Mathemagenic

One more piece about intranets Avoiding the same mistakes (via Jim McGee: k-logs)

Ensure the intranet becomes part of the "daily activities" of all staff. Once there is a strong demand, there will be a strong incentive to support the intranet, and many complaints if it is not kept up to date.

Weblogs and Firm-wide Knowledge Management by Seb's Open Research (bold is mine)

I'd missed this nice piece on law K-logging by Rick Klau the first time around. I believe that Rick's observations easily generalize to pretty much any knowledge-intensive field. Here's a point worth reiterating:

"you just don't know what you'll want to know down the road [...]

This is where I think a number of current KM initiatives at law firms have fallen short: they are too structured and require too much effort on the part of the individual to contribute useful information. Weblogs, at their core, are simple tools for the collection of information. Because the architecture behind the scenes is explicitly built to encourage linking, publication of posts and sharing of relevant information, once that information is collected it is easily distributed throughout the organization."

Analysing where and what knowledge is needed will help to optimise, but will not help to change as we don't know what we'll want to know down the road. We have to connect and empower people for creating and sharing knowledge and then rely on self-organisation. May be steer a bit...

And in a very strange way this connected with something totally else from my RSS subscriptions: We can't predict the future. (context: Tara Sue takes Aim via John Robb's Radio Weblog).

Matt Mower: liveTopics finally released

Today, and with great relief, I formally announce the release of liveTopics (v1.0.3) which is now available for download.

I'm looking forward to try it out. Just one week of waiting - untill I'll be back from my trip back home.

10 Best Intranets of 2002 (Alertbox Sept. 2002) with a couple of things highly relevant to KM:

In the long term, we will need better tools to quickly implement major changes in intranet designs. For now, one helpful approach is to structure the intranet's information architecture based on employees' tasks and job goals instead of on the company's org chart. Even major reorgs are likely to leave large parts of a task-based intranet in place, whereas an organizationally structured intranet will require redesign. Indeed, most of this year's winners chose information architectures and navigation schemes that are primarily task-based.

To ideas come to my mind: (1) this is the way to structure any KM application, and (2) I can see come connections with "social capital as a stable part of a company". I wonder if we have to build intranets around people's networks, or this structure will emerge itself with linking, or something blog-like?

Many intranets suffer from a fragmented design and the resulting loss of usability as users are confronted with different rules at every click. The winning intranets had all made great strides toward consistency and were typically successful at overcoming internal politics by the sheer quality of the central design, as opposed to the dubious designs usually produced by individual departments.

Wal-Mart has a particularly fruitful strategy for managing its intranet for consistency: Users own the content and the central team owns the design.

Do we need something similar for corporate blogging?

Have you seen this BRINT question about k-logs?

Came across the idea of using Weblogs (Blogs) as a conduit for knowledge sharing within organizations. Could also be called K-Logs.

[...] One of the concerns of this could be how do you organize the data to be meaningful to newcommers who view it after a few years?

Christina asks BRINT:

I'm looking for the source of a recond study that stated "a recent study of 6,300 knowledge workers showed that the average worker spent 8 hours per week finding (obtaining, reviewing, and analyzing) information - with 10% of this group spending over 20 hours or more per week." Does any know who did this study?

I became curious as well and found that this study was done by Outsell. I didn't find the price. 

A bit more details from this study could be found in this report about knowledge technologies:

In a 2001 survey of 6300 US knowledge workers, such as IT professionals, technical writers, researchers, academics, lawyers, teachers etc. Outsell Inc Super I-Aim found that the average employee spends eight hours per week processing external information. 68% of the respondents preferred "Do-it-yourself" methods to using content provision services. Ten percent of all knowledge workers spend over twenty hours per week looking for information. Translating this into dollars and cents, this represents about $10.000 per employee per year.

As a side-effect I found this one - how European sales and marketing people use information. May be useful in the future.