Archive for February, 2005

It’s not knowledge management, exactly

Tuesday, February 15th, 2005

Having some interesting conversations with people in the office about the nature of organizational knowledge. Everyone is surprised to hear the Delphi Group stat about how 80% of an organization’s knowledge is locked up inside the heads of its people. I was, too, initially. But anecdotally I would argue that I have spent the vast majority of my “seeking” time delving not into information systems, but into people’s heads.

And I’m thinking now, about knowledge management. That phrase implies a structure that isn’t necessarily a good thing. I prefer to think of it as knowledge accessibility. The goal of any knowledge-focused systems project should be to make knowledge more accessible to those who need it. The management of knowledge grows out of the accessibility of knowledge.

It took me three days and the assistance of another person to get my hands on a document describing a set of business rules that are common across the entire organization. This should not happen. There is a knowledge accessibility problem here that I think we can solve. Easily accessible, accurate knowledge information can save a company so much money! It’s mind-boggling. The average knowledge worker, according to Delphi, spends 30-60 minutes per day (270 hours per year) “looking for people or information to help solve business problems.” I know I spend much more than that right now. I don’t have the reference in front of me, but I’ll dig it up.

I’m going to push and poke and prod until I get the go-ahead to put a pilot program in place. I already know where I want to put it. I just need a web server, time to train the team, and some marketing assistance. In three months, it will develop into an integral component of the organization’s communication infrastructure.

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Blessed

Saturday, February 12th, 2005

If I can learn new things right up until the very moment I die, I will at that moment consider myself to have lived a fully realized life. Along the way, there are myriad ways in which I can and intend to express to the world how grateful I am for having been born into my family, in this country of wealth and power, surrounded my entire life by extraordinary friends, and challenged by all the people I meet to do more, to extend myself. Everyone I recall continues to be an inspiration to me to this moment. Whether by chance, determinism, or Supreme Being, I am blessed, and I hope to learn ways to be a blessing to the world.

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Corporate Challenge

Friday, February 11th, 2005

I have not spent much time in the corporate world in the last five years.

That is one of the things I’ve learned in the past three weeks. Perhaps my biggest challenge is going to be learning how to fit in. I’m a nice guy. I play well with others. I have good social skills. But wow! I’ve spent five years either starting companies or working in and around startups. I have been somewhat spoiled with the requirement to just get things done. It’s curious that one of the aspects of this job I like best — having real co-workers and colleagues again — is also something that makes it the most difficult.

Once it was clear that I’ll have to work hard to figure out the rules of the game, I started watching other people play. One woman, in particular, seems to be very good at working in this environment. She is a great communicator, good at running meetings, a facile speaker, and talented at managing relationships. She’s one of the consultants who are part of the Wholesale group, and I’m going to be paying a good deal of attention to how she works.

Another thing I’ve learned over and over and over in the last few years is that I have much to learn.

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Moving On

Thursday, February 10th, 2005

Cows in the Mist has been a metaphor for my life, my business, and my spirit for some time. It is the name under which I have run my consulting business — the metaphor there was cows-cum-solutions, hidden in the fog that I helped clear up. I spent a few years bumping into things in the fog of the world after my divorce — again the cows metaphor helps out; the darned pastoral things just standing around chewing their cud while I carom from place to place. My spirit has been the same — searching, hidden, sometimes here, sometimes there, covered in the mist.

And now it looks like I’ve put my life in order. Or rather, I’m on a more structured path. It’s time to hang up the spurs and the lasso, because the cows are all coming home. Some of them got away and ended up eaten by cougars. But I got most of them back in the barn.

For the time being, Cows in the Mist is no longer a business. Now it’s a place. The metaphor can relax, take on more of what it should have. It became forced, much like the effort of being an independent consultant. It was a good run, but it is time to move to something else. How about T-Mobile?

On 1/24/05, I started work at T-Mobile, as a Sr. Reporting Analyst. It’s my job, basically, to help the business mine its information systems for useful data that we can convert into trends for analysis. It’s a big stretch for me, but I’m ready to get out of technology for a while and apply some of what I’ve learned of business strategy and operations over the years.

So what happens to Cows in the Mist?

I’m not quite sure. I can say that it will remain. I chose tonight to turn it into a much more intimate, personal space. Naturally, it isn’t really intimate, and only superficially personal. After all, it’s an expression of me in a public place. This is an experiment that has been simmering for a while, and now is a good time to move forward. This space will be a variety of things, but rest assured it will not be a confessional. I intend to share ideas, mostly. I’m hoping to develop enough of myself intellectually that I can say something meaningful out here about business intelligence, knowledge management, poetry, fiction, ethics, morality, and maybe baseball. The metaphors will continue. I live in metaphor — I’m trying to bring the rest of the team at T-Mobile into my metaphoric state. We’ll see if it works.

I can say with confidence that I did my best. I simply wasn’t able to make Cows in the Mist, as a business, run any longer. I have no regrets, and no doubt that someday I’ll be an independent consultant again. But for now, that chapter of my life, with its attendant uncertainties and inherent instability, is closed.

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