If you work in knowledge management (or in a KM-like area), you know that on many projects, things go wrong — and it’s often difficult to pinpoint the exact moment where the train left the tracks. So I thought I would put together (based on my own experiences and many, many conversations with colleagues from many different organizations) some warning signs that should tell you your strategy’s in trouble.

Before I get into these signs however, I want to point out two things. First, while the presence of any of these indicators may be a death knell for your current strategy, this should be viewed as an opportunity to craft a new strategy that better meets the challenge you and your organization are facing — not that you should put your head in your hands and give up.

Second, the presence of any one (or even several) of these indicators in not necessarily a sign that your strategy is totally off-base — these indicators are meant to be used as a warning that you should be constantly adapting your strategy to new challenges. At the same time however, don’t get so mired in strategic decision-making that you never actually get any work done. Strategize, adapt and move forward — making major strategy changes only when things are not going the way you had hoped.

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I posted in mid-July about the Canadian privacy commissioner’s concerns over privacy and FaceBook — that among other things, FaceBook was keeping dead users’ accounts activated indefinitely, providing private information to application developers and providing no clear difference between deactivating and deleting an account.

Well it would appear as if FaceBook is taking this seriously, as the company has already made some changes to its privacy policy, and it says more are in the works. This is a good thing — not only for FaceBook’s many users, but also for FaceBook itself.

How responsive companies are to this type of issue often has far greater consequences than the actual alleged transgression — and FaceBook’s desire to put this to bed early is both prudent and wise. FaceBook has a real opportunity to come out as the hero, since the company can both further protect its users’ privacy as well as meet Canadian legal standards for that very same privacy. I guess we’ll see how this ultimately plays out.

Like many other WordPress users, I use a comment form plugin in order to get comments from my website’s WordPress installation into my mailbox. Getting that information from the site to the inbox is a fairly simple process, due mainly to fact that I used a simple contact form plugin.

For the most part, I was getting the occasional spammer who actually took the time to write manual spam into the form (why, I’m not sure — since manually entering spam would only reach me, and doesn’t manually sending each spam message kind of defeat the purpose of spam), but for the most part, my inbox stayed relatively clean.

For the past month however, my comment form has been hit with more automated spam — not a ridiculous amount, but just enough to be annoying. On most days, I would get at least three or four spam message with gibberish subject lines which I needed to delete.

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