Adventures in home working

Steve over on the Reflexions blog try’s to answer the question

Does Corporate Failure = PKM? posed by Nick Milton and I must admit I find myself agreeing with Steve, who has a few points of agreement with Nick.  That is up until the point where Nick is quoted as saying:

If the company is doing Knowledge Management properly, and making communal knowledge transparently available at the point of need, then you would not need PKM.

and Steve responds:

Here’s where I think Nick is spot on

At this point we diverge and here’s why:

1. The personal knowledge that I need to manage is not and never will be the same as any pool of knowledge held by my company, although there will be overlaps and gaps in both
2. My personal knowledge spans several different companies, and with 60%+ of the content of my knowledge repository being publicly available information, I don’t want it locked up in some company specific silo
3. In the last 10 years of working for my current company if I’d put my trust in the companies well funded knowledge management infrastructure, it would now be fragmented across dozens of different systems. Some of these different generations of the enterprise system and some functional or project specific repositories that all existed with sound justification
4. A significant proportion of my personal knowledge management system is meaningful only to me based on a context that only I understand, with a subtlety that I’ve never seen in the meta-data support of any enterprise KM system
5. Locating the specific “thing I want” in my personal system relies on many clues that don’t exist in enterprise systems and a narrow search scope “just the stuff I’ve tagged, linked, saved or created or modified”.  I don’t see an easy way to create this search scope in another way
6. I’ve been an avid contributor to enterprise KM at the same time as I’ve built my personal knowledge, but I’ve contributed a small subset to the enterprise, because much of my personal stuff would be clutter to the enterprise, lacking the connections and context that make it knowledge to me
7. I’d never consider my personal knowledge as a substitute for enterprise PKM or Google, but I find many people who use google or enterprise search confuse being able to find “something” on any topic, with being able to find the “specific assets” I want in the way that I do in my PKM system
8. One final point is that some of my best work and best external knowledge has been dropped from issued versions of work at the enterprise level, because it didn’t survive a scope cut or a change in customer requirements or didn’t convince some approver.  I still have that stuff. Unissued stuff still has huge value to me, but would quite rightly confuse the enterprise in a big way

In summary I’m all for enterprise KM, but PKM is a complement to it.  A good KM strategy should see itself in this capacity too.  Take a look at the “my life bits” research to see the direction that PKM is going, taken to this extreme I don’t see anyone suggesting that all “my life bits” belong in the enterprise KM system.  Rather it see’s PKM as an extension of the brain.

PKM is one of the most neglected areas within the enterprise, no surprise that there’s such a rich eco system of tools being created directly targeted at the individual, with many now starting to integrate with the individuals network of contacts, to create a personal knowledge network.

Graham writes an interesting post where he compares the impact of slow login and slow applications.  It’s a good analysis and leads Graham to conclude that forced to choose he would go for slow login, because it’s predictable and infrequent and so can be proactively managed (ie do something else why you wait.

I’ve been mulling over the same issue – but without the nice graphics -when it comes to desktop and application virtualization, and I’m very keen to dig a bit deeper into the user experience impact of a collection of new technologies:

1. Virtualised applications add a small performance overhead
2. Streaming virtualised applications adds a significant overhead to launch time, especially in a VDI environment where caching is of limited value (although pre-caching in the image would be better)
3. Virtualization of the applications configuration and the users personalised settings adds a further overhead to launch times
4. WAN access to data adds a further overhead to application launch times
5. We’ve yet to quantify for many niche applications whether non-persistent VDI images (where only the roaming profile is persisted at logoff) are going to be slower, maybe because they cache for performance in the local profile and assume that the users local profile is going to be there tomorrow 99% of the time
6. Sharing server resources across many users, is likely to work out great on average, but I’m not 100% sure that it will be faster for peak CPU periods which often occur at application start-up
7. Most VDI deployments encourage users to logoff frequently and that’s likely to increase as the logon/logoff cycle is required in order to update the master image, not only does this affect a few of the points above, but it also makes detailed user state preservation very important – ie saving which applications, files, scroll locations, browser tabs, window positions etc the user has open and restoring them when the user logs back in. 
8. I dread to think how regular logoffs would impact my productivity, right now I logoff once ever couple of weeks, and it takes me at least 20 minutes to close everything down and open everything up again, if I had to do this every day – the least of my worries would be the time it takes for the OS to boot.

So one things for sure, in the new word of desktop, end user experience performance monitoring is going to be pretty important.

Every year or so I hear Microsoft talking about Internet Search and implying that Google Search is nothing compared to what Microsoft has in store for us.  Unfortunately what seems to be delivered is useful, but incremental.

I heard about Wolfram Alpha today, and it the first time for years that I’ve seen a real revolution in Internet Search, the kind of revolution that depends on the search engine really understanding the information it’s searching and the content of the search query.  It’s not the full vision of the semantic web, but it’s the best demonstration I’ve seen that illustrates the promise of it.

It’s developed by Stephen Wolfram and team, a genius, who’s delivered a series of breakthrough products and insights over the years.

This is going to be ace on the Blackberry!  True information at your fingertips   Check out this article

This short video:

This longer video

Excellent!!!

I’m using Postie to allow me to send an email to my wordpress blog, it works great, supports images as attachments, some formatting and categories,tags and more, it also has better security than the built in wp email support. What it doesn’t do is trigger twitter tools, so currently no tweets to say I’ve blogged from my Blackberry.

I gave my old bike to my Mum a few weeks ago as an excuse to by another, as if even more excuse was needed though I had the opportunity to take advantage of the governments cycle to work scheme. Vince seemed to have a few issues getting a non Halfords bike so I took the lazy route and went for a Carrera Subway 8 and I’ve been very happy so far.

What I added:

A rack and rack bag, which I’ve padlocked to the rack so I don’t have the hassle of having to carry it around

A mirror, I don’t know how to ride without one now, I’ve had one for 20 years

Handlebar extenders, never had these before but they really vary the riding position, great

Jennie gave me her handlebar bag, this has been very useful

The bike:

The disk brakes are a revelation,

The 8 speed hub gears cope just fine with all the hills around here, changing is effortless and you can change gear while stationary

Overall the bike seems great, a bit heavy but that’s the price I’m paying for tough and comfy

This blog post is also an excuse to try out posting via email using the WordPress Postie Plugin.