058 This month’s tip:

Make a list, check it twice.

A check list is one of the most fundamental information management tools and we're inveterate list-makers at Knowledge Street. Do you ever make a list of chores in the morning, get only half of them done, and then add some others that did get done, only for the pleasure of crossing them off? No?!

But a list can also be more than a process manager. It can be a kind of visioning system and self-motivation tool. If you make one of those life lists people talk about, it can put some real focus on things. In the words of singer-songwriter Maura Kennedy, it can make you "jump out of bed in the morning, breathing deeply the rarefied air known only to those who have a list."

Of course, on any given day you don't actually have to do any of the things on your life list. But you can think about them. Perhaps you can move toward one or two in some small, incremental way. You don't have to buy the ticket to Nepal, but you could read about it, and look at a map.
 

June 2008 - Volume 6, Issue 6

Right Under Your Nose 

Most people think of innovation in terms of discovery, since that's where the glamor is. Everyone likes the idea of coming up with some new thing that's never been seen, heard or considered before. However, you can also take a more "archeological" approach, by digging into the things your organization is already doing. Think of it as a Raiders-of-the-Lost-Knowledge strategy.

If within your organization, you can identify something a single department does exceptionally well, and introduce the same practice elsewhere, it can be very significant. If you can scale one group's success up to the entire enterprise, you can make a tremendous change.

Not every innovation has the "wow" factor of the iPhone. But even small incremental changes can have deep and long-lasting impact, if applied in the right way.

Death to PowerPoint?

In the last few years, we've noticed two things that seem to form a technological yin and yang. On one hand, digital storage devices have gotten progressively smaller and cheaper, so it's gotten easier to carry vast amounts of information around in your hip pocket. On the other hand, Web-based applications have gotten progressively more powerful and sophisticated, so it's also gotten easier to avoid carrying anything at all. A new entry in the latter category is called SlideRocket -- a Web-based presentation authoring tool. It's more powerful than SlideShare, which we mentioned in passing back in April. This is a real tool for building, managing and showing presentation materials. It’s a cool idea, and at this moment it’s counting down to beta.

They don't plan to give it away, but they promise "a range of prices including a free account for an individual user." It's designed for on-line use, but also has an off-line client that will let you download and play SlideRocket presentations when you don’t have an Internet connection. And it seems to be well integrated with other Web-based things, like Flickr, while being browser agonistic and cross-platform capable.  Could it be a PowerPoint killer?

Once upon a time, an old mentor of ours habitually carried a dozen or so explanatory graphics, each cradled in its own sheet protector. He'd realized that he was often asked the same questions when traveling around the company, and this set of visual aids let him answer them more effectively. So he'd whip one out of his briefcase and say, "Well here, let me show you!" With a SlideRocket account, we could all do the same thing, pretty much any where and any time.

Mom’s Recipe Box

Sometimes, when asked by a novice about this Knowledge Management thing, we harken back to conversations from the mid 90s. If you were involved back in the day, you'll remember those rambles about Data vs. Information vs. Knowledge. You saw presentations that explored the line between tacit and explicit. ("If I have it written down, but I can't find it, is it still explicit knowledge?")

One thing we usually tell KM beginners is that the roots of Knowledge Management go all the way back to prehistory. When humans first began to externalize what they knew, casting their ideas into something that would outlive them, we were on the way to KM. Between then and now, we've mostly just improved on the process. And once the Web brought so much information within easy reach, the desire for better ways to manage it was probably inevitable.

Mom's recipe box is a very accessible metaphor for talking about KM. We all had moms, and most of them had recipes. That box of explicit information captures dishes the family most admired, but it also carries a huge amount of sentimental meta-information. That's the tacit part -- the memories invoked by reading the ingredients of a particular dish. Like her ham and spaghetti casserole...

Engaging The Younger Worker

You can only have one first Full-Time Job, and most of us probably remember that it began (at least) with a sense of hope. We were ready, willing and able to make a genuine contribution in return for that daily wage. Sadly, it doesn't take long to grind that optimism out of a person, and a lot of companies seem almost designed to generate disgruntled employees.

Today, younger workers are entering the job market with particularly high expectations. They're more technologically savvy than any previous generation, and the principles of sharing and collaboration have been woven into them since high school. It's going to be hard for them to accept rigid bureaucracies and top-down management, even though that's still the norm at many (most?) US companies.

Wachovia, one of the largest US banks, is a firm that recognizes the problem. It's about to deploy an internal collaboration platform that will give its 120,000 employees access to wikis, blogs and social networking tools. Pete Fields, in a keynote address at this month's Enterprise 2.0 Conference, warned that many new workers, even those who assimilate well, are at risk of being disenfranchised "in a systematic and pervasive way." Something to think about.

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