Pollard on Personal Productivity Improvement

THE BUSINESS CASE FOR PERSONAL PRODUCTIVITY IMPROVEMENT.

In a recent post I argued that IT and Knowledge Management (KM) should merge into a combined TechKnowledgy department that would, in addition to the traditional responsibilities for managing the financial, HR and sales systems and technical hardware of the organization, take on these two important new responsibilities focused on the individual ‘knowledge worker’:1. Social Software Applications: Development of new social software applications for front-line employees, including:

  • Expertise locators – to help people find other people inside and outside the organization they need to talk with to do their job more effectively.
  • Personal content management tools – simple, weblog-type tools that organize, access and selectively publish each individual’s ‘filing cabinet‘, as a replacement for failed centralized content management systems.
  • Personal collaboration tools – wireless, portable videoconferencing and networking tools that save travel costs and allow people to participate virtually in events where they cannot afford to participate in person.
  • Personal researching and reporting tools – technologies and templates that enable effective do-it-yourself business research and analysis and facilitate the preparation of professional reports and presentations.

PPI2. Personal Productivity Improvement: Hands-on assistance to front-line employees — helping them make effective use of technology and knowledge, including the above tools, one-on-one, in the context of their individual roles. Not training, not wait-for-the-phone-to-ring help desk service — face to face, scheduled sessions where individuals can show what they do and what they know, and experts can show them how to do it better, faster, and take the intelligence of what else is needed back to HO so developers can improve effectiveness even more.
I’ve written before about social software applications, and noted that Business 2.0 has named these applications the Best New Technology of 2003.

Now I’ve put together, in Word format, a downloadable Business Case for Personal Productivity Improvement. I’ve written this so that it can be used by both:

  1. IT/KM professions inside the organization, to get executive buy-in and resources for it, and
  2. external IT/KM consultants who want to sell this service to organizations that prefer to outsource it.

I hope you find it useful and I would welcome comments on it. I am looking to organize a virtual collaborative enterprise of IT/KM professionals interested in providing this service, so I may also post it on Ryze/LinkedIn.

What do you think — could people make a living doing this?

[How to Save the World]

More spot on insight from Dave Pollard. This ties in nicely with several lines of thought I’ve been exploring. Take a look at Is Knowledge Work Improvable? for example.

The key challenge here is that success depends more on leadership than on management.

Personal Wiki PIM – Update I

Personal Wiki PIM – Update I.

I’ve been using MoinMoin as my personal information management platform for the last several weeks. This had several goals. First, I needed to get my growing collection of documents under control. Secondly, I really wanted to dive into wikis a lot deeper and this gives me a great chance to do just that.

So here is a brief update about what I have found so far.

  1. I am amazed at how useful the auto linking and document templating is for PIM type functions. It is really a snap to put some rudimentary organization on the material and then let it develop from there.

    I was initially worried that what I needed was more structured database style storage for contact information and such, but doing it freeform doesn’t seem to have anty real disadvantages that I have found yet.

  1. MoinMoin has a pretty cool regex based query tool that lets you collect links to other pages. I have made good use of this to create a very low maintenance set of navigation pages so my info is only one to two clicks away. Very Handy.

  1. Wikis really help me write … all the fuss about how it really is designed for writers not readers is apparently true, at least in my case. I find it easier to write in my wiki than in MS Word. Perhaps less clutter? More focus on the words?

I have also made use of editmoin which allows me to use vim to edit my documents which may contribute to the ease of writing somewhat. Here is an Infoworld article noting that writers tend to work in minimal writing tools. Maybe that is partly what I’ve experienced.

  1. I have had to spend sometime on buffing up the css stylesheets. This is mainly because a lot of my formal documents need to get emailed out to customers and I have been converting them to PDF and sending them that way. This required some adjustment to the styles.

[Note to MoinMoin developers: It would be cool if the print preview used a different stylesheet… Then I could highlight uncreated WikiWords in the regular view but not the print view …]

  1. Finally, I am using JPluck to sync the content of my Wiki to my Palm Pilot. That way all the info I need is always at my fingertips. It took some adjustments to the spidering controls to get it to focus only on what I wanted, but it has worked out very well.

So far this has been extremely successful. More reports as events warrent 😉

[Ed Taekema – Road Warrior Collaboration]

Here’s a perfect example of why Ed’s blog is in my subscription list. This is excellent perspective on similar experiments I’ve been trying to get some traction on.

Ed Taekema – Road Warrior Collaboration

Cooperation and evolution.

Here is a golden quote from Howard Rheingold:

When Cooperation Breaks Out, Civilizations Advance

As a mobile technology professional (ok an on the road every day of the working week consultant) cooperation with my peers is extremely difficult and yet when it happens the rewards are great. I believe that the impact that community or collaborative tools can have on mobile professionals is even greater than on people who have opportunities to interact face to face on a regular basis. This is kind of like an un-tapped market for collaboration …

[Ed Taekema – Road Warrior Collaboration]

Really just wanted to point to Ed Taekema’s relatively new blog, Road Warrior Collaboration (RSS Feed), about his experiences trying to do effective knowledge work as a road warrior. I spend way too much time on the road myself and I’ve found that most software tools don’t really deal well with the problems of mobile professionals, no matter what the marketing claims of vendors may be. Ed’s blog provides some helpful perspective.

Feedster – Don't Blog Without it!.

Feedster – Don't Blog Without it!.

For those of us that can't afford John Peterson's LISA solution then implement this! For your own name, for the name of your blog, for all the things you search for each day.

The FuzzyBlog

If you have some topic you follow–if you want your newsreader to keep “pumping” it right to your desk–just do one search for it at Feedster.com. Then, get the rss url of the search itself to transfer into your own newsreader. Awesome. Feedster search rss urls are indicated with these icons:
— Gives you the full post
— Gives you the summary and headlines
You don't have to run that search ever again–because your aggregator will do it for you, automatically, and for free.

[Unbound Spiral]

Clearly time to start thinking about how to take more systematic advantage of Feedster.

mamamusings: Internet Librarian: 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes

mamamusings: Internet Librarian: 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes. (SOURCE:mamamusings: Internet Librarian: 30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes)- Lots of great tips.  Read the full article for all 30.

QUOTE

Mary Ellen Bates on tips for searching effectively. These are her tips, not mine. My comments, when I have them, are parenthetical.

I almost hate to share these, because these are the kind of tips that let people like me come across as an “angel of information mercy” to the people who ask me for help in finding things!

BTW, Mary Ellen is a great presenter. Funny, interesting, clear. She’s got a free “tip of the month” email update, which you can also read on her web site.

  1. Always use more than one search engine. (You’ll often get very different results; useful to triangulate.) See a test at www.batesinfo.com

UNQUOTE

[Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

If you fancy yourself a knowledge worker, search skills had better be in your repetoire and you had better be looking to improve those skills routinely.

Questions and Ignorance

Questions and Ignorance. Questions and Ignorance — From the archives of John Lienhard’s Engines of Our Ingenuity radio show…

“I’m pretty sure that the only real function of a teacher is to guide students in asking and pursuing questions. Once a student develops the rare talent for seeking his or her own ignorance, teachers become irrelevant. But it’s hard to look at your own ignorance. And it’s not easy to ask a true question. It feels like humiliation.”

But a little humiliation is worth it to find the bliss within your ignorance. Since “Knowledge…flows to the point of greatest ignorance.”, it’s the real questions that break the dams impeding that flow. As a result, it behooves teams and organizations to both solicit and embrace them. [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

I also think that good teachers are those who give you permission and safety to not know. Here’s a tidbit I heard on Car Talk this morning that’s relevant.

I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions. . .Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren t even aware were problems. To sum it all up . . . In some ways I feel we are confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.

Tools and problems

Emergence, reverence, and irrelevance.


Via Jerry Michalski, here’s a great text by Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of Operations Research (pdf file), that sketches what I feel is the usual arc trajectory of successful fields of knowledge.

The life of OR has been a short one. It was born here late in the 1930’s. By the mid 60’s it had gained widespread acceptance in academic, scientific, and managerial circles. In my opinion this gain was accompanied by a loss of its pioneering spirit, its sense of mission and its innovativeness. Survival, stability and respectability took precedence over development, and its decline began.

I hold academic OR and the relevant professional societies primarily responsible for this decline-and since I had a hand in initiating both, I share this responsibility. By the mid 1960’s most OR courses in American universities were given by academics who had never practised it. They and their students were text-book products engaging in impure research couched in the language, but not the reality, of the real world. The meetings and journals of the relevant professional societies, like classrooms, were filled with abstractions from an imagined reality. As a result OR came to be identified with the use of mathematical models and algorithms rather than the ability to formulate management problems, solve them, and implement and maintain their solutions in turbulent environments.

Eventually the tails begins wagging the dog. “When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

[…] In the first two decades of OR, its nature was dictated by the nature of the problematic situations it
faced. Now the nature of the situations it faces is dictated by the techniques it has at its command.

There’s an interesting passage on interdisciplinarity as a sign of the aliveness of a field:

Subjects, disciplines, and professions are categories that are useful in filing scientific knowledge and in dividing the labour involved in its pursuit, but they are nothing more than this. Nature and the world are not organized as science and universities are. There are no physical, chemical, biological, psychological, sociological or even Operational Research problems. These are names of different points-of-view, different aspects of the same reality, not different kinds of reality. Any problematic situation can be looked at from the point-of-view of any discipline, but not necessarily with equal fruitfulness.

[…] The fact that the world is in such a mess as it is is largely due to our decomposing messes into unidisciplinary problems that are treated independently of each other.

Don’t miss the ironic postscript, too.

A related earlier post of mine is Information systems research: towards irrelevance?

[Seb’s Open Research]

Written almost 25 years ago, this gem from Ackoff captures why I’m back in the real world and was never a particularly good academic. I’ve always been more interested in making some progress against interesting problems than in solving toy problems.

I helped pay for my college education as a stage carpenter and electrician. I learned a lot of valuable lessons about tools. Probably the most important was that the tool you could get you hands on now was a lot more useful than the perfect tool back in the shop. The second was that if you had a reasonable collection of tools, you could usually adapt one to the problem. But you could rarely fit the problem to the tool.