May 2008 Archives
It is worth a look at this set of videos on YouTube. Nouriel Roubini has been consistently right on the severity of the banking crisis and its effect on the US and global economies. He is now predicting a 12 to 18 month recession.
RGE - Nouriel Roubini's Global EconoMonitor and the community of economic bloggers that it aggregates provides a rich source of thoughtful debate about the economy. For example, in Noriel Roubini's EconoMonitor there are links to posts about the Brazilian economy, the global credit crisis, whether there is a bubble in oil prices. I like Nouriel Roubini because he is honest and his analysis of the recent turmoil in financial markets has been consistently gloomy, but accurate.
This is a really nice video on how HR Block listens to customers on Twitter. It gives a good example of how to engage customers in a very different way and in a way that might yield far greater value.
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.
