Living by Design

Your company does not need to be very large before it starts grappling with two significant problems that plague the knowledge economy: How to maintain and improve effective teamwork between people that are often separated by geography or time. How to share timely and useful information across the organization, reusing existing knowledge and channeling emerging experience. Photo Credit: PMThink! Blog Technology Helps Fortunately, Web 2.0 technologies and emerging communication practices are helping slow the growth of these corporate tumors. However, it takes more than just technology to reverse the trends. Effective design, initial content seeding and proactive facilitation are critical factors for re-firing in the innovation engine. Is it working? There's only one way to know... metrics . Measuring for Success A successful community generally has two hallmarks : a high level of interaction between the participants, and a growing body of valuable content. That's a wonde...

SECI Model at Fuji Xerox - from the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology A Model for Learning When researching knowledge management and organizational learning you're bound to come across the SECI model and the work of the Nonaka and Takeuchi. Appreciating the value of tacit knowledge (carried in people's minds) and explicit knowledge (codified or articulated) is paramount for the knowledge based industries. The authors of the SECI model emphasize that as valuable as the knowledge assets may be, the process of creating knowledge and how it is transformed is where the real potential lies. Simply managing existing knowledge is not enough . The Heart of the Machine Intuitively we know that human talent is the critical success factor in hi-tech and other knowledge based contexts. Creativity and innovation are primarily human functions and are hard to systematize but are essential for ongoing success. Additionally, the picture below demonstrates how all significa...

What looks like a doc, sounds like a doc, but doesn't behave like a doc? It's a Google Doc! Google Docs , along with similar offerings from other web based vendors, is an innovative collaboration environment that behaves a lot more like a Wiki than a traditional document management system. Mike Riversdale captures this eloquently in his post, " Google Docs ... so what - the ONE reason why you should care " Wikis live by understanding the connectivity of their environment and the innate desire of 'words' to love all and be loved by all. In the future there will be no difference between a Google Doc and a wiki page ... in fact, it may be so close already it's just a matter of semantics and opinion. Collapsing the Publishing Process One of the dynamics of a Wiki is that whatever you create is immediately, or very quickly, published. This means that knowledge can be communicated as quickly as it is captured, significantly outpacing the change in knowledge d...