Just recently I discovered an enlightening weblog that after reading through some of the different posts I just knew I had to subscribe to it to keep up with some interesting and worth while discussions. The weblog itself is eContent by Rich Hoeg and you can find it over here. Rich gets to talk quite a bit about managing content remotely (eContent) as well as eLearning, two areas that anyone doing Knowledge Management would always be quite interested in reading some more, wherever it may be coming from. So, like I said, I subscribed to Rich’s weblog and so far I have found some very interesting articles that I will be referencing over time and which are worth while reading to say the least. But I am going to start today with one particular weblog post that I have found very helpful and worth while catching up with: Corporate Use of Wikis.

In that particular weblog post, Rich shares some further information details regarding his reports on the recent event Wikimania he attended and that includes as well a link to a wiki space over at Socialtext (Another weblog worth while subscribing to is Ross Mayfield’s, Socialtext CEO) that I am sure quite of us would be interested in: Enterprise Wikimania. In it, you would be able to find some interesting links to help fast forward the adoption of social software within the enterprise (Something that I have weblogged about already not long ago myself a couple of times), along with some case studies and best practices, some additional webloggers who are covering these topics and some other wiki related topics to the enterprise usage of them.

Quite an interesting resource, I must say, that working myself in one of the largest IT corporations out there is going to keep my interest as to how it would grow further from there. I may be able, perhaps, at a later time to add some further input based on our own exposure to social software within the enterprise but so far you can have a good overview at IBM’s Knowledge Management Strategy Part II - Entering the Web 2.0 World. Thus later in time I shall let you know how that goes. For the time being Corporate Use of Wikis and Enterprise Wikimania seem to be two useful, and worth while, bookmarking resources to check out at a later time.

Tags: eContent, Elearning, Enterprise Technology, Social Software, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, IBM, Web 2.0, Wikis, Weblogs, Socialtext, Wikimania

A few weeks ago a colleague of mine, Jack Mason, invited me to check out a new IBM initiative that is coming up later on this year (Around September / October timeframe) and which is supposed to bring social networking into the IBM enterprise. But with a twist. Indeed, the actual initiative is called The Greater IBM Connection and right at that moment when I was first exposed to it I was very excited about the whole thing. And big time! Why? You may be wondering. Well, because this initiative will actually shape a good chunk of IBM’s adoption of social software within the enterprise. Something that I weblogged about not so long ago. Indeed, The Greater IBM Connection is an IBM sponsored initiative that will put together in the same social network current and former IBMers, who have decided to try out other adventures but who would want to still keep in touch with everything IBM related. That is right, this would be the beginning of a massive social network between current and former employees who would still want to keep in touch and take advantage of the actual network. Here is an interesting quote from the weblog’s About page:

"The Greater IBM (blog) is a channel for people who have worked at IBM and want to remain connected to IBMers past, present and future in a new kind of network that will serve new kinds of relationships"

Thus as you can see from that particular quote this is a social network initiative to help get together people who currently work in IBM and also those who have left the company but who would still want to get in touch in one way or another. That is why Greater IBM will be providing a number of different venues for those folks to get together and keep in touch: a weblog, a Google group, an e-mail address, Instant Messaging and, finally, one of the most interesting and exciting emerging new social network offerings out there: openBC. Yes, that is right, Greater IBM will also be making extensive use of openBC along with a link to LinkedIn, at some point in time, but the main platform would be going, though, through openBC.

I have already got my own profile set up in openBC and have signed up to the Google group, thus I am half way there, because my next item on the list is to also take active part on the GreaterIBM weblog where every now and then I would also be sharing some insights about the initiative itself along with where we are and some other topics related to social networking in general. Thus, as you would be able to see, I have taken up the role of one of the Core Connectors and that means that I have already joined the initiative and have started working in some of the different areas, like reaching out to those of you that I know keep on reading off my weblog and that at some point you were working in IBM. Yes, I am reaching out to you, folks, who would still want to keep informed about what is actually happening inside IBM but may not have a way of doing so. Well, here is GreaterIBM coming to the rescue. Now you will have a chance to hook up. And I would be more than happy to help transition that move. Even better, if you feel that you yourself would want to become a Core Connector, drop me an e-mail and I will help you out become one, too!

Now you may be wondering what that group of Core Connectors is, right?  Well, over at More Alumni Core Connectors For Global Rollout you would be able to find some further information details on this very same subject.but I am going to share over here some key pointers as to what the Core Connectors would be like and what would be expected of them:

"Connect With Other Connectors

• Attend one of the core connector briefing events/mixers planned for EMEA, AP & Americas in Sept/Oct 

  • Nominate alums and current IBMers who should be invited as core connectors

Drive Viral, Organic Growth Through Personal Invitations

• Invite former and current IBMers into the network, especially those with large social networks (Super Connectors), interests in using net for business innovation (Sales/New Business Drivers) and those interested in social networking itself (Mavens)

  • Encourage new members to invite their contacts into network

Build the Network’s Practical Value Through Introductions & Advice

• Make introductions  to connect members for business and innovation opportunties

• Help new members take advantage of network features like events, member searches, job opportunties, and other IBM innovations we’re planning to integrate into the network

Catalyze Collaborations & Create Projects

• Start Innovation Initiatives related to one’s work (i.e. I’m going to focus on building two subcommunities: one around nanotech and another related to virtual communities such as Second Life)

  • Start and participate in the forum dialogues, post news, share ideas"

So, there you go, that is one of the initiatives I will be spending some time from now on helping getting things together and where I hope I will be seeing some of you very soon. If you feel that you would want to keep in touch with your former colleagues and continue building up on those relationships and if you feel you have been made up to become a core connector, do not hesitate about it, contact me right away and I will hook you up with the initiative. For the time being I will be keeping you folks updated both over here and over at the GreaterIBM weblog on how we are getting along. I hope to see you soon over there ! More to come later …

Oh, if you are a current employee from IBM and would want to hook up with this social network but haven’t found a way to do so just yet inside the Intranet do let me know as well ! The more, the merrier.

Tags: GreaterIBM, Greater IBM Connection, IBM, Social Networking, Social Networks, Enterprise 2.0, Alumni, openBC, LinkedIn

A few days ago I mentioned how I was really glad that Dave Snowden had finally ventured into the blogosphere and created a weblog in Cognitive-Edge. I bet I was not the only one who was very much looking forward to that. I am not sure about you folks, but I haven’t been disappointed one single bit ever since he got to write different enlightening and thought provoking weblog posts that would certainly make you think about things twice before you could just move into the next thing. Yes, I am glad he actually got started with Cognitive-Edge’s weblog. Most people out there wouldn’t probably know that Dave was actually one of the main reasons why I entered the Knowledge Management world few years ago. Back then, when he was still working for IBM, I had the privilege of attending a number of different conference events where he was one of the speakers and his knowledge and in-depth views of what Knowledge Management is all about inspired me in such a way that by the end of the event I knew I wanted to follow a career path within KM, whether it would be inside IBM or elsewhere.

So why am I saying all that ? Well, mainly because one of his latest weblog posts that he has just published contains some of the rules that I have been trying to apply to any KM strategy I have been involved with from the very first beginning and which, still today, makes perfect sense to me, even though it was a couple of years back when he came up with those KM rules in the first place. Take a look into the following quoted text, directly off Volunteer not conscript:

"1. Knowledge will only ever be volunteered it can not be conscripted.
2. We only know what we know when we need to know it.
3. We always know more than we can tell and we will always tell more than we can write down."

I doubt there would be a better way of defining what Knowledge Management is all about. Most KM advocates would probably tell you how there are hundreds of KM definitions, perhaps every single KM advocate would have their own, like I tried to point out elsewhere, but I must say that those three rules that Dave has been advocating for all along would be good enough for me to help people understand some of the different principles and challenges that KM has been facing all along, up until today. And to help clarify further more some of those principles here is another quote from the same weblog post which I can certainly identify myself with it 100%:

"[...] if you ask someone, or a body for specific knowledge in the context of a real need it will never be refused. If you ask them to give you your knowledge on the basis that you may need it in the future, then you will never receive it."

Enough said ! Don’t you think ? Just in case, over at Complex Acts of Knowing - Paradox and Descriptive Self Awareness you would be able to read some more about this very same subject.

Tags: Knowledge Management, KM, Cognitive-Edge, Dave Snowden, KM Principles

I couldn’t help it. I hardly ever can help it. Every time that I bump into such things I just have to give in and go for them. And join the crowd. Jack Vinson just shared over at his weblog a quiz that has been put together by Darren Rowse, from ProBlogger, and which, of course, is also titled ProBlogger Quiz. Darren talks about it over here and you will be able to see how it would actually just ask you a couple of questions regarding your own weblogging habits and from there you would be able to see if you are a ProBlogger or not.

Jack mentioned that he is a Serious Amateur weblogger and, as I said, when I first saw it, and after the weblog post I created yesterday on having made it as Superstar Blogger over at ITtoolbox, I just had to give it a try and see how far I would go myself. So I took the ProBlogger Quiz.

By the looks of it, I, too, seem to be a Serious Amateur Weblogger because these are the results I got:

"You managed to score 24 points out of 40.
You might not be a full time blogger yet but you’ve got some promising Signs! Keep at it!"

That is just not too bad at all, is it? Next thing would probably be if I could ever manage to take things into the next level, but I guess that would be the subject for another weblog post at some point in the near future. For the time being  it looks like the initial purpose that I have set up for my weblogging is coming to terms quite nicely and ProBlogger Quiz is just one proof of that. But pretty much like Jack mentioned, weblogging is all about contrasting your opinions in whatever the subject matter with whoever passes by your weblog. Thus you better be ready.

Tags: ProBlogger, ProbBlogger Quiz, Weblogs, Metablogging, Jack Vinson

Long time readers from elsua.net would probably remember how at the beginning of the year I created a weblog post where I was indicating how I was getting started with a second Internet weblog around the subject of Knowledge Management, Communities, Collaboration, Social Networking, Web 2.0 and Social Software. And therefore elsua - the Knowledge Management Blog was born. Well, after seven months of regular weblogging with 140 weblog posts and over 400 e-mail subscribers (Not sure the total number of readers coming through RSS) I am very happy and excited to announced that elsua - the Knowledge Management Blog is now listed as part of the Superstar Blogs for the month of July 2006. You can find all of the different details and the listing of superstar webloggers at the following link: Superstar Blogs, where I appear on the 6th place.

This is certainly a huge achievement since I didn’t expect it to happen so soon! But the greatest thing of it all is the fact that if you look into the other different webloggers listed out there you would be able to recognise how most of them are very technical diving more into the areas of Knowledge Management tools and off I go getting my weblog listed over there when most of my main topics of discussion have been about everything but tools. There have been the odd weblog posts on different KM tools but in most cases it has just been a rundown of topics ranging with everything else that relates to KM that may not be covered by tools. And, that, indeed, is what is just so great about this particular achievement. The fact that plenty of folks out there are not just interested in KM tools per se, but they are starting to pay more attention towards everything else that is related to KM, i.e. the people, indeed! Good stuff!

Thus along these lines, I also wanted to mention some of the different weblog posts that dragged plenty of traffic over the course of the last few days and which some of you may find of interest, specially those of you who have been asking me about what’s the state of Knowledge Management inside IBM, now and for the foreseeable future. Here you have got them:

• IBM’s Knowledge Management Strategy
• IBM’s Knowledge Management Strategy Part II - Entering the Web 2.0 World
• 5 Key Steps towards Adopting Web 2.0 within the Enterprise (And its follow up 5 Key Steps towards Adopting Web 2.0 within the Enterprise - Part Deux)

With all these precious moments of celebration I do realise that the challenge is going to start from now on, which is try to keep on top of things and remain with that status of superstar weblog providing a continuous set of interesting conversations to keep up and, why not?, engage with. So if you happen to drop by elsua - the Knowledge Management Blog feel free to leave a comment or just say "Hi!". Time now to continue celebrating those precious moments I mentioned earlier on…

Tags: ITtoolbox, Metablogging, KM Blogs, IBM, KM Strategy

I am not sure how I ended up bumping into this particular article from Canadian Business Online but I am surely glad I did because I have enjoyed reading through it quite a bit. It is titled Hands On: Why you need a wiki and it comes to share some interesting, and spot on, points as to why businesses would be looking into adopting wikis within the firewall in order to spark some further discussions and get knowledge workers collaborate closer with one another. Jennifer Rivkin has put together a very enlightening read, specially for those who may not be familiar with wikis and how they operate and I thought I would comment as well on a couple of paragraphs where I felt I could chime in based on my own experience of having used wikis for several years now. Thus here is that commentary that came to mind as I was reading through the article, which I can certainly recommend reading through it, specially if you are skeptic about making use of wikis within the enterprise, or whatever other business:

"Although wikis are plain text (read: not so pretty to look at), you can easily attach Word files, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and videos — anything attachable to an e-mail. Want to see what your employees have added or changed? You can be automatically e-mailed whenever a page you’re interested in is altered, or click the "view recent changes" button to compare documents."

Well, to start with wikis are not only available in plain text. Quite a lot has changed over the last few months, specially with the particular buzz of adding some extended features to make the experience much richer and fruitful. Thus capabilities like adding WYSIWYG editors have certainly come a long way and you are now more than capable to play around with different options to enrich that plain text that you may have been exposed to in the past. Take, for example, cases like Wetpaint, Wikispaces or Confluence. They are just three instances that would show you how sharing content in a wiki can be as rich as you may have wanted / needed all along.

Another interesting item from the quoted text mentioned above is the fact that indeed through e-mail and "View Recent Changes" you can keep up with everything that is going on in the wiki. However, those are not the only methods put in practice nowadays. One of the things that you have probably noticed yourself as well is how more and more wiki engines are actually adding Really Simple Syndication feeds, or RSS feeds, in order to syndicate their content so that people get notified about potential changes directly into their feed reader client, without them having to go elsewhere. This RSS adoption is something that I have been weblogging about earlier on today as well and where I have indicated how it has moved from the blogosphere and integrated with everything else, like in our case over here, wikis.

"Besides using a wiki to manage documents effectively and store key information, you can also "grab all that tacit knowledge that exists in the minds of workers and make it more explicit," says David Senf, a Toronto-based program manager at technology research firm IDC Canada Ltd"

So accurate ! I just couldn’t help but agree with David on that statement big time ! This is all what wikis are all about. You can certainly make use of them as whatever the complicated Intellectual Capital system you can think of, but at the same time their state of the art simplicity is what actually drags people into the wiki experience, the fact that you can use your favourite browser, load a URL, click on the Edit button, type away and then share is perhaps one of the closest processes to capture tacit knowledge successfully and, indeed, make it a bit explicit, so that others can benefit from it and reuse it as they may see fit.

"[...] And departing staff won’t take all their accumulated knowledge with them, because much of it will be stored on your wiki"

That is also very true, and something that would help address some of the concerns and issues that I have been discussing with Dennis McDonald just recently about the subject of the maturing workforce and how their knowledge and experiences could be captured before they would actually start retiring. Wikis are just such a relatively easy to use technology that even non technical people can master in a matter of minutes, so imagine their great power in putting together a space where everyone is more than welcome to share whatever piece of knowledge they may and which others could benefit from.

"If you’re scanning this story for the catch, you won’t find it. There’s no financial risk to a wiki, because it’s so cheap to set up. The information can be protected behind your firewall. You’re free to set access levels as you wish, from a "democracy" in which any employee is allowed to revise any document to a top-down model in which only senior managers can read and edit certain pages. But if you opt for the latter, don’t limit access too much. Although confidential information and sensitive pages need to be protected, the more staff who have access to a wiki, the better it will work. The point, after all, is to tap into the power of shared information."

This paragraph is probably one of the best references out there that would explain why businesses should be paying attention to wikis in order to help knowledge workers get closer to one another and share their knowledge in an environment where there are no restrictions, no hierarchical structure, no clear definitions for different roles. Just purely sharing information for the sake of knowledge sharing and collaborating in an environment where everyone would benefit from it and all of that without hardly any effort. Yes, indeed, the power of collaboration in a space where you are in control and not everyone else. How difficult could that be to understand?

Tags: Wikis, Wetpaint, Wikispaces, Confluence, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Information Sharing