Category Archives: Information Management

Deliberate Knowledge Structures

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Grant has challenged me to describe my personal deliberate knowledge structures.

I have become much more ruthless about tools lately – I simply don’t have the time or inclination for anything too complicated… As you’ll see from the below I am a hi-tec and a lo-tec girl.

The game changer for me has been my iPhone.  Where I’m perhaps a little different from most is that I have never been much of a photographer .  I have gone years without taking photos.  Even with previous phones the effort involved in downloading the photos to a PC and then uploading them somewhere else or sending them to other people was too much for me.  Now I do one click to take the photo and then a second click to send it.  My parents get daily photos of their granddaughter and we are collecting a great record of her first year of life.

I use Evernote frequently.  In fact, I have all of my useful “stuff” sitting in Evernote.  It has completely replaced Delicious for me. I record my families birthdays, gift ideas, useful websites and music I want to download.  Most helpful is that I have Evernote wherever I go.  Again, I don’t have to do anything, it is automatically available to me online, offline or on the road through my iPod.

I eat breakfast going through the blogs that I subscribe to.  I flick through most of them looking for useful references and points of view.  In particular, I find that most of my non-fiction reading (about a book every fortnight…) comes from blog recommendations.  We’re also starting to get value from our internal team blog – particularly the insights that people are recording from conferences. 

Now onto the lo-tech.  I use a hardback, unlined, moleskin for ideas/thoughts and general writing.

For thinking, I work in colour on a large A3 artists pads…I’ve used this recently to map the model from The Opposable Mind onto my life and onto my thinking about the business.  The key to this is to not to aim for pretty or for perfection.  That can always be done later. It’s really to focus on getting the ideas out and I enjoy the paper and pen effect.

How about you? What are your deliberate knowledge structures?

 

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Content Technology Choices

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CMS watch has released an update of its content technology vendor map. 

The Enterprise Content Line shows hubs for Open Text, IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Oracle and Autonomy/Interwoven.  There is also a smaller hub for Alfresco commonly thought to be the gruntiest of open source document management products.

A couple of the strong players in the NZ market are missing (CMS Watch comment that this is just a subset of the vendors that they monitor):

  • Objective from Objective Corporation
  • TRIM from Tower Software (bought by HP late last year).
  • And DataWorks that was going strong in the NZ local government market in the early days of EDRMS but has not won much in recent years

What is increasingly apparent – and no surprise – is the convergence between enterprise content management, web content management, enterprise portals and social software and collaboration.

This throws up an interesting dilemma for the selectors and implementators of ECM solutions.  How much do we buy from the ‘get go’ and how much should we implement first up?   What do we use as part of a bundle of services from one vendor versus to what extent are we going to mix and match?

In NZ, I suspect that the PRA may be distorting these choices somewhat with a strong driver behind RFPs still being PRA compliance.  Note the number of tenders that are still being released asking for a PRA compliant solution – despite solutions not being compliant in and of themselves. 

If the PRA driver was removed I wonder what would be the top priorities for NZ organisations in the selection of ECM solutions and what would be the strongest business reasons for investment.  Is it finding documents, is it accountability/risk management, is it better ways of working together? 

What have been the drivers for your organisation?

 

 

 

 

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EDRMS: How do we know what users want?

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I’ve been talking with several organisations recently about how they would know what it is that users want in systems to help them manage their information (be it EDRMS, ECM or SharePoint).

And you might recall that one of the trends from KM World is that of letting users decide – putting a smorgasbord of features and functionality in front of the user on the basis that only the strong (the things that users like) will survive.

At the same time, I’ve come across this interesting paragraph from Gary Klein’s book, Sources of Power.  Sources of Power is about how people in high pressure situations make quick and good decisions.  Yes, I know it doesn’t really apply to information management – I don’t get any urgent calls for taxonomy building – but there are some useful insights about mental models.

Anyway, one of the comments that Klein makes is: “In a marketing research project for a large company we studied how consumers imagined a product in action…Many consumers could not formulate a mental simulation to describe how some common products really worked…We should be careful in assuming that consumers know how products work.  Some were using the product inappropriately, getting unsatisfactory results, and blaming the product.”

Does that sound familiar?

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Top 100 Tools for Learning now out

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The Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has released its top 100 tools for learning based on contributions from 223 individuals who each shared their top 10 tools for learning.  The full list is somewhat mindnumbing to read but if you click through to the tool categories display they usefully organise the tools and then identify the top tool, the top free tool and other tools in each category.  For example, under mindmapping tools they show Mindmanager as the top tool, FreeMind as the top free tool and MindMeister and Bubbl.us as other tools in the same category.

As is often the case with these things it is also interesting to see the tools that didn’t make it.  My current favourite, Evernote, is missing.  What about you?  Any of your favs not on the list?

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Wikis that work

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This month Computerworld profiles four organisations that are successfully using wikis to manage a range of tasks including technical training and project management.  It is helpful to see some successful models emerging and also to hear where organisations feel this approach is not serving them (see the comments).

We’re using a wiki successfully to hold, manage and build our methodology around a particular piece of work that we do.  This is giving us massive leverage in terms of how quickly (and cost-effectively) we can deliver this service to our customer.  It also has the effect of our virtual brains parallel processing and the output being recorded.  Thus it is combining, in one place, technical insights, business analysis insights, recordkeeping insights and strategic insights with all searchable in a variety of different ways that can combine each of these usefully. 

A key to success has been that the wiki is essentially where the work happens – that is, people aren’t doing something and then recording it separately in some unrelated system.  Instead the thinking, consulting and reviewing is all happening in the one place.

Hat tip: Bill Ives

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Confused by content, document, records management?

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CMS Watch has a cool ‘London Underground’ map of the major players and where they play.  Some of the vendors we’re used to seeing in NZ aren’t on here but it’s really interesting to see how CMS watch categorise the different products and how they show the relationships between the different functionality.

 

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KM World 2008: Trautman – Transferring Knowledge Isn’t Just for Nice People

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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.

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KM World 2008: Gibbons – Intranet 2.0 in 10 Not-So-Easy Steps

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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.

 

 

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