New Agora

What makes lists of items so compelling?

The "list" article was first perfected by the magazine industry -- particularly beauty magazines (Cleo, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, etc) and music/film magazines (Rolling Stone, Filmink etc). But it's now spreading into the mainstream media and is also very common on the Internet. There are now whole sites dedicated to producing N thing lists such as cracked.com (WARNING: clicking this link may waste a lot of your time).

Bob Lewis is an IT columnist who I find consistently worth reading because of his clear and dispassionate insight into how organisational politics really works.

He is the ultimate pragmatist, with a low tolerance for cheap insights and bullshit. So I was pleased to see that he recently finished reading Chasing the Rabbit by Steven Spear and found it worthwhile.

There's a great story in The Boston Globe about work being done to improve a children's hospital's capacity to help people without a single additional dollar being spent.

The thing that really struck me was that I'm sure everyone in the hospital was genuinely trying to deliver the best service to their patients:

This is the presentation I gave at KM Australia 2009:

[notes follow below the fold]

Just got back to Canberra tonight from KM Australia 2009, where I gave a presentation on KM strategy and tactics (slides will go up soon).

Over the last few months, I have been thinking about ways to generalise the individual theories, practices and expertise of the KM community into a consistent, albeit relatively abstract theoretical framework.

By identifying points of commonality rather than difference, I am hoping that the KM community can begin working towards on a "base layer" of acceptance about what KM is trying to achieve. This would then be built upon and used as a tool to evaluate more concrete KM frameworks and the success of interventions.

One thing that most practitioners of Knowledge Management find out very quickly is that deciding on a KM initiative is, at best, only 10% of the battle.

The other 90% is change management: assembling coalitions, getting stakeholder buy-in, and above all communication, communication and more communication.

Patrick Lambe, responding to a great post by Jed Cawthorne, makes the point that:

The inimitable Matt Moore recently posted a link on actKM to an article by Mehrizi & Bontis undertaking a KM cluster analysis.

The article undertakes a classification of KM activities that is quite similar to my recent work analysing common definitions of KM collated by Ray Sims. M&B have instead chosen the more comprehensive route of analysing the text of KM research papers published since 1997.

One of my frequent issues with Knowledge Management is the way that it is often defined in terms of activities being practiced, but then avoids explaining what objectives will be achieved via these activities.

A while ago I did an analysis of 43 knowledge management definitions assembled by Ray Sims (now has 62 definitions listed). I thought I would revisit these definitions and focus solely on the objectives (if any) cited in association with KM activities: