What Ralph Knows

Most companies have a rich store of metadata about their employees, sales leads, customers and suppliers, yet they fail to use this data when they build portals and knowledge management systems.

Here is an example: a lot of data is collected about target customers during the sales process. Sales people know what industries their customers participate in, who the key executives are, the size of the business and what products or services they deliver. In addition, sales people frequently involve subject matter experts from the company to help configure the product or service offerings for the customer. By mining the rich store of data in the CRM system, a knowledge manager can identify the customer, the solution that the customer bought and the names of the internal subject matter experts that have the tacit knowledge about the solution.

If knowledge managers identify the stores of information in the enterprise, then they don’t have to collect all that information in an exercise called knowledge harvesting. Part of the job of a clever knowledge manager and system developer is to find the existing metadata and import it into the knowledge management system so that it does not have to be reentered or worse, recreated. Metadata can be inherited from many different applications, for example, data about people and their expertise frequently resides in HR systems. From electronic resumes we can find where people went to school, the languages that they speak and identify their previous experience. All of this can become metadata for applications that help to find people with specific experience.

Frequently, executives, employees, and knowledge managers worry about the volume of incremental work created by a knowledge management system, but analysis of data sources can actually lead to reducing the amount of work in business processes and accelerating critical information flows.

Photosynth is a really exciting technologies that can transform digital images into virtual landscapes with incredible clarity. Blaise Aguera y Arcas is an architect at Microsoft Live Labs.

 

Harvard Law faculty votes for 'open access' to scholarly articles on May 7 2008, making the ideas generated at the Law School. Articles authored by Harvard faculty will be made available in an online repository, whose content will be searchable and available to search engines.  This type of 'open access' is very important to scholars and a real innovation in the legal industry.

A hilarious explanation of how we got into this situation.

 

Knowledge Management In The Real World is a slide deck presented to the Lawrence Technology University by Stan Garfield that explains HP's current approach to knowledge management.  The KM processes are enabled using Windows SharePoint Services.

I have been in the process of redesigning and rewriting much of my business focused site: Coherence Group, Inc. This site discusses the value proposition for knowledge management and the work that I do developing taxonomies and guiding the information architecture of client sites. The new site was developed using Movable Type, which I am finding increasingly easy to use. My other business interest continues to be Bridge Consulting International. Bridge focuses on building the capabilities of a company's leadership through learning and other developmental activities. Bridge's headquarters are in the the UK, but we maintain a presence in the U.S. in Boston and Atlanta.

Tony Karrer, the author of eLearning Technology notes in a post that there is a 1% rule in collaborative environments.  The rule is that for every 100 people that sign up:

• 90 will lurk (read with no active participation)
• 9 will participate in a limited fashion (maybe rate or comment periodically)
• 1 will regularly post content

This has been my experience too and usually I am the one that is the most enthusiastic contributor!  I have tried many things to overcome this which Tony discusses in the post:

• Incentives or requirements (students must blog - it's graded)
• Community cohesion
• Focus (short time frame, limited topic)
• Integrated as natural activity

It is very hard work to make online communities work.

 

Harvard Law Review - THE END OF THE GLOBALIZATION DEBATE: A REVIEW ESSAY by Robert Howse asserts that the globalization debate has ended and that there is no more antiglobalization "side" to the argument:

"Today the protesters who march against globalization are not marching in favor of the state. Instead, they are mostly advocating a set of values and causes that transcend state boundaries and that require global action."

The article reviews four books that contribute to the globalization debate:

1. CAPITAL RULES: THE CONSTRUCTION OF GLOBAL FINANCE. By Rawi Abdelal. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 2007. Pp. xi, 304. $49.95.
2. IN DEFENSE OF GLOBALIZATION. By Jagdish Bhagwati. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. With new afterword, 2007. Pp. xiii, 330. $16.95.
3. TERRITORY, AUTHORITY, RIGHTS: FROM MEDIEVAL TO GLOBAL ASSEMBLAGES. By Saskia Sassen. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press. 2006. Pp. xiv, 493. $37.95.
4. MAKING GLOBALIZATION WORK. By Joseph E. Stiglitz. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 2006. Pp. xxv, 358. $16.95.

Office Live Workspace is a free web-based extension of Microsoft Office, which I have been using with several of my work teams.  This tools lets you access your documents and share your work with others. Because you are working in the full featured Office applications and only saving the files online, it lets you  retain the rich features of Office while easily collaborating with others.  Here is an example of a workspace screen:

 

Sometimes I star an article in Google Reader that I don't fully read, although I know it relates to something I am thinking about.  I just re-read 10 marketing resolutions for 2008: Church of the Customer Blog. Number 2 suggests that you should build a model of how customers, employees, and partners can meet, share and participate with you company and with one another. Well, it is something I don't do and is a great idea.  The work that I do in knowledge management would really benefit from a conversation with all of my customers, and, since I like the work, and the people I work for, it would be fun.

I have been thinking a lot about my business website lately because I need to update it and an article in Duck Tape Marketing Blog gives good advice: A lesson in marketing from my dear sweet wife  suggests that you have to tell a potential customer on your website what to do with the information that they are reading on your page.  There should be some instruction, if, indeed you want someone to buy something.

It has taken me a long time to set-up my new computer and get all the services I use working correctly again.  Now, I have Windows Live Writer connected to my blogs, I upgraded Movable Type to 4.1, I have Windows Vista Ultimate working, plus all my applications.

I bought the same computer that I had the last time, a Dell Precision laptop M4300, but this time it has two processors and wow, that makes a difference in the speed of the machine.

Since I have been working hard as I simultaneously configure everything, my blogging frequency has suffered, but I am back...

This video floated up in my Google reader, from a blog called: if:book, A project of the Institute for the Future of the Book.  "Orson Whales" is a photomontage of a book painted and photographed by Alex Itin set to music by Led Zeppelin and John Bohham, the drummer. 

Orson Whales from Alex Itin on Vimeo.

I liked this cartoon enough to republish it here.

Typically, Google Book Search has not been high on my list of sites that I regularly use to search for content.  However, recently I have had very good luck with searching this site.  Over at Learning to Change Business, a blog that I write on executive education, you will notice that I have been doing research on the Mars Pathfinder mission. Google books actually produced excellent results for this query and I found two or three books on the subject that had not turned up in other sites.

Today's post at Google Operating System entitled Quantity Over Quality at Google Book Search explains a bit more about the status of the product and some of the problems associated with producing the site.  I have not found a downloadable book yet, but the citations have been helpful.

There are a number of chart types that are not included in Excel or PowerPoint that I would like to use, but I have not found the right graphics creation tool. Mekko Graphics: the graphics tool for strategic thinkers promises to be an application that can do these types of charts.  I downloaded the trial version and I will try it out.

One that I find especially frustrating is called a Marimekko chart:

In the past I have calculated the areas and plotted this kind of chart by hand. I like this chart type because it can provide a quick snapshot of a market.  Because of this it is frequently called a Market Map and displays relative market share within a total market as well as individual geographic segments.

I was led to this graphics software site by a blog by Stephen Few, the author of Show me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten.  Stephen also publishes a site called Perceptual Edge.  In the site he describes his objection to Marimekko charts:

In the case of Marimekko charts, however, separate values are encoded by the length and the width of each rectangle. As such, all of the variables in a Marimekko graph are spatially encoded. We can easily view some pairs of visual attributes independently, but others we can only easily view together as a whole. For instance, we can easily see the area and the color of objects independently. These are called “separable” visual dimensions. It is easy, for example, to quickly find all of the large rectangles, all of the blue rectangles, or all of the large blue rectangles in a display that consists of red and blue rectangles of varying sizes. Other pairs of attributes are called “integral” visual dimensions. In this case, we tend to perceive the dimensions holistically, not independently. For instance, the lengths and widths of rectangles are perceived holistically as their areas. If we try to find all of the tall rectangles in a display, our eyes will be drawn to the tall rectangles with the largest area, even though there might be other rectangles of similar heights that we have trouble noticing because they have small widths. In order to search for differences in only width or only height, we are required to work harder and spend more time than we would if focusing on the differences of two separable visual dimensions.

I tend to like this type of display because it gives you a quick gestalt of a market, the data can be teased apart in other ways, in my opinion the magnitude of the differences in area are quickly apparent.

At the end of the year there are lots of lists of the best web-based applications.  On Bnet, I noticed an interesting app reviewed by Rick Broida called PPT to YouTube.  YouTube only accept video formats such as WMV, MP4. To put a PowerPoint slide show on YouTube, you need to convert PowerPoint file to WMV or MP4 video.This is exactly what Wondershare PPT to YouTube can do for you.  Other PowerPoint slide sharing software includes Docstoc and SlideShare.

I have become a big fan of Gmail, but I miss the task management functionality in Microsoft Outlook.  Recently I started to use Remember the Milk, which is integrated with Google Calendar and offers a very quick, stripped down task management web-based service.  Imagine my excitement when I read the Remember The Milk - Blog and found that they built and have released a plugin for Firefox that presents a task management column on the right side of your mail screen in Gmail. Task management is fully integrated into Gmail... It seems to work great and I am already procrastinating!

 

I don't like the term KM 2.0 because I don't think that knowledge management and the technologies that support it has evolved much beyond the initial stages of development. The slide show: The Evolution Of Knowledge Management Km 1.0 Vs. Km 2.0 presented on slideshare presents examples of how our thinking has progressed with regard to knowledge management.   Knowledge managers and software developers recognize that the richest knowledge sharing happens in a community in which ideas are shared rapidly via conversation.  Static repositories and one to one communications via email do not provide a channel rich enough to build understanding of concepts.  Many professional service firms have invested in static repositories and while these still have a place as knowledge sharing repositories, they can not substitute for face to face conversations.

 

I have been reading Richard Ogle's new book, "Smart World" which proposes that the world of ideas thinks for itself.  This means that the community does the thinking collaboratively through conversation and sharing idea.  Ideas and the generation of new ideas cannot therefore be understood outside the context of the conversation occuring at the time.  Anne Zelenka discusses this in a post on Gigaom: The Web Mind at Warp Speed and in fact refers to Richard Ogle's book. Essentially she argues that the faster we discus and converse about new technologies or new approaches to solving problems increases the likelihood that new and interesting ideas will emerge along with useful analysis.

I do, however, continue to wonder about reflection and thinking. We no longer seem to give our selves the chance to reflect on what we have learned. Our instinct now is to immediately pull up and shoot.  Perhaps that is required in today's hyper fast world .

Robert Scoble pointed out a list of Office 2.0 applications which covers most of the types of applications I use frequently in my work. Office 2.0 Database - My Office 2.0 Setup provides a list, compiled by Ishmael Ghalimi, of the Web 2.0 applications he uses and then lists the competing apps.  Our lists overlap a lot.  I have become a big fan of GMail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Notebook, and I am in the process of switching from Outlook.  I use MindMeister with my colleagues when we are brainstorming.  I still however use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio and Project since I know them and it is hard to switch.  I also use the Adobe CS3 Suite since they have the best products in this area.

I do have an unsolved problem with Instant messaging.  I would prefer one app for IMing and now I have three: GMail, Microsoft Live Messenger, and Skype.  I can't seem to combine all the channels.  Meebo is close, but does not provide a connection to Skype since a lot of my collegues use that.  One combined app would be really appreciated.

A critical skill in today's multimedia world is to be able to create .flv files to upload to video sites.  I have had this trouble with seesmic.com which requires flash files of the short videos that people make.  I am not a video professional by any means, so if I make a video, I want to see it before uploading it and if it is stupid, I will edit it or throw it away.  If this is how you work too, then read this page on Wimpy - How to make FLV files

 

I have begun to migrate all my mail usage to Gmail from Microsoft Outlook. Using Gmail as Your Universal Email Account is a post by Peter Jalbert, a prolific writer of articles about Google at Google Tutor.  Once you begin to understand GMail's approach to organizing mail in threads, how to filter emails with meaningful labels, and how to incorporate Chat, you can appreciate the power of this application.  In fact, I am finding GMail faster and more stable then Outlook.

I found this video by mistake on You Tube.  I sometimes feel like this!

One of the most read posts on this blog is a post I did in 2004 on ITunes and Windows registry settings, so I thought I would update it a bit since Apple has come out with instructions on you to fix problems with CD issues caused by device filters.

Device filter entries from third-party optical drive software can conflict with iTunes for Windows. This can cause issues like these:

• iTunes does not detect any supported CD burners.
• iTunes does not recognize audio CDs.
• Windows does not recognize audio CDs after installing iTunes.
• You are presented with this message even after reinstalling iTunes:

  "Warning! The registry settings used by the iTunes drivers for importing and burning CDs & DVDs are missing. This can happen as a result of installing other CD burning software. Please reinstall iTunes."

For ITunes for Windows XP look here: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302976

For Windows Vista: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305422

Let me know if these solutions work for you!