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Learn to Adapt Links for October 27th through October 29th

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Learn to Adapt Links for October 26th through October 27th

  • What Tim O’Reilly gets wrong about the cloud – Nicholas Carr’s wise response to Tim O’Reilly’s post (see link below) about cloud computing and Web 2.0. A great post that quickly summarizes many of the forces (besides Web 2.0) that businesses can harness to be successful on the Web.
  • Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing – O’Reilly Radar – A great post from Tim O’Reilly that considers the future (and future profitability) of cloud computing. The big take away: just as value moved from hardware to software, the value now will move from software to leveraging the social network capabilities of the cloud as platform. This is what we’ve longed recognized as “Web 2.0” – networked products that explicitly leverage network effects.

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From Knowledge Management to Knowledge Ecosystem

This post is based on the keynote I delivered at Knowledge Management Australia this summer (I know – but better late than never).  I entitled the talk “Abandon Your Content Management: KM in the Age of GooTube”. When I developed it I was under the questionable influence of two books: Clay Sirky’s Here Comes Everybody and David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous.  But here I want to share the main premise of the talk: that we should focus less on managing our information and focus more on capturing it and then making it discoverable.
(A note before we begin.  I will be using the terms “information management” and “content management” in place of what many people would refer to as “knowledge management.”  I define knowledge as “information in action” – and that action can only take place in the human mind.  Since I’m not fond of the idea of mind management, I believe “information” is actually what we are managing, not knowledge.)
Most traditional information management or content management systems and programs follow a highly centralized model:

Traditional CMS Model

Think about those three verbs: Gather, Organize, Publish.  Those are the verbs of centralization and governance.  It implies one system (or group) is responsible for information management.  And often the majority of the resources within that system are devoted to “Organize” – organizing (and controlling) the information in the system.  In an age when search makes unorganized information easily discoverable, this is probably a waste of resources.
The focus on organizing grew out of natural human reaction to trying to understand an increasingly complex environment.  There was so much information available that we had to develop ways of organizing it in order to cope.  Over time, this resulted in what David Weinberger refers to as the “three orders of order”:

The three orders of order

  1. Organizing the objects themselves based on shared traits. This does have some basis in logic and is exemplified by placing flora and fauna into related Kingdom, Phylum, Class, etc. or in organizing a department store into clothing items, kitchen items, electronic items, etc.  But even this has its limitations.  Does an under-kitchen-counter TV go in the kitchen department or the electronic department?  This order of order is based on organizing the physical objects themselves.
  2. Organizing “pointers” that represent the actual objects based on some arbitrary system. This order of order evolved to address the sheer volume of objects that needed to be discoverable.  We could create new smaller objects that “point” to the real object and then organize those “meta-objects”.  The arbitrary way these meta-objects were organized (think alphabetization or the Dewey Decimal system) often removed any “natural relations” they might have.  And again, their use and discoverability were limited by the fact that they were still physical objects.
  3. Digitizing the objects (or meta-objects) allows us to return to the “natural state of chaos”. This new order of order reconsiders the reason we organized objects in light of our new digital world. The core driver of our past organization was to make objects easily (and hopefully logically) discoverable.  But in the digitized world, we can discover without the need for organization.  Search is the key that unlocks the chaos of information.  So, Weinberger’s (arguable) proposal is this: In a digital world power by full search, we no longer need to order (organize) our information to be able to find and use it.

If Weinberger is correct and we can return to chaos comfortably, it brings us to a more natural state of knowledge capture and discovery.  To illustrate this, let’s first consider a (grossly simplified) picture of an ecosystem:

Ecosystem cycle graphic

Within ecosystems, resources (food, energy) are circulated within the environment from producers to consumers and then (again, grossly simplified) back around to producers again.  If we apply this ecosystems model to our old information management model, we will see “Organize” drop out entirely, “Gather” become “Capture” and “Publish” become “Discover.”

Think about these new verbs, Capture and Discover.  These are not centrally controlled and they abhor governance.  Given an open system, anyone can capture information as they create it (or discover it) and then everyone can discover all that has been captured (via search – as well as links, recommendations, etc.).  And if the ecosystem (i.e., information management system) is designed properly, every act of discovery is automatically an act of capture that returns value to the ecosystem.  Let’s consider the ideal application of the two verbs in more detail:
Capture. All the content (information) in our knowledge ecosystem is generated by people (people who need people – sorry…).  We should design our work applications and procedures to capture everything that people produce as they work.  There should be no separation between the tools of production and the tools of information capture.  And, of course, those tools should have discovery built into them.  Imagine if every time information of value to the ecosystem was generated – whether in a spreadsheet, database, e-mail, conference call, IM or Tweet – it was immediately captured, indexed and discoverable through search, cross-linking, and extensions.  People working in that that ecosystem would thrive.
Discover. First and foremost, our information ecosystem must have comprehensive search.  In addition, it should incorporate every tool or process for improving discoverability such as tagging, syndication, linking, the “database of intentions“, and recommendations.  Moreover the system must recognize that the information is being captured and discovered by people (people who need people – damn! sorry…).  As we move from the information age into the connected age and the importance of social networks increases, the system must support the socialization of information.  Our ideas and information are satellites orbiting us just as the people in our social graph do.  The ecosystem must recognize that information and the people who created or discovered it should be inseparable.  We gain far greater value from social information than orphan information.
So how does one go about building a knowledge ecosystem? What are the basic requirements of a system to support the continuous cycle of capture and discover? That’s what the buzzword d’jour, “Enterprise 2.0” (aka “Knowledge Management 1.53”) is all about.  By applying the social ideals and platforms sweeping the Web to the enterprise, we can approach (carefully) a knowledge ecosystem.  One of the best (though techno-centric) models to capture the elements needed within a knowledge ecosystem is the FLATNESSES checklist created by Dion Hinchcliffe (based on the original SLATES checklist created by Andrew McAfee):

Hinchcliffe's FLATNESSES checklist

I encourage you to review it and the other “Enterprise 2.0” information out there.  Applying those ideas can help you begin to shift from knowledge management to knowledge ecosystem.

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Learn to Adapt Links for October 15th through October 23rd

  • Social Media Classroom – The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes—integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets , and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos.
  • Productivity 2.0: How the New Rules of Work Are Changing the Game | Zen Habits – Interesting post from Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. Despite the grating "Productivity 2.0" moniker, he raises some very good points about how technology empowers individual performance. Some of the ideas will be difficult inside incumbent organizations, but they do approach ideal performance. His "Just Start" echoes my long standing mantra of "Just Do It" (props to Nike) and I echo his "Don't multi-task" in my other mantra "Muli-tasking Kills". He also touches on the well established them of moving from hierarchy to wirearchy.

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Learn to Adapt Links for October 6th through October 8th

  • 750,000 lost jobs? The dodgy digits behind the war on piracy – A very thoughtful and informative piece from Julian Sanchez that tries to get to the real cost of IP piracy. The cost to "the U.S. economy" seems to be considerably overstated. He also discusses the potential boon that piracy plays in the economy through its role in innovation.
  • Analyst: Half of ‘social media campaigns’ will flop | The Social – CNET News – Adam Sarner, an analyst with market research firm Gartner, has projected that over 75 percent of Fortune 1000 companies with Web sites will have undertaken some kind of online social-networking initiative for marketing or customer relations purposes. But, he added in an interview with CNET News, 50 percent of those campaigns will be classified as failures.

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Learn to Adapt Links for October 1st

  • Getting Web 2.0 right: The hard stuff vs. the harder stuff – Josh Ross shares yet another example of how technology is often the easiest part of the the Enterprise 2.0 Three Legged Stool. It is the other two legs (processes and culture) that require additional attention in order for the implementation to succeed.
  • GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps – GigaOM – Om Malik rails against bandwidth caps from Internet providers. This trend is the beginning to the shift of bandwidth as commodity. Soon this will be like all utilities and we will pay per use (just like kilowatt hours or gallons of water). The difference should be choice. I can’t choose my water or electricity provider, but I do have choice for my Internet provider. And the competition should help keep per MB pricing low.

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Learn to Adapt Links for September 29th through September 30th

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Learn to Adapt Links for September 22nd through September 23rd

  • Should Knowledge Workers Have Enterprise 2.0 Ratings? – Andrew McAfee's latest post posits the performance management standards that an organization might employ to measure/motivate employee use of Enterprise 2.0 (aka Knowledge Management 1.53) tools for collaboration. This is incredibly important as the greatest challenge to the success of E2.0 deployments is fostering the cultural change. By measuring/rewarding participation the organization demonstrates the importance of E2.0 collaboration.
  • Examples of eLearning 2.0 : eLearning Technology – Tony Karrer pull together a nice list of tactical examples of how different organizations are using Web 2.0 social technologies in their learning and business practices.

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Learn to Adapt Links for September 18th through September 21st

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Learn to Adapt Links for September 17th

  • The Social Enterprise – Steve Gillmor at TechCrunchIT posts thoughtful reflection on (some) IT leaders resistance to social applications in the enterprise. From the article: "No wonder the reaction is fear and denial; the saving grace is that a new wave of middle management will not tolerate the arrogance of earlier times, when IT was the implementor of corporate policies designed to prevent employees from wasting time on the job."
  • Social Learning : eLearning Technology – Tony Karrer's blog's his thoughts on Grockit and a few other social learning communities/platforms…

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