So you want to be an evangelist?

When I was just a wee lad, me mom said, son I would like it if you became a priest some day. So I grew up with the notion that if I did not become a doctor or lawyer or an Engineer perhaps that would be the way to go. That was a profound notion and I did not really realize it, till now.

Fast forward 40 years: I did not become a priest, but I often think of myself as an Evangelist. It is a self endowed title, and I dont even preach all that often. So what makes me think I am an Evangelist? I have this urge to improve the common good, do selfless acts, improve what is around me without profit. Problem is, I get caught up in sustenance, so most times these lofty thoughts and ideas go by the wayside.

So am I an Evangelist for just having these thoughts and urges to do good by my brotha? umm NO. I think it has to go beyond that. What I found through years of having these thoughts and urges is something that the Priests and Nuns and brothers had figured out long time ago. Here it is in a nut shell:

If you want to do good: your basic nessesities have to be taken care of. If you are independantly wealthy, you are well on your way to becoming an evangelist, unless ofcourse you want to multiply what you have. Start a foundation, adopt kids from Africa, Save the homeless are easier to embark on, if you dont have to worry about being laid off, if you dont have to worry about your kids schooling, if you dont have to worry about Christmas gifts, you get the picture. If you want to do good, you have a better chance if you are a Priest or a Nun, where those important selfish things are taken care of, so you can concentrate on doing good by others.

So become a man of the cloth: You can then truly say you are an evangelist. Otherwise you will always be someone else's boy toy, perhaps Seagate or kmart or whoever will pay your rent, or throw you an occasional bone.

Problem Solving Revisited - A story about Cognition

Just because I have not ranted these past weeks does not mean I did not have any thing to say, on the contrary I did have quite a bit, but did not know how to put it in words. So I started drawing and sketching and procrastinating instead. I should really change that order to: Procrastinating, Sketching and Drawing. Eventually I realized that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, so here are a few sketches involving my thoughts these past few weeks.

Problem solving free hand sketch:
I still love to doodle and sketch, and sometime when faced with a problem, I gravitate toward the pencil and paper and the sharpie. Many iterations later, I arrive at a sketch, I want to show folks, but I think I loose something in translation. Remember when our math teacher would say, "Show how you arrived at solving the problem and you will at least get partial credit", well that is really true. So here is the doodle and the final sketch of my problem solving methodology that I arrived at.
1) the Genesis - A Doodles of fair significance:

2) The final Sketch - born out of refinement and discussion:



Problem solving mind map:
Once I arrived at the freehand sketch, it was easy to use a tool like Mindmap and translate that, but as you will see there is something lost in translation.



I lost two loved ones these past few weeks: Aunty Mattie - My Dad's brothers wife and Aunty Tressy - My mom's sister. Each of them impacted me significantly as I was growing up. Each contributed quite a bit in my cognitive development. I owe my problem solving skills in part to them. Thank you.

its all about Perspective

This one is all about perspective when used as a metaphor. Sometimes it is necessary to see beyond our point of view to get a better understanding of what is going on. Sometimes it does not matter, but most times we get to see way more than what is apparent if we change our viewpoint.

We are in the midst of a historic election year and there is just about 10 days till America elects a new president. I will use that backdrop to explain my point about perspective and viewpoints.

In Knowledge management circles there is a concept called "conformational bias". Basically this means that if your thought process is inclined one way, you tend to analyze and dissect events from the point of view of your BIAS. So if you are a democrat, everything the Republican candidate says and does is phooey and vice versa. So if conformational bias can skew our perspective where does the truth lie?.

Lets take a look at John Mccain's (Republican candidate) campaign for a moment: He is running on a ticket where the current president's approval rating is in the single digits, the economy is in a bad state and we are still fighting a war that was never popular. So if you walk in his shoes, he has quite a campaign going. The big question is can we learn something from it?. If you were put in a situation of not having a snowball's chance in hell, but you were knee deep in it, how do stay motivated?

Well it is all about perspective and viewpoints.

Take a game, your favorite game. You are down at half time, so way down that you dont really have a chance of winning, what do you do?. Do you throw in the towel? or do you play the game out and making it a point to learn, so the next game you play, you have learnt from it? My heart goes out to the loosing team, becuase it takes a lot more to play the game out than the winning team. It is easy for the baser side of human emotion to come out when you are put in a state of being a loosing team and it is easy to not concentrate on skill, but rather on unproductive paths.

So if you see charector assasination taking a frontal role or a focus for the loosing side, you know why. it is all about perspective and viewpoint.

So my hats off to the Mccain campaing for still being in the game. And remember when his team does not concentrate on issues that matter, and focus on socialism, race and other base emotional issues, they are just human beings, playing on a loosing team.

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.

IS 456 Class VIII, convergence in the course.

WARNING!!!!
Its time to wrap up the course, we have 3 more classes to go:

Todays theme:

• KM technologies
• Miscellaneous
• How to: Knowledge versus Information problem
  
• Stephan Dennings story telling presentation
  

Next Week:

• Metrics
• Barriers

KM technologies:

• Lot of ground covered here including going back over the content management best practices compilation of papers that started last week. Al used the article on "how to correct myopia in your organization" to work out a template of problem solving using excel. It appeard intitutive.
• The topic of best practices in other areas such as Web self service Best Practices,Communities of practice were also discussed.
• Discussion also focussed on the differences between Project management and Knowledge management. project management is managing THINGS such as tasks, work breakdown schedules, timelines etc. The question is how do you use Knowledge Management to manage projects. More on that next week

How to: Knowledge versus Information problem

• Al in his effort in trying to give an example of "Knowledge versus Information" Problem asked the class if they have ever met a "Jerk", if so what makes him a jerk?. one person said, her boss was one, when asked why, the answer was that he micro managed the her work. This lead to a series of question and answers that boiled down to three things:
• What you know, What you know, you don't know and What you don't know, you dont know.

Stephan Dennings Presentation on Storey Telling:

• The class endeded with a great slide presentation. Al had managed to pick up Stephan Denning's preso on Storey Telling to share with the class. Lots of good stuff in there including the style of presentation that used very sparse content on each slide, but told a powerful storey. I always compare presentations to Larry Lessigs, and this one got a 7 on a scale of 10. But more importantly is the topic of storey telling with the approach of starting out with a jarring incident to catch the attention, planting the seed with a good story and finally appealing to the reasoning part of the senses to drive home the point. Enjoyed it.
  

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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