I found this slide deck via Jeff Dirks’ post on twitter:  For all of us working in Information Management. Interesting post on Peter Morville's http://www.findability.org: http://twurl.nl/bdarnl that led me to this post on Peter Morville’s blog: 

“Architecture for the Information Age

Yesterday, at IUE 2009, Dan Klyn gave a talk called Now That I See It. I really wish I'd been there. It takes a bit of work to recreate the experience, pulling together the slides and the notes and the tweets, but it's absolutely worth it.

As an extra bonus, Dan has posted a short excerpt from his interview with Richard Saul Wurman. I found it surprisingly refreshing and inspiring.”

Here is the post that Peter was referring to.  It is a great discussion of the importance on Information Architecture, User Experience and User interface design.  We are deeply indebted to library science for many of the concepts used today in site design.

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Semantic, Structured Authoring is an important concept in writing content for the web.

Semantic authoring has been defined as "to compose information content semantically structured according to some ontology". (If you've never encountered the word ontology before, the dictionary defines it as "the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of being".) A much better explanation of semantic authoring is "knowledge markup". Simple tags such as <policy> aren't the only way in which knowledge is categorised, indexed and labelled within XML. Tags can contain attributes (such as the id attribute in <section id="upg11">), and metadata can be stored in tags separate from the content itself (such as <author><firstname>Tony</firstname><surname>Self</surname></author>).

The most common semantic markup languages for documentation are DocBook and the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). DITA specifies a number of topic types, such as Task, Concept and Reference.

Within DITA, a Task topic is intended for a procedure describing how to accomplish a task; lists a series of steps that users follow to produce a specified outcome; identifies who does what, when, where and how . A Reference topic is for topics that describe command syntax, programming instructions, other reference material; usually detailed, factual material .

In Coherence Group’s business, writing structured content is important because we combine knoweldge, learning and software development in to performance support tools so that knowledge workers can avoid the integrative effort of putting this content together themselves.

The Sunday Herald - Scotland's award-winning independent newspaper reports in a recent article entitled, How the US forgot to make Trident missiles, that the “US National Nuclear Security Administration lost knowledge of how to make a very hazardous material named Fogbank.  As a result, the warhead refurbishment programme was put back by at least a year, and racked up an extras $69 million.”

.”…vital information on how Fogbank was actually made had somehow been mislaid. "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s, and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency," the report said.”

This is a clear and very compelling case for knowledge management.  The NNSA says it will strengthen its “management procedures” but knowledge is an extraordinarily costly commodity as this fiasco demonstrates.

1. Reduce cost of sale? faster sales cycle; increase yield
2. Reduce cost of lead generation? Less expensive marketing mix...
3. Reduce marketing collateral development costs and time?
4. Get answers faster
5. Reduce reinventions ... use the combo of bookmarks and search
6. Reduce errors
7. Speed up discovery process
8. improved quality of role-role interaction
9. Make faster decisions
10. transparent policy making lead to improved efficiencies
11. cost savings from shutting down low yielding projects

I would add several others:

increased win rate.
increasing customer retention
increasing number of non-competitive sales opportunities
increasing reuse of solutions
increasing utilization of subject matter specialists
greater job satisfaction
increasing customer satisfaction
increasing number of new service offerings
faster time to market

Today I published a new blog post in a blog called:  Not Otherwise Categorized…, a blog by Seth Earley of Earley & Associates.   I have been doing a lot of work in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, so I posted MOSS 2007 Requirements Gathering: Fast and Focused to discuss the process  we’ve use for requirements gathering and analysis.  The post notes our reliance on Agile and Lean software development methods to accelerate MOSS development and implementation and to increase the accuracy of requirements analysis.  Of course, the key is user involvement and enough user feedback to avoid rework caused my misunderstandings.

Marwan Tarek, has provided an excellent compilation of SharePoint Performance Optimization tips in a recent blog post:

SharePoint Performance Optimizations

Guide to SharePoint Performance Optimizations

Both articles provide links to excellent resources.

SharePoint ‘How we did it’ articles « Footprint of IT provides of list of “how to articles” that have been posted on the SharePoint Team Blog.  Many of these articles have to do with plugging in other applications to MOSS 2007.  For example the articles list here offer advice on the blueWiki SharePoint Connector, the Confluence connector and connecting Contectbeam Spotlight.

SharePoint is a platform that is well suited to extensions with other packages, so these articles are extremely helpful.

This is a great little presentation on Lean Software development.  It clearly shows where  waste creeps into the development process and demonstrates how a lean approach can accelerate applications that meet customer requirements.

Today I replied to Herman van Niekerk’s question in the LinkedIn Knowledge Management Experts Group discussion.    Here is my answer to the question.

The value of knowledge management remains high, but the implementation success is extraordinarily variable. When knowledge management works, it enthuses the process of sharing business problem solving experience and accelerates learning.

I started working in knowledge management at the Boston Consulting Group in 1977. Bruce Henderson had recently discovered the relationship between the number of a times a task was performed to the cost of performing the task. As the cumulate volume doubled the cost of performing the task falls at a constant and predictable rate. This is called the Experience Curve. We applied the experience curve concept in BCG’s consulting practice by encouraging professionals to share their practice experience so that everyone’s work would improve and profitability would increase. In fact, we learned that by sharing experience, any efficiency learned from delivering one product or service can be applied to other analogous products or services.

Initially, given this context, we called “knowledge management”, practice experience sharing. After I left the Boston Consulting Group, I joined Bain & Company where we applied the same insight, calling the knowledge sharing function the “Experience Center”. This recognized the fact that professional service firms can capitalize on the positive effects of experience and learning to increase market share and profitability. I have seen this work successfully throughout my career.

I don’t think much has changed. Businesses still strive for efficiency and profitability. Knowledge Management can positively affect the process performance by sharing experience and getting better at performing value creating tasks. As the practice of Knowledge Management strays from capturing and sharing problem solving experience or striving to improve business process performance, its relevancy decreases. For example, document sharing in portals is not, per se, knowledge management.

Technology solutions can enable practice experience sharing, so Lotus Notes and SharePoint are good examples of tools that can equip employees to learn from other’s experiences. Today, Web 2.0 tools can enable the speed and efficacy of knowledge sharing.

So, is KM relevant, absolutely, but it is only relevant when applied toward improving the efficiency and profitability of business.