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Happy Holidays
We haven't had to declare any Grid-Lock Alerts on Knowledge Street, but the holidays certainly increase the need for effective
multitasking. The extra torque of this season makes you ponder the old question of life-work balance...
So Directions will be a tad shorter this month. We figured that would be better for us, and
better for you too. Happy holidays!
The Next Big Thing?
Knowledge Management has tended to focus on the benefits to the organization, which is reasonable
enough up to a point. It's the organization, after all, that's being asked to come up with the money to support KM. So if you follow the press, the stories tend to be about increased productivity through
re-use, or reduced risk through retention of intellectual capital, or reduced cost through shorter learning curves. That's all good from a cost-justification perspective, but it undersells the benefits
that KM brings to the individual.
KM systems mean higher productivity because they make life easier for the people who are doing the work. Instead of starting with a blank page, a good KM system
will provide reusable components as well as examples of what the finished product should look like. It can connect people to helpful experts, or maybe just to peers who are facing the same challenges in
different places. A KM culture recognizes the contributions of individuals (or teams), and lets them be famous for same. An enterprise that adopts KM principles will outperform one that does not, but
that performance derives from the higher individual performance of its people. It's a classic win-win scenario.
Interest is growing in this particular aspect of things. Personal KM (PKM) considers
the processes, tools and concepts that are best suited to unleashing individual effectiveness. Knowledge Management ("the original KM publication") has listed PKM as one of the things it might explore in 2004. UK consultant David Gurteen has added a topics page for Personal KM to his site. UCLA Professor Paul Dorsey has defined seven core skills for effective PKM, and Steve Barth, Knowledge Management magazine's Editor at Large, is building a recommended set of PKM Tools. You should also take a look at thought?horizon, a nicely
integrated site that connects PKM directly with our individual responsibility as "learners."
PKM could be good news for KM in general. Large-scale programs are always in danger of being
undermined by people's ability to opt out. Telling a story that emphasizes the benefits for the "user" is a step in the right direction.
Redbone Outfitters Goes Live
If you live in the northeastern US, you know that last weekend brought the first winter storm
of the season. It left almost a foot of snow at Knowledge Street World Headquarters, and that's a lot for these parts, especially at this time of year. The first day of winter is still 12 days away!
While the snow was falling, we were putting the finishing touches on redboneoutfitters.com -- which made for an interesting contrast. Redbone is a fishing charter company based in southern Florida, offering half- and full-day excursions out of Naples. This site is their first foray into the virtual world, and it will be interesting to see how it effects their business.
This was a fun project for us, with soup-to-nuts responsibility that ran from logo design through to the finished site. It's also a good example of K Street's "common sense" approach to
web technology. We believe you can usually assemble what you need from off-the-shelf components, if you pick the right ones. At this site, the client wanted a way to publish fishing reports on demand,
and we recommended a Web Log (powered by Blogger), integrated with the other HTML pages.
Take a look, and if you're in the mood for some south Florida fishing, tell them Knowledge Street sent you.
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