Re: When Information is Not the Answer

Andrew McAfee has another really nice post: 'When Information is NOT the Answer'. I advise you to go and read it, definitely if you are in IT. And for Knowledge and Information Management experts this post summarizes what you've been trying to tell IT all along.

McAfee basically shows that not all information can be processed using IT systems. Even though many think so and heavily depend on these systems for decision making. And he gives an example of a company, Zara, that acknowledges this and works with it in practice.

In a comment on his post I pointed to two books that underline the point McAfee's making. One is 'Blink' by Gladwell. (And I'll write a review of this book soon.) And the other is 'The Social Life of Information' by Seely Brown & Duguid. (The last book is one of my all time favorites.) If you haven't read them, please do so. It's very worth your time.

In 'The social life' they have that nice example of a control tower. The tower is fused with IT. But when they really tried to understand the PEOPLE that work in the tower and how they make decisions, they arrived at interesting results. These people used sticky notes, easily processed loads of data, make decisions based on intuition and experience - not on what's on the screen, etc.

And 'Blink' is loaded with examples of 'split-second decisions'. He shows that these decision can be good when they're (implicitly) based on processing lots of information in the past and becoming expert at something. Gladwell shows that some can make good decisions even though all the (objective/general) information in the world seems to be against them.

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Tags van Technorati: knowledge management,information architecture,information overload,information

Too Many Ideas?

Can you have too many ideas? I've been musing about this question lately. And can the amount of ideas you have be stalled by the context you work in? With 'context' I mean: your colleagues, your work tools, the culture of the company, etc.

I'm curious what your answer would be to these questions. I'll share my experience after you share yours!

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A Yammer Widget? Adopting Internal Microblogging

You may still remember we're experimenting with internal microblogging. We're using Yammer for this goal. And it's still working out nicely.
But I've been thinking how can we encourage further adoption? There are lots of ways as I've written before. But couldn't it be even easier?

I was thinking: Wouldn't it be nice if we had a Yammer widget? (I made a quick mock-up on the right-hand side of this post.) Then we could integrate it in the homepage of our intranet.

What I find is that our Yammer page is too 'far away' for lots of people. They have to be explicitly pointed to Yammer. My question was: how can we point them to it in a much easier way?

The company I work for get millions of hits on intranet homepage, containing corporate news. With the widget on the intranet homepage, eyeballs will be attracted to something that's moving on the page. What's going on there? What is this? Are 'regular' employees posting news in real-time here? They can then click-through and go see for themselves and hopefully dive in.

What do you think: is this a good idea? Do you think this helps drive enterprise microblogging adoption?

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Tags van Technorati: adoption,microblogging,enterprise2.0