- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- The community coordinator role is targeted to be 25% full time equivalent per community.
- 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”
- 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?
Archive for the 'quick updates' Category
It has been a while since I last posted quick updates. Here is the latest that is too long to Tweet, but too short and fragmented for individual blog posts:
- I’ve now had some distance and time for reflection from my 3-month consulting engagement during the winter months. The work turned out to be a good reminder that formal training still has an important role in organizations — especially within those that are more transactional (e.g. insurance, financial services, call/contact centers, and other ‘back-office’ functions.) I admit I have a personal bias towards informal self-directed learning, and I continue to believe that, in general, companies under-invest there. Still, like with many good ideas, informal learning is not the end-all be-all for every situation. Balance.
- I’ve accelerated my reflection on the knowledge management field. This is prompted by my expected new employment and the job search leading up to that (watch my LinkedIn profile for details, but only after I’m actually attending new hire orientation, which is still weeks away.) Even more so than ‘formal training’, I’ve emotionally wanted to distance from the term knowledge management; however, I’m coming back around to embracing it as the best (for now) umbrella description of what I’m most committed to — even given that my expected new role will be a lot about what would more correctly be labeled information and/or content management. Researching and writing 43 knowledge management definitions has been a bit of a cathartic experience. More to come, and needed, in this realm.
- In research for the 43 definitions post I used Google’s “define:” functionality. Somewhat helpful; however, overall a lame collection of sources, including several that were broken links. I wonder how Google selects targets for particular ‘define:’ key-words? Here are some hints and further fuel for my fear of commercial manipulation.
- In addition to KM, my web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0 research is intensifying as I pull together a presentation regarding web 2.0 influence on knowledge management. This work immediately begged the question of what did each of the two terms mean…so again, setting me off on the 43 definitions post. By comparison, defining web 2.0 felt pretty easy. Two sources that I’ve found especially useful when I put some time to this a few days ago were Steve Thomas’s look at Libary 2.0 (98-slide PDF), and SocialMediaToday’s IBM Case Study (registration required.)
- A couple of knowledge management and learning convergence sightings:
- At the eLearning Guild 2008 Annual Gathering Eric Parks’ (ASK International) session #110 is on “Merging Knowledge Management with e-Learning”. The abstract suggests using AICC and SCORM industry standards as a piece of a bridge between unstructured information and e-Learning. I’ll not be able to attend…so, if you do, please pass along a debrief.
- Two years ago Matt Moore was already on to this emerging trend with his KM & Learning: a match made in heaven? post — I had missed this one until last week.
- I recently started to use XING, an European alternative to LinkedIn for professional networking. Here is my profile over there. Initial impressions (full blog post at some later day, maybe) are that, even after LinkedIn’s recent make-over, I prefer XING’s workflow and user experience; XING’s communities are more open and mature; and (the obvious) XING’s members are more International…or at least non-USA. Bottom-line, sigh, I think you need to be in both. For more, see Online Business Networking: 2 Horse Globalization Race.
- Since my last Quick Updates, and for the fourth or more time, I re-branded this blog via the tag-line. In recent time the tag-line read: “Enterprise 2.0, Business Analysis, Information Management, Learning, Management & Leadership, and much more…” Early on it was: “An exploration of individual and organizational learning, training, e-learning, performance support, content management, communities of practice, organizational development and similar disciplines dedicated to improving workplace performance.” Whew. Now the tag-line is a simpler, more personal, and more open: “Living at the intersection of People, Technology, and Content — with a passion for Knowledge and Learning”. It’s all a journey.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day for the observant.
- With my current contract assignment completed, and with only a short follow-on starting Monday, I’m back in the job hunt for full-time employment. On this day-one of making my job search a priority, versus a sideline, it doesn’t feel as scary as my last day-one.
- I started using Twitter a month or so ago. I’m rsims there. I was initially resistant in the same spirit of how I felt about blogging, circa 2000 — who really cares about what I am eating for lunch? Well since then, blogging became valuable to me — initially as a regular reader, then later as writer — and now I am already sensing that Twitter will become the same. As I think about my own technology adoption, I’m also realizing this feels like Instant Messaging and Wiki, where again I wasn’t instantly gung-ho, but I now have trouble getting through professional life without either of these.
- With the just concluded assignment, I had the opportunity to climb up on the SharePoint bandwagon hands-on for the first time. My overall impression was just so-so. It gets the job done; however, at least in our install it seemed fairly slow, the functionality wasn’t always the most intuitive, and I really missed having a full-function integrated wiki. Sharepoint wasn’t the focus of my assignment; but I could see the upcoming challenges of information silo-ing and the current confusion within the company relative to “when to use what for what” amongst file-server, stand-alone wiki, email, and SharePoint. Full disclosure: in my previous professional life I had been an Open Text Livelink power user.
- Favorite recent podcast find: Stan Relihan’s The Connections Show focused on gaining value from LinkedIn and other professional networks and networking.
- SecondLife is another party that I’m a bit late coming to. Today I finally jumped in to get first-hand experience. This was in part motivated by Stuart Henshall’s Use the Tools First rant, but also an offer from within the local Organizational Development community to hold conference calls to walk their membership through their first SL experience. I’m in a session tomorrow morning. I download the software tonight to my new Vista machine, and promptly crash on initial launch. Dig into the support site, determine that my video card is supported, but doesn’t have latest driver. Off to ATI’s site to grab the lastest, install and now I can launch SL. Grrrr, not how I had planned to use the last hour…but glad it is tonight and not tomorrow to make the discovery and fix.
- I have a ‘Part-3′ of L&D and KM convergence post in draft, finally getting to the real meat of what if anything to do about the possible convergence — but the CLTI2007 conference is already sending my head spinning in this regard before I’ve had a chance to tidy-up to make presentable. Might be the weekend before I get this out. The of the moment observation: on first two CLTI2007 sessions today (and I wasn’t able to attend the third one live, need to listen on weekend), I couldn’t have made identification between a “L&D” or a “KM” audience…and I also identified more cross-overs like myself (Data-point) with one foot in each ‘camp’ from prior roles, to the extent that there two ‘camps’. Caveat being that this is a very self-selected advanced audience as noted in the kick-off session when 30% of respondents said they personally maintained a blog.
- Another post in the oven is a LinkedIn versus Facebook comparison and getting off the dang fence relative to the latter. Punch-line preview as that post could also be a long time (if ever) in the coming: I think I now “get” Facebook (again echo to Stuart’s rant above.) In Facebook it is much easier to really build some level of personal connection (closer to the feeling I get from my blogger-buddy and prior employer networks) and hang-out with your friends (real ones, including professional connections)…but golly there is a lot of ‘noise’ and immaturity in the system for that benefit. Plus, from what I’ve seen so for, the application functionality is really lacking for community-based sharing on professional topics (ala Yahoo or Google groups even)…despite all the people kicking-off attempts at that. How many overlapping ‘communities’ on a given subject can be sustained? I’m wanting to see the parallels to TRDev and Com-Prac to emerge. And all this has potential for a huge time-sink…ah, but only half of what the SL time-sink that I just ignited will be?
- I finally made the time to sort out how to install MyBlogLog in WordPress with the K2 Theme (which doesn’t use the default widgets interface, but something better.) Like with so many things, dead obvious in retrospect, but not dead obvious in the moment. Yet another post to write is more detailed instructions than at K2 or MyBlogLog sites, I’ll put this one on my non-professional blog. Web 2.0 doesn’t yet pass the “and my mother could do it test” — and this is from a son that has an amazingly computer literate mother for her age group. Hi mom!
- Yesterday I downloaded and read Dave Snowden and Mary Boone’s A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making — the November Harvard Business Review cover article. This helped me move further along on my journey to understand what David has been talking about. I highly recommend the article as a basic introduction for applying the Cynefin Framework to leadership. One of the specific benefits for me was allowing me to again feel comfortable regarding where ‘best practice’ or ‘good practice’ can be used beneficially (for ‘simple’ and ‘complicated’ ordered contexts respectively) — whereas I had left the Boston KM Forum event at the beginning of the month feeling like I might have completely missed the point in all my prior work with documenting ‘practice.’ My misunderstanding from the event, now I see I have only partially (smile) been missing the point.
- From athenahealth co-founder Todd Park’s Health Care Mega Trends webcast last week I was exposed to another framework; a five-stage innovation diffusion model, where the stages are: Ignore – Resist – Substitute – Innovate – Transform. Via internet search, I have yet to find the original citation; so if you know the source, please reply via Comments. I thought it would be interesting to apply this to enterprise 2.0. Pretty clearly many companies are still in the ‘ignore’ stage, and more than a few are currently in ‘resist’; with relatively few having moved to ‘substitute’ or all the way to ‘innovating’ with the new technologies. The enterprise is yet to be ‘transformed’ as a result. Again, a pointer to the original citation for some more guidance on appropriate application would be appreciated.
- I’m slowly beginning a new push to upgrade my blog infrastructure:
- If you are viewing this at the site (versus via a feed reader), you may have already noticed that I’ve started to prune and consolidate my categories. With WordPress’s recent Tag introduction, going forward I plan to use Tags for detailed (low-level) classification and use Categories for higher-level classification. Alas, for those who do consume via a feed reader, depending on the particular reader, I may have created the appearance of edits to some older posts when I changed categories. Sorry.
- I split my ‘Blogroll’ into a couple of major categories and added several new blogs that I’m now especially trying to follow, among the 380 now in my feed reader.
- Next, on to some widget experimentation.
- By the way, I find I’m depending on search alerts more and my feed reader less, as crammed full as it is. There are too many different things I am trying to follow at the moment and I’m finding that alerts are doing the more efficient good job at catching the high-points of what is (also) in my reader while still having the intended benefit of finding many new authors worth following in what are some relatively new subject areas for me.
- Congratulations to the RED SOX! And thanks for sweeping the World Series so I am able to get back to more normal sleep and evening writing that much sooner. I’m not that big of a sports fan; however, I have watched much or all of each post-season Red Sox game — just can’t be helped when the hometown team is doing this well.
Yesterday, for the second time in the past two weeks, this blog was down for several hours while I sorted things out with my host service. Not fun for me, the host’s helpdesk, or anyone trying to visit the site. Apologies to all. Soon I will be doing some further rebuilding that will hopefully lead to more stability.
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Being our own IT department can be a frustrating reality for many small-time bloggers like myself — among the bloggers that I regularly read, I notice I’m not alone this week, for example. To achieve the desired portability and the URL, I’m still glad I decided to set-up my own domain versus using WordPress.com, Typepad.com, Google Blogger, or another fully hosted blog, which then leads to lock-in; however, I could do without this distraction.
I’ve also noticed that as my visibility creeps up that more spam has been sneaking through my filter. Thankfully, in the past six months Akismet has kept more than 12,000 of these lice off this blog; however, now nearly daily one or two do sneak through, to then be smashed via moderation.
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- As I continue my personal metamorphosis from “learning professional” to something more yet (while still being keenly interested in learning in the workplace — and doing some job interviewing for such), I have re-branded my blog tag-line to more closely reflect what I hope to write about when I again make time for regular blogging. Alas, this is more aspirational (both for the time and content) than factual at the point. Thanks for your patience during this transition.
- Speaking of job interviewing, I’m sending out some love for the Manager-tools Interview Series. This past weekend I got in under the wire with the “sign-up for premium subscription and get this series at no extra cost” promo. I crammed with the iPod all weekend and found the 8+ hours of advice valuable. I only wish I had purchased this sooner in my process and had my practice sessions down cold versus only starting.
- I’m now +/- fully productive on my new Dell desktop PC running Vista — full details in All The Rest… The short summary is that I am happier with Vista than I expected to be (having gone in with lots of fear and trepidation.) I do miss a few pieces of functionality from my previous beloved SUSE Linux; for example the “cube” to facilitate multiple workspaces, and the still better than Vista’s application menu. I have enjoyed that my fairly lengthy list of applications have been plug-and-go with the exception (big sigh) of my Comcast Rhapsody internet music service.
- Lots of time lost today mucking with blog mechanics, prompted by an unplanned outage yesterday. Sorry for anyone caught in the “403″. I believe things are again stable for the moment, at least until I start experimenting with more widgets. I’ve been holding off on widget explorations until WordPress 2.3, which I just upgraded to, and K2 theme release 1.0 (almost there now, currently running version RC2). With 2.3, WordPress introduces Tags, in addition to previously used Categories. I have yet to research and get my head around how the two differ and what strategy to adopt for optimal maintenance and findability.
- Over at my more personal blog, All the Rest… I’ve started a “design observation” series prompted by Daniel Pink’s suggestion in A Whole New Mind. Within this series, I also follow Pink’s suggestion relative to considering the design of customer experience and services to be equal to the design of physical objects and software.
- Starting the above series reignites some feeling of stress I have been having relative to “which blog to post to?” as I get back into active blogging; plus the question of if to re-brand Sims Learning Connections to (say) a more generic raymondsims.com along with taking the liberty to focus (oxymoron?) on innovation, product management, information/knowledge management, the business analyst role, enterprise 2.0, etc. — my interests beyond the ‘learning’ focus that the current brand suggests. Readers, what do you think? Should the split be just professional interests versus “home” (e.g the rare post about my dog goes to All The Rest…, but everything else goes here?)? Ah, brand strategy and segmentation.
- Again prompted by my diverging interests, I broke down and started paying the nominal $5 per 3 months for the optional Blogbridge feedreader ‘basic’ service. It is a bit of a scary thought that the 300 feed limitation in the free service was feeling cramping. Now, if I just really could keep on those currently 302 feeds?
- I’m finally giving Google Mail a test-drive, full report to follow
- Another party I’m feeling late to is Facebook. I only recently registered for an account and will start to “play” more shortly. Again, full report to follow.
- The job search continues and (no surprise) is stressful and consuming. Eventually, after employed, I might do a post on lessons learned (or would that be best posted at All The Rest…?, smile). One small item that I’ll share now is a good word for indeed.com that removes the need for registering at so many different job “boards.” Thanks to Indeed, I’ve gotten on to some possibilities that I would have definitely missed otherwise.
With summer coming to an end, today I kick-off my transition from ‘sabbatical’ to ‘job search’ as my primary emphasis — along with an intention to again become an active blogger.
- My All The Rest… blog summarizes some of what I’ve been up to for the past couple of months
- I’ve decided to remain in the Boston area and starting today am aggressively pursuing employment in some combination of the following areas:
- information / knowledge management
- product management
- software requirements definition (business / systems analyst)
- employee learning and development, with an emphasis on informal learning
With respect to industries, aside from enterprise software where I’ve most recently worked and I continue to have strong interest in, I’m drawn to contribute at a societal level via employment in any of the three social areas that I’m most passionate about: healthcare (either via pharma or hospitals), environmental (e.g. related to clean energy), and education (at all grade levels.)
For anyone that might have employment leads, my resume is posted here. - I expect that I will be taking this blog more strongly towards “Knowledge Management” (although I still dislike this term) and “Enterprise 2.0″ (sigh, another problematic phrase) topics — however, for now, I’ll not re-brand until this more fully emerges…in-part guided by where the job search takes me.
- My next immediate tasks are to catch-up with my search alerts and massively reconnect with my professional network, after several months of being 100% “off-line” professionally.
A) Living in the Boston area allowed me the opportunity to stop by the eLearning Guild conference even though I didn’t have the budget or speaker’s slot to allow me to attend sessions. It was tremendous to meet in person for the first time Brent, Cammy, Clive, Mark, Tony and (if only very briefly) again see Elizabeth, Jay, Simon, Tom, and Vicki, among others. I know I’d classify this as ‘network’, but is sure felt like ‘community’ (smile, with reference to earlier discussions regarding the distinction.) As mentioned by others, it is great to be able to jump right in with deep conversation, as if we’ve known each other for years, when in fact in many cases these were first-time meetings in physical space. I also appreciate several new connections that weren’t first formed in the blogosphere prior to the event.
B) I’ve been thinking about whether and how I and others may project our own learning preferences onto others. I admit to rather strong bias towards visual forms of learning, conversation (making sense of the topic together), podcasts (again, the audio channel), blogs, and lots of time for reflection…including while writing this blog. My wife on the other hand is kinesthetic, not very visual or spatial, and appears to be more tolerant of classroom lecture than I…and blessedly not so prone to over-thinking (the downside of my reflection.) She is an adjunct professor and over dinner a few nights ago we got into a conversation around how our teaching styles (including use of visuals) are influenced by our own learning styles.
C) Follow-up from Quick Updates: 1 April 2007
My “most tagged by others in del.icio.us” content is actually by far my PLE mindmap. When I did the analysis first reported in my last Quick Update, I hadn’t thought to check files and was only comparing my blog posts.
Why the relatively high tagging frequency? Certainly heavily influenced by Stephen Downes’ link picked up from Scott Wilson’s; however, I also think this reflects the distinction between static content and conversation and although people appreciate both, we are more likely to want to come back to an Example than a conversation.
D) Follow-up from Quick Updates on 18 March:
I created a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) resource page. As with the earlier Information Architecture (IA) resource page, this is available from the blog site header. All the posts triggered by Stephen Downe’s talks at MIT and at eLearning Guild this past week suggest some more updates that I may get to yet today.