I only see something like this once a year. It's an empty mailbox:

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Cleaning my office is like an archeology dig. Most layers are just garbage, but occasionally there's a gem. For example,

First Wordz is the first product from friend and Emergent Learning Forum booster, Ken Fong's company, T.P. Kidz. Record baby's first words and email them to grandparents for less than $20. Sorry I didn't find this one again until after Christmas.

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Clipping from Econtent magazine, dead-tree version:

Content syndication = distributing information outside of the primary place of creation/publication. "I suspect the next big wave will involve optimizing syndicated content behind corporate fiewalls. Of course, syndicated business news and information services have thrived on corporate portals and intranets for years. But it will be fun to see if RSS feeds take off as a way to distribute synicated content directly to corporate users," writes David Scott.

I certainly agree with this. In-house RSS, yet another component of bottom-up knowledge management.

In my journal, I've scribbled about looking at corporate information through the lense of the Johari window. Business entities need to be explicit about how transparent they want to be. Is it in their interest to expand or contract the Arena? What's it worth to elucidate the Blind Spots? Is our approach to innovation mining opportunity from the Hidden area?

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An Inxight brochure reports this handy metric:

Recent industry studies estimate that an enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers loses a minimum of $6 million annually in time spent just looking for information.

The volume of electronic information is increasing up to 60% annually, making access and use more of a dream than a reality.

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A story retold by Wayne Hodgins:

When Smith-Corona was closing its doors, the chairman pulled the very last typewriter made off the line. He told employees it was probably the best typewriter SCM had ever made. "What we did was to perfect the irrelevant."

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Remarks from a senior-level presentation I was privy to:

Making the most of intellectual assets is at the hunter/gatherer stage. It is innovation in experience that leads to customer value (because labor is being commoditized.) Yet assets are akin to "mushrooms they found in the woods."

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Tim O'Reilly talks of changing the world by spreading the knowledge of users. "Follow the hacker frontier."

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Orchestrating Loosely Coupled Business Processes: The Secrety to Successful Collaboration

by John Hagel III, Scott Durchslag, and John Seely Brown 2002

An awesome article, available on Hagel's website.

• Collaboration can only generate economic value when it is firmly anchored in specfic busines processes that span across enterprises.
  
  
• Loose coupling gives service providers the opportunity to specialize more and more on the activites where they have truly distinctive capabilities.
  
  
• Web services are the technology analog to loosely coupled business processes.
  
  
• This is not a simple transition.... Success requires migrating towards a much more flexible business architecture....

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