Far Wise in Knowledge Management

Colours of knowledge management

I forgot to announce that last week a short paper of Janine and myself appeared on the Net. It is in Dutch, with the title "Durf kleur te bekennen in kennismanagement", which can be translated as "Choose your colour in KM". On the site you can leave a comment and give the paper a rating (last week we were in the top 10!, but now we disappeared from the top-10 list). We are working on an English version of the paper that we want to submit to a KM-journal later this year.

The colour idea is a way to distinguish different approaches in knowledge management and give it a colour. We also made a simple test, which we use in workshop, so people can find what is their KM-colour. Very simple, but people like it a lot. We just tried to make the KM field a bit more transparent for those who are new in the area.

The approaches and colours we distinguish are in short:

1. Stock (blue), where the core issue is how to store the knowledge of employees (who might leave the company).

2. Process (yellow), which has the business processes as starting point for KM.

3. Learning (red), where people are central (learning organisation)

4. Organic (green), with change, chaos and enery as core theme of KM.

You can read our Dutch paper or have to wait for the English...

World travelers

My boyfriends father (Jan) and a friend (Tiny) planned a long time ago to cycle to Santiago de Compostello (in Spain). They both are retired (I think, Jan is), but they still are fit enough to go for such a long tour. They talked about it a lot, bought equipment, trained a bit, and last Monday they left for 5 weeks.

On Tuesday, the second day, I received an e-mail with the message their tour has ended: the bike of Tiny was stolen! It happened in Breda, in front of a house where they were drinking coffee, though the bike was locked. I think the thief was a connoisseur, because this bike was the expensive one. What a bad luck!

However, the two men didn't want to end their cycling dream in Breda. They bought everything new (thanks to insurance) and they continued their tour. I haven't heard from them till now, so I think that is good news.

Books, or: finishing them

As long as I remember I have something with books. People say I was always reading when I was young and I can't imagine I will one day hate it. In a bookstore I get greedy and I think that from all the books we have in our house, about 90% is mine.

However, I find that I hardly finish books. Which really is a problem, because my reading list grows every day. It is not only a matter of time (I spend less time reading now than I used to). Maybe I'm just spoiled: at the moment a book gets predictable I put it aside. Or, when I get the point but the author thinks I need more and more examples to convince (Blink, Wisdom of the Crowds).

The problem is that I find so many things interesting. It is difficult then to prioritise. And to finish before something more interesting comes by.

It could be the reason now why I read weblogs or papers. The postings in weblogs are concise and I can quickly see if it is interesting enough to continue. Papers are also often concise and have the advantage (to weblogs) that they are on paper, which is more relaxing to read than a computer screen.

And here is a message to book authors: don't try to make as much pages as possible when there is nothing more to say. (Does anybody know if they get paid by the number of pages, then I can understand) I don't have problems with thick books, as long as they have something new, interesting to say.

Too hot

Dutch people always complain about the weather: it is too cold, raining too much, or too hot. We now jumped from too cold to too hot in a few days time.

Too hot to run, so we went cycling yesterday. We have a favourite route to Bad Bentheim (Germany), a route not possible to find with Anjo's present (maybe that's why it is always so quite there). Had an icecream at our favourite place.

Too hot to work today, since our office cooling system was set off because of some problems on Friday. So the whole weekend my office room warmed up in the sun. And my room is on the shadow side of the building, the real poor people have their offices on the other side.

Too hot... do I need more excuse that I can't concentrate on my things to do today.

Blogger's lifecycle

Frankwatching writes about the lifecycle of bloggers (which he has found in another source).

It is a nice list, see below:

1. Start reading blogs

2. You start a blog

3. You become a stats whore

4. You become really personal on your site as the online and real-life worlds start confusing you

5. You faux “retire” from blogging

6. You cave back into blogging in less than 72 hours

7. You decide to “get serious” about blogging

8. You have a pseudo flirty im/blogging/flickr flirting relationship with another blogger whom you have never met

9. You decide that you must meet other bloggers

10. You take a step back and metablog about blogging and what blogging has done about your blogging

11. See step 5

12. You decide that as a result of step 10 and having repeated step 5 more than 3 times in the course of your lifecycle as a blogger, that you need to sanitize or reinvent your blog

13. You either lose your job because of blogging, are afraid of losing your job for blogging, or join a company that builds blogging tools

14. You decide to start an anonymous livejournal blog

We always recommend people to start first with reading before writing. I first thought the rest of the list is more of a funny list of steps, but I recognise some of them (maybe in a different order, skipped a few). The question is, how much part does blogging become of your life?

Never a real sprinter

I don't see many entries from my colleagues appear in their weblogs and I didn't have much time myself, so it could mean we are all very busy at the moment...

At least I found some time for running, which is always good to "empty" my head. Last Sunday I had a new experience: I made my debut as a sprinter when I ran as final runner in the 4x100 meters relay. I can tell you, 100 meter is a very short distance, especially when you're used to racing about 10 kilometers. But it was fun, even though we as a team became last on the list (the other teams were nearly finished why I started). It was also the first time I ran on spike shoes, which made me fly (or at least, gave me the feeling of flying). But I don't think I'll ever be a real sprinter, according to my boyfriend it didn't look like a sprinters race. I wasn't even tired after these 100 meters ;-)

Sometimes it is good to do something new, different. Maybe it is a discovery of new fun, or you remember that you are good/better in other things (like I had).