Recently, I was engaged in a listserv conversation (remember those?) regarding the balance between standards-based enterprises and the need to engage creative talent who may bristle at standard processes. The conversation moved to the question of new processes and standards that respected the nature of complex organizations (rather than early 20th century bureaucracies), and I offered [...]
Category Archives: Governance
Don’t Connect the Dots, Watch the Noise
Originally appeared in Inside Knowledge Magazine 10 Sep 2008, Vol 12, Issue 1.
On 12 September, 2001, I received an e-mail from the CEO of my company (a federal contracting firm located just outside Washington DC). As F-16s continued their combat air patrols over my neighbourhood, I read, paraphrasing: ‘John, yesterday [9-11] was a failure of knowledge [...]
Also posted in National Security 5 Comments
The United States’ New CIO: Metrics that Matter
President Obama today announced the selection of Mr. Vivek Kundra to be the nation’s Chief Information Officer. Back in January of 2009, I had the honor of touring Vivek Kundra’s operation while he was the Chief Technology Officer for Washington, D.C. Several things struck me about the arrangements – a small cubicle farm in the [...]
Open Government – Issues
The Obama Adminstration is committed to an open and transparent government, leveraging current technology and principles of business and public sector collaboration that are revolutionizing the way we work and live. This generation is writing their own encyclopedia (Wikipedia.org), spreading information virally (digg.com, twitter.com, blogs), and is constantly connected to their friends and colleagues through [...]
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Can You Hear Me – Which Party values Triple Loop Learning?
The exploitation of social media by the Obama campaign has reverberations across generations. Two Republican Congressmen (Pence, Cantor) remarked on the phenomena on the Sunday following the 4 Nov election. Paraphrasing: We must use this media to reach out to young people, get them our message, explain where we want to take this country.
That sounded [...]
Also posted in Election2008 Leave a comment
Will This Product Make the Portal More Functional?
With slight editing, this question was posed to me this morning. The product in question was an RSS service, of questionable value on many levels. For one, employees are not blocked from using their own RSS feeders, so those who are interested in using this capability are already doing so. For another – and more [...]
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Principles
I am getting comfortable with today’s mind-shift from developing a KM strategy to developing a strategy for incorporating and resourcing KM. I will still need principles in this process somewhere. So far, I have four.
I drafted the following four principles a while back, and I think they serve as a touchstone – one of the [...]
Posted in Governance 3 Comments
