Gadgets = Food & Sex for Techies?

A really good read from the NY Times on how multi-tasking is affecting people - Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price.

"While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress."

Can our brains really handle the deluge of information coming our way?  How can KM help to cut through the data stream pollution and enable people to better manage their individual knowledge?

Who owns my medical (identity) records?

In the U.S.A. the "healthcare reform debate is raging in our congress and on main street. What is missing is intelligent conversation around how the Laws of Identity should be applied to medical records/health records. Maybe I could recoup some of my out-of-pocket costs for healthcare if I could charge the hospital or provider when they sell MY records for research. What about my health insurance provider and all the claims data they have on me.

An interesting point, and one lost on all in the media, is that the debate is really about health insurance costs and not healthcare itself. Sure there is noise and dollars being thrown to digital medical records but no one seems to be even talking about the endless cost increases from providers, hospitals, and diagnostic testing. I have personally seen around a 45% increase in office visit fees from my family physician in the last two years. My health insurance costs rose only about 12% in that same time period. So, where's the problem? We can't place the blame entirely on insurance companies, after all it is to their advantage to reduce medical costs not increase them.

Sorry for my digression into reality. I read, I think for the first time, in a mainstream news article something that has long been ignored in the U.S.A.'s debate on healthcare: Who owns an individuals medical records. The Dallas Morning news had a single paragraph in an article last week titled "Who really profits from digital medical records?".

"Data sharing confronts age-old assumptions that providers, not patients, own health records, which are valuable assets that can be used to obtain grants and market hospitals. It requires the government to decide what kinds of systems will improve care and how providers should use the systems to achieve that. "

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We've got to stop pretending it's a paper-based world.

"We've got to stop pretending it's a paper-based world."  This is a quote in the Des Moines Iowa Register from Scott McLeod, an associate professor of education leadership at Iowa State University.

These are words we should all remember.  Everyday I am confronted by terms like reports, print this out, let people print things.  We need to move on.  It is not just about being green, it is about providing value.

Autonomy gobbles up Interwoven

I remember when Autonomy was just a start-up struggling to get their message out.  They've come a long way with a broad-based set of product offerings.

Here's a link to the press release.

Enterprise Social Interaction

The social enterprise is not just an off-shoot of the Social Graph on the web (Facebook, LinkedIn, twitter, etc.) but something that has been real and delivering value within many organizations for some time.  It was labeled collaboration, knowledge management, or not labeled at all.

Certainly new forms of technology, especially through web services, wiki’s, instant messaging, and presence have helped push awareness and adoption forward.  Adoption and value realization of enterprise social interaction tools lags behind the consumer marketplace.  Lots of talk in the trade press abounds regarding how the technology that people encounter outside of work is expected to be in place within the organizational firewall.  What needs to be considered is how these new technologies can be applied to add value in the enterprise context.  It is not and can not be an “if we build it they will come” approach to implementing enterprise social interaction tools.

Enterprises need to clearly articulate a strategy.  A strategy that builds upon and supports the organizations goals and objectives.  To often things turn into what I term a series of unfortunate projects (approaching enterprise social interaction as a series of discrete projects) instead of creating a road map that helps achieve strategic objectives in a series of planned events.

I have put together these bulleted thoughts on the value proposition around enterprise social interaction.

• Connectedness
  
  
  
  • Provides participatory interaction vs. passive delivery
    
    
    
    • Example: use Wiki’s to develop Detailed Business Requirements
    
    
    • Reduce project cycle times through less face-to-face meetings and more meaningful interaction
    
    
    • Enhance project value through full documentation and change management of requirements “documents”
    
    
    • Provide a concise view of how the requirements evolved over time
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Communication becomes Conversation
    
    
    
    • All employees can participate in information creation and consumption based on role and interests
    
    
    • Requires an open environment where people and systems work together
    
    
    • leverage each person's tacit knowledge
    
    
    • Not just about putting technology in place, but letting conversations and interactions take place organically without management intervention
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Communities of Interest
    
    
    
    • If allowed, will form without top-down hand holding
    
    
    • Provide added value by allowing diverse view points to be heard and applied
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Interactive Management Communication
    
    
    
    • Leadership communication should be parallel not serial
    
    
    • Example: CEO communication through blog instead of email or a static web page (moderated of course as some people can be rather boorish)
    
    
    • Generational expectations to work, communication and collaboration must be adequately addressed
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  


• Connective Fabric
  
  
  
  • Tools need to provide a connective fabric that connects people and ideas together not just processes
  
  
  • Organizations need to learn from and leverage the enterprise social graph
    
    
    
    • Understand how social interaction capabilities can accelerate innovation and drive knowledge worker productivity
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Individual knowledge is not power, it is obsolescence.  The collective knowledge of the organization is power and creates a competitive advantage
    
    
    
    • There is no such thing as sustainable competitive advantage; there is only a race to create new sources of temporary advantage.  The challenge is to string together a series of temporary advantages into advantages over time. (1)
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Stale Content/Rigid User Experiences
    
    
    
    • Top down, centralized activities reduce value and limit innovation
    
    
    • Balance needs to exist between security and usability
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  


• What this means for organizational hierarchy
  
  
  
  • A workplace transition from command and control to people focused and community-centric approaches that ties people, ideas, content, processes and systems together
  
  
  • >Empowerment
    
    
    
    • Employees are empowered to create and publish information that is easily disseminated throughout the organization
    
    
    • Value bubbles up to those that need it just in time
    
    
    • People need to be free to add value at will without compromising their role within the organization
    
    
    • Break down cultural barriers that limit innovation
    
    
    
    
  
  
  • Process Improvement becomes more closely aligned with value than with rigid industrial age notions of productivity
  
  
  • Tools used are based on flexibility/the ability to enable connectedness vs. a command and control approach
  
  
  
  

(1) Eric Beinhocker – The origin of wealth

[amtap book:isbn=1422121038]

What KM isn't

I was just reading a some forum posts on a well known business focused social web site about KM.  The topic was around web/enterprise 2.0 and KM.  A valid and relevant topic.  There were a couple of posts where supposed KM experts postulated that KM was all about documents and search. Wrong answer.

True Knowledge Management has never been about documents and search.  Knowledge Management has always been about Connectedness.  If "experts" have been doing KM as documents and search, they haven't been practitioners of Knowledge Management.

See the KM News definition of KM for my thinking...

Identity Context & Information

Kim Cameron does a stellar job in making the connection between identity, context and information in his blog post "Trends in what is known about us".

Information accumulates power by being put into proximity and aggregated.   This even appears to be an inherent property of information itself.  Of course information can’t effect its own aggregation, but easily finds hosts who are motivated to do so: businesses, governments, researchers, industries, libraries, data centers - and the indefatigable search engine.

What Kim is describing in the above quoted paragraph is connectedness; informational connectedness.   I would go a step further and add that information accumulates power by relational context.  Each individual views aggregated information differently depending on their personal perspective and the current context in which they are viewing the information.  If I am viewing aggregated information on a job candidate, the interpretation will be different than if my context is that of a friend.

The element that many don't seem to pay attention to, and Kim brings to the fore is that what happens within social networking tools won't always remain localized.   As digital personas connect, the information generated through those interactions multiplies and in the near future will become rather easily aggregated.Â

Personal health-care knowledge

How do you go about managing your personal knowledge as it relates to your health?  Tough, isn't it.  You know what ailments you have or have had but how do you easily articulate that to your physician.  How can you really be an informed consumer of health care services when you need to share your health history with medical professionals but you don't have that information at your finger tips?

There's a push amongst Google, Microsoft and others to help us manage our personal health information.  The problem is that much of the information we need is locked up inside huge data stores within health insurance companies and in paper files at multiple health care providers.

Google just announced that Massachusetts Blue Cross Blue Shield will make available each members claims data for inclusion in a personal Google Health Account.  This is to my knowledge the first health insurance company to do this.  The hole in the dam has opened....

Internet technology is changing ever more rapidly, potentially even surpassing Moore’s Law.   Consumers are expecting an exponential increase in the availability of technology-based services, even from health-care organizations.   It is only a matter of time before health care consumers will demand expect electronic access to all the information related to their personal health history.  I believe that this will become a deciding factor as to what insurance company gets a persons business and loyalty in the not to distant future.

Get on the Identity Bus

The Identity Bus

I am all in favor of a standardized service in support of the seamless exchange of identity data. At present, public facing services need to support an alphabet soup of methods for 'sharing' identity data.

It is great for those of us interested in the technical nits and nats to converse about this, but in order to have full scale adoption of identity interoperability it needs to be seamless and mindless. Mindless in the sense the the end user of a system, web site, etc., does not have to think about which credential to use to gain access to a resource.

The thing I am having a lot of trouble understanding is why anyone would want to re-label this as LDAP. The use of LDAP has been so bastardized already, why add more confusion to. History: LDAP is a protocol for accessing data stored in a directory (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol). The term has been used incorrectly for many years. If it is a directory, why can't we just call a directory a directory?

I'm thinking out loud here, but this identity 'bus' should be called something like the IBS - Identity Bus Service...

Dave Snowden on the abuse of language

Some great points by Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge regarding the abuse of language.

It has been one of my peeves for some time how respectable and relevant terminology gets co-opted to the point that it no longer makes no sense to anyone. Clearly I believe in Knowledge Management, but what passes for KM most days is really Information Management dressed dressed to appear as something different.