infoarch

Presentation #kmnl by Bozena van Trigt

2009-11-06T21:09:00.001+01:00

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

Presentation #kmnl by Rienke Schutte

2009-11-04T21:44:00.002+01:00

Title of presentation: Wikipolicy: institutional policy & social software by Rienke Schutte, Hogeschool Zuyd, Knowledge community Knowledge Organizations and Knowledge Management. Related article about the Wikipolicy.
In 2008, the 'Hogeschool' (English: college) initiated a project entitled “Policy Workshop 2013”. The result of this project would be a policy framework for their organization. The new policy should bring together insights, opinions and wishes of students, staff and stakeholders. A wiki was one of the instruments to achieve that goal.
Objectives of the project:

powerful, stakeholder oriented vision strategic direction
shift towards a co-creative organization

Plan of action (in 2008):

wiki with 4 main topics (platform: Wikispaces)
conferences for managers, teams, external experts (educational/non-educational)
work meetings
flyers
weekly blog members of the board
Café 2020 (SURF - foundation scenario's)
formal conclusions by management

Evaluation of the project:

enthusiastic discussion in work- and staff meetings
lots of corridor chat
representative Advisory Body were involved
limited participation students and external stakeholders in the wiki

Limited active participation in the wiki was due to:

involvement with the topic (what's in it for me?)
unstructured nature of the process and open medium
initial text not seen as an incentive
pressure of work

Conclusions of the project:

main issues strategic direction taken for granted
commitment of the Board insufficient to raise participation
future: implementation of horizontal dialogue (Organization 2.0) on limited amount of subjects and related to the concrete work of stakeholders

Tags van Technorati: wiki,knowledge management

Presentation #kmnl by Ton Zijlsta

2009-11-04T16:34:00.003+01:00

Title of presentation: Autonomous (self-steered) learning in groups.

KM in Holland

View more documents from Ton Zijlstra.

In 2007 the HR department of the Hogeschool Rotterdam heard of presentation by Wim Veen ("Homo zappiens") about Gen Y, etc. They wanted to undestand this deeply and act on it.
Goal of their HR department was to change the education style and learning methods.
Ton tells about how the project to achieve the goals was set up. I love the way this project was organized without fixed gates. They explicitly took a more chaotic approach. Progress of the project was measured based on quality measures. This gave educators lots of opportunities to try, experiment, fail, learn, etc. without time pressure. Examples: blogging, make screencasts, education and video's.
Also points to the Social Media Classroom.
Yammer was also set up to keep the community together after the project ended.

Tags van Technorati: learning,knowledge management

Presentation #kmnl by Christiaan Stam

2009-11-04T15:28:00.001+01:00

Christiaan Stam, associate lector, knowledge community Intellectual Capital, Hogeschool INHolland.

Title: Learning from elderly people.

Look at ageing from knowledge management perspective.

This work was triggered by a thesis in his PhD thesis: "In the near future the success of companies depends on the will to invest in the development of older employees."

Provides numbers on demographics and ageing.

The image of older workers is based on prejudices, myths. They are false, but self-fulfilling.

How can we retain knowledge from older workers? (brain drain) Lots is being done (successfully) by companies, such as Thales and Shell, in this area.

Christiaan would like to address this question scientifically, using CIMO-logic (Context, Intervention, Mechanism, Outcome).

Gives 6 intervention for knowledge retention:

file transfer conversation
leaving expert interviews
expert-apprentice relation
individual gap analysis
knowledge recall

Based on the analysis of the above-mentioned interventions with the CIMO-logic, Christiaan derives statements, such as:

To increase the productivity of employees (O), etc.

Interesting preliminary conclusions are:

the different methods have comparable outcomes.
the effects of the methods are mostly implicit
codification strategy also has effect on personal productivity
most of the learning is applying the method itself, not in the knowledge is delivers.

Tags van Technorati: ageing,greying,knowledge management,knowledge retention

Presentation #kmnl 2009 by Rene Jansen

2009-11-04T14:43:00.001+01:00

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 is very interesting in this context!

Gives explanation of what they did for the intranet site of D66 (Dutch political party). Button 'Thank you/Like' most used feature of knowledge café.

Also tells about how they see dynamic profiling and expert finding. Based on what they see how people interact.

Tags van Technorati: knowledge management,social networking

Presentation #kmnl by Jose Kooken, Henny Leemkuil & Wilco Bonestroo

2009-11-04T14:34:00.001+01:00

This presentation gives an overview of the APOSDLE project (Advanced Process-oriented self-directed learning environment). Title of the presentation is "Learning in the workplace: supporting it by the APOSDLE system".

This project runs from March 2006 to February 2010 and has 12 partners.

Goal of this project is to design a domain independent system for knowledge workers using exciting sources in the company.

Assumptions:

People mostly learn at work in a self-steered way. > True, learning at a computerized workspace is seen.
Self-steered learning during work is mostly initiated by the actual work people do. > True, a work task is the most important trigger for learning.
During self-steered learning at work bottlenecks occur that should be overcome. > True, in general learning is successful (72%), but there are several issues. (non existing info, lots of info instead of precise info, experts not willing to share, etc.)
Inter-personal communication is important when in self-steered office work. > True, practical applications and written material are checked, but inter-personal communication is essential.

This was used as requirements for the APOSDLE system. Henny tells what type of questions need to be answered by and the theoretical underpinnings of the learning system.

Wilco demo's the APOSDLE prototype. Looks like a huge expert system. I like the interactive part in the system: adding comments, highlights, etc. Also leads to expert finding tool implicitly.

The documents used in the system have to be added to the system manually and annotated manually. The original idea was to add documents automatically, and have system learn from the document. This is still an open issue.

Tags van Technorati: knowledge management,learning

Presentation #kmnl by Samuel Driessen

2009-11-04T13:42:00.001+01:00

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

At KM "Made in Holland" 2009 meeting

2009-11-04T11:27:00.001+01:00

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

Every Morning

2009-10-30T09:41:00.000+01:00

Chris Brogan's post inspired me to tell you about my morning work routine. Like many social media enthusiasts I get lots of strange and anxious looks when I tell them about the way I work and the information I process. They're even more surprised when they hear it doesn't take as much time as you would think.

We'll here's my daily morning routine! Every morning, when I work at the office or at home, I open the following applications:

Outlook (client or web) = work email. Usually I can go grab a cup of coffee before Outlook is ready to use... I go through my mail following the GTD flow and empty my inbox (inbox zero). All email that can be processed in 2 minutes (which is about 90% of my email...) is done right away. Other emails contains tasks which are put on my Outlook task list, or contain an appointment (and is automatically put in my Calendar). If a task has to be finished by a certain date I'll allocate a slot in my calendar to be finished on time. I check my calendar for today's meeting and get an alert just before the meeting.
Gmail = private email. I process this inbox in the same way as Outlook.
Google Reader. I use this feed reader to pull information about the things that interest me, to me (about 200 feeds). Postrank helps me filter through feeds of sites and Google Alerts. Some sites have too many updates for me to process. Postrank tells me which one's are important or interesting. I usually don't read the posts right away. I star posts that seem to be interesting. I'll read them when I have time (on Friday afternoon or in between meetings). I also use Google Reader to back up my tweets and the tweets of people I follow.
Brizzly. I catch up on tweets using Brizzly. I used to use TweetDeck, but like Brizzly better. I mostly use Twitter for business purposes. I organized my followers in two groups that are important and interesting to me. People not in those two groups can get promoted by followers in my groups.
Yammer. We use Yammer for enterprise microsharing. I check the updates in Yammer.
FriendFeed. I used to use FF to merge all the social media streams I have into one stream. I stopped using it, because I found most stuff in FF were tweets anyway. I do dip into FF because of the interesting Youtube video's and pictures that are shared by friends. So I have a specific saved search to filter them out.
Google News. I check the news quickly (Dutch section).
Intranet. I check if there's any interesting corporate news.
Facebook. If I have some time I'll quickly see if their are Facebook updates. I mostly use Facebook to stay in contact with family and friends.

This takes about 30-45 minutes of my time. I don't have a smart phone (yet). I practically do this the same way every morning. A work routine is important in general, but definitely when you use social media. If I have a meeting in the morning, I'll do this later during the day or in the evening.

This is my way to stay connected with my friends, experts in the field and colleagues.

So, what does your morning routine look like?

Tags van Technorati: productivity,knowledge worker,knowledge work

Sharing Process Information

2009-10-29T13:39:00.001+01:00

Does your company share and manage process information centrally? And, if so, where is that information share/stored?

I usually make a general distinction when thinking about enterprise information. I distinguish four types of information:

process information: information describing the processes of the company, the way of working and best practices, the document templates, etc.
product information: information about products, such as designs, requirements, parts descriptions, product structure(s), etc.
project information: information used to manage a project, like minutes, task lists, progress reports, customer visit reports, etc.
departmental information: information about resources, monthly reports about the department, presentations given to the department, etc.

In many companies process information is shared and stored all over the place. Part of the information can be found on the intranet. I think most process info is shared here. Some process information is stored within the project team on a share or project site. Other process info is shared in a more formal quality management tool (to be able to be ISO certified for instance).

What I'm seeing is that companies are slowly moving process information to the wiki (or a wiki-like platform). We are doing this too.

Processes, working methods, best practices, etc. is daily experience for employees. They have to work with them and they know what works and why. For this reason I think a wiki is a great way to share process information. Management could start the 'process wiki' by providing an initial structure and by monitoring its content (top-down). It is very important management doesn't start from scratch but acknowledges there's all kind of process information on the wiki already, it's mostly not coordinated yet. But the content itself will be provided, bottom-up, from the employees. Following the edits to this content gives lots of information about the way employees see the company, what really works according to them, and tells you who in the company is good at rightly in an analytical way about how the company works.

By having your employees provide the process information they are also committed to right it down in the way it actually is in daily practice and keep it up-to-date. It's not "something management imposed", but it's "ours" or "mine".

Furthermore, process and ways of working are not static, but alive. They change continuously, usually with small steps. Keeping up with these changes does not work with a complex governance structure on topic of a closed intranet or quality management site.

So, I'm curious: are you seeing process info move to wiki's? If so, share your experiences with us. If not, let us know how you manage process information.

Tags van Technorati: information architecture,knowledge management,information management,process

Giving Praise and Showing Empathy

2009-10-27T15:40:00.001+01:00

Recently I read a couple of interesting posts/articles about innovation and invention.

First of all, Dev Patnaik has a nice post about what empathy has to do with innovation. Dev has seen "companies prosper when they're able to create widespread empathy for the world around them". Empathy is:

the ability to reach outside of ourselves and walk in someone else’s shoes, to get where they’re coming from, to feel what they feel.

And this should be widespread in the organization. People within the company are able to stand in each other's shoes and in the shoes of their customers. They understand what's happening outside and respond to that accordingly. In this way the edges of companies start to blur.

Dev says we're lacking empathy not innovation. This is an interesting point also related to the posts stressing the importance of an innovative culture.

One of the facets of empathy is praising others. Steven DeMaio over at the HBR blog has an interesting post on praising. Praising colleagues for who they are and the work they do fuels creativity and innovation. This is the opposite of the 'idea killers' heard too often in the office...

But how do you organize for innovation. HBR recently (Sept. 2009) ran an interesting article. Actually it's a two page visual showing how Lego organizes to innovate. "Innovating a Turnaround at Lego" tells the story. The core of Lego's turnaround is:

a new structure for strategically coordinating innovation activities, led by a cross-functional team...

The September issue of HBR also ran another interesting article about using 'mass collaboration' and 'open innovation' to find the next big idea at Cisco ("Inside Cisco's search for the next big idea"). I liked it because it shows that 'innovation by mass collaboration' is not a quick win. Cisco is open about how they sift through all the ideas (manually) and judge which ideas are keepers. But even though it is not an easy shot, they stress the results are invaluable.

We learned how people around the world think about Cisco and the markets we ought to be pursuing.

And finally Clive Thompson in the Wired magazine has a great post about daydreaming and invention.

Daydreaming isn’t just the mind’s way of processing information, though.

Other scans have found that the wandering mind also utilizes the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that’s involved in problem-solving.

Now I'm going off daydreaming!

Tags van Technorati: innovation,ideas,creativity,masscollaboration,open innovation

Searching inside Companies

2009-10-23T21:02:00.001+02:00

Working for a large company can be tricky sometimes. Definitely when it comes to meeting a colleague you don't know. You only know his or her name and the meeting room.

Of course most companies have who-is-who databases with a picture of the colleague you're meeting (Yellow Pages). So now you can do some facial pattern recognition besides looking for the meeting room.

Can't this be done in a better way? Micello seems to have asked this too. They want to be the Google Maps of the inside of buildings. So Google Maps helps you find the address. Micello takes it from there and helps you find the location you're looking for after you went in the front door. For example: you're looking for a store in a shopping mall. Google Maps will take you to the mall. Micello will take you to the shop in the mall.

Now extend this to companies. Search (in general) in enterprises is usually not very well implemented. This also goes for finding locations insides companies. Micello could help solve this issue. It could map the inside of the company.

And take this idea one step further. What if you linked this application to Sharepoint or (internal) Twitter? Then you could project information on Micello like: where are the experts in a certain areas located, where do they meet, where do colleagues write about a certain topic, etc. All of a sudden you're not only search for the location (of a colleague); you're looking for people that could help you solve certain problems or work with you on a topic.

I think Micello has an promising proposition. I do hope it will be integrated in Google Maps or so someday. Because, as most knowledge workers, I don't want yet another tool to keep an eye on.

Tags van Technorati: search,expertise location,social networking

I'm experimenting with Yammer...

2009-10-23T19:58:00.001+02:00

... and all I got was a lousy T-shirt. ;-)

Just kidding. Just wanted to show-off my new Yammer T-shirt. Have a nice weekend!

Inspiring Innovation Speaker

2009-10-21T21:13:00.000+02:00

If I had no budget limitations, who would I invite to speak about innovation for my colleagues? Recently I was asked to provide a list of inspiring speakers about innovation. The focus of the talk should be in the area of creativity, innovation and invention. This is the list I came up with. If you have other's you would recommend, please leave a comment!

My list, again, in no specific order:

Scott Berkun, author of 'The Myth of Innovation'. Nice book about what innovation is and what it's not.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of 'Flow: The psychology of optimal experience'.
John Seely Brown, ex Xerox PARC director, talks, publishes and thinks about new forms of learning and education and the role of technology. Wrote an interesting report for McKinsey called ‘The next frontiers of innovation’ with the next person on this list
John Hagel, thinker/author about mega trends (shifts) in the world and its meaning for enterprises.
Clay Christensen, author of the well-known books about innovation: The Innovators Prescription, the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution.
Dev Patnaik, author of book about innovation culture ('Wired to Care') and recently wrote a great article titled: ‘Innovation starts with empathy’.
David Murray, recently wrote a book about building ideas on other ideas. It's titled ‘Borrowing Brilliance’.
Henry William Chesbrough, the Open Innovation guru.
Edward de Bono, author of several inspiring books about creativity, invention and innovation.
Rene Jansen, inspiring speaker on the edge of organization, innovation and technology.
Someone at IBM to tell about their (Innovation) Jam Sessions.
Someone at Innocentive or Proctor & Gamble to tell about Innocentive and crowdsourcing innovation.
Dave Snowden, special thinker and practioners on the edge of innovation and knowledge management.
Thomas Davenport, recently published an interesting article about 'reverse engineering Google's innovation machine'.
Tim Brown, director of IDEO about 'design thinking'.
Darell Rigby, Kara Gruver and James Allen, authors of a June HBR article 'Innovation in Turbulent Times'. Interesting how they show companies that successfully and structurally innovate have paired leadership: analytic left-brainer thinkers and an imaginative right-brain partner.

Tags van Technorati: innovation,invention,creativity

Favorite Books about Information and Knowledge Management

2009-10-20T20:48:00.001+02:00

Some time ago a friend asked me to give him a list of my favorite books about information and knowledge management. I emailed them to him, but I'd also like to share my list with you.

I'd like to hear how this list relates to your favorite IM and KM books. If you would recommend other books, please leave a comment with the title!

Here's my list (in no specific order):

Chun Wei Choo, Information Management for the Intelligent Organization. Basic book on information management.
Thomas Davenport, Thinking for a living. About the characteristics of knowledge work.
Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive. Must read because the term 'knowledge worker' is used in this book for the first time.
John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information. Great book stressing that information is social. This is mainstream now, but at the time this book was published it wasn't...
Mathieu Weggeman, Kennismanagement. [Dutch] The Dutch book about knowledge management.
Ikujoro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The knowlegde creating company. One of the core books in the knowledge management area. This book made KM mainstream. Their SECI model has been critiqued as too objectivistic and mechanistic. Dave Snowden has fundamental articles on this topic. He also shows that Nonaka related to the concept of ba before the book was published, showing the model wasn't meant as an all-encompassing model for knowledge management.
Kazuo Ichijo and Ikujiro Nonaka, Knowledge Creation and management. An update of the previous book with other authors. Good overview over state-of-affairs of KM. Does not address web 2.0 though.
Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. A collection of fundamental articles about KM.
Dave Snowden's work about knowledge management (not in a book yet).
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, Wikinomics. Not specifically a book about information and knowledge management. But it is a book about shifts in the way we see and manage information and knowledge.

Tags van Technorati: information management,knowledge management,book

Climate Change - Blog Action Day 2009

2009-10-15T10:50:00.001+02:00

Today is Blog Action Day! I just went over to the Blog Action Day site to see how many people have registered. At this time 8,103 sites have registered, resulting in 11,788,878 readers. Wow!

This year's Blog Action Day is about 'Climate Change'. A big topic these days. And I'm happy it is too. The number of times we talk about 'it' at home, at lunch, at the coffee corner or in the carpool with colleagues clearly shows: this issue grips lots of us.

However, because it's such a big topic and lots of people are talking about it, I'm also sensing that lots of people don't really know what to do about it. It's too big for me to really make a change. I don't agree, but I do understand. Is the fact that I'm doing all these small things in my personal life really making a change for our climate and the future of this world? This question is a serious one and should be answered regularly. I know all kinds of websites and organizations are providing tips for personal contributions to climate change. But even if lots of people listen to these tips and actually do them, they wonder: But if governments and big companies are the source of the problem, what effect does my good-doing have?

For this reason I think 'climate change' should be approached from two sides. Governments and business should show leadership with clear, measurable goals. Governments should also provide clear, measurable goals to people so they understand how they contribute to a greener world. Incentives in what ever way could encourage them to keep up the good work. I like the 'carpool lane' the US has. In the Netherlands we don't have one. The 'only' incentive to carpool is your personal finances and idealist reasons (- which is good enough in my opinion...).

Small, clear, measurable and actionable steps with which I can contribute to a cleaner and greener world. That's what I'm looking for. And I think that's what many people in this world need.

We are moving towards a more open and transparent world. This trends relates well to 'green' and 'climate change'. Consumers can now scrutinize companies openly for not be green or sustainable. But we still have some big steps to take here. And again, these big steps have to be broken down into smaller steps. For instance, when I buy a product I want to easily be able to see and understand if this product is green and sustainable. At the moment this is hard to do. And because it is, most consumers just buy the product.

So, I'm looking and asking for small steps to change. In this way we can all contribute and understand our contribution.

But until then, we don't have to sit still. I'm not either. Even though I don't always understand what my contribution will result in, contributing to make this world a 'better place' is just good in its own right. So, I try not to spill water and electricity. I carpool to work (which is great because we get to talk and share ideas about climate change a.o.). I isolate my house as best as possible. I separate different kinds of trash. Etc.

I'm curious: what are you think about climate change? And how are you contributing? Do you think 'small steps' will help overall? Blog about what you are doing and join the Blog Action Day!

Tags van Technorati: blog action day,green,sustainability,climate change

Ideas Built on Other Ideas

2009-10-13T14:09:00.001+02:00

Wow, looks like there's a new interesting book out. It's called Borrowing Brilliance. The Six Steps to Business Innovation by Building on the Ideas of Others by David Murray. I'm definitely going to buy it. Why?

Well, the review in BusinessWeek triggered me. This book seems to look at ideas, creativity and innovation being sparked by other (older) ideas. I think this point is often overlooked. Your idea has to be brand new to be a good idea. Your invention has to be done all by yourself or else it's not really an invention. This book says: That's not true. Lots of inventions and innovations are sparked by old(er) ideas and innovations.

And it provides six steps to help you apply this fact in your personal practice or in your business. As I understand the first step is: define the problem you want to solve. What I'm hoping is that the book will say: Try to define your problem as a wish. My experience is that looking at a problem can limit the creativity of the people trying to solve it. To get around this don't say: The problem is..., but say: It would be great if 'this and this' would be possible.

What also triggered me about this book is how well it relates to the concepts underlying Web 2.0. Web 2.0 has a lot to do with sharing ideas openly, building on other's ideas, praising others for their ideas, etc.

However, this is also the hard part. If building on ideas of others is good, how do we cultivate and encourage that? We all know employees hate it when someone else takes your ideas extends it and goes off with te success (- even though we like Truman's quote...). I think this can be done. And I hope to tell you how soon.

Tags van Technorati: innovation,book,ideas,creativity

Blog Action Day 2009: Are You Participating?

2009-10-12T17:08:00.001+02:00

I just registered for this year's Blog Action Day about Climate Change!

I participated last year too. I really like the initiative. It's a really smart way of getting all kinds of people together on the web thinking about one issue. What you have to do to join in? Just write one post on the 15th of October about 'climate change' and link to the Blog Action Day site. It's that easy.

So, are you also participating?

Tags van Technorati: blogging,climate change

Océ's Social Media Guidelines

2009-10-01T11:33:00.002+02:00

Recently Luis Suarez pointed to this nice overview of the different social media policies companies have (- Thanks Luis!). It's nice also from the perspective that it shows which and how many companies are taking social media seriously.

However, Océ's social media policy hasn't been shared yet... We'll here it is! As you may notice our policy has been inspired by IBM's. So, thanks for leading us IBM!

Océ Social Computing Guidelines

Océ encourages all employees to communicate open and transparent, for the benefit of Océ, your colleagues worldwide and yourself. With regards to participation in social media on behalf of Océ, it is required to obtain management approval in advance and to focus your contributions on topics related to your position.
Every Océ employee has signed a contract with Océ. Act according to the guidelines provided in this contract. These guidelines also apply when communicating on-line.
Every employee is personally responsible for the content they publish on blogs, wikis or any other form of user-generated media internally and externally.
Identify yourself- name and, when relevant, role at Océ, when you discuss Océ or Océ related matter externally and write in the first person. You must make it clear that you are speaking for yourself and not on behalf of Océ. You can use a disclaimer such as: the postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent Océ’s position, strategies or opinions.
Respect copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.
Don’t provide any confidential information or information that is meant to be private or confidential to Océ.
Don’t cite or refer to clients, partners, colleagues or suppliers without their approval.
Respect your audience. Don’t engage in any conduct that would not be acceptable in Océ’s workplaces.
Try to add value. Provide worthwhile information and perspective.
Oce’s brand is best represented by its people and what you publish will reflect on Oce’s brand, your colleagues and yourself.
Don’t talk about our competitors.
Stop publishing if your manager says so.

Well, that's it. What do you think? Like it?

Tags van Technorati: social media,social computing,guidelines,oce

Implementing Sharepoint at Océ

2009-09-29T13:25:00.001+02:00

Just wanted to point you to the following post. Recently two colleagues of mine were interviewed about their work in rolling out Sharepoint in the company I work for. It's a nice story and their approach is thoughtful.

I'm curious if your Sharepoint implementation is different. If it is could you explain in which way or point to your post describing it?

Tags van Technorati: sharepoint,collaboration

Too Much Communication

2009-09-23T16:31:00.001+02:00

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 don't want to get. Read from paper instead of screen (- you can concentrate on paper better than with reading from a screen, he says). And remember: the interest/importance of the message is defined by the sender.

Wow. This is really different from the trend that says we we moving to 'life streaming', 'filtering' and the 'real-time web'. I don't feel I'm becoming sick, irritated, etc. by the amount of information and communication signals I'm processing. Of course I do find we should think before we communicate and share. It should be mindful.

But I feel like I'm missing something here. Are you experiencing what is described in this post? And where can I read more about this subject, also proving the statement that more communication is unhealthy?

Tags van Technorati: communication,social media,information,information overload

Recruiting New Style

2009-09-22T22:20:00.000+02:00

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 - and I'm sure they will - they would extend this to the world?

I told my wife about this as if it were real. She's not working (a paid job at least...) at the moment and taking care of this kids. But she responded right away: Great, I'd like to work for them!

Tags van Technorati: google,work,knowledge work,recruiting,HR

Companies as Communities

2009-09-21T22:00:00.001+02:00

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 prevalent in the business world.

This relates well to Jim Collins' "level 5 leaders" in Good to great and Greenleaf's "servant leadership". Mintzberg calls it "just enough leadership".

How to start? Start with the remnants of community in your company. And promote trust. (I'll write about other interesting HBR articles about trust and candor soon!) People must also know what the place is about (strong culture). And leadership at the center. Leaders should rather reach out, than down. (Mintzberg relates to the CoachingOurselves initiative that looks very interesting. Hadn't heard of it before!)

Great article and very inspiring, I thought!

Tags van Technorati: communities of practice,community

Social Media is Old

2009-09-21T21:18:00.001+02:00

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 - and social tools are now available to support this.

This is great stuff - and I enjoyed reading the whole post, which isn't just about 'social media monitoring'! It stresses one of the reasons social media appeals to me and so many others: it's back to basics. It's back to what the market is really about: conversation. People asking each other how they can help and earn money by doing stuff for the other.

By the way, this post ends in an open request. Robin is looking for a client "who wants to genuinely involve individuals, members of the public, in what might be described as a circular process...'. What a great way to find new clients!

Tags van Technorati: social media,web 2.0,enterprise 2.0,adoption,history

How Does Your Boss Process Information?

2009-09-17T14:13:00.000+02:00

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 regrettably relates well to the world-wide RSS trends.

Do you think the way execs process information internally differs much from externally? My hunch is the difference is minimal. Within the enterprise it is clearer what needs to be read. But what I'm hearing is that these formal communications (reports, memo's, etc.) aren't being read too closely. Or do you have other experiences?

Tags van Technorati: information management,knowledge management,search