kmzen » knowledge management

The River Gives Way to the Sea

Robert Bruns — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 01:30:15 +0000

Discussions with colleagues will reveal different interpretations of the truth. The job of an autonomous agent is not to own an interpretation or the path ahead; meandering the river to the collective wisdom of an organization is the objective.

Human nature is to find a subjective truth, stop, kick your feet up, and have a beer. Objective truth assumes the quest goes on forever, a Kaizen approach to the collection of knowledge.

When you need answers to the essentials or a fresh perspective and unique results do you go to the person with all the answers, or do you give the curious a shot?

Artistry for the Unknown, Obedience for the Respected

Robert Bruns — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 23:34:20 +0000

Stephen Malkmus, an indie rock artist from Portland and Colin Powell, the American statesman, have something in common….fountainheads of knowledge.

Malkmus uses artistry as a tool for tapping the unknown, Powell’s prescience commands obedience through earned respect.

If you have 17 people in a room and want to gleam the best information possible for making decisions moving forward, chances are you’ll need to use both artistry and obedience in problem / solution discovery.

People look for kinship in others before you can develop trust, and reputation affects knowledge sharing among colleagues.

Practical Application of Knowledge Management using SharePoint Content Types

Robert Bruns — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:58:50 +0000

The Scenario: Organizations live in stove pipes. Often this is in the form of departments responsible for different competencies such as accounting, finance, market, information technology, and management. Interdependency and overlap are overlooked in organizing the intellectual property produced. All departments produce ‘Products,’ so we need to create a content type in SharePoint to bridge the gaps. The ‘Products’ content type needs to be created and the appropriate metadata columns assigned.

To make it happen we must set up a site collection level content type and inherit throughout all the sites that create ‘products.’ Once we have the content type established, it’s easy to associate with document libraries and subsequently create templates for re-usability.

Some unique challanges that arise deal with handling large document libraries, the size of your content databases, and synching content types across site collections. Managing large lists and traversing content types should be much easier in SharePoint 2010, I have my fingers crossed.

In conclusion, setting up content types at an enterprise level pays off in organzation that produce thousands of documents. Do you have individuals that want to search documents within this date range that transcends departments pertaining to ‘X?,…’ no problem.

The technology is a slam dunk, the art is in the vision.