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Falling Out of Context
One of the truisms of knowledge management is that while knowledge is generally contained in artifacts (documents, memos,
presentations, etc.), it's very hard to recognize it without understanding the original context.
In our early experience with knowledge repositories, we sometimes came across folks who were proud
of the hundreds (or even thousands) of artifacts they'd collected, believing that bigger was better. They failed to recognize that while they sure did have a lot of stuff there, they weren't making great
strides in understanding what it meant.
They might have every proposal they'd produced in the past decade, carefully stored and organized by client name. But they couldn't tell you which
proposals led to wins. They couldn't connect the proposals to projects, and didn't know whether the projects were successful, or had crashed and burned. They had no idea which ones were profitable, or if
they were, why they were.
It's not that these questions couldn't be answered, but the answers couldn't be found in the artifacts alone. This is a common failing in start-up KM efforts, which have
a tendency to produce so much stuff they make it impossible to see the big picture. Without the human context -- the "story" -- KM is at risk of making a bad situation even worse.
It's del.icio.us!
Social bookmarking is generating a lot of buzz lately, and if you're not aware of it, you should be.
Basically, social bookmarking lets you maintain your own personal collection of hyperlinks on a server, instead of on a PC. They work just like the bookmarks or favorites in your browser, but they're
accessible from anywhere. At that level, it's just a matter of convenience, something that's been available for years if you were using a portal like my.yahoo.com. What's new is that social bookmarks are
also available to others.
A key idea here is tagging - each bookmark you save is tagged with one or more keywords of your own selection, and you can search other people's bookmarks for common
threads. One of the most popular social bookmark sites is del.icio.us, and it's recommended to support the new live bookmarks feature of Firefox. It's an open source application created by Steve Mallett (founder and managing editor of OSDir.com). All you need to do is register, load your bookmarks and start tagging. Del.icio.us also has an RSS capability, which will notify you when
someone adds a bookmark that fits one of your tags.
Think of it as a new gadget for your Personal KM toolkit. If you're interested, also check out related apps like Furl and Spurl, or the tagging capability offered by the digital image publishing site
called Flickr.
Dropping the Virtual Ball
In today's world, it seems everyone has a website. The Internet connects more than 72 million
hosts in 247 countries, and is growing at a rate of 40% to 50% per year. Half of humanity still hasn't made a phone call, but in the wired world the web has become an invaluable business platform.
When done well, a website can practically eliminate geographic barriers to commerce, something which benefits buyers and sellers alike -- according to Forrester Research, electronic commerce generated $12.2 billion in 2003. The web gives even very small businesses an opportunity to connect to new customers, and an extremely cost-efficient way of doing business. Of course, there's a down side, too. It also presents a new opportunity for dropping the ball.
Every web site is in competition with the best, and web customers quickly learn to recognize what works, and what doesn't. You can't fool them. People come to a website to do something -- they
don't just drop in to say hello. They have a goal in mind, and the faster that goal is met, the better the user experience.
Even the simplest, bare-bones sites generally have a "Contact
Us" page. Yet in our own, entirely unscientific research, we've found these contact pages to be peculiarly ineffective. Some offer only a phone number, which leads to an answering machine from which
calls are not returned. Others provide a generic email address, which is just as unresponsive. It's surprising some companies bother to build a site at all, when they're so careless about managing it. If
you're involved in external communications, and you're not regularly addressing comments from your organization's website, you may be dropping the virtual ball...
New Ways of Looking, New Ways of Seeing
Since the media for digital photography is essentially free, it's a technology that
encourages the amateur photographer to snap away like mad. It encourages you to produce a lot of images which aren't really very good, but it also gives you more options for messing about with them.
Images that a film photographer might throw away, can sometimes be fixed, or used in a collage, or digitally enhanced in artistic ways. What’s interesting is how this technologically-enabled context
shift can change their asthetic value.
At least one of us on Knowledge Street is a fan of Picassa 2 for managing (and tweaking) digital images. It's a modest, idiot-proof tool, not as daunting as Photoshop, although not as powerful either. But it can transform a folder of point-and-shoot snaps into a satisfying slide show of a friend's housewarming. It’s a good example of how a new tool can give you a new way of seeing things.
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