How do you know that?: March 2002

Newsgroups as KM tools...
Hell yes -

Allow for people to post queries and for multiple people to respond and comment.

Allow for active interaction and display of knowledge. There's a great example of this in the American Sailing Associate newsgroup - there's easily two dozen active
contributors all the time. These people tend to know each other and even get together in carbon format everyonece in a while.

Encourage non-vitrual interaction. Yes this is the point at which the communcation leaves the computer and goes one on one - a phone call a meeting etc. Very important
for KM
Not -

Info tends to be 'without guarantee', so if the news group is sparsely attended or unmoderated the info is doubtful at best

People have to particpate - often the a group will be created and then sit there empty.

I've been wrestling with MS application server all day. It's a really cool technology when it works. But setup is dicey. I've got a brand new server that I wanted to include in the cluster. I added it and suddenly the web server wasn't displaying all of the pages that it should have been. (if it's not obvious - this is all MS IIS 5.0). After reinstalling iis and app center at least three times I finally tripped onto the solution. Run the IIS lockdown utility and everything worked fine. Definitely a permission issue. Frustrating!

KM Rules

I've been contemplating writing an article about knowledge management for some time, i'll use this blog to pull together my thoughts.

Perhaps the best way to think about knowledge managment is in terms of a few rules. It's such a squirrly topic that if there are no rules - you can't even talk about it. Also, since this is my blog - these are my rules. Debate via email please....

It has to Cost Nothing

I'm not referring to dollars here - I'm talking to time and effort. The people who have an interest in KM are general your high end types - this usually translates into smart, busy people who would rather do what they are good at then teach others how to be good at what they do. They would rather swim than talk about swimming - even it keeps others from drowning. These people here the hype about KM and will express interest in and committment to the KM initiative. But they come to work every morning to make money, they are going to hard pressed to spend time doing something that isn't directly related to this.

What can a KM manager do to counter this? Draw direct lines between KM and profit. This is one approach, and has merrit, but first we have define KM.

It has to be Valuable

I continually argue that the successful models for application development in the enterprise should be the successful applications in the dot com world. Ebay, Napster, Hotmail etc. all delivered a valuable service at no cost. The payback was there right away. It's unreasonable that a knowledge work will do something unless they get a noticable payback right away. So how does this effect KM?

There's a maelstrum of activity going on in the Knowledge Management communinity in NYC in the last couple months. Several KM managers had shifted firms in the last couple weeks. It's insestuous in nature - people just swithching harses. My horse is doing just fine, thank you very much.

In other news - put up my dart board last night. Most of my weekends in college were spent throwing darts and drinking taquila. It's a wonder we all made it out alive. But I'm pretty dangerous with the pins. I actually find int theropeutic.

Geek Alert: I'm dealing with MS Application Center 2000 - conceptually the product is wonderful. It allows you to manage a cluster of application clusters - both web content and com+ applications. It can also work as a cluster manager for com+ applications which is very cool.
The problem is that the installation of it is tricky - and the software is not all that stable. Also, when it comes down - it takes prisoners. I suspect it has a tendancy to corrupt the performance logs of the server. It's gross and complicated.

This is real geeky but - we ran into a problem yesterday where a standard javascript function wouldn't work on certain machines. "Window.Open("")" wouldopen the window, but it wouldn't find or execute the content that was supposed to work in the window.

We looked at alot of different variables - in the end we had to go to 'add/remove programs' and repair the IE 6.0 installation. Tre annoying.