Category: Knowledge work

Davenport, Prusak and Cohen are Blogging

This should be interesting to watch and likely will be a very welcome
addition to the ongoing conversations about knowledge management and
knowledge work. Tom, Larry, and Don have long been astute and
insightful observers of the world of organizations and knowledge work.
Both the opportunity to get an earlier look at their thinking and the
insights they are likely to develop as they immerse themselves in some
new tools should be valuable for all of us.

Steve Matthews writes that Davenport & Prusak are Blogging

Along with Don Cohen, they are publishing a collaborative blog titled The Babson Knowledge Blog. The blog is also connected to the Babson College's Working Knowledge Research Center, or WKRC.

They started at the end of September.
They are taking their time and writing longer pieces less frequently.
They deserve to take their time. It should be interesting to follow
what they have to say.

Comments

On the Menu at BlawgThink

Matt Homan and Dennis Kennedy are putting together a really interesting
get together next month. Jack and I are planning to put together a
highly interactive session to tap the collective interests and
experience of everyone who chooses to join us.

Jim McGee and I are going to host a session on knowledge management / collaboration during BlawgThink 2005, here in Chicago. LexThink! Blog – Speaking of BlawgThink

Q: What do Matt Buchanan, Ben Cowgill, Dennis Crouch, Fred Faulkner, Peter Flashner, Brandy Karl, Cathy Kirkman, Rick Klau, Jim McGee, Steve Nipper, Kevin O’Keefe, Evan Schaeffer, Doug Sorocco, Ernie Svenson, Jack Vinson, and J. Craig Williams have in common?

A: They are all speaking at BlawgThink 2005. We’ll have a few more additions to this list by the end of the week.

Comments

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community

Bill Ives finds a nice report on the use of new technology within the intelligence community. You will need to register with the Social Science Research Network (for free) in order to download the report, which is a pdf file, but it’s worth the trouble

The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community. Here is an article by Calvin Andrus of the CIA on how they can use blogs and wikis to help them change, The Wiki and the Blog: Toward a Complex Adaptive Intelligence Community, which is not a bad idea. As… [Portals and KM]

Thinkers you should know – Alan Kay

One way to get a handle on the future of work is to get to know some of those who are already there.

Alan Kay with "Dynabook" prototype
Alan Kay with “Dynabook” prototype (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the recent news about layoffs at HP, several sources noted that Alan Kay is among those getting a pink slip. It struck me that Alan is a perfect embodiment of William Gibson’s observation that “the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed.” He is the prototypical example of someone who has been living in, and creating, our future for the past 30 years. Taking some time to examine and reflect on his thinking is time well spent. Alan was one of the scientist/engineers at Xerox PARC. Much of the technology we use and take for granted today traces its lineage to work Alan and his colleagues did in the 1970s at PARC. Alan is an engineer not an academic; more interested in building things than in writing papers for journals. If you ever get an opportunity to hear Alan talk, take it. In the meantime, there are some worthwhile starting points on the web I can recommend:

Alan is also fond of aphorisms. Two of my favorites and among his best known are “the best way to predict the future is to invent it,” and “point of view is worth 80 IQ points.”

Your workshop for doing knowledge work

Lately, it seems like I’m always running behind.

Had a column go up at ESJ two weeks ago and I’m just getting around to blogging it here now. It is on the notion of thinking about how you might go about setting up a knowledge workshop for your day-to-day knowledge work. I wanted to set up a contrast with the “one magic, integrated, tool” mindset that seems to dominate most current software marketing.

Check it out if you’ve got a few minutes. I’d be curious about two things. To what extent do you find the analogy helpful as something more encompassing than the typical tools perspective. Second, what’s in your workshop?

Corante launches Future Tense – on the future of work

I’ve signed up to contribute to a new blog at Corante that launched officially today. Hylton Jolliffe lays out the premise below. My involvement grew out of a lunch Hylton and I had last month in Cambridge (at Charlie’s Kitchen, a Harvard Square landmark). We’ll be exploring a topic that’s long been near and dear to my heart and it feels like it’s going to be a great group to work with. For all you fans of RSS, the blog’s feed is here.

Check it out.

New blog on the future of work. Today we launch a new blog – Future Tense – that will examine and explore how the modern work “place” is evolving and adapting to new trends, technologies, and economic factors. Future Tense, authored by a handful of closely read thinkers and practitioners in the broad, industry-spanning “space,” will discuss the trends and pressures that are forcing employers to rejigger the way they think about the workplace, manage projects and staffs, encourage collaboration and innovation, support a decentralized workforce, motivate and reward employees, build morale and foster teamwork, design physical spaces to accommodate a mobile and transient workforce, etc. Future Tense’s co-authors: Elizabeth Albrycht, a 15-year veteran of high technology public relations practice and a co-founder and co-producer of the New Communications Forum; Jim Ware, cofounder of the Work Design Collaborative and the Future of Work program; Regina Miller, formerly of Vodafone and founder of the consultancy The Seventh Suite;… [Corante Blog]

My dinner with Buzz – time to get back to practicing blogging

I caught up with Buzz last week face-to-face. We were both in Cambridge, MA and managed to find time for some pizza at Bertucci’s followed by ice cream at Herrells. If you live in Cambridge, you likely know of Herrells. Those of you who don’t, should make the pilgrimage if quality ice cream is important to you.

Buzz chided me on my less than prolific blogging recently. The usual excuses apply; travel, new client projects, family sporting events when I am in town, etc., etc. But he’s right. I haven’t been making as much time for this practice as I should. Some of the issue is managing and rethinking the split between public and private blogging. I originally began using these tools as a backup brain and as an amplifier on my ability to stay informed about topics that matter to me. I still spend substantial time tracking topics using RSS and my aggregator, but much of that doesn’t find its way into McGee’s Musings nor should it.

I also use my local blog as the place where I draft and work out various ideas for my client projects and other efforts. Again, that is material that is frequently not ready for wide dissemination.

While I find these tools immensely important to my long term productivity as a knowledge worker, I still find it a difficult concept to sell. I don’t think we really give tools the importance they deserve if we are knowledge workers. If you’re reading this, most likely you’ve made this conceptual leap already. But how often do we encounter conversations like the one Rex Hammock reported last week on a question by Ellis Booker, “ What were you trying to achieve with your blog in the first place?”

I agree with Rex. I didn’t start this with a well-developed business case or a clear plan. The out-of-pocket costs to play with these new technologies are close to zero. The time costs can be a different question, but the potential payoffs are what is absolutely critical. And none of it fits into a business case any better than trying to calculate the future value of a newborn baby. You’ve got to live it to create whatever value is going to be found.

Here’s my analogy. We’re about where Frederick Taylor was when he started trying to figure out how to make manual, repetitive work more productive. Figuring that out was science at its most fundamental; observe, experiment, learn, repeat. The sooner you start, the faster you learn. If you continue the process, the most that anyone following you can do is to catch up to where you are now. Waiting for the answer is a sucker’s bet. It’s the person doing the practicing that gets better, not the spectator in the stands. So, Buzz, you’re right.

Latest ESJ Column – Crafting Uniqueness in Knowledge Work

I have another column up at ESJ. I’ve been arguing that knowledge work is best thought of from a craft perspective for a long time. This time I took a look at knowledge work deliverables and came to a new insight (I’m just a bit slow sometimes). Knowledge work products achieve their value from their uniqueness not their uniformity.

This contributes to the failings most organizations have had with their efforts at knowledge management. Managing activities in an industrial economy is about achieving and enforcing uniformity. When it works, we get the PC revolution where my computer gets better and faster and more reliable every year. When it doesn’t, we get everyone in the call center reading from the same debugging script after I’ve been on hold 30 minutes while they ignore the problem diagnosis I’ve already done before I ever called.

Knowledge management efforts need to be rethought to bring this issue to the forefront. They need to put attention toward how to enable knowledge workers to be more proficient at creating unique results, not at creating an artificial uniformity that undermines the real point of knowledge management in the first place. The more sophisticated your knowledge workers, the more likely they are to ignore ill-conceived efforts toward uniformity. Also, the more likely they are to support efforts that address their real concerns.

A strategy for improving knowledge work – new column at ESJ

In my most recent column at Enterprise Systems Journal, I'm taking another look at what a strategy for improving knowledge work
might entail. Of course, as I look around the borderline chaos that
constitutes my half of my home office and the contents of the backpack
that constitutes my mobile office, it's questionable whether I am
qualified to have any useful advice. Based on long prior experience,
this is not something that will get figured out in a single column. But
we'll keep on trying.

The Art of Intelligence

If you consider the C.I.A. as an example of a knowledge based
organization, this op-ed piece from David Brooks is worth some thought.
Here's the money quote from my parochial perspective:

But the problem is not bureaucratic. It's epistemological. Individuals
are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans.
We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm
Gladwell's “Blink,” that the human mind can perform fantastically
complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a
powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people
around us.

When we think about knowledge work processes, we need to be very
careful to ensure that we do not destroy those processes by mapping
them onto bad assumptions about the nature of knowledge work.

The Art of Intelligence. Many of the C.I.A.'s failures stem from its reliance on bureaucracy and analysis rather than humanism. By By DAVID BROOKS. [NYT > Opinion]