Quote Details

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”

Aristotle

From Harvard Business Review Blog

Do your Knowledge Workers have a Bitsmith?

This post presents a wonderful concept that points out the need for specialized tools for the knowledge era.  That of a “Bitsmith”.   Bitsmiths, according to the post ” are people who have deep knowledge of both the work content and the tools used to support the work. In other words, they are almost as expert in derivatives or computer design as they are in computer-programming languages. Because they understand both the domain and the tools, bitsmiths can take an idea from concept to implementation quickly .”

The article makes the case that high performance teams need to have a “bitsmith” just as many towns in the “old west”  had blacksmiths to create the tolls they needed.

What do you think of this concept?

Thanks Peter for the article suggestion

From Detroit News

FORD Product Idea Website Article

From the website “Ford Motor Co. is creating a “idea portal” on its Web site, to give consumers the opportunity to suggest new features, allow others to critique them and vote for which ones should be considered by Ford’s product development team.”

Seems like a great idea.

Article on FORD Site About Idea Gathering

What do you think?  Should they allow ALL comments to be seen by everyone?

From The Detroit News: http://www.detnews.com/article/20100413/AUTO01/4130330/1148/Ford-to-harvest-product-ideas-from-Web#ixzz0m9T8mjH4

From Government Computer News

Thanks Hugh

Mobile phones are used to access the Army’s portal for soldiers to access information from their Knowledge Online Portal.

“The Army Knowledge Online portal, a repository of online information, distance-learning tools, e-mail and other resources for 2.6 million Army users. The Web-based service is now part of a broader service known as Defense Knowledge Online.”

Mini solar chargers and video goggles are also used.

“Army officials are tapping into the ingenuity of its young workforce and responding to their predisposition for smarter gadgets at the same time by developing an array of Go Mobile devices — new communications and conferencing devices that can fit into a soldier’s pocket while going easy on the service’s pocketbook.”

Sounds like we should all be following in the Army’s footsteps for our firms.  What do you think?

From KM Edge

Referred by Evelyn of MSOE Rader School of Business MG-750

KM Edge (blog) from APQC presents a wonderful PPT which looks at three Ba Based Knowledge Management approaches in Japanese Companies.  As we study Knowledge Management, we learn more of the concept of Ba.  This presentation gives us some insight into the power of Ba.

Ba Based Knowledge Management Approaches

Comments?

From an Article in Chief Learning Officer

Agile Learning: Thriving in the New Normal

From the article

“Organizational learning agility is an enterprise capability that requires deliberate and systematic design, including essential cultural, structural, process and technology-support elements. Based on studies from TRClark, a research, consulting and training company, there are five primary factors that interact to promote or hinder learning agility within organizations:

1. Intelligence function: The capacity of an organization to survey and interpret its entire business ecosystem, including both internal and external competitive environments. The intelligence function interprets information for the strategy function, which feeds the learning function.

2. Learning mindset: The prevailing assumptions, beliefs and dispositions relating to the way people learn.

3. Leadership behavior: The dominant patterns of leadership within an organization.

4. Organizational support: The processes, systems, structures and other forms of support that organizations provide to help employees in their formal and informal learning and execution activities.

5. Learning technology: The forms of technology employed to enable learning at both individual and organizational levels.”

This article presents a number of important ideas about what organizations need to do to compete.

The article goes on to explain each of the five factors.

What do you think?

From Talent Management Magazine…..

Virtual Teams: Narrowing the Performance Gap

This article talks about how virtual teams are becoming more common, however, there are problems with cohesion, collaboration and focus.  The article offers some suggestions to deal with these problems.

The article describes the “work revolution” as:

“From local workplace to global work webs: People used to travel to a workplace, but increasingly the work is traveling to them, wherever they are. Freedom from “place” also means we are collaborating more often with customers, partners and colleagues in transitory virtual teams that cross multiple geographic, cultural and organizational boundaries.

From physical presence to technological presence: Being fully present and connecting with others is important on any team, but it becomes more challenging in virtual environments, where isolation and alienation are common.

From command and control to collaborate and control: Managers leading distributed workgroups understand that command-and-control micromanagement is dysfunctional in a virtual environment. To paraphrase a Pentagon saying: It’s pretty hard to turn a screw with an 8,000-mile-long screwdriver.

From information value to connection value: The right information at the right time still has power, but information is everywhere and easily accessible. Connections are becoming the new currency — not simply the number, but the access many give to new knowledge, influence, skills and resources.

From fixed structures to fluid structures: New technologies enable agile working and teaming. Virtual project teams can be formed and dissolved quickly to promote speed, responsiveness and innovation. The best global talent for a job can be mobilized and leveraged to solve customer problems or create new sources of value.”

What do you think of the Six C’s?  Cooperation, Convergence, Coordination, Capability, Communication, and Cultural Intelligence.

Are you using virtual teams?  Do you see these trends and problems?

From the Harvard Business School Blog…..

How will Augmented Reality affect Your Business

Check out the five “things”.  Personally, of these, the “nature of location” will have the most profound impact.

What do you think?

Thanks Chris

The CDC is using Social Media to get the word out about what is happening related to H1N1 etc.

According to the CDC website, ” Help us spread the word and prevent novel H1N1 flu by sharing interactive tools with friends, co-workers and family members!”

Specific Website for H1N1 and Social Media

Seems like a great way to spread the word (I could not resist).  What do you think?

Thanks David.

From the article “The result of the collaboration between Twitter and Peek is a version of the device built exclusively for sending tweets.

Clad in “Twitter blue,” the TwitterPeek allows all the same functionality of a desktop Twitter client – reading tweets, sending tweets, replying, retweeting and direct messaging – only it gives users that access on the go.”

Dedicated Twitter Device

Will you be getting one?

Thanks Hugh

Here is another data visualization example.    Be sure to try out the controls.

Crime Spotting

Cool eh?    How could you use this for something other than crime spotting?

Thanks Hugh

We are always looking at ways to get our point across related to data, graphs, dashboards, charts, graphics, animation.

Check out this visualization technique   Growth of Walmart with Flowing Data through 2006 anyway.

What do you think?  How could you use this?

Death by Information Overload

This above link is to a HBR Abstract which introduces an article that discusses information overload.  It also entices us with the promise of some solutions “Innovative tools and techniques promise relief for those of us struggling with information inundation. Some are technological solutions—software that automatically sorts and prioritizes incoming e-mail, for instance—designed to regulate or divert the deluge. Others prevent people from drowning by getting them to change the way they behave and think.”

I am going to dig out my September copy of HBR and find the answers.

Are you looking for answers?  Are you suffering?  No, how do you do it?

Here we go, the rumors are starting?  The New Your Times’ Bill Keller ranting about the end of newspaper publishing (the coming of Googlezon?) and the potential of an iTablet?  Is this good marketing — pre-announcement?  Market Research?  Apple iTablet

What do you think?  Marketing?  Rumors?  Advance, off the record, notice?

Thanks to Liquid Canuck for this one, who got it from…….

Check out this video…….

The format will be familiar.

Word of Mouth

What do you think?

Thank you Kathy and Catherine for this referral.  (Two students recommended this same video)

Great TED Talk on a device that can serve as our “SixthSense”

Amazing and not too far away!

What do you think?

Thanks Hugh for the referral.

NASA on Twitter

I am now following NASA.

How cool is it to get Tweets from space?

Seems to be a bit of a theme this Fall, but yet another article about the Kindle.  (I bet you can guess what might be on my Christmas List this year) However, as we think about NPM (New Products Management) we need to understand how important “Launch” is, and pricing.  This article points out a bit about how we need to think about launches in multiple countries may in fact, cause problems for us.

The FAST Company article “Has Amazon Bungled Kindle’s International Launch” gives us a bit of a case study.  What could/should they have done differently?   What have we learned about the importance of a “service” strategy that becomes part of a product launch?  What have we learned about partners?

Thank you Wendy for your suggestion.

The article “Google’s ingenious plan to spruce up the browser” or Chrome for Clunkers is an interesting article and short video sabout browsers.  Personally, I like the CHROME browser from GOOGLE especially for accessing webmail (it seems to be faster), I also like the fact that it is a GOOGLE Search tool and browsers where I can be lazy and not even type a URL, I just type what  am looking for.

The article also promises that it will be a big part of GOOGLE Wave — which you have perhaps read about in this blog.

So what do you use and why?   If you have used Chrome, do you think it is faster, or just anti-Explorer?

Thank you David for your suggestion of this article.

Kindles yet to woo University Users

One student said in the article ““Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

Humm.  Interesting.  You can highlight on the Kindle, however, in the university environment, it gets in the way of learning.  At least according to this student.

What do you think?