b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
Most Popular
- Historical Yearly Average Gasoline Prices
- Outlook 2003 Message-ID Insanity
- Real-time Sand Animations
- Adobe Acrobat 7
- Adobe Announces Name Change and New Product
- Largest Technology Boondoggle in Public Education History
- Yahoo! Buys del.icio.us
- Skype - Disruptive, Not Compelling
- Aluminum Christmas Tree Museum
- Network Printing Hell and windoze XP
Book Reviews
Recently
NFL: Atlanta Over Vikings in OT
Business Implications for Changing CMS Landscape
Karl Sveiby at KM Europe 2002
Blocking Referer Spam
instantOutliner Test File
Freight Management for Demand-driven Print
Sunday, December 1, 2002
A Little Patent History
A short, fairly basic, but useful article on patent history for those studying the topic.
Innovation and patents. Bangkok Post Dec 1 2002 5:30PM ET[...] Any particular society's prevailing attitudes toward patents and other intellectual property rights can say as much about that society as they do about patents in any objective sense. These attitudes can be an unconscious reflex of what a particular society values and what it considers important. If it values innovation and creativity, that society will have a positive attitude. If it does not value these things, it will have a negative attitude.
Venice in the 1200s and England during the Industrial Revolution were self- confident societies. They valued innovation and had favourable attitudes. Interestingly, the same society can have different attitudes at different stages in its development. In the United States in the 1930s after the Depression, the government and courts were less favourably inclined toward patents than after World War II with the rise of the pharmaceutical industry and the development of new medicines to treat diseases that had previously been untreatable. [Moreover - IP and patents news]
NFL: Atlanta Over Vikings in OT
The Falcons beat the Vikings in OT, based on nothing more than the incredible talent of Michael Vick. Vick made a spectacular 46-yard run in OT, jamming Walter Payton-like moves to elude defensive players and score the winning TD. The guy is incredible.Unfortunately, the best that can be said about the rest of the team is they didn't screw up enough to cost Vick the game, although they got close. Vick accounted for 346 of Atlanta's 379 yards. That's no way to play football in the NFL.
I hate to say it, but Vick is the team. And the sad fact is he won't last more than a season or two playing the way he does. It just doesn't work that way. I dread the day some defensive back ties Vick in a knot and they cart him off the field. But until that happens, he makes for one hell of a ball game.
Vick's walk-off home run gives Falcons OT victory. FOXSports.com Dec 1 2002 7:26PM ET [Moreover - NFL: Atlanta Falcons news]
Business Implications for Changing CMS Landscape
Martin White expands on the business implications inherent in James Robertson's predictions about the future of CMS.
The future for CMS applications. There are a small number of blogs I look at on a regular basis, amongst them Column Two from James Robertston, based in Sydney, Australia. How James manages to maintain his blog at such a consistently high level of quality constantly amazes me. I expect that many readers of his...[...] To me the interesting area is the current gap between the low cost systems, such as Ektron ($3k), and the next level of CMS solutions represented by companies such as Merant and Reddot. These are of course departmental/small enterprise solutions with initial price tags in the $50k area. I am certain that we will see new entrants, or 'light' versions of established products, come in at the $15k - $25k base price. [Intranet Focus Blog]
Karl Sveiby at KM Europe 2002
Ton Zijlstra has posted his notes from the keynote speech at KM Europe 2002. Speaker Karl Sveiby presents yet another model for studying KM -- this one focused on the individual.I discovered Ton via the Blogs & Bloggers Tribe on Ryze.
Karl Sveiby's key note speech at KM in Europe 2002 .... Karl Sveiby's key note speech at KM in Europe 2002
As I wrote before, I visited the KM in Europe 2002 convention in London November 13-15th. On the last day Karl Erik Sveiby held his key note speech. I did not find time before to make a report from my hand written notes, so I'm doing it now.The powerpoint presentation (even though he thinks powerpoint is a very bad way of 'pushing' information at people) of Sveiby's talk can be found at the KM Europe download page. You will also find all the other key note presentations there.
Sveiby started his talk with an exercise: close your eyes and touch your nose with your right index finger. About 3 people couldn't. Now talk your neighbour trough the same exercise by giving him precise instructions on what to do. About 3 people could.
That, says Sveiby, is the difference between knowledge and information. So to him all knowledge is implicit. "Knowledge is the capacity to act within context." Both the emphasis on action and context are important I think.
He then continued to define KM, a term coined by Karl Wiig in 1986, something Wiig "now bitterly regrets". Sveiby defines KM as the management of a company/organisation that consists only/mostly of "knowledge workers". Knowledge workers here are highly educated, highly skilled and experienced. So to Sveiby not everybody is a knowledge worker, as can be heard quite often lately. The latter would also render the term useless by the way, as it does away with all the distinctive qualities of the phrase.
The next step was connecting the definition of knowledge to the definition of KM. In essence he closely follows his own 1997 book The New Organizational Wealth. He talked of internal structures, external structures and competences in both the book and his speech. However, where in the book all three are presented more or less at once, in his speech he explained more clearly the way internal and external structures come forth from individual competences. And this deepened my own insight.
As an individual uses his knowledge, his capacity to act within context, to do just that, act, he "stretches" himself into the outside world, he is reaching out. The result of this, relations, transactions, etc, are the external structures. It is by putting individual competences to use that external structures are built. So now you have two circles, competences and external structures, with a two-way link between them. The third circle, internal structures is added as you become succesful in the outside world. You start to need other people to help you, you start building an organisation. The internal structures are the translation of your own individual competences into a larger scale. This cluster therefore has a two way link to your own competences, but also starts to interact with the already existing external structures in its own right. You end up with three circles, each dually linked. Value is created in the overlap of all three circles, and is the product of all interaction taking place. The one thing I value the most in this description is that it takes the individual as a starting point. This also emphasizes to me that humans are at the heart of KM, whatever the IT-boys might think. (Sveiby: "Alas, Knowledge management has been hijacked by IT")
The three circle picture identifies 10 strategic issues. One for each circle in itself (3), two for each two way connection between circles (6), and the tenth is the overall question how the value creation capacity of the whole system can be maximised. In the sheets, examples of all ten strategic issues are described. I will give a list of them here:
The three circles:
Individual competences: Improve the transfer of competence between the people in our organisation External structures: Support our customers' conversation with their customers Internal structures: Integrate systems, tools, processes and products The two-way links between each pair of circles:
External to Competence: transfer competences to customers, suppliers and other stakeholders Competence to External: learn from customers, suppliers and other stakeholders Internal to Competence: improve individuals competence by using systems, tools and templates Competence to Internal: convert individually held competence to systems, tools and templates Internal to External: allow customers and suppliers to learn by accessing our systems External to Internal: use competence from customers and suppliers to add value to our systems processes and products And, as mentioned above the tenth strategic issue is how the value creation capacity of the whole system can be maximised.
You can now proceed by identifying bloccades on each of these ten issues. Sveiby gave some good and bad practices he encountered concerning these ten issues. The last part of his talk was about the benchmark system he helped make, the Collaborative Climate Index. In three years of testing, with 20 questions, 12.000 respondents in 80 organisations he created a database for benchmarking. Some of the general results can be seen in the sheets.
Most of what is described above, you are propably already dealing with in some way or another in your organisation. But not consciously as Sveiby pointed out. And that is precisely what I am constantly pleading for: conscious choice making, based on self knowledge (in this case of your competences). Sveiby also named trust as the one vital ingredient for knowledge sharing.
One last remark that Sveiby made: "Value is independent of the way it is measured." Euro's and Dollars are not equal to value, but merely one way of trying to measure it.
The New Organizational Wealth: Managing... [Ton's Interdependent thoughts]
Blocking Referer Spam
Brent Ashley keeps an eye on spam blocking techniques: ask him about SimpleFilter for e-mail.
Rogue Referral Reduction. Unxmaal describes a simple way to block referral spam. Mmmmm - less filling!... [brentashley]
Friday, November 29, 2002
instantOutliner Test File
I'm playing with the instantOutliner again.The icon is much too big and bulky. How can I rewrite the macro to call a modified graphic? Where can I find some modified graphics? Is anyone still playing with the instantOutliner publishing tool? Did this ever get beyond Beta?
It seems to me the usefulness is limited as long as the OPML is rendered in a Goggle-able public site, but kept behind a firewall this could be a great supplement to IM, e-mail, and weblogs.
Update: I see Dave is still updating his instantOutline.
Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Freight Management for Demand-driven Print
Printable.com is the first print e-procurement service to incorporate sophisticated rate shopping software into its hosted software bundle. Logistics management has been one of the missing links in the development of demand-driven print models. With the these services becoming available to all of Printable's ASP customers the reality of broad-based, demand-driven print gets closer.
Printable Technologies Inc. Licenses Invenix Freight Management Software[...] The Invenix Freight Management software calculates an order's real-time shipping costs by performing order cubing, box selection, weight calculations, and shipper rate calculations using both parcel and LTL carriers. The solution licensed by Printable includes the printed products configurator, which calculates volume and weight for printed items based on quantity, product dimensions, paper weight, and other job specifications including folding, binding, and shrinkwrapping. [...] [WhatTheyThink]
Syndication
Contact
Presence
This Page was last updated: Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:06:57 GMT
