Goodbye

Well here is one last post before the semester is over. I think this course has been extremely beneficial and I have really learned much more than KM. In my mind KM is more than just an IT tool, it is a vision that encompasses everyday life and culture at an organization. The part that culture plays in KM implementations is huge but the part that management plays can be very influential in changing these things. I'm excited to get to work in an organization where I can actually use KM for its true purpose.

From all of these blog posts it has been really nice to explore my own experiences as well as those of others I have found through reading many more things online. I can't say this class would have been the same without this reflection. Overall you need to use KM tools to truly experience it and understand how to use/implement it. And this blog was very successfull in doing so. 

A KM Experience Reaches My Sister

My sister has been very interested in what I am learning in this KM class from the first day in September. She is working at a small internet start-up company doing search-engine optimization, and has always made it a priority to learn the latest and greatest on the internet. The company she is working at is called Yodle, and is based on a school project designed at the Warton School of Business. At the ripe young age of 26, the founder uses many technologically advanced techniques in making his business run as efficiently as possible. Just this past week, she mentioned that all the stuff I have told her about in my class is coming to Yodle!

Apparently the company is starting their own wiki in order to make it easier for the employees to contact people for advice on how to better handle clients. They created the wiki to store things like powerpoint slides made for presentations and things that they generally don't know where to store. In addition to file storage and advice sections, they wiki is also going to act as a social networking site. The employees already have a contact directory that lists the accounts that everyone has, but the wiki is adding a section for every employee to list some things about themselves "to make employees feel more comfortable contacting people they don't know." 

The interesting thing about this wiki though, is that not all employees can have access to change things. The employees have to go through an administrator to update anything. My first question when hearing this was "Doesn't that defeat the purpose of a wiki?" But after thinking about it some more, it seems the wiki isn't being used for the same purposes we have discussed in class, although it does take advantage of the enormous flexibility. Yodle is using a wiki as a kind of internal portal, but I wonder how this will evolve in the coming years as Yodle's clients and problems grow.  Any thoughts?

The KM Response to the Economic Crisis

In addition to discussing how KM is used with organizations, we talked about KM tools open to the general public. I have listed some of them in the links on the right. I found an extremely interesting article recently about how blogging is being used to combat the economic crisis and everyone being laid off from their jobs. The article mentions how free lance writers are going to be attempting a new style of creating a career. They call it "guerilla" like as in guerilla warfare. Their approach seems to be going back to the American entrepreneurial style. A lot liked linked in, new writer blogs can act as a yellow pages for people looking to hire writers or publish books. It's fascninating how Web 2.0 tools are changing and becoming flexible to our society. 

In my first blog post on my experiences with KM, I mentioned that the youth generation was becoming reliant on new KM tools and that eventually this will be able to be seen in the workplace. This article reinforces that and shows that now the workplace is becoming intertwined with our personal KM needs. In organizations blogs are also being used as kind of advertisements for skills and ideas. Which brings me to my thought of using a "Craigs List" within an organization to be able to progress ones job promotion quicker. Ultimately employees may have to use this "guerilla" career building technqies on an everyday basis. Scary thought! 

"For Laid-Off Journalists, Free Blog Accounts"

Web 3.0

In prepartion for the Knowledge Management forecasting paper coming up, I have decided to start looking into what is out there. I came across this article on a NY Times Blog and found it very interesting. The blog post speaks about how Silicon Valley is moving beyond Web 2.0 tools and moving to what they call the Semantic Web and Web 3.0 tools. The post also mentions that previously the Web 2.0 tools are only available to large corporations and sharing/creating knowledge within them. This Web 3.0 that is coming about is an attempt to bring Web 2.0 to the average user. I am fully aware that I am not an expert in this, but from what I have seen besides the few extremely large corporations Web 2.0 is not being fully utilized. How can companies think that coming up with new tools is going to help if they aren't even using current tools available? Also is this shift to Web 3.0 really a semantic web? Or is it just opening integrated Web 2.0 tools to the general public? I am excited to see what Silicon Valley has come up with, but I am concerned about its implementation. If smaller companies can't even implement Web 2.0 how are they going to be able to move to Web 3.0?

Semantic Web Blog Post YouTube Video on Web 3.0

Does Location Matter in KM?

Recently I found an interesting book by an author while researching a little bit more about KM. The book is called "Who's your city?" by Richard Florida and he brings up the point that even though all of the new technologies allowing us to collaborate across continents and telecommute to work, location really is still important to our careers. He even feels that location is more important than ever. I read the first chapter of the book and although it touches on many things beyond just sharing knowledge based on location, I completely agree in feeling that Knowledge Management is becoming increasingly important in our globalized "flat" world. A lot of the articles these days touch on using KM in order to bring employees on different continents closer to each other. It's amazing that technology can make us feel like we are closer than ever and at the same time continue to make us realize how we really are worlds apart. The book brings to light an important theme often lost in the excitement of technology: culture. We talk about organizational culture often, but many people forget about the cultures of the countries/societies we are working in. Since our culture has been given so much more mobility people are now taking advantage of it. Therefore we can even venture to say that where we live tells a lot about our lifestyle and ultimately our values. I believe that companies can benefit by this and are going to start capitalizing on this theory. Some may call it discrimination but isn't it the same as picking someone based on the fact that they fit into the company culture better? Ultimately Richard Florida discusses location as a key factor in creating a "creative class" for an industry and attracting the best of the field to one location. I am interested to find this book to read more....

Richard Florida's Book Website

Flirting with Google and Scaring the Bejesus out of Microsoft

Wow, amazing timing for our class to be finishing up our case analysis on Google. The article Professor Jang sent us is very interesting:

P&G Flirts with Google Apps and Scares the Bejesus out of Microsoft

The only thing that I thought the article didn't address was probably a major factor in P&G's decision: security. Briefly mentioned in my last post about Google, security is a major factor in Google's entry into the Enterprise world. The security features of Gmail just aren't going to cut it for enterprises carrying extremely sensitive data - for example medical records or payroll information. When everything is going to be centered around web-based applications, security better be as excellent as can be. BUT has Google ever made us think their security is not superior to Microsoft? If you think about how secretive Google has been about their PageRank algorithm, we should not be doubting them at all. Through all of the scares of Google becoming a major competitor of Microsoft I do think that we should be happy. Microsoft now has a competitor to give them a run for their money, maybe they will acutally take a que from Google's innovation and instead of following the pack become the leader of the pack again.

A better question to be asking is if Google is going to become the next Microsoft-like bully...

IBM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_x78XLBBVM

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I have been intrigued by IBM's success and by how they have been one of the early adopters of KM. What is even more interesting is how they are so vocal about its importance and their success. Isn't this a competitve advantage they are giving away? I recently attended a recruiting session for IBM and they listed their Web 2.0 KM tools as a large recruiting tool. One of the ways they explained their tools was in relating them to tools open to the general public in order for the company to feel small amongst its thousands of employees:

BlueTube - You Tube
Dogtagging - del.ico.ous
Wiki - Wikipedia
BluePages - Facebook/Yellow Pages

I also found other tools (more on the enterprise level) when researching a little bit about IBM. I guess we can all learn a lot about IBM's success. They have converted well-liked/used tools widely available to the public into internal tools just for their employees and created the largest intranet in the world. IBM has become successfull because they have basically created their own INTERNET! Imagine that? It is apparent that IBM has realized the power of knowledge and have even conquered social issues that our class as encountered (ex confidence in declaring oneself an "expert" in order to publish their knowledge) and has saved approximately 220,000 hours of practitioner time. No wonder they are bouncing back after their brief loss of market share in the 90's. And no wonder our class and practicaly all of the project's presented in class (including my own on CRM) are studying IBM as an example of success. My question now, is what are they concocting next?

Some articles I found interesting about IBM's success:

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=16907&PageNum=1

http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/journal/sj/404/thomas.html