How I made a dream come true To wake up in winter on a silver Scottish morning in a remote part of beautiful Galloway is not easy. Teeth chattering, I jump out of bed and throw on every item of clothing within arm's reach, until only my head is visible. Four years ago, I was an aspiring film director living in Los Angeles, doing tai chi at dawn. Now here I am, hidden under layers of wool and down feathers, half way across the world; living above a secondhand bookshop in Scotland, in a grade II listed Georgian building where what little warmth there is slips out between the floorboards and the rattling windows. I grew up in a suburb of Boston, the daughter of an engineer father and art teacher mother. At 25, I was hired as a storyteller and media consultant for Nasa, exploring new ways to use narrative to share knowledge within the organisation. From there, it was just a short commute from my base at Nasa's Jet-Propulsion-Laboratory, where I walked the same halls as my great scientific heroes. This is how it began.
Take a peek at your email metadata ... before the feds do If this NSA data-snooping thing has you wondering about how much can be learned from your email metadata, there's an easy — and safe — way to find out. A new public Web application from the MIT Media Lab picks up metadata from your Gmail emails and displays an easily readable map of your digital connections, just enter your Gmail details. I sent my own first Gmail email a few weeks into my first semester at college. Since then, I've made and lost friends, foes and beaus — and no one knows this better than my inbox. Last Friday I handed over the contents of my personal account, tens of thousands of emails, to the trio running Immersion at the MIT Media Lab. In under 10 minutes my email history was digested and sent back to me as a web of wobbling dots of assorted colors and shapes that instantly showed me who was important to me and my mailbox. Anyone I'd written to more three times appeared as a single dot, connected to anyone else I'd cc'd in a conversation.
The four Ifs of Knowledge Management This post is an elaboration of a Linked-In comment, and is based on a diagram from a paper I co-authored called Implementing a Framework for Knowledge Management We see four key enablers for Knowledge Management - The first 3 are generally recognised as the "People, Process. It's informative to look at what happens if any of these four are missing. If there are no roles and accountabilities, then Knowledge Management is nobody's job (or else, it's "everyone's job" which soon becomes "no-one's job")If there are no processes for KM, then nobody knows what to do, or how to do it.If there is no Technology for KM, then nobody has the tools, and KM can never extend beyond the immediate and localIf there is no Governance, then nobody sees the point.
100 Companies That Matter in Knowledge Management With the juggernaut of consolidation growing ever louder since we first put this list together in 2000, you'd think identifying a hundred companies that matter in knowledge management would be increasingly easier to assemble, right? Heck, it simply follows that with fewer companies to choose from, it would be simpler to pick 100. Not at all. It's harder than ever because of the increasing cross-functionality of today's solutions. As is the case since we first published it in 2000, compilation of the list is a yearlong collaborative effort among colleagues, analysts, system integrators and a select group of users. Criteria for inclusion vary, but all companies have things in common. Remember, the purpose of the list is to generate interest and discussion about the breadth of knowledge management tools and services-and to highlight the companies our panel believes best fulfill the goal of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time.
Vijay Govindarajan - Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators at the London Business Forum