infoarch

Last weekend I read an intriguing article in the Dutch newspaper, NRC . A communication researcher, Tjardus van Citters , wanted to give us all well-meaning advice. (Dutch titel: 'Welgemeend advies van een communicatie-expert: minder communicatie, s.v.p', Sept. 20, 2009.) His article gives an overview of the sources that are increasing the number of signals we process each day. For instance the number of communication providers has increased. And the fact that our senses are being addressed more than ever. This overview leads to his advice to communicate less. Why? Because our health is at stake. Our brains get more impulses to process. The model of 'selective perception' is out-dated. We get irritated by communication we did not want to see, leading to restlessness, even illness. He therefore advises us to turn off signals. Read the news once a week instead of every few hours. Unsubscribe to things you don't want to receive. Be clear what kind of emails you ...

Thomas Friedman in The World is Flat and Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in Wikinomics have predicted that the way companies will recruit people will be fundamentally different in the future. In the past the model was easy: Get the best and brightest people to work for you. Of course these new employees would move close to your company and work inside the firewall as much as possible. Of course we've seen some movement in this area. Outsourcing of jobs to India or China. Tele-commuting, working-more-from-home, etc. At first I thought it looked like Google has taken this a step further . But this is fake (Twitter spam...). But the idea is great and got me thinking. In short the site said: Everyone with a computer and a broadband connection can work for us right from their homes. (And aren't we already, but clicking on links!? ;-)) Seriously, this could be interesting and big in my opinion. This 'offer' is 'only' focused on the US and Canada. But what if...

Professor Henry Mintzberg has an interesting article in the HBR of July-August 2009 titled: 'Rebuilding Companies as Communities' . (Isn't it too bad these articles are readable by all, even non-subscribers?) Reading this article brought back memories of Etienne Wenger's book, 'Communities of Practice' . That book was a big eye-opener to me, introducing me to 'social worlds theory', companies staring as communities, communities that just exist (and can't be formed) in communities, etc. To Mintzberg Community means: ... caring about our work, our colleagues, and our place in the world, geographic and otherwise, and in turn being inspired by this caring. He proposes a new word: "Communityship" to underline the importance of on the one hand individual leadership and on the other side collective citizenship. Communityship should make... ... use of leadership, but not the egocentric, 'heroic' kind that has become so prev...

This provoking statement popped up after reading Robin Hamman's post, 'Social media monitoring - more first step than end game' . Of course some people start sighing when they hear 'social media' and 'web 2.0'. What's the idea of this new stuff and why should I get into it? Robin quotes his Headshift colleague Lee Bryant saying: If you look at a longer timeframe, you will see that our new era of social technology and social business is in fact more traditional, and continues very old, resilient models of network-based trade, business and socialisation. The difference is, we now have the technology and infrastructure (and arguably the globalised world) that enables us to scale up these old ways of working to support our modern life. Robin goes on to say: In short, consumers can and should be closely involved in the co-creation, testing, refinement and marketing of products and services - something that nearly always involves a conversation -...

A colleague of mine kindly pointed me to an interesting report: "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite. How executives locate and filter business information'. It's a Forbes Insight report, sponsored by Google. To be clear, this report is about how executives look for and process external information. Information that is on the web. It would be very interesting to read a comparable report on how execs do the same for internal information. I think it's the case for many execs they're too busy to follow and look for external trends anyway. Surprisingly more than 60% of the execs said they accessed the Internet for business intelligence on a daily basis. Another interesting part of the report is how execs use web 2.0. For the 50+ category 80% or more didn't maintain a blog or tweet. Only 26% of the 'under 40' category didn't tweet. RSS is not used much at all over all categories. Only 40% of the 'under 40' category for instance. Which regrett...

Recently I was honored to be interviewed a couple of times by Bill Ives about the 'Enterprise 2.0' implementations the company I work for ( Océ ) has done. I thought I'd list them here for your (and my) convenience. Implementing Enterprise Micro-sharing at Océ Implementing Enterprise Wiki's at Océ Creating Enterprise Information Architecture at Océ Implementing Enterprise Social Bookmarking at Océ These interviews have also been published on Bill's blog . Being interviewed is very helpful. For one the questions of the interviewer really make you think about the work you've done. Bill did a great job asking questions and I loved the way he structured the interview in posts. Not the basic question-answer type interview. Another great thing about being interviewed is the external reference it gives you. Of course I've been blogging about my work, but having your story on a couple of big blogs, such as the AppGap , the FastForward blog and Bill's own blog...

On the 4th of November the second Knowledge Management meeting 'Made in Holland' will be held at the University of Twente! Last time - the first time - I was there and blogged about the presentations . I really enjoyed it. This time I hope to be there again. And... I'll be one of the presenters! I'll be talking about our 'enterprise wiki' initiatives . Looking forward to it. The meeting is open to all. It's focused on Dutch KM researchers and practitioners. So if you want to come, just leave a comment and I'll get you in contact with the organizers. Tags van Technorati: km , knowledge management , wiki