Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

Knowledge Management of the Personal-Flavored Variety, Part 1

[photo credit:  "Knowledge Management," originally uploaded by F. Montino]

Today's Boston KM Forum Meeting at Bentley University focused on "Personal Knowledge Management," and I was fortunate to attend three interesting and divergent sessions.

The first was a panel discussion focused on personal information management.  The speaker from I took away the most actionable content was Stever Robbins, aka "The Get-it-Done Guy."  Although the panel mostly focused on e-mail management (and I don't subscribe to much of what I heard, being of the "store it in a pile and use search and metadata to find everything" school), the following ideas were of note:

• Reduce any KM tool to Return on Investment (ROI).  What is the cost of getting the information in & out of the system?
• Test ANY tool you want to use to see if it makes you more productive.  Just because you use something a lot DOES NOT mean you like it, or that it makes you more productive (e.g., iPhone, heroin, etc.).
• Take a "deathbed" perspective once in a while.  How important is this e-mail, or document, or presentation, REALLY, in the big picture?
• Use the same structure to manage your data on every platform (consistent folder taxonomy, tags, etc.), and keep it simple:  no more than 4 or 5 top-level folders.
• For all you "Inbox Zero" devotees, try this:  move EVERYTHING to your deleted items folder, then "rescue" the really important ones.
• The degree to which noise or echoes are being made about a topic is more related to the topic's velocity than its value.  Weigh content from trusted, primary sources high and tune out the rest (e.g., US Geological Survey usually  > a blog about geology).

(to be continued in part 2)

[photo credit:  "Knowledge Management," originally uploaded by F. Montino]

Today's Boston KM Forum Meeting at Bentley University focused on "Personal Knowledge Management," and I was fortunate to attend three interesting and divergent sessions.

The first was a panel discussion focused on personal information management.  The speaker from I took away the most actionable content was Stever Robbins, aka "The Get-it-Done Guy."  Although the panel mostly focused on e-mail management (and I don't subscribe to much of what I heard, being of the "store it in a pile and use search and metadata to find everything" school), the following ideas were of note:

• Reduce any KM tool to Return on Investment (ROI).  What is the cost of getting the information in & out of the system?
• Test ANY tool you want to use to see if it makes you more productive.  Just because you use something a lot DOES NOT mean you like it, or that it makes you more productive (e.g., iPhone, heroin, etc.).
• Take a "deathbed" perspective once in a while.  How important is this e-mail, or document, or presentation, REALLY, in the big picture?
• Use the same structure to manage your data on every platform (consistent folder taxonomy, tags, etc.), and keep it simple:  no more than 4 or 5 top-level folders.
• For all you "Inbox Zero" devotees, try this:  move EVERYTHING to your deleted items folder, then "rescue" the really important ones.
• The degree to which noise or echoes are being made about a topic is more related to the topic's velocity than its value.  Weigh content from trusted, primary sources high and tune out the rest (e.g., US Geological Survey usually  > a blog about geology).

(to be continued in part 2)

Office 2010 Web Applications Preview

In this window between Microsoft's July Worldwide Partner Conference (with many Office 2010 previews) and Microsoft's October SharePoint Conference, I'm working to learn about Microsoft's Office 2010 applications.

A recently posted video shows an interesting aspect of Office 2010:  Office Web Applications that are positioned as an on-line companion to the richer Office client experience, for users with only a browser and needs for high-fidelity collaboration around Office documents.

Office Web Apps Video

Office 2010 Preview Site

Late addition:  ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley wrote a great article recently summarizing Ten Things To Know as Microsoft Office Web Apps go to testers. 

Geek Reads 2009.2: Free

My reading this summer included Chris Anderson's book, "Free" (I got the Kindle edition, available for a limited time as a free download, of course).

Anderson's seminal work, "The Long Tail" helped explain to a generation how the distribution model of the Internet has fundamentally changed economics of many businesses by spreading fixed costs over previously unimaginably huge audiences/markets.  He continues in this vein in "Free" by tackling the "free economy" and what makes it tick.

In "Free," I learned about Anderson's six models of free:

• Freemium
• Ad-supported
• Cross-subsidized
• Zero marginal cost
• Labor exchange
• Gift Economy

and the important but often-overlooked distinction between "gratis" ("free as in beer") and "libre" ("free as in speech").

The lessons I took away from "Free" are twofold:

1. Buy side: When I am offered something for free, I am more guarded, inclined to want to understand why I'm getting the offer (what is the premium item they will have earned the right to sell me? do they want my contact information? am I expected to contribute content back to a community in return? can I "free ride" on this offering?)
2. Sell side:I am more cognizant that the best way to sell consulting services is to give a little bit away. This frequently means providing clients and prospects with something of value at no charge during what consulting guru David Maister calls the "courting" and "super-pleasing" processes.  I've always known intuitively that this was the right thing to do, but this book helped me sharpen my thinking about it, and consider it as part of the professional service firm's economic model.

How Does the Internet See You?

The title of this post is the key question posed by the "Metropath(ologies)" exhibit at the MIT Museum, one of Boston's best-kept secrets.  I had the chance to try out an on-line component of this exhibit called "Personas," an installation that comments beautifully on both the power and fallibility of data-mining.

When you enter your name into Personas, a computational process kicks off that assembles a "seemingly authoritative personal profile," beautifully presented as follows:

It's not meant to be useful or accurate, but to spur thoughts about reliability of algorithms being created inside "black boxes" that can have significant impact on our lives:  showing up on the first page of search engine results, having misinformation about us "out there" for credit reviewers or hiring managers because of past indiscretions, sharing a name with someone else, or something as simple as a misapplied tag to a photo on a social networking site, etc.

Although it took me a while to discern what is meant by "illegal" in my results (it's not as bad as I had thought, but it did indeed make me think!), I enjoyed not only the visualization of my "on-line identity", but also the thought that the artist  put into the project.

A Refresher on Ritual -- Managing Your Day in 18 Minutes

[Hill & Knowlton Clock, originally uploaded by MarkHillary]

In the "Attention Economy," as it's been called, how we allocate our (scarce) time across many competing (abundant) things calling for our attention may be the single most important skill to have.

I am generally fairly well-organized, but I find that at times like these, as I sprint/limp (choose your metaphor) toward a week's vacation, I occasionally get overwhelmed by all the things that need to be done, and lose focus on my priorities.

An article  I read today by Peter Bregman  in his "How We Work" blog served as a good reminder of the trick to time management and focus:  Ritual. 

Consistently and deliberately work toward specific goals, and use a process to keep focused on them. Here are the three simple steps Bregman prescribes:

1. Plan your day before you turn on your computer (my biggest challenge!).

2. Stop periodically to refocus.

3. Review your day at the end (again, after you've turned off the computer).

Not rocket science, huh?   I don't generally get that excited about books or consultants that try to tell me how to live my life, but as I get older and more self-aware, I find that there are indeed some best practices that I need to be reminded of occasionally. This is clearly one of them.

Being motivated but prone to procrastination, I plan on re-doubling my commitment to these steps, just as soon as I get back from my vacation. :)

Webinar-apalooza: SharePoint Thought Leadership

The dog days of summer are busy days for KMA.  We've got a lot of content queued up for our KMA Insights Webinar Series, as well as other events with our business partners, bunched up over the next few weeks, with these three the next wave of thought leadership:

On August 26, I'll be presenting a lunch-and-learn webinar about "SharePoint and Enterprise Social Computing," with always-insightful industry analyst Gil Yehuda and Laura Farrelly, VP of Marketing for NewsGator. The invitation to this webinar can be found here.

That same afternoon, my colleague Sadie Van Buren will be presenting the results of our firm's annual survey into SharePoint adoption trends in a webinar for the Special Librarians Association (SLA) entitled "Dispatches from the Front Lines of SharePoint-based Collaboration."  I'm told that this session is sold out already, but Sadie will be delivering the KMA Insights Webinar Series September lunch-and-learn webinar about "SharePoint - The Sophomore Year" with similar content. More information about Sadie's SLA presentation is here.

Shortly thereafter, our colleague and resident "compliantist," Sean Megley, will be presenting a webinar along with our business partner Blue Moon Industries about the new MA Privacy statute and KMA's SharePoint-based compliance management solutions.  The slide deck to his recent presentation (KMA Insights July webinar) on this topic can be found here, and I'll post invitation and more details about this Life Sciences-focused event as they become available.

Syndicating Myself (BDC Column Limitation in SharePoint)

My colleague ran into an issue today on our SharePoint intranet, KMANet.  He saved a proposal to our collateral library, but the "Account Name" column, a Business Data column populated via a link to our Microsoft CRM system, showed the wrong account.

My colleague had tried to populate the correct account name, but it did not save properly.  When I tried to replicate the issue and save the proper account name, SharePoint threw an error indicating an invalid character in a text field.  This looked squirrelly and vaguely familiar to me, so I did a little research and, ironically, found my own blog article from February, 2007 that got to the bottom of the issue:  the Account Name business data column is limited to 60 characters, and when we try to populate an account name that is too long, we get the error.  We shortened the account name in MSCRM and re-saved without event.

I've yet to find documentation that reflects this limitation, and I'm not technically experienced enough with the BDC to know a non-programmatic way to overcome this.  The "shorten the account name in CRM" workaround works fine, but I welcome any suggestions for resolving this in SharePoint, and hope this post helps others who encounter this limitation.

Metrics That TRULY Matter: Combat Analytics

The recent passing of the iconic Vietnam-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara brought to mind an article  I read by Tom Davenport in a Harvard Business Publishing blog about analytics in the combat theater in Afghanistan.

Mr. Davenport summarizes an approach called "Combat Analytics" that is being used to assess progress toward the American military's objectives in Afghanistan, and how difficult it is to identify metrics about counterinsurgency activities that are directly reflective of the situation on the ground.  It's a fascinating summary of the issue, and it focused on the frequent disconnect between broad measures (e.g., at a national level) and the very specific things commanders need to measure "how the civilian population is faring at a local level."

I'll leave aside the obvious enterprise vs department vs individual metrics corporate analogy for now, and state for the record my surprise at the degree to which the architect of these combat analytics uses "economic and political/social indicators to see if [the commanders'] strategy is working in their regions."  A fascinating read, and a great reminder of how valuable meaningful metrics, presented well, can be life-changing (or life-saving).

Lagniappe:  An interesting supplemental report on the topic, "The Uncertain Metrics of Afghanistan (and Iraq)" can be found here.

The New MA Privacy Statute -- What You Can Do to Prepare

Yes, after two postponements, it appears that the deadline for complying with the new MA Privacy statute will be January 1, 2010.  If you have employees or customers in Massachusetts, and you store personally identifiable information about them on computers, you will be subject to this statute.  Given that the fine for each INSTANCE of non-compliance is up to $50,000 and that there were several hundred thousand security breaches around this type of data last year alone, it's no surprise that people are taking notice of this statute and preparing in earnest.

As my firm combines its expertise in SharePoint technologies with some specific capabilities around compliance, we're bringing to market a SharePoint-based tool to manage compliance programs, including the new MA Privacy statute.  Accordingly, we're hosting a "lunch and learn" webinar next Wednesday, July 29, featuring:

-- Doug Cornelius, a Chief Compliance officer at a real estate and private equity firm, and noted writer and speaker on compliance issues.  If you care about compliance, you need to be reading his blog, "Compliance Building."  Doug will speak to the genesis of and requirements under, the statute, and how we can expect it to change as the first wave of adoption gets underway.

-- Bob Boonstra, a Chief Information Officer at a publicly-held pharmaceutical company who has instituted compliance management programs for SEC and FDA requirements.  Bob will speak to how he has seen firms institute programs to manage compliance requirements such as this one.

-- Sean Megley, a SharePoint architect and resident "compliantist" at KMA with a long history of working in government contracting, life sciences, and banking enterprises with rigorous compliance requirements.  Sean has been building compliance management solutions for years, and will show a solution developed specifically for the new MA privacy statute.

We're looking forward to an enlightening session.  You can find details and register here. 

Office 2010 -- First Impressions

At last week's Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, I learned a bunch of things, to wit:

• Microsoft has a HUGE wave of technologies poised to hit the market over the next 12 months (Windows 7, Office 2010, and many others)

• Microsoft LOVES to compete with the likes of Google, VMWare, Cisco, Apple, etc.

Notwithstanding these big, obvious themes, I was pleased to get my first look at Microsoft Office 2010.  Here are a couple of first impressions, formed via Chris Caposella's value keynote, some executive roundtable meetings, and a hands-on lab session with Office 2010 at WPC:

Outlook:

  The ribbon finally shows up in Outlook 2010, eating up some valuable screen real estate but also providing access to some interesting new features.  One is a "conversation view" that allows the user to group messages by conversation, and expand or compress conversations, very easily. 

My favorite new Outlook feature is a "Clean Up/Ignore" function that allows the user to quickly and systematically re-direct or delete messages in a thread -- it's also known as the message "mute button."  For example, once a thread gets unwieldy (5 reply-all's, 5 "please remove me from this thread" messages, 3 "me too" messages, etc.), a user can systematically trim out the chaff, keeping only the messages where a decision was made or action required. I remain curious, however, how this feature will handle branching of messages outward from a thread, and look forward to testing this feature in more depth.  

Another useful feature is the addition of a small, relevant snippet of a calendar view added to meeting requests so that the user can see his/her calendar from within the meeting request.

Excel: 

I'll likely write more about this in the future, but the addition of sparklines and a feature called "slicers" add more BI and data visualization capability to Excel, and the keynote demonstrations included a user easily working with a data set containing 1.5 million rows of data in a workbook via the SQL Server 2010/Excel 2010 integration previously code-named "Project Gemini."  

Word: 

One exceptional thing I saw demonstrated in Word actually applies to several of the Office products:  the ability for multiple authors to concurrently author the same document.  This is a frequently requested capability, and I look forward to demonstrating this when the SharePoint beta is set up in our lab environment.  For now, you can see this process via the demo in this video (note: fast-forward to the 54-minute mark).

 
[BP0VK] The Business Productivity Opportunity: The Next Wave, Your Customers, and You

PowerPoint:  

Other than the co-editing capabilities which I saw only in the context of Word but which I expect to be most valuable in PowerPoint, the most interesting new features I saw related to new tools for editing of pictures and videos from within PowerPoint.

In all of the Office products, the "Backstage" view replaces the combination of the Office button and the Document Information Panel as the place to see and manage metadata and other document properties.

There were several new features in Office applications like Access, One Note, etc., that I saw in demos but have yet to take for a test-drive.  KMA has the bits installed in our lab, so watch this space for more updates as we continue our testing and learning.  Meanwhile, check out this excellent image gallery that shows off the new user interface and other key features in Office 2010, and this overview [Download OfficeOverviewFS].