Skip to content

{ Category Archives } Knowledge work

Technology for us - the heart of Enterprise 2.0?

[Cross posted at FASTforward]
The phrase “technology for us” has been kicking around in my head for the past several months. At the FASTForward ‘08 conference, I took a first pass at articulating my thinking in a video interview with Jerry Michalski. Consider this my next attempt. I expect there will be more.
Technology for Them
Information systems [...]

Prusak on Knowledge, Community, and Dunbar’s Number

These are my notes from a talk that Larry Prusak gave at my invitation at the Kellogg School back when I was on the faculty there. (For posterity’s sake, here is a link to the original blog post, although that version is suffering from bitrot. The Magic Number 300: Knowledge and Community)
His reference to the [...]

Knowledge management and innovation

What’s the relationship between knowledge management practices and innovation? On first thought, you would think that effective knowledge management would contribute to more effective innovation as well. On the other hand, knowledge management has often been justified on the value of not routinely reinventing solutions to problems that an organization has already solved. This potentially [...]

Going hands on to get your arms around Enterprise 2.0

I was not able to attend last month’s Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. I wanted to pick up on something Andrew McAfee had to say during his keynote there, however. Here’s his set up:

I found myself in an uncomfortable position at the end of my short keynote speech during the Enterprise 2.0 conference yesterday. I got [...]

Better thinking about performance improvement

  Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, Gawande, Atul
I’ve always been troubled by the phrase “best practices” thrown around loosely in business settings. In certain engineering and professional settings, the term can have an important legal meaning. Even then, “best practice” is always a moving target. Better, Atul Gawande’s most recent collection of essays [...]

Literate thinking as a barrier to Enterprise 2.0 adoption

Most of the technologies lumped under the Enterprise 2.0 label presuppose some facility with the written word. I wonder to what extent that presents a barrier to adoption in many organizations? Moreover, I wonder how visible that organizational barrier is to those who are already facile?
I’ve written before on oral vs. literate cultures in organizations [...]

Alan Kay on learning and technology

Alan Kay is talking once again about what went wrong with the personal computer and personal computing. Here’s a pointer to a recent interview he did with CIO Insight magazine that is well worth your attention.

A CIO Insight

Alan Kay was recently interviewed for CIO Insight magazine’s Expert Voices feature. In this piece entitled Alan [...]

Strategic sensemaking and Enterprise 2.0 technologies

The increased importance of sensemaking will prove to be one of the central drivers for Enterprise 2.0 technologies adoption. Organizational theorist Karl Weick positions sensemaking as one of the central tasks in organizations. Dan Russell at Creating Passionate Users provides a nice definition of sensemaking that will serve as a useful starting point:

Sensemaking is in [...]

Strong Opinions, Weakly Held

Ross Mayfield points to an interesting post by Bob Sutton at Stanford. Ross nicely captures the essence of Bob’s post.
More important, for my selfish purposes, is learning that Sutton is blogging. Sutton is a Professor at Stanford’s Engineering School, the author of several recent, excellent, books on management and innovation and one of the vocal [...]

Balancing diligence and laziness

Some time back I came across the following quote in The 80/20 Principle : The Secret of Achieving More With Less by Richard Koch, which I’ve been pondering ever since for its implications for knowledge work and knowledge workers:

There are only four types of officer. First, there are the lazy, stupid ones. Leave them alone, they [...]