Keith March 8th, 2009
Without clear thinking, valuable work may grind to a halt
The following is the introduction to an article that I wrote, published in the November/December KM Review.
Despite everything that the modern KM practitioner knows about communities, collaboration and technology, communities of practice (CoPs) often fail and collaboration often breaks down. In order to establish an effective CoP, it’s necessary first to think about the nature and structure of a community and recognize that it’s an entirely different entity from a work group or a project team. As such, it must be treated differently, too. In this article, author Keith De La Rue examines the pitfalls associated with CoPs and why helping them to grow and flourish requires a better understanding of three words: “community”, “practice” and “technology”.
Read the full article.
Keith November 13th, 2008
Talking Cock (v.): A Singaporean term meaning either to talk nonsense or engage in idle banter.
- The Coxford Singlish Dictionary
Over the last few years, I have had the privilege of traveling to Singapore on a number of occasions to speak at conferences. I have greatly enjoyed the experience - both the conferences, and wandering around Singapore as a tourist. I have met some fantastic people there, and have greatly enjoyed the culture - and the food!
Singapore is a land of contrasts. It is richly multicultural, with all public signage in four languages. The population is predominantly Chinese, yet most of the public institutions are as British as they were before independence. It has earned a reputation as a non-democratic nation, yet the country is alive with art and innovation, and not in the least like a totalitarian state. I feel safer walking around the streets anywhere in Singapore than I do in some parts of Melbourne.
Some would like to portray Singapore as a place where freedom of speech is suppressed by the government, yet Singapore is now becoming increasingly open. One friend I have made in Singapore is Enrico Varella. Enrico introduced me to a fantastic local web site - Talking Cock.
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Keith October 23rd, 2008
US researchers said they are able to selectively erase memories from mice in a laboratory, raising hopes human memory afflictions like post-traumatic stress syndrome can one day be cured.
An initial step has now been taken towards the ability to erase memories. This takes us one step towards the scenario in Philip K Dick’s story - now also John Woo movie, starring Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman - Paycheck.
In the movie, this capability is used for less altruistic purposes.
Even though most science fiction writers deny that they predict the future, it is always interesting to see life imitating art…
Keith August 28th, 2008
Now everybody wants one:
Mistake makes ‘iPhone girl’ a celebrity
“A Chinese factory worker has become a celebrity after her smiling face was accidentally loaded onto an Apple iPhone and shipped to the other side of the world, her employer has said.
“The unidentified worker flashed a smile and made a peace sign to a co-worker whose job was to test the device’s camera in the southern city of Shenzhen, said a spokesman for Foxconn, which assembles the phones for Apple. The woman’s colleague apparently forgot to delete the photo from the phone, which was sold to a consumer in Britain, who posted it [to MacRumors.com] on the Internet, Foxconn spokesman Liu Kun told AFP on Wednesday.”
Apparently Apple have no plans to adopt this as standard practice, but this raises an interesting question:
“As one person wrote in an Internet post: ‘It would be great for every Chinese worker who makes your iPhones to take a snap of herself or her factory friends … a hello from a person you would never otherwise meet. Globalisation in practise.’”
A new social networking technology?
Keith July 31st, 2008
Apologies if you have visited this site any time in the last 12 hours or so, and noticed that it didn’t look quite right. Something caused complete chaos…
I realised that I hadn’t checked for dead links for ages, and ran LinkSleuth. In fact, I may never have used it since setting up the WordPress blog. This is a great little program that has always worked very nicely in the past, but this time it apparently caused complete chaos. Half the posts on the site vanished, the theme changed back to the basic old WordPress look, and all the Categories vanished.
I am still not quite sure what happened. I may have entered the URL into LinkSleuth in such a way that it behaved incorrectly; the way I have my site set up with redirects may have upset LinkSleuth; or LinkSleuth may just be a bit dangerous with WordPress for some reason. I’m not sure about this, but I can’t find anyone else complaining about it on Google.
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Keith July 21st, 2008
The debate question: “Technology is the silver bullet for knowledge management.” The final vote result: overwhelmingly opposed.
Even the team arguing against freely admitted that technology is an important enabler - we aren’t Luddites - the argument is that it’s first and foremost about people.
Arthur asked another question - how many people changed their mind as a result of the debate? Only two.
Keith July 18th, 2008
I have just heard about MoFuse. So what? So now you can view my blog in a neater way from a mobile device. Check it out now at:
http://acknowledge.mofuse.mobi/
(The idea is to open this URL from a mobile device - but you can see a simulation on a PC browser…)
MoFuse is “Mobile Fusion”, and it was mentioned by Chris Brogan in an email that was forwarded to me. It is “a web application that allows content publishers to easily and instantly create a mobile version of their blog or website.”
I wonder if it will be friendly to me?
Keith March 4th, 2008
The Human Dynamics lab at MIT has developed some interesting “surveillance badges”. This has been brought to my attention by Andrew Mitchell. New Scientist Technology blog reported this January that these badges “recognise each other using infrared, then record your speech, note your distance from other people, and track your movement.” With these badges, researchers can “monitor people going about their day - working, meeting, eating, going out and sleeping. The devices record where the wearers go and how fast, their tone of voice, and subtle details about their body language.”
These badges have been apparently been used for some interesting investigations into free will. By tracking individual movements and personal interactions, MIT researchers found that “we are more instinctual and a lot more like other creatures than we care to think… a good 90 per cent of what most people do in any day follows routines.” Interesting…
In a more recent application, as New Scientist reports, “… one of the researchers, Ben Waber, has blogged about handing out the badges to delegates meeting with their corporate sponsors.” This application was used to develop and display a social network map, visible to the participants. “… over the course of the day, more people became connected within the network as they met more people.”
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Keith November 7th, 2007
A belated note from the Enterprise Change Management conference in KL at the end of August:
“The context for most structured data lies in unstructured data. The IT industry has come a long way in managing structured data, but has a long way to go yet in managing unstructured data. The two are handled totally separately.”
- Alan Pelz-Sharpe, CMS Watch
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Next week, I will be in Sydney at two conferences for Ark Group: Driving Effective Intranet Delivery in the Public Sector and Promoting a Culture of Knowledge in the Public Sector. I am talking about Maintaining the currency and accuracy of content at the first of these, and Using social media to engage stakeholders and the community at the second - a late inclusion in the program.
After realising that Matt Moore and I would be somewhat overlapping in our content, we are now planning a double act - should be a bit of fun!
If you are in Sydney, and would like to catch up, drop me a line!
Keith August 29th, 2007
Had a great day at the ECM conference today - it was great to meet some new people! As promised to the participants, here’s my very brief summary of the “three errors of ECM” from the McKinsey report that I mentioned. This is from Making a market in knowledge, by Lowell Brian, from 2004:
- Build it – and they won’t use it
- A huge DM technology investment is not a solution
- Content too hard to find, and not kept up to date
- Top-down Intranets don’t reach audience needs
- Corporate staff may not understand needs
- Expertise is distributed around organisation
- Distributed model better, but has flaws
- Closer to people and needs, but no guarantees
- Can lead to islands of incompatible technologies
- Solution – Knowledge Markets
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