photo credit: Shandchem

This is part of my assignment for Business Intelligence course, answering how 9/11 terrorist attack in 2001, the collapse of Lehman Brothers financial firm in 2008, and the rise of internet age affected the way multinational consumer electronic firm approach business intelligence, especially in regards to managing business risk.

The Black Swans

The 9/11 terrorist attack in New York and the collapse of financial firm Lehman Brothers in 2008 are examples of what Nassim Nicholas Taleb called as Black Swan as he wrote in his books, The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness. Taleb uses the metaphors ‘Black Swan’ to describe such events that has three features: “rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability”[5].

Both events are rare and have extreme impact, but do they retrospective? According to Fox Business Network, the two events are not necessarily unrelated.[11] It reported that after the 9/11 event, there is reduction in interest rate to increase market confidence in spending and boost the economy back. The higher liquidity in the market, added with high spending habit of many Americans (even with money they have not earned), has resulted in large sum of money created by debt. Unsurprisingly, the bubble is burst with Lehman Brothers as its first victim.

Hugh Courtney brought up the four levels of uncertainty that business has to manage [2]:

• level 1 (clear enough future),
• level 2 (alternative futures),
• level 3 (range of futures), and
• level 4 (true uncertainty).

Black Swans are examples of the level 4 uncertainty. Even though they are not prospective, they are retrospective. In other words, we might be able to predict or avoid it with enough business intelligence. Hugh Courtney also suggested that we can put our best effort to minimize residual uncertainty – the uncertainty left after the best possible analysis to separate the unknown from the unknowable [2].

A multinational firm in consumer electronics, without any exception, has to face level 3 and level 4 uncertainty as well. These are what they can do to avoid or cover themselves against catastrophic events such as 9/11 terrorist attack and Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

1. Insurance. Firms are realizing the need to cover themselves against catastrophic events, not only the traditional risks such as fire and earthquake, but also the human made catastrophe, such as the terrorist attacks. Within few years after 9/11, insurance industry had seen severe losses, great price rises, and profit records, all in swift succession.[7] As insurance industry stabilize itself, multinational consumer electronic firm can get the benefits by covering itself from the losses due to catastrophic uncertainty.
2. Precautionary actions. Firms are also seen to be more cautious in dealing with uncertainty. Some examples can be observed in the world trade one year after 9/11.[12] Corporations pay close attention to the so-called BERI index (Business and Environment Risk) when assessing investment opportunities in critical countries.  Companies also spread the value chain across various locations or even to multiple continents. Since 9/11, many companies have also radically restricted their number of business trips. Company regulations even specified that board members must not travel in the same plane.
3. Backward strategy analysis. Under level 1-3 uncertainty, the analyst can move forward from situation analysis to the implications for strategy. In level 4 uncertainty, however, an alternative is needed. Analysts are now required to move backward from hypothetical strategy to the assumed conditions or situations needed. Further, analysts are required to challenge those assumptions, gathering information and intelligence to support their beliefs. Analogies and reference cases can be useful in assessing whether those assumptions and beliefs are feasible.[2]
4. Bigger intelligence pool. Two out of four remedies to the strategic surprise suggested by Chester A. Crocker[1] are dealing with enlarging the intelligence pool. First, he suggested that leadership and management structure need to place a premium on open architecture to ensure that multiple inputs and voices are heard and to instill rewards for unconventional thinking. Second, he also suggested that the inclusion to the decision bodies and boards of various sources and expertise will help. With those practices, firm will have access to bigger intelligence pool to gain the “mega view” of the issues at hand, ensuring lesser residual uncertainty.
5. Flexibility. To tame the beast of uncertainty, Lord Levere suggested that a firm needs to respond to the changing risk environment.[7] As uncertainty is always there, maybe the best policy is being flexible or at least include some flexibility into the planning process. As Chester A. Crocker said, “ the implication is clear: if, despite all best efforts, strategic surprises are inevitable, then it becomes imperative to do everything possible to build the possibility of surprise into the planning process and to focus particular effort on coping with and managing its potential effects”.

Nevertheless, consumer electronics firm must avoid “analysis paralysis”. The firm might be required to make a decisive action in spite of the uncertainty and along the way, reiteratively correct and fix their direction. For example, there is a need to increase liquidity after Lehman Brother’s collapse. Consumer electronic firms cannot wait for a perfect product to be launched, they need to come out with products soon to compete and meet the market need, and possibly release patches, fixes, or new versions along the way. Multinational firm with deep pocket is also seen paying their supplier faster to increase market liquidity.[13]

The Emergence of Internet and Web 2.0

This is the era of internet, an information era where user can have access to the abundance of information anywhere, anytime. With the rise of Web 2.0, internet users do not only consume the information, but also produce the information that collectively shaped our modern culture.

However good it may sounds, this also extends another risk that a firm needs to manage; that is the risk towards its intangible asset. Besides intellectual property, Lord Levere, Lloyd’s chairman, also raised up reputation risk as an important asset whose loss may lead to years needed in regaining market position and public confidence.

Reputation risk is one of the intangible asset that has to be managed better with the growth of Internet and Web 2.0. There are customer’s reviews everywhere, from reseller sites (such as Amazon) to the individual blog in the blogosphere. They provided user feedback on firm’s products and services, both the satisfactions and dissatisfaction. Most potential customers will now also search for review before buying a certain product. Hence, customer electronic firm needs to be careful in managing its product quality and its brand reputation. Well-managed reputation will also pay very well as potential buyers put high value on such reviews.

Besides the risk, Internet and Web 2.0 era also brings up bigger pool of intelligence that businesses can be benefited from. As I stated earlier, this is necessary to manage the risk against uncertainty better. Here is some the additional intelligence that the modern internet has brought in.

1. Online community of practices. A firm can benefit from them to learn more about various expertise to get a better bigger picture of the uncertainties they are facing. Knowledge sharing has also revolved in which an individual firm does not only capture information content, but at the same time build contacts and its knowledge networks.[10]
2. Accessible information about their competitors. A firm can find out more about the strategy movement and updates from its competitors faster and easier. They can also find out more about the customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction against their competitors. The firm can then convert it into product idea and strategy to meet the unmet needs.
3. Collective intelligence. Don Tapscott defined it as the “aggregate knowledge that emerges from the decentralized choices and judgments of groups of independent participants”.[8] As more web tools are provided for user to tag and comment on what is good and what is bad, collectively a pattern will emerge and firm will be able to identify what is popular and important for their customers and potential markets.

The ‘Swans’ fly in flock

According to James Shinn, “Swans fly in flock. Though their appearance individually may be close to random, Swans may be linked causally and sequentially in time.”[5]  Shinn also emphasized that they are not necessarily bad. In fact, good and bad swans can be linked together.

To emphasize his point, Shinn shared an example of the bad swan, December 2004 tsunami that has devastated northern part of Sumatra. That tsunami (‘bad swan’) brought along the peace into the island (‘good swan’). The tsunami devastated Sumatra’s Aceh separatist movement, Gerakan Aceh Merdeka (GAM) that it was finally willing to come to a peace arrangement with Indonesian government.[5]

Similarly, a firm can look into the unexpected surprise they are facing and take another look into the situation. With enough intelligence, business can identify potential trend they can tap into to make profits from them.

Consumer Electronic Association (CEA) President and CEO, Gary Shapiro has a good perspective on the recent economic turmoil as posted by TheTechZone.com[6]. “The CE (Consumer Electronic) industry is resilient but not immune from the business cycle. In a tough economy our products offer high value for entertainment and an entry point for entrepreneurs creating new businesses,” said Shapiro.

Tapping into the good ‘swan’. The economic downturn since 2008 might have affected most industries badly. This can be reflected by the number of job loss and retrenchments. Rather than resenting the current business state we are in, Gary Saphiro raised up a very good perspective that consumer electronic industry can gain advantage from, such as offering high value for entertainment and entry point for entrepreneurs creating new businesses.

In the current internet and collaboration economy, more and more people have access to start their own online business. Competing in the market that previously dominated by the big player, people build alternative products for a specific niche that is not covered by the bigger player. This build what Chris Anderson called ‘The Long Tail’ in sales distribution.[9] More and more players in the market lengthen the tail. With easy internet access, search and advertising, these start-up businesses might also gain a considerable share of the market, and in a way, thicken the tail.

Multinational consumer electronic firm can tap into these trend by taking the role as the Long Tail “aggregator”. Chris Anderson defined it as “a company or service that collects a huge variety of goods and makes them available and easy to find, typically in single place.”[9] Apple with its application store and iTunes is an excellent example of how a consumer electronic firm has successfully put itself into a very strategic role in harvesting profit from such trends.

In conclusion, internet has brought up and widen the expertise and intelligence business can tap into. With proper business strategy supported by enough business intelligence and certain amount of flexibility, businesses can make better risk management and make decisive actions despite the uncertainty and surprises they are facing.

Bibliography

1. Chester A. Crocker ~ Reflections on Strategic Surprise, chapter 13 of The Impenetrable Fog of War (edited by Patrick M. Cronin). 2008.
2. Hugh Courtney ~ 20/20 Foresight: Crafting Strategy in an Uncertain World. 2001.
3. Robert J. Rhee ~ Terrorism Risk in a Post-9/11 Economy: The Convergence of Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Action. Online: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=898062. 2005
4. Wikipedia ~ Catastrophe Modeling. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophe_modeling
5. James Shinn ~ Tracking Asia’s Black Swans, chapter 12 of The Impenetrable Fog of War (edited by Patrick M. Cronin). 2008.
6. TheTechZone.com ~ CES 2009 – Consumer Electronics Industry 2009 Forecast. Online: http://www.thetechzone.com/ttz/index.php/ces-2009-consumer-electronics-industry-2009-forecast/. 2009.
7. Lord Levene ~ Taming The Beast. Online: http://www.lloyds.com/News_Centre/Speeches/Taming_the_beast_-_managing_business_risk_Lord_Levene_Chairman.htm. 2004.
8. Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams ~ Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. 2008.
9. Chris Anderson ~ The Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand. 2006.
10. Donald M. Norris, et.al ~ A Revolution in Knowledge Sharing. Educause Review, September/October 2003.
11. FOX Business Network ~ 9/11’s Impact on Business. Online: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FocoRIyyDSA&feature=player_embedded. 2009.
12. Hermann Simon ~ Terrorism Hurts World Trade. Online: http://www.ip-global.org/archiv/volumes/2002/fall2002/terrorism-hurts-world-trade.html. 2002.
13. Tom Krisher ~ GM to Pay Suppliers Faster. Online: http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20090928/BIZ13/309289956/1031/BIZ. 2009.

Rev. Dr. Lewis Winkler

I met an interesting person last weekend. Rev. Dr. Lewis Winkler is a faculty staff in East Asia School of Theology teaching Christian Theology. When I asked him whether he is blogging, he said no.

Many people has asked that question to him, but he is still decided not to blog. The reason is his belief that blogging will take too much time from him. It is simply not for his personality. He is a deep person, thinker that blogging and structuring his thought into short article in a blog will simply take too much time. Many other things can be done if he is not blogging, so he is decided not to blog.

He wrote books instead. He’s about to submit one book to one publication in United States on objective study of the differences between Christians and Moslems in handling religious differences. He has also started writing on his second book on the subject of the hidden-ness of God. Many books has been published on how God is real in people’s live, but in this book he is going to share why sometimes God hides himself. God asked us to look at the needy people around us as He is there.

More than what he explained about his books, I learned one message from him. He has not found a publisher, so I asked him why not going for self-publishing. His answer is the inspiration to this article. He writes not for the sake of publication or money, he writes to get his message heard. Publishers know the best about reaching wider audience and that is why he chose to go with an established publisher, even if it is tough.

He taught me to write a book only when we have some message we believe we are the one to speak about. There is simply too many books out there. I don’t know how many authors write just to get their name popular, just for profit or for the sake of writing a book. Dr. Lewis’ message is to write only if you believe you have some message that others need to see and understand, and you are the one that should speak about it. Isn’t that a better perspective?

Knowledge Codification

Knowledge codification is taking too much time, do you agree with me? Putting our tacit knowledge (what we know) into written format is a process that really takes time. If there is a spectrum between sharers of knowledge to the hoarders of knowledge, I might be closer to the sharers of knowledge.

If possible, I want to codify what I learned in life, every books that I read, every inspiration there is to share, every interesting thoughts or imaginations. Unfortunately I have to put things into reality, that writing really takes time. What I learned while starting something on my own, being paid for results rather than time, is that I don’t have much time to codify my knowledge anymore. I have to keep up with my study and make ends meet that I might have no more time to blog. It’s tough, blogging is actually something that I enjoy.

I guess I will blog only when I take a break from my study and work. But after the second thought, maybe not, I will blog only when I have a message to share, message to write, not to gain popularity from people or search engine, not to keep up with certain regularity, not to make me a consistent blogger or so, but simply when I have an important message to share with you.

Share your knowledge, with thoughts, with filter, with purpose!
Don’t simply write to join this information overloaded era.

Best,
Robert

photo credit: cyberuly

People and experts might ask, “why should I even share my knowledge?” They ask, “what’s the benefit for me?”

Rather than sharing, they prefer to hoard their knowledge. They think that it will save them their job, at least as they are the only ones who know that particular knowledge.

They forgot that knowledge grows as they share them.

Knowledge can be regarded as the only unique resource that grows when shared, transferred, and managed skillfully.
~Alfred Beerli

Why do knowledge grows when we share them?

1) Knowledge requires context

First of all, let’s reflect back to the difference between information and knowledge. Information might be able to achieve its meaning in generalized way, but we need application and context for knowledge to emerge.

Our distinction between data/information and knowledge conveys that the source of value does not arise from possessing the information source, but from acting on it in a context of a specific meaning at a specific time.
~Thomas Davenport and Sirkka Jarvenpaa

You may understand information individually and in isolation, but knowledge can only be understood in context, and that includes interactivity and communications with others.

2) Knowledge is a “flow”

Do you think knowledge as a “thing” or a “flow”? Rather than static resource or snapshot, it’s better to think that knowledge is a flow between the various state of known and unknown. It flows between the tacit (subjective) to explicit (objective) knowledge, it exists in the transition between the two, and it also exists in the symbiosis or the combination between the two dimensions. By defining knowledge as a flow, we will see the emergence quality of knowledge and how it can only be realized through practice and knowledge networking.

3) Knowledge can be used in many ways

Traditional use of knowledge may include only acquisition, assimilation, and sharing of knowledge. But in practice, knowledge use includes interpreting, reflecting, creating, applying, realizing, understanding, associating, recognizing, repurposing, and enhancing knowledge.

From that many usages, it is only a limited number that an individual in isolation can do. We need network or conversation to maximize the usage of knowledge. As you will see, more knowledge can be created by asking questions and watching the response provoke cascading conversations, responses, and interactions among the participants.

I hope that this article helps you to see the importance of knowledge sharing. Knowledge grow when we share them. Not only they will benefit other learners, they will also benefit you. With the power of technology that we have right now, it’s much easier for us to share knowledge. My question to you, will you dare to share?

Robert

[This article is summarized and adapted from the article "Revolution in Knowledge Sharing" (EDUCAUSE September/October 2003) by Donald M. Norris, Jon Mason, Robby Robson, Paul Lefrere, and Geoff Collier.]

The idea came when I was trying to restructuring my blog Reason-4-Smile to cater with my variety of interest. I’m sharing more than just for introverts, and hence I was looking for a new theme and a new classification for my articles. I eventually came out with 4 categories, the leader, the human, the engineer, and the blogger. Over there it’s more than just a role, it was the personality as well, courageous leader, humble human, meticulous engineer, and marketing blogger.

My Documents in My Mac

Managing your documents

That does not end there, I started to organize my documents in my Mac accordingly as well. As you might have guessed, I am using the four roles again. The engineer includes work I have done in the past, and many materials and e-books on IT and technical stuffs. The human includes all from fun, dvd projects, and transactions that I just need to keep for reference sake. The leader includes career opportunity and toastmaster stuffs. Finall, the blogger includes all my articles, pictures, affiliations, things that are related to my blogging journey.

You might have noticed also that I added two folders,I have two additional roles, those are the student (especially for my KM study) and the freelancer (documents related to clients I have right now and in the future).

Managing your notes

My Roles in Evernote

Let me introduce you with Evernote (if you don’t know about it yet). A free note-taking application that you can use widely acrosss PC, Mac, blackberry, and iPhone. You can take note from pictures, webs, emails, audios, and many more.

The application comes with both notebooks (something like folders) and tags to help you organize and find your notes better. And this time, again I’m using role-based taxonomy as the how I want to classify my notes.

Secretary Roles in Evernote

Initially I came up with lots of roles as notebooks to help me classify my notes. The list was really big, that I thought that it will be much better if I have secretary to help me find things that I need. Unfortunately I can’t afford one right now, so what I’ll have to do is to keep a list of secretary roles/tasks, and put several roles into hers, virtually.

The line might not be so clear to you, but I simply differentiate them between the one that I thought of as references, I’ll choose to delegate if I can, and the one that I’ll do and keep it to myself.

Of course, with role based taxonomy, you can even have more roles into that, even to the point that you have your own company or organization with different people set up in your notes.

Taxonomy in Things

Managing your to-do list

Role-based taxonomy was built-in into one to-do-list application in Mac called Things from Culture Code. Besides the classification of to-do list into timeline and projects, it also classifies their tasks into areas of responsibility, or practically roles. I guess this could be something that I really like from Things. It’s not free but it’s really easy to use, and even more it could be integrated or synced to your iPhone.

Do check out the applications I listed above, hope you have more organized life, a better life to manage all the information that is coming to you.

All the best,
Robert

photo credit: Vironevaeh

I’ve got a new pair of glasses, it’s not sunglasses, or those glasses with transition from lighter to darker color. Its brand is KM, and it’s given by NTU with its Master of Science in Knowledge Management course. And what does it do, it helped me to see things in KM perspective. The world is full of people, and each of them own potential resources to be managed, called knowledge.

Let me give you three examples, how something ordinary, that might have missed your attention could be seen from KM perspective.

As I shared earlier, I recently learned how knowledge can turn into information, and that happens when there is knowledge/information overload. That could happen with your pile of RSS articles, that could also happen a lot in other areas of your life. So what can you do about it? The answer is really simple actually, be different and stands out.

Not the usual yada yada

Google Toolbar

My first example is Google Toolbar, and its post-installation note. You always know that every software installation has come with its terms and conditions, something that we will simply skip and ignore. So how can we actually get user’s attention if there is something important there?

Google came up with some interesting text to get our attention, it says “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual YADA YADA” I bet that now most if not all people will pause a moment and reading it.

Syltra Lee from Singapore Idol 3

The second example is the Singapore Idol contestant, Syltra Lee. She just got into the top 12, and here is a video of her song in the top 24, the one that got the “best performance tonight” award from the judges.

What’s interesting? It’s how she stands out. She might purposely make her hair a bit blonde, and the most interesting point is how she want to be remembered by the audience. “I want to be known as the girl with the guitar, and my strength is the guitar.” I don’t know about you, but it does capture my attention and made me want to see her performance more.

The Head First Series

Head First PHP & MySQL

This is a technical book combined with a child story book. Let me give you an example from Head First PHP and MySQL, a book that stands out from other PHP book. And why is that? The goal of the series is to create something easy for our brain to digest. They have a lot of pictures and pointers, a lot of space between texts, and maybe a very important feature of the book, it’s storytelling.

And that’s not the end, the story is made with full of exaggeration to help us grasp the concept better. The sample application was to make an alien abduction report, the two different technologies was arguing over a coffee, the security threat was an innocent-looking grandma. And those are only some samples of exaggeration in the book.

Interestingly, storytelling is also one practical idea that was taught in my Knowledge Management course. Why? because story is something that can easily stick to one’s memory.

Yes, knowledge management deals a lot with knowledge sharing, but rather than thinking that knowledge has to be presented in technical manner or points form, knowledge is actually better shared in a story, even better with something that sticks, something that make us grin, think, or smile.

All the best,
Robert

Data, Info, or Knowledge?

What is data? It’s a set of discrete, objective facts about events. It could be one transaction in your retail store, one visit to your website, or an article in your pile of RSS reader subscription. Why is that data? There are at least 4 reasons why data is data. Let’s take an example of site visit event, and why do I think that it is data.

• Everyone else is doing it. Tell me if there is any site that is not counting their visitor? Maybe there is one or two, but if they seriously think about doing something significant, business or so with the website will likely to count their visitors.
• Voluminous. The more your site’s subscribers, the more visitor you have, and that is a significant measure that what you have is data.
• Automatic capture. You can put a counter in your website, that is increased for every visit. You can ask help from SiteMeter or Google Analytics. You can use their data, but unless you do more things with it, it’s simply automated capture that is meaningless to you.
• Doesn’t answer substantive question. You may have the visit info, but merely data will not answer substantive questions, such as what profile are your visitors, where do they come from, why do they buy or why don’t they buy your product and services, what are they interested in, and so on.

Information is simply data that is put with more meanings into it. Let’s come back to our site visitor example, Google Analytic gives us a much more useful information based on the visitor data that it collected. So here is what they do with it, the data is…

• Contextualized, as a service provider, Google doesn’t just give and present data aimlessly. It provides the data as a service that they provide to site owners. They put more information into the visit data that they gathered to meet the common information that site owners need. And how they do it can be explained further to the following points.
• Categorized, the traffic is differentiated into many classification, some examples are their location and traffic source. Taking traffic source as an example, the traffic is differentiated between direct traffic, referring site, and search engine. Again another value it contributed to their users to analyze the traffic further.
• Calculated, they calculated more than just number of visit. They have bounce rate, the rate of people going off the site soon after they come. They also have page views to count the number of views per visit.
• Condensed, the data has been condensed into a summary format. By default it summarized your data in monthly manner, but you have the ability to adjust the period longer or shorter as needed.

Now, let’s talk about knowledge. The Master course I’m attending took almost an hour to explain what is knowledge. The lecturer, Prof. Lee Chu Keong gave us the definition from various type of people. I won’t go through that here, but let us explore more about how can we transform information to knowledge.

• Comparison, what kind of situation or impression does that information give us, compared to other situations we have known?
• Consequences, how will the information affect our decision and action?
• Connection, how does the information relate to the others that we have received?
• Conversation, what do other people think about the information?

As you see, knowledge is a personalized information. Only when you take an information, reflect upon it, compare and relate it against your experience and others, then it will become knowledge. That is why, you should never say that a book is knowledgeable, because a book does not contain knowledge. Knowledge is contained within a person. And yes, you can only attribute “knowledgeable” to a person.

And back to the data again. No, it’s not meant to be a repetition. It was meant to give you one idea and one warning. Let’s start with the idea first.

These data, information, and knowledge are practically a cycle. Tuomi raised the idea of reverse knowledge hierarchy, where people must have knowledge before they can find out the data that they need to gather. Let’s take an example as an internet marketer, you certainly need to have some kind of knowledge about internet marketing, to know what kind of information you need to collect, and how you can collect those data to improve your marketability and profit. That pattern, knowledge -> information -> data is exactly the reverse knowledge hierarchy Tuomi was referring about. So again, yes, it’s really a cycle of knowledge.

Now, let’s finish this article with the warning. Besides how knowledge can give us insights on the value-added information, knowledge can also move down the value chain. It can turn into information and eventually data. That happens when we are in the information overloaded mode.

Earlier I mentioned that an article in RSS reader could be data. Why did I say that? Don’t get me wrong, that article could be contextualized, categorized, calculated, and condensed information. However, when we have too much knowledge, we will go through a process that Davenport and Prusak will call as de-knowledging. The knowledge and information abundance that we have will become data due to its voluminous tendency.

And yes, this is an era of participation, era of Web 2.0 that everyone can become a producer and publisher, from thoughts, words, pictures, audios to videos. This is an era from which any amateur can join the crowd to have their own say and contribution. This is the danger that Andrew Keen captured in his book The Cult of The Amateur.

In this era of exploding media technologies there is no truth except the truth you create for yourself.
~Richard Edelman (Edelman PR) quoted by Andrew Keen

This age has become a real threat to knowledge, and this open up the importance of knowledge management in the world. How do we ensure that what we have is knowledge, not to be overloaded with too much information, but how can we capture the significant and authentic voice in the crowd? These are the questions that KM needs to answer in this era. And let’s explore with me in this blog. Share your thought if you are reading this.

Best regards,
Robert

Welcome to KM-4-Life

This site is called KM-4-Life and KM stands for Knowledge Management. Still, you might be wondering, what is Knowledge Management? You can choose between the longer and the shorter definition I give below.

Let’s go with the longer one first, taken from my lecture notes, quoted from the experts in Knowledge Management…

Any process or practice of creating, acquiring, capturing, sharing and using knowledge, wherever it resides, to enhance learning and performance in organizations.
(Swan et al., Journal of Knowledge Management)

There is another definition from another expert, David Skyrme. David Skyrme is a strategic analyst and management consultant specializing in the practical application of knowledge in organizations. From his point of view, KM is…

The explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of creating, gathering, organizing, diffusion, use and exploitation, in pursuit of organizational objectives.
(David Skyrme)

Thank God, my lecturer, Mr. Kan Siew Ning give us a much shorter definition of Knowledge Management. Briefly there are 3 points in Knowledge Management or KM

• Connecting people with people
• Connecting people with information
• To drive business/organization results

Your personal knowledge manager

I think the last point is arguable. Is that really true that KM only applicable for business or organization? What if it is also useful for personal or individual? In this blog, I want to share not only how KM can be useful for businesses, but also for personal and individual. It is Knowledge Management for Life, managing knowledge for a better life.

Besides sharing my thought through this blog, I would like to become personal knowledge management consultant as well. If you know personal trainer, it is the equivalence. Not to build your muscle, but to build your capacity especially in handling knowledge or information overload problem. It could be for your life or your business life.

As I have 5 years experience in web and software development, I can go to the extent of providing personalized web/software solution to you. Contact me and let me know what you need! Email me to (km4life.com at gmail dot com) and I’ll be in touch. (Ya, you got it right, my email account is km4life.com, just like this domain).

For your success,
Robert