Our latest newsletter is now out - should make it to your in-tray soon if you’re on our list. 

In the meantime, we’ve also published some supplementary material on our website this month.

We have a Compliance “BS Detector” Test here.

And a SharePoint “BS Detector” Test here.

Enjoy!

At the start of this year I wrote a post about the ‘10,000 hours’ concept – the ballpark period of time that it takes to become an expert at something.  Now here’s an attempt to accelerate the process.

The Beautiful Aim is an experiment.  Imagine a 23 year old man who has not played soccer since he was 16 and who was an average player in his youth.  If he harbours dreams of playing in the premiership league is it too late for him?  Most of us would think certainly yes.

However, John Grinder (one of the co-founders of Neuro Linguistic Programming) has stepped up to try and prove us wrong.  And, at the same time, to demonstrate tangibly that NLP modelling can do what it is claimed to be able to do.  In modelling the skills, attitudes and beliefs of exemplars (people who already exhibit excellence) are identified and broken down so that they can be replicated by others.  This theorectically cuts down on the time it takes to learn a particular skill. 

Despite being a very late start at 23 already, Arton Belaci, the subject of The Beautiful Aim is attempting to make the premier league in just 12 months.  He will have a team of ‘head’ people, ‘body’ people and ‘football’ people.

I wouldn’t like to predict whether this project will be successful or not but I have signed up for the updates.  If these guys can pull it off then this will explode how we think about human potential.

Nice people are often a liability when it comes to knowledge transfer.  While we might pick Jane to do our training and knowledge transfer because, after all, she is such a people person, Jane is most likely to become a liability in this role. Why?  Because she will tend to over teach.  That is, she will teach both the stuff that she knows and the stuff that she is not expert in because she is so keen to help and to connect with people.

So, if being friendly is not required what is?  Only two things: the person must be competent in the thing that they are teaching and they must be willing to be involved (although being grumpy is fine!)

This was another timely paper for us as Grant and I are bottlenecks in two main areas – creating proposals and managing risk. 

Steve gave a set of questions for extracting the wisdom from your experts.  We’re going to try this.  Example questions include:

·        Why does each step matter?

·        What are the most common mistakes?

·        Who do you have to talk to and why?

·        How do you know when you’re in over your head?

·        What are the rules and which ones can you ignore?

·        How do you know if it is good?

·        What should you listen and look for?

He also gave a set of steps for transferring knowledge.  I was so engaged by his presentation style that I forgot to jot all of these down so I think I’m going to have to order his book.

This was a clear, entertaining and informative presentation by Darren Gibbons.

1.    Blow up the old intranet

2.    Turn users into authors – the intranet becomes self-healing and there is no distortion.  Employees feel trusted and empowered.  There is no excessive burden on a person or team to maintain the content

3.    Email-free Wednesdays – forces people to use other tools to communicate.

4.    Add signals – ways to notify users that something has occurred

5.    Provide scaffolding – it is easier to edit information than to create information so use tools that have low barriers to people getting involved. Examples include: tools and links, people, how to, news, projects.

6.    Hold a barn raising – war rooms to create and find the content that really matters and to get it on the intranet

7.    Make them use it once – (I’ve got no notes on the context of this step)

8.    Lead by example

9.    Expose the social context – navigating by people

10.  Get the intranet into the flow of how people work.

The background material for the presentation is here.

I was dubious about attending this session.  The subtitle was ‘Putting Hypertext to Work on the KM 2.0 path’ which seemed destined to send me into fits of yawning but I hung in there and got some interesting bits and pieces out of it.

The main point was that we are moving from information that is document based to information that is based upon activities and relationships.  For example, as well as using subject tags for information people are now tagging based on time related tasks, activities and their own emotional reactions: @toread; @tobuy; @fun.

In addition, the more information is structured the more tightly it is connected to a point in time.  In contrast, raw information retains the context.  Hence blogs, wikis and project workspaces can provide more information than documents published to an intranet or into an EDRMS.  Where documents do exist knowing who authored these merely gets you picking up the phone faster.

So, here’s the challenge for those of us that are into archives and records. We can’t turn back the tide and change how people work.  Nor have we had much luck compelling people to publish their documents into an EDRMS or onto an intranet.  How do we need to be changing our thinking to accommodate these ways of creating and describing information while still allowing for records to be managed where this is needed?

My biggest takeaway from this session was the statistics from Intel about their social software tools.  1% of users author and comment  often, 9% occasionally author and comment, 90% find value in editorials etc.

I suspect that the 90% is overstated – does everyone read this stuff or do many people just ignore it? However, regardless of the accuracy of the statistics, there is an interesting point here.  This is that we shouldn’t be too alarmed if not everyone is contributing.  In a sense these observers are merely leveraging the work of others.  I subscribe to a number of blogs because their authors act as filter for me, sorting a lot of information and summarising the results.  Because my interests are aligned with these blogs they act as both time savers and discovery tools.

This paper really hit a hot button for me.  How and where do documents fit into all of this Web 2.0 stuff?

This was part paper and part demonstration from the Singapore Armed Forces.  They started out by identifying the key activities of knowledge workers, boiling them down to four: writing papers; attending meetings; attending courses; and communicating.

They built an enterprise system to support their knowledge workers comprising a learning management system, a content management system, an enterprise search engine, a knowledge mapping tool and a collaboration portal integrated all integrated their EDRMS Livelink.

What struck me most of all was how clean and easy to follow their interface was.  The user home area was split into three columns. The first column contains a reference space for news, feeds etc.  The middle column is the workspace for email, my documents and my learning.  The third column is the sharing space for blogs, wikis and shared workspaces.

Very simple but with lots of power packed into it.

The main open source components are JOOMLA for communities, forums, blogs and wikis, MOODLE for learning management and the OpenOffice productivity suite.

The focus of this paper was federated search. Federated search works across multiple repositories – typically the extranet, EDRMS and intranet – and returns the results together.  The user interface presents the results either sliced by repository (top 3 intranet searches; top 3 EDRMS searches) or by relevance using tricky behind the scenes algorithms.

The key challenges faced by vendors developing search tools are:

·        De-duping (removing duplicate entries)

·        Developing algorithms that generate useful relevance rankings

·        Reflecting the security models present in each repository

When a tool meets these challenges then a vendor has a ‘viable’ federated search tool.  However, that doesn’t account for that nasty thing: human behaviour.  Letting humans at your repository can really stuff the accuracy of the search tool.  The nasty things that humans do include:

·        Changing content types

·        Adding and removing directories

·        Creating new workflows

·        Creating versions

·        Opting out of metadata

·        Changing taxonomies

All of these can conspire to seriously challenge your search tool.