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Communications as Architecture
One of the things that often comes up when we're talking to K Street clients is the need to think about
communications from a big-picture perspective.
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. People are more likely to listen to you, too, since credibility is something you can't establish overnight.
A communications
architecture considers content, audiences and delivery channels, and combines them with the idea of time. With this kind of view, it's easier to see that at a given point, you should be introducing the
next message on your list, while reinforcing one delivered previously and perhaps treating a third topic in detail. We've evolved a Communications Decision Tree to help illustrate this idea, and you can
take a look at it on our "Considering Communications" page. (The page isn't new, but the decision tree is something we just added
this week.)
It's also important, especially for large organizations, to develop some kind of integrated view that combines their internal and external messages. When you have multiple channels in play (websites, newsletters, direct mail, etc.), it's easy to undermine your message. People can feel overwhelmed by too much information and different channels can seem to be in competition with each other. All the channels should work cooperatively to deliver a coherent story.
The Challenge of Learning Lessons
The idea of "Lessons Learned" is all over the KM landscape, and many KM
programs build such material into their portfolio.
It's a search that will bring you over 100,000 citations from Google, and it's also the name of the US Army's primary KM structure: the Center for Army Lessons Learned (CALL). The Army relies on a feedback process called an After Action Review as the vehicle for figuring out what
happened (and why), thereby building on successes and improving on failures. Even when it's part of established doctrine, though, it's important to remember that learning isn't easy.
In fact, in
an organization as small and collegial as Knowledge Street, learning can still be hard. Different individuals may find different lessons in the same situation, and looking for the underlying moral of the
story can be a stressful and difficult activity. If it’s going to work, an element of personal disclosure and exploration is necessary. A willingness to say "oops," to look a failure in the eye
and make the personal pledge -- "Well, I'm sure as hell not going to do THAT again!"
Generally speaking, it's worth it. But if you're using some kind of Lesson Learned resource in your
own work, remember that honest appraisals don't happen without pain. If the lessons sound a bit too positive, a bit too self-congratulatory, you might want to dig a little deeper.
Nightmare on Knowledge Street
Once every few years, thanks to Moore's Law, PC users have to face an inescapable truth: it's time to upgrade the hardware. Like death and taxes.
If all you do is word processing and a bit of email, maybe
you can last a lot longer. If you're a serious gamer, you need to think in terms of months, rather than years. Either way, the day will come when a perfectly adequate machine, with working drives and a
pretty good monitor and a much-loved keyboard will no longer be able to swallow the applications you need. Upgrade, or be left behind.
One of us just went through the upgrade-and-migrate process
on K Street, and it was no less painful than it was three years ago. In fact, it seemed to be worse. It wasn't the data, which was a snap to move. It was all the little server applets that worked just
fine on one machine, and didn't work on the other. A desktop weather monitor that can no longer can remember what zip code to call home, an Instant Messenger that will no longer log in automatically, the SETI@Home screen saver (a very cool idea), that needed extra help to get through the firewall, a flash media reader that doesn't like Windows XP... The list goes on, and even 10 days later, bugs are still turning up.
There's no clever ending to this little rant, although it may itself represent a kind of lesson learned. We're going to wait a while before going to Service Pack 2.
The Mirra Personal Back-Up Server
We generally don't plug specific products but are very happy with a recent addition to
the K Street infrastructure -- happy enough to bring it to the attention of our readers. It's a "personal back-up server" from a company called Mirra, Inc.
It's a simple idea, but is very slick in execution. It's a Linux-based box that contains a motherboard, a big hard drive and some networking components. All you need to do is plug it into a
router and turn it on.
On each computer you want to back up, you install Mirra client software. This client monitors designated folders on the PC, and backs them up dynamically, in the background.
That means you don't have to do anything to initiate a back-up, and it retains the last eight versions of each file. It also keeps copies of deleted files, until you decide to throw them away. Plus you
can create an account at the Mirra website, which will let you connect to your own Mirra from any browser. If you activate that option, you can share designated back-up folders with others, by letting
them create their own secure accounts.
The box itself is not that expensive: $399 for an 80 Gig version. It's already saved our bacon once or twice.
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