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Archive for October, 2008

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Posted in Blog, Collaboration, KM, Personal, Web2.0 on 23 October 2008 | No Comments »

A recent exchange of views on the actKM mailing list inspired me to think about writing about my own Web2.0 experience, and what it means for me. Then the now-famous Wired article was published (no link — it has had enough — but here is a good early critique). I commented on the article’s point [...]

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With a little help from my friends

Posted in Collaboration, Culture, KM, Lawyering, Technology on 20 October 2008 | 3 Comments »

Knowledge management activities in UK law firms depend very heavily on people power — being more reliant on Professional Support Lawyers (PSLs) than their US and continental European counterparts. Despite this, the recent Knowledge Management in Law Firms conference had a noticeable technology focus. I’m afraid I set the tone in the first session with [...]

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The World snores

Posted in Fun on 15 October 2008 | No Comments »

I usually get up early, but this morning was exceptional. As a result, I fell to wondering how many other people were up, and from there what would be the moment in time when there was least human activity on the planet. I should have gone to bed hours ago, but the question popped into [...]

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Measuring maturity

Posted in Irrationality, KM, Knowledge, Learning, Management on 14 October 2008 | 1 Comment »

There is a small number of meta-questions about knowledge management that people regularly grapple with. The most obvious is “what is knowledge management?” After that, the next most frequently asked must be “how do you measure KM success?” I have found at least 23 answers (or challenges) to that question, and there are undoubtedly more. [...]

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In search of failure

Posted in KM, Projects on 13 October 2008 | 1 Comment »

I am speaking at a conference tomorrow, looking at case studies of KM systems implementation. During my preparation, I was struck by how much I was concentrating on the things that went wrong. On reflection, I think this is correct.
Last week, Shawn Callahan asked why business writing tended not to use examples:
I suspect it takes [...]

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Oh good grief…

Posted in Culture, KM, Tradition, Web2.0 on 10 October 2008 | 7 Comments »

I think I am grateful to Mary Abraham for pointing me in the direction of Venkatesh Rao’s densely argued article opposing knowledge management and social media. In fact, it made me as despondent as Charlie Brown faced with yet another opportunity to kick Lucy’s football. This is not a generational war: it is a battle of the [...]

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Social software in law firms

Posted in Information, Lawyering, Sharing, Web2.0 on 6 October 2008 | No Comments »

About ten days ago, I attended a law firm breakfast meeting hosted by Headshift, the social software consultancy. Penny Edwards has blogged about the event and posted the presentation on Slideshare. It was a really interesting meeting and discussion, and well worth the very early start I had to make to get there from Manchester.
The presentation [...]

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You can’t make me do it…

Posted in Culture, KM, Management on 3 October 2008 | No Comments »

In an earlier post, I wrote briefly about incentives in KM initiatives. In what looks like a response to Dave Snowden’s assertion that story-telling can be manipulative (”I think story telling is the weakest, least effective and most dangerous form of narrative work”), Shawn Callahan points to a summary by David Maxfield of the distinction between [...]

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