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 Corporate Reports Wisconsin

Atwitter in the NEW North

The survey of companies in the “New North” supports that Social media is on the rise in Wisconsin among businesses.

From the article “Of those who do use social media, they tend to use it to connect with/communicate with others in the community or their industry (39 percent), to connect with/ communicate with clients (31 percent) and to gather information or research specific topics (27 percent). Just 22 percent indicated they use social media to find or connect with potential new clients.”

The article also states that of the companies using social media 79% feel the networking has benefited their firms.

Is your organization using social media?  What are you using? Is it helping? How?

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 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 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.

Viewed over 3.5 Million times.  Funny and and important, interesting and thought provoking TED Talk Video.

How Schools Stifle Creativity

Do we grow out of creativity?  Are you prepared to be wrong?

What do you think?

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?

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?

Ok, here is some more information and a look at the Plastic Logic eReader.   Looks pretty cool to me.

Plastic Logic Que e-Reader

We read that the Que may be actually targeted at something other than the Kindle. ” But Archuleta also repositions the Que as something a little different to merely being a Kindle killer e-reader device. He notes “Que enhances business performance and gives you a competitive edge.” The business angle’s also played up with mention of support for PDF, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel…and there’s even the intriguing phrase “powerful tools for interacting with and managing the content.” That implies you may be able to do more than just annotate documents on the Que–will you be able to actually edit them, or run a Powerpoint presentation? We can’t tell yet, but it certainly seems that Plastic Logic’s Que will enter the e-reader game right at the top end, perhaps tending toward limited Tablet PC capabilities.”

What do you think?  Pretty cool?  Will the market handle a “premium product”?  Does this seem to square off with the new tablets that we read are coming?  DO you want one?

Thanks Hugh for the referral.

NASA on Twitter

I am now following NASA.

How cool is it to get Tweets from space?

I learned about this new book from an article and short video on the INSEAD KNOWLEDGE website.

The article is “The Innovation Manual“  and we can see from the perspective of a marketing professor a number of key points, many of which we have discussed in our classes, but it serves as a great reminder about the “basics” .

David Midgley, the author of the book, uses the example of the Apple iPod and the business model it created.  Once again, we see this model coming out as a key to success. Further, the role of customers in product/service innovation and development.  We also read about the importance of an innovation culture and the challenges of maintaining a culture of innovation.  The book promises to tell us all about it.

What do you think of the reminders here?  What should be emphasized more?   Less?

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 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?

Baseline Magazine has a slide show that offers some pretty compelling reasons why Solr perhaps offers a great alternative for full text search on your internal sites and databases.  “Smarter Search with Solr“  It is open source for one and has been used successfully with CNET and other sites which are named.

What do you think?  Would you rather pay license fees?

What made you think about switching or implementing this?  From a managerial standpoint, is this something you may direct your IT team to look into?  Why?

Fast Company posted “The Argument for Kindles in Schools“.  Mainly, the arument is that it saves money.

What do you think?  Would you prefer an electronic textbook reader?  What features would you think beneficial?

Thanks to Hugh for this recommendation on “The World According to GOOGLE”.

CNN Money published an article called “The World Acccording to GOOGLE” wherein they discuss some of the economic trending that GOOGLE is doing.  Also, we have spoken in class about GOOGLE TRENDS and more specifically, the GOOGLE Flu Trends .  Knowing what people are searching for can yield some powerful trending information.

What do you think about this technology?  How can it lead to competitive advantage?  What would you like trended?