Before I get into these signs however, I want to point out two things. First, while the presence of any of these indicators may be a death knell for your current strategy, this should be viewed as an opportunity to craft a new strategy that better meets the challenge you and your organization are facing — not that you should put your head in your hands and give up.

Second, the presence of any one (or even several) of these indicators in not necessarily a sign that your strategy is totally off-base — these indicators are meant to be used as a warning that you should be constantly adapting your strategy to new challenges. At the same time however, don’t get so mired in strategic decision-making that you never actually get any work done. Strategize, adapt and move forward — making major strategy changes only when things are not going the way you had hoped.

That being said, keep these warning signs in mind when you are examining (or reexamining) your current or upcoming knowledge management strategy.

1. People outside your group don’t understand what you’re doing.

I’ve listed this as warning sign number one, since I personally believe it’s one of the most dangerous indicators that your strategy is not accomplishing its intended goals. Assuming you’re communicating your strategy appropriately (and yes, communicating your strategy is important), the fact that no one else gets it usually means that far from being too brilliant to grasp, that instead you’ve simply got your head in the clouds. Talk to your stakeholders and consider rebuilding your strategy from the ground up.

2. You keep changing vendors/technologies/products.

As stated above, this isn’t always a bad thing. There are times when vendors/products/technologies are just difficult to deal with, and you need to simply change directions. However, these types of strategic changes should be exactly that — strategic. Look very carefully to make sure that what you’re attributing to be a set of technology defects or a vendor deficiency isn’t actually a non-existent content management process or broken governance model. Changing vendors/technologies/products won’t help you with those sorts of issues.

3. You keep layering vendors/technologies/products on top of each other.

More’s better right? Unfortunately, it’s usually not. More vendors and products to deal with usually also means added complexity — and unless you have a strategy and the resources to deal with that added complexity, you’re going to drop a few when trying to juggle all those balls. Before looking at new vendors, I would strongly recommend two things.

First make sure that your current suite of products can’t already do what you need — most of the time, enterprise products (such as content management systems, financial systems or project/process management software) have all kinds of features you didn’t know were  in there — do your research before going out and buying something else.

Second of all, make sure that your clients (even if those are internal clients), actually need the functionality/features you believe they do. Have conversations with everyone who’s going to be using this type of functionality, and make sure you understand what they need almost as well as they do. You don’t want to buy something that’s never going to get used.

4. You find it difficult to explain what you’re trying to accomplish.

This is another big one. When this happens, you may wonder if it’s your listener who’s just not getting it (or, perhaps wonder if you haven’t crafted your explanation very well). Both of these assumptions are dangerous. If it’s really that tough to explain what you want to get done, it’s probably going to be really tough to get the money, support and people to get it done. That’s not to say that complex things that are difficult to explain should never be done — just don’t underestimate the complexity when you start out.

5. You’re prescribing organizational change.

Okay, so prescribing organizational change doesn’t automatically get you a failing mark. Organizations can be changed — but a knowledge management strategy that seeks to change every part of an organization at once is pretty much doomed to fail. Seeking organizational change also comes across too often when there are immediate problems that are difficult to address and the solution is unknown. Use the phrase “organizational change” sparingly and extremely carefully.

6. You’re making big promises.

Again, making promises isn’t a bad thing — knowledge management should be there to generally make things better for everybody. If you aren’t making things better, you’re not really doing your job (and of course, that’s not just true of KM, it’s also true of human resources, finance and every other group). But don’t promise things you aren’t sure you can deliver — or assume that certain longstanding problems can be fixed via knowledge management.

This is related to my point above; some problems are more deeply entrenched than they may at first seem to be. Take a long, careful look at what you really think you can change, and reach just beyond what you’ve promised.

Well it would appear as if FaceBook is taking this seriously, as the company has already made some changes to its privacy policy, and it says more are in the works. This is a good thing — not only for FaceBook’s many users, but also for FaceBook itself.

How responsive companies are to this type of issue often has far greater consequences than the actual alleged transgression — and FaceBook’s desire to put this to bed early is both prudent and wise. FaceBook has a real opportunity to come out as the hero, since the company can both further protect its users’ privacy as well as meet Canadian legal standards for that very same privacy. I guess we’ll see how this ultimately plays out.

For the most part, I was getting the occasional spammer who actually took the time to write manual spam into the form (why, I’m not sure — since manually entering spam would only reach me, and doesn’t manually sending each spam message kind of defeat the purpose of spam), but for the most part, my inbox stayed relatively clean.

For the past month however, my comment form has been hit with more automated spam — not a ridiculous amount, but just enough to be annoying. On most days, I would get at least three or four spam message with gibberish subject lines which I needed to delete.

Time to switch to a contact form that protects me from that kind of automated spam. I tried a bunch of them out, but all of them were either too complicated to install (which means I was too tired/lazy to actually follow the steps in the instructions) or didn’t include the really basic spam protection I was looking for.

That’s when I stumbled upon Enhanced WordPress Contact Form, which does exactly what I need and really nothing more. While I wasn’t overly impressed with the way it looked, I simple wrapped some HTML tags around some of the fields in the admin panel and that fixed things up nicely.

Just in case there’s anyone else out there who is experiencing the same kind of issue with contact form spam, I would suggest checking out this great, simple spam-fighting WordPress plugin.

You can also get a free expo pass — just use this link to get both the discount and the free pass. Thanks to KMWorld for providing the discount and enjoy the conference!

Facebook shares personal information with developers who create games and quizzes in a way that breaches Canadian privacy law, the office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has found.

The popular social networking site, which is used by 12 million Canadians, doesn’t have enough safeguards to prevent those third-party developers from getting “unauthorized” access to users’ personal information, said the report released Thursday by assistant privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham.

It’s notoriously difficult to ‘un-FaceBook’ (which I’ve contemplated doing more than once), and even more difficult (if not impossible) to completely remove your private information from the site.

While some would argue that ‘nothing on the Web is private’, it’s hard to argue with having reasonable measures in place in order to ensure that private information is secured (especially by a site like FaceBook that has such a sheer volume of such information). The article cites 3 specific ways that FaceBook is breaching Canadian privacy law:

• It keeps information from accounts deactivated by users indefinitely and does not make it clear that users can also choose to delete their accounts rather than just deactivate them. Nor does it explain the difference in its privacy policy.
• It keeps the profiles of deceased users for “memorial purposes,” including this in its terms of use. That means users cannot opt out.
• It allows users to post personal information about non-users without their consent. For example, it allows them to tag photos and videos of non-users with their names, and provide Facebook with their email addresses to invite them to join the site. It keeps the addresses indefinitely.

It should also be noted that the primary motivation for collecting personal information is very simple: money. Even if an individual’s information is not resold (i.e. your email address, telephone number and such), aggregate information is still a very valuable commodity.

While I’m not saying that dealing in such information is nefarious in itself, there must be safeguards put into place in order to ensure that people can opt out when they want to. So if my friend invites me to FaceBook, and I choose to decline that invitation, FaceBook shouldn’t have the right to keep my information forever.

I bought a hybrid bike (hybrids are somewhere between mountain bikes and street bikes, according to my limited understanding of cycling) two weeks ago which has been great — I haven’t had a chance to take it out too much, but I’m looking forward to finally being able to ride around the city. I was looking forward to taking my bike out to Toronto Island, but unfortunately for me there’s a strike here in Toronto, which also means no ferry service to the island.

Thanks for reading, I hope all my readers in the northern hemisphere are enjoying their summer.

Thanks to everyone who has commented on this blog (whether it’s on a new post or an older post), and I hope to keep getting some of the great comments that people have left. I hope closing comments on old posts will not hamper any discussion or dialogue that this site has enjoyed for the past few years.

The addition of one-click upgrades to both the WordPress core installation as well as installed plugins was a brilliant feature addition, but I’m hoping things will go one step further and just update my stuff automatically. While I could see the questions raised already (what if something broke? what if you didn’t want to upgrade? what if your database imploded?), why not just make it a feature that you could turn on?

For me anyway, having to log into all of my sites and upgrade WordPress and all its plugins is something that I do irregularly because it’s time-consuming. Would there not be some way to just have WordPress go through the upgrade and just let me know if there’s a problem? I guess we’re still a long ways away from software that can diagnose its own illnesses. Oh well, I can hope, can’t I?