Informationoverlord

There is a nice straightforward article by Thomas Vander Wal on Zdnet blogs about Taxonomies.  In it he explains why - as many of us know - that withi an organisation it should not be a choice between traditional taxonomies OR social tagging/folksonomies, but that it should be an AND choice with the latter informing and feeding into the former.

The fact that a Taxonomy should be a living thing is one I have seen overlooked in companies before.

 Vander Wal uses the following table to show how by combining them each of their strengths accounts for the other’s deficiencies.

Good article. Well worth a read.

Google has announced that it is pulling the plug on Jaiku - the once very promising Twitter competitor. Or, at least, it is stopping developing it as an ‘official google service’ - along with doing the same or killing off: Google Catalog Search, Google Notebook, Dodgeball and the Google Mashup Editor. (although some of these will all still have some Google input as a 20% project by Googlers). With Jaiku, Google plans to release it into the Open Source community. According to the announcement the new open source Jaiku Engine project will appear on Google Code under the Apache License 2.0. According to Google this move will allow organizations, groups and individuals to be able to “roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine”. [The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth] So, Jaiku will now live or die down to whether there is enough community interest to work on it an improve the service.

I must admit to being surprised by this announcement. I was interested and excited when Google bought Jaiku back in October 2007, whilst it was still an invitation only service (it still is). At the time I thought they had bought the best product on the market (and I have said since that I still think it is better) I had always though that the plan for Jaiku was to either exploit the mobile market - and add it as a key component of Android or to make it part of their Google Apps suite and target businesses and use behind the firewall. So, is this Google admitting that it backed the wrong horse and SHOULD have bought Twitter? - perhaps it still will? Or is this Google realising there is no way to make any money on Microblogging, and it is better off not even trying?

Steve Rubel thinks that Google has not finished here and that the development cull may continue. He suggests Google Reader could be next for the development kill off? I’m not sure I am buying that one, although I can certainly see it becoming less of a priority.

So, what will an open source Jaiku rise from the ashes? People are not exactly falling over themselves to desert Twitter for identi.ca, so unless the market is the enterprise market, I would not hold my breath.

My Jaiku timeline.

“A market without enterprise use of business class RSS readers is like a flock of sitting ducks. Any company that steps up to make serious strategic use of such software should be at an immediate advantage in terms of early and efficient access to information.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at the excellent Readwriteweb has written what amounts to an obituary for enterprise RSS, or at least enterprise-specific RSS readers, saying “it looks to us like the demand simply never arose and that market is over.”

Is this really true? or are we just asking the wrong question about RSS.

Is the widespread presence of - what we would regard as - ‘rss readers’ within an organisation a good gauge of whether or not that organisation and those within it are using RSS? I don’t think it is. Whilst organisations may not be adopting ‘a business class RSS reader’, many have adopted Office 2007 and or IE7 and 8 and have members of staff using those to deliver their feeds - and in the case of Office 2007 - into the receptacle that means the most to them - their Outlook inbox.

MK says “We suspect that many people who combine email and RSS don’t know how to use either, but we are totally open to being convinced otherwise. It seems to us that in order to effectively manage feeds they should live outside of email, as the two mediums are very different.”

Surely this depends on the individual and how they work? How many feeds to they subscribe to? How many emails do they get a day? Do they live in their Blackberry, or always sit at their desk? As it happens, I do prefer to keep my feeds outside of my email application, but just because I do, doesn’t mean everyone else does, or indeed should.

I know a growing number of organisations using feeds or combinations (mash-ups) of feeds who are displaying these on intranets as updates for their employees or groups of employees. These are invariably created and managed by library and information, BD, and marketing and communications staff to help keep their employees in the know about certain topics/developments. So the use of RSS is - I would argue - growing quite rapidly within the enterprise, even if is not always at an individual level. Those involved in information provision, business development, competitive intelligence and marketing and communications are more often than not using RSS and RSS readers - whether web-based or company sanctioned - to deliver strategic advantage to their organisations.

In the field of law, the fact that Westlaw, Lexis, PLC and others have all launched RSS capability for the delivery of their updates/saved searches etc in the past few months, I think demonstrates that they are ware of its importance and are - in these cases - responding to pressure for users to offer RSS.

The question is who needs to use the resulting feeds. In some sectors, such as the legal profession, many lawyers have enough problems reading all their emails, without also navigating their way through loads of rss feeds each day. It is their business service staff - such as librarians, BD, and marketing people who they use as ‘their filters’ to identify what it is they need to know. Obviously, this is never going to be as effective as a lawyer doing it themselves, but most do not have to time or inclination to do so, and having a business class RSS reader at their disposal would do little or nothing to change that view; so others effectively act as their human business class RSS reader, doing so as part of a continuing provision of effective current awareness services.

So, are enterprise-specific RSS readers dead? I think if you look at it expecting huge multinational companies to all buy and roll out Newsgator’s or Attensa’s enterprise product to all their staff, then they may be - as least if that is not part of a wider, and more integrated adoption of an enterprise 2.0 strategy. Sadly, most companies have already signed on the Microsoft dotted line, so will take what Microsoft can offer for free as opposed to paying for something additionally which they perceive as serving the same purpose.

One thing is for certain, and that is that RSS use within the enterprise is alive and well and is - I believe - set to continue to grow rapidly over the next 12 months.

I got sent a link this morning to a fascinating conversation on KM between Patrick Lambe with Dave Snowden and Larry Prusak. (it last 42 mins)

In the video they talk about the history of KM and whether KM is an idea that is dead. They speak about the 3 generations of KM: (i) just information management; (ii) collaborative technologies, and (iii) now an approach which is more set of principles - not one size fits all - and is more organic.

Dave Snowden points out that the fundamental assumptions of the dominant theories of KM don’t match the organic nature of human interaction. Building on this idea they say that the traditional view of KM is dead but wont lie down: What’s dead?

• that it is mostly a technological subject;
• that documents in repositories equals knowledge;
• taking IM and calling it KM;
• that a large Bureaucracy, run by the central part of the organisation, is a good idea for working with knowledge;
• that knowledge exists outside of people;
• that knowledge itself can be measured in some way, that you can ROI knowledge.

Asked, will still be Knowledge Managers in 5yrs time ?

Dave said Yes, but they will be junior members of IT department. Larry, on the other hand thought the job title would die, and they would be called practice coordinators/knowledge brokers - whose job it would be to keep track of ‘ the knowledge of the group’ . Patrick chimed in here with “or even librarians.”

This was interesting as they then made the point that librarians who are interesting in knowledge often leave librarianship in order to seek roles within KM. The reason’s they see for this are that: whilst being a librarian is very valuable work , it’s often a poorly paid position, with low status within the organisations, and as Larry quips, is also something everyone thinks they can do.

The latter point is certainly a true one, although I sometimes think that we librarians are partly to blame for this, as we often fail to promote ourselves and what we do within an organisation. How is the head of the organisation to know what you ‘actually’ do and the ‘actual’ value you provide without highlighting these aspects of our work, our skills, and the resources that we utilise. The initial point of librarians often leaving the profession in search of knowledge (so to speak) is, again, one with which I am all too familiar. We do have a profession that puts you in a box and wants to keep you there, and it is often only by dropping the ‘L’ word, that more expansive and challenging roles and opportunities present themselves. This in some ways could lead onto a question , not of is KM dead, but are librarians and librarianship dead or dying? One to ponder.

Patrick, Dave and Larry also discuss the codification concept of KM, and how blanket codification of things doesn’t work. Larry argues that whilst codified repositories, are not bad in themselves, they are often mistaken for being actual knowledge. He states it is “wrong to say you are going to work with something as elusive, human, complex, contextual and local as knowledge, by managing knowledge in a repository - It’s like saying I’m going to mange an apple tree by building a cabinet”. He see this as part of the myth that knowledge, which is a very human thing, can be managed by technological means.

Dave is even more forthright stating there is “no excuse for document libraries other than as archivists. Active documents should now be in dynamic information structures, which is the wiki type concept, and variations - possible with publication points, possibly with authorisation.” This is an interesting view, which basically sees two type of document: - active and archive. I think this is a good approach, although people like the think of things as finished/final/complete, and not as a work-in-progress. You want to say: look these guidelines are finished. In truth the guidelines almost always will not be finished, and the document for them should be live and open, until the need for the guideline has ceased.

Dave comments - and this is something I agree with wholeheartedly - that social computing is doing a lot of what were the original intentions of KM, but accidentally, and from the bottom up. He sees blogs as replicating the school/university common room - bringing together people from different disciplines to chat and exchange ideas. This, for me, is right on the money. Social computing allows KM to be transformed and allows for that organic growth by allowing networks to form in organisations, and for the learning and exchanging of ideas to no longer be confined to set groups who purportedly ‘know’ about the subject matter under discussion.

It isn’t a panacea for everything, but it starts to capture and replicate the way people interact in ‘the real world’ , and how they really think - the terms someone might use to tag a document/web page etc says a lot about how that person’s mind operates, when not tied down by rigid taxonomies. This is why facebook etc work and most organisation intranets don’t, because the trust is being placed with the individual to manage their relationships instead of the organisation trying to manage their relationships.

I could go on and on, but I will just say that if you have any interest in how knowledge and information are handled within an organisation, then listening to this is a must. I will also add that there is - some might say controversial - stuff in the discussion that I would have liked to have heard Dave and Larry expand on, especially their views on eLearning (which they think is a waste of time), and Myers-Briggs (ditto). I obviously need to go in search of more of their work.

Computer Weekly has a nice piece on LinkedIn, asking whether or not social networking sites can provide real business value. Many of the views voiced in the article seem to reflect where I am with it. I feel there is a value, even if it is not demonstratable to me at this moment in time. Killer quote: “LinkedIn seems to have realised that the site has become a bit of a Panini sticker album, where members collected contacts without there being an end goal or benefit in sight. So the danger is that it becomes bloated with extra functionality without delivering value for the time people invest in it” (Philip Szomszor, Berkeley PR)

Meanwhile, the Current Issue of the New Scientist has a couple of pieces on ‘home entetainment’ which includes a piece on citizen Media by Dan Gillmore and a look at what web3.0 might look like by Annalee Newitz - her conclusion ‘ web3.o will be about making information less free’ and ‘enjoy web2.0 while it lasts’

The current issue of ‘Online’ has an interesting article on using Wikis by Anne Welsh (Information Officer at DrugScope) entitled: Internal Wikis for Procedures and Training: From Tacit Knowledge to Self-Guided Learning

It looks at how DrugScope have used wikis as part of their staff training process, sitting between ‘formal and informal communications’. I was particularly struck by this paragraph, which highlighted for me one of the main reasons that tools such as wikis can be dynamite in the enterprise environment. Anne is describing how printed notes are given out in training but then scribbled notes from those trained are harvested, and added to the wiki.

“In short, using the wiki format has given those of us involved in training access to the notes our trainees write in the margins of our training notes. This provides a valuable reflux action to the training process. I provide new staff members with a set of notes, as well as face-to-face and screencast training. They then add their notes and input their annotations to the wiki. There I can see the annotations and incorporate them into my notes for the next new staff member.”

This simple way of capturing the tacit knowledge of new staff members from day one, is one I admire very much. Not only does it help improve the training materials, but it also engages new staff members in collaboration from their first day on the job.

Oliver at Headshift has an excellent post entitled ‘Behind “Enterprise 2.0″ Performance: Exploitation or Exploration?’

Two particular comments stood out for me.

“IT people still put communication processes on the backburner and favour operational processes. They don’t understand that knowledge work cannot be limited to processes, that it is multi-faceted communication flows around processed tasks that make things work. Meetings, e-mails, phone, IM, blogs, wikis, information aggregators and filtering devices wrap defined task oriented programmes up. The former help employees use the later, more efficiently”.

and:-

“The corporate world needs no more old routines hidden behind new tools. Stop confusing documents and information. Stop forcing people using only emails and Enterprise Content Management. ECM reduces workflow to permission and conversation to versioning. Emails create confusion in conversations. This replicates ageless routines. Replication does not create performance in a world of innovation”.

Meanwhile, Charon QC spoke to David Jabbari, of Allen & Overy on education, know-how and training in a City law firm on his podcast last week. Mentions the importance of harnessing social networking tools in business.