HBS Working Knowledge: Using Web Services to Tame Technology
HBS Working Knowledge: Using Web Services to Tame Technology"Web services replace "big bang" approaches with targeted incrementalism. The business proposition with this technology is much more compelling: Invest modest sums of money with relatively short lead-times (often six to twelve months) and generate tangible business benefits, particularly in the form of operating savings. In these challenging economic times, that's a powerful proposition."
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, December 03, 2002
ERCIM: Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs
ERCIM: Extended Faceted Taxonomies for Web Catalogs"A faceted taxonomy is actually a set of taxonomies, called facets, each of which is a set of terms structured by a specialisation/generalisation relation. Using a faceted taxonomy, the indexing of objects is done by associating each object with a compound term, ie with a combination of terms coming from different facets. It was recognised long ago that a faceted taxonomy has several advantages over a single hierarchical taxonomy, including conceptual clarity, compactness and scalability."
taxonomy Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 02, 2002
Search Tools: Faceted Metadata Search and Browse
Search Tools: Faceted Metadata Search and BrowseThis article explains the concept of faceted metadata using examples of popular websites. "Metadata is information about information: more precisely, it's structured information about resources. This can be a single set of hierarchical subject labels, such as a Yahoo or Open Directory Project category. More often, the metadata has several facets: attributes in various orthogonal sets of categories. This is often stored in database record fields and tables, especially for product catalogs."
metadata Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 02, 2002
Fast Company: Innovation Now
Fast Company: Innovation NowGary Hamel: "The problem isn't that companies are wrong to worry about efficiency. The problem is that companies aren't imaginative in the ways that they worry about efficiency. So fine, let's get back to basics. But if you want to outperform your lackluster peers, you're going to have to bring more than basic thinking to the basics. You're going to have to bring radical thinking to the basics."
innovation Add tag Permalink | Monday, December 02, 2002
MIT Tech Review: Immobots Take Control
MIT Tech Review: Immobots Take ControlQuite unlike the metallic contraptions that march stiffly through sci-fi movies or the mindless, stripped-down devices that heft parts on our assembly lines, the new robots have more brain than brawn. Each possesses a detailed picture of its own inner workings
Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 29, 2002
Emerald Fulltext: Does the degree of redundancy in social networks influence the success of business
Emerald Fulltext: Does the degree of redundancy in social networks influence the success of business start-ups?"Entrepreneurs use their social network to start businesses. According to Burt, low redundancy in the social network promotes entrepreneurial success. [However] Using data on 100 entrepreneurs in Norway we find that simple measures such as the number and strength of ties are more important for entrepreneurs than redundancy because many weak and strong ties increase the entrepreneur's access to resources. We find that much redundancy is beneficial. Entrepreneurs get information and support more easily if they have many ties with redundant relations."
You also download the entire collection of " International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour and Research", available as a free download this week only.
Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 29, 2002
IT Web: Knowledge management is key to business
IT Web: Knowledge management is key to business"It would seem to be intuitive that good knowledge management leads naturally to the more effective management of risk. Better knowledge of influencing factors and the actions needed to cope with these can only help reduce the possibility of things going wrong. But as with anything else to do with KM, the challenge is in the detail. This article attempts to identify various types of risk faced by organisation and to demonstrate how KM approaches can be used to manage or mitigate these risks."
knowledge management Add tag Permalink | Thursday, November 28, 2002
Workforce: Chief Learning Officers Link Training and Business Goals
Workforce: Chief Learning Officers Link Training and Business Goals"CLOs say that they identify needs through interviews with managers and executives, with the underlying premise that matching business objectives with desired competencies among employees will lead to greater productivity. It
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, November 28, 2002
NY Times: Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files
NY Times: Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files"Some students may well emerge from educational sessions on copyright laws and electronic etiquette with a higher regard for intellectual property rights. But many of them are honing other skills as well, like how to burrow through network firewalls and spread their downloading activities across multiple computers to avoid detection."
Add tag Permalink | Thursday, November 28, 2002
EContent: It’s All in What You Know: Internet Information and Expert Referral Services
EContent: It's All in What You Know: Internet Information and Expert Referral ServicesExpertise can be acquired through education and experience. It can also be programmed in. The most interesting and dynamic developments in online expert services may be in the area of automated expertise. In increasing numbers, companies are using software "experts" to leverage their proprietary knowledge bases, assisting internal users in navigating through complex but well-defined areas, such as employee benefits information, or, like Jeeves, providing automated tech support and customer service through Web-based "self-help" systems.
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, November 27, 2002
The Chronicle: Web Site Lists Professors Who ‘Indoctrinate’ Students
The Chronicle: Web Site Lists Professors Who 'Indoctrinate' StudentsA new Web site allows students nationwide to anonymously accuse their professors -- who are named -- of political bias. Some of those professors are calling the site "silly" and "cowardly."
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Electric News: E-learning fails to make the grade
Electric News: E-learning fails to make the grade"According to a new report from market research company Screen Digest, previous estimates about the size of the corporate e-learning market were greatly exaggerated. Nevertheless, the USD5 billion-a-year industry will still grow to be massive as Europe's knowledge-based corporations jump in on the trend. "
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, November 27, 2002
Boxes and Arrows: Practical Strategies for Creating a Successful Intranet
Boxes and Arrows: Practical Strategies for Creating a Successful IntranetToo often, an intranet
Add tag Permalink | Wednesday, November 27, 2002
E-learning pilot opportunity
E-learning pilot opportunityEduventures, in partnership with a Fortune 500 firm, is conducting a market trial by piloting an e-learning solution for small businesses. They are actively seeking small business (defined as a firm having between 2 and 199 employees) to take part in this pilot.
The deal:
Participating companies will be granted access for three users from their organization to 20 courses of their choice from a deep-catalog over a 4-month period.
The market trial participation requires no financial commitment and participants will be asked to complete a series of brief evaluations to assess the value of the e-learning solution to their business in order to assist in the market research process.
If you are interested, contact Sean Gallagher at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Vnunet: Sexy e-learning doesn’t work
Vnunet: Sexy e-learning doesn't work"I suppose we're guilty of this ourselves. If a client is hooked on getting e-learning, you can deliver something that looks good but where the learner doesn't learn a lot."
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, November 26, 2002
Working Knowledge: Does Your Product Have Buzz? Tap into an Online Newsgroup
Working Knowledge: Does Your Product Have Buzz? Tap into an Online Newsgroup"Word of mouth can and should be measured just as all of the other key metrics of a company's success are typically measured. Just because it is a difficult phenomenon to get one's hands around doesn't mean that it should be thought of as purely "qualitative." We think that our method for measuring it
Add tag Permalink | Tuesday, November 26, 2002
The Oracle: A coming attraction
The Oracle: A coming attractionThe course runs like a video, with slides and moving images accompanied by narration. The lesson is reminiscent of a program on The History Channel. The page is set up so that a student can pause or rewind the tape. A link allows questions to be sent to a professor via e-mail, and there is even a link to a page to take notes.
Each course, costs $1 million and a year to develop.
Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 25, 2002
Learning Circuits: Smart Machines, Dumb People?
Learning Circuits: Smart Machines, Dumb People?Moving forward, perhaps most knowledge (not just of facts but skills) will live in learning devices. With machines assuming more mental work, humans will store fewer facts
Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 25, 2002
Gerry McGovern: Intranet communication versus traditional communication
Gerry McGovern: Intranet communication versus traditional communicationThe intranet can result in a reduction in traditional forms of communication, such as print and person-to-person communication. To justify the investment in your intranet you can measure how much it costs to carry out a particular activity or process using traditional forms of communication. If the cost of the process is less using the intranet, you are beginning to build a business case.
Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 25, 2002
Strategy+Business: The Art of Best Practice Transfer
Strategy+Business: The Art of Best Practice TransferWorkers resist sharing because they fear that efforts to make their company more efficient will mean fewer jobs, more work, and/or less overtime pay. They have difficulty collaborating to meet the challenge of documenting practices and determining which ones to implement across the company. And they often fight the use of best practices, succumbing to people
Add tag Permalink | Monday, November 25, 2002
Wired: Law Grads Online, Bar None
Wired: Law Grads Online, Bar NoneBoth the American Bar Association and the California Bar Association have refused to accredit the school, charging that law students can't get a proper education online.
Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 22, 2002
David Weinberger: The arrogance of knowledge
David Weinberger: The arrogance of knowledgeJust as we sometimes confuse a business with the spreadsheet that represents it and as we sometimes over-systematize knowledge in order to manage it, the belief that someday we'll create conscious computers seems to me not arrogant but ungrateful.
Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 22, 2002
Sidebars: Primer on Learning Objects
Sidebars: Primer on Learning ObjectsApart from describing what learning objects are, this article also provides a nice set of links to other learning object resources on the web.
Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 22, 2002
ZD Net: Open-source CMS: On the rise
ZD Net: Open-source CMS: On the riseHere's a look at some of the issues enterprises need to evaluate when looking at open-source CMS products, and how four of the main open-source contenders--Zope, Midgard, OpenCms, and Red Hat CCM--stack up.
Add tag Permalink | Friday, November 22, 2002
CMS Watch: Structured Content: What’s in it for writers?
CMS Watch: Structured Content: What's in it for Writers?Problem: Everyone has heard (or experienced) stories of CMS or knowledge management initiatives that did not work because content contributors refused to use the tools deployed or were unwilling or unable to supply content in the format required. The conclusion often reached is that writers cannot give up their WYSIWYG tools and that any attempt to make them do so is doomed to failure.
Solution: If a writer sees that by providing a piece of information in a highly structured and controlled format they can avoid having to search for that information across a whole set of documents whenever the information changes, then they have the motivation, feedback, and context to produce accurate highly structured information.