The département Ain (01) in France is barely known. Even our friends in Geneva – an one-hour ride away -haven’t explored this region. We came across this beautiful landscape after having seen the movie “Le renard et l’enfant” (“The fox and the child”). Luc Jaquet shot the movie mainly in the surroundings of the Plateau du Retord where we stayed for one week. The landscape is fantastic: panoramic view on the Alps from the Col du Grand Colombier, hidden highlights to be discovered along the rivers, meadows full of various flowers and a incredible diversity of butterflies. Whoever is interested may first have a look at the tourism office of Valromey Retord.
The Lac d’Annecy where we enjoyed again sunny days during the second week is also a lovely place. Annecy has a wonderful old town worth more than a visit. The mountains which surround the lake offer a perfect ground for hikes and are a paradise for paragliders. My children particularly appreciated the four-hour hike on a overhanging path (Grand Balcon Nord) from the Montenvers station to the Plan de l’Aiguille station in Chamonix.
01 A département to discover
Written by Felix on June 8th, 2009Bing Bang Migration
Written by Felix on May 11th, 2009Eventually, I’ve migrated
- from Windows XP to Mac OS X Leopard. I haven’t used a mac since 1992 (the good old days with e.g. Macintosh Classic). I’m really positively surprised by the user experience. It’s often “wow” in comparison to Windows.
- my domains from candan.eu to united-domains.de (a smooth process – thanks to my former and new domain hosting company)
- my webspace from candan.eu to metanet.ch. This Swiss company offers a very attractive packaged price – 9 GB webspace, unlimited traffic and databases for about 5 EUR per month. Not the kind of limitations which I encountered with candan and other German webspace hosting companies. The questions which arised during the migration were answered quickly. So, I don’t mind to recommend their services. Please mention my mediator # 905101 in case you transfer your webspace, too
- the blogging software from MovableType 3.33 to Wordpress 2.7.1
I’m happy to  focus again on content, to discover new people and to say bye-bye to technological & contractual issues. Nevertheless, I’ll publish some lessons learned in one of the upcoming posts.
The Power of Less
Written by Felix on April 7th, 2009Not so sure whether the web 2.0 expo title was so powerful. I’ve barely found interesting presentations on the public website:
Tim O’Reillys keynote “Web 2.0 Five Years On” outlined nothing new. We have all already heard of harnessing collective intelligence, smart grids, gov 2.0, “build a simpler system”, “create more value than you capture” and “something that we create together” pleas.
Aaron Kim from IBM compiles some important enterprise 2.0 anti-patterns in his presentation (the content related to the anti-patterns is presented in the appendix).
Eventually, the presentation from Christina Wodtke seems to be my favourite from this series. She introduces a framework to design social websites (see below):
Britannica, Encarta, and Wikipedia
Written by Felix on April 1st, 2009
Picture by Imissthevelvetunderground (creative commons license)
Microsoft has decided to shut down Encarta. The comments on the NY Times blog post are worth to be read.
Loose sight of management tools
Written by Felix on March 30th, 2009
Image from HVargas (Creative Commons License)
Managers seem to be more reluctant to make of use tools even before the current economic crisis emerged. According to the most recent survey of Bain & Company none out of 25 tools which are relevant to senior management, topical, and measurable showed an increased usage pattern in 2008. The interesting fact, though, is that this obvious result is not even reflected in the survey report.
“Knowledge Management” still belongs to the management tools with a high satisfaction rate. However, the latest reference mentioned dates back to 2006. Five tools have been added in 2008:
Decision Rights Tools
Downsizing
Online Communities
Price Optimization Models
Voice of the Customer Innovation
Collaboration = Speed + Scale
Written by Felix on March 18th, 2009
MITWorld is another good place to explore latest thinking. So, e.g. the excellent presentation of John Chambers (CEO of Cisco) on “Building the Next Generation Company”. Thanks a lot to Jon Husband, whose blog Wirearchy (BTW: good KM blog) has pointed me to the MITWorld videos.
John Chambers is an eloquent presenter and introduces his audience at MIT to the change Cisco has undertaken in the last 2-3 years during the first 30 minutes of the talk. The enterprise-wide collaboration which has been set up at Cisco has enabled the company to now drive 26 strategic priorities in parallel in 2009 (instead of 2 three years ago).
It may not come as a surprise to a knowledge manager that John Chambers outlined the importance of a threefold approach to be successful with the transition to a collaborative company: process (CEO lead, tied to market transition goals, working groups…), technology (enable innovation, collaborative tools, …), and culture (viral, accountability, reward, enforce common processes, adopt or eliminate,…). John also talks about his personal change management experience while implementing collaboration at Cisco: from command + control to listen + trust.
Contextual information is the sixth sense
Written by Felix on March 10th, 2009
Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry from the MIT Media Lab demonstrate a new way to access, manage and create information in daily life with a portable device. The sixth sense project shows how powerful a combination of off-the-shelf devices, smart software, and mobile information will be in the near future. Once again, a wonderful TED presentation.
Collaborative innovation powered by a tool?
Written by Felix on March 2nd, 2009I’ve been invited to take part in the OpenTeams group at LinkedIn. OpenTeams is a SaaS collaborative software that offers a pretty ambitious value proposition. The strange thing is that at first glance OpenTeams offers just a tool (a kind of improved wiki), nothing else. So, how will this value be delivered? I assume that it will not be delivered: there is no indication of success stories on “enabled innovative enterpreneurial organizations” or similar examples on the website.
At second glance (and to be fair) there is not only the tool but a new management model which has been implemented at OpenTeams LLC. Tory Gattis, the founder and president of OpenTeams, calls himself a social system architect, a role which he plays e.g. in his hometown Houston (Texas) and describes in his blog Houston Strategies.
Knowledge Zoo
Written by Felix on February 22nd, 2009Arthur Shelley, the Global Knowledge Director of Cadbury Schweppes, has presented a bunch of slides on using animal metaphor for understanding behavior and building relationships during the most recent SIKM call.
The good thing is that he has clearly stated that each of us is typically a mix of some of the identified characters (see also the following presentation). I’m always averse to pigeonhole somebody based on a few characteristics. Arthur’s point is that it’s in many ways easier to discuss on the impact of the behaviour of a specific “animal” than to discuss about a specific person. The metaphor helps to separate between the person and his behaviour. Thus, avoiding unnecessary confrontation. According to his experience the usage of the organizational zoo method
“creates an environment where trust can develop and stress reduced, leading to improved knowledge sharing and more interactive people.”
Another good point in his presentation (slide 11) has been the multidimensional definition of performance. I’m looking forward to Artur’s next developments; e.g. he will soon start an organizational zoo character profile (beta version).
Visualizing complex information
Written by Felix on February 15th, 2009
One of my favourite magazine, the German c’t, has recently published a story on the visualization of complex information. The article contains a lots of interesting links to information visualization sites that I would like to share with you. Thanks to André Kramer who has written this excellent article. Information design offers a lot of interesting insights for knowledge managers. Please have a look:
- The visualcomplexity.com site offers more than 600 examples of information design. Of them, nearly 100 belong to the “knowledge networks” domain.
- Andrew Wande Moere, a senior lecturer of the University of Sydney, offers information design example on a continuous basis in his blog information aesthetics.
- Chris Harrison has also collected some interesting visualization projects.
- Have you ever wondered how a chess computer thinks? Just try it out with Thinking Machine 4.
- The Cyberspace Atlas offers various views on internet’s visualizations.
- The Twingly Screensaver shows new blog entries just in time on the globe.
- The TouchGraph Navigator visualizes relational information (free software).
- WinDirStat is a treemap file explorer. Each file is represented by a colored rectangle.
- LiquiFile could be the file explorer of the next generation. The good news is that the inventor is based in Germany. The bad news is that’s available for Mac only.
- I’m not sure if somebody will like AnyMails. To treat each mail as a microbe with different shape and size is certainly an interesting methaphor, yet not so viable in daily life. The same applies to the tree icon as a new way to show the age and size of files.
- Who ever wonders what top managers think about in tough times may have a look at the EnronExplorer. The 200′000 e-mail archive offers insight into the lives and preoccupations of Enron’s top executives during the 1999 – 2002 period.
- Last but not least Gapminder shows really astonishing relationships that debunk myths thanks to historic statistical data. The powerful visualization combines three types of data in one chart plus the timeline for each combination of countries in the world. Hans Rosling offers the most useful information design tool (see video).
