Non Trivial availaibilty lessons for today's Thought Leaders.

Suppose I were a leader with a whole slew of followers. What does my day look like?. For some it looks like this: (confession: took the following 4 bullets from Chris Brogan's note this morning)

1. Reading what friends write.
   
2. Reading about the “new marketing” industry and the tech industry (fishbowl).
   
3. Reading what people recommend.
   
4. Reading off the wall stuff that inspires new thoughts (outside the bowl).
   

The purpose behind these 4 bullets, of course is to "make things" that the followers find useful. But what of availability?

There are two kinds: Trivial and non Trivial. For most thought leaders today, availability does not even enter into the picture. Why? because with Availability there is a sense of immediacy. And the plain and simple truth is most so called thought leaders cant be bothered by that. Remember the God Father? He presided over these sessions where his followers would come to him and he would grant them his wishes. Great availability story there. We all knew exactly where we stood and he was always available to this followers.

Okay I am going somewhere with this and it mostly has to do with Non-Trivial availability. Some time ago, I had a boss who was always available when challenges were Trivial, but the minute it got any where near non-Trivial, the man was no where to be found. He must have thought that if he stays away I will always find a way. So why come in between a good thing.

You see I work in IT operations and Availability is a huge yardstick for us. So this generated a lot of discussion with SELF!!. It made me want to be available for the guys even more. Every time there was a situation, the picture of this boss who was never available when needed most came to mind and I would over compensate. To the point where I had enough material to write a dissertation on the subject.

It all started not too long ago. I was in a Data Mining class, Professor Mobashar (one of the best in my opinon) dropped this idea in passing about mining for availability and why it is important to categorize it into two buckets. Of course that was in the context of machine availability at that time, but boy did it get me thinking. What a concept.

So circling back to our Thought Leaders and what availability means to them. What is YOUR availability to your followers?. What percentage is Trivial availability?. Are you in the availability business at all?

The Followers and Leaders, the Pew and the Pulpit.

After so many years of intellectual development what has changed?. Nothing in my opinion. We are still a global culture of Followers and Leaders, the Pew and the Pulpit, the Soap box and the on lookers. Need I continue.

The age of electronic media has changed how we follow or Lead perhaps. The Pulpit is no longer a physical object and the Soap box in Hyde park is no longer just that. But this article is not about leaders or the elite or the trickle down goodness that we have all faithfully condoned and accepted for so long. It is about the faithful, about the followers and the listeners in each of us and how potent the collective consciousness can be.

So what does this all mean? Can we get to a point where there are no leaders, no pulpit and no soap box?. Can the listeners and the followers and the innocent bystanders become a collective whole. How much more effective would we be if the Leaders were just Data Miners and Knowledge experts who provide us the message without imparting their subjective spin on the collective thoughts?. Leadership today is sustained by the power it brings them. Can we change this model. I would like to see our future leaders become leaders not for the power it brings them, but for total selflessness. If not get out of the business.

The Open source model starts out with this selfless concept, but then quickly gets swallowed up by how much power the concept of giving stuff away for free can bring us. So much so today we give away for free and when we have enough followers, we Sell out.

We have always been people centric. We adore and worship the person(s) who deliver the message and deliver it well. In short the message takes a secondary role to the messenger. So much so, even if the the message is bad, as long as it is delivered by our favorite messenger, all is well. We are okay with it. Conformational BIAS is what it all amounts to. But it is driven by our model of Leaders and Followers. Until we break away from that, we will forever be defined by our MESSENGERS and not the MESSAGE.

With that I end my Saturday morning Rant.

What you stand to gain through Social Media.

A few years back, I got my family and friends to sign up with JotSpot, yes before they were bought out by google, to do pretty much the same thing as what can easily done by facebook, Orkut or myspace today. Long before that, there were the IRC channels that I would use to gain insight about veritical topics, but today twitter, friendfeed and the likes makes that easy.

When I joined twitter, it was becuase I was into the "knowledge elicitation" kick, born out of a KM class I was taking at DePaul, thanks to Alan Burns. That was about 3 months ago. Today I have about 46 followers and I follow 37. A drop in the bucket when you compare those numbers to that of Shelisrael, Scobelizer, Chrisbrogan, davewiner or Techcruch and the likes. But while it might be important for some to have a large number of followers, what is important for me, is to be able to get at the important bits of imformation that is flowing through these channells. To understand that in quantitative terms, if each of those listed about have about 10K followers, I have access to the information flowing through their conversations, provided I know how to extract that. That is where the skills of ETL come in handy.

For example, today @Shelirsrael put out a request to get a list of businesses that were using twitter. I wont go into the model of using twitter to enhance the customer service experience, you can do that if you follow the stories of Zappos and the like, but instead in a few minutes, @shelisrael got a link to Twitter Brand Index , which is truly mind boggling.

Most twitter users are very proficient at following conversations, and use it in clever ways, but I am new to this game and every time I stumble onto something that is powerful, I like to share, so here goes.

I am following @shelisrael (one of the 37 that I follow), I see he puts out a request for a list of businesses who use twitter. A little later, he thanks everyone who sent in good information. Thats a trigger. I go to http://search.twitter.com and search for @shelisrael, it lists all his conversations, with the most recent ones on top. From there, I just drill down into conversations and get the information needed.

@Chrisbrogan put out a really nice blogpost on the 5 tools of social media, a while back. I find that a very interesting post or rather a great social media strategy. If you are a intentional social media leverager, it 's a must read. If you are hooked into social media then read his other posts as well.

I will leave you with this for today. If you are new to the twitter scence, and would like to LISTEN and learn, (with a slant into technology, mostly information systems), follow the guys and gals on the list that I follow. I am @mibdepot on twitter and you can get to me via http://twitter.com/mibdepot.

Happy Listening.

It's all about passion

There is a great tradition at Winchell, it's called a happy hour, once a month, one household hosts and invites the entire neighborhood. Since moving here last year We have been to 3 of these and I must add, the reclusive me does not mind it one bit.

I have met a quite a few folks and like hearing their stories. Particularly what brings them or brought them to Kalamazoo. Okay you are wondering what does this have to do with passion?. Well be patient Kemo Sabe.

At the last happy hour, I run into this couple, both Geologists, who picked Kalamazoo for a variety of reasons, after having lived in many major cities in the US. Well that perked my attention. One thing led to another and we got talking about kids. My friend told me that his son was a national merit scholar. Well I started digging deeper.

After some knowledge elicitation, I got this:

Teach your kids about being passionate about what they do. It does not matter what they do, all that matters is they do the best they possibly can or they become the best they can be in what they do. That's it.

I remember the days when I would often work late, and would leave work around 3 or 4 in the morning, take the train, it would be me and the homeless folks on the train. I would often say to myself, WTF?. and the answer always was, it takes Passion Terry!!.

I share this bottled secret of passion with you, Enjoy.

In Search of Transparency

Steve Denning's idea of Scaring someone into listening, followed by selling the idea by appealing to their intellectual reasoning is a tad opaque and worse yet, no one wants to listen to "The Sky is falling" Story. So In the interest of getting the message out on Transparency, this is perhaps the first of one of many in the series of blog posts you will see at this site. To start with, here is how you can achieve transparency using CSS assuming you have a file called klematis.jpg

<img src="klematis.jpg" width="150" height="113" alt="klematis"
style="opacity:0.4;filter:alpha(opacity=40)" />

Presenting an image via CSS has a lot in common on how we present ourselves. To start with, it is an image of ourselves presented with physical attributes such as size (width and height), our moniker and Style. Interestingly we also use Opacity pretty regularly. In fact so regularly that we are now trying to conciously be TRANSPARENT. The filter:alpha(opacity=40) therefore is a very significant attribute. It truly means that you are 60% transparent in what you do.

I plan on taking this further to understand, what is the opacity level we should strive to? Should opacity levels vary with differing external inputs? What taxonomy is ideal for differing level of opacity? so on and so forth.

Mental Obesity

Mental obesity is the deadliest disease plaguing the American public today and we don't even recognize it.

WARNING!! if you don't treat it on time it will KILL you.

We Americans are so used to excess that obesity is fairly commonplace amongst us. If you consciously watch, you will be surprised how conditioned we are to ignore obesity around us. of course this from the point of view of a non-obese person, which I truly can't lay claim to.

It is killing a lot of folks for sure, but we are unable to stop it at the roots. All indicators point to excessive consumption as the root cause of this deadly malady.

Excessive consumption if pervasive, eventually becomes a culture. So we have become an mentally obese nation. The next biggest product we will consume will therefore be none other than a plethora of mental fitness gadgets.

From a conversation with Daniel Casey on 07/12/2008

Collaborative Video Blogging

From the "Always full of Ideas" department:

8 people go on a journey, a vacation of sorts. Age ranges, 10 through 60. Some place exotic. As all trips go, of course we take pictures because we want to remember our trip, our journey to that exotic place. So why not do it right.

What does a camera at a wedding table signify?. It is inexpensive and disposable, where the participants at the table take pictures during the event. A collaborative photo journal of sorts that gives us a better collage if you will of what transpired. It is a better collection of memories taken from exponentially higher number of angles, than that of what the hired Photographer can take physically take by himself. In fact it was one such Photographer who thought of this idea of collaborative Journaling using that disposable camera. The folks at the table have to ONLY point and click. The idea is simple, easy to implement and therefore adoption came easy to the point where every wedding does it today. Brilliant!! as the guiness guys would say.

Extend this idea to our 8 people that go on a journey to an exotic place and then take it further. As a rule when we go on vacations to an exotic place we carry our camera. We tend to have one designated photo journalist for the trip. This designate is akin to the hired Photographer who provided the disposable camera's at the Wedding. What if he or she came up with a way that could get every one to participate in the photo journaling process? But instead of being just photographs, what if our method of chronicling was to podcast or video cast the journey?.

Remember the rules for successful adoption. It has to be simple, inexpensive and easy to implement. Just like the disposable camera at the Wedding table. If we were a student of Collaboration and Knowledge management, this can be a fascinating project of fairly significant proportions. Why? because the days of us just taking static pictures while on vacations might become a thing of the past. This might become as disruptive to Vacations as the internet perhaps.

Collaboration needs good facilitators, for this project we need a good facilitators who are also good story tellers, good Knowledge management experts who can elicit good story telling from the rest of the group. And finally she needs to be an innovater to turn this into a "disposable camera at the wedding table" sort of an idea.

A good innovator's quest most often starts with research, more research and then some more research. Today, research is easy thanks to the many innovators that gave us the internet, search engines, data mining and folks who share content.

In a nutshell, I am looking to create a SIMPLE INEXPENSIVE TEMPLATE for folks who go on exotic vacations, to photo journal from different angles (like our innovative hired photographer at weddings) using good story telling and podcasting.

Off to Kenya next Summer, but before I go, I need to become a innovator, collaborator, KM expert, and Great Story teller!!.

Smart folks leveraging Social Media networks for Upscale Customer Service

There are some smart folks out there leveraging social networks to provide customer service of a unique kind. The example I came across is a gentleman at Dell, who appears to be watching the social networks for any dell related questions and then finds you an answer, He also maintains a blog, that is actually a corporate blog with a personal brand. http://richardatdell.blogspot.com/

The other end of the spectrum, I needed some Server power consumption data. Most of my research using google and similar search tools, generated a lot of noise, but nothing precise. I posted a request on Twitter. I got an answer in about 20 min. Sort of a global IRC. How cool is that?.

Here is a pull model for customer service: Search for all the complaints against your company's brand, and on various social networks, compile it and try to find the answer. You will make a lot of customers happy. Your Sr. Management will be happier.

IS 456 Class VII - Homework - Elevator Questions

1. "I see from your transcripts that you took a course in KM. What is KM?"

• Knowledge management can be defined as Structuring, Storing, capturing, disseminating, using knowledge we gain out of this relationships between nodes in an organization.
• Knowledge Management focuses on the content of Knowledge in the process of " Acquire Create (and refine) Store,à Transfer/Share Use, Improve Performance".
• One view point to describe KM is to look at it as data stored in a database: Data is stored in Fields, Information is stored in Records and Knowledge is the pattern(s) that can be discovered across tables and data sets. Everything can be looked at as a Knowledge Problem if you wear the right glasses/lenses!!.

2. "Tell me how you would apply KM in my organization."

• KM can be applied to Discover hidden assets - information and expertise, Eliminate duplicate and redundant projects, Assimilate employees faster into the organization
  Innovate faster, and bring products to market faster, Break through knowledge silos to find relevant content and Discover untapped talent and expertise
• KM could be applied to reduce the pain that your organization faces in dealing with the mass quantities of information that the organization and its customers are exposed to on a daily basis.
• Use KM to effectively manage and contain the tension between the users and the IT department
• Use knowledge management to diagnose and solve knowledge and information problems that the organization faces today.

3. "What KM technologies would you recommend here?"

• Stealth KM. Since adoption follows the porter curve, it is important to follow the stealth KM model to acquire knowledge before recommending technologies.
  
• Diagnose the existing content management system by understanding how the "Create, Manage and Publishing" process works and supplement that with KM domains of "Capture, Route and Covert".
• An effective "Knowledge Search" mechanism to access knowledge when and where needed.
• 1) Collective Search Toolbar: Delivering collective intelligence to users at their point-of-search.
  2) Social Bookmarking and Tagging: Information Discovery and sharing.
  3) Social Networking: Social Networking for getting your work done.
  4) User Communities: Enterprise information flow business processes
  

4. "KM sounds great, but how do I justify KM here?"

• The best justification for KM is its capability to reduce "Information Pain" faced by the organization.
  
• Each organization is unique, therefore any justification has to be made within the context of the knowledge or informational problems the organization faces.
  

5. "KM sounds great, but what KM metrics do you recommend?"

• Measuring knowledge management (KM) is not simple. Determining KM’s pervasiveness and impact is analogous to measuring the contribution of marketing, employee development, or any other management or organizational competency. It is nonetheless a necessity if KM is to last and have significant impact in an organization.
• There are two things that all organizations should keep in mind as they develop measures and metrics. First, it is extremely difficult to create any measure of knowledge sharing that will show an absolute one-to-one correlation between a knowledge-sharing action and a business result. Much like measuring the success of training and development programs, measuring the impact of knowledge sharing requires correlation and some assumption. Second, to truly understand the impact of knowledge sharing and reuse, an organization must first understand the baseline business or process performance before beginning KM efforts. If you do not know where the starting line is, how can you say what your time is at the finish line?
• An effective metric or gauge for Knowledge Management might be an index that is comprised of the following four types of measures:
  1. Awareness – knowledge of what to document, how to document it, how to access KM data bases, etc.
  2. Behavior – participation in KM activities such as committees/teams, making presentations, etc.
  3. Outputs – creation of data bases, white papers, lessons learned reports, best practice documentation, etc.
  4. Outcomes – impact of new knowledge on key measures of organizational performance such as new product sales, productivity, cost reduction, or quality improvement.
  
• 
  
• The Department of NAVY put out a good paper on measuring KM. The following url points to this paper. This guide presents a practical framework for measuring the value of investments in KM initiatives. Since the value of KM depends on each organization’s goals and people, it is not a “cookbook” of standard procedures but rather an aid to help you identify and apply appropriate metrics for your initiative. The reader should be familiar with the concepts and approach for KM described in the KCO Toolkit; these topics are not discussed in detail since they are thoroughly covered in the Toolkit.
  
• http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Metrics_Guide_for_DON_KM_Initiatives.pdf
• 
  

6. "Tell me the main barriers to adopting KM I can anticipate. How would you overcome
them?"

• Adoption barriers are the most common ones to anticipate. Rogers adoption curve shown below indicates the process/timeline for adoption of Change.
• 
  
• 

7. "Summarize for me what you learned in that KM class."

Most of what I have learned in class falls under the following themes

• Collaboration
  Knowledge management systems
  Personal Knowledge Management
  Problem solving and decision making in in organizations
  KM Technologies
  Knowledge elicitation - Organizational learning and knowledge transfer

The class also provided me better insight into social networking, blogging and microblogging, Problem solving, decision making, organizational learning and knowledge transfer.

The blogging exercise in class has the potential to help me hone my writing skills that will come in handy as I work on my PhD dissertation.

The Wiki collaboration tool, while cumbersome (sharepoint versus media wiki) provides insight into collaborative writing skills.

The best bang for the buck, I got from class is my exposure to twitter and related tools that let you follow conversations of selected genre. I have been able to gain a lot of insight into KM and related technologies by following conversations in twitter and friendfeed and Google Reader. I highly recommend, a feed based approach in augmenting ones reading on specific subjects and microblogging to follow current trends through conversations.

IS 456 Class V - Homework

Homework:

Please answer these questions on your blog, based on the articles enclosed in this folder:

Action learning article:

o Focus on the "Problem solving process" picture, Fig. 4-1.

o There are 6 steps. Which is the most important?

§ ANS: “Reframe the problem” is the most important in my opinion, because it reviews the presented problem and digs deeper to understand if it is a knowledge problem or an Information problem. Framing and Reframing the problem are critical steps of creative problem solving. While Framing the problem, presents it, Reframing the problem scrutinizes the problem further, by asking why. So this step by far is the most important as it provides the information necessary for the root cause.

o Note that 2 new steps are described, before 'determine the root cause'.

Understanding & Supporting Decision Making.pdf

o What is naturalistic decision making, and how is it different from the traditional decision making, i.e. the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude?

§ ANS: The naturalistic decision making process uses observation as a s first step prior to testing hypothesis. NDM also tries to understand the role of intuition in the decision making process that the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude model does not include in its framework. The premise of the NDM theory is that the scientify investigation of how people makes decisions begins with observation.

What data mining can't do.docx

o In terms of data, data modeling, data warehousing and data mining, why is more not necessarily better?

§ ANS: Recency and Frequency are two measures that have been around for a long time. Most time they are all we need in the Analytics process. Data collection technology should work toward making these measures more accurate to get a better bang for the buck. Having more data there fore does not necessarily mean it is a good thing, rather, Collecting data geared toward the models you are using should be the right approach. Another train of thought to consider is that suppringly simple spreadsheet models can take you much further, particularly in capturing initial behaviour. As the author puts it “Start Simple”, you will be surprised how much you gain by starting out in the spreadsheet realm.

General Reflections:

Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?

ANS: Yes, Problem solving follows the premise that there is an awareness of a discreprency, resources to do it and pressure to act. Tools used for problem solving generally provide a Root Cause Analysis and selection of best possible choices among a series of solutions.

Decision making on the other hand, tries to be “more programmed” and tries to eliminate BIAS from the process of decision making to arrive at a rational approach to process. The steps in decision making normally follow: Identification of a problem, --->identify decision making criteria, --->allocation of weights to criteria. --->develop alternatives--->Analysis of alternatives--->selection of an alternative --> implementation of alternative-->evaluation of decision effectiveness.

o

True or false:

o There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions.

§ ANS: False, there on only “decisions”, based on alternatives, analysis of alternatives and selection of alternatives.

o Better information yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better information (as opposed to Bad information) yields better decision making. It can help you develop better alternates and help you allocate weights better.

o Better knowledge yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better knowledge (more actionable pieces of information) yields better decision making.

End of Homework.

IS 456 Class V - 4/30/2008 - Organizational learning

Review of Last Class and Homework.
Al reviewed the homework submitted by the students. He chose 10 homework submissions that according to him were well scoped and commented on those. Not sure why he did not pick the ones that were not well scoped and provided feedback, but he is the boss in class, so he chooses!!

Tonight's Threads
Diagnosing and solving knowledge problems in organizations. I have started using MS one note following the discussion in Class IV. Here are some notes that I made on themes such as problem solving and decision making:

Problem solving stages: Make decisions, solve problems or make tasks. Difference between decision making and problem solving:
Some decisions solve problems, or they can create a problem that you have to solve later. Problem solving is probably bigger than Decision making because you have to do a lot more. Reframing the problem is an important step in Problem Solving

Decisions: structured decision, ill structured decisions (mergers and acquisitons)
Problem: awareness of a discreprency, resources to do it and pressure to act. Root cuase, fishbone diagrams etc are problem solving. Decision making: more programmed, Story: irrational exuberance. Al was looking at 14 schools, Schools were asking Al, if they made the short list?.

Al used his decision making approach when picking his first teaching Job:
a. Identification of a problem, --->identify decision making criteria, --->allocation of weights to criteria. --->develop alternatives--->Analysis of alternatives--->selection of an alternative --> implementation of alternative-->evaluation of decision effectiveness.

Naturalistic is decision making under pressure --->trader floor -->fighter pilot etc

Problem solving and decision making in in organizations
See the week 5 zip files on COLWeb--with blog questions enclosed. Some more about analyzing problems, specifically organization design content. Here are the answers to the questions that are required for this homework.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Homework:

Please answer these questions on your blog, based on the articles enclosed in this folder:

Action learning article:

o Focus on the "Problem solving process" picture, Fig. 4-1.

o There are 6 steps. Which is the most important?

§ ANS: “Reframe the problem” is the most important in my opinion, because it reviews the presented problem and digs deeper to understand if it is a knowledge problem or an Information problem. Framing and Reframing the problem are critical steps of creative problem solving. While Framing the problem, presents it, Reframing the problem scrutinizes the problem further, by asking why. So this step by far is the most important as it provides the information necessary for the root cause.

o Note that 2 new steps are described, before 'determine the root cause'.

Understanding & Supporting Decision Making.pdf

o What is naturalistic decision making, and how is it different from the traditional decision making, i.e. the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude?

§ ANS: The naturalistic decision making process uses observation as a s first step prior to testing hypothesis. NDM also tries to understand the role of intuition in the decision making process that the theory-hypothesis-test-conclude model does not include in its framework. The premise of the NDM theory is that the scientify investigation of how people makes decisions begins with observation.

What data mining can't do.docx

o In terms of data, data modeling, data warehousing and data mining, why is more not necessarily better?

§ ANS: Recency and Frequency are two measures that have been around for a long time. Most time they are all we need in the Analytics process. Data collection technology should work toward making these measures more accurate to get a better bang for the buck. Having more data there fore does not necessarily mean it is a good thing, rather, Collecting data geared toward the models you are using should be the right approach. Another train of thought to consider is that suppringly simple spreadsheet models can take you much further, particularly in capturing initial behaviour. As the author puts it “Start Simple”, you will be surprised how much you gain by starting out in the spreadsheet realm.

General Reflections:

Is there a difference between decision making and problem solving?

ANS: Yes, Problem solving follows the premise that there is an awareness of a discreprency, resources to do it and pressure to act. Tools used for problem solving generally provide a Root Cause Analysis and selection of best possible choices among a series of solutions.

Decision making on the other hand, tries to be “more programmed” and tries to eliminate BIAS from the process of decision making to arrive at a rational approach to process. The steps in decision making normally follow: Identification of a problem, --->identify decision making criteria, --->allocation of weights to criteria. --->develop alternatives--->Analysis of alternatives--->selection of an alternative --> implementation of alternative-->evaluation of decision effectiveness.

o

True or false:

o There are good decisions, and there are bad decisions.

§ ANS: False, there on only “decisions”, based on alternatives, analysis of alternatives and selection of alternatives.

o Better information yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better information (as opposed to Bad information) yields better decision making. It can help you develop better alternates and help you allocate weights better.

o Better knowledge yields better decision making.

§ ANS: True, Better knowledge (more actionable pieces of information) yields better decision making.

End of Homework.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Multimedia and cognitive processes
An interesting exercise. Al had the class read the lyrics, then listen to the sound track and finally watch the video and soundtrack of Mettalica's song labeled "One". At step he requested the class to write down what the song is about and then compare it to the previous answers. The idea behind the exercise was to understand the influence of media in the learning process, particularly the impact of BIAS. In this particular case study, my analysis was as follows:
1) After reading the lyrics, my impression: the song was about WAR and its RAVAGES.
2) After listening to the soundtrack: I was glad I had read the lyrics, as it was hard to decipher the sound bytes. I guess heavy metal is a hard listen (atleast for me).
3) After watching the Video: I picked up some additional BIAS that came through, such as the Son and father relationship and the soldier sending signals via morse code as a plea for help.

Parting Shot:
4 types of learning we’ll discuss later:
1) Knowledge acquisition is the process by which knowledge is obtained.
2) Information distribution is the process by which information from different sources is shared and thereby leads to new information or understanding.
3) Information interpretation is the process by which distributed information is given one or more commonly understood interpretations.
4) Organizational memory is the means by which knowledge is stored for future use

See you next week.

Tagging memorable Knowledge

For those of us who wish for an attribute system that TAGS memorable Knowledge:

The scope of this project has the sense that we could choke on it, but so was the scope of the first trip to the moon. Is there a need to focus on memorable knowledge?. Or similar attributes for Knowledge?

IS 456 Class IV - 4/23/2008 - Personal Knowledge Management

Three Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: The format this week is a tad different following the theme of the lecture. Its going to be all about PERSONAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT. To emphasize my point and Al's, the two stories this week actually there are three will be represented by mind maps created out of the freemind tool.

Parting Shot: After taking down all the notes using the freemind tool, the verdict is "use ONENOTE for class notes", I think it works much better. Next week I plan on doing just that. I Wanted to do this class in Freemind, its done. Now I can truly say been there done that!!

Story One: Assignments due on 4/29. See mind map below, click on it to view it in its own windows and then zoom in and out as needed. Two assignments due on 4/29 along with this blog entry. Al has provided the templates, so there should not be any format issues. I will post them to next weeks blog.
Story Two: Review of last class. Not much in terms of review except for a discussion on what is the difference between this class and the other Knowldege classes. See mind map below, click on it to view it in its own windows and then zoom in and out as needed.


Story Three. KM theme for today - Personal KM management: Lots of KM ground covered via a demo of the MINDMAP tool. Through the demo Al covered KM processes, KM solutions and his Expert system paper. The second demo went into the the Microsoft product ONENOTE and how class notes can be organized. See mind map below, click on it to view it in its own windows and then zoom in and out as needed.
Conclusion:Using the Freemind tool for documenting these stories is a one time experiment, not sure if I will use this again. But it is certainly possible to document it. Reading the material is another matter. It requires the reader to double click the image then zoom into the various parts. Talk about making it harder to get to?. Finally, below is the whole class in one snapshot, enjoy it if you can stand the drill down and read approach!!

IS 456 Class III - 4/16/2008

Two Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: The first story will interpret or shall I say document what I gathered in class, the second Story will be about the readings and finally the parting shot. I will start with the parting shot, sort of like reading the conclusion to get a gist before delving into the whole....Today we had a guest speaker, Ed Brill from IBM, contrary to what I was expecting, he kept the IBM sales pitch down to a low key. I noticed he got a little defensive on the subject of Exchange versus Notes but that goes with his territory is my guess.

Parting Shot: Knowledge is about NODES and RELATIONSHIPS as can be seen from the logic modelling done by Burns of Steven Job's paragraph on "Love What you Do", As was discussed last class. It is also about hierarchies as can be seen from the mind map shown below.


Story One: Ed Brill's chat with the class. Ed brought a hefty presentation chalk full of graphics and icons. 42 slides in all. I came away with the impression that Ed communicates better talking to group, than his presentation skills using PowerPoint. Or may be he was using Openoffice's PowerPoint look alike. The chat started with a discussion on Trends in Collaboration, and Virtual collaboration in particular. He touched upon various forms of collaboration including the recent trends in microblogging that is geared toward the mobile space with short burst of 140 words.

The historic perspective: 1990's money --> Engineers, 2008 --> innovation driving differentiation was the next topic of discussion. He then went into a case study of a Chicago firm that hired a CIO to turn things around. Who leveraged the idea of using a blog to capture/elicit innovation from the janitor all the way to the top. Further he went into examples of http://mystarbucksidea.com and http://ideajam.net and http://salesforce.net. All these sites are built on the same concept of capturing/eliciting innovation with a simple, accessible weblog platform. The discussion also touched upon the reward and reputation management space that enhances this form of innovation elicitation. He ended this theme with the parting shot: major trends to watch in the near future would be the hand held device which will play the role of the primary interface. If twitter's success is any indication, he could have nailed this trend.

Much of the next hour was spent on discussing Lotus notes and its development, its competetion and the surrounding software suites at IBM. He walked the class through the new generation features of Notes that integrates Instant messaging and left us thinking about the changing model: "The document should not be the center of the collaboration universe, rather people or something other than the document object paradigm".

The highlight of the evening was his discussion on the power of the blog to mobilize the masses. His story about "searchdomino.com" that was advertising Micorosft's migration tools, was in my opinion very insightful. The outcome of this episode was credibility damage that led to searchdomino loosing its subscription base and in turn its advertising revenue. The pen is indeed mightier than the sword!! This might look interesting in a logical model!!

Story Two: Al's clas notes: Following the Ed's talk, Al continued with the lecture for the evening, with the open discussion about "Information Overload". Next weeks lecture will follow on the logic modeling exercise from last week and discuss mind maps and hierarchy based Knowledge representation. Week 4 reading material has been posted to the document repository on COL web.

Conclusion: Time flies when you are having a good time. Today's lecture was a good example. Having a good guest speaker helps!! For those of you who want to follow me on twitter, I twitter as @mibdepot.

IS 456 Class II - 4/9/2008

Two Stories Each Week and a Parting Shot: I modified the format for this week to two stories and a parting shot from my previous entry, where in I indicated that there will be three stories each week. The first story will interpret or shall I say document what I gathered in class, the second Story will be about the readings and finally the parting shot. I will start with the parting shot, sort of like reading the conclusion to get a gist before delving into the whole....

Parting Shot: Knowledge is about NODES and RELATIONSHIPS as can be seen from the logic modelling done by Burns of Steven Job's paragraph on "Love What you Do". The whole paragraph when looked through the lens of LOGIC MODELLING can be viewed as the following schematic representation, The theme of the whole class focused on LOGIC MODELLING as you will see from Story Two. So take away for the week, put on the logic modelling hat to get better at KM.

Knowledge management can be defined as Structuring, Storing, capturing, disseminating, using knowledge we gain out of this relationships between nodes.

Story Two: Class notes. The first hour (an entire hour) in class was spent on introductions, with the KM context interspersed in between. The discussion warmed up into Intellectual Assets and Tacit and Explicit knowledge and a brief discussion on Nonanka's article and how Nonaka could have got it wrong. Al then took us through logic modelling process (using examples) using decision tree examples. All examples were geared toward how to translate directives in plain English into "Actions, Conditions and Rules". Powerful stuff. Brought back memories of pseudo code and structured English and programming. This followed a discussion on The models of KM as discussed by Bowman. The Network Model and the Repository Model. The discussion moved on to the definitions of important concepts in KM and a Question on Which is better? Knowledge or Truth?

My thoughts on this (it is my own compilation!!): Truth is a reality that is snapshot in time, it is temporal. While Knowledge is an unending collection, a summation if you will of the content of the collective human mind, that grows, gets modified and is organic. Knowledge modifies truth and transcends the temporal nature of Truth, following the cognitive process in learning.

Story One: the Readings. As an afterthought from last week, I am going to label each article I read, with the date it was created, so I don't confuse old concepts with the new.
1) CFO-"Who you know" - [2003]: A paper that talks about the immense nature of knowledge in existence, expert systems to capture knowledge of the brightest and the best, talks about folks who coined "don't try to bottle it, just try to find it when you need it". Finally discusses why acronyms are being used today, with the computation that it will take us 2018 years to watch all videos that have been captured.
2) Notes on Scheriber: Chapters 2 and 8. [2000]: Discusses Process roles in KM and Knowledge elicitation techniques to extract data for modelling. Elicitation uses two questions: a) how to get experts to tell us what they do and 2) How to determine what constitutes their problem solving competence. It also has a interesting definition of experts: academic/practicing/samurai.
3) Topiary - case study [2004]: is about a Chicago based company that sells KM tools, the two slides at the end on measurement appear to have been slapped together as an afterthought.
4) IA PowerPoint extrapolated from "one more time what is KM" by Harris and Berg []: defines Intellectual assets and talks about tacit and explicit km.
5) Alvi - a review of KM and KMS [2001]: Lots of material on KM with interesting tables, particularly one about taxonomy and examples. (I think I like the work TAXONOMY, just like I liked the world FOLKSONOMY, makes me sound intelligent?). Great discussion on KM I am sure, but I did not find anything to store away for a rainy day!!
6) Bohn - measuring and managing technological knowledge. [1994]: Great paper at that time, I am sure. He concludes with a statement from Lord Kelvin from 1890, which was a nice touch. But to his credit in 1994 he was thinking about using decision trees and variables and how efficiency can be improved by understanding the impact of these decision tree variables better.
7) finally, Nonaka [1991]: Talks about spiral knowledge and forms of Knowledge and combinational relationship between tacit/tacit, explicit/explicit, tacit/explicit and explicit/tacit. Also talks about how Japanese firms in the 1990's produces superior products by using slogan's and themes to motivate and drive quality and innovation.

Conclusion: This is a force of habit, wanting to conclude. It is interesting that all the readings we are doing are a little dated. Nonaka's went back to 1991. Is this a representation of the sate of KM, stale with nothing new?. I remember having to study the great masters in History of Architecture before I studied the contemporary greats. May be the readings from classes 8 on up will focus on today's material. I will be patient.

IS 456 Class I

Three Stories each week, totalling 500 words is Al's requirement. At the end of 10 classes this should achieve a letter grade equal to an A in lieu of Exams. Each story will contain 167 words more or less, and the three stories will through the magic of writing and presentation styles tie in to form a whole. If I learned anything from Larry Lessig, his ideas on UGC (user generated content) and how he ties 3 stories to make one argument, then this should be smooth sailing. Sounds simple but the math works as follows. 3 hours of watching Al's class + 2 hours of reading the material he suggests each week (this week it is 7 papers and 2 ppt's) + 1 hour to compile and write this blog will equal 60 hours of effort for this course.

Story 1: Readings for the week: I narrowed in on Steve Job's Stay Hungry - Stay Foolish, commencement speech and was pleasantly surprised that he still pays homage to Lessig in his style of presentation. Did not know he had cancer and recovered among other things. Pollard and his future of KM, came across as a depressing article, he should really style his presentation on Lessig as Jobs did. May be then his stories will connect better. The Knova white paper - 10 Principle for KM, like most folks who write about this subject make KM appear to be everything and a mystery. In this day an age of transparency and connecting with the masses, I wish folks would stop doing this particularly in white papers. Here is how the author describes KM in the starting paragraph: "depending upon the nature of the initiative. KM, as we all know, is not a technology or a set of methodologies…". The author (Tom Tobin) then goes on to list 10 principles of KM, which increases the mystery 10 fold and ends up subscribing to Pollard's doomsday vision of KM. The fourth reading "Performance management" by Cognos's Doug Barton (IBM bought them out), talks about CPM, but fails to define the acronym anywhere in the material. Doug starts out by saying that CPM is financial performance management, but then goes on to talk about everything else, so I came away wondering. The fifth reading "One more time what is KM" by Harris and Berg, talked about Tacit and explicit Knowledge, which caught my eye and appears to be a recurring theme in other papers I read, I took this one step further applied my scant datamining skills and googled "tacit and explicit" + Knowledge and got 38400 hits. This has to be an important concept, I am sure by the end of this course, this concept will rise to the top. I did a word frequency check on Casanato's "Glossary of terms" and got a score of 8 for TACIT and 10 for the term EXPLICIT. I love finding patterns using heuristic word frequency!!. The final reading "Building KM systems" by Bowman, is a well written paper that gets into data mining techniques and structure of knowledge repositories. In his conclusion he talks about the measuring the return of KM systems and the lack of approaches thereof. May be we should design systems with "measuring the return" as a key criterion, we might be in a less of a mess if we did perhaps. I will end with that thought for my first story.

Story 2: Class Notes: The Second Story: What I gained from Class this week. This being the first class, the focus was mostly on an overview, ground rules and who is Al. Did not know that Al is going in for his Juris Doctorate. I am told that on a PhD tract one has to write 1000 words a day, far cry from the 500 words a week that this blog will generate for the next 10 weeks. If in some small way I can contribute to that 1000 words, may be this blog will achieve a higher purpose. So Al, this one is toward your Juris Doctorate: Larry Lessig is the Key!! Beyond that, this course is about KM themes such as: KM Technologies, Diagnosing/Solving Knowledge problems, KM best practices, PKM, BPM/BRM (hot and new) and Knowledge Based systems.

Parting Shot for this week: BPM and BRM will be explored in detail, where in we will learn to document Informal systems using the "Swim Lane Diagram" that depicts work flow.

Story 3: Conclusion:
This is a discussion/Learning course about Data/Information/Knowledge/Wisdom by exploring 7 THEMES over a 10 week period. One view point to describe KM is to look at it as data stored in a database: Data is stored in Fields, Information is stored in Records and Knowledge is the pattern(s) that can be discovered across tables and data sets. Everything can be looked at as a Knowledge Problem if you wear the right glasses/lenses!!. Stay Hungry - Stay Foolish, and I will get there.



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