infoarch

Location-based services are very interesting, I find. And I see a big future for them. The fact that you can connect content to a location is intriguing. It's even more fascinating to realize that it's not just content linked to a location, but also the person sharing the content is linked to it. I've been using Foursquare since the beginning, checking in regularly (now 1379 checkins). I changed my location sharing strategies several times: from sharing everything on Twitter to sharing nothing and everything in between. Looking at the numbers location-based services are growing , but they're still a niche. It's great to see businesses experimenting with these services. Starting now will give them an edge when things go mainstream. But has it been useful to me? Has it made me more productive? Have I met more interesting people? Did I get interesting discounts? In short: No, it didn't. Let me explain. It's great to get badges every now-and-then, to s...

Tomorrow I’ll be at the National Knowledge Management Research meeting “Made in Holland ” in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). I’ll be live blogging (most of) the sessions. Here’s the program: Theme ‘Valuing Knowledge’ - Ton Zijlstra (Proven Partners): Kennismanagement scans - Christiaan Stam (Kenniskring Intellectual Capital, Hogeschool INHOLLAND & de Baak – Management Centrum VNO-NCW): Knowledge productivity Theme ‘Knowledge creation’ - Henk Smeijsters, Hans Koolmees & Sylvia Schoenmakers (Kenniskring Kennisorganisaties en Kennismanagement, Hogeschool Zuyd): Practical research and action learning in learning organisations - Vanessa Dirksen & Ard Huizing (University van Amsterdam): The Networking Knowledge Worker, Technology Appropriation and the Shaping of LearningPractices Theme ‘Knowledge retention’ - Marian Grootveld (Telematica Instituut) & Anja van der Hulst (Cognitive Tools): Kennisbehoud bij Thales. - Kees Vreugdenhil en Marijke Diel...

This is my presentation for the KM Made in Holland meeting about 'enterprise wiki's @ Océ: Pres. Enterprise Wiki’s @ Océ Km Made In Holland View more presentations from Samuel Driessen . Got some interesting questions: about culture and wiki's and getting people to collaborate in wiki's how are disagreements about content in the wiki handled? what would happen if the wiki platform was taken away? Will work come to a grinding halt? Tags van Technorati: wiki , knowledge management

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

And here's the last presentation of the KM 'Made in Holland' meeting. Bozena van Trigt of Triam Float kindly emailed me a link to her presentation. I had to leave early, so I had to miss her presentation regrettably and don't have notes going along with this presentation... But I will, as requested by Bozena, share her presentation here for completeness sake! The topic of her presentation is very interesting: knowledge management in a process operator environment. KM "Made in Holland" presentatie Triam Float View more presentations from MB van Trigt . Tags van Technorati: knowledge management , learning

Ton Zijlstra ( Proven Partners ): Knowledge management scans Since 2000 Proven Partners collects the results of 4 knowledge management scans, using an online benchmark engine. The scans are about the following themes: 1) How important is knowledge in our organization? 2) How clear is our future direction? 3) How good are we at knowledge management? 4) Is our company organized in a knowledge sensitive way? These scans are based on the Knowledge Value Chain (Weggeman, 1997) and filled in by a broad selection of Dutch organizations. In this presentation Ton looks back and gives an analysis of seven years of data collecting. Impressions from the surveys: - the survey consists of 600 questions of which 151 are taken from standard scans. Weggeman helped define the questions. - there is a big gap between KM ambition level of companies and what they are doing in practice. - Companies find it hard to define knowledge goals and strategy. - Most companies ...

I'm at the second Knowledge Management "Made in Holland" meeting. The first one was held two years ago . I'll be blogging about most of the presentations. And some are also tweeting about this meeting. You can follow the tweets by searching for this tag: #kmnl . Focus of this year's meeting is: "Knowledge Management and learning at work". Tags van Technorati: knowledge management

Hendrik Kupper ( Wageningen University ): Knowledge policy in the sector Agriculture, Nature and Food quality The sector ‘Agriculture, Food and Nature’ has always been characterized as an excellent knowledge infrastructure and showed passionate use of knowledge by farmers and gardeners. However this has changed in the last ten years, initiated by the privatization of the knowledge institutes of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. Now a new knowledge system is growing. All sorts of collaboration between knowledge institutes, companies, community organization, education and government is developing. The model of knowledge management in the sector looked like this: Know why > know that > know how - which relates to: Understand > control > do - which relates to: Create > exchange > utilize - which relates to: Fundamental knowledge (laws, theories) > technological knowledge (control/influence matter, people, organizations) > technical knowledge (...

Kees Vreugdenhil en Marijke Dieleman (Kenniskring Kennisorganisaties en Kennismanagement, Hogeschool Zuyd): Knowledge policy and sustainably continue (Dutch: “duurzaam doorwerken”) working in the mid-sized businesses in Parkcity Limburg Parkcity Limburg (Limburg is a southern Dutch province, Parkcity is a group of cities in Limburg ) is the first region in The Netherlands where ageing (“silver economy”) in the Mid-sized business is clearly hitting home hard. (90% of the employability in Parkcity is in Mid-sized businesses.) Therefore a project was set up to develop and implement policies to address the loss of knowledge due to retirement, to develop and implement an HR policy to allow employees to continue working if they are able to and would like to. Their preliminary results are presented today. They mention that what ‘graying’ really means, is not clear; we’re learning on the go. “The key is to use knowledge about age to manage it.” (Prof. Ilmarinen - He defined the 12 pil...

Vanessa Dirksen & Ard Huizing (University van Amsterdam): The Networking Knowledge Worker, Technology Appropriation and the Shaping of Learning Practices This very interesting presentation reports on “an ethnographic study performed in a large and distributed, knowledge intensive ICT company. It gives an in-depth account of the introduction of virtual communities in this organization and what happened afterwards. When confronted with organizational change ideas such as virtual community, people make sense of and appropriate these ideas to make them ‘their own’.” Basically they asked: What could or should knowledge management be? Why is the game Warcraft such a success as apposed to corporate Intranet for instance? They see to main approaches to KM: One from ‘Objectivism’, and the other from ‘subjectivism’. Objectivism says: Knowledge and information is a thing, product, etc. Objectivism: the philosophical tradition that for knowledge development we should view the worl...

Ruud Janssen ( Telematica Instituut ): Coping with information overload Information overload is a popular subject. And for good reasons. Lots of media comes at use via lots of different ways. However we can only process a certain amount of information at a certain speed in a certain amount of time. This can stress people, which, in short, we call ‘information overload’. Refer to NRC article, Nov. 8, 2007: "Inbox overflow leads to less colleague contact" . Following interviews and workshops, e-mail is usually seen as the culprit (ambiguous e-mails, e-mail avalanches, number of e-mails, etc.). They also found that some managers suffer more from information overload than others. This seems to result from the way they handle information overload. In other words: the way one handles information overload relates to how much you suffer from it. Furthermore information overload is not always experienced, but in periods of time. They focused on information overloa...

Henk Smeijsters, Hans Koolmees & Sylvia Schoenmakers (Kenniskring Kennisorganisaties en Kennismanagement, Hogeschool Zuyd): Practical research and action learning in learning organizations Encouraged by the government, the Maasland hospital of the Orbical (Dutch: Orbisch) Medical and Care concern is realizing the hospital of the 21st century. Part of this venture is the Patient-focused treatment (PFT), which should help this hospital evolve into a learning organization. The project developed a mental model of PFT rules of conduct, a PFT training and a method to embed it in their work. This is done in dialogue with the employees, using data collecting techniques, techniques for co-creation and natural inquiry techniques (such as member checking, triangulation, peer debriefing). Embedding in daily work is done using action learning, which is still work-in-progress. There are hiccups w.r.t. embedding: the employees don’t have much time, limited experience with ICT, big differe...

Rene Jansen gave the second presentation at KM Made in Holland. Here's his presentation (in Dutch): Kennismanagement met Winkwaves Kenniscafe View more documents from Rene Jansen . Some personal notes: Winkwaves (gestart in 2005) is Rene's company. Their fascination is how people live together and collaborate in knowledge intensive organizations. And how "untapped potential of technology can contribute when organization have more than one coffee machine". Tells about Winkwave's Knowledge Cafés. The different roles in social media: Tippers, Storytellers, self-advertisers, Archivers, Promotors, Reactors, Connectors, lurkers, one day flies. They use persona research: segmentation based on goals, attitude and behavior. Points to the Soft systems methodology (Peter Checkland): start with looking at the way people really work/live. Social media can only do the following: make content visible and support many-to-many conversations. Sheet 15 i...

Daan Andriessen (Kenniskring Intellectual Capital, Hogeschool INHOLLAND): Metaphors for knowledge Daan started out by say we used 159 metaphors for knowledge during this meeting. Examples are: knowledge sharing, flows, etc.! Daan is inspired by the “Conceptual Metaphor Theory” of Lakoff & Johnson. The use of metaphors is largely unconscious and they direct our thinking. Knowledge as abstract concept is primarily conceptualized by metaphor. It’s the only way we can talk about knowledge. When comparing the used of metaphors in knowledge management literature they found that: - in the Western world (e.g. work by Davenport and Prusak) knowledge is used as an object, as a resource. - On the other hand, in the Eastern/Asian world (e.g. work by Nonaka & Takeuchi) knowledge is used as thoughts or feelings, as an organism. So they wondered: What is the effect of metaphors on the discourse about knowledge management in organizations? Based on a workshop with managers and o...

Christiaan Stam (Kenniskring Intellectual Capital, Hogeschool INHOLLAND & de Baak – Management Centrum VNO-NCW): Knowledge productivity This presentation is about designing and testing a method to diagnose knowledge productivity and to subsequently make a knowledge management plan. It will address what we mean by ‘knowledge productivity’, how we can diagnose and improve it. Christiaan wrote a PhD thesis on this topic and will defend it in December (2007). Christiaan mentioned that addressing and defining knowledge productivity is a real challenge. Currently there are two approaches to knowledge productivity: Knowledge productivity as a process. Focus on knowledge, improvement of process on knowledge creation. (Dutch KM-ers like Weggeman and Kessel represent this group.) Knowledge productivity as result. Focus on productivity. Measuring knowledge results, insight in knowledge performance. (Sveiby is a representative of this group.) ...

Marjan Grootveld ( Telematica Instituut ) & Anja van der Hulst ( Cognitive Tools ): Knowledge retaining at Thales . How do you retain critical knowledge in an organization ( Thales ) with many retiring employees? How do you combine strict need to know policy in practice with knowledge sharing? How can the internal training department and the group that trains customers learn from each other? How do you spread the knowledge retaining effort over the different business units? 50% of employees at Thales are between 46-50 years old. And these people usually are life-long employees. Furthermore, the products (radar systems) Thales sells require 20-30 year maintenance and support. How to retain knowledge due to reorganization, aging, shorter careers, and outsourcing? They used techniques as interviews, story telling and knowledge mapping to analyze the situation at Thales. They found that knowledge retaining is really expensive. So, retain only company critical knowledge. ...

Jose Kooken, Robert de Hoog, and others ( University of Twente , IPIT, Politie Academie): Knowledge Sharing at the Police: Police Knowledge Net (PKN) PKN is (“push”) system that was implemented for daily use of the whole police organization to support knowledge and information sharing. This presentation is about how PKN is used and who uses it, why and with what success. What other sources does the police use for acquire knowledge? They observed police employees in several police units for one hour to define their knowledge need. A ‘knowledge need’ is defined as a need that one has for which he/she searches for and analyzes for longer than 10 minutes. The highlights of the observation are: - the use of PKN, as part of all the digital knowledgebases, is approximately 12,5%. - the most-used knowledge sources are colleagues. - knowledge use reported in the survey was much higher than seen during actual work. - 80% of the surveyed employees say they never have a knowle...

Lilia Efimova ( Telematica Instituut ): Employee weblogs: a knowledge management approach Lilia is conducting her PhD research on ‘employee blogging’ . She’ll present part of her research results here. This part of her research was published in Efimova & Grudin (2007), Crossing Boundaries: A case study of Employee Blogging . Weblogs are: - used as a (personal) KM instrument - passion driven, bottom-up tools in a (non-)business environment - used as a research tool Lilia investigated employee blogging at Microsoft (- at that moment 10% of MS employees were blogging). Why do people at Microsoft use work-related weblogs: - To communicate directly with others inside and outside of the organization - To document and organize their own work - To showing the human side of the company (Within Microsoft employees are not asked to blog about why they’re proud of the company by their managers. They themselves want to write about why they’re proud and why th...

Daan van Tienhoven, Ebru Göçmen, Boudewijn Elsenburg ( Erasmus University , RSM): The influence of unit performance requirements on knowledge sharing between units In their daily work they found resistance to share knowledge over business units and wanted to find out why. They investigated the relationship between two constructs: KPI’s/targets knowledge sharing How do the organizational goals influence inter-unit knowledge sharing? They defined several types of organizational goals: - Quantitative-qualitative goals - Learning-outcome - performance goals They joined these two goals because quality relates to learning and quantity relates to performance. These do split into hard and soft goals. They found that hard goals, such as KPI’s (key performance indicators), tend to obstruct knowledge sharing, soft goals encourage and stimulate it. - Less strict boundary goals (?? Didn’t quite get this one…) > There were no conclusions on the influence of this goal on kn...