Knowledge Rocks!

I received this advert (via email) from Borders telling me I can buy ebooks for $6 each. let me remind them (and others) we don’t buy ebooks – we license them. Try lending and ebook to a friend or selling it at a used book store.

Until they get this model right this is like an industry trying to run with shackles on their feet. I long for the day where ebooks have the same rights and freedoms as their print brethren.

Canada Health Infoway recently launched a campaign with the slogan “Knowing is Better“. I have seen the TV ads and this drew me in turn to the web site.

If you are tracking progress regarding the Electronic Health (or Medical) Record you should check out this site for the promotion ideas contained therein.

I await the day where we see this community embrace concepts of collaboration more formally – the Record is necessary but not sufficient. Collaboration in the system – across health care providers and groups is essential in making the system more effective and efficient.

What are the odds? I am attending a session today hosted by Ark Group on Legal Project Management in NYC. Today’s Dilbert puts an exclamation mark on this session:

I have been in two session recently where the debate goes on about the role of knowledge management in legal project management. (Aside: Funny how we attached the label ‘legal’ to PM these days to make the distinction; but we don’t do the same with KM. Anyway, back to the main purpose of this post.) One KM lawyer asked — is LPM (or PM) going to replace KM as the term? is KM dead?

Let me offer the following positions:

• KM practitioners need to use PM in the same way they use other tools and frameworks such as information technology (IT) and KM frameworks themselves
• KM and PM are not synonymous. To say they are would be to equate two words – project and knowledge – and to treat these words as interchangeable. PM is not a new name for KM! [@ShyAlter suggests: "Integral" as opposed to "synonymous"]
• KM should no more drive PM than IT should drive KM. These are different but interrelated disciplines that must learn to work together in a symbiotic fashion — all for the good of the Firm.
• There is a key element of projects that is about project and process knowledge – that is the overlap with Knowledge Management.
• Indeed, knowledge can (and should) be embedded in project management practices; in the form of checklists and templates which provide scaffolding for matters cases or engagements.
• KM practitioners should be helping lawyers / attorneys share expertise or project knowledge just as they do other project knowledge.

And finally, this is not about philosophy, as one attorney suggested, but about role definition and clarity — essential elements in organizational design and organizational behaviour.

One of my favourite magazines is MIT Technology Review.

“Each year, Technology Review selects what it believes are the 10 most important emerging technologies. The winners are chosen based on the editors’ coverage of key fields. The question that we ask is simple: is the technology likely to change the world?”

This year’s list contains three technologies that caught my eye:

• Real-time search — search engines wrestling to make sense of streams of real-time information from sources like Facebook and Twitter
• Social TV — remember all of the talk about interactive TV? Seems we have arrived there given the use of social media tools as a back channel for conversations amongst friends watching TV (same time / different place). But there is research underway to enhance this.
• Cloud programming — featuring research from those working on better programming tools for cloud computing

Worth the read.

I came across this story in Scientific American about how a group of mathematicians work together to solve (math) problems. Two cases are presented: the case of French mathematicians working together; and the other a more recent Internet-based collaboration:

From the April 2010 Scientific American Magazine

Problem Solved, LOL

Blog comments point to a new, faster approach in math
By Davide Castelvecchi
In the mid-20th century the encyclopedic works of French mathematician Nicolas Bourbaki traced every mathematical concept back to the subject’s foundations in the theory of sets—the stuff of Venn diagrams—and changed the face of his field. Like many of his notions, Bourbaki existed only in the abstract: he was the pseudonym for a tight-knit group of young Parisian researchers. The Internet-age version could be D.H.J. Polymath, another collective pseudonym who could define a new style of mathematics.

This is another example of an expertise network in action. Also, an excellent example of why collaboration matters. If this works for mathematicians, why not for others? Why is this just a ‘faster approach for math’?

“If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

~~ attributed to Benjamin Franklin

Business Week had an excellent article on the new Google home page (did you notice the changes yet?). The article reviews a number of design considerations and the design process. It highlights some of the subtleties that go into good design. You should also look at this graphic for a better understanding.

I was directed to the CICA’s 20 Question series by a colleague recently. What an excellent resource of carefully thought out assessment instruments.

Check out:

• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask about IT; and,
• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask about Governance Assessments.

I also found their IT Advisory Committee page. Here are some of the additional resources they have there:

• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask About IT Projects (2007)
• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask About the Information Technology Aspects of Business Continuity Planning (2005)
• 20 Questions Directors Should Ask About Information Technology Outsourcing (2005)

Thanks Jerry!

I came across an article in the April issue of Wired, Clive Thompson on the Cyborg Advantage.In this article, Clive tells the story of how, after having been beat by IBM’s Deep Blue, Garry Kasparov observed that “(H)uman smarts and silicon smarts work in very different ways” — “which gave Kasparov an intriguing idea. Instead of competing, what if humans and computers worked as a team?” So Garry …

“… created what he called advanced chess, in which players are assisted by off-the-shelf software. Each competitor enters the position of their pieces into a computer and uses the moves that the program recommends to inform their decisionmaking.

At a “freestyle” online tournament in 2005, where any kind of entrant was allowed, such human-machine pairings were absolutely awesome. In fact, the overall winner wasn’t one of the grandmasters or supercomputers; it was a pair of twentysomething amateurs using run-of-the-mill PCs and inexpensive apps. …”

Clive notes that

The most brilliant entities on the planet, in other words (at least when it comes to chess), are neither high-end machines nor high-end humans. They’re average-brained people who are really good at blending their smarts with machine smarts.

And …

As we face that trade-off, figuring out how to integrate machine intelligence into our personal lives becomes the key challenge. When should you rely on online tools to fill you in on the news or your friends’ lives? When should you forage on your own?

There’s no one answer — and there never will be, because everyone is different. It’s a personal quest. But there’s also no avoiding the question, because it’s clear that serious cognitive advantages accrue to those who are best at thinking alongside machines.

Ultimately, the real question is, what sort of cyborg do you want to be?

This article is worth reading. It leads to the conclusion that the answers to performance (personal or organizational) lie not in ‘either | or’ trade-offs but rather in how we combine the power of machines and humans.