Time Sensitive
• George Leonard - check out Mastery

One theme across all of these thinkers is the learning is a personal phenomenon. There's lots of help you can get, but you have to do the work. None of them are particularly impressed with schools or classrooms as the best place to do that learning. That's why the real value of a place like HBS or Kellogg is the community of smart and motivated people they assemble.

5:35:58 PM •  • comment  

Complexity and Simplicity

Thanks to wood s lot (back online at the familiar address) for this link to a rabbi who senses that what the world needs now is not oversimplification. . . . Permalink - [AKMA's Random Thoughts]

Food for thought.

2:04:14 PM •  • comment  

Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk. If you read nothing else today, or this week, read Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk, which Cory just blogged at BoingBoing. And give a big thanks to both of them for bringing us back to first causes, first principles. [Doc Searls Weblog]

Follow the good Doctor's orders.

1:23:54 PM •  • comment  

Death to Blogs. Jonathan Peterson: Death to Blogs. [Doc Searls Weblog]

Distributed conversations and the communities that they create/nurture are the killer app of the internet. Let's talk about why that is revolutionary:

• It's uncontrollable - While governments, media companies and even technologists may try to conspire to deliver least-common-denominator pablum that can be monitored, licensed and controlled. Self-published content may easily be replicated, anonymized and what's more it is text, allowing it to flow along ultra-low bandwidth backchannels where necessary to avoid disruption.
• It is ubiquitous, open and simple - Blosxom is tiny. The entire tool could pretty conceivably run in an 802.11 enabled hand-held. The APIs for blogging , aggregating and notification are open and evolving.
• It's addictive - 'nuff said
• It is useful - I know that there are few/no examples extant, but clued-in companies will start realizing that blogs are great tools for corporate/project memory. Perhaps they will be evolve to become a tool that enables knowledge workers speeding the transition away from business tools and processes in use today that were designed for the mass-production factory mindset of the industrial revolution.
• What obvious things have I missed?

An excellent reflection on the more important dimensions of weblogs, especially from a knowledge management perspective.

1:11:02 PM •  • comment  

I Think of It More Like My Brain's "Memory Stick". My Blog, My Outboard Brain by Cory Doctorow

"As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don't know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this -- it's one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers....

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVo frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form."

I find that Cory's reasons for blogging echo my own, and that I am reaping the same benefits. It's the opening up and sharing that makes it possible, whereas before I would send a link to a few select people. It also gives me the opportunity to explore my thoughts and ideas more fully, having to flesh them out into actual concepts I have to articulate. It's helped me connect the dots in my own mind, and luckily it's all centrally stored on my blog.

Hopefully I'll be able to impart this vision and explain the advantages to my colleagues when I start implementing Radio for internal KM.

[The Shifted Librarian]

In my wrap-up Tuesday night, we talked about the notion of having a personal KM strategy. If knowledge is your craft, you have a responsibility to maintain and develop your tools and your craft.

When we talk about learning organizations and about knowledge management practices, it can be easy to lose sight of this personal dimension. We think about the problem in terms of what 'they' ought to be doing. This problem is aggravated by the fact that senior level executives don't have a lot of knowledge management problems of their own. They have assistants and staffs whose fundamental role is to be the executive's KM system. Most of us are not so fortunate.

Tom Davenport wrote an interesting piece on the notion of personal information environments in CIO magazine quite some time back. It's still a good introduction to the notion, although I would take it up a level. Managing the details of your information life is a starting point,  but we need to do more if we take a knowledge perspective.

Blogging is one piece of the puzzle as Cory's comments capture nicely. Not only do you have that link to something that has caught your attention and interest, but you have an opportunity to boil down the 'so what' that warranted that attention.

The other thing that blogging can do for you is create raw material for your learning and reflection.  This works on at least two levels. When you create an entry, you have to do some thinking and reflection. That alone puts you way ahead of most of the pack. And, as you do it over time, your skill at thinking, reflecting, and writing will all improve, which will make you a more effective knowledge worker.

It's the next level, however, that creates a long-term amplifier for your knowledge work productivity. You now have a chronological trace of what you thought at the time. You have something you can examine to understand how your thinking and insights have evolved over time.

Now, there is a question of how much of this you choose to share publicly. Most of what I've said so far works whether you publish your weblog or not. Although there is an advantage of visualizing an audience to help you distill your thinking. Warren McFarlan at the Harvard Business School was one of the professors who dragged me through my doctoral program.  He used to joke that one of the worst aspects of being an academic, especially in a fast-moving field like information technology, was that there was a public record of every dumb idea you'd ever had. On the other hand, if you have the guts to put the ideas out there, you also get the opportunity to test and refine them.

Fundamentally it's the difference between doing real science vs. crank science. The only way to tell the difference in the end is whether you're prepared to open yourself up to criticism. Putting yourself on record is the first step in that process.

10:58:37 AM •  • comment