Google as a Knowledge Operating System

Knowledge Management April 14th, 2003

From Microdoc News:

“Google, a Knowledge Operating System (KOS) manages your knowledge activity on the Internet. Google, as a KOS, manages your requests for information, indexes your web pages, responds to applications you may be running on your computer that interface to it via the Google APIs, and integrates knowledge and information from millions of computers into a single large managed database.”

This seems to be a little excessive in that I don’t know if I’d want to give one company that much information about me, but the high-level idea is interesting.

Perhaps this would work better in a distributed fashion via personal and enterprise Knowledge OS instances.

In fact, I think this is basically what MindModel is attempting.

Knowledge management and weblogs

Knowledge Management April 14th, 2003

More on KM and Blogs …

Jim McGee writes: “One reason that so many of us find weblogs exciting in the realm of knowledge management is that weblogs reveal that the most important knowledge needs to be created before it can be collected and organized.”(via Sebastian Fiedler)

I think I agree, if Jim is implying that blogs enable the full KM process cycle of creating, collecting and organizing information.

Corporate Portal Single Sign-on via Jabber

Knowledge Management April 6th, 2003

Bryan over at SourceID posts about the Jabber + PingID single sign-on solution:

“Single sign-on, from corporate portal website, to 401k provider website, to Jabber window.” (via Doc)

Resistance is futile

Knowledge Management March 28th, 2003

Promit Chakrabarti: “Resistance to share knowledge stems from the fact that people are concerned about job security. This leads towards knowledge not shared or used. To enter one’s knowledge into a system and to seek out knowledge from others is not only threatening, but also involves lot of effort that hunts for motivation.”

Well said.

Study shows corporate structure found in email

Knowledge Management, Search March 24th, 2003

Hewlett-Packard scientists found a company’s power and communication structure may be as simple as examining patterns of e-mail exchanges.

“Because [Email] can be captured and stored, many scientists are eyeing e-mail as a tool to quantify exchanges that in the past have taken place in hallways or meetings. The researchers in this study said e-mail flow could provide a window into the communications structure of an organization.”

A brighter future for Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management March 15th, 2003

From Jon Udell’s latests InfoWorld column:

“Making knowledge more available gets easier with Weblogs, improved information sorting, better user connections”

“Bottom-up vs. top-down taxonomy is an old, ongoing KM struggle. But the emerging architecture of business process automation may help us cut that Gordian knot. XML documents, produced and consumed by Web services but also by people running a new generation of XML-savvy applications, will be the currency of the information economy. Richly structured, easily captured, and embedded in well-defined business contexts, they’ll be a godsend for tools that mine knowledge from documents.”

More good stuff on Jon’s blog

Business Programming

Knowledge Management February 14th, 2003

Quotes from Jon Udell’s interview with Ward Cunningham:

“Most of business programming is about getting a wrong program to do the right thing by being even smarter. People resent these systems because that’s what they have to do. The program is a boat anchor dragging down the pace of business, and it’s almost set up so that it can’t be anything but.”

XML Content Management

Knowledge Management February 11th, 2003

Jon Udell has some encouraging words to say in regards to Chad Dickerson’s experience “winning ugly” with XML and content:

“As a longtime content wrangler, I’m guilty of assuming that any structure is mappable to any other structure. And that’s true. But it’s never as trivial as we like to imagine. Transformation is work. We’ll always need to do some of it programmatically.”

Well said.

Data emergence et al

Knowledge Management February 6th, 2003

Jon Udell just ties everything together in this sentence, “When teams form and work together, the “markup” that enables and documents team formation, and that represents shared work product, needs to arise naturally and invisibly as a consequence of tool use.” … great post!

People in Knowledge Working

Knowledge Management February 2nd, 2003

Jonathan Peterson writes in his Amateur Hour column, “Web content can always go lower and be more “real”. More positively; without advertisers’ demands for “reach”, individuals can aspire to the most intimate, emotional artistic visions. Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame is closer at hand than ever before…”

“Instant messaging, ubiquitous connectivity (SMS, two-way paging, etc), project blogging, k-logs, XML and other technologies are going to allow us to turn the computer from a replacement for the secretarial pool into a tool for collaborative knowledge working.” (link via Kevin Werbach)