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Blogging in the WorkplaceOur company recently acquired CAB as a partner. We are currently teaming up people from both companies who work in the same areas of expertise, encouraging them to share info, and discuss clients and projects together. A colleague of mine, whom I introduced to blogging recently, has now suggested to give these intercompany-teams a blog to jot their references and thoughts down. Hopefully we'll see this idea through to implementation in the coming weeks. permalink | Thinking ToolsEverybody I guess sometimes ponders questions like "what is it I want to do?", "where do I want to stand in five years?", "what exactly are my capabilities and will I be able to use them in the next project?". This is especially so in an environment where what you actually do is quite abstract, and the competences you bring into the project probably even more so. Anyway, as I see me employing myself some time these are the kind of questions to answer to decide what this self-employed me should bring to the market. Yesterday I met for lunch with my former employer, with whom I keep in regular contact, and it turned out that between us we know a lot more people that want to answer the same questions from their respective professional perspectives. This leads me to the idea to spent a few sessions with these people to play around with these questions using a handful of philosophical thinking schemes. I have tried this a few times before and it always yielded answers and new questions I hadn't thought of before. With thinking schemes like deconstruction, transcendentalism, phenomenology, dialectics and hermeneutics we might get a foot in the door of these questions. A book in Dutch on this was written by Paul Wouters, director of the International School of Philosophy in Leusden, ISVW.  Later this month I will give our junior researchers a course in these thinking methods, to boost their competences in assessing the research questions put to us by customers. permalink | CEN/ISSS Good Practice Guide to KMLast Thursday I spent a great day in Brussels contributing to a project that will produce a good practice guide to KM for SME's. This takes place under the flag of CEN/ISSS. There are five items in the guide, that is due to appear in Octobre: I have taken up interest in the items on measurement, implementation and culture. The breakout session on culture was a lot of fun, thanks Neill and Manon. The next meetings will be held in May and Octobre, which I will certainly attend. Why not join this project yourself? Especially if you work in a small to medium sized company, run or own one, this is your chance to help set the pace and direction of KM in 25 European countries. You're welcome to contribute. permalink | KnowledgeBoard turns even more polyglotZones for other languages than english on KnowledgeBoard have been around for some time now. This week a Zone in german was added, called Wissensmanagement und Networking. The last word being as german as can be of course ;) This is of interest to me as I live near the German border and have several contacts in other german speaking countries like Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein as well. Hope it turns out as a source for meeting new people with great ideas. Go check it out, or better: Geh schnell hin und schau nach! permalink | Quick links to follow up on laterLilia Efimova points me to a new blog by Andy Boyd with the explicit goal to try and find out how blogs might be useful in commercial surroundings: Here as part exploratory and as part of our KM research program I will be keeping a blog and asking my colleagues and others to come in and comment on it's use for commercial companies employees - our main purpose is to assess is this a tool by which we can share knowledge. 10 years ago I was skeptical about whether we could apply CoPs within industry and now after riding high on our success with them, this is yet another KM process to explore I promised Denham Grey to start a discussion here on the use of blogs as a knowledge sharing tool, as we seem to have opposing views on this. Will have to honor that promise soon! Lilia ends her reference to Andy with mentioning The Tipping Point and wonders if it will happen to blogs as well. Ross Mayfield links to the same thing: two references, a sign for me to go explore. permalink | The Science of KMOften KM as a subject in Academia and as a practice in organisations seem to lead completely different and also isolated lives. Both regularly tend to shy away from the multidisciplinary aspects that are at the core of KM. In my opinion KM should embrace its multidisciplinarity because that's excactly what KM should do: network-straddling. That's why I am suspicious of initiatives where KM is proposed as a scientific discipline in it's own right. It is a discipline all right, the discipline of translating cross-disciplinary insights into good practice for organisations. Management in short. That's not science, that's application, so we should look for the science elsewhere. And that is what this proposal by Angela Nobre, co-founder of the Quaerere SIG at KnowledgeBoard aims at. She says: The idea is to explore, to develop and to integrate perspectives on KM Research coming from the broad areas of human and social sciences - namely from Anthropology, History of Ideas, Philosophy of Science, Cultural Studies, Political Science and, finaly, Organisational Semiotics, my current research area. Using Knowledge Economics and Knowledge Management as an integrating matrix, the objective is to focus on learning and innovation issues at organisational level. And I would like to add psychology to that, as well as make sure that the role of technology is covered by philosophy of science. From a more managerial perspective (and this is the more applied stuff) I would also like to add to the mix, and then there is life system dynamics and game theory. This is a daunting list, and therefore a bit more discussion on where to take this is warranted. I would not like to be looking for a Unified Theory for KM, for reasons stated above, but would like goals that aim for synergy and translation into practical stuff for Km-pros. Building the bridge between Academia (being part of it myself), and the Practicing Alchemists that meddle in the organisations (being one myself). I think it is necessary to think out the proposal a bit more in another direction as well, otherwise we might end up with too broad a scope and too less focus. I can imagine people being able to contribute to only one or two of the disciplines in the spectrum, as sort of a thematic nucleus in the group, while others are the community bridges in this, perceiving how to connect the one discipline to the other. Or in other words, we will have to tackle some KM-problems in the area of community-building and content-guidance (I specifically shun the words control and management here), in order to be able to get some work done. As always, you're thoughts are welcome. permalink | Contagious BloggingA while ago I commented on Rick Klau's experience with corporate blogging, and ended with the question if blogging would be something to use within my own company. The first thing I did was add the link to my weblog to my business e-mail signature. This to trigger curiousity, both amongst colleagues, as well as clients and others. In my experience seeing something is a more powerfull message than being told something without illustration. According to the serverlogs this indeed led to increased traffic to my blog.  One colleague was eager to discuss blogging with me as a result of this, he's also the QA-guy in our organisation. By way of experiment he has now started his own blog, called Jan's thoughts, written in Dutch. It's not related to our work, but deals with a passion of his: composing. He also has been advocating my blog with others. So I'm kinda curious what this will lead to. If my colleague hits it off with blogging, it might well be that we will together propose a blogging experiment for our company. An added bonus for me is that this colleague is no wizzkid or technical adept, which might go a long way yet in 'selling' the concept to the rest of the organisation. permalink | Creative CommonsI've just added a Creative Commons License to my musings here. Not to say don't touch my stuff, but to advocate the fact that it's ok to use what I post here, to advocate I explicitly want to share (why else publish it on the web). With a few restrictions that is: correct source attribution, no commercial use, and no alterations to the original texts. In return, I'll make sure to do the same for anything I use here. permalink | Open BrandingLast Friday I attended a roundtable of some 20 people in Amsterdam on "Open Branding". Now I don't know the first thing about branding, apart from being a consumer that is, but nonetheless it was a great day. The people behind the meeting call themselves Chief Brand Officers Association, or CBO, and envision honest brands (hence 'open branding') as the only way to go for organisations in the 21st century. The issues they address are things like trust, authenticity, leadership, value, transparancy, knowledge sharing, communication and the like. A familiar line up, for me, and I hope indeed for most KM-people. So their agenda closely resembled mine, and hopefully I could add to their discussions from my KM background usefully. Later this year, a co-authored book by the CBO-group is to appear at Kogan Page, aiming to place Open Branding on the agenda's of CxO's around the world. Part of the discussion focussed on who to reach with the book, and how to do that. As with KM, translating a vision to the workplace will only be succesful if you can list the concrete issues and needs it will help address. You can't convince someone to do KM, if there's no identified need to deal with. So the risk of developing an answer in search for a problem is something to watch out for, especially with such a bookproject. This inspiring get-together of branding experts will certainly be followed up with extensive e-mail discussions. Meanwhile webspaces to watch in relation to this are: permalink | |
Currently reading:
 The Tipping Point
Just read:  Small Pieces Loosely Joined
Plan to read: 
The Human Condition Why show you these books? |
