Kommunikation und Produktivität

Via Thomas N. Burg c/o randgänge, ein weiterer Grund warum Social Software in the Enterprise ein Thema für mehr Organisationen sein sollte, die 3/2 rule of employee productivity:

The more employees your company has, the less productive each of these employees are. It is a generalization, of course, but a useful one and one that is confirmed by most people who have worked for growing organizations. As the company grows, so does the internal processes and the layers of bureaucracy, and the time spent on communications grows rapidly.

Das ist natürlich radikal vereinfacht, für Organisationstheoretiker keine Neuigkeit, die Ergebnisse sind nicht über alle Größenklassen von Unternehmen verallgemeinerbar etc. Gleichzeitig ist es aber auch ein guter Grund Zusammenarbeit und Kommunikation besser zu unterstützen …

Lotus Connections – Some Initial Thoughts

Luis Suarez promises to offer some insights and reflections into Lotus Connections, i.e. Dogear, Roller, Profiles etc.

Looking forward to it, Luis.

And yes, it’s interesting to see whether IBM will offer this as a packaged, integrated solution or if they will push this via the consulting guys? Technology issues are important, but the real groundwork must be done in implementation (and change management).

Knowledge Management 2.0 (Again)

Eclectic Bill on the difference between Web 2.0 and Knowledge Management 2.0, triggered by this comment by David Weinberger in KMWorld:

[…] Web 2.0 is not a disruptive set of technologies but just the “continuous and incremental changes” as the Web has evolved in popularity and usage. The web has always been collaborative from the beginning and the new technologies just make it easier to collaborate.

[…] KM 1.0 was all about “managing and controlling information environments” while KM 2.0 is “bottom-up, participatory, rapid innovation, more mixing up and and mashing of information.” […] KM today is a decentralized group of methods and technologies that is very different from the IT-focused centralized group of applications.

He goes on expressing his concerns that

[…] KM 2.0 will suffer from being too-closely associated with the latest technology. Even though IT applications help enable KM, it is more than the software. You can practice much of KM without technology because it is people that create knowledge – not computers. This collaboration between people is what makes KM work. But with the focus on Web 2.0 and its collaborative technologies, KM 2.0 will be confused with the Web 2.0 tools. And as these tools become outdated or fail to live up to the hype, KM 2.0 will suffer much KM 1.0 suffered during the early 1990s. There is more to KM than the tools and the KM community needs to stress that point.

Yes, it’s about people, not about technologies … see my posts here and here for further evidence.

Wissensmanagement Quo Vadis?

Dave Snowden, in Cognitive Edge:

“Now don’t get me wrong, the objectives of KM theory and practice persist and will continue to be of great importance. They are clear, simple and important and can be summarised as follows:

To support effective decision making
To create the conditions for innovation”