Recently in Knowledge Category
Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki is an excellent source of good ideas for those of us who work with information. I am finding more and more creative content being published in a wiki format and this is a good example of a community of people getting together to help each other deliver service to people in thier communities.
My colleague, Youngjin Yoo, has created a site with a number of videos clips that demonstrate design and rapid prototyping of organizations. This way of designing is very useful as you think about changing organizations, especially when introducting new technologies.
Five Best Online KM Discussion...be sure to visit the list of KM bloggers.
[elearnspace]
Solid advice from Brendon on how to get the most out of any non-fiction book. Some tips and tricks I will want to incorporate into my habits.
How to read a business book. I'll be honest here, this isn't just for reading business books. What I'm going to cover ought to suffice for pretty much any physical text from which you wish to squeeze maximum value. This isn't a how-to on studying though...there... [Slacker Manager]UPDATE: Through a cut and paste error (mine) the original title on this made no sense - so I fixed it
[McGee's Musings]
Knowledgeboard has pulled together a list of recommended KM journals. To quote:
Welcome to our featured recommended journals section. This provides links to some journals that we would like to recommend to our community. All recommended journals have been kind enough to allow us to host a number of their papers in our library.
[Column Two]
Marcus P.Zillman has released a new interesting annotated mini-guide focusing on "Academic and Scholar Search Engines and Sources". This 32-page PDF brings together over 150 of the most interesting resources dedicated to academic research and online bibliographic information. For each......
[Robin Good's Latest News]
I visited Singapore 5 years ago and was impressed by the sophistication of the knowledge management efforts in industry and in the private sector. The government had a plan for implementing knoweldge management throughout the country and expecially in the libraries in the urban community. The public libraries were very sophisticated, with all the most current equipment, knowledgable staff, lots of books, and well supported by the government. So it is no surprise to run across a very good blog by the international Knowledge Management Society (iKMS) located in Singapore. This is an excellent source of information on new learning in the field, with thoughtful book reviews and examination of current KM issues.
My colleague Eric Mankin has published an article in the Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge. Eric is a strategy consultant who specializes in product and business creation. In this article Eric asserts that there "...are four benchmarks for predicting the success of your product or service, according to this view from Strategy and Innovation. Here’s how a few well-known products tested out."
My UK KM colleague David Gurteen has recently launched a new journal entitled Global Knowledge Review. I am delighted to have been asked to be a regular contributor to the journal. You can download the inaugural edition free here.
[How to Save the World]
Both Column Two and elearingspace have pointed out this set of documents and I have written about the culture document. The European Commision for Standardization has put out an excellent set of frameworks, implementation guides and measures.
Well, there is no such thing as perfect of course. But from the seventeen entries in the Perfect Elevator Pitch for Weblogs Contest the winner has now been selected and it's...............Lee Lefever (why don't you stick up a hand so...
[Ton's Interdependent Thoughts]
The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) have just published their Good Practice in Knowledge Management guides. To quote:
This guide aims to:(a) Provide European readers with a practical introduction to mainstream thinking in KM;
(b) Give an indication of some of the emerging new thinking in KM;
(c) Stimulate interested readers to join an ongoing public discussion about KM, which will be facilitated through the European Commission’s KM portal at http://www.knowledgeboard.com/
[Thanks to KnowledgeBoard.]
[Column Two]
Maxine Armitage has published a case study on the use of metadata to improve searching. To quote:
The NSW Office of Fair Trading launched its first intranet in June 2003. At the very beginning of the intranet project we recognised that unless users could find information easily the intranet would not succeed. We also understood that different people prefer to find information in different ways. To maximise the chances of searchers finding relevant information, and to provide flexibility in search options, we developed and implemented metadata driven search and browse functions. This case study describes the standards, tools and technology we used and how metadata was manipulated to retrieve information in a number of different ways.This is a really excellent case study, and I recommend anyone looking to implement a powerful (and usable) search solution to read through it.
[Column Two]
While I have not tried it yet, Robin Good pointed out a compelling new tool for project management and collaboration that combines webloging with a dashboard to keep track of project progress and milestones. I will look for an opportunity to use it.
Basecamp Makes Distributed Project Work An Online Pleasure To ManageThis is an ideal asynchronous collaboration tool for distributed project teams working on keeping their tasks, files, calendar and notes in great synch. The classical idea of a "project site" originally brought about by David Siegel has greatly evolved over time adjusting and flexing to accomodate the different needs of various professions and working groups. YahooGroups have been a great free resource for many needing to have a reference site in which to centralize messages, files, calendars and other information connected to a group or project. Basecamp leaps a few orders of magnitude ahead while offering a truly well designed interface, an extremely well designed organization of the different functions and all of the quite enjoyment of being a truly private, ad-free, secure working space. Basecamp is a hosted service so there's no hardware or software installation required. Basecamp is RSS-enabled out of the box. For $ 19/month, this is definitely a service to look at.
Robin Good -- February 28
Lou Rosenfeld comments on Information Architecture in his weblog. It provides a good source of information and commentary on the field and I found that his presentations on taxonomy and metadata particularly useful.
I copied this post from Knowledge Jolt with Jack because I thought it was important.
"There is too much information to pile it on the floor."
Marjorie Hlava of Access Innovations an excellent overview of the state-of-the-art with taxonomies, including both basic background and discussion of where and how taxonomies are used in the business world.
For those that don't know, taxonomy is generally a hierarchical means of categorizing a subject matter. Hlava includes in her definition all the data associated with each entry in the taxonomy - the term records that give each term its context, history, status, cross-references, etc. Others prefer to use "taxonomy" to strictly refer to the hierarchy and "ontology" to include the additional information about the terms. In either case, to be useful, you need this additional information, as the taxonomy continues to change as ideas emerge in the subject area.
Taxonomies fit in a number of places in the organization. Libraries use them, as you might expect. Websites tied to content management use them to help users navigate and provide consistent information displays. They are used to help stay abreast of the industry and keep up to date with terminology. They are used to filter newsfeeds and other data sources (for syndication to various clients). They are used in filing and cataloging. They can even be used in translation, either across different subject areas or even languages, given enough capability to create synonyms.
Hlava indicated that taxonomies themselves are a knowledge repository. If one were to "read" a taxonomy from a given discipline, one should be able to get a good overview of the important areas of focus within that discipline. Or within an organization, the taxonomy tells a lot about the organization itself. Hlava even reads taxonomies for fun.
In this vein, Hlava gave an example of taxonomies being used in support of communities of practice, particularly those that form around critical issues and need to be up-and-running as quickly as possible. The taxonomy can help with correlation across functional, regional and national languages; support navigation of information; help layout knowledge maps; improve search queries and results; and judge authority.
Hlava discussed how organizations go about building taxonomies, which sounds a lot like standard life cycle projects anywhere else: scope, requirements, collect, build, apply, continuous improvement. The critical aspect for me is the last piece of continual renewal of the taxonomy terms. Language changes, preferred usage changes and new terms come into favor.
Throughout the talk, Hlava provided some interesting visualizations of taxonomies that go beyond the traditional indented list, particularly since these make it difficult to see the cross-references and interrelations across branches of a large hierarchy. There are some graph techniques that show the density and connectedness of a given taxonomy. And these visualizations help see things within hierarchies that may not have been obvious.
Summary: Taxonomies create opportunities for knowledge sharing. They add value to any discussion, creating a common context around which people can speak.
In each of the knowledge management implementations that I have participated in, communities of practice were integral to the success of the program. These communities owned the content and self managed sharing their understanding of a domain. So, this reference to a site that lists good documentation on the subject is welcome. .
Communities of Practice Documents: "The Community of Practice resources identified below represent some of the finest work available on communities of practice research and development."
