Herding Cats

The never-ending quest to manage knowledge collectively. An effort as effortless as trying to herd cats.

Our class learned the challenges of knowledge management (the knowledge cycle has too much breakage) and the beauty of Google docs and viral marketing. I was pleased to see the promotion of on-line, real-time document sharing touted as the current best solution for thought sharing as I have been actively promoting it at Four Seasons for sharing between us and ourselves.

• Google docs is the newer version of Google groups. No need to go backwards. There is also a corporate version of Google docs that may be worth investigating.
  
• Risks:
  
• Google's hardware might crash (make sure we back up once per week)
• Privacy considerations (not the same as using internal tools). However, remember that most IT fraud is done internally.
  
• Data is crawled for key words - for future advertising use
  

• Companies like viral marketing because
• To connect relationships between individuals
• Invitations from known sources are more effective
• Puts the burden on customers to market

• What Google has to gain from freeware:
• Weakens competition (pulls users away from traditional software)
• Advertising revenue
• Data mining from profiles, email keywords - Google is invasive!
• Selling of web 2.0 services ($200m US stream... currently)

• Suggestions for Wikis as used by the big players:
• Twiki
• Confluence
• Mediawiki
  

If you don't want Google to know your every move, use IE to log into gmail and google docs, but do your surfing on FF. This creates a firewall that prevents Google knowing what HongKongLexy does on line. (Heaven forbid they discover I'm an impatient closet Corrie fan who nibbles on spoilers. Come to the dark side...)









The message about old-school knowledge management is that it requires to much downstream decision-making. Effective knowledge management requires the distribution of decision making.


TechnoTips

• •You can download videos from YouTube – you need FF; download “download helper” www.downloadhelper.net – you also need to download the flv player 1.33

• •Why Wikipedia works: Purists will argue that the data in wikipedia is unreliable; however, the reality is that most of the knowledge we rely on to operate in the world doesn’t have to be 100% accurate – we can operate highly effective if we have reasonably reliable but not 100% reliable data – Wikipedia is a great starting point

• •Wikipedia is used 200X more on-line than Britannica

• •Wiki tread carefully. Sharing with customers has risks
• Customers can change your web pages – they may post things that do not reflect the corporation
• •Employees could post something that contradicts the company position
• What you shouldn’t post on a company blog/wiki (for the wiki guidelines):

  •No financials

  •No product road map

  •No negative comments about customers (or company)