e-Portfolio: The new business proposition

Visitor from US House of Representative

Just when I was about to go to bed, I saw the stats of my blogs and saw a visitor from "US House of Representatives". Don't know what it means and what implications it may have... but I've got some attention. Probably.
 

National Knowledge Commission, India

Quoted directly from the press-release (grammar may have been modified).

Prime Minister of India, Mr Manmohan Singh, has constituted the National Knowledge Commission. Shri Sam Pitroda will be Chairperson and Dr P.M. Bhargava will be Vice-Chairperson. The Members of the Commission will be Shri Nandan Nilekani, Dr. Deepak Nayyar, Shri Ashok Ganguly, Dr. Andre Beteille, Dr. Jayati Ghosh and Dr. Pratap Bhanu Mehta. (The members are eminent persons from industry or otherwise.)

The Commission will advise the Prime Minister on matters relating to institutions of knowledge production, knowledge use and knowledge dissemination. The mandate of the Commission is to sharpen India's "knowledge edge".

The Commission will advise the Prime Minister on how India can promote excellence in the education system to meet the knowledge challenges of the 21st Century; promote knowledge creation in S&T laboratories; improve the management of institutions generating Intellectual Property; improve protection of IPRs and promote knowledge applications in agriculture and industry. It will suggest ways in which the Government's knowledge capabilities can be made more effective, making the Government more transparent and accountable as a service provider to the citizen. It will also explore ways in which knowledge can be made more widely accessible in the country for maximum public benefit.

The National Knowledge Commission will be assisted by a Technical Support Group to be staffed by young recruits, hired on contract from premier educational institutions in the country. The Planning Commission will provide logistic support to the National Knowledge Commission. The National Knowledge Commission is expected to interact with different Ministries that handle knowledge areas and encourage Ministries to generate their own plans for upgrading institutional capacity.

The Commission will be guided in its work by a National Steering Group chaired by the Prime Minister and including the Ministers of Human Resource Development, Agriculture, Commerce and Industry, Communication and Information Technology, Dy. Chairman, Planning Commission and Minister of State, Science and Technology.

The Commission will identify its action programme by 2nd October, 2005 and complete its work by 2nd October, 2008.

Comment on the last paragraph -- a very daunting task!

Knowledge Management A-Z: Workshop

On the KM group, Kate posts about the 2nd KM-AZ workshop on 23rd June, 2005 in Brisbane.

The workshop shall focus on practical HOWTOs for top ten tools and techniques for KM. The workshop is accompanied, he says, with a 120-page guide to on-job KM application and implementation of each technique.

Now, that's something pretty interesting and nice to have. If anybody's going to the workshop, please give me a copy of the HOWTOs.. ;-)

The contact details are:

Dr Kate Andrews
Partner, Intellectual Capital
BDO Kendalls
GPO Box 457
Brisbane  4001
Queensland, AUSTRALIA
 
Telephone:  61 7 3237 5839
Mobile:     0418 153 917
Fax:        61 7 3221 9227
E-mail:     kandrews@bdokendalls.com.au
Website:    www.bdokendalls.com.au

KM Awareness - How to Improve?

How to improve KM¹ awareness in an organization is one the first challenges while implementing any KM solution or creating the so called KM-Culture.

Well, the best way, as Kondal says², is to show how KM will benefit the participants - the individuals and the organization as a whole. Here are some ways suggested by him on the basis of his research at some global corporations in Automotive, IT services and telecom industries.

• Get senior management support and commit to show how the KM will benefit the participants. If possible, make the business leader present the importance of KM to the organization.
• Start KM with a small group that is positive towards knowledge sharing. How to find them - generally, these people would be high performers.
• Select the pilot group where the direct impact of the KM initiative can be seen. This acts as the testimonial and Proof of Concept (PoC) of the advantages of the KM - you can show the benefits and power of KM to whole of the organization.
• Talk to the HR and try to introduce K-sharing aptitude in perfomance appraisals. This sends a message to the people that the organization valus K-sharing in the long term and it's not momentary.
• Recognize and award (monetarily or otherwise) the people who are champions in K-sharing. Kondal, during his research, finds that most people share knowledge for pride and personal satisfaction rather than monetary benefits. Money is not the key. Keys are recognition and praise.
• The next level is to look at the core processes and introduce K-creation (like best practices etc) and reuse activities in them.

The above listed measures are excerpts from a message by Kondal to the KM group.
¹KM: Knowledge Management.
²Modified the grammar to suit the context.

KM Features: 4 - K Repository Access

In this article, we will look at the access rights to the documents in K-Repository, the common pool.

As I mentioned earlier, it is very crutial to have restrictions to critical documents otherwise the document management system will be of no use. An organization may not want to share some documents with an individual or a group or may like to provide access to only selected people.

The K-Manager is reponsible for setting up proper permissions. Another important point to note is that there may not be one K-Manager but a group of managers who may be assigned for specific groups or otherwise.

Here are screenshots from DocMan^©:

Document without permissions

Right now I'm at home and don't have administrative priviledges to TeN^™ Trans-e. I'll give provide some illustrations on how the permissions may be set for one or more groups, one or more individuals or a combination of theirs with minimal clicks, probably.

KM Features: 3 - K Repository Population

Here, we will see how we populate the K Repository by submitting various kinds of documents. We will also see that uploading a document is just one form of putting the information into the system. There can be more more methods.

In this we will concentrate only on various modes of submission. The submission does not necessarily mean that the information / knowledge / content will be available immediately. Automation here may lead to duplicacy or bogus files make K Repository a junk.

Any submitted resource must be first reviewed by the K Manager (can compare with librarian-role) and then put up in correct category with permissions and access rights as required.

Let's look at the submission part:

Single file and zip-files are normal modes of uploading content and is available everywhere. But DocMan^© allows you to point to a URL and tell the system whether it should add a reference to the link or download the target URL and put it in the repository.

This is something very useful feature. Suppose you are browsing some website and you want it to make the contents of the website available for everybody who's using the repository, just ask the DocMan^© to retrieve the target URL. One thing to keep in mind is that the K-Manager should respect copyright issues associated with the content. Not everybody may like their website to be cached locally.

But otherwise, instead of you downloading any PDF or HTML or any document for that matter, just tell DocMan^©

KM Features: 2 - K Repository

In my previous article in the series, I discussed about file browser. This article will cover the organizational view of DMS.

In the last article, we saw how we can create an online repository of resources that can be accessed by individuals and groups anywhere, anytime. Of course, the access constraints are built in.

Here we see how documents can be put up at a common place and group them according to category rather than common interest groups. I will cover this topic in conjunction with DocMan^© (or K Repository) in TeN^™ Trans-e.

Here are a couple of screenshots to start with.

Now.. some critical features that should always be there:

• Categorically Listing of Documents
• Searching - full text, keyword based, category limited, across categories etc
• History of recently seen documents for faster access to the ongoing topics of study
• Bookmarks for quick access to favourites
• News from across the system to know what going on lately

We will revisit the K Repository dicussing how to put up the documents in this common place.

KM Features: 1 - File Explorer

File explorer, or WebSpace^© as it is called in TeN^™ Trans-e, is a must in any collaboration softawre and so also in KM software.

WebSpace is the area where people or groups can dump their files for use by others or at other locations.

What all features should a WebSpace have? Look at the screenshots below before the words:

Not just being a simple upload / download system, the file explorer should be supported by advanced tools like cut, copy, paste. This reduces the efforts of downloading and reuploading the files. A side-effect is reduction in bandwidth usage.

Strict permissions on the file at individual and group level is required to ensure the integrity of the data.

Is there anything that I may be missing? Do comment about it and I'd ensure that it is incorporated in the best possible way.

Knowledge Management

Have I ever mentioned about this phrase before? The blogger search fails on any keyword on my blogs... donno why! May be still not indexed.

You must have heard about this phrase every now and then. But what does it take to build a Knowledge Management System? What should be the essential features of the application? It cannot be a mere Knowledge-Base where you search for items.

Starting today, I will write about one feature daily that I consider are a must in any KM system. Needless to say, TeN™ Trans-e has most of them. However, not all of the ones that I write about, are present. Having said that, most of them are under development - to be incorporated in the next version of the product.

I start with segregating various features into groups. As I said, it cannot be just a searchable knowledge base with loads of content.

In my opinion, the features can be classified into following categories:

• Document Management System (DMS)
• Content Management and Publishing Tools (CMS)
• Collaboration and Communication Tools (Comm-Tools)
• Business Applications (Biz-Apps)
• (Scope to integrate) 3^rd-party Applications

I will start with a feature at a time, explain about it and classify it under one of the above categories.