topsarge

Paul Bryan reported in the “Intranet Journal” last year a result of a survey where an oft heard complaint was about low usage of company portals. In his attempt to narrow the causative factors contributing to negative reviews one of the key challenges he found was “often a result of focusing on technical requirements rather than the real-life context of the system.” Sounds like another example of missing the other two elements of good KM…the People and Processes that support the underlying Technology. Give ’em a portal but don’t show them why they need it, how to use it, or help them change their internal procedures to support it. As Maxwell Smart would say, “ah, The Oldest Trick in the Book!”

Is that a problem in your work area, are there portals at your disposal that are little understood or seldom used? Who needs these portals anyway, I have lived without them for all this time, why do should I use one now? Be it an organizational Sharepoint server, the Army’s Knowledge Online enterprise portal, or one of the communities of practice that have proliferated in the .mil domain, these online internet (or intranet) presences are something you should be paying attention to. I suggest that you may have the technology, but do your people know how to best employ them and have your operating procedures adapted to using them yet?

Read More »Dirty Dongles Done Dirt Cheap

“The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry”

How do you go from sharing information to learning new knowledge? Experts describe two types of knowledge, explicit and tacit. Explicit knowledge is the type that organizations and people exchange by giving instruction and writing steps or details in how-to guides, policies and procedures, or instruction manuals. You can often exchange explicit knowledge regulalrly and it can be done for basic skills, like say maybe map reading. I suggest most good trainers can sit down with a complete novice and after a matter of hours have them reading a military map.

Tacit knowledge is the type of knowledge that comes from experience, intuition, and basically a gut feeling. Some of it can be expressed, but other types are difficult for a trainer to actually teach. Consider
explaining to someone how to glance at terrain features and then by using their own experience to be able to convert that 3D view to a spot on 2D map and quickly identify a location. That is probably harder to get across in a simple data exchange.

Read More »Of Maps and Men

Yep, according to author Marc Prensky, Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft and the face of the personal computer revolution is a digital immigrant. But so is Steve Jobs, Apple chairman, and Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape, the first popular web browser. And, as I was so correctly reminded this week, so am I. Actually, you can pretty much sum up digital immigrants as at… Read More »Bill Gates, Digital Immigrant

As I was preparing for what would have been my magnum opus blog entry this week, the firewall on the network provided by the local Directorate of Information Management (DOIM) stopped me dead in my tracks. I was seeking out that one golden nugget to really hammer the nail home on Knowledge Management, but sorry boss, no can do.

Surely you all have been at that exact moment after you click a link when the web address in your browser changes to that familiar filter warning and the big bold letters “WEB ACCESS DENIAL” come at you like a digital smack to your hand? It appears that the site I wanted to see conflicts with the Access Control List and it was going to take a petition to the network gatekeepers before I was ever going to see that now elusive web page. Come to find out, I am never going to see that site from here. And for some unexplained reason I now wanted to see that website more than I have ever wanted to see a website before.

.Read More »Has your Library Card expired?

New guy jumps on the band-wagon of sharp-stick poking