Thursday, August 30, 2007

Federated Collaboration

There is a nice piece in KM World about collaboration 3.0 - The Collaboration 3.0 approach.  We won't go into a discussion of the '3.0'.  What I found interesting is what I call Federated Collaboration.

The author does not use the term Federated Collaboration, but he is refering to it in describing how Boeing is using it to build design and build the new Dreamliner aircarft (B787).  Boeing is designing and building this aircraft collaboratively with its business partners through the use collaborative technology.  This is amazing in itself and undoubtedly has cost Boeing an impressive amount of resources.

Key issues raised in the article are compliance, informatinon security, governance.  These issues must be addressed via some mechanism.  A mechanism that is often overlooked by the knowledge management and collaboration community.  That mechanism in my opinion is Federated Digital Identity.  There can be no high value federated collaboration without an underlying understanding of WHO is collaborating, WHAT they can collaborate on, WHEN the can have collaborative access, and HOW they have access to the collaborative environment.  This can only be accomplished when a common framework for digital identity is used - Federated Digital Identity.

Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Perpetual Conversations

I just read the The adversity of knowledge in KMWorld. The article is by Davide Weinberger and covers Jack Welch's (of GE fame) book.

The article is by Davide Weinberger and covers Jack Welch's (of GE fame) book.  While the article was an interesting summarization of Welch's views re integrity and adversity (as Weinberger puts it).  What I found most useful was the last paragraph of the article titled "Perpetual conversation".  Specifically Weinberger points out that collaborative environments that embrace many points of view and are and are in prepetual conversation are where knowledge finds its integrity.

I have experienced this many times recently in online community discussions where people from diverse backgrounds and points of view converse on topics such as KM and Value Networks.  Often these collaborators do not see eye-to-eye, but through the course of the collaborative conversation come to appreciate the integrity of each contributors view points.  These perpetual conversations create/enhance the collaborators knowledge of a given subject within the constructs of their environment - there really are no losers as Weinberger says.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

BI Saves the day

El Reg has an article that clearly shows how great value can be delivered from a BI system.

Having experienced first hand some of Overstock.com's ERP woes back in 2005 I dug into this story from El Reg.

Ending a nightmare - Overstock's data center journey

Some would argue the article highlights the difficulty of implementing ERP, but regardless of how you look at it, BI did in fact help Overstock.com out of a bad situation.  The technology now provides the company with a competitive advantage.  Clearly the company stumbled by not moving sooner or better managing their ERP implemenation.  Perhaps they could have done better had they better leveraged up-front analysis and requirements work, but in the end the BI system kept the company moving forward until the combined ERP/BI systems were fully in place.

Knowledge to do what?

Can your organization answer the question; knowledge to do what?  That should be the starting point for any organization embarking on a new ...