Lest ye forget

Bloom's Taxonomy

Benjamin Bloom created this taxonomy for categorizing level of abstraction of questions that commonly occur in educational settings. The taxonomy provides a useful structure in which to categorize test questions, since professors will characteristically ask questions within particular levels, and if you can determine the levels of questions that will appear on your exams, you will be able to study using appropriate strategies.

* Adapted from: Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green, via University of Victoria.

Knowledge Tips

It's Memorial Day. I arrived back in California from ASTD a few minutes before midnight yesterday and am digging my way through hundreds of emails. Most of my inbox is filled with inane spam. I also received dozens of notices of obscene graffiti vandals had posted to my blogs. Animals, incest, and loose women promising to do anything imaginable. Yuck.

It's uplifting to receive something genuinely useful, and the Gurteen Knowledge-Letter hit the spot for me. Consider these links from the current issue:

• Peter Drucker, My Life as a Knowledge Worker

• Scott Peck, The Stages of Spiritual Growth

• Via a pointer from Ross McDonald, this awesome image of the "Metaweb" from Peter Drucker's grandson, Nova Spivak.

• Two sites dedicated to exploring conversation

• John Holt
  "The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, and do what he can see other people doing. He is open, perceptive, and experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, He does not shut himself off from the strange, complicated world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it.

  He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient.

  He can tolerate an extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense ... School is not a place that gives much time, or opportunity, or reward, for this kind of thinking and learning."

(This is "Copyright 2004, David Gurteen, All rights reserved.")

Windows fixes

Hints on making Windows work, from Dave Farber's Interesting People mail list.

Dave's list provides an awesome array of opinions. It's one fo the few daily mailings I pay attention to. To subscribe, go here.

Archives

Grab bag

The Gurteen Knowledge Website is a fascinating collection of books, articles, pointers, people, documents, blogs, and more on the topics of knowledge management, learning, creativity, innovation & personal development. David Gurteen has woven everything together to create a labyrinth I could wander around in for hours.

There's a newsletter, too. Handy tips from the April 6 edition:

************* RAY OZZIE ON COLLABORATIVE TECHNOLOGY *************

Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and founder of Groove Networks is always a guy whose thoughts and ideas are worth keeping in touch with ...

White paper from Ray and Peter O'Kelly on collaborative technology http://www.groove.net/contact/b2f-download/

Voice interview with Ray by Robin Good
http://www.kolabora.com/news/2004/03/17/robin_good_interviews_ray_ozzie.htm

Ray's weblog
http://www.ozzie.net/blog/

Ray Ozzie:
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/ID/X000358FA?open&r=3&p=0

These are headed straight into my private links page:

********************** ONLINE DICTIONARIES **********************

I usually use the online Meriam-Webster dictionary when looking-up words on the web but increasingly I use Hyper Dictionary. I prefer the results and get a set of Thesaurus results as well without having to conduct a separate search.

http://www.hyperdictionary.com

Compare this:

http://www.hyperdictionary.com/search.aspx?define=knowledge

with this:

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=knowledge

which do you prefer?

Another fascinating dictionary is Urban Dictionary which is a slang dictionary where you can actually submit your own words and vote on words submitted by others:

http://www.urbandictionary.com

but I'll warn you now if you are easily offended don't look up 'knowledge' ... I thought I had come across most definitions but not this one - as they say in a footnote "Urban Dictionary is not appropriate for all audiences" :-)

A week ago today I was making final preparations for a trip to Kingston, Ontario, for a conference. Forwarding the phone to my cell was going to be one of the final steps. Five minutes before we were due to leave the house, I lifted the handset and heard nothing. No dial tone. Dead air. Zilch.

I scrambled around on the floor under my desk wiggling the connections to our four incoming phone lines. I tried other equipment. Nothing worked. Uta called Pacific Bell. They said they could come out to check on Friday morning, a mere three days away.

On Thursday, the dial tone magically appeared. Uta called. What had happened? PacBell said a line had been cut. Where? Telling that would involving violating somebody's privacy rights. When was service restored? They had no idea.

She said she'd like to cancel the Friday service appointment. Pacific Bell said there was no appointment to cancel. She said she'd talked with someone on Tuesday and set an appointment. Pacific Bell said she did not have an appointment. Never did.

I told you so.

What can I say, but "duh"?

80/20 or bust

In 1897, Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto noted that wealth was distributed unevenly. 20% of the people owned 80% of the assets. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 Rule, says that often, 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort.

20% of people have 80% of the wealth

20% of the sales force makes 80% of the sales

20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes

20% of the carpet gets 80% of the wear and tear

20% of the products account for 80% of the profits

20% of the defects cause 80% of the problems

20% of the suppliers provide 80% of the stock

20% of the stock fills 80% of the warehouse

20% of the staff causes 80% of the problems

20% of the project takes 80% of the time & resources
(the first and last 10%) On the web, Lou Rosenfeld says,

80% of your site's users belong to 20% of the site's audiences.

80% of users' information needs are served by 20% of the site's content.

80% of users' navigational needs are served by 20% of all possible architectural components.

80% of users' searches are represented by the 20% of unique searches that appear most frequently.

Do you see a pattern here?

The “80” and “20” aren’t precise. You can interpret the 80/20 as saying, “A small part of the overall effort produces most of the results.”

The results of many decisions are what the Department of Defense calls asymmetrical. Putting your chips on the high-impact people or activities provides more bang for your buck. If you’re selecting people for sales jobs, a 20% candidate is obviously a better choice than an 80%-er. Sixteen times as much! Here’s the math:

Top Performer 80% output/20% input

So-so Performer 20% output/80% input

Time is all we have

The Pareto Principle also applies to the investment of time in getting a job done.

Often, less than 3% of the elapsed time performing a process has anything to do with real work.[1]

Manufacturing companies spend anywhere from 5-10 percent total time actually adding value to the product.[2]

Mangers and supervisors spend less than 25% of their day doing what they were hired to do. Most of their time is spent putting out fires.

My original graphic said Fluff instead of Ancillary, but I decided that was misleading. A worker drinking a cup of coffee isn’t moving widgets down the assembly line, but it’s an ancillary activity without which the worker would quit.

Geoff Moore’s Living on the Fault Line says anything that raises one’s stock price is core; everything else is mere hygiene. Do you bathe? Good. If you didn't you'd lose your job. But don't expect to receive a promotion for bathing no matter how squeaky clean you are. Differentiating on things that aren’t core is the single biggest waste of resources in Fortune 500 operations. Without very careful management, the ancillary stuff always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.

The way to prosper as an organization or as an individual is to hand off ancillary activities and put more time into core. It’s called “working smarter, not harder.”

Faster is better

A business that can do more in less time will have happier customers, lower inventories, and higher profits, but how can a business speed up its people? What kind of training would that take?

The answer comes from engineering. You’ve heard the principle described as lean manufacturing, time-based competition, kaizen, and zero-latency. If you’re familiar with the discussions coming out of Workflow Institute, it’s the real-time enterprise. Practitioners of six sigma look at it as reducing cycle time. They’re all about optimizing systems to speed things up.

Automobile manufacturers figured out what increased throughput was worth to them. Visit a Toyota or Honda assembly plant. You’ll witness a smooth operation. “From aerospace assembly to chemical manufacturing to production enhancement in oil and gas, our customers are enjoying bottom-line results and easier operations,” touts an ad.[3] Managers in pharma, intelligence, minerals, the military, and other sectors of industry are boosting profits through optimizing their processes and accelerating how quickly they get things accomplished.

It’s time for eLearning to adopt the approaches of the industrial engineers.

Process

A process is a series of steps that bring about a result.

Cooking a meal is a process. Walking the dog is a process. Brushing your teeth is a process. Making a sale is a process, as are sending a fax, writing a brochure, delivering a package, inflating a tire, developing a business plan, and assembling a computer. Bringing a new product to market is a process. So is bringing a new employee up to speed.

In sum, processes occur everywhere. Knowledge workers perform processes, not just factory hands. And a process may range from tiny (a memory cycle in your PC) to immense (a merger or acquisition). Conceptualizing a group of activities as a process enables us to analyze and often improve upon it.

Cycle Time

A business is a collection of processes that create value for a customer.

A process is a series of steps that occurs over and over again. A process begins with an input and ends with an output. Each time that happens is called a cycle. Every cycle has a start, a middle, and an end. The elapsed time from the start of one cycle to start of the next is called cycle time.

Factories and offices are not very efficient. In fact, workers spend relatively little time performing processes, the real work. Processing time in factories is often only 5% to 10% of cycle time. Knowledge workers spend only 5% to

25% of their time doing the work in their job descriptions.

The remaining 75% to 95% is Slack Time – time spent waiting for materials, looking things up, dealing with interruptions, fixing what didn’t make it the

first time, straightening up the work area, going to the bathroom, putting out fires, taking a cigarette break, answering wrong numbers, eating lunch, reading junk email, and learning how to do a better job.

Use the 80/20 rule to select an important process. Cutting cycle time by 1/3 increase profitability ten times over.

Generally, the processing itself is already quite efficient. It has been under the efficiency expert’s microscope for a good while. Also, it’s the smaller component of cycle time.

To improve cycle time, cut the slack. There’s a more to cut from. The slack is often made up of departmental anachronisms, historical accidents, slow start-times, linear processes that could be done in parallel, and things at boundaries that nobody has taken responsibility for.

An Example

A high-tech company sent new recruits to a two-week sales boot camp before sending them into the field to learn on the job. On average, it took new hires eighteen months to be selling at quota level ($5 million/year).

The company re-structured the process to include online learning on the technology in preparation for the boot camp. Freed of technical training, the boot camp focused on selling strategies. Structured online activities, mentoring, and seminars replaced the catch-as-catch-can learning from experience in the field. Shortening the slack cut the development cycle to nine months.

Do the math. ¾ year x $5 million = $3.75 million incremental revenue/person. This company was adding more than a thousand new sales people annually. That’s more than $3 billion in new-found revenue.

Interesting stuff

Free clip art, sounds, templates, etc. from that company in Redmond.

Cascading Style Sheets 1 reference from W3C

CSS2 reference from W3C

How to build a web site without tables

Decisions: Making the right ones. Learning from the wrong ones

Ed Tech Dev, educational technology, learning sciences research, programming

Cmap free concept mapping tool

Engines for Education. I had lost track of this Roger Shank masterpiece when he departed Northwestern. If you haven't read it, do so.

CILT's Design Principles, from the school right down the hill from here

Association of Knowledgework

Business Integration Journal

Chris Lydon's blog has interviews with Dave Winer, David Weinberger, and others about the blogosphere.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/zhamurai/mindmap.htm

Using Weblogs In The Classroom: ECOO 2003 Session

CETIS Glossary

Kevin Kruse's eLearning Glossary

Homepage of Ben Shneiderman

Finally, an alumni benefit of value, free HBR

David Bohm

Blog of COllective Intelligence

Archives of Dave Farber's Interesting People list

UMd Human Computer Interaction Lab

post-autistic economics review

Personalization Survey

- or -

http://tinyurl.com/hncp

Results of the survey

Simplicity

Edward De Bono on Simplicity

1. Value simplicity highly.
   
2. Strive for it.
   
3. Understanding begets simplicity.
   
4. Explore alternatives and possibilities.
   
5. Challenge and discard vestiges.
   
6. Always be ready to start over.
   
7. Think conceptually.
   
8. Break things into pieces.
   
9. Trade off other values for simplicty.
   
10. Know who you’re making it simple for.

Add this to your bookmarks

J. D. Lasica's awsome list of Research & reference tools covers current events, people, business finders, area and zip codes, search engines and directories, shopping comparison sites, map services, and more.

Tomalak's Calendar of web design events

Spam, spam, spam, spam

LockerGnome Windows Daily is such a handy, well-written newsletter that it's on my short list of push media worth reading. Usually it's chock full of hints and great links. Today Chris Perillo starts with a few words on SPAM that captured my feelings on the matter precisely:

Raspberry Jam, Law of

Formulated by consultant Gerald Weinberg, the Law of Raspberry Jam states, “The more you spread it, the thinner it gets.”

Few things scale forever.

Materiality

As Alan Watts titled a book, “Does it matter?”

Contrary to what you may think, accountants don’t strive to account for every penny. They strive to present a fair picture of an organization’s financial condition, not to balance its checkbook.

If your employer is auditing your expenses, a $300 discrepancy on your hotel bill is probably significant; it’s “material.” If Deloitte is auditing Exxon, a $5 million discrepancy in expense reimbursements is trivial — it’s a drop in the bucket that won’t even show up on Exxon’s financial statements.

I interpret the Principle of Materiality as “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” Don’t fixate on false accuracy. And if you’re unsure whether or not something’s material, change its value up or down to see if it makes a meaningful difference. Impress your friends by saying you’re performing a “sensitivity analysis.”

Sunk Cost

Don’t throw good money after bad.

Imagine you’ve sunk $100,000 into a project. Another $10,000 and it will be completed. But market conditions have changed and you’ll only recoup $25,000.

A colleague discovers an open-source code that will generate the same $25,000 return for an investment of only $8,000 total.

Do you go for the first option and complete the $110,000 project?

Or do you abandon the $100,000 and go for the cheaper new alternative?

Selling your ideas

Selling the value of a project to management takes more than talking like a businessperson. It requires thinking like a businessperson. In essence, if you’re not there already, you must become a businessperson.

The overriding focus of business leaders is creating value for stakeholders. Stakeholders include owners, managers, workers, partners, and customers. The firm’s leaders are responsible for articulating a vision of how the organization will create value and specifying milestone objectives along the way there.

Any businessperson worthy of the name can relate how his or her activities support those objectives and help fulfill the vision. You should be able to articulate how what you're doing establishes value in these areas. This is your "elevator pitch" and you should be able to giive it in your sleep.

Analysis and Decision-making Techniques
Here are techniques for business analysis and decision-making that we rely on continually. We suggest you run through them when making major decisions until they become second nature.

• Trade-off. Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) We find it useful to list the pro’s of doing something and the con’s of not doing it or doing something else. Try to be aware of what you’re trading off when making a decision.

• Risk. Every decision is made with less than perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision-maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both.

  Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. An important corollary: There is no free lunch.

• Empathy. To understand your customer, walk a mile in her shoes. Here’s how. Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, likes, gripes, habits, intelligence and personalities. When you’re planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas’ shoes. How does our proposal make them feel?

• The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. It’s not uncommon for 20% of the sales force to make 80% of the sales. Or 20% of the customers to generate 80% of the profits. It’s likely that 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results.

  The point is that input and output are not balanced. As marketers, we break the market into pieces (“segments”) in order to identify and focus our attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.
  As designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20% of the learner’s time that yields 80% of what is learned and put your energies there.

• The bottom line. Earnings. Profit. Revenue minus costs. Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. Forgive us if you find this obvious, but you must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change.
  Focus on core; outsource everything else. Shareholder value (AKA market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.
  
  
• To get a different view, go up to the balcony. Look down from a higher level to gain a broader perspective. Try to discern what’s really going on. Back away from the trees to see the forest.

Business leaders present themselves to the world as confident, authoritative, conservative, results-oriented, deliberate, and a bit staid. It’s best to leave your clown suit in the closet when you’re selling a concept to executives. Be concise. Hit the concepts described above as they apply to your project. When you’ve said your piece, ask for questions and sit down.

Risk

Risk.

Every decision is made with less than perfect information, and every decision entails taking a risk. The way to make sound decisions is to judge when you have enough information to move ahead and when the level of risk is acceptable. A decision-maker who takes no risk receives no reward. A decision-maker who disregards risk is a fool, a pauper, or both.

Financial decisions trade off risk and reward. An important corollary: There is no free lunch.

Trade-off

Trade-off.

Every business decision is a trade-off. (If there’s no trade-off, it’s a no-brainer.) We find it useful to list the pro’s of doing something and the con’s of not doing it or doing something else. Try to be aware of what you’re trading off when making a decision.

Empathy

Empathy. To understand your customer, walk a mile in her shoes.

Here’s how. Make up several representative customers (personas). Give them names, positions, likes, gripes, habits, intelligence and personalities. When you’re planning marketing campaigns and learning activities, stop every now and again to slip into these personas’ shoes. How does our proposal make them feel?

Balcony

To get a different view, go up to the balcony.

Look at the big picture.

Look down from a higher level to gain a broader perspective. Try to discern what’s really going on. Back away from the trees to see the forest.

Focus on core

Focus on core; outsource everything else.

Shareholder value (AKA market cap) is a function of sustained competitive advantage, and organizations achieve it by leveraging their core competencies. Everything else is context (overhead), and context is a needless distraction. Without careful management, context always gets in the way of core because it absorbs time, talent and management attention.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line.

Earnings. Profit. Revenue minus costs.

Over time, profit and shareholder value are the same thing. The total value of the shares is equivalent to the stream of expected future profits, discounted for the cost of capital. Forgive us if you find this obvious, but you must be able to relate your decisions and choices to the profitability of your organization. Otherwise, you will not be able to make sound decisions as conditions change.

Do not confuse profit (the bottom line) with revenue (the top line).

The 80/20 Rule

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common situation where 20% of the effort gets 80% of the results. That's where to invest your energy.

It’s not uncommon for 20% of the sales force to make 80% of the sales. Or 20% of the customers to generate 80% of the profits. It’s likely that 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results.

The point is that input and output are not balanced. As marketers, we break the market into pieces (“segments”) in order to identify and focus our attention on the significant few who produce most of the results.

As designers of learning experiences, less is often more. Find the elusive 20% of the learner’s time that yields 80% of what is learned and put your energies there.

Hot Stuff

Here...	...and there
Workflow Learning Institute Another Look at Learning, (Is learning anything more than making good connections?) Template for Developing an eLearning Implementation Action Plan, free Center for Visual Learning	Technorati and more Mark Oehlert's Future of eLearning Models QuickTopic, the free, instant-on, no-brainer conferencing tool. E-Learning Centre, UK

Knowledge Management

Knowledge maps, knowledge architecture, taxonomies, and more from KAPS Group On the rebound? Peter Martin, writes in CLO: The Market Is Coming Back to Knowledge Management In hindsight, knowledge management was a recklessly defined initiative. [See below.] Companies were going to be able to ?empower the intellectual capital of their enterprise? with ad hoc software purchases. Over time the initiative lost its cachet, very much like the ?portal??a key element of knowledge management. As the meaning and value of the portal has risen from the ashes, so has knowledge management. The comeback for knowledge management can be traced to the economy, consolidation of vendors, technological advancement and enterprise software vendor buy-in. To Verna Allee, it's all a matter of making connections. I think she's got it. KM=BS? An abstract of T.D. Wilson's The Nonsense of Knowledge Management Life On The Internet: Could Blogging Assist KM? from Amy Wohl Knowledge Blogs Are Tough Denham Gray's amazing KM Wiki What's knowledge? Knowledge management is a high-fallutin' buzz phrase for creating and sharing know-how. A hot item circa 1998, overuse has watered down KM's popularity as a category. To vendors, KM became "whatever I want to sell you," be it document-tracking or warehousing good ideas or building web pages or reinforcing innovation or focusing on intellectual capital. Knowledge is like the sound of the tree that falls in the forest when no one is there: it doesn't exist unless people interact with it. Nurturing innovation and rewarding the sharing of ideas fertilizes seedling ideas. Setting up processes to highlight what's worthy and weed out useless undergrowth help grow heathly trees. While it may carry a different name in the future, knowledge management anchors one end of the eLearning continuum and is vital to improving organizational performance. "Knowledge is information that changes something or somebody -- either by becoming grounds for actions, or by making an individual (or an institution) capable of different or more effective action." -- Peter F. Drucker in The New Realities (The same might be said of learning.) Knowledge Management is a case of the blind men and the elephant. KM refers to one or more of these activities: creating and populating a repository of in-house knowledge measuring the dollar-value of chunks of knowledge facilitating the transfer of knowledge creating a knowledge sharing environment building a corporate culture focused on innovation and knowledge creation At a minimum, do these things: Databases: Corporate yellow pages Best practices system that captures lessons learned Competitive intelligence Infrastructure: Groupware Empowered Chief Knowledge Officer Culture: Top-down belief Spirit of sharing and collaboration Experimentation encouraged Five Basic Principles of the Mind Minds are limited. Minds hate confusion. Minds are insecure. Minds don't change. Minds lose focus. Jack Trout In 25 years, knowledge will double every three months.What will that do for learning requirements? Doug Engelbart "Knowledge Management is the broad process of locating, organizing, transferring, and using the information and expertise within an organization. The overall knowledge management process is supported by four key enablers: leadership, culture, technology, and measurement." American Productivity and Quality Center A wealth of knowledge exists and can be generated among people with a passion for learning and a willingness to explore connections across traditional boundaries. Meg Wheatley Tom Stewart's Intellectual Capital, fun to read and source of the ideas to the left. Information and knowledge are the thermonuclear competitive weapons of our time. Knowledge is more valuable and more powerful than natural resources, big factories, or fat bankrolls.? Thomas A. Stewart, Intellectual Capital   Jack Welch of GE: We soon discovered how essential it is for a multibusiness company to become an open, learning organization. The ultimate competitive advantage lies in an organization?s ability to learn and to rapidly transform that learning into action. And, in GE?s boundaryless learning culture, the operative assumption is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action fast.   "If HP knew what HP knows, we'd be three times more profitable." Lew Platt   Come together Tom Barron, drawing on the ideas of GartnerGroup's Clark Aldrich and others, presents an astute view of the impending merger of e-Learning and Knowledge Management in A Smarter Frankenstein, lead article in the August 2000 issue of Learning Circuits. Take an eLearning course. Chunk it into discrete learning bites. Surround it with technology that assesses a learner's needs and delivers the appropriate learning nuggets. Add collaborative tools that allow learners to share information. What do you get? Something that looks a whole lot like knowledge management. Just In Time Embedded Help Performance Support EPSS Wizards Knowledge Management Traditional KM Combined eLearning/KM Just in Case Classroom Replication Self-paced courseware Virtual classes Simulations Skills-building sims Games   Connvergent (Discrete-path) Divergent (Infinite-path) The training function is accustomed to limiting its scope -- offering a curriculum that provides grounds for assessment. KM is open-ended, encouraging participants to share whatever works without an intermediary to translate things into lessons. Oil and water? The accelerating pace of business is already obsoleting the authoring function -- there's not enough time for lengthy development cycles; intitutive authoring systems are replacing middleman authors by taking content directly from the expert's mouth. An obstacle I've personally never overcome to my satisfaction is countering the hoarding of knowledge by those who believe knowledge is power, or are perhaps too self-motivated to contribute to the good of their organizations. What to Blogs have to do with it? Weblogs (AKA Blogs) are important. If you're not familiar with Blogs, read Rebecca Blood's excellent Weblogs: A History and Perspective. 1. Blogs are a free authoring tool that enables anyone with a net connection to publish content on the web. The doors are open. 2. You cannot keep up with the raw flow of information being posted to the web without a lot of help. The Blogs of people you trust point the way to the good stuff. For example, I read Camworld because it has proven worthy of my time; I've grown to trust Cameron Barrett -- I know where he's coming from. 3. In time, organizations will encourage in-house Blogging.   Tacit & Explicit Knowledge Nonaka's Knowledge Creation Spiral In an economy where the only certainty is uncertainty, the one sure source of lasting competitive advantage is knowledge. When markets shift, technologies proliferate, competitors multiply, and products become obsolete almost overnight, successful companies are those that consistently create new knowledge, disseminate it widely throughout the organization, and quickly embody it in new technologies and products. These activities define the knowledge-creating company, whose sole business is continuous innovation. (source: Ikujiro Nonaka, The Knowledge-Creating Company, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1991) Explicit Knowledge Tacit Knowledge You can write it down. Easy to share. It?s tough to explain. Tough to share. Left brain, pragmatic ? learned. Think classroom. Right brain, idealistic ? internalized. Think watercooler. Theory of organization = Machine for processing information Living organism with a purpose Knowledge = Formal, systematic, quantifiable Know-how and ingrained mental models and perspectives. Subjective, hunches, intuitive, highly personal. Metrics = Quantifiable: increased efficiency, lower costs, improved ROI Qualitative: increased effectiveness, embodies company vision, expresses management aspirations and strategic goals, builds organizational knowledge network. Impact = Increases immediate capabilities Profoundly shapes how we perceive the world around us. Communicated = Via words, textbooks, CBT Via figurative language and symbolism, metaphor, analogy, modeling. Other sources The Economics of Knowledge, Eric E. Vogt. "Knowledge is a perspective shared by a community which allows for some effective action. ...the economics of knowledge dictate that we think in terms of creating collection systems that allow for the instantaneous sharing of these new perspectives. Collection systems allow us to listen to the needs and concerns of customers. Collection systems allow us to tap into the global flow of creative ideas and fuel the imagination of our knowledge community." Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization (JOHO). David Weinberger has the most level-headed approach to knowledge management you'll find anywhere. He's also a laugh riot. JOHO is one of my favorite reads on the Web. Weinberger? He's a commentator on NPR, and co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. "Jay of InternetTime.com, has put a link to JOHO on his site, www.meta-time.com. We hereby declare www.meta-time.com to be the new Finest Site on the Web." Knowledge Management News, Brad Hoyt. Sporadic ever since Brad joined a start-up but worth the wait. Pointers, reflections, jobs, events. University of Denver: Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management Karl Erik Sveiby's impressive "library" of on-line resources ASTD on KM -- an overview of what's going on in the field E&Y Center for Business Innovation -- a great resource Scient sells KM as something that strengthens them and their customers The Knowledge Management Paradox: How to Manage Your Most Strategic Asset, CPT BRINT -- exhaustive and exhausting links and essays. More is more? Thinking Business -- the document tracking end of KM

Leverage the Value-Hierarchy of Knowledge Different skills produce different levels of impact. Difficult to replace, low value added Staff jobs, skilled factory workers, experienced secretaries ?Know the ropes but don?t pull the strings.? Don?t directly impact customers. INFORMATE à Difficult to replace, high value added Irreplaceable role in the organization; nearly irreplaceable as individuals Create the products and services that draw the customers in CAPITALIZE Easy to replace, low value added. Unskilled, semi-skilled labor. Success not dependent on these individuals. AUTOMATE ¯ Easy to replace, high value added Designers Work is valuable but not this particular individual. DIFFERENTIATE or OUTSOURCE ¯ Often, the value added is the information subtracted. A hired hand is not a hired mind. Routine, low-skill work, even if it?s done manually, does not generate or emply human capital for the organization.  Unleashing the human capital already resident in the organization requires minimizing mindless tasks, meaningless paperwork, unproductive infights. The Taylorized workplace squandered human assets in such activities. ?Informate? = change the work to add more value to customers. Outsourcing frees resources to continue developing high-return expertise. Capitalize means providing opportunities for learning. People need to feel they?re ?in the game,? and not ?being kicked around by it.? How to Capitalize on High-Value Knowledge Structural capital company property builds on corporate yellow pages, knowledge maps, speedy transfer. Do enough and no more; many overinvest. HP and others find that demand-driven approach is more effective than pushing information into people?s emailboxes. Avoid overinvesting by making it okay not to know everything ? leverage the expertise of specialists. When a manager brings in a problem, the experts teach her how to apply the lessons of a module to solve it. Customer capital, the relationships of the company with its customers, is measured by market share, customer retention and defection, and profit per customer. This is the most valuable capital of all it's where the money is but ironically, it's also the least well managed. Tom Stewart has a wonderful line, The customer today can call the tune because he knows the score. The goal is to maintain an increasingly intimate relationship. Empowered customers deal directly with companies' databases. Ten Principles for Managing Intellectual Capital Companies don't own human and customer capital. Companies share the ownership of human assets with employees. They share ownership of customer capital with suppliers and customers. An adversarial relationship with employees destroys wealth. To create human capital it can use, a company needs to foster teamwork, communities of practice, and other social forms of learning. To manage and develop human capital, companies must unsentimentally recognize that some employees, however intelligent or talented they are, aren?t assets. Invest in proprietary and strategic knowledge workers; minimize all other costs. Structural capital is most easy to control because companies own it, but customers are where the money comes from. Structural capital serves two purposes: to amass stockpiles of knowledge that support the work customers value, and to speed the flow of that information inside the company. Just-in-time knowledge is more efficient that knowledge stored in the warehouse.  Substitute information and knowledge for expensive physical and financial assets. Knowledge work is custom work. Mass production does not yield high profits. Analyze your value chain to see what information is most crucial. The knowledge work is generally downstream, close to the customers. Focus on the flow of information, not the flow of materials. Information once supported the real business; now it is the real business. Human, structural and customer capital work together. Source: Thomas Stewart, Intellectual Capital

Knowledge Management: Four Practical Steps jay @ 25-Apr-00   Ideas @ Work > by Diane McFerrin Peters (Harvard Management Update, Vol. 5 #3, March 2000) Most companies underestimate the importance of intangible assets such as knowledge, creativity, ideas, and relationships. All these account for more value in our economy than the tangibles. Yet it's difficult for companies to get their arms around intangibles, so they rarely protect them as carefully as they do bricks and hardware. What would you do if your smartest people suddenly left? How can you ensure that what one department or division learns is widely shared throughout the company? 1) Create a setting for sharing knowledge. Access to knowledge breeds more knowledge, and the best KM techniques ensure that everyone's involved. Try an open meeting policy. 2) Eliminate communication ?filters. Politics, turf, and implementation responsibilities can squelch ideas in traditional communication channels. Going outside the channels?for example, by allowing people to skip levels?leads to more ideas on how to do things better. 3) Prioritize the tasks. Most companies' to-do lists contain twice as much as they could ever accomplish. A prioritization process can align brainpower and effort behind what's truly strategic. Senior leaders get together to rank all vital activities first to last, no ties allowed. The process lets people challenge assumptions about the value of long-running projects, share knowledge about what is being accomplished, and break down the departmental barriers that bottle up ideas and creativity. 4) Keep time budgets. Few individuals and fewer organizations get a true read on where their time and effort really go. Picasso had a collection of masterpieces in his home. They were hung slightly crooked, and visitors couldn't resist the temptation to straighten them. But Picasso felt that when a painting was straight, the observer focused on the frame around it. When the frame was crooked, the beauty of the image jumped out. It's the same with knowledge. Instead of trying to put boundaries around it, we should be letting it jump out of its frame.

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