Goodbye and thank you

Published on 28 December, 2008 in about. 6 Comments

This will be the last post to this blog.

Thank you to everyone that kept me going with this iteration, either with direct encouragement, your comments, are just being a nameless page view. Although I’ve always said (and still do) that I blog first-most for myself…your presence has kept me going when I would have otherwise have stopped.

To the extent I return to blogging, please look for me at raymondsims.com.

As of December 2008, the hosting bill is paid-up for two years, so this (now) ‘archive’  will be available for at least that long.

Best always,

Ray

Blog traffic stats – Tony’s meme [redux]

Published on 11 October, 2008 in blogging. 2 Comments

Back in February I promised to take another look at my blog statistics after six months. Well, it has been longer than that…but in the interim I had stopped blogging with the start of my new job this Spring. Now, six months into new job, I belatedly returned and updated the original post with data for four months — from analytics install through the week after my last post. Here is the visual that goes with that:

Google Analytics charts

Google Analytics charts

The spike in March is from my 43 Knowledge Management Definitions post, which since I stopped blogging has still seen 1300+ views, just slightly behind the more surprising favorite New Employee Orientation post. As I prepare to now walk away from this blog, it does give me some satisfaction that people are still visiting — as I’ve seen the same traffic in the past 5 months of absolutely no blogging, as I did in the previous 4 months pictured above. Hopefully I have left some small piece of enduring value behind. With this in mind, I’ll pay for another year of hosting to keep this site alive.

Well, there you have it. Now I feel I can otherwise sign-off.

Quick Updates + Boston KM Forum

Published on 17 May, 2008 in blogging, knowledge management and quick updates. 3 Comments
  • I’ve very much enjoyed taking a break from blogging, what I’ve been calling my “blogging hiatus.” I’m not certain if I’m now back in for real, but I feel the urge to write again today, even though it has turned out to be a gorgeous, almost summer day, in Boston…after a rainy start.
  • I’ve just completed week six in my new job and time continues to move by quickly — too quickly, as I haven’t made as much progress as I had hoped for in these few weeks. I’m still adjusting to being a knowledge management group of one at the global scale of my industry vertical. We have a distributed team — nah, I’m now calling it a ‘network’ as a more accurate description, without judgment there — covering about 30 countries. A few in the network also carry ‘knowledge management’ in their titles, while the majority have their country-level KM duties as an extra assignment. This makes complete sense as many countries are not at the scale to justify a full-time person. So far, knowledge management means almost entirely “information management” and I find that I now introduce myself externally as an “information manager” or “information specialist”…my most preferred term for what I have been up to. Again, no judgment…rather just what it is. Near-term I’m mostly consumed by the need to move to a new content management system and fielding tactical classic requests for information (have we ever done work like this before?, who are the internal experts on this topic?, who can we use as a client reference in this proposal?, etc.) I am also at the very front-end of working towards launching some global communities of practice to complement existing country-level activity.
  • Within the context of this last point, on Thursday I attended the Boston KM Forum meeting; my first since the one I presented at during week #1 on the new job. Gian Jagai’s presentation was titled So You Were Just Promoted to Knowledge Manager – Now What?. Gian and I appear to be on somewhat similar paths within our respective corners of very large companies. Sadalit Van Buren nicely blogged one of the key points that emerged from conversation: For Knowledge Management, Add a Human — as many in the audience on Thursday lamented on why companies just didn’t “get it” relative to the value provided by research librarians, information brokers, community coordinators, and the like. Newly Bostonian, Jack Vinson (who I met in person for the first time at the event) shared his notes with KM in Global Services. Some sound-bites that stood out as potential connections to my own new journey:
    1. Gian actively recruited membership in his first community…going after particular individuals that he wanted in the community based on their expertise, their believed connections to others, and a “personable and accountable” nature.
    2. For the community kick-off meeting he asked each person to share an “influence map”…showing their connections to others that they thought they could/should carry the community learning to. I was surprised to hear that this didn’t appear as an uncomfortable or threatening request to people.
    3. The heavy-lifting of keeping the community going is shared by a two or three person core team, and facilitated by a community coordinator (Gian). This is an identical model to what we used at my former employer.
    4. The community coordinator role is targeted to be 25% full time equivalent per community.
    5. The communities typically hold monthly calls and rotate the time of day to suite the various regions of the world. Calls are recorded and made available in mp3 for internal to the company “podcasting”
    6. During the conversation, Forum leaders Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait spoke passionately about the necessity of logging every single request for information or assistance that the community fielded, to then later use to validate this one aspect of the community’s value. This is something I am tackling in my new role; however, I do find it takes a lot of discipline to pull off.
  • There, I’ve done it. I’ve broken my blogging silence. See you again next month? Or, sooner?

Traveling in circles

Published on 12 April, 2008 in knowledge management, methods and reflection. 1 Comment

I’ve been seeing circles lately, in a positive way.

As I mentioned in earlier posts this month and at the Boston KM Forum KM 2.0 symposium, I’ve been putting some time into reading Joseph Firestone and Mark McElroy’s knowledge management writing. Highly recommended, although occasionally challenging reading. Seeing their Decision Execution Cycle, in Doing Knowledge Management (29 page PDF, Firestone and McElroy, 2004), and also in On Doing Knowledge Management, (Firestone, 2008), got me to thinking about other circular models that have seen. From page 6 in the first paper:

Firestone McElroy - Decision Execution Cycle

Perhaps the most well known circular model is the similar Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle (PDCA) from Walter Shewhart; frequently credited to W. Edwards Deming, who popularized its use. The American Society for Quality describes the cycle as:

  1. Plan. Recognize an opportunity and plan a change.
  2. Do. Test the change. Carry out a small-scale study.
  3. Study. Review the test, analyze the results and identify what you’ve learned.
  4. Act. Take action based on what you learned in the study step: If the change did not work, go through the cycle again with a different plan. If you were successful, incorporate what you learned from the test into wider changes. Use what you learned to plan new improvements, beginning the cycle again.

At the Boston KM Forum symposium, in his presentation, Dan Keldsen referenced another circular model, the Observe-Orient-Detect-Act (OODA) loop from John “40 second” Boyd, United States Air Force, as described by Vicki Bell in her 2003 article: A different battlefield, the same strategy: How the OODA Loop applies to business:

Lastly, Chris Collison and Geoff Parcell propose several circular models in their book Learning to Fly: Practical Knowledge Management from Leading and Learning Organizations. The first is a learning cycle represented as follows (p.21):

Learning to Fly - Learning Cycle #1

The second is double-loop model “relates learning processes, and the capture and transfer of knowledge to day-to-day business.” (p.33):

Learning to Fly - Learning Cycle #2

Now the work is to learn how to intentionally travel in, not just see, these circles.

For Further Reading:

Related Post:

KM2.0 Presentation – Boston KM Forum

Published on 9 April, 2008 in conferences, enterprise 2.0, knowledge management, personal KM, personal learning environments, strategy and wiki. 7 Comments

This morning I presented a slightly condensed version of these slides at the Boston KM Forum’s KM 2.0 – Real or Hype? quarterly event at Bentley College:

What’s emerging?

Published on 5 April, 2008 in enterprise 2.0 and wiki. 3 Comments

Rose BudLately I’m finding myself thinking frequently, if not deeply, about emergence. Two recent triggers for this ongoing reflection were:

  • Without much thought, labeling one of my what 2.0 memes to me top-level categories this (with bullets under the heading being closer to things that help fuel emergence, contrast to examples of emergence),
  • the number of mentions of emergence in AIIM’s Market IQ enterprise 2.0 report (31 per Adobe Search) and feeling that the examples given were fine, but somehow not the entire story.

So, once again I start an exploration with a brainstorm list, this time for the question “In the context of enterprise 2.0, what items potentially demonstrate emergent behavior?”…

  1. Use cases for new collaboration and social software applications. I think back to my experience with wiki four+ years ago prior to having benefit of the seeds in wikipatterns.com. Then, we openly didn’t know what we were going to use the wiki for, but overtime, some “standard” use cases emerged. Now I see the same with some of the newer social software applications like Twitter, where not only use cases but syntax conventions (for @username and #hashtags) emerge.
  2. Shifts in company culture, including towards more openness and more innovation
  3. Shifts in the macro way that employees work
  4. Organizational networks, including new ties facilitated by social software applications, shifting demographics, and changing culture
  5. Folksonomy, emerging from content categories
  6. Increased visibility to the most valuable content, derived both from explicit ratings and from behavior (e.g. tagging, subscriptions, linking, and page views)
  7. Wiki page structures
  8. Definitions and terminology, including definitions of web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and knowledge management beyond the original coinage — see for example the enterprise 2.0 definition exchange documented in the AIIM report
  9. Collective intelligence. I’m still sorting out in my own mind to what extent this term works for me, but I at least think it is better than AIIM’s “collective wisdom” — although the report also uses “collective intelligence”
  10. Perhaps software applications, or at least mash-ups. Is it valid to claim emergence here? Although in a common-language sense they are emerging, it really isn’t emergence in the sense of complexity theory.

What did I miss? What are additional emergence examples that apply to enterprise 2.0?

Further Reading:

  • Jim McGee’s The problem of emergence (published at FASTForward blog, October 2007), where he writes:

    The attraction of emergence is twofold. One is the realization that conventionally structured approaches have generally failed when tackling knowledge intensive problems. Knowledge work and knowledge workers don’t mesh well with the structuring techniques appropriate to industrial work. The second [attraction] is the perceived success of emergent approaches behind current Web 2.0 success stories on the Internet.

  • Jordan Frank’s Pros and Cons of Emergence (also October 2007)
  • Andrew McAfee’s Explaining my Fondness for Explicit Content (March 2008) that includes a nice discussion of implicit (derived) information per #6 in the above list
  • Mike Gotta’s Enterprise 2.0: Culture Required? (April 2008)
  • Kevin Kelly’s fascinating and well illustrated The Bottom is Not Enough (February 2008), where he writes:

    I have tried to temper my celebration of the bottom with my belief that the bottom is not enough for what we really want. To get to the best we need some top down intelligence, too. I have always claimed that nuanced view. And now that crowd-sourcing and social webs are all the rage, it’s worth repeating: the bottom is not enough. You need a bit of top-down as well.

    and

    What’s new is only this: never before have we been able to make systems with as much “hive” in it as we have recently made with the web. Until this era, technology was primarily all control, all design. Now it can contain both design and no-design, or hive-ness. In fact, this Web 2.0 business is chiefly the first step in exploring all the ways in which we can combine design and the hive in innumerable permutations.

  • Wikipedia’s Emergence page
  • del.icio.us emergence tag

Lots more yet for me to explore on this topic. Please leave a comment with your recommended resources.
Photo credit: Ann-Kathrin Rehse

Tiring of collaboration – the word

Published on 1 April, 2008 in collaboration, communications, enterprise 2.0 and wiki. 2 Comments

Yesterday I lamented in a Tweet: “Is the collaboration word overused? Sometimes it really is just communication, or even just presence-ing. And that is OK.” Then in a Twitter connection moment, Thomas Vander Wal (@vanderwal) pointed me to his recent blog post Getting to Know Collective and Collaborative and Jack Vinson (@jackvinson) similarly pointed both of us to his earlier Just what do you mean by ‘collaboration’. Both gents nailed exactly what I’ve been feeling.

Jack’s post, in turn, pointed to Shawn Callahan’s Collaboration’s Resurgence, which provides historical context for what I was observing…both a legitimate increased need for collaboration, along with the unfortunate increased abuse of the word as if to mean any interaction involving more than one person.

For me, it isn’t collaboration unless we are working on a common deliverable or problem, all party’s inputs effect the result, and we have the opportunity and expectation to influence each other during the creative process. In this regard the use of blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking, RSS, and email are rarely truly collaborative. Even wiki, the most collaborative tool of the new lot, often reverts back to just self-publishing…not because of limited permissions, but because the page is published as if it were final and nobody cares or dares to edit it.

The AIIM Market IQ report on Enterprise 2.0, Figure 8, p.27, identifies “increase collaboration” as the respondents number one objective for enterprise 2.0. I wonder what those who answered in this fashion really meant and how they intend to use web 2.0 tools (beyond wiki, which I ‘get’) to accomplish collaboration? Perhaps what they really meant was increased visibility, interaction, connections, and shared meaning; i.e. an increase in social capital, which in turn can facilitate productive collaboration…including the old-fashioned kind of, for example, getting on the real or virtual white-board together to thrash out the next breakthrough idea.

Further Reading:

Wish-list: aggregate outbound social media experience

Published on 28 March, 2008 in enterprise 2.0. 0 Comments

As I prepare to move back into corporate employment, I’m again reminded of a “simple but not easy” user interface dream I’ve had for some time: a single user interface / user experience for all my outbound communications, regardless of audience.

What I envision is a single application that provides a front-end for the actual sending applications. This “composer” would have check-boxes for “Who can see?”, where the selections would be something like:

  • Project team ‘x’
  • Company (i.e. intranet)
  • Trusted partners and/or clients (i.e. extranet)
  • Public (i.e. internet)

Additionally it would bring together Twitter, instant messaging, email(? not sure if I’d really want this), and blogging into closer to a single user interface…allowing the user to somehow select writing length (Twitter = short, blogging = long) and the immediacy of communication (instant messaging = instant, mailing lists = middle ground, blogging = most asynchronous) that then defines where this front-end “composer” application would ultimately feed.

Combine all this with one of the attempts now underway with inbound aggregation…all moving closer to a single “online conversation central” — both inbound and outbound, both behind the firewall and outside the firewall.

Related Post:

What 2.0 memes to me

Published on 25 March, 2008 in enterprise 2.0 and networks and communities. 9 Comments

In pulling together content for an upcoming presentation, I did a card sort (well, actually a Post-It Note sort) to group my too many “what is 2.0?” bullet-points into a handful of over-arching themes. Then, to further aid memory, and for the visual interest, I selected iconic photos for each theme.

This started as just a Web 2.0 behavior and impact scan (trying to stay away from a tools focus); however, as I got further into this it began to blur into the 2.0 meme in general. More about that in the Further Reading below.

Same with my compilation of Knowledge Management definitions, this is not about creating yet another definition for Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, or 2.0 in general, but rather a sharing of my own process and result for getting my head around some of the existing content.

My five groupings ended up as follows:

It’s All About Me,Makeup

and My Networks.Network SNA

  • Connections
  • Communities
  • Ecosystems
  • Interaction
  • Sharing
  • Collaboration
  • Reputation and Trust

Side Observation: the first three bullets are a definition and two examples of networks, the next three are what is occurring within the network, and the last bullet (reputation and trust) are both outcomes and enablers of that doing.

It’s Open,Philip Johnson - glass house

Emergent,Rose bud

  • Innovative
  • Perpetual beta –> never complete and frequently changes
  • Light weight
  • Right-brain
  • Complexity
  • Leadership, contrast to management
  • Fun and exciting

Fast…

(added 28 March)Lamborghani

  • …to get up and running
  • …and easy to use
  • …to find and make connections with others
  • …response to questions from social network
  • …time to value
  • …to appear and (sometimes also) fast to become irrelevant

and Always On.Late night at computer

  • Global
  • 24 x 7 x 365 1/4
  • Mobile devices and upcoming ubiquitous wireless connectivity
  • Software as a Service (SaaS) [oops, slipping into technology; but it is hard not to for this point]
  • Virtual

Further Reading:

An historical classic and a sample of more recent writing across topics within the topic…

Related Posts:

Photo Credits: Janelle Siegrist (makeup), José Luis Molina (network), Ann-Kathrin Rehse (rose bud), Steven (glass house), Samuel Herrman (car), Reed (at computer)

Does Twitter fill a communication void?

Published on 24 March, 2008 in communications, enterprise 2.0, methods and networks and communities. 2 Comments

Twitter Logo

Since writing my first post regarding Twitter, I continue to refine my own usage pattern and think about “why Twitter?” — what is it exactly that makes it so addictive, or perhaps even so useful? Including within the enterprise?

First, I thought about communication alternatives: (with a loose attempt at some clustering within the list)

  • Face-to-face, one-to-one, unscheduled — the “water cooler”
  • Face-to-face, one-to-one or small group, scheduled (e.g. the typical physical meeting)
  • Audio or web-conference, small group (e.g. for a virtual team meeting)
  • Face-to-face, large group, scheduled (e.g. presentation or lecture)
  • Virtual, large group, scheduled (e.g. webcast)
  • Land line phone, one-to-one
  • Mobile phone, one-to-one
  • Voicemail, one-to-one
  • Voicemail, broadcast, one-to-many
  • Instant message, one-to-one
  • Instant message, broadcast
  • Micro-blog (e.g. Twitter)
  • email
  • Mailing list (e.g. listserver)
  • Discussion functionality within collaborative workspace (e.g. SharePoint)
  • Traditional blog
  • Traditional print mass media (newspapers, magazines, white papers, journal articles, direct marketing, books, etc. — many variations, with various degrees of the parameters outlined below)
  • Intra or inter-company print media (e.g. the design document, the marketing plan)
  • Wikis
  • Traditional web pages (static, or essentially static, internet or intranet)
  • The good ol’ fashion snailmail letter

Next I thought about communication parameters (as with the previous list, I imagine that I’ve left off at least a few critical points…please use comments to suggest important additions):

  • How much fidelity? (in the sense of the likelihood of the intended meaning being in-fact the meaning absorbed)
  • To what degree personal or personalized?
  • How formal or informal?
  • Synchronous or asynchronous? With some shades in between, e.g. for text (SMS) and instant messaging, depending on the particular usage scenario.
  • Mobility? (e.g. can I do it during a cab ride?)
  • Supports non-verbal communication?
  • Is there a potential network effect? (i.e. does the value likely increase as more join the communication?)
  • Opportunity for feedback? (e.g. replies, or opportunities for questions and clarification)
  • Likelihood of building new connections? (echo to network effect)
  • Facilitates multi-tasking? (i.e. can it be done during a meeting or conference call? — the crackberry under the conference room table.)
  • How much overhead? (i.e. is it quick to do? Natural and easy to learn?)
  • How much information volume? (i.e. War and Peace at 1000+ pages, or?)
  • Is there a recording, is there a way to review the communication later?

Applying these parameters to Twitter:

  • Surprisingly the fidelity is pretty good. Unlike with email, with only 140 characters available, there isn’t a whole lot of room to get yourself in trouble. Plus, it is highly public, which also contributes to keeping the flaming down.
  • Surprisingly personal via author pictures, personal information (e.g. “having dinner with my daughter”), and at some fashion personalized to my current of potential Followers (e.g. in the sense of “if you are Following me, then you might be interested in this link”)
  • Very informal (in general, a good thing in my world view)
  • Asynchronous, while still being fast-moving, e.g. for breaking news
  • Highly mobile and cross-platform
  • Gets a zero for non-verbal (hmm, a micro-video-blogging parallel to Twitter?)
  • Has a network effect, both at scale of the application overall and for an individual’s Followers
  • Limited opportunity for feedback, although does support “@ replies” and also via links handing off to blogs where more extensive feedback is possible
  • Strong likelihood of building new connections. Your mileage might differ; however, I have “discovered” and started to connect with interesting people that to date I had missed via my blog and social networks.
  • Facilitates multi-tasking? — yes, primarily due to the next point
  • Twitter is quick and light-weight, low overhead
  • Low information volume; however, high link density…leading to increased information volume
  • Twitter is recorded in the sense of being able to search and find prior tweets (hmm, a good thing or bad?)

For now, I’ll leave it to the reader to pick other communication methods and compare. Still, even without the rigor of a full spreadsheet, I’ll go out on the limb and claim that Twitter (and other micro-blogging applications) do fill a unique niche untouched by other channels — a niche worth exploring within forward looking enterprises — while still very thankfully not being the be-all to communications.

Further Reading: