Hullistic

In reading Doing Oral History for my semester master’s project I came across a discussion on pages 42 – 45 of corporate oral histories.

Some examples are given and an executive is noted to have become concerned that “the corporation was losing  the knowledge of its ‘epochal events’ because employees and managers with first hand knowledge of those events were dying…” This executive commissioned an oral history archival collection and “Management used the oral histories to develop case studies on decision-making process and for workshops to train potential corporate executives.”

When I decided to take on the oral history project for The Tulsa Historical Society I really had not considered it as relevant to knowledge management, but apparently it is. Upon reflections this makes sense. Oral historians recognize the value of people and their experiences and unique points of view. Then they attempt to capture and share memories and knowledge. 

This looks like pretty straight forward knowledge management though I take KM to generally be more focused on specifics than on general memories.

In any case, for those pursuing KM experience, look for an oral history project and volunteer!

The required text for one of my Fall 2009 Master’s courses is Looking for Information by Donald O. Case. I am only 4 chapters into this book and it’s already the best I’ve read in 27 credit hours. Possibly my previous courses prepared me to find so much value in this text, I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that Case does an excellent job of giving the reader the lay of the land with respect to information studies.

Some may debate the value of Case’s work to Knowledge Management but I consider it immensely relevant and important. Of course I am already sold on KM belonging quite rightly under the rubric of information studies but that is not necessarily a requirement to see how the book can be useful for knowledge managers. Any organization that relies on information and knowledge must build it’s culture and systems with as full and understanding as possible of how staff behaves vis-a-vis that information & knowledge.

Said a different way, if you want your people to be engaged, you have to learn about and care about them and their approach to accessing and using information & knowledge. This book is an excellent starting point to thinking about that very issue.

This semester I am earning graduate credit for a directed project to develop an oral history program for the Tulsa Historical Society. There are several goals for this project but the scope for the semester is to develop a program that is properly documented, supported by appropriate technology, funded, valued within the community, and sustainable over time. Pretty ambitious but if it’s worth doing why not go big?

I hope to learn learn several things from this experience, among them (and this list is by no means exhaustive): 

1. The value to the community of doing oral histories
2. How to do oral histories
3. How best to digitize audio from reel-to-reel and cassette
4. How to find and write grants

I learned today that there was an attempt in the 1970’s to do an oral history project and that there are c lose to 150 reel tapes and cassettes along with a typewritten indexing structure all sitting in boxes in a work area for me at the Society. My first task is to inventory those items and put out a request for proposal to digitize the audio. A corallary task is to digitize teh indexing structure. There is a challenge because I can’t take the items out of the building and so must work during Society hours of 10-4 Monday through Saturday. This means I must work on a Saturday because I do have a full time job

My second task is to thoroughly research grant opportunities that might support this project and to allow those opportunities to help steer my work. At some point we will need funding and this seems like the best way to get started. 

As I perfrom these tasks I am concurrently reading Doing Oral History by Ritchie and Tulsa: Biography of an American City by Goble. I’m sure more readings will come and I certainly welcome suggestions.

I will post about this experience each week during the semester under the “Oral Histories” tag and the “Historical Society Project” category. I hope you will follow and comment.

“The growth areas are library management, taxonomy building, and deep understanding of business processes…”  This according to Bryant Duhon in the latest issue of Infonomics. 

It is good to see these areas in demand not just because they are the areas in which I work but because they are truly valuable. Every organization has a collection of information needing managed (a library). The information should be meaningfully organized (taxonomy building), and actually used efficiently (via business processes). 

Full disclosure demands recognizing that I am possibly expanding the context of Bryant’s quote beyond the boundary he intended, but my goal is not support any claim, just to think about the application of these growth areas, particularly librarianship and taxonomy building, to the enterprise in general. 

It might seem strange to think of enterprise content as a library needing taxonomy. Even the term ‘library’ might seem archaic and nondescript for the enterprise. In fact the SLA is going through a rebranding effort because many believe that the ‘L’ no longer fits. 

Whether a collection is called a library or information workers titled librarians ultimately makes no difference. The important thing is to realize that libraries have been built for people. Interestingly, even in 2009, many business processes are carried out by people. And classification and categorization seem to be innate in the brains of people.

 Good librarians organize and manage information with the ultimate goal of delivering to people so they can use it to learn and achieve goals. Indeed librarians were doing this long before electronics of any kind existed, let alone computer technologies. 

Is thinking of the enterprise content collection as a library for people to use the real growth area embedded in Bryant’s quote?

In justifying to people their need to convert paper to digital many point to a study allegedly done by Coopers & Lybrand containing statistical data about the cost of finding, handling, and losing paper documents. I use the term ‘allegedly’ because after searching all over online, in the public library and the university library…I can’t find this study or any reference to it. (A Google search on “Coopers & Lybrand Document Management” yields plenty of results…I looked through the first hundred. Neither library returned a single relevant hit. The best I found was a website that claimed the study was done in 1998). 

The companies that make reference to this study, if they provide any citation at all, keep it vague saying things like “according to a recent study.” Even AIIM articles that reference the study fail to provide enough in the citation to locate the source material.

 When the supposed results of a study are pitched at you, ask to see the source material and judge for yourself it’s efficacy in general and it’s relevance to your situation in particular. Who funded this study? What was the research methodology? What were the ultimate findings? Do the findings reasonably represent my situation? 

The point here is not whether it is a good idea to go digital. This is about whether you are content to do business with lazy, dishonest vendors who cannot back up their claims. 

By the way…if there really is a Coopers & Lybrand study, please point me to it.

The 2009 Knowledge & Project Management Symposium starts Wednesday in Tulsa at the OU-Tulsa learning center on the Schusterman Campus. Besides being good a local networking opportunity, the symposium is informative and PMP certified professionals can earn 12 PDU’s.

I’ll be blogging and tweeting during the event but it won’t replace your attending. Take a look at the program and register now at http://www.kpmsymposium.org

Most sales people are constantly competing for attention. They use all kinds of techniques and display their marketing plumage to get other people to give up their most important and completely non-renewable resource…time.

Personally, I think salespeople and marketers should stop worrying about the plumage. The contrived messages like “value propositions,” and marketing collateral. They should quit trying so hard to get attention and instead sit down, shut up and pay attention . Forget about elevator pitches and ‘prospecting’ systems. It’s about other people so go where they are and ask them to tell you about themselves. If you’re not sincere you will of course be switched off because people are smart and they’ll see right through you.

So if you feel like you are constantly competing for attention, get out of sales because you clearly don’t get it. Worse, you are maintaining the “self-serving salesperson” stereotype. Sales is hard enough without those of us who really want to listen, understand and help having to overcome your selfish reputation

This quote from Clive Thomson’s article should pique your interest:

“…when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion.”

But even more interesting to us information professionals is the embeded assertion in the final paragraph that Wikipedia is a good tool for combating this problem. Many of my fellow students (and some professors) seem to believe just the opposite.

Over the winter break from graduate school I got my digital life in order. One of the difficulties of my existence is that I find fascination and interest in so much. Unfortunately, it is just not possible to keep up with *every* category of human knowledge. So I decided to apply some principles from my grad school courses to get a handle on what kind and how much information I needed. I broke the problem down into goals:

1. Organize my web bookmarks in a way that makes the existing resources useful and allows new resources to be added without constantly adding categories.

2. Track feeds in what I choose at present as the most important areas of interest and need.

3. Make my resources mobile to maximize productivity.

4. Make sure I have a reliable policy for backup and redundancy of digital files.

With these 4 items in mind, I set out to determine those “most important areas of interest and need.” To do this I looked at my bookshelf, my current list of feeds and bookmarks, my course notes, my D2L posts, my personal journal, and this blog. From these I created a simple list of terms in MS-Excel. Next, I signed up at MndMeister and created a mindmap using these terms…it was a mess. But over the course of several days I was able to visualize connections between interests. When I found areas that had no connections, I registered them less important and those with the most connections most important. I ended up with 8 Primary branches and relevent terms under each and several connections between branches. The end result of these processes is a personal interest index consisting of 116 terms.

Next, I organized the “My Documents” folder, my Bookmarks, my blog Feed Reader and my MS-Outlook email folder list using the primary and secondary branches of my mind map, they all match. I then reworked my projects in Nozbe adding tags that are all in the list of 116 terms. I can then click on a term like “knowledge management” and see only projects that are relevant to that area of interest. Then, I added my bookmarks to Delicious  and tagged them according to my 116 terms.

With this process, I solved #1 and #2 above and more importantly, provided myself with more focus as to where and how to use my time.

As to #4, I have always been diligent about backup and redundancy locally (i.e. at home) but I really wanted an online backup solution. After some research I found SugarSync that not only provides the online backup solution, but also provides the sync solution I wanted in #3. I am testing it now and will provide my review in about a month, but so far, it looks good.

So for 2009, I have control of my digital life, I have access to my information anywhere, anytime (and I can and sometimes do choose to ignore it), and I am in control of how best to use my time. It feels good. My tools may not be best for you, but I highly recommend the process of creating your personal interest index. That alone was worth the effort.

I have lived in Oklahoma for 3 years this month and wonders here never cease. Oklahoma is the only one of the 50 united states to officially be recognized as a state of creativity and will host the 2010 Creativity World Forum. Oklahoma Creativity’s mission statement reads:

 To establish Oklahoma as a world-renowned center of creativity and innovation in commerce, culture, and education.

Even I would never have guessed that such a mission existed and was taken seriously. I plan to attend and since I found this through one of the KM blogs I follow I suspect that some KM movers & shakers will be there too. I can hardly wait.

I will be on hiatus for the next several weeks so posts will be infrequent until January. Happy Holidays.