016 This month’s tip:

You can’t have too many champions.

Anyone who's spent time working in KM knows the importance of finding a champion for the cause -- the more highly placed the better. Companies that are most successful in implementing KM always have this Support-from-the-Top in common. The CEO was behind the idea, and his or her clout was there to break down barriers and secure funding and otherwise provide spiritual leadership.

KM programs are at their most vulnerable when a champion goes away, so the tip here is that two champions are better than one. Tom Tobin includes this as one of his Ten Principles for Knowledge Management Success, and recommends finding a champion at the executive level and another at the operational level. We also recommend looking for champions across organizational boundaries, recruiting someone who is well placed in IT, and someone else on the business side.

It's also a good idea to consider the overall corporate culture, and look for champions where executive attention is most likely to be focused. If it's a research kind of culture, get R&D on board. If it's a sales culture, sell the sales folks.
 

December 2004 - Volume 2, Issue 12

‘Tis the Season

We like traditions, generally speaking, and this year we're continuing a practice established in 2003. This is a special "holiday edition" of Directions. That means it's going to be shorter than usual. Less for us to write, less for you to read! The gift of time from us to you.

We're not sure if people really are any busier in December than they are in, say, March. But it sure seems that way. People seem a little more tense, and a little more harried, and the difference is palpable even here in the generally tense and harried northeastern US. Maybe we're juggling too many details, or maybe we're worried we're not juggling enough. In any case, this being the last issue for 2004, we'd like to say thanks to all our readers, and wish you the best of all possible times in 2005.

Happy holidays!

The Best of 2004

Being that it's the end of the year, what could be more natural than to revisit the past eleven months, and offer our own set of favorite articles from past issues? Another sneaky way of making this a holiday issue!

The links here will take you to articles about which we received particularly positive feedback, as well as some we just like a lot ourselves. If you've read them before, we appreciate you may not want to read them again. However, given that any individual reader may have missed an issue here or there, you might want to take a click.

We Don't Need No Stinkin' Metrics -- The kind of insights offered by real, trustworthy metrics mean better decisions, better products, faster response times and more rapid innovation. Sadly, there are many companies where good metrics would be useless, because their culture is not measurement oriented... read the article

The 90% Rule -- Science fiction luminary Theodore Sturgeon is credited with originating the 90% rule. Simply put, this rule says 90% of everything is crap... read the article

Engineering Serendipity -- Sometimes, the most interesting discoveries are made when you're looking for something else... read the article

Email (In)Effectiveness -- In many organizations, universal email has only emerged in the last 10 years. So it's perhaps not surprising that we're still working the kinks out of it... read the article

Communications as Architecture -- It's much harder to communicate effectively if you work at the level of a single event. If you invest some time in developing an architecture for your communication work, it's easier to deliver any individual message... read the article

Virtual Teams, Real Challenges -- These days, almost every team is virtual to some degree. That means people have to find ways to work well together with minimal face time, overcoming challenges that are interpersonal, logistical and technical in nature... read the article

Hope you enjoy them. And if you have any thoughts about the kind of article you'd like to see in 2005, please drop us a note. We love that.

More Good Clicks

Last year around this time, we ran an article called "Good Clicks," directing readers toward websites that generate donations for worthy causes with the simple click of a mouse (as they say). This isn't your money, either. The donations are made by advertisers and sponsors who've signed on to make small contributions for each click registered. Most of the contributions seem small ($25 for every 1,000 clicks) but they can add up clickly. (Clickly, get it?)

So the more the merrier. You can spread the word about fighting aids, providing free mammograms, increasing literacy or fighting hunger. There's also a stronger "directory of free clicks" presence this year. Pay a visit to Make your clicks count or EcologyFund to access multiple good-click causes. Care2.com, with a membership of over 2 million, takes the concept even further by offering a way to network with others who care about the same issues.

What's this got to do with Knowledge Management and Communications, you might ask? Not a thing.

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