I’ve been following Luis Suarez’s mission to live in a world without email with interest pretty much since it started. And while I agree with Luis that email will not die any time soon, I do think Luis’ email journey raises some interesting questions (many of which Luis has noted in blog posts throughout that selfsame journey).

As I was reading the latest post I’ve linked to above, it made me think about why I send email and how I feel about email. I’m sort of ambivalent about the actual act of sending an email — I often get the sense that there are certain things I’d be better off sending through instant messaging, posting somewhere fixed (especially in terms of files) or simply picking up the phone.

I won’t run through an exhaustive list of the disadvantages of email (a quick Google search brings up a ton of results on email’s cons), but its main disadvantages are pretty obvious. Email is impersonal, error-prone (ever forget to cc someone crucial?), fractured, and is often misinterpreted.

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Since it’s Friday, I figured I’d draw your attention to something a bit different. A friend of mine sent me a link today to the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference website, where you can watch videos from the conference for free. In case you haven’t heard of it before (like I hadn’t), the conference “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).”

There are some fascinating talks available on the site from some of the world’s smartest and most influential people. As the TED site says, they’re “building here a clearinghouse that offers free knowledge and inspiration from the world’s most inspired thinkers, and also a community of curious souls to engage with ideas and each other.” To get you started, here’s Bill Gates talking about mosquitos, malaria and education:

I just came across an interesting piece over at Inside Knowledge that argues that possessing competence is actually more important than the “mere acquisition, development, storage, usage, ownership and protection of concepts and facts”. Competence, in this argument, extends beyond just knowing something — it’s more about the practical and useful application of knowledge.

The authors go on to describe a ‘framework of competence’, through which competence can be managed. It’s the authors opinion that competence matters a great deal more than just knowledge, and that by extension, the management of competence is of greater value to an organization than the management of knowledge.

Yet it would seem to me that there is an assumption inherent to the phrase ‘knowledge management’ (rightly or wrongly) that assumes that knowledge is, in fact, applied information. Not that I want to open the (very tired) data-information-knowledge(-wisdom?) can of worms. The interesting part about the word ‘competence’ to me however, is that it denotes something entirely different than what is denoted by the data-information-knowledge hierarchy, and I don’t think ‘competence’ really fits in there hierarchically. Either way, definitely an interesting read.

I was reading an article this morning about how to turn your business around through effective knowledge management (this topic interests me quite a bit, and I wrote about it just a few short months ago).

The article I’ve linked to however, is in fact about enterprise search (while there is a caveat about half way through the article about progress working practices being necessary to thrive, the article is not really about knowledge management in general).

While I think the article title would have been more accurate if you replaced ‘knowledge management’ with ‘enterprise search’, it’s a small detail. There are also some important generalizations about search in this article, which, while still being generalizations, paint a somewhat accurate picture of the state of search. I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

Overwhelmingly, it [enterprise search] was felt it wasn’t meeting the needs of businesses – 63% of those surveyed stated that they believed enterprise search tools should be as easy for staff to use as consumer search engines, yet two thirds said that wasn’t currently the case. The study also discovered widespread concern about lengthy set up times – 73% said they believed it would take more than six months for an enterprise search tool to be useable by employees, with a staggering 68% stating they thought it would take between 18 months to two years to generate any return on investment (ROI). A further 19% estimated it would take over two years to generate ROI.

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As I’ve promised many times, I decided to update my ever-popular list of essential knowledge management sites and blogs. While the original list was only 26 sites, and eventually almost doubled to around 50, I’ve now got the list up to 66 sites that are really cranking out some quality content.

As always, if you have a site that you’d like to suggest for this list, please just let me know and I’ll take a look at it. If it fits the bill (high quality, frequent posting, and it hasn’t been around only since yesterday), it’ll get on the list.

One small suggestion to the many bloggers out there with knowledge management blogs, however. Create an ‘About’ page! There are so many great sites that I’ve found that I’ve been unable to attribute to a person or organization because they lacked an ‘About’ page. And with that small request, on to the list.

1. Aa..ha! – This blog is an eclectic mix of thinking about the human condition as well as knowledge management. There’s a good mix of knowledge management, wisdom and just general stuff about life.

2. Above and Beyond KM – “A discussion of knowledge management that goes above and beyond technology.” Has somewhat of a law focus, but often discusses non-legal knowledge management issues.

3. ActKM – I have to give Keith De La Rue credit for pointing this one out to me (as per his comment below). A great site for finding out what’s happening in the KM world.

4. The American Productivity & Quality Center’s Knowledge Management Blog – Thoughts and discussions on knowledge management by Jim Lee from the APQC.

5. Anecdote – Anecdote is a consulting firm that specializes in organizational change, leadership and storytelling. While not a strictly KM site, the blog on the front page includes many thoughts and links related to communities of practice and other KM-related areas (thanks Vincent).

6. Association of Knowledgework – At the Association of Knowledgework, people from every specialty cross professional, geographic, cultural, economic and hierarchical barriers to learn together.

7. Boxes and Arrows – While this site doesn’t focus exclusively on knowledge management, it does have a great deal of content in peripheral areas like content management and design.

8. Brad Hinton’s Plain Speaking – Lots of good storytelling and business narrative-type stuff here, as well as some great collaboration and communities of practice resources.

9. BRINT – Developing leading edge thinking and practice on contemporary business, technology, and knowledge management issues to facilitate organizational and individual performance, success, and fulfillment.

10. ChiefTech – While this blog is mostly about information technology, there is some very interesting stuff there about the web and social networking. This site also talked (very kindly I might add) about this blog.

11. Chris Collison’s blog – This is an excellent resource for collaboration-related knowledge management stuff. Chris is a fantastic resource on anything collaborative (and has even been kind enough to leave an insightful comment here).

12. Cindy Gordon – Focuses upon knowledge management, human capital and innovation.

13. CIO’s Knowledge Management section – The magazine about business, technology and leadership has a specific section on their website devoted to KM. The other sections are also interesting and definitely worth checking out as well.

14. Cognitive Edge – Dave Snowden’s Cognitive Edge talks about all aspects of knowledge management, and is updated quite frequently.

15. Collaborative Enterprise – Blog belonging to an Indian social software consultant that deals with managingknowledge, KM systems and social media.

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With the current downturn in the economy, many companies are starting to feel a little less secure about their market positioning than they were a year ago. And understandably so — extra cash is becoming tough to come by in almost any company.

We’ve seen banks fail outright, and we’ve seen many companies trying desperately to cut costs; and, in more than one place, I’ve heard the same discussion — can knowledge management save a failing company? Well, the short answer seems to be ‘no’, and the long answer is a decisive, yes, you guessed it, ‘maybe’.

Let me first say that (while I’m not any kind of expert in failing companies or in turning said companies around), that there can be any number of reasons why a company fails. If we’re talking about a start-up, the ‘maybe it was just a bad idea’ reason seems to often be an obvious culprit.

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If you’re a knowledge management professional (that is, somebody who thinks about knowledge management more than they probably should), you’ve probably encountered the formal-versus-informal debate in some capacity.

Much of the time, as knowledge management folks, we try to come up with processes — processes for how people work, processes for how organizations make decisions, processes for how technology gets put into place. Yet where there’s a place for building, there’s a place for tearing down.

We’ve all had to deal with nonsensical but well-intentioned processes. Maybe somebody thought it would be a great idea to make somebody fill out a form every time they want to be recognized for sharing knowledge — thinking that it would be easier to track who was doing a good job of sharing and who was shoveling knowledge into their own personal silo.

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The Centre for International Competitiveness recently released the 2008 World Knowledge Competitiveness Index (available for free download here), which shows North America beginning to lag in knowledge dominance, with Europe and Asia picking up the slack.

The shift in knowledge dominance has seen old guard Western centres (like New York, Washington and London — London dropping all the way from 46th to 102nd) losing ranking to smaller American cities such as Hartford and Bridgeport, as well as smaller European nations.

The report compares 145 regions across 19 different knowledge economy benchmarks. It’s worth noting however that the top 5 spots are still all in the U.S.: San Jose (#1), Boston (#2), Hartford (#3), Bridgeport (#4) and San Francisco (#5).

The persisent ascent of cities like Stockholm and Tokyo is also interesting to note, as well as the fact that Shanghai has now moved ahead of both Berlin and the Canadian province of British Columbia. China’s Guangdong region also comes first in the study’s Regional Knowledge Intensity index (a measure comparing the knowledge base of a region to its economic output).

I think most knowledge management practitioners would agree that part of their job is to educate users and management types about the possibilities of a successful knowledge management program. But what happens when the knowledge management practitioner doesn’t agree with where the business wants to go with KM?

When I talk about users in this context, there’s a bunch of different groups I’m talking about. Knowledge management implementations usually end up with a host of technologies being put in place (content management systems, enterprise search engines, collaboration tools, etc.) — and ‘users’ usually end up being any group of people that has to interact with these systems.

When you end up asking users what they want, you usually get a few consistent answers (a search engine that looks and acts like Google usually comes up, or less time looking for templates and other often-used documents), and then a smaller proportion of very diverse answers.

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I was a little disappointed when I first read the title of Patrick Lambe’s commentary at Inside Knowledge, “Should be it be wisom — not knowledge — management?“.

However, as I got into Patrick’s arguments, my disappointment gave way to a sense of relief — Patrick, by the end of the article, dismisses “wisdom management” as the red herring that it is.

Discussions about whether knowledge management should be called “wisdom management” (or anything else, for that matter), usually stem from epistemological arguments about the nature of knowledge and wisdom, and whether it’s truly proper to call what we do “knowledge management”.

Well of course it’s not. A name is, after all, just a name. And it’s unfortunate that “knowledge management” is what has stuck, but that’s the nature of naming things — sometimes the name you end up with is not really the best for something.

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