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On-the-Job Knowledge Management
We've always been convinced that Knowledge Management is where you find it, even if people aren't using that
term. If you put your Knowledge glasses on, KM turns up in all kinds of places. For example...
A recent article at CNNMoney.com cited several studies which suggest that a surprisingly large number of employees are terminated before their first year. One study of 20,000 new hires by Leadership IQ found that 46% of entry-level staff were let go in the first 18 months. It may be even worse in the upper ranks, with a Development Dimensions International study finding that 53% of managers fail within a year.
The authors of Sink or Swim attribute this phenomena to a number of factors. One is that people are not clearly told what they're being hired to do, nor given clear goals for their first six months. Also, they're not given good tools for finding the information they need. That means they appear either to be wasting their own time by reinventing wheels or wasting their co-workers' time by asking too many questions. Consider how much money companies spend finding, interviewing and hiring workers, and then consider a possible failure rate of even 30%.
Seems like it shouldn't be hard to justify the development of a KM system, eh? That's system with a small "s," by the way. Not necessarily technology, just a better, more thoughtful
approach to help newbies integrate with the team.
Better Ways of Sharing (Part 1)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the proliferation of digital cameras must be
adding value somehow. Even casual photographers can develop huge collections, and that introduces a new problem. Once you have them, what can you do with them?
Most people want to share their
pictures somehow, and web-based tools for image sharing have been around for several years. Most of them use a photo-album structure, though, and suffer from the same problem as any other collection: The
bigger they get, the harder they are to handle.
Sites like Flickr address the problem with meta-tags, so you can organize your pictures by whatever concepts you like, and also see how other users are using the same tags. Some tags (like, say, "Ellis Island") are pretty focused and predictable. Others (like "green") are more subtle.
Two relatively new sites offer something more than just meta-tagging. Tabblo lets you load pictures into templated web pages, creating a kind of collage effect. OurStory uses a timeline as a navigational metaphor, so you can capture pictures to tell some kind of story -- about a vacation, a project... your life. What they're doing could be done to a degree with blogging technology, but these sites are designed to emphasis the use of pictures rather than text. You'll see some imaginative applications, too. How about an illustrated guide for building your own Mento-Diet Coke geyser?
We wrote about this idea back in April 2005, in an article about Google's Picassa image management tool. This is another example of how changes in the interface allow you to recognize better ways of working with the underlying content. And when that content is on a server instead of your own PC, you have better ways of sharing it, too.
Reconsidering the Wikipedia?
By now we assume most of our readers are aware of the Wikipedia, the on-line encyclopedia that's written and edited by a global community of volunteer experts. It's one of our favorite tools for learning a little bit about a lot of
subjects.
Understanding its open publishing model, as well as its self-correcting nature, we appreciate that it's perhaps less dependable when looking into current events. (For example, in the
first few hours after the death of Ken Lay last week, the Wikipedia reported his passing as a "probable suicide" brought on by guilt. By the afternoon, though, things were back in synch with reality.)
The lesson here is that on the Web, things are not always what they seem. The Wikipedia may appear to be as solid and well-informed as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but knowing how it's assembled
means it won't always be as accurate. (Not that the Brittannica always gets things right, either, of course.) Thoughtful users should understand that when working at Web speed, published information can easily be overtaken by events. At least with the Wikipedia, corrections can be posted quickly and easily, without waiting for the next edition. Caveat lector.
Better Ways of Sharing (Part 2)
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what's a moving picture worth? In the past week,
we've come across a couple of news items about the emergence of video on the Web. National Public Radio had a segment describing how television networks were trying to expand their audiences by moving into a Web environment. They also mentioned that the big dogs were paying close attention to sites like YouTube and Google Video. (If you're not aware of them, both of these are community-oriented
video hosting sites. YouTube went on-line in February 2005, and pitches itself as a way to "get your videos to the people who matter to you...")
There was also an item in The Washington Post, about the political aspects of Web video, particularly on YouTube. Most of what you'll find there is pretty amateurish, although not without charm. Some are actually pretty slick. It's hard to say what (if any) influence homemade YouTube attack ads might have on a national election. But it's certainly true that traditional media underestimated
the power of the bloggers the last time around.
Blogging essentially lets anyone with an Internet connection present themselves as a journalist, something that can be either disturbing or
empowering, depending on your point of view. Video sharing lets anyone with a camera become a broadcaster. It's still evolving, of course, but in our view anything that facilitates the sharing of
information will likely do more good than harm.
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