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)

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.

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. 

Serendipity and Weak Search -- For When The Stakes Are Low

I've been playing a lot lately with a music service called blip.fm (@mikegil), where one can "virtually DJ" songs stored by others to create a playlist.  When trying to find songs based on a keyword or theme, I'll often search based on that word (for example, "Saturday").

Blip.fm doesn't have anything like faceted search, and very little metadata associated with the songs, so the search results may return anything from songs with "Saturday" in the title to bands with the word "Saturday" in their name.  Pretty sloppy, right?  Lousy user experience, right?

As it turns out, no.

Perhaps it's the unique nature of music, but the imprecision of blip.fm's search actually makes my searches fun -- I often find some little pearls that I didn't expect and frankly wasn't looking for, but am happy to encounter.  I've discovered songs and artists I never would have found otherwise.

Commentators often lament the "niche culture" and "death of serendipity," those precious moments where you find the unexpectedly fascinating article on page 2 of the Metro section instead of the one article you googled and found on Boston.com, so this imprecise search has been a breath of fresh air.

However (and this underscores points we make all the time about the difference between enterprise data and consumer data), I'm not seeking serendipity when I'm searching for my firm's institutional knowledge.  I need one authoritative data point, not ten decent ones.  This requirement frequently means insertion of a human into the process to broker the flow of knowledge. 

Am I going about it wrong?  Is there a place for serendipity, for Amazon-esque "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought..." suggestion, or is precision the most important?  Is the distinction a work/fun one?  An enterprise/consumer one? 

There's some great reading on this point -- I especially recommend the work that Dan Keldsen and Carl Frappaolo have done on behalf of AIIM in the area of findability.

Boston KM Forum Event: Virtual Teams and Social Media Tools, Part 1

At this week's KM Forum eventat Bentley College in Waltham, the theme of the discussion was "Leveraging Virtual Teams and Social Tools for Business Advantage."

A variety of presenters shared valuable (and frequently entertaining) insights, but in this post I'll focus on the first presentation, by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps of NetAge, who shared with us some best practices around optimizing the performance of virtual teams.

Their key themes included:

• the definition of a virtual team

• studies performed/published on virtual team effectiveness (including a great article from the May, 2004 Harvard Business Review -- subscription required for full article)
• the building blocks of virtual team effectiveness:  people, purpose, links, and time.

Some of the noteworthy best practices for working with virtual teams that Lipnack and Stamps have seen and prescribed include:

1. Give your teams rich teleconference AND shared workspace capabilities. You MUST give them both, as they serve very different purposes.
2. BAN e-mail as a tool for teamwide communications. It's for old people.  :-)
3. Create and enforce ground rules for conference calls.  Some really useful ones are included in more detail in their presentation, but the caveat remains:  Many people know these already, but relatively few have the will and discipline to live by them.
4. Standardize the structure of your team workspaces. For team members to find the information they need shouldn't require treasure hunts. (I loved Lipnack's "lightswitch" metaphor here:  if you walk into a dark room, of all the hundreds of square feet of wall space available, you still grope around very specific places for the switch.)
5. Ifyour collaboration strategy doesn't include people outside your entity/firewall/premises, you're missing the point.

Lipnack and Stamps also provided many tidbits and resources (little mental bookmarks for me) that merit further investigation and reading.  I want to think and write about these in more depth, but here's a quick list, as much a placeholder for me as a reference for you:

• Tim Berners-Lee's quote from April 2008: "The Web is still in its infancy."
• The "50-foot rule" about physical proximity needed for effective collaboration, based in part on research by MIT's Tom Allen.
• Michael Sampson's "When to Travel" flowchart.
• Albert-László Barabási's book "Linked." (just went on the Kindle wish list)
• NetAge's "OrgScope" software application for mapping organizations and networks.

It was fascinating to hear from consultants who have studied and coached high-performing teams over many years.  Among their many pearls of wisdom was one I'll leave you with, a quote from technology luminary Paul Trevithick about something we as practitioners often see in the field:

"We always get the technology right and the sociology wrong."

SharePoint Real-World Lessons (in-person event)

One of the local organizations that KMA enthusiastically supports is the Boston KM Forum.  At next Thursday's (7/17, from 4-6 pm EST) meeting, my colleague Sadie Van Buren will be the featured speaker.  Her subject will be "Dispatches from the Front Lines of SharePoint-based Collaboration," and her presentation will feature lessons learned on the part of our firm and our customers based on many SharePoint projects.

The KM Forum has consistently strong events and presenters, and this should be no exception!

New Skills Needed for "Work 2.0"

There's an old saying about the weather:  "Everyone talks about it , but no one is doing anything about it."  The same thing seems to be happening with Web 2.0 (63,100,000 results for this term on Google, a very small percentage of which actually prescribe skills you'll need to thrive in it).  At a recent KM Forum meeting with this theme, however, I got some very specific prescriptive guidance for survival in the Web 2.0 world in a presentation from Ray Sims.

One slide in particular from Ray's presentation really stuck with me.  The slide (slide 34 of 51) enumerates some skills we're going to need in this new world, such as:

• efficient network creation and vetting (knowing who is worthy of your time and your trust),
• being OK with sharing ideas before they are fully thought out, and
• attention discipline (rather than scatter-brained multi-tasking).

There is plenty of worthwhile content all throughout this presentation, but I found this slide, in particular, to be worthy of immediate action and long-term resolve.  Ray's blog post on the definition of knowledge management is worthy of a separate post (or series of posts).

One last thing about the KM Forum. It illustrated something I've felt for nine years via opportunities like the KM Forum or last week's Sloan Sales Conference, or even the random guy sitting next to me at last week's Sox game quoting Hamlet's soliloquy to me as we chatted about David Ortiz's slump:  I'm blessed to live in an area where there is just an insane concentration of brainpower.

Geek Reads 2008.2: Everything is Miscellaneous

If you manage, store, or search for data in your job, read this book.  Twice.

In probably my favorite work-related book of the past two years, David Weinberger has written a classic of the Information Age in "Everything is Miscellaneous."  Different from many other books of this type, it feels not at all like a Wired magazine or Harvard Business Review article stretched by another 100 pages to make the author some money -- this book is at once dense and broad, bursting with information and context for information workers.  I feel as if I need to read it again to do it any sort of justice in blogging about it. 

In chronicling how humans have sought to make sense of the physical world, and how this can be translated to the digital world, Weinberger travels far and wide from UPC codes to Wittgenstein to Dewey to Flickr to Aristotle to del.icio.us to Darwin to Wikipedia to Britannica to McCallum's railroad organization chart to Amazon to Linnaeus to the semantic web.

In very general terms, here are some of the themes he explores:

• the death of rigid information taxonomies in the digital world because data can be in more than one place at one time
• the fallacy of a neutral point of view because in practice this merely means the consensus of the community at a particular point in time
• information is evolving away from being represented like atoms in physical space (first "order of order", like a bookstore) or even metadata used for splitting and lumping items into categories (second "order of order," like a card catalog), and into piles, tagged with data by everyone, effortlessly resorted/re-organized to fit the user and the context (third "order of order," like Flickr or Del.icio.us)
• implicit relationships between ideas are far more important and less limited than explicit ones in describing complex, meaningful phenomena.

As search capabilities and collaboration technologies mature, and as "web 2.0" has provided users with a read/write experience on the web, this third order of order has taken root.  The ramifications of this are incredibly broad, from the specifics of users not storing e-mail in folders (store in a pile, sort by author or search to quickly find the relevant messages) to how organizations architect their enterprise collaboration environments (finding the best way to leverage traditional navigation + metadata + rich search to fit user needs).

This has already been a hugely influential book to me, and I expect to continue to explore the themes herein for many years to come.  I encourage you to read it yourself and learn, and think about these themes as you consider your own, or your organization's information architecture.

When to Use a Discussion Board, Blog, or Wiki in SharePoint

My colleagues at KMA just finished a new white paper examining three collaboration features in SharePoint (meaning for purposes of this discussion, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007):  discussion boards, weblogs (or "blogs") and wikis.  They compare and contrast them, discuss use cases for each and suggest ways to most effectively use them in a portal or intranet environment.

Until we revamp our internet site, I don't have a way of publishing it to a structured external-facing repository, but in the interim, I will gladly send you the .pdf if you send me an e-mail request for it.  Simply put "discussion board/blog/wiki" in the subject line, and I'll send it right out to you.