Globalization - a new member of my team

It is in a slightly tongue-in-cheek manner that this week's topic is presented, but given the focus on China currently, it is appropriate.  I have a new member on my KM team, and he is preparing for his probationary period.  His name is Feng Shui.  Of course I am personifying something that is an ancient practice with Eastern origins, but when you go to the abstract in thought and realize that you would call a robot a member of your team, generally, then it is not such a far reach to call any significant component of your approach to practice a member of the team.

I mention that it is on its probationary period because I am not by tradition, or conviction, a practitioner of Eastern philosophy, and the concept is often taken far deeper than a tool for work and becomes something around which people organize their entire lives.  I personally warn against this, but I also do attempt to constantly seek out ways to work better, so in the spirit of Da Vinci, as outlined by Michael Gelb in his studies of Leonardo, and especially three of his seven geniuses - Dimonstrazione, Sfumato and Connessione - I am giving the feng shui organization of my workspace a fundamental try out.

How does this connect with KM?  One might well ask what connection there is between data entry and an ergonomic keyboard.  There is a clear connection between information gathering and information facility, and this connection is directly-related to the quality of the KM work done with the data.  I remember well being a student in an engineering co-op program, and seeing my first testing unit (it was a Yokogawa - that's a name I haven't heard in years, but somehow it stuck with me) designed to measure the performance of an electric motor.  It had an incredible amount of memory for its day (1990), and it was indeed an impressive meter.  That would seem to indicate that the information gathering function was taken care of.

There was a problem, though.  The testing rate of the meter was so fast that it filled the available space within seconds.  That is okay to take a deep look at a partial picture, but no good if you need to evaluate a whole performance curve.  So in this case the facility of the data was not up to the same standard as the gathering.  What was gathered wasn't useful, in other words, even though it was gathered with precision and care.

So with this though I am going to take a few steps such as eliminating the 'to read' pile from my desktop so it doesn't face me every day, re-positioning my desk slightly to take advantage of 'command position' and creating an 'I love me' wall - military parlance for a wall displaying awards, trophies. etc. - though I don't place a large amount of stock in the value of such a wall, preferring instead to allow performance to define others' working definition of my value.  I also am toying with the addition of a water feature, but I must weigh its potential benefits against the danger of having 4 processors, 3 monitors and a mobile device in close proximity to water.

I intend to give the 'new' a chance and evaluate it s performance.  Feng may be a valuable co-worker, or he may be a form of 'time spam' (if no one has yet claimed that phrase. I'll take the opportunity).  He and I will work that out. 

Well-Rounded Knowledge Management

This week's post is fairly short, but it addresses a problem we see more and more.  There is a speed with which information goes past us, and our ability to grasp it is inversely proportional with its velocity.  In order to foster a sense of connectivity to our knowledge, and to round out the development of both KM and the person, I submit that practitioners should routinely read books and other, tangible matter.  There is far too much to disturb, there are far too many 'blinky-lights' on the typical on-line piece.  In addition, if you didn't catch the article on Slate this week regarding blatant plagiarism, there is something complete about an original source.

So without further ado, I challenge anyone reading this (if anyone does - I have no proof it happens) to put together a list of the next ten printed pieces of material you will read, and also WHY you find them important to read.  That challenge laid out, if anyone will send me their list I will try to aggregate a microcosm of recommended books to read and will post it later on for all to benefit from.  Send any lists to ctuite@bsu.edu.  To get the ball rolling, here is my list:

1) Hostage at the Table - will be read to enhance negotiating skills

2) The 21 Indispensible Qualities of Leaders - these will be turned into reminders I will post to myself

3) Don't Eat the Marshmallow...Yet - this was recommended by Kevin Eikenberry, a trainer and motivator whose advice I respect

4) An Innocent Man - I saw that John Grisham wrote this piece of non-fiction, and was intrigued because of his skill

5) ACIF Indexing with Content Manager On Demand - I will read this, because I will NOT lose to a machine

6) The Lucifer Effect - I am interested in the things that happen within an organization that turn normal people into conniving individuals. even when survival is not at stake

7) Death By Meeting - Patrick Lencioni has a brilliant way of telling a story that illustrates a point; in my book, he does the best job of this since Eliyahu Goldratt did his 'The Goal', and if you have no clue about that, hie thee quickly to yon used bookseller forthwith!

8) The Levity Effect - because life and work tend to get too serious

9) Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob - if you want to know where you are, you had better study those with differing opinions than yours, to make sure you understand your terrain (remember what we learn from Sun Tzu, and if you have never read 'The Art of War', go read it first before anything comes along and wipes you out, in a business sense); this book is written from the viewpoint that advances in online technology are not necessarily good, and techies need to bear the lessons in mind.

10) Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performances and Results from Knowledge Workers - I don't supervise people directly, but I do have to coordinate efforts, and am ultimately whose name is either positively seen, or universally cursed, at the end of the KM work that I do, and without the limitation of having a 'stick' to beat people with, the freedom to learn to motivate and collaborate allows me to do a lot more than would otherwise be possible.

Actual Perception is Theoretical Reality, or How Knowledge Management Kills Knowledge Management

After a couple weeks off, spent observing knowledge in other areas of the country, I return today with a thought.  Knowledge Management is definitely more than the tools used, but in the converse, it is also more than the knowledge managed.  The whole, in this case, carries value far beyond the sum of its parts.  An interesting concept to be sure, but somewhat difficult to explain.  Here is an attempt...

I have spent several hours in the last couple of months battling issues on the users' end with a software that we have rolled out in thin-client mode only [thin-client computing means that all installed software necessary to perform the software's functions doesn't reside on the user's computer, but on a server elsewhere, with the user's computer using a web browser to connect to and run the software on the server - it takes up less space on the user's computer, and has the benefit of making maintenance and other tasks easier and more efficient to do].  The interesting thing is that the ease and efficiency gained from our efforts is far less easy and efficient given competing knowledge management efforts.

A lot of the fight has been waged against potential problems that only appear on certain users' machines, and the root of the vast majority of those problems is Google's toolbar.  I am not a hater of Google - I do find their lack of competence in efficient computing and resulting spread of JAAWS mania (Just Add Another Windows Server - I coined that a while ago) to be disappointing, but I don't 'hate' Google - but their efforts in the knowledge management arena have hindered knowledge management in the systems with which I work.  The coding of the toolbar changes the functionality of the browser's behavior with respect to opening new pages, pop-up blocking and the like.  Those 'assets' interfere with the functionality of the software, which relies on dynamically building web pages for presentation to the user.

Why is it Google who receives my blame for this?  There is of course the most obvious primacy of position - my system is a production system, installed before Google toolbar was even promoted and entered into the Web, and so it should have spent more time in the stages of researching conflicts and making sure that it didn't interfere with vital software already on the host machine - but that is only a logical argument.  The reason for the blame lies in the manner through which the toolbar is distributed.

When Google toolbar is installed, the user is not asked about individual options, or given the information they need to be able to make an informed decision.  They are asked if they want to install the toolbar to protect them from evil things and help them find things they want.  If anything, it is the outgrowth of a wave of frustration and disappointment with the toolbar and other software offered natively by Microsoft.  From what I have heard, it is something that users like to use, which is a good thing for Google, since that is a primary requirement for an add-in to aid the user.  

There could be nothing easier than asking the user if they want to install something, and they just click 'Yes'.  The problem is that old nemesis the Law of Unintended Consequences.  We have long ago gone to the presence of medical testing ethics boards who must approve of medical testing, for example, and even if you are not doing anything that could cause long-term harm to an individual, you must have both the permission of the board, as well as the permission and full disclosure to the test participants, before the process begins.  This was done because of the Law of Unintended Consequences when the medical testing done in the post WWII era resulted in horrific side effects and innocent victims of the testing wound up harmed for life, or even killed as the result of the experiments.  The resulting outcry of society and resulting pressure on created the safeguarded system we have for medical testing today.  Can any of us truthfully say that the resulting discoveries from radiation testing on soldiers, thalidomide testing - even Josef Mengele's work - are justification for the ways in which the knowledge was gained?

You might say that comparing medical testing to testing and installation of software to be a reach, and if we weren't in the information age, where data and the decisions from it/harms done by it do have a lasting and indelible impression on the consumers and users, that would be the case.  In the past, the lifeblood of the post-capitalistic society was the value of human life as expressed by therbligs and other manpower measures of what a person could do with their physically hale body, and so things that would unwittingly tamper with that and the future life lived well were found to be taboo.  Fast forward to today, where we still measure productivity but in terms of data and information, rather than iron out the door, and you start to see the connection - anything that harms our ability to do more work, efficiently, is by definition the opposite of what we need to have.

The best-case scenario here would be for the developers of things like the Google toolbar to take a version of the Hippocratic oath that all doctors have to take, pledging that they will do no harm, and having a malpractice system that handles times when they don't (there is the gasoline for the fire).  Barring that, a proper installation process for the users would be one that takes them through a few options and tells them the possible consequences of what they do before installing.  As an example, when installing, warning the user that if they use any software that the first open a web page to use, they may begin to have problems using that software as the result of installing the toolbar.  That would definitely have a chilling effect on the rapid adoption of things, but it would 1) improve the quality of the coding, so that fewer interferences would be had, 2) enforce codes more rigidly so that 'improvements' don't lead to bare metal re-installs (to be fair here, it wasn't Google toolbar that caused the bare metal work, it was a calendar and shareware, but the concept remains the same) and 3) cause more people to be cognizant of what they are doing.

KM is a desirable practice, especially since knowledge is the new steel, in terms of our raw materials.  Tools that leverage KM are welcomed, because we don't have to carry the bit bucket ourselves.  It is at the locus of usability and benign effects where we find the true value in our KM systems.  There is far too much work to be accomplished to have to re-do everything we have done before because someone else has started to do something related, yet incompatible.  As inconvenient as it would be to have a user do more than click on 'Install', I can vouch for the fact that causing them not to be able to see the things they need to do their job is worse.