Thanks to Patti Anklam’s blog on “Network, Complexity, and Relatedness” I found a link to the “Communities 2.0″ conference. Shel Israel will present the findings of the SAP Global Survey in a key note.
March, 2008
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Shel Israel on the SAP Global Survey
Sunday, March 30th, 2008What’s more important: age or KM-maturity?
Sunday, March 30th, 2008The AIIM published a survey on Enterprise 2.0 one week ago.
One interesting finding is that age has less an impact on attitudes and approaches to Enterprise 2.0 than the knowledge management orientation of the company.
What could we learn from KM@MindTree?
Tuesday, March 18th, 2008The article “Make KM fun” in the “InsideKnowledge” magazine drew my attention to Raj Datta, the CKO of MindTree Consulting.
As far as I understood, KM is strongly aligned with MindTree’s business strategy. MindTree Consulting developed and lives the concept of the “knowledge eco-system”
The KM approach of MindTree Consulting (BTW: MindTree is partner within the SAP ecosystem and is also a great place to work) – as outlined in the article and a podcast – makes use of some unconventional methods: e.g. “unconferences” (presented in more details on Shahnawaz Khan’s blog), or constantly refreshing KM solutions being offered to the employees. The MindTree KM team has success with its change & innovation initiatives: KM got the highest ever rating received by any function in MindTree in a company-survey, MindTree has won the MAKE Award 2007 and has delivered good figures.
Social Networks – Strong limitations in practice
Sunday, March 16th, 2008Imagine that you would like to plan a two-week travel by car to Corsica with your kids. I tried to “unleash” the power of travel 2.0 communities, but eventually I got the best results via the “old fashioned” way of web 1.0 sites and an excellent travel guide. Why doesn’t the travel 2.0 sites deliver what I would have expected? So, I would have expected more than 10,000 online reviews of touristic sites in Corsica (6.4 millions overnight stays à 14 days and 3 people per trip = 152,000 trips. Of them, 70% of the people with Internet accounts and the usual active contributor ratio of 1% for the web = 1,066 published trips per year. Each trip with about 10 “moments of truth” worth an online publication.).
So, which are the main obstacles?
1. There are “tons” of social networks dedicated to travelling: TripAdvisor.com (5,000,000 members) / VirtualTourist.com (1,000,000) / Qype.com (500,000) / TripsByTips.de (250,000) / Travellerspoint.com (140,000) / Globosapiens.com (20,000) / Globalzoo.de (3,000) and dozens more… So, where is the unified search to look for the specific info you need in order to plan a travel? I am looking forward for the next generation of the web to get other the info silos created by web 1.0 and 2.0 technologies. The question that each person who would like to share her/his travel experience has to answer: where I’m going to publish it?
2. Most of the travel social networks are either large and focus on “standard” features (e.g. hotels & restaurants reviews) or are rather small and limited in the coverage of sites around the globe. Hence, if you travel to sites that are off the beaten track you will get only fractions of the info compared to the “hot spots”.
So, do you think that the “mushrooming” of travel 2.0 sites will soon come to an end and what is your experience with travel 2.0 sites?
Knowledge Management Fun for Cynics
Tuesday, March 11th, 2008Thanks to the frogpond blog entries on the enterprise 2.0 summit @ Cebit I discovered the video serial with Dr David Vaine by Patrick Lambe: well done “how to NOT do it” introductions.
Communities of Practice – Video
Sunday, March 9th, 2008Mark Schenk called my attention to a well-done video by Rio Tinto in a recent Anecdote blog entry. The video shows one lighthouse benefit of communities of practice. Rio Tinto is member of the SAP Industry Value Network for Mining.
I looked for other “communities of practice” videos just by curiosity: Dave Vance, former President of Caterpillar University, presents his view on communities of practice at Caterpillar. “KMInstitute” published “KM and Communities of Practices at IBM (January 2006)” with a lecture-like presentation by Richard Warrick one week ago. Well, no wonder, that I also came across this page with lecture-like videos with Etienne Wenger. Conclusion: Rio Tinto offered a very appealing video on communities of practice. Do you know of even better examples?
TED2008: Food for KM Thought?
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008Thanks to the live bloggers Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani (other bloggers) I got a good overview on the presentations that have been made at the TED2008 Conference last week (BTW: Ethan and Bruno offer also a guide on how to blog at conferences).
So, which were the presentations with “food for KM thought” potential?
- The collaborative 72-hour-product development by Ben Kaufmann (Kluster project)
- The visual recording and synthetizing of ideas by Kevin Richards and David Sibbet
- The Livescribe smartpen demo by Jim Marggraff
- Freeconomics by Chris Anderson
- Walter Isaacson on the future of the art of narration
Wiki matters
Sunday, March 2nd, 2008The debates à la “Wiki vs. KM” or “Taxonomies vs. Folksonomies” are interesting to track for a while. Nevertheless, in an enterprise knowledge management context the question is less “wiki vs. KM” but more “How do we make the best use of the available systems, processes, and approaches to support and drive our business?”. Therefore, wiki as a tool and approach contributes to an even better knowledge management practice in the company. It’s a given.
The Atlassian wiki evangelist Stewart Marder has written wikipatterns, a book that was very well received by the enterprise 2.0 and knowledge management community. Those who don’t want to buy the book (or don’t have an online access to the book e.g. thanks to the SAP SkillSoft partnership) may have a look at the Wikipatterns website or at Stewart’s blog: he is currently publishing a “21 days of wiki adoption” video serial.
