Real Business Users and SharePoint

Introducing buzzword-compliant technology like a wiki, or integrated collaboration spaces like SharePoint, will typically go well with a motivated audience like your internal IT department. But if you really want to understand how this stuff works, try it with “real people” – line employees in sales and marketing, operations, and finance.Sure, you’ve heard complaints from [...]

Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but …

When I see / read articles like this, or hear the breathless claims of vendors, pundits, and True Believers, I’ll privately chuckle to myself. All of this stuff – social networking, collaboration, and innovation – are 21st century takes on good old Knowledge Management (KM), circa 1998. Do these sound like presentations from your recent [...]

Zodiac of Knowledge Capture

The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally [...]

A Plea for Empathetic Communication

It’s impossible to over-communicate
Sounds a bit strong, but if you think through your real-world experiences, this shouldn’t surprise anyone. No matter how hard you try, your message will be missed by someone …
Problem: It’s all their fault!
Rely on Web 2.0, and …

… they won’t subscribe to the RSS feed; they don’t understand the concept, and [...]

Where to Start? (1 of 2) Process & Procedure

If you need a one-slide, three-bullet, PowerPoint special for describing the basic tactics for “How to Achieve Operational Excellence”, try these:

Process and Procedures
Metrics and Measurements
Continuous Improvement

The first two are nicely alliterative, but you might consider substituting Standards and Processes as your lead-off if we’re talking about an IT, Finance, or Engineering department.
Now What?
Of course, now [...]

Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment

“What will you do with that car if you actually catch it?”
– what the cat asked the dog (from the Chicago Reader, circa 1989)
So you’ve gone all “Enterprise 2.0″, spinning up a wiki, a blog, and a SharePoint or Drupal server inside your firewall. Now what happens?
The groundswell of interest in “cool tools” brings a [...]

Opportunistic Insights from the RSS Stream

I’ve written about using RSS for internal as well as external information sources. This past week, I found a couple of interesting tidbits in my feed reader (behind the firewall) …

1. Eyes on the Skies: It’s that time of year again; oil price volatility will continue if any big storms create problems for refineries [...]

No Silver Bullet for Group Collaboration over Distance?

Lots of organizations have to deal with the challenge of implementing standard work and best practices over physical distances. With sales offices, distribution centers, and manufacturing locations scattered across the country, what’s the best way to get people who know their stuff to collaborate on process improvement – and then take that knowledge back to [...]

Success, Failure, and Insights after 12 Months of Internal Web 2.0

Different areas of our IT department are using internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration spaces, with varying degrees of participation, readership, and success. Some observations:
Blogging is Easy …
The blogs and wiki(s) have effectively removed the hassles of capturing and distributing information quickly. One important early decision was to not implement an editorial approval process for [...]

Rules of Golf – Project Prioritization Process Needs Clear Documentation

Different areas of our IT department are using internal blogs, wikis, and collaboration spaces, with varying degrees of participation, readership, and success. Some observations:
Blogging is Easy …
The blogs and wiki(s) have effectively removed the hassles of capturing and distributing information quickly. One important early decision was to not implement an editorial approval process for [...]