033 This month’s tip:

Appreciate the limits of email.

Have you ever sent someone an email with two or three questions in a single message? Are you surprised how many people respond by answering the first question, and ignoring the others? Did you think they were being evasive? Rude? Did you think they were just knuckleheads? It could be none of the above.

It's unfortunate, considering its tremendous efficiency, but email has never been regarded as a very high-value form of communication. Its perceived value has actually deteriorated too, since more than 80% of the email people now get each day is some kind of spam. So folks tend to process email as quickly as possible, often giving each message only a fraction of their attention. They may have scanned your note in a preview pane, and replied without even opening it.

So here's a tip. If you have three questions, precede them by saying "I have three questions," and then put the questions in a numbered list. The easier you make it to understand and reply, the more likely you are to get the response you're expecting.

 

May 2006 - Volume 4, Issue 5

Can Foresight be 20/20?

Probably not, but last month the Economist Intelligent Unit published a very detailed report with this title. Foresight 2020 considers economic, industry and corporate trends in an attempt to predict what the world will look like 15 years from now. The research was sponsored by Cisco Systems, and included interviews with 1,656 executives from around the world, conducted in November and December of 2005.

Foresight 2020 identifies five important trends, most of which are no surprise. Demographic shifts will lead companies to focus on an aging customer base. Globalization will continue, with a redistribution of economic power, particularly to Asia.  "Atomization" will occur, in which supply chains fragment as the work flows to wherever it can be done best. Personalization will be important, too, as customers demand highly configurable, customized products.

But it may be surprising that the fifth trend is the growing importance of Knowledge Management. In fact, the report says that "improving the productivity of knowledge workers through technology, training and organizational change will be the major boardroom challenge of the next 15 years." Most of those surveyed felt knowledge workers would be their most valuable source of competitive advantage.

Of course, we've been saying that for years. You can read more about it here, or download the whole report from the EIU website.

Personal KM, for Free!

Web Logs, or Blogs, have been around since the late 90s, and we assume most of our readers are at least familiar with the concept. Originally touted as something for the techno-savvy diarist, a blog is really a kind of content management system in its simplest form. The primary organizing principle is a reverse chronological sort, a quality that makes them naturally suitable for journal-writing. But depending on the tools used, individual blog entries can also be categorized in other ways..

We recently sat in on a presentation by author and consultant Bill Ives, and he really nailed blogging's most interesting characteristics in an elegant way: blogs provide a means to capture information that is more "lively and personal" than publication, yet more "permanent and accessible" than conversation. He also mentioned an aspect of blogging that we hadn't considered before, namely its value in personal Knowledge Management (a subject covered in one of the first issues of Directions). Bill said his own blog has proven to be a great forum for connecting with like-minded folks, but it would be worth doing even if he kept it private. Blogs provide a way to grab any stray bit of information you like, and stick it up on the Web where you can come back to it later. Like a vast wall of Post-It Notes, a personal blog could be a home for recipes, or books to be read, or quotable quotes. Whatever matters to you.

Completely unstructured, of course, so you need to build it yourself. But sometimes that's a good thing. And did we mention you can get it for free?

That Pesky Adoption Curve

Web 2.0 is a trendy way to refer to the various things the Web can do to support collaboration and sharing -- blogs, RSS and wikis are considered by some as harbingers of a new age for Knowledge Management. They are easy to use, open-ended and may (or may not) hold great promise for business.

It's the adoption curve thing. Writing in his blog at ZDNet, Joe McKendrick lays out arguments for and against this idea. He quotes writer Nick Carr, who feels these Web 2.0 concepts are not that different from the Knowledge Repositories of the past, which tended to "collapse under the weight of their own complexity." Carr thinks people eventually will find that using them is more trouble than it's worth, and fall back on email, Instant Messaging or the telephone as better ways to share useful information. On the other side, Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee attributes his "cautious optimism" to the broad uptake among general users, who have helped made tools like the Wikipedia so powerful.

It's hard to say how businesses will adapt to these new collaborative technologies. Overburdened workers are unlikely to become enthusiastic contributors unless they feel they're getting a personal benefit from their participation. But if they find that collaborative KM helps them get their own work done, they just might.

One Red Paperclip

Now and then, we come across something that's interesting, even if it seems off-topic. We particularly like stories about the surprising things that happen when imaginative people come together with technology. Have you heard the one about the red paper clip? It goes like this:

In July 2005, a chap named Kyle MacDonald started an experiment on the Web, offering to trade something for a red paper clip. He was living in Montreal, doing odd jobs, and declared the goal of trading up until he landed a house. He traded the paper clip for a pen, and the pen for a drawer pull and the drawer pull for a Coleman grill. The grill got him a generator, and that went for a keg of beer and a Budweiser sign. This "instant party" package brought him a snowmobile, as well as some media interest. He traded the snowmobile for a trip to Yahk, in British Columbia, offered by a Canadian snowmobile magazine. He swapped the trip for a van, and the van for time at a recording studio. The studio time went to a singer-songwriter named Jody Gnant, in exchange for a year's rent on an apartment in Phoenix. In the latest trade, he exchanged that year in Phoenix for an afternoon with Alice Cooper. Yes, that Alice Cooper.

It's a strange journey that wouldn't have been possible without the Web, and the tools that put Web publishing in the hands of anyone who wants it. If you think the story's an interesting one, you can follow it (of course) on Kyle's blog. So maybe it's not off-topic after all?

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