Knowledge Management News

i GET IT(R) Provides Engineering Knowledge Management Support for Ford Motor Company Global C3P-NG P2 Release

Tata Technologies’ knowledge management application provides single, easy-to-navigate access point

DENVER, May 1 /PRNewswire/ — i GET IT(R), the global engineering knowledge management application from Tata Technologies, announces its support of Ford Motor Company’s global “Next Generation” release of CAD/CAM/CAE/PIM (C3P-NG) software tools. i GET IT is an engineering knowledge management portal that allows Ford’s Digital Innovation group to deliver all global C3P-NG methods through a single easy-to-navigate access point. Methods content can be configured to support the specific needs of individuals or groups and delivered to each user’s custom learning path. Accessed by over 6,000 people and 100 suppliers globally, Ford utilizes i GET IT to deliver podcasts, process work flows, and a threaded discussion board in addition to internally developed C3P-NG tool usage methodology documentation.

Read the full story here.

Knowledge Delivered in Any Other Form Is…Perhaps Sweeter

At a bimonthly Friday happy hour, a group of employees shares stories of baseball games and baby showers, interspersed with bits of knowledge about their jobs. Amazingly, people still remember these random pieces of learning come Monday morning, despite being mixed up with personal anecdotes.

Tim notes that Donna would be a good future resource on figuring out the new email system. Stephanie invites Aziz to the internal marketing group that brainstorms catchy slogans. To generate further discussion, Trevor posts a wiki summarizing the company’s revised mission statement and the process behind it.

Informal learning, or social learning, has been around for eons, and was the first method of sharing information within and between groups of people. Suffice it to say it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

“Formal training and workshops account for only 10 percent to 20 percent of what people learn at work,” says Jay Cross, one of the foremost experts on informal learning and systems thinking. On his blog, he compares formal learning to passively taking a bus whereas informal learning is like riding a bike, in that “the rider chooses the destination and the route. The cyclist can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or help a fellow rider.”

Pervading many a workplace in various guises and fast becoming a staple of today’s employee diet, the tools of informal learning are being harnessed both inside and outside the training function, infiltrating all parts of the organization.

Read the full story here.

What does ProjectOffice.net Offer?

For the last few months I have been familiarizing myself with the Project Management Tool ProjectOffice.net and found that it is a very simple and easy to use product.

They have an exhaustive feature list ( that continues to grow )  that will take a few weeks to dissect and what really makes it impressive is the fact this is a product that undergoes revision constantly to provide better value.

So what does ProjectOffice.net Offer?

• Virtual office – The concept of ProjectOffice.net is based on spaces. Imagine that you work in your own office, however if you have to work with John you will go in his office and work there. Each space in ProjectOffice.net represents each office where you work at, except that you don’t have to actually go anywhere.
• Project management – Creating and managing projects has never been easier. With ProjectOffice.net all relevant project attributes are easily defined. Also, a visual representation of each project is presented with the Gantt chart.
• Task management – For each project unlimited number of tasks can be created, also subtasks, predecessors and milestones can be set. Additionally, every team member assigned to a task can update the time spent working on the task.
• Import projects from MS Excel – If you use MS Excel 2003/2007 to create your tasks or enter team members’ time, it is time you start to use a real project management solution that will make your team’s work easier and more productive. Thus, import your projects, tasks and already reported time as it is in Excel and get a better visual presentation of your project status.
• Add/import contacts – Keep all important contacts in a single location. With ProjectOffice.net you can add your contacts or import them from Yahoo, MS Outlook 2003/2007, Gmail, Hotmail, AOL as well as from the resource pool in your space.
• Resource management – In ProjectOffice.net the resource pool is defined at space level, so the project managers can assign them at various projects and tasks in a single step. Resources can also be activated or deactivated in a space depending on the company needs.
• Time management – Every team member updates task progress on a daily basis and submits the timesheet to the project owner for approval. Also, overtime and grand total are automatically calculated. Moreover, time-off requests for various reasons can be submitted for approval.
• Expense management -  ProjectOffice.net allows reporting expenses at a basic level. Besides the general expense, subexpenses can be added. After submission the project owner approves or rejects the expense request.
• Issue tracking – Important characteristic of successful project management is tracking the inevitable issues that always emerge along the way. With the issue tracking system that ProjectOffice.net has, issues can be associated with particular projects and tasks and can be assigned to the responsible team member.
• Wiki collaboration – Project collaboration is critical to successful project management. Creating and editing wikis in ProjectOffice.net provides each team member with the opportunity to become an active contributor in sharing knowledge with the rest of the project team.
• Reporting – General project reports requested from our users are now available in ProjectOffice.net: General overview, project summary and milestones list.Soon to come are more predefined as well as custom made reports.
• Search – If you can’t find certain information the search functionality searches all over the application as well is inside of every attached document.
• Project templates – Project managers do not have to waste time and create recurring projects every time since ProjectOffice.net offers predefined templates that can be used when needed. Also, project managers can save their own projects as templates for further use.
• Data privacy/Permissions – Data in ProjectOffice.net is secured and can be viewed only by project managers/team members/guests who are assigned to the particular project or task. Moreover, if you want to give your clients with the opportunity to supervise a project, you can invite them as guests in the project.
• Dashboard – The Dashboard in ProjectOffice.net is the central place where an overall summary from all tabs in all spaces is presented. What is most important is that every user can customize the Dashboard to his likes.
• SSL secured data – All information stored in ProjectOffice.net is secured with a SSL certificate which prevents any possibility of privacy invasion, data theft or data loss.

A complete overview of the features is available here. and I would recommend setting up a free account and experimenting with it.

Articles from Here and There

I came a cross a few interesting articles that i though might be of value to some of you out there… The first one is about “Asymmetry of Knowledge Spillovers Between MNCs and Host Country Firms” from INSEAD and the second on “Why commercial Wiki’s don’t work” from the CNN money website.

Asymmetry of Knowledge Spillovers Between MNCs and Host Country Firms

“Multinational companies (MNCs) invest abroad for many reasons, but invariably the quest for knowledge and information will be a part of the mix. In this paper, shortly to be published in the Journal of International Business Studies, Jasjit Singh, Assistant Professor of Strategy at INSEAD, uses patent citations from 30 countries to explore whether the flow of knowledge between a MNC and host country is one-sided, or if everybody wins.

Global economic growth is highly dependent on the diffusion of knowledge around the world, but it rarely comes in a form that can be easily transferred, such as a blueprint or an engineering diagram. Practical skills such as management, distribution and marketing know-how are just as important to growth.

To gain these tacit skills, many countries focus on attracting foreign direct investment, developing incentives intended to encourage multinational companies to establish subsidiaries and work with local companies. But while these local subsidiaries can be a significant source of knowledge for the host country, they also provide a very effective mechanism whereby the MNC can access host country technology. As a result, technologically advanced countries may fear that such subsidiaries gain significantly more than they contribute in terms of knowledge, and that foreign direct investment may come at a cost.”

Why commercial Wiki’s don’t work

“(Business 2.0 Magazine) — Nowadays, the all-powerful Web user, recently anointed as Time’s Person of the Year, is both creator and consumer of every last bit of content at some of the Web’s fastest-growing destinations. Witness the success of Flickr (the photo-sharing site), YouTube (the video-sharing site), Deli.cio.us (the bookmark-sharing site) and Wikipedia (the knowledge-sharing site).

This naturally has gotten a lot of large companies interested in the idea of outsourcing their content to the Web crowd, or “crowdsourcing.

At the beginning of February, for instance, Penguin Books – one of the biggest names in the global publishing industry – launched a month-long, publicity-soaked project that attempted to get Web surfers to create a novel. The idea seemed destined to belong in the Web 2.0 hall of fame (or shame), as the most audacious (or most arrogant) use of crowdsourcing ever.

And eighteen months ago, the L.A. Times started a Wiki to open up its editorial page content to user-editing. (Wiki software allows a lot of people to edit the same document simultaneously, as with Wikipedia’s encyclopedia entries). In January, Amazon (Charts) launched its “Amapedia” in a bid to create product pages that could one day replace, or at least enhance, Amazon’s product descriptions. Penguin opened up its Wiki novel at amillionpenguins.com in February.”

Conference : The 10th Annual Knowledge Management Conference

I came across another conference being held in Washington DC next month. Titled “Transforming Government Operations with a Decade of KM”. This conference is being help on the 28th and 29th of April at the Ronald Reagan Building.

About the Conference :

At a time when the U.S. Government is poised for a change in leadership and directions that accompany a new Administration, many key technology and management strategies also are transforming the way public sector professionals gather, share and glean knowledge from the explosion of information available to agency professionals.

The 10th Annual Knowledge Management Conference will explore how government departments are working collectively to simplify access to public information, ensure the accuracy and privacy of the information they share, and analyze large data repositories to support actionable decision-making.

Looking ahead to tomorrow’s KM implementations, key program topics include:

• Trends in collaboration technology
• Supporting business intelligence techniques through knowledge exploration
• How KM will support the demand for increased government accountability and transparency
• Web 2.0 technologies – wikis, blogs, social networking – and their impact on public sector business operations
• Enterprise search technologies and applications
• Using KM programs to improve citizen services
• Managing knowledge in the Cloud and the key considerations

Register Now for the 10th Annual Knowledge Management Conference.

How does the MS Wiki stack up against the competition?

Right, I’ve already put up two prior posts on the wiki functionality that’s available on MOSS 2007 ( Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 ).

Now while it’s a great thing that Microsoft have finally awoken to the wonder that is the wiki, an in-depth look at the functionality leaves one with the feeling that this could have been done a lot better. While it is true that MS Wiki does have a few of the basic features that we’ve come to expect of any wiki, the features it doesn’t have really makes you wonder if this isn’t a 1.0 version that’s been launched.

Being a fan of mediawiki I’ve come to expect that all other wiki’s display the same high standards . However,  basic things like a categories function seem to be missing from the MS Wiki package. Which means that grouping the “articles” you create becomes a logistics nightmare. Some of the features that they have managed to put in are the web based UI , an interlinking feature and of course version control.

The biggest plus point ( from a corporate perspective ) is the ability to control access to various pages though all said and done i do think this wiki functionality needs a lot of work before it can be compared to standalone wiki products.

I truly hope they plan to move to a “2.0″ version quickly, and with a new version of the application coming out soon i’m keeping my fingers crossed.