Putting Ideas to Work

Putting Ideas to Work is a recent article by Thomas H. Davenport, Laurence Prusak and Bruce Strong published at Sloan Review.

The authors point to the problems of traditional knowledge management (KM) and write:

Over the past 15 years or so, many large organizations have embraced the idea that they could become more productive and competitive by better managing knowledge—the ideas, insights and expertise that originate in the human mind.

In practice, however, some of them are still struggling to make it work. Their knowledge-management efforts, while useful in some ways, haven't necessarily led to better products and services, more effective employees or superior work processes.

What went wrong? Some firms stumbled by focusing their knowledge-management efforts solely on technology at the expense of everything else, while others failed to tie knowledge programs to overall business goals or the organization's other activities. A new approach is needed if knowledge management is to transition into a more pragmatic discipline, one that can be used to improve specific job functions and work processes.

To overcome this problem, the authors then suggest three knowledge-related activities, namely knowledge creation, knowledge dissemination, and knowledge application.

The authors also note that learning and KM have been kept separate from an organization structure point of view. As they put it:

In the past, most companies treated knowledge and learning as separate entities. These functions were managed by different departments, and the groups didn't coordinate their activities or work toward the same business objectives.

That is starting to change. A survey of 20 high-performing businesses conducted in 2006 provided strong evidence that learning and knowledge initiatives increasingly are being intertwined and targeted at mission-critical work forces.

I've written about the deficiencies in traditional learning and KM initiatives and the challenge of the fusion of the two domains. These ideas are dicussed in this article addressing the view of learning and KM as two sides of the same coin (article available for free).

First World Summit on the Knowledge Society

The Open Research Society (ORS) is organizing the first World Summit on the Knowledge Society, 24-28 September 2008, Athens, Greece. It's a honor for me to be a member of the Program Committee.

The World Summit on the Knowledge Society, is an international attempt to promote the dialogue for the main aspects of the Knowledge Society towards a BETTER WORLD for all. The World Summit on the Knowledge Society will bring together Academics, People from Industry, Policy Makers, Politicians, Government Officers and active citizens to look at the impact of Information Technology, and the knowledge-based era it is creating, on key facets of today’s world: the state, business, society and culture.

For more information, you can visit the summit homepage here or contact Dr. Miltiadis Lytras.

Portability in Social Networks

In this post, Sean Ammirati gives an introduction to 4 important technologies for portability in social networks:

• hCard
• XFN and FOAF (Recently used by Google for the Social Graph API)
• OpenID
  
• OAuth

Connectivism Resources

George Siemens has compiled a list of resources related to connectivism including transcripts of talks by Terry Anderson, Will Richardson, Stephen Downes, Diana Oblinger, and Bill Kerr from the online connectivism conference that he organized last year.

OpenService API

I would like to start a conversation about the idea of having what can be called „OpenService API“ that enables to develop services that can be used anywhere that supports that API (something similar to the OpenID and OpenSocial concepts but in a service provisioning/integration context). The „OpenService API“ should not only be based on HTML and JavaScript as it is the case with Google Gadgets API for instance; it can also use SOA technologies (e.g. REST, SOAP etc.).
In my opinion, this can be very useful for the extensibility of Personal Learning Environments (PLE). I can imagine to design and develop a PLE Framework (PLEF) that supports the “OpenService API” such that services based on that API can easily be plugged into the framework.

What do you think? Do we really need this? What are the requirements of such an API?

I would also be very thankful if you can point me to existing ideas in this direction.