- KM - Comments

Social Networking

Sun, 25 May 2003 18:26:00 -0400

From Dave Pollard at How to Save the World:

I agree that KM has not lived up to its name, and comment on a particularly scathing attack on KM that another KM blogger Ian Glendenning brought to my attention here. We’re really back to the stage of selling KM to management on its value propositions. It hasn’t made much difference to worker productivity or employee learning. It’s made no impact at all on business innovation (where many, including me, thought it held greatest promise). Its greatest success has been tapping customer/market knowledge/information and hence improving the Sales process. If we’re to ‘sell’ Social Software as a KM tool, we need to convince managemement that there are top-line or bottom-line or customer or learning returns on Social Software investment. I think that will be a harder sell than we might expect.

K-Powered Enterprise

Charlene Hutt — Sun, 20 Apr 2003 00:34:10 -0400

Had the good fortune of hearing Mark Federman's comments in person.....his book is coming out in September and I have already ordered it at my favorite business bookstore. M. McLuhan may not be of this world any longer but he lives on in the hearts and minds of the McLuhan Program at U of Toronto. Mark asks "What haven't you thought of?" Guess I can put my tarot cards away and just follow his 4 points and be able to predict the outcome of almost anything.....am looking forward to his contemporary look at the "Media King's" thinking........

The web is the book

garym — Sat, 19 Apr 2003 01:52:26 -0400

... or perhaps you're face to face with a good reason why we need to implement TrackBack in Drupal :)

Seriously, trackback would let all these conversations about Taxonomies take place in their native environments while still feeding the central hub of Drupal.org. In Ben and Mena'a original plan, TrackBack and Ping were specifically for building networks around individual conversations, multi-site threads that extend and clarify a topic off into all sorts of different perspectives.

Thanks for the kind comments --- I'm just doin' my job, sir ;)

Taxo Taiken

garym — Sat, 19 Apr 2003 01:48:07 -0400

There's a word in Japanese, Taiken that means the knowledge gained through direct interaction ... my experience has been that this is the only way to really understand the Drupal taxonomies.. I had seen some examples, most notably one posted to the Drupal mailing list about a movie database with vocabularies for directors, f/x, locations, but that was an academic topic-map exercise -- it wasn't until I tried, and followed right through to the end, that I noticed the many subtle uses of Drupal taxonomies.

I'm still no where near the potential --- that would take all of the fun out of it! I'm content to still be but an egg.

Gary's write-up offers great

Dries — Tue, 15 Apr 2003 16:48:01 -0400

Gary's write-up offers great insight in Drupal's taxonomy system. I hope we can merge the different bits and pieces into the Drupal documentation.

Good examples

Gunnar Langemark@www.langemark.com — Mon, 14 Apr 2003 04:15:44 -0400

While I'm as enthusiastic about the taxonomy system in Drupal as You are, I must admit that I have still to get around to using it to its full potential.
The import module in the contributions - which uses taxonomy - is on my radar, and so are dhtml menus and XFML.
I just can't seem to figure it all out at once.

I have a project on the drawing board where I would like to use some of these features.

What I really need is a set of examples - describing a number of ways to apply category management in the Drupal fashion!
It is too flexible to be easily grasped.

I guess most new users of Drupal would benefit from that.

Blog Mindshare is Building

garym — Mon, 10 Mar 2003 17:37:38 -0500

This story appears to be getting a lot of traction in the mainstream press. There's been a CNN story (with the sidebar that defines "what is a blog?") and now also this one in BizReport. Time to watch the newswires for evidence of an upturn out of the slump ... and who knows, maybe all these years of experiment with chickens and rats will finally pay off!

Definitions for KM

garym — Thu, 30 Jan 2003 21:42:37 -0500

I can already hear some of the scoffing from long time collegues about this new terminology for "Knowledge Management" so I thought I might just post a quick stab at a justification for yet another 2LA...

First off, critics will point out how 'knowledge' is classically split between that which we can enumerate and that which we can predictively understand; that's simplistic, but it boils down to epistimon and gnosis as two poles of the knowledge axis. For the purposes of KM, it does not matter because the subject matter of KM is the transmission of streams of consciousness, whether it's ideas or musings or detailed recipies, and it hardly matters if the material brings only knowledge of some event (announcing a concert for example) or deep understanding of it (the post-mortem summary after the concert). In KM, both are knowledge.

Knowledge is distinct as a special kind of data because the contents are deeply human, and a special kind of communications, because the sender and receivers are both directly human. A spreadsheet or a data table is data and information, perhaps vital, but generic and impersonal. The email message about those files is knowledge. An MP3 file in a database is data, but the reputation system that successfully recommends it to me is a knowledge system.

Now, 'Management'. yes, this can mean the Dilbert micro-management of petty demigod IT depts reading your emails, but it can also mean the sense of husbandry we get from Forest Management or Money Management, ie, the process of using what you know about the whole subject ecology, about the ways and wheres the subject moves and grows, and from that applying little tweaks here and there to make it grow more effectively.

That's the sort of 'Management' I want put into KM: Knowledge Management is the means by which we build our ships to sail on this new-found sea of information, rather than leaving ourselves to flail and flounder in the waves of it.

So what is Knowledge Management? In the sense I've just described, no, it's nothing new, "Old as the Dickens" as it were. It's that change of design in a filing system which saves one half-hour a day from each of ten thousand employees ... to net a result right there of $150,000/day corporate savings. KM is the way that document was placed into the system, and how it was found, how it got from writer to reader, how the other readers helped them find it, and how it came to be a book in the first place.

KM is about how to tell which of 500 'near fit' documents might be the 'best match', for example through applying distributed (P2P-style RDF-based) reputation systems (think DayPop on the Corporate Desktop). KM is not having to read ever spam, but if a good one happens, you don't miss it because someone caught it and KM made it possible for their knowledge about the value of that knowledge to become your knowledge.

Am I making any sense?