e-wot?

Great conference today. In the morning, keynotes from Graham Higgins, Manager of Organisational Development and Learning, Cathay Pacific and Tony Sheehan Director of Learning Services, Ashridge Business School… great presentations.

In the afternoon a knowledge cafe with 14 KM practitioners from different companies showing and sharing their projects and experience. Awesome. Lots of opportunity to talk to other practitioners. Not like a normal conference – much better.

I drank far too much coffee at the conference, so before the caffeine buzz subsides…

One thing that made me cheer (on the inside) is that in every conversation I had, there was someone saying that Knowledge Management is a term that should not be used outside of the KM community. And this time it wasn’t just me saying it. O.O

In other words, don’t mention KM when talking to rank and file staff. One reason is that it’s unnecessary jargon that requires layers of workshops and communication to ‘get the KM message across’. But the main reason is that most staff will think that ‘KM’ equals ‘more work’. Many times I’ve heard “so now you expect me to do KM in addition to my usual job?”.

Over the past 4 years I’ve explained this particular problem to management, who’ve nodded sagely. We commissioned a report which found the same issues raised in staff interviews. Message loud and clear, but somehow always sidelined. I suggested that we try ‘Ninja KM’ or ‘KM by stealth’, but nobody was listening (or they didn’t get it). So now I’m delighted, because now I can say that I’m not alone when I recommend to others something along the lines of: “Think ‘KM’, but say ‘problem solving’ (better still use terms which talk directly to your audience’s context)”.

Instead of saying ‘Knowledge Management’, try ‘resource management’, ‘risk management’, ‘asset management’… or whatever makes immediate sense to whoever you’re talking to.

[edit: James Robertson owes credit for being the first to articulate this idea, here's his post in Column Two that made me slap my forehead and go 'yes, that's it'. It's from 2004, so it's not a new idea at all. It's funny how ideas take a while catch on and hit a tipping point like this one did today.]

YMMV but Delicious wins, Foxmarks comes second, Ma.gnolia third and Google bookmarks gets lapped several times before retiring from the race. Foxmarks? Not in the title above, I know, and it’s not an online bookmarking tool like the others, I know that too. But it’s good and worth a mention.

Why do I rate Google bookmarks so low? Well simply because Google released Chrome without support for Google Bookmarks. This is bad because in my view Chrome handles bookmarks appallingly, and given Chrome’s online app focus, a strong Google Bookmarks would have fixed Chrome’s shortcomings. Bad timing I reckon. Ivan’s blog also makes the point that Google has so many apps in development that their online bookmarks offer is bound to get neglected (compared with Delicious). Everything Google has is ‘Beta’, even Gmail. Yeah, right.

Ma.gnolia is the new kid on the block. Very pretty interface. Does pretty much what Delicious does, but I agree with these guys and PARAgiraffe for the moment.

Foxmarks now. This has got very good since they introduced favicon support. It was good before, but I reckon it’s got much better with favicon sync. Before Foxmarks I used Torisugari’s Bookmarks synchronizer, back in the day. But I switched to Foxmarks when Torisugari slowed down on updates. I rely on favicons in my bookmarks toolbar to find my most used links. I can click and go. Here’s a screenshot which I hope will show you what I mean:

Delicious wins for me mainly because it’s simple and effective. Also as Ivan’s blog mentions, it has a healthy business focus: it’s the only thing they do, so they’re committed. Another point in favour of Delicious is that our partners in local schools here in Singapore are using it. There’s also an excellent Delicious Firefox addon. The only gripe I have about this addon is that it takes up quite a lot of space on my NT profile at work – I had to delete this addon since Firefox 3 came out because I couldn’t log out: my profile was too big.

I’ve started a revolutionary move away from IE6 towards using Firefox at our school, but if our IT infrastructure won’t handle the Delicious Firefox addon we might have to do without it. I reckon we’ll manage ok. Here’s what ours looks like so far:

Apart from showing our teachers how great Firefox is, I’m also going to have to persuade them to start using Delicious in their teaching practice. I’m not sure these people know how to make the most of their bookmarks anyway, but that’s another story.

Innova Junior College seem to have the right idea though:

On the subject of how bad Internet Explorer 6 is… check out IE Death March just for fun.