Knowledge management

Jon pushes some innovative ideas on knowledge management in this environment where the Internet is all around us. Traditional education and training are falling short of managing the increasing complexity. It is not knowing the explicit steps to solve a problem but instead knowing where to find the steps quickly. He references Jeff Hawkins On Intelligence and Jeff’s ideas on the function of the brain. Jeff theorizes that the brain or more specifically the neocortex is a vast autoassociative memory. It is faster to remember than to figure things out. Memory fragments link to the associated memory or idea. In many cases it is Google that takes the fragments as search words and associates them with the collection of content on the web.

As more and more content (is this knowledge) is placed where it can be indexed for search, the more powerful this process is as a tool.

In many cases the answers obtained in this manner are better and more relevant than say…the manuals that are published. This process benefits now from the ease with which folks can publish on the web. Here are a few key drivers:

• Weblogs or Blogs – these are personal publishing tools
• Wiki – a wiki is a collaborative publishing tool where anyone can change the content. What gives it resilency is the fact that every change that is made to the wiki page is saved in a history.
• Forums – forums are a different type of collaborative device that follows a topic thread

Each of these forms is useful on its own. But to add increased value, they can be indexed by a search engine and folks can search across all of their content.

O’Reilly Radar > Supernova 2005: Attention

Linda Stone was a speaker at the Supernova 2005 conference (O’Reilly Radar > Supernova 2005: Attention). While working at Microsoft Research she coined the phrase “continuous partial attention” to describe how we cope with technology and life.

Linda’s was perhaps the best talk of the conference. She definately hits the nerve for the overstimulated, overconnected folks. There are a few great points made:

• Email-free Fridays–originated in the UK. Folks may show a bit more creativity when they work without email.
• Dropping out of the online social networks to actually meet those same folks
• A developing trend to use technology to filter the noise from the flood of information that technology makes available.

I suppose this is really going to frustrate the marketing types perfecting their online sales pitches 😮

nonadmin – Home

It appears that we do not have to wait for Longhorn for LUA (Least-privileged User Account) in Windows. LUA is an accepted security practice to manage vulnerabilities. Microsoft has created a wiki to get the word out…nonadmin – Home This is a very effective method to manage vulnerabilites.

My main concern is with the vulnerabilities caused by Rockwell SCADA software. You cannot run Rockwell software without having administrative privileges on that system. Because of this the PC is vulnerable to many of the malicious and spyware threats. From what I’ve seen so far nonadmin – Home doesn’t have a solution for dealing with Rockwell’s problem.

A different process may be required. Though the process could be tedious it should be possible to run Rockwell software on a lab PC and map the specific PC resources required by the Rockwell software. The permissions on just those resources could be enabled for a less than Administrative account. Two big issues are that each Rockwell software application will likely require separate mappings. And each new version could change the requirements as well.

Why is this important? Remember the power blackout affecting the northeast a couple years ago? They have pretty much admitted that the SCADA software designed to contain the original problem did not. Now consider the timing…the MyDoom virus was at its peak. MyDoom spread to vulnerable PCs without any human action. Once infected the virus consumed most of the PC’s resources…in other words any applications running on the infected PC would be slowed down to a crawl. If that SCADA software on that PC should have thrown a switch to contain a problem, that action would be delayed. I should say that this is my opinion of what may have happened.

Emergence/demergence

Behavior of folks in a company, or people on the outside interacting closing with them, determine information services needs. Emergence and as flyingsquid said on Slashdot demergence can be a very strong factor of what works and what doesn’t.

• When there are simple rules governing a system, intelligent behavior usually emerges.
• Systems that are governed by complex rules usually lead to stupid behavior.

Emergence…. and demergence (Score:5, Interesting)
by flyingsquid (813711) on Friday April 22, @12:21PM (#12314167)
I recently read a book about “emergence”: the idea that simple rules of interaction between unintelligent subcomponents of a system can lead to emergent behavior which is surprisingly complex and intelligent. In short, the whole is more than the sum of its parts; for instance, ant colonies, where the behavior of the colony is more intelligent than any given ant.

It then occurred to me that many groups and institutions exhibit the reverse of emergence: you have complex, smart people making up your system, but when you get them together you get stupid decisions. In this case, the whole is less than the sum of its parts, sometimes less intelligent than any one individual. The obvious name for this phenomenon is “demergence”.

GTD Outlook Addin

The Gettting Things Done Outlook Addin is a VB program that integrates with Outlook and automates workflow based on David Allen’s book ($69.95).

There is also a document available on Allen’s website called Getting Things done using Outlook. The document is for purchase ($10) as a downloadable Adobe Acrobat file. This document shows you how to configure Outlook to take advantage of the ideas presented in the book Getting Things Done…. The document tells you how to use Outlook but it is left to you to follow. It is faithful to what is described in the book where the Outlook Addin deviates some.

Once the addin is installed it creates the necessary folders and categories in Outlook automatically. A toolbar is added with buttons to perform the GTD-type actions. It is well integrated and cuts down on most of the things you have to do to get things done.

But…there are a few negatives that led me to uninstall the addin:

• Outlook has become quite the platform mainly because of the central role it plays. There are quite a few products designed to work with Outlook (such as SpamBayes, LookOut, antivirus tools, etc). After a few addins are installed you have to weigh the positive benefits against the potentially negative conflicts that inevitably happen. Folks using Outlook can customize a great deal within the Outlook application which can also lead to conflicts.
• The complexity factor. Outlook is already a complex beast to learn and use effectively. The additional toolbar, buttons and behaviors of the GTD Addin increase the complexity. Had they not deviated from the original workflow and simply automated those areas it would have been better. The original workflow represents the minimal distillation of what works! But then it would be harder to charge $69.95 for that! SpamBayes and LookOut are very elegant examples of simple yet powerful Addins.
• Deeper down in the plumbing the quality of the coding is somewhat suspect. It makes me suspicious of what lies deeper. The AddIn creates what are known as User Defined Fields for each task item to support some of their more advanced features. The fields that are added are not included in Outlook by default. But the questionable approach is where they hijack a few little used fields that are included in Outlook for an entirely different purpose. What are the chances someone uses those fields? …Slim but the possibility exists. Why go through the trouble of creating unique fields for some but not others! It is compromises like this that lead to conflicts…weird behavior…bugs…you get the picture.
• The Outlook Addin is not a replacement for reading the book or attending a seminar on Getting Things Done. To take advantage of the benefits of this approach to workflow a person has to understand the basic principles. If you’re looking for an easy silver bullet using the GTD Outlook AddIn will only make things worse.

This is not a problem though because the short PDF provides everything you need to take better advantage of GTD anyway…you’re better off.