semanthink

The Lost Art of Re-Learning Conversation ... a Remark You Made ...

Newly back from the NewComm Forum 2009 …with many realizations emerging in my analytical mind.  But this one is particularly foreground …

The whole suite of social media tools (together with those yet to come) - twitter, flickr, twine (of radar networks), facebook, freebase ... and on ...) solves one of the central issues, one of the holy grails, of Knowledge-Management-that-works – capturing the tacit and making it explicit.

Easily.  Simply.  Done.

Knowledge is not always a document.  It can be.  Knowledge is not always static.  It can be.  Immediate, new, knowledge from the First Finder is critical.  Always.  Early response from the Knower is critical.  Always.  Often knowledge is best delivered and best asked for in a conversation … and that conversation can be text, video, audio, photographs … and others can join the conversation, from both sides of knowing/seeking, and benefit.

Emerging social media – the applications that carry conversations – fulfill all the criteria to carry knowledge-based conversations.  Such as – immediacy, simplicity, ubiquity (for those who choose to adopt).  So we are left with the easier Knowledge Management task – once the tacit is captured into the explicit – putting human semantics, lexicons and ontologies into information access, content supply chain, applications.  That’s easy.  Really it is.

Relax and chill ... reflect ... about this ... just for a moment - 

"Get IT off that SharePoint Train!”

I spent the first two days of the week at NewComm Forum 2009, and listened to a group of very talented thought leaders, strategists, researchers and practitioners.  Since we now live firmly post-paradigm - in a new paradigm where content creation, sharing and its use happens newly first outside the enterprise - we also live with this basic root question: “what does this mean for the enterprise?”  Or: “how can the enterprise learn from and use this?”

This – in this case – is the burgeoning world of new social media tools.  So … do enterprises choose to ignore … or … or do they choose to adopt? 

There were too many interesting insights and lines of thought (and view) to even partially list.  But, the remark that played with me throughout, and is still with me, is one made by Pam Strayer.  Pam, President of Strayer & Co., was a panelist at one of the first panels of the three-day event – “Integrating and Measuring Web 2.0 across the Enterprise”.  And, in the dying minutes of the panel she said “people have to get IT (departments) off that SharePoint train!”

Why?  Let me tell you  (or contact Pam).  SharePoint will likely keep you in the past – stuck in time, in a time warp that is forever 2004 (or thereabouts).  Before Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and that group.  Before YouTube.  Before Twitter …  And, just as important, before lots of web tools began to make it SO EASY to integrate a mesh of new media tools to create the basis for building front ends that display the sliver of the ontological world that the user wants (demands) to be in.

2004 was a so-so year for knowledge management.  Most of the problems faced by enterprises still not very solved.  And along comes this whole slew of innovation called new social media, which solves at a fingersnap the whole pervasive issue of how to make tacit knowledge actual and concrete and shareable and “permanent” (for its useful life).

The future always reveals itself.  But, those who analyze it coming (NOT the lucky guessers) bequeath great benefits to those who hire them or their advice.   Want some proof that the SharePoint train may keep you in 2004, or thereabouts, regarding the kind of knowledge management that you need?  Pam opened her intro of the panel by showing the video of what Best Buy is doing with new media from The Conversation Group home page.  It’s very well produced.  But don’t let that get in the way of seeing what’s going on.

As for SharePoint – trouble ahead … trouble behind … likely too.  And as for train wrecks …  Americana (culture and music particularly) is littered with tragic tales and good advice around train wrecks - 

Google Grows the Paradigm Again – with Flu Trends

I’ve always admired from the get-go Google’s ability to change the paradigm, grow the paradigm, of “search” – seeking, finding, creating, contributing “content”, social and actual.

Google Flu Trends, an initiative of Google.org, has carried out research taking search terms commonly used to search for “something” about influenza and then mapped the frequency of these terms to the actual epidemiological data collected by U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).  The match is uncannily good.

Well … that’s cool … maybe not so surprising ... but … so what?  Latency, that’s what.  Quickness, swiftness, speed.  It turns out that … and I can’t say this any better than The Official Google Blog itself can for themselves … “It turns out that traditional flu surveillance systems take 1-2 weeks to collect and release surveillance data, but Google search queries can be automatically counted very quickly. By making our flu estimates available each day, Google Flu Trends may provide an early-warning system for outbreaks of influenza.”

Being ahead of the curve … now that IS cool.  Useful.  Actionable. 

We are what we search for.  It doesn’t take much energized insight to stretch our own creative business minds to apply this model to appropriate business issues. 

Thank you, Google, for making our One World a better place … acknowledging that this is only the beginning.  And if you want to sing along to something One World-ish while you muse on what Google.org have done, and what might become … “Let’s get together and feel all right” … then I can’t suggest anything better than Bob Marley, singing One Love.