Gartner Summit by Betsy Burton

There are couple of things were interesting from this summit and couple of things were for Organization level.Betsy addressed three key issues to this summit which organizations are facing currently.

1. Which forces will enhance or hamper workforce performance, productivity and leadership?
Nowadays teaming and collaboration of organization become different in terms of workstyles and workplace due to globalization. Since 2000 till now number of people who used to work alone has decreased and will decreased in future as per Gartner.
2. How can CIOs and IT leaders use organizational behavior and evolving worker profiles to drive change?
I was suprised when Betsy said that IT leaders need to change their attitude. The demand of IT leaders used to be based on their skill set. However in future, their demand will be based on their interaction - based. IT leaders should be able to communicate with their clients or cutomers.
3. What are the best practices for attracting and developing a high performace workforce? Betsy mentioned that there are eight best practices for Collaboration. Those are as follow:
1. Assess your readiness.
2. Focus technology selection on people, processes, business and architectre.
3. Agree on common goals and make people accountable.
4. Measure the benefits of collaboration.
5. Monitor human behavior and evolving technology
6. Keep senior management in the loop
7. Extend collaboration outside the company
8. Get consumer technology working for you.

She also mentioned that if you can't make your changes at the organization level, try to change at lower level. Start making changes from your department. Spread the grassroots of best practices. Some day it would change whole organization. I think professor has explained the same theme in the class.

Answers to Questions' from Professor

1. How does knowledge compare to information?Ans. Information is interpreted based on data. When knowledge comes out of source mind, it becomes information.
a. What do you hope to learn in this course? Will this course change your long term career plans? If so, how?Ans. Since this is my first class at CTI and for masters, I hope to learn managing the information related stuff. I want to do masters in Project Management, so this course will help me in my career.

2. Give some examples of data, information, and knowledge.Ans. Example of Data: 6 out of 10 people took survey of Dell Customer service. Example of Information: Since 6 out of 10 people took survey, the dell's supervisor was not happy. Example of Knowledge: If more people would have taken survey, then the results of product would have been great at Dell.

3. Why might the distinction between information and knowledge be important to you? Give a couple reasons.Ans. With information you can figure out the pattern of the data and and I think with knowledge, you predict future results
based on the pattern.

4. a. An asset is "anything the organization owns or controls". Why is knowledge so important as an organizational asset?Ans. These asset can be used for future purpose. For example, during recession time, when organization find shortage of
people, that time knowledge asset that is documentation, their opinion, their report etc. could be useful.
b. Is the importance of knowledge ever-increasing, or is there a limit to its usefulness?Ans. The importance of knowledge is ever increasing due to its tools and technologies for example, intranet, document
management, office suites. All most all the organization going after these technologies.
c. For most assets, such as raw materials or equipment, the value of the asset is lowered each time you use them. Equipment
gets old, e.g. and needs replaced. Is this true of knowledge?Ans. This is not true with Knowledge. If you use more knowledge, you gain more out of it.

5. a. What is "Service and Support"? Why would KM be so important for it? Which definition of KM is most appropriate here?Ans. According to Knova article, Service and support is providing quality service to maximum number of customers by using
knowledge management tools and techniques. KM can help reduce agent training time and speed up new employees. Agents don't need to call to customer service if
they get access to common questions' answers. KM is as an enterprise-wide goal, many companies find success if they kickoff an initiative in one department and
then extend the practices throughout other parts of the organization.
b. Is self-service better than traditional service? Why or Why not?Ans. In my opinion, I depends on the situation. If I don't have any mobility for example internet service, then I would like
t contact customer service and get the answer. If I have internet service, and don't have time then I would call customer
service. If I have time, and have internet service then I would prefer self-service.
c. I think if student has common question, then he or she would visit to campus connect website. If that student has multiple
questions, then he or she would call customer service.

6.a. What is the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge?Ans. Tacit knowledge is highly personal. It is hard to formalize, and therefore, difficult to communicate to others. Explicit knowledge is shared throughout an organization, other employees begin to internalize it that is, they use it to
broden, extend, and reframe their own tacit knowledge.
b. Can tacit knowledge really be captured?Ans. Yes, tacit knowledge can be capture. However, it is hard to communicate to others.
c. Individual has more of tacit knowledge and therefore, organization has more tacit knowledge because organization is made
of individual.
d. Tacit knowledge is more valuable though it is hard to communicate. This problem can resolved by using tacit and explicit
knowledge with the communication theory model.

WR-WC-Training

This is very interesting white paper. How rapidly web conference's demand has grown in last few years! I was surprised that people like to attend to web conferencing training instead of in-person due to its advantages in various areas. However, sometimes I have found difficulties with connection, or with dropping files due the bad connection while attending web conferencing meetings. Overall, web conferencing is being point of attraction for organization in recent years.

Are Wikis and Blogs a threat to Enterprise Content Management strategies?

This is very good article for the organization. After reading this article, I still couldn't conclude that whether Wiki or blogs would create any threat to ECM. Blogs and wikis meant to be creating collaborative environment at organization level. I am not sure how would they threat to ECM?

Traditional Budgeting-Objectives and Common Problems

I started reading this white paper which is providing solution for budgeting. I am not sure how this paper is related to course? What will we learn out of this paper? Therefore, I didn't finish my reading.

Key issues for Enterprise Content Management, 2007 By Gartner

According to Gartner, there are five challenges for ECM.
1) How can you measure the value of ECM?
--Since BCS has low initial price, their technologies are often adopted by business users. Therefore, BCS's rapid demand in organizations, it creates issue for ECM.

2) How can organizations best manage their content and information at both strategic and tactical levels?
--ECM needs to support the increasing interdependence of the organizations and workflow need to be cross applications.

3) How will the ECM/BCS market evolve?
--Current ECM suites lack the full integration of the ECM component technologies.

4) What role will ECM and information access technologies play in overall information management architecture?
--Information access has always been a critical component of an ECM suite and will play an even bigger role in helping companies sift through structured and unstructured information.

5) How can you effectively deploy contents technologies and solutions to address specific business problems?
--Organizations must analyze current business processes, and understand the changes that must occur as they are automated.

Chapter-5 How Organization Manage what they know

After reading this chapter, I came to know that how organization's culture is impacting on transferring knowledge. Japanese organization believes in face-to-face meeting or knowledge sharing sessions whereas American companies believe in both that is face-to-face and electronically. This chapter also talks about the frictions at the organization and their best solutions. I think, this the most interesting part of this chapter. It doesn't only raise the question in the readers mind but also providing effective solution of that.

The Forrester Wave Enterprise Content Management Suites

This article provides evaluation on leading ECM vendors based on suite radiness, extended
capabilities, and strategy. It has also provided the results of their evaluation. The evaluation methodolgy involves Vendor surveys and customer interviews. Based on the Forrester Wave results, EMC and IBM lead in ECM suite.

EMC leads based on result because EMC's Documentum 5.3 offers ECM breadth and strong document management. IBM leads because DB2 content manager offers strong document imaging, COLD, and records management support.Also, Stellent, FileNet, Interwoven, Humingbird, Vignette, Oracle, Open Text, Mobius, and Microsoft companies have improved or need to improve their ECM suite in one way or the other.

Problem Solving

Today's organizations are facing two types of problems: technical and adaptive.

Technical Vs Adaptive Problem:
The challenge in solving technical problem is to obtain and apply the knowledge in an efficient and rational way. That is applying knowledge at the right time, and right place to right person. Whereas, the challenge in solving adaptive problems is to mobilize people so that they are able to make painful but necessary adjustments while learning new ways of working.

There are six stages in Problem-solving process which are as follow:

These processes are being held by asking particular questions in each processes.
1. Present the Problem.
2. Reframe the Problem.
3. Determine Causes of the problem.
4. Develop Alternative Solutions.
5. Evaluate alternatives and select actions.
6. Implement the solution.

Organizations and individuals gain benefits through solving problems via Action Learning. Those benefits include Organizational learning, team development, leadership development, and individual growth and professional development.

Action Learning: What It Is and Why It Works

Action Learning is process and a powerful program which involves usually four to eight individuals in a group solving real problems while at same time focusing on what they are learning and how their learning can benefit each group member and the organization as a whole.

There are six interactive and interdependet components of an action learning program. Which are as follows:
1. A Problem: Some examples of a problem are project, challenge, issue or task.
2. The Group: Four to eight individuals who examine the problem which is not easily solvable.
3. The Questioning and Reflection Process: This process involves first asking questions, to get better clarification of the exact nature of the problem and then reflecting and identifying possible solutions before taking any action.
4. The resolution to take action: People who are working the problem have the power to take action themselves or be assured that their suggestions will be implemented.
5. The Commitment to Learning: This interply between solving the problem and learning as well as developing yourself and organization.
6. The facilitator: The facilitator helps the group members in solving the problem by giving advising in the process.

What action learning is not:

Action Learning is not Task Forces and Quality Circles.
Action Learning is not Learning an Reflecting on the Job.
Action Learning is not Outdoor Adventures.
Action Learning is not Simulation.

Need of Action Learning in Today's world:
As we move from Newtonian Physics to Quantum Physics, Industrial Age to Information Age, National Economy to Global Economy, Worker Market focus to Customer Market focus, Manufacturing to Mentofacturing, we need solution to a complex problems in a systetic way, so they remain solved. Action Learning provides this kind solution to organizations.

Intranet Librarian

I read this article. I think most of the organizations use blogs, wikis, portals, groupware, discussion boards, and IM to share knowledge. It didn't provide any extra information.

Personal Toolkit

A framework for Personal Knowledge management tools provides seven principles and each principle has its own processes, values, skills, and tools. Each principle is based on information and ideas. What I think is both information and idea is different from each other then why the author has combined them together and given the principles on information and ideas? Are they interdependent?
Even he has also shown the differences between accessing information and accessing ideas. Accessing information is about locating, identifying, retrieving and viewing documents and data to discover the knowledge contained therein. Accessing ideas is about learning, inquiring and seeking out experts and other colleagues in the network who can help.

The Knowledge-Creating Company

The business review describes four basic patterns for creating knowledge in any orgainzation.
1. From Tacit to Tacit
2. From Explicit to Explicit
3. From Tacit to Explicit
4. From Explicit to Tacit.

While I was reading the fundamental principle of organizational design at the Japanese companies, the author of the business review says that in Japan, a team is divided into competing groups that develop different approaches to the same project and then argue over their proposals. When I thought about this approach, it still didn't convience me due its overlapping, time consuming and wastage of money approach. I still have questions on this principle.
One is what if two teams have the same proposal for project? another one is How about oppertunity cost?