Feb 14
Podcast on KM Implementation in Asia
Naguib Chowdhury over at KM Talk in Malaysia has published a podcast of a conversation we had a couple of weeks ago in Kuala Lumpur about the state of KM adoption and implementation in Asia. The podcast also features colleagues Edgar Tan and Hayati Mansor.
Feb 13
We’re Having a Gathering!
We have a chillout party every year around Chinese New Year to toss Yu Sheng with our clients, friends and partners. This year we have a new office to warm as well (see below the fold for more pictures). So we thought we’d be hospitable and open the invitation to any faithful Green Chameleon blog readers who wanted to drop by and say hello. Drop us a note if you’re coming so we can make sure there’s enough grub to go round {plambe-at-straitsknowledge.com}.
Time: 6.30 pm this Friday 15 February
Place: 19A Keong Saik Road, Singapore (very close to the NE line exit for the Outram Park MRT station).
Feb 13
InteresThink!
For afficionados of the TEDTalks videos, here’s an interesting event organised by a bunch of bright spark Singaporean undergraduates and now in its second year – who says that initiative, drive and creativity are dead here?
Recipe: get a bunch of interesting people who are passionate about what they do to speak for 20 minutes on a topic that will challenge the audience, stir in gently with an audience gathered by word of mouth and informal networks, add food and drink from sponsors, and cook in a couple of world cafe sessions during the day. Result? Knowledge souffle!
Feb 13
Talking My Way Out of an Apocalypse (Perhaps)
The last two weeks I guest-blogged over at Cognitive Edge on how we deal with failure in the work we do. I thought I’d present a contents list here for anyone who missed it (shock horror). Thanks to Matt for my blog post title.
Apocalypse
Pestilence
War
Famine
Death
Authority
Capability
Positive deviance
Struggle
Feb 12
Creating a Scene
Thank you JP! Why do New Yorkers have all the fun? (They make it).
Feb 11
Blogs and Email Again
John Tropea has a really excellent post developing the “blogs can simplify your email problem” theme sparked by Benjamin Greenberg, picked up by Beth Kanter and then me.
I especially like the nitty gritty ground view practicality of his suggestions, including:
- posting to the blog by email
- seeing who’s subscribed to your blog” so you can email those who aren’t
- bundling RSS feeds that go with a particular job role into an OPML file and giving it to employees when they start in that role
- seven different productive uses for blogs inside the enterprise
- some great follow up links for good measure
There’s a lot more than that in his post. Wonderful stuff.
Feb 09
Gumption
Two different takes on gumption from Graham Durant-Law and Cairo Walker, from different contexts but heading in similar directions: stop complaining about other people and take some responsibility.
Cairo on leading intranet projects: “When I was much younger, a particularly well-weathered project management veteran, to whom I was grumbling, told me to get over myself and said “power’s not given, it’s taken”. He was right, it was up to me to take the initiative. Often we expect others to take the initiative in and to know how to go about doing things, yet we are the experts. The organisation looks to its intranet staff to provide that expertise and leadership.”
Graham on knowledge management (and management) journeys: “All knowledge management journeys require people to exercise individual discipline to constantly look to the collective good. All journeys require group and cultural discipline to work to a common cause. All initiatives require process discipline to follow corporate requirements, and all initiatives require technology discipline to work with what you have and not constantly seek the technological silver bullet. All initiatives are plagued by learned helplessness and selective non-compliance, and it takes discipline to overcome the plague. People matter, but if they won’t help themselves or are selectively non-compliant then management should not be afraid of “helping them out” – in every sense of the phrase.”
Feb 06
I’ve Decided: No More Information Please!
Researchers at the University of Iowa have found that once people have made a decision about a product, their satisfaction rates get higher the less information they have about the product.
——The team’s paper, “The Blissful Ignorance Effect,” shows that people who have only a little information about a product are happier with their purchases than people who have more information, the U of I reported. The paper will be published in an issue of the Journal of Consumer Research.“We found that once people commit to buying or consuming something, there’s a kind of wishful thinking that happens and they want to like what they’ve bought,” Nayakankuppam said in a prepared statement. “The less you know about a product, the easier it is to engage in wishful thinking. The more information you have, the harder it is to kid yourself.”—-
To be honest, I sometimes feel this way before decisions too!
From the Des Moines Register.
Feb 05
The Power of Social Media: An example
There is a protest in Bogota at the moment by ordinary Colombians against the Marxist rebel group FARC. This group has been fighting the Colombian government for 44 years, and is responsible for hundreds of kidnapping. Ordinary Colombians are now saying that it’s enough. See BBC’s coverage here.
What’s remarkable to me is that the protest first started with a call in the social networking site Facebook, before it cascaded to traditional media like radio and TV. I remember asking Ross Dawson when he presented at an iKMS evening talk whether governments are ready to deal with the power of social media. I guess I can now also ask if rebel or terrorist groups are ready for it.
Feb 05
Wiki Tricks
There have been some nice practical suggestions lately about how to roll out wikis in a way that supports their usefulness and adoption (and eminently transferable to other enterprise 2.0 tools). From Industry Week (via Maish) there’s some sensible advice about integrating wikis into the business activity and essentially creating macros or templates for commonly anticipated tasks (eg minutes of meetings).
This advice chimes perfectly with a felicitous distinction made recently by Michael Idinopulos and amplified by Andrew McAfee: Idinopulos said that the reason why many enterprise 2.0 initiatives fail (and actually also why most KM initiatives fail) - is because they are pitched “above the flow” of normal work. Ie they are construed as extra activities “giving back” to the organisation like a kind of tax on work. Where they offer most promise is where they are integrated “into the flow” of normal work. This is a really nice way of putting it, and it complements by adding a process perspective to our idea of information neighbourhoods that are contoured to the shape of localised work practice.
