Column Two

Scott Berkun has written an article on how to innovate right now. To quote: he biggest secret of innovation is that anyone can do it. The reason is simple: It’s just not that hard. Look up the word “innovate” in any dictionary and see what it actually means, instead of ...

Shawn Callahan has shared his knowledge management words of wisdom. To quote: View every knowledge management initiative as a change initiative, which means helping the leadership group to imagine what it will be like when it's done and after imagining it, they want it. It also means getting the employees ...

Shawn Callahan has written an entry on starting a community of practice. To quote: In starting any community of practice, the first objective is to help the members recognise the value they will get from being and working together. Often we will help organisations kick their communities off with a ...

Patrick Lambe writes about a fascinating approach of doing KM one person at a time. To quote: Yesterday, for the first time in my KM consulting career I did something that I had not had the chance to do before. My colleague Paolina and I held a “clinic” at our ...

Scott Berkun has written about the 8 challenges innovations face. To quote: In chapter 3 of The Myths of Innovation, I explore why innovation methedologies are prone to fail. It’s not their fault - there are many factors involved that are out of the control of any individual. You can ...

Shawn Callahan has written a post on factors impact on knowledge management. To quote: One of the aims of a knowledge strategy is to design a set of activities to enhance an organisation's knowledge environment. The knowledge environment includes all the factors, both within and outside an organisation, which might ...

Patrick Lambe has published a plan for a KM communications strategy. To quote: This concept map catalogues all the elements of a KM communications strategy that we've found useful, with some ideas for messages, media and audiences. Download the pdf version formatted for A3 size printing for easier reading!

Patrick Lambe has published a guide to using KPIs in KM. To quote: The paper is in three sections: the first sets out some guidelines for how to use KPIs smartly. The second section gives ideas for sample sets of KPIs covering KM activities and tools as diverse as communities ...

Bill Ives reports on the measurement of collaboration at HP. To quote: Stan Garfield, Worldwide Consulting & Integration Knowledge Management Leader, Hewlett-Packard, recently shared the metrics his firm uses to keep track of all threaded discussion forums: New ThreadsRepliesTotal PostsTotal SubscriptionsNumber of ForumsConsulting & Integration Participants% of Participation

Scott Berkun has written an article on creative thinking hacks. To quote: All of us, except my idiot cousin who still eats glue, possess everything necessary to be more creative. The problem is we've been trained away from our creative instincts by schools, parents, movies and workplaces. The word creativity ...

Scott Berkun has written an entry on how to innovate on time. To quote: I've taught the tutorial How to innovate on time a few times now, and the big takeaway for most is the need to carve out time for failure. That's right, failure.

Scott Berkun has written an entry on the best creative thinking books. To quote: Between teaching a course on creative thinking at UW, and writing a book on innovation, I've read dozens of books on creative thinking, from handbooks, to games, to psychology literature. Here are the four books I'd ...

Dave Pollard has written an entry about how to make a living running an innovative business. To quote: Several readers have asked me for a five-minute summary of the iterative, lifelong process of learning what we're meant to do for a living, and making that living through Natural Enterprise. I ...

Shawn Callahan has written an entry on knowledge strategy, consisting of three separate journeys. To quote: We've learned that top down strategies don't work. For one thing they typically rely on extrinsic motivations (rewards -- do this and you

S. L. Kogan and M. J. Muller have written a journal article on an ethnographic study of collaborative knowledge work. To quote: We present an ethnographic study in which we examine the ways collaborative knowledge work gets done in a process-oriented environment. The purpose of the study is to identify ...

Patrick Lambe has written an article on getting management buy-in for KM, introducing a number of archetypes. To quote: About 18 months ago we launched a narrative project to collect stories from KM practitioners about their experiences of success and failure in getting management buy-in and support for their KM ...

Scott Berkun has written an article on why innovation fails. To quote: Established companies try to retrofit innovation into organizations by things like task forces, committees, portals and suggestion systems. Have you seen these efforts in action? I'd love to hear why you think they worked, or didn't. I'm cynical ...

Patrick Lambe has written an entry exploring why we share knowledge, providing a simple but useful model. To quote: There's another common assumption in the knowledge sharing literature that I think needs to be challenged, and that is that knowledge sharing is essentially an engineering problem somehow associated with motivation. ...

Scott Berkun has written an article on how to avoid lame morale events. To quote: The basic rule, where managers get in trouble, is this: any event outside of work does not create morale - it only allows whatever morale exists to surface. Case in point: Take a miserable team ...

Patrick Lambe has written an impassioned plea for a greater understanding of knowledge sharing. To quote: A combination of two very different incidents reminded me this week of just how incompetent we still are in KM at capturing the complexity, richness and sophistication of human knowledge behaviours. In the first ...

Andrew Rixon has posted a primer on Social Network Analysis, outlining the major steps involved. To quote: Given that I'm right in the middle of a social network analysis, I thought I'd throw together a very quick, very brief primer on Social Network Analysis. What is Social Network Analysis? A ...

Gardiner Morse has written an article challenging the over-use of circular diagrams by vendors and consulting firms. To quote: The circle below, from a global accounting firm's Web site, is used to illustrate the company's consulting services for owner-managed businesses. It shows the business life cycle "maturity phase" leading, inexplicably, ...

Joann S. Lublin writes about the open inbox policy of corporate CEO's. To quote: Open inboxes appear to be more the rule than the exception at many major corporations. In a survey for The Wall Street Journal conducted last month by the Business Roundtable, a Washington group representing heads of ...

I'll be presenting at the upcoming ActKM conference, to be held in Canberra on 26-27 October 2005. My topic will be "Understanding staff needs", looking at the practical needs analysis techniques that can be used to identify staff needs and issues relating to knowledge. I've been to every ActKM conference, ...

Martin Leith has published a comprehensive list of idea generation methods. To quote: This website lists and explains every idea generation method I've encountered during the past 15 years. It is the result of extensive research; my many sources include books, management journals, websites, academics, consultants and colleagues. [Thanks to ...

David Bartholomew has released a Knowledge Sharing Toolkit, which includes a 49 page how-to manual and a number of case studies. To quote: The 'Knowledge Sharing Toolkit' is the result of a two-year DTI-funded project carried out by innovation consultancy David Bartholomew Associates (DBA) and nine of the UK

Jim McGee has written an article about building your knowledge workshop. To quote: We are at a point in carrying out knowledge work where we would be well-served by setting aside the quest for the one true tool and turning toward the problem of creating and equipping a knowledge workshop ...

Fulvio Iavernaro has written an article on the relationship between GIS and KM. To quote: GIS are universally recognized as decision support systems that help users in problem solving activities related to geo-referenced applications thanks to their ability of organizing and processing information both geographically and logically together with a ...

Michael W. McLaughlin has written an article about the issues with "best practices", from a marketing perspective (but relevant for all). He identifies four main problems: They rarely work It's a follower's strategy Change comes from within They don't come with a manual [Thanks to elearningpost.]