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Rock & Roll Redux
You may remember that in the October issue of Directions, we took an admittedly unscientific poll by running one article with a particularly catchy title. We wanted to see if a piece called "Rock
& Roll Never Forgets" would increase our CTR. That's email marketing lingo for Click-Through Rate, which is based on the number of people that click through to read an article after looking at
the mailer.
In fact, it didn't seem to effect the CTR one way or the other. We had about the same number of readers as the previous two months, and the same proportion of them clicked through to
the newsletter. However, 51% of those who did click through started with the Rock & Roll article. The next catchiest title, apparently, was "Effective, or Simply Busy" -- 18% of readers clicked through to that one.
Our sample is too small to be deeply significant, but it's interesting to get a sense of how people react to individual articles. Over time, we'll be able to use the stats to get a better handle
on what people find interesting, and what they don't. We've always talked about Directions as an attempt at an electronic conversation, and now we have the tools to make it a bit less one-sided.
Raiders of the Lost Files
We've written about Personal KM in a previous issue of Directions; it's an area that has huge potential for increasing
the impact of Knowledge Management.
Tom Davenport has written about it too, after his research showed that very few people believe they have a handle on their personal knowledge space. Davenport's findings suggest this may be the Achilles heel of enterprise KM. Most corporate programs consider personal KM out of scope, even though their success is ultimately based on users' ability to manage information. If people feel overwhelmed by the files on their own PC, they're not emotionally ready to tap a corporate Knowledge base.
You may be aware of Google's new desktop search, which was launched in mid October. It runs under a browser, and looks just like the familiar Google home page. It starts by building an index of
your hard disk, and then is lightning fast at finding something. In addition to searching for Microsoft Office files and plain text files, it can retrieve individual messages from Outlook and Outlook
Express, as well as chat files in AOL’s IM format. It even searches your web history, and retrieves URLs for pages you've looked at recently. You can tell it not to search particular paths, and also
integrate its results with the main Google search. If you enable that option, every Google search feeds both engines, and your local hits are presented at the top of your web results page.
There
is a potential down side. Google’s desktop search makes the contents of the hard disk accessible to anyone who sits down at the keyboard, so there may be privacy issues. For a single-user machine, it's
great; on a shared machine, it might be less so. Either way, it's worth a try. It's available for download on Google's Tools page. And it's free!
The Volatility of Understanding
The title of this article is drawn from an essay that K Street's Bill Bly has been threatening to write for almost as long as we've known him. It has to do with both teaching and learning and is something to keep in mind if you're working in KM or Communications. It's a simple truth, but one that's often forgotten: comprehension fades.
A person's understanding doesn't last forever, and that's true of almost everything that's humanly know-able. You can gather a group of people together, put them in a room, and let them talk for
90 minutes. If you're lucky, the group will come to a consensus on a project, and in the process arrive at an absolute certainty on plans and priorities. At the moment they walk out the door, they know
what they need to do, and why. But the half life of that understanding might be only a few hours.
The next day, some folks will have drifted a little, and be less sure about the objectives. A
week later, everyone will have a slightly different idea about what happened, and who agreed to what. Six months later, they may not even remember having the meeting. It's like the children's game of
telephone, in which a repeated phrase is degraded beyond recognition as it's passed from person to person.
It's silly to pretend this isn't so, especially if you want to accomplish something.
That's why it's important to capture group decisions in some explicit form, to make the revisiting of those decisions part of an ongoing process, and to find ways to reinforce the group's vision.
If you don't, even with the best intentions, people will wander away.
Calling Dr. Knochwater
Earlier this week, the phone rang at K Street World Headquarters and gave us an interesting object
lesson on the blended nature of Knowledge Management. It was a wrong number.
The caller was an elderly woman trying to make a doctor's appointment. It took a while, but we convinced her we
weren't really qualified to consult on back problems, and weren't booking that kind of appointment. "Well," she said, "if this isn't the number for Dr. Knochwater's office, what is?"
That gave us pause, but being both service-oriented and equipped with cable modem, we figured it shouldn't be hard to find out. In less than a minute, we had the right number, even though our caller had
the wrong spelling for the name and the wrong address for the office.
In this little transaction, you can see many of the fundamentals of KM. There is first of all, a need: a thing that is sought.
KM is not about codifying all of human experience, it's about finding what you need when you need it. There is also the human component, in which a person asks a key question -- if you're not the person
I need, who is? Add some technology (Google in this case), and throw in some experience, and you have a microcosmic representation of EDS's original "Right 5" definition of KM: the right
information, in the right format, delivered to the right person, at the right time and the right place.
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