Knowledge Management

Introducing Collaboration Tools? Three Required Personas for Success

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 17, 2011 ⋅ One comment

When introducing collaboration tools to an organization – creating the corporate intranet, defining project sites in Sharepoint, etc. – there are multiple skills you must master – well, at least get better at. You need to capture the ideas and communicate the data such that your target reader understands what you are trying to convey [...]

A Little Too Literal (or, How to Teach Innovation)

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 9, 2010 ⋅ One comment

Spoiler alert: It can’t be taught … One of the questions I get – and I’m getting this a lot lately – is how to get people to think more analytically, less literally. We need folks to stop focusing on the mechanical task of manipulating reports with Excel just to compute some answers. How about [...]

Underwhelming experiences with Google Wave

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ October 17, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Took some time today to work with the new communication meme – Google Wave. I wouldn’t call it a fundamentally new way to communicate – well, not yet. I think Google is safe to continue with a “preview” label – clearly not even “beta” yet. No horrible bugs – at least on the Windows platform [...]

Training and Learning: A Different POV

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ August 18, 2009 ⋅ One comment

The topic was training users for an upcoming project rollout, and the debate (as always) roamed back and forth between “traditional” (classroom training, scripts & workbooks) versus “experiential”, pairing existing users with their counterparts (who are new to the system), walking through the basics (screen navigation, terminology, and step-by-step instructions for the most common required [...]

Business Benefits of Social Networks Exist, but …

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 26, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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 [...]

Practical Applications of Twitter in Manufacturing?

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ April 5, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a couple of interesting discussions about the introduction of Twitter to Manufacturing. When someone poses a question like this to me, it throws me for a minor loop, because for very basic, practical reasons, it just doesn’t seem to apply. More keyboards & data entry on the floor? [...]

A Plea for Empathetic Communication

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ November 17, 2008 ⋅ One comment

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 [...]

Enterprise 2.1: Exiting the Trough of Disillusionment

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 22, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

“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 [...]

Finally! Relevant Applications for YouTube and Twitter in the Enterprise!

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ July 11, 2008 ⋅ One comment

If you are involved with manufacturing these days, you’ve no doubt heard about Lean Manufacturing. I’ll not go deep into this area here, but one fascinating (for me) aspect is the thread (in some quarters) that ERP and computer systems are the enemy of Lean. On the whole, I don’t disagree – process improvement, kanbans, [...]

Opportunistic Insights from the RSS Stream

By Jim MacLennan ⋅ June 5, 2008 ⋅ Post a comment

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

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