FreeMind is a free mind-mapping software tool, written in Java.  The latest version has turned it into high productivity tool.

Possible uses of FreeMind include:

• Project Management: planning and keeping track of projects, including developing Work Breakdown Structures
• Building a Project knowledgebase, with links to files, sources of information and project documents
• Keeping a collection of notes with links on some notes which can be expanded as needed
• Planning Reports, using colours to show which sections are completed, not yet started etc.
• Keeping a small database of something with a structure that is either very dynamic, or not known in advance
• Brainstorming with images, icons, colours and fonts to help categorise ideas

MindMap Work Breakdown Structure

FreeMind is free software, licenced under GPL – GNU General Public License.  FreeMind is also open source software.

Visit the FreeMind wiki.

Decent overview of wikis at work, the ways in which they can be used, and an overview of typical concerns before implementing them with rebuttal.

The wiki crops up in many companies’ internal discussions about process improvements and efficient collaboration, but it is often shot down because so few people have exposure to good models of what a really successful business wiki can do. Ars is here to help with a practical introduction based on real-world examples.

In general, wiki’s would be a great addition to work but I worry that the editing environment might not be quite rich enough. Our various Word documents often contain simple diagrams, and the Microsoft-Project style add-on we purchased for Sharepoint also gets a lot of use. Maybe there’s some feature-rich wiki’s available?

via Wikis in the workplace: a practical introduction – Ars Technica.

What does small talk have to do with Knowledge Management? Everything according to Canada’s national news.   Small talk is a first step in networking. Networking is a medium to create relationships, learn about people and ultimately build trust.  These are the foundations for knowledge management.

Apparently, those who are good at small talk get more jobs, raises and move through the ranks to higher positions.

A couple examples ring true:

-          Five great people applied for a job and it was difficult to choose.  The one who got the job is he who spoke to the secretary in the waiting room and showed interest in learning about the company.

-          Three people applied for a job teaching at a school.  The one who talked to the interviewee about the photos on his wall, fishing and children got the job.  He also had the lowest grades.

Success doesn’t come from good grades alone.  The ability to connect, i.e. small talk, is what is moving careers.  Developing a repor with colleagues, making others feel comfortable and building trust all lead to people wanting to work with you more.

In summary, the heart of Knowledge Management is connecting people, ideas and experience.  Small talk is the starting point for making these connections.  If you are interested in people and their lives, you are fortunate.  If small talk is your weak point, start practicing!

I finally had a decent conversation with my chair yesterday. She was away from the office and very relaxed with no distractions. After I exposed what my lit review strategy had been thus far and confessed that I simply didn’t know if I was approaching it correctly, my chair said I am doing all of the right things. She also said that once I get a prospectus and fully develop my research question that the rest of my dissertation is going to go very quickly. Oh good. There is hope.

Right now I’m tossing around the idea that there is a lot of tacit knowledge floating around professional organizations such as the one I am interested in. The question of how to harness and later leverage that knowledge is worth exploring; especially as it relates to the specific training needs of the organization. The people who have conducted the training for several years have lots of tacit knowledge that isn’t formalized. The trainers desire that the knowledge be formalized in the form of taking the F2F training to CBT. They also want to ramp up the quality of the training as well.

So the big question is whether or not a knowledge management framework (or model) can be applied to the problem at hand (taking F2F training to CBT) to capture some of the tacit knowledge, formalize it and facilitate maintenance of said knowledge in the future. What am I looking for? Before I figure out what I’m looking for I need to identify KM frameworks or models.

Two tasks for today:

1. Finish third level of literature review and ID/request any dissertations that match what I’m looking for
2. ID KM frameworks/models

If I can accomplish those two tasks then I can begin to write something up on Friday. Since tomorrow is Thanksgiving I doubt I will get anything accomplished. I’ve already got 4 teenages boys in the basement for a sleepover, a husband who (for whatever reason) didn’t sleep last night and is cranky and a 6 y/o who is just looking for something to do. I may have to go to the library. ugh.

The guru of knowledge management David Gurteen was asked what is knowledge management? his answer was very simple and straight forward.  Kindly check the attached youtube.

Mr. Gurteen, the well known knowledge management consultant, speaker and facilitator,has developed a knowledge based website that has lots of valuable information and knowledge about everything related to Knowledge Management that includes conferences, articles, books, community cafes, links, magazines, societies and the most important stories of knowledge management.  His website is a very helpful and should be saved in your bookmark.  The link for the website is http://www.gurteen.com and his youtube channel is called dgurteen’s channel and this is the link if you like to watch more interesting and valuable videos about knowledge management http://www.youtube.com/user/dgurteen

Mr. Gurteen’s main goal is stated clearly in his website “I help people to share their knowledge; to learn from each other; to innovate and to work together effectively to make a difference!.” I think this should be the main goal of each instructor in our university and in Department of Library & Information Sciences.  Professors, doctors, facilitators, and staff who truly impact you, and your life are those who we really respect, appreciate and remember the most in our life because they are sharing with us their knowledge.

It’s 6:30AM, and it’s time to go to work.  So, good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone all over the world, and thanks for reading this post about What is Knowledge Management by David Gurteen

Re-using work templates developed by someone who has been efficiently performing a particular task is another inexpensive KM approach. This approach also works very well for shortening learning curves of new recruits.

A work template is a document, code or material that was used in performing a task well and can be re-used to perform other identical or similar tasks. By guiding action, a work template helps perform a task quickly and with fewer mistakes especially by those who are doing the task for the first time:

• A checklist of things to do or to watch out for
• A form letter for a type of communication that is repeated many times
• A spreadsheet to compute something or to summarize something
• A workshop session guide
• A step-by-step action guide
• A successful proposal that can be used as a pattern for drafting future proposals
• A course outline or course syllabus
• A well-written report to guide writing of next similar reports
• Etc.

Knowledge workers (often unconsciously) improvise, re-use and improve work templates as a matter of course. They do these little things to simplify and speed up their work. They do not call what they are doing as “knowledge management” and often they do not recognize that they are creating and reusing valuable “knowledge products.” Nevertheless their intended result is what KM is really aiming for: more effective action.

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So another SWAT4LS is behind us, this time wonderfully organised by Andrea Splendiani, Scott Marshall, Albert Burger, Adrian Paschke and Paolo Romano.

I have been back home in Cambridge for a couple of days now and have been asking myself whether there was an overall conclusion from the day – some overarching bottom line that one could take away and against which one could measure the talks at SWAT4LS2010 to see whether there has been progress or not. The programme consisted of a great mixture of both longer keynotes, papers, “highlight posters” and highlight demonstations illustrating a wide range of activities at the semantic web technology – computer science and biomedical research.

Topics at the workshop covered diverse areas such as the analysis of the relationship between  HLA structure variation and disease, applications for maintaining patient records in clinical information systems, patient classification on the basis of semantic image annotations to the use of semantics in chemo- and proteoinformatics and the prediction of drug-target interactions on the basis of sophisticated text mining as well as games such as Onto-Frogger (though I must confess that I somehow missed the point of what that was all about).

So what were the take-home messages of the day? Here are a few points that stood out to me:

• During his keynote, Alan Ruttenberg coined the dictum of “far too many smart people doing data integration”, which was subsequently taken up by a lot of the other speakers – an indication that most people seemed to agree with the notion that we still spend far too much time dealing with the “mechanics” of data – mashing it up and integrating it, rather than analysing and interpreting it.
• During last year;s conference, it already became evident that a lot of scientific data is now coming online in a semantic form. The data avalanche has certainly continued and the feeling of an increased amount of data availability, at least in the biosciences, has intensified. While chemistry has been lagging behind, data is becoming available here too. On the one hand, there are Egon’s sterling efforts with openmolecules.net and the data solubility project, on the other, there are big commercial entities like the RSC and ChemSpider. During the meeting, Barend Mons also announced that he had struck an agreement with the RSC/ChemSpider to integrate the content of ChemSpider into his Concept Wiki system. I will reserve judgement as to the usefulness and openness of this until it is further along. In any case, data is trickling out – even in chemistry.
• Another thing that stood out to me – and I could be quite wrong in this interpretation, given that this was very much a research conference – was the fact that there were many proof-of-principle applications and demonstrators on show, but very few production systems, that made use of semantic technologies at scale. A notable exception to this was the GoPubMed (and related) system demonstrated by Michael Schroeder, who showed how sophisticated text mining can be used not only to find links between seemingly unrelated concepts in the literature, but can also assist in ontology creation and the prediction of drug-target interactions.

Overall, many good ideas, but, as seems to be the case with all of the semantic web, no killer application as to yet – and at every semweb conference I go to we seem to be scrabbling around for one of those. I wonder if there will be one and what it will be.

Thanks to everybody for a good day. It was nice to see some old friends again and make some new ones. Duncan Hull has also written up some notes on the day – so go and read his perspective. I, for one, am looking forward to SWAT4LS2010.

In my over twenty years of experience at the large, very successful aerospace company where I labor, I have spent a great deal of time trying desperately to get the IT people to talk to the Engineering people. I haven’t, for the most part, been all that successful. Back in the day IT was truly an empire unto itself and it was pretty blind when it came to listening to the needs of the Engineering community. Furthermore, many of the systems that were used by various programs were dictated by the customers who were paying for our services and our products, basically NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and DOE.

This resulted in some very interesting problems with respect to systems, tools, and their use and subsequent development. What used to happen was Engineering would get an itch for a certain type of functionality but, since it hadn’t been contemplated in the original contract and since it might be some time before it could be renegotiated in order to get some money for developing the code required, Engineering would take it upon themselves to develop what they needed. You can imagine what happened many times. Though not an Engineer myself, I believe all Engineering students study one or more computer languages . .  . I’m fairly certain most of them  do.  Well, they would just get on the problem themselves, either writing code or – even worse – creating a tool in Excel.

So now we find ourselves in the interesting position of having something like a couple hundred tools, many quite useful, many overlapping in functionality. Many of them are unwieldy and kind of out-of-date, yet we don’t quite know how to get rid of them. This does seem to be changing somewhat as the tools of Enterprise 2.0 are gaining traction, i.e. blogs, wikis, user-generated content in general. Regardless, there are still numerous choices for how to deal with each of these as well. What wiki should we use? What about Open Source? (Anathema, btw, in my company – at least for now).

So the beat goes on. We keep adding tools, if at a slightly slower rate than previously (I think), and we seldom shed any. I suspect, as more and more content gets generated through the use of social media, and the ability to organize and make sense of it improves, we will eventually move away from many of the tools we’ve kind of grown up with. Data, too, will probably migrate toward a common format that can be accessed easily by anyone who wishes to and has authority to do so. It would be nice to see everyone on the same page, rather than pockets of people talking about the same thing in slightly different, and frequently incompatible, formats and locations.

I just finished a group presentation for a Knowledge Management course I am taking for my MBA. The company we presented is a huge data mining firm called Attensity. They focus on a wide variety of industries with specific attention being placed on goverment. Check it out…

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The recent tragedy at Fort Hood was only the latest in a series of crises that would likely have been prevented if the U.S. Government had adopted a logical holistic system design when I first began making the argument more than a decade ago. Since that time we’ve witnessed trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives lost; 9/11 and two wars, Katrina’s turf battles and incompatible communications, the mortgage bubble and global financial crisis, and now the Fort Hood massacre. The current trajectory of systems design and dysfunction isn’t sustainable.

While this particular tragedy is still under investigation, patterns are emerging that are very similar to previous crises, including 9/11. So let’s take a closer look at this event relative to what is currently possible with organizational design and state-of-the-art technology in order to better understand how to prevent the next crisis, for it will surely occur unless prevented by a logical holistic system design.

Crisis prevention by organizational design

It is true that some crises cannot be prevented, but it’s also true that most human caused crisis can be, particularly those that are systemic, including all cases cited here. In fact many tragedies are reported to have been prevented by intelligence agencies without our detailed knowledge, some of which would undoubtedly help inform our democracy if declassified, but we are still obviously missing preventable catastrophic events that we can ill afford to endure as a nation; economically or otherwise.

In each of the cases mentioned here, including Fort Hood, actionable evidence was available either on the Web or within the content of digital files residing on agency computer networks, but were not shared with the appropriate individuals or partners in the decision chain, usually due to careerism, turf protection, and justified fear of retribution.

It is difficult for leaders to understand that members in a hierarchical bureaucracy are often punished by micro social cultures for doing the right thing, such as sharing information or taking action to prevent tragedy. A good report from the field on 9/11 is Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller in 2002.

Interests are not aligned: Denial does not a better system make

The reality is that interests of the individual and that of the organization are often not well aligned, so system designs need to include intentional realignment. However, in the case of the Fort Hood massacre, red flags were so prevalent that many of us are asking the logical question: How explicit must a threat be before the systems will require action?

Red flags were hidden from those who need to know

In the case of Fort Hood, as was the case with 9/11, the U.S. Government apparently again experienced a data firewall between agency cultures, supported in previous cases by fear-induced interpretation of regulations and defensive micro cultures within agencies. The Washington Post reported that an FBI-led task force was monitoring emails of the suspect Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, some of which were shared with a Washington field office, but were not shared with the military, to include apparently Hasan’s supervisors who clearly were in the camp of ‘need to know’. A properly designed architecture as described in our recent hypothetical use case scenario for the DHS would have automatically alerted those in the decision chain who were pre-determined to ‘need to know’ when certain phrases are present, including the base commander and security officer in this case who may have prevented the tragedy in a manner that did not compromise the subject’s rights to privacy or freedom of religion.

One such semantic phrase for example that should probably be immediately shared with base commanders and counter terrorist experts would be: “communicating with known terrorists”. No one in the chain of command, including criminal investigators, should be empowered to prevent that information from reaching those in a position to prevent tragedy, whether a national security threat or localized. Indeed, logic suggests that local surveillance might be necessary in order to define the threat, if any.

Crisis Prevention by Technical Design

Among the many academic disciplines influencing modern enterprise architecture are organizational management, computer science (CS), and predictive theory, which manifests in the modern work place environment as network design, computer languages, and mathematical algorithms. The potential effectiveness of these disciplines depends primarily on three dynamically interrelated factors:

1. Availability and quality of the data

The problem reflected in the decades-old phrase GIGO (garbage-in garbage-out) used in computer science influenced the holistic semantic design of Kyield more than any other factor. Rather than attacking the root of the problem at the source and investing in prevention, CS in general and consumer search in particular have teetered at the edge of chaos by combining clever algorithms and massive computing power to convert unstructured data (GI) to relevance (GO). While search and conversion of unstructured data has improved substantially in the past decade, it cannot compare to a logically designed QIQO (quality-in quality-out) system. Evolving to a QIQO environment from GIGO in organizational computing requires a holistic solution that is focused on prevention, improving work quality, and enhanced innovation.

It became apparent during several years of extensive applied R&D shortly after the commercialization of the Internet and WWW that embedding intelligence in files would result in far more functionality and efficiency, particularly within enterprise networks.

Without availability of high quality data that provides essential transparency while protecting privacy, the potential of enterprise computing is severely hampered, and in some cases has already become more of the problem than the solution. Once essential data is collected containing carefully tailored embedded intelligence, the task of preventing crises can be semi-automated.

2. Interoperability through data barriers

Unlike other industries in previous technical revolutions, the U.S. has generally embraced a laissez-faire approach to technical standards, resulting in proprietary standards that are leveraged for market share. Unfortunately, the result in technology has been much like that in finance, although largely invisible with costs of inoperability transferred to customers. Unfettered innovation can have tragic consequences. In the network era, inoperable systems have increasingly contributed to some of our greatest challenges; including crisis prevention, cost and inefficiencies in healthcare, and reduced innovation and productivity in the workplace. So in our case, even though voluntary standards are less than ideal, we’ve embraced the W3C standards for public transactions.

3. Data constructs and analytics

Once the essential data is collected, many of our current great challenges in organizations become within reach:

• Red flagging can be automated while protecting jobs and privacy.
• Realignment of interests between the individual and organization.
• Accountability and meritocracy is far more achievable.
• Original work by individuals and teams can be protected.
• Information overflow can finally be managed well.
• Creativity and innovation can be enhanced.
• Predictive and ‘what if?’ modeling /algorithms are much easier.
• Formerly essential unknowns about the org become known.
• The organization can become more adaptive to change.
• Cultural management and continuous learning is manifest.
• Rich visual metrics of formerly unknown patterns become routine.

Crisis Review

To his credit Secretary Gates has called for a system-wide review of the Fort Hood tragedy, which will coincide with reviews by the Army, White House, and Congress.

However, it would be irresponsible not to emphasize that the underlying stresses that likely contributed to this tragedy are directly related to failure in preventing previous crises. The result of previous failures to adopt logically functional systems is that our macro-fiscal situation in the U.S. is now so degraded that future prevention requires a much greater effort than would have been the case a decade ago.

Preventing systemic crises and related security (economic and warfare) are the foremost reasons for our government agencies to exist, and was the primary motivation for creating Kyield, even if the holistic design provides many other side benefits. The system problem has now been solved by design; but it has yet to be adopted.

Master of Science Thesis, Carolyn Simmonds Zuniga, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science and Services (NAS) Group Trans-Sector-Innovation Delft University of Technology.

The Telecom sectors’ current evolutionary stage requires a thorough evaluation of all its current implementations in order ro restructure and consolidate them. In order ro maintain the vital telecom contribution to our society and economy, cost optimisations and the ability to keep on innovating in an increasing complex setting, need to be safeguarded. We know that, apart from financial difficulties, there are important handicaps in this sector itself: it has an ill-defined set of functions that has been addressed by different standardisation bodies. This has led to the main research question, namely:

How to identify a best of breed model which both reflects the current (2009) and the near future (2012)
Telecom sector functionality in order to come up with an advise about optimizing its internal functional structure taking into account the relevant requirements concerning interoperability with other sectors ?

The major objective of this study was to identify both the internal and external functions performed by the Telecom sector and thus reveal how they provide value to the other nodes in the sectors’ network. The Telecom sector (as defined in this document) is the research domain and subject of modelling in this thesis. Accordingly, the functional approach deliberately chosen for this project provides an implementation independent basis of knowledge that could be transferrable from the Telecom sector to other sectors or to different aggregation levels in the economy and society.

Download Final Version Thesis from original links …

Download Final Version Thesis from other links …

Read Trans-sector Innovation Framework …

Alignment: using the balanced scorecard to create corporate synergies By Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

All Enterprises can benefit from knowledge sharing throughout the organization. Even highly diverse business units, having different targeted customers and diverse value propositions, still conduct many similar or
identical processes, such as payroll, monthly financial reporting, recruiting, annual employee performance reviews, purchasing, vendor selection and payment, shipping, receiving and scheduling.

By sharing information about common processes, the enterprise has more opportunity to identify a best practice that can be implemented quickly across all business units. This best-practice knowledge capture and sharing will occur sooner and at lower cost than if independent companies had to contract among themselves for periodic benchmarking studies. For knowledge sharing, the larger and more diverse the corporation, the greater the chance that a process innovation will occur that can be leveraged into benefits throughout the corporate business units.

KM Sharing Pdf …

Read Knowledge Sharing in Kaplan Norton Alignment Book …

Knowledge administration is a address of methodical compilation, transfer, administration and administration of advice central organizations, forth with systems advised to accomplish the best of that knowledge. It refers decidedly to accoutrement and techniques developed to aegis advice and ability captivated by individuals who accomplish up the organization. It is at already acomputer application exchange and a allotment of consultancy convenance accompanying to fields such as aggressive intelligence. A key focus of ability administration deals with ability that is not accessible to digitally codify, such as alone experiences.

The action of ability administration additionally goes by a few added agreement in its assorted adorning stages. One is “corporate learning” and it has the afterward basal aims: recognizing, accession and systematizing absolute ability and facilitating the conception of fresh knowledge. Ability administration has existed from time immemorial, either in the anatomy of discussions, brainstorming sessions or in added academic means such as apprenticeships and able training apprenticeship programs.

However, it is alone now that ability administration is actuality congenital as a business practice, and appropriately it has apparent the addition of assertive ability and advice technology practices, the enactment of intranets aural accumulated environments and so on. All this is allotment of a bid to authorize ability administration systems.

Knowledge administration arrangement is a broadly broadcast hypermedia address for the administration of knowledge, advance of adroitness and the capturing, autumn and distributing of that ability and knowledge. The appellation hypermedia is acclimated to call a average in which audio, video and apparent argument bisect to actualize a crabbed approach of advice accumulator and dissemination. In added words, the appellation “hypermedia” can be acclimated as a believable addendum of the appellation “hypertext”.

For instance, the World Wide Web is a acceptable archetype of hypermedia, admitting the aforementioned cannot be said of a cine on DVD. The World Wide Web is acclimated as a amplitude area all-around advice is stored, accessed and transmitted through computers which are active to the Internet. The web is a amplitude that can be finer acclimated to apparatus ability administration systems effectively, aloof as the appointment intranet ability can additionally be used. In itself, it is not a ability administration system. However, it can be acclimated to abundance and admission a ability administration system.

Wonder whether we in 2012 will look back in anger or recognize the facts that some major transitions started in (or created) the great depression of 2008/2009!. Great to see how themes of this blog come back in Dominic’s post!

Found at http://www.futurelab.net/blogs/marketing-strategy-innovation/2009/08/new_way_work_top_5_trends_watc.html

by Dominic Basulto on 21 November, 2009 – 23:57

Looking back at pivotal events that took place within the business world in 2009, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are five macro trends that will be shaping a New Way to Work in 2010 and beyond. Together, these five trends point to a New Way To Work in which creativity and innovation are more valued by employers than ever before and the traditional notion of work as merely an economic activity is being supplemented by ideas about happiness and well-being.

Here are the five trends that I feel are creating The New Way To Work and what they mean to me:

(1) Organizations will embrace Design Thinking. In 2009, Tim Brown, the CEO of IDEO (arguably one of the most important design consultancies in the world), published Change By Design, which suggested that organizations must go even further in their embrace of right-brain, creative thinking. Design must become more than an aesthetic — it must become an integral part of the overall process of how companies think about products, services and customers. By extension, “design thinking” must now become part of any worker’s toolkit.

As Daniel Pink first suggested five years ago in his bestselling A Whole New Mind, right-brain thinking — in the form of creativity, innovation and big picture contextual thinking — is an increasingly important way for workers to demonstrate their value to their employers. Design thinking is, if anything, a stronger form of creativity and innovation that is focused around achieving specific business goals and objectives. As a result, design thinking will continue to play a key role in any organization’s business strategy as it attempts to differentiate itself vis-a-vis competitors. The most obvious examples are companies like Apple and Target, which have made breathtakingly-beautiful design part of their core value proposition.

(2) Women will play a more important role in re-defining traditional notions of work. In 2009, Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress published The Shriver Report, which attempted to catalogue the many ways that women are changing the U.S. workplace. In 2009, for the first time ever, women now account for more than 50% of all jobs in America. At the same time, women account for 57% of all bachelor’s degrees and 60% of all master’s degrees, making them the most important part in any company’s talent pipeline. Quite simply, with women now a majority in the U.S. workforce, organizations will need to reassess how well they are responding to the needs of women in the workplace. This ranges from new thinking about customized careers and flexible work arrangements to fundamentally important notions of how to encourage managerial traits such as empathy and compassion.

The most successful organizations will be companies like Pepsi, which has made the recruiting, retaining and promoting of women a company-wide priority. At Pepsi, not only is the CEO a woman (Indra Nooyi), but nearly one-third of all executives are women. There’s an economic payoff, too, from ensuring that women are members of your Board of Directors and members of your senior management team. Business school researchers at Pepperdine and Maryland have found that companies with women in these roles actually out-perform their rivals.

(3) Small business owners will become the new stars of economic growth. The “credit crunch” of the past 12 months, in which financial institutions systematically withdrew liquidity from the banking system in the hopes of stemming the tides of bad loans and foreclosures, appears to be coming to an end. As liquidity slowly makes its way back into the banking system, the first beneficiaries will be small business owners — some of whom had their access to funding turned off seemingly overnight. In recognition of this fact, the Obama Administration has made small business the linchpin of many of its economic policies. At the same time, companies like Goldman Sachs — which recently created a $500 million fund to foster and launch 10,000 small businesses — and American Express – through its OPEN Forum for small business owners — are jumping into the fray, in the hopes of galvanizing economic activity at the grassroots.

Small business owners have often been overshadowed as the traditional media focuses on the empire builders (yes, Donald Trump, that’s you) and the titans of industry rather than unheralded small business owners. Heading into 2010, though, this trend appears to be reversing. Monocle, for example, published a Small Business Guide for 2010 that is chock-full of examples of how resilient small business owners around the globe are re-inventing their industries. From equity research companies in Stockholm to interior design firms in Tokyo to graphic designers in Munich, these small businesses are inspiring examples of how creative, nimble and risk-taking ventures can bring real economic change to any industry. The women and men who dare to dream big now will be the first to reap the rewards once economic growth returns.

(4) “Happiness” will become a way to measure economic prosperity. In September, Nicolas Sarkozy, the (often controversial) president of France, announced that his country was seriously considering a “happiness index” that would transform factors like “quality of life” and “vacation time” into a broader measure of overall economic well-being. In short, the traditional way to measure national economic activity – Gross National Product (GNP) – would be supplanted by something called Gross National Happiness (GNH). This, of course, is a fundamentally new way to think about work that surely has economists scrambling to find a way to quantify something so unquantifiable as “happiness.” Other than France, only the tiny Himalayan nation of Bhutan has had the pluck and audacity to adopt the concept of Gross National Happiness. In 1972, Bhutan adopted GNH as a way to symbolize its dedication to spiritualist, Buddhist ideals rather than purely materialistic, Capitalistic ideals.

In many ways, this thinking about “happiness” is part of an overall paradigm shift in the world of economics that takes us further away from the purely “rational thinking” paradigm. Behavioral economists, led by Princeton’s Daniel Kahneman (who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), Yale’s Robert Shiller (who famously coined the term “irrational exuberance”) and Harvard’s Daniel Gilbert (who is typically credited as the founder of the “science of happiness”), are helping us understand that purely rational considerations are not all that matter when it comes to making decisions. (Shiller, in fact, specifically asked prominent New Yorker cartoonist Edward Koren to illustrate the book cover of Animal Spirits with his irrational wild things). Within the Obama Administration, ideas from the emergent field of behavioral economics are informing everything from solving for health insurance plans to helping workers save more in their 401(k) plans.

(5) Personal branding will become the buzzword of talented workers around the world. 2009 was the year that Gary Vaynerchuk and Dan Schawbel burst onto the scene with ideas about ways to use the leverage the Web for personal branding. Using everything from blogs to YouTube to Twitter, it’s now possible for everyday people to create a personal brand online — and then use it to launch new businesses based around their personal passions. Gary Vaynerchuk (known to his adoring fans as simply “Gary Vee”) showed what’s possible when you combine a passion for wine, a deep knowledge of social media, and a YouTube-ready personality. He turned a small family wine business into a national industry leader, becoming a national celebrity in the process.

Gary Vee has tapped into the current economic zeitgeist. Idealistic notions about lifetime employment with a single company are long gone. The only real job security is to create your own personal brand. With U.S. unemployment pushing above 10% in November, starting a new venture has become a very attractive option to millions of workers. Take the self-employment route and do what you love. Do it well, and you might just Crush It.

This last trend is perhaps the most important of all five mentioned above. The Internet as a distribution channel for a personal brand is unmatched. For freelance workers, the Internet has made it possible to showcase their best work to anyone in the world, at any time. Take photography, for example. Using the photo-sharing service Flickr, professional photographers have had a way to showcase and highlight their work. Starting in mid-2008, Flickr made it possible for anyone to buy royalty-free and rights-managed photos through a unique partnership with Getty Images. If your photography skills and talent are strong enough, you no longer need to give them away for free (the photo accompanying this blog entry was actually purchased via the Flickr collection of Getty Images).

Heading into 2010, I’m looking forward to watching how these five macro trends about The New Way To Work continue to evolve. Sometime in the future, no doubt, today’s world of work will look as wonderfully anachronistic as the world of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men appears to us now.

[photo credit: People at Work by BestPics/Flickr Collection/Getty Images]

NOTE: This blog entry is an official submission to the Elance “New Way to Work” competition. Email contact information: basulto [at] gmail.com.

Original Post: http://endlessinnovation.typepad.com/endless_innovation/2009/11/the-future-of-work-5-trends-to-watch-in-2010.html

Read more at http://www.futurelab.net/blogs/marketing-strategy-innovation/2009/08/new_way_work_top_5_trends_watc.html

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There are several issues that influence the competitiveness of any organization.  These factors are to be found in any domain (and are almost generic). This means that the organization will lead to the innovation, growth and decline of organizations.
Some organizations are privileged by owning a monopoly either backed by a government or by the fact that their products or services are superior to any of the competitors on the market. This makes the organization rather good to earn money since they often can set the price for the products and services as they want to; however this also leads to lack of agility since the pressure of the free market isn’t influencing the decision making of the management or the employees.
When organizations growth then they have a tendency to become more bureaucratic since there is a greater need for coordinating among the members of the organization, departments and management. This leads to a great degree of standardization but it also leads to a decline in agility compared to changes in the domain of the organization.
Therefore it becomes a question on how to cope with the need for coordination (bureaucracy) and the need for agility.
This can become an influence that impacts the organization and if it is used correctly then the organization can gain a competitive advantage.
Likewise can the way the organization make use of a technology become a competitive advantage for the organization. An example of this is that the organization might be superior to any competitors to utilize their information technology like software and hardware to support and develop their processes. These processes might in return prove to become easier to handle and create more value than the processes the competitors of the organization have.
Organization culture might also prove to become a competitive advantage since it indoctrinates the employees to act in a specific way. If the organization culture makes the members of the organization find and discover errors and eliminate the errors then the cost of repair and service fall and re-enforce the brand of the organization and re-enforce the good will the customers of the organization has to the organization.
Thereto will coherency management assist the host organization with creating a competitive advantage since it will assist the management and the various other stakeholders in the organization developing the necessary overview and consistent information that can be used to make the proper decisions.
Thereto if IT, business processes, organization culture, corporate strategy aren’t aligned then the organization will experience that the system is not able to fulfill the its potential and will therefore the organization will experience opportunity costs.
It is therefore in the interest of the management to work with the organization to achieve its goals and it is in the interest of the employees to assist making their work place better for them. It is the interest of them to feel productive and feel that their work matters for the organization. It is therefore a paradigm to involve them in the decision making but they too should be kept informed on how the organization develops.
Coherency Management is building on the principles on identifying the underlying architecture in the organization and enhancing the development of the architecture and by that the organization.
This is done by applying the tools from Enterprise Architecture to identify and evaluate the various processes and adding the technology needed to enhance the processes or re-think the processes to generate more organizational value.
It is therefore a strategical tool to evaluate and rebuild the architecture of the organization to match those tasks and challenges the organization will face in the future competition. A solid architecture which can be extended and reused will be a necessity in the future so the organization can grow and develop an architecture that can be used to connect the processes, people, departments and organizations to develop the right products and services to the right price.

Organizations will in the future be able to align them self to one or more syndicates to create products which are cheap enough to sell to the people in the third world. The organizations in these  syndicates have to know their architecture to understand and connect to these shifting syndicates and if these organizations either don’t know or understand their architecture then they will not be able to join the syndicates and gain the benefits from it.

Therefore is it of strategic importance that all organization work with and articulate their architecture to enable abilities of agility, knowledge and innovation and to that all the support functions and processes to enable interactions with so called networked organizations and syndicates.

To give the analyst some insight into how IT influences the an Architecture then it is advised that the analyst reads about critical issues in IT management.

Hello. My name is Art and I am the Chief Knowledge Integrator for my organization.  I used to be the Chief  Knowledge Manager, but times are changing and so is my role in the organization. I still am responsible for overseeing knowledge based activities such as tacit to explicit transfer as a means to reduce organizational knowledge loss, facilitation of collaborative communities to increase efficiencies and drive innovation, and working throughout the organization to infuse the processes, procedures, and policies that support an enterprise culture of collaboration that enables us to make better decisions faster and with better results, but now my organization needs more. The lines between Information Technology and Business Operations are dissolving. The CIO is now focused more on enabling the business then on managing IT resources, while the Operations Directors are now focused on delivering results faster and with more impact through the use of enabling technologies. My job as CKI is to develop the strategies, tactics, and techniques that connect the right information and knowledge to the right people at the right time in the context they need, and ensure they have to know-how to adopt and use the resources. My role is unique in the sense that I need to play a part in all aspects of the organization from strategy development, to operations, to education and training, to sales, to human resources, to finance and metrics and assessment. My goal is to focus the organization on maximizing our corporate knowledge and intellectual capital while minimizing knowledge gaps, and empowering the workers to leverage all the information, knowledge, and resources at their disposal.

I have also found that my new title resonates better with my organization then CKM did. For some reason people understand the notion of knowledge integration better than knowledge management. They can see how knowledge integration strategies can foster better decision making, promote business agility, and connect people to information in context more than they could in a knowledge management context. They also seem to understand that integration requires an organizational/cultural, people, and technology approach to be effective. Yes, I know that was the same with KM, but for some reason the notion of integration resonates better.

I am happy to be part of the next generation of knowledge leaders who will hold the CKI title. I expect that in the next 15 years the job will become obsolete as organizations continue to infuse IT and Business operations, and knowledge strategies, tactics, and methodologies are inculcated into the daily routine of operations, but until then I am proud to be a Chief Knowledge Integrator.

Indeed, as an operational manager I always state that my personal productivity will increase with at least 15% in case the rigid use of guidelines and applications of our corporate ICT Guidelines would be loosened.

Found at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703567204574499032945309844.html

By NICK WINGFIELD

Does this sound familiar?

At the office, you’ve got a sluggish computer running aging software, and the email system routinely badgers you to delete messages after you blow through the storage limits set by your IT department. Searching your company’s internal Web site feels like being teleported back to the pre-Google era of irrelevant search results.

At home, though, you zip into the 21st century. You’ve got a slick, late-model computer and an email account with seemingly inexhaustible storage space. And while Web search engines don’t always figure out exactly what you’re looking for, they’re practically clairvoyant compared with your company intranet.

This is the double life many people lead: yesterday’s technology for work, today’s technology for everything else. The past decade has brought awesome innovations to the marketplace—Internet search, the iPhone, Twitter and so on—but consumers, not companies, embrace them first and with the most gusto.

Even more galling, especially to tech-savvy workers, is the nanny-state attitude of employers who block access to Web sites, lock down PCs so users can’t install software and force employees to use clunky programs. Sure, IT departments had legitimate concerns in the past. Employees would blindly open emails from persons unknown or visit shady Web sites, bringing in malicious software that could crash the network. Then there were cost issues: It was a lot cheaper to get one-size-fits-all packages of middling hardware and software than to let people choose what they wanted.

But those arguments are getting weaker all the time.

Read more from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052748703567204574499032945309844.html

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In 1995 I co-authored a paper [1] about “Change Proofing” – the ability of a commercial organization to manage change stimulated by largely unanticipated, hard-to-predict events and shocks. Examples up to that time included trauma due to third world debt in the 1970s, the energy industry in the 1980s, and commercial real estate and corporate buy-outs in the 1990s.

History shows that the consequences of failing to recognize and interpret harbingers of change can be devastating. It is said that the ancient Peruvian Indians were unable to “see” the sails of the invading Spanish fleet, and dismissed them as mirages. More recent historical (hysterical?) examples of myopia include US automobile manufacturers who were blinkered to Pacific-Rim competitors, and even IBM, which was long unprepared for opportunities presented by the explosive growth of personal computing.

Clearly-identified business trends, such as globalization, technology, demographics and new social orders, had often been cited up to 1995 as drivers of change. However, little attention had been given to management of change stimulated by largely unanticipated, hard-to-predict events and shocks, such as rapid oil price changes or the sudden collapse of centrally-planned economies. Few models of such change, or techniques to plan or cope with it had been presented in the literature in 1995 or since for that matter, although even in 1993 according to such an authority as Ed Schein [2]: “…the problem is not management of change but the management of surprise”.

Change Proofing was not intended as a means to resist or avoid change, but rather a process for becoming more flexible and responsive in order to cope with it. The Change Proofing paper proposed that environmental shocks and surprises could best be managed by increasing the ability of the organization itself to anticipate, recognize and respond to them – surprise surprise – before hand! The paper set out theoretical reasoning, but more importantly it detailed a straightforward practical Change Audit that would help organizations of all types and sizes frame and address critical factors for Change Proofing; form more realistic and objective views of radical environmental change; and develop better means of coping with surprise. The paper also recommended that the Change Audit should cover organizational learning processes and their impact on strategic focus, motivation and core capabilities.

So what can one say about current events? Too bad so many of today’s organizations haven’t read the paper or didn’t heed its message?! Well, it’s not too late to plan for next time – and there will be a next time – so I invite you to have a look at the paper now …

[1] Drew, S.A.W. & Smith, P., The Learning Organization: Change Proofing and Strategy, The Learning Organization, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1995

[2] Schein, E.H., How can organizations learn faster? The challenge of the green room, Sloan Management Review, Winter, 1992; pp. 85 – 92

Top 5 Problems with Service Today

We’ve all been the victims of bad service. We have to repeat ourselves to agents; we get different answers depending on whether we use email or we call a service rep; or worse, we don’t even receive a response. We have a tendency to blame the agents.

But it’s not their fault. They want to do a good job. They just don’t have the tools they need to meet customers’ expectations of personalized, consistent, accurate and fast service. They don’t have the tools because their technology isn’t working.

Thus, I trace bad service to 5 root causes:

- IT organizations have not solved the integration problem. Agents need dozens or often hundreds of un-integrated tools and applications to perform their jobs. Agents must toggle through many applications in the span of a service call, resulting in long hold times.

- IT organizations have not solved the change problem. Agent tools are typically hardwired together. When procedures change in a company, IT organizations cannot quickly respond to the changes in order to give the agents the new tools that they need.

- Knowledge management vendors have not solved the knowledge problem. Corporate knowledge exists on an island; it does not fit into the context in which agents are searching for content. This means that agents need to wade through many solutions in order to find the one that is right for a particular customer.

- Case management vendors have not solved the business process management problem. Today, business or call center leaders can’t drive agents through clear processes. This means that they put the responsibility of following the right resolution processes in the hands of agents, which are not all equally competent.

- Organizations have not solved the agent training and turnover problem. Businesses know how they want service delivered, but they can’t have their best, most highly trained agents handle every interaction.

How do we start solving these problems? We start with technology. We implement service-oriented architectures (SOAs) to begin integrating systems in a flexible way so that information is no longer siloed. This means that when processes change, IT systems can be rewired easily, without a tremendous amount of overhead. We ensure knowledge is it’s shared and applied appropriately. We present in a way that makes sense to agents, and we use it to inform our decisions about what’s working and what’s not working in our service processes. We provide agents with stepped procedures for each and every service interaction that allows them to provide the consistent service that we desire. If we are able to achieve these goals, and provide agents with the tools they need to succeed, then we’re solved our final dilemma. Because every agent becomes as good as our best, most highly trained agent.

Ever heard the old cliche, “Knowledge is Power?” While the saying is tired, the advice is not. The life cycle of knowledge provides us with invaluable life tools manifested in what I have divided into three stages: getting it, using it, and passing it on. Each stage provides us with hidden benefits that reach far beyond the surface value of learning a subject.

Learning is the process of acquiring knowledge. Learning empowers us with critical thinking skills necessary in all decision-making, big or small. Learning requires taking an active role in your development of a broad and in-depth body of knowledge. Go beyond life’s lessons and educate yourself. Never stop learning; go back to school and finish that degree, check out graduate school, or join a local professional organization that offers development training. Take a cooking class or learn a new language. On a budget with your time or money? Read a book or white paper. Interview people who inspire you or ask your elderly neighbor about their youth. Opportunities to learn abound. Remember, your brain is a muscle that must be exercised! Use it or lose it.

Knowledge gives us the tools to make sense of our experiences and to think logically. The more we know, the better equipped we are to weigh out the possibilities in front of us, and with that comes confidence in decision-making. Knowledge keeps us relevant and helps us communicate with different people. Diversity prevails in this post-modern world, placing importance on learning a wide range subjects. Seek out new and interesting opportunities. If anything intimidates you, you should try it once. We fear that which we do not know. Plunge and explore the unknown.

Knowledge kept is knowledge incomplete. The life cycle of knowledge is incomplete if it remains in the mind of the knower. Pass on what you learn! There is no world limitation on the amount of knowledge to go around. Don’t try to give yourself the upper hand and hoard what you know. Let others benefit from your experience and inspire them to explore the world. The greatest personal growth is often experienced when assisting in the growth of another. Engaging in the exchange of knowledge opens us to learning more.

Learning gives us the power of critical thinking. Knowledge gives us the power to see and seize opportunity. The selfless sharing of knowledge is the highest form of growth. For these reasons and more, never stop seeking, using, and passing knowledge.

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