I’ve owned knowledgecog for a few years now, and the site has went through a few radical transformations. For about the last year, I was working on a few ideas for knowledgecog, but nothing really definitive came out of it. So instead of coming up with something completely new, I decided to get back to basics.

Originally, I had the idea of publishing some of the news feeds I’d created for myself using Yahoo! Pipes — and I’ve decided that since that was the original point of knowledgecog, why not just get the site working as I had originally intended it? So I put 4 feeds (business and competitive intelligence, enterprise search, knowledge management, and social networking and collaboration) on the main page, and I’ve got a few other lists of potentially useful information about KM at the bottom. It’s simple, and it’s going to stay that way.

You can click through to a longer list of feed items from the main page, and you can also subscribe to the Pipe itself using the RSS link beside the title (which will take you to the RSS version of the Pipe page). I’m going to be working on the news feeds over the next few weeks in order to refine the results as much as I can. Enjoy the new knowledgecog! And of course, any suggestions or feedback on the new site are always welcome. Just leave a comment or get in touch with me through the contact form.

Patrick Lambe at Green Chameleon’s got an interesting post about the history, strengths and weaknesses of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKM) hierarchy. Overall, the post provides an insightful critique of DIKM as a mental model for how knowledge management programs or services are constructed and offered.

I’ve always found the transformational nature (data turns into information, which turns into knowledge, which turns into wisdom) as well as the lack of  focus on context (‘wisdom’ — whatever wisdom is — is not always necessarily better to have than data) a bit annoying. But read Patrick’s post, it’s very informative and makes some great points.

Patrick Lambe over at Green Chameleon is having a rather novel competition (novel for the world of knowledge management at least, I think): he’s having a competition to see who can create informative, inspiring, creative and even funny videos about knowledge management.

The video has to be your own work and publicly available for people to watch, but other than that, there’s not really many rules as far as content or subject matter go. So if you’ve got something to say about knowledge management, or are just super-talented at making viral videos, why not submit something?

Patrick’s also giving away some prizes: KM Method Cards, KM Approaches, Methods and Tools – A Guidebook, and his Organisation Culture Cards (worth US$140).

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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If you’re going to be attending the KMWorld 2009 Conference (if you don’t know about this conference, you can find out more about it), the good folks at KMWorld are going to give readers of lucasmcdonnell.com a $200 discount on the conference.

You can also get a free expo pass — just use this link to get both the discount and the free pass. Thanks to KMWorld for providing the discount and enjoy the conference!

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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