How to survive in daily business life?

- So many management concepts!
Smoking or non smoking management concepts? I really like this one !
Remind me an old chart about management concepts life cycle...

- A good manager has surely to be stress tolerant, have to feed his curiosity, ...
In daily life, some nice vizualization tools can help him (look at the demos...)
Ignorance is his basic state. Can Artificial intelligence, this prothesis to natural ignorance help him?
("Before we work on artificial intelligence why don't we do something about natural stupidity?" Steve Polyak)

And so much tasks, contradictory, so many mails, sometimes useful, sometimes just "umbrella" mails ("I copy you, so I am clean"), sometimes just business intelligence information. Microsoft showed that over 70% of information workers spend a fifth of their time or more on e-mail related tasks.
How do people deal with these queues of "things to do", are their trade-off, to decide to do or not, based on their own personal priority system or on organization priority system ?
Recent studies by IDC, the Working Council of CIOs, the Ford Motor Company, and Reuters found that:
* Knowledge workers spend from 15% to 35% of their time searching for information.
* Searchers are successful in finding what they seek 50% of the time or less.
* 40% of corporate users report that they cannot find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets.
* Some studies suggest that 90% of the time that knowledge workers spend in creating new reports is spent recreating information that already exists.
* An IDC report suggests that rework costs an enterprise about $5,000 per person per year for an estimated annual total of $12 million dollars across the U.S. Furthermore, not locating and retrieving information has an opportunity cost of $15 million dollars per year.

People are still interested in "learning" how to deal with email better. Maybe Web2 can offer some solutions - for a recent analysis of the situation, see Michael Sampson's series of posts on the topic that starts here..
...but is there a danger that Web2 opportunities amplify the problem?

Knowledgable ?

- Just found a good new book about KM and performance manager. It examines the partnership between decision-makers and the people who provide them with information to drive better decisions and suggestions for 42 decisions areas, taking into account the need to understand your data, but also plan and monitor performance.

- One way to start KM in an organization is to consider it as a service

- KM often needs technology, what do you do in front of that kind of people (good funny story about relation with technology ! I know so many people like that...)
More seriously, I like Martin Koser blog, with this relevant post on Management tools and Bain article

- The conventional wisdom today is that the flow of knowledge cannot be organized and driven by IT. Is that true?

- Management of K is not enough, you have too to do things !
- ...and always this relation between Innovation and KM techniques

- Librarians are the historically first "knowledge managers" in organizations. Now, all managers are supposed to be ! Are librarians out? Or any manager is the librarian?
- But classification not so easy: look at this good literature synthesis of some connected concepts

- Teaching (I'm a teacher) and KM tools: a relevant list of techniques

- PKM, a new buzzword or individual productivity still a key challenge?
and Davenport's thoughts about it

- Against dominant thoughts, creating knowledge, tagging changes and improves KM...

- I like this idea about KM strategy to capitalize on know-how can be counterproductive, in the case the know-how you store is average, too low level. It can inhibit employee's will to experiment.

- KM, organizational learning gurus still alive, studying how KM can be a link between NGO and companies, in case they want to cooperate.
-...and a good way to use knowledge at the bottom of the pyramid...

- Are incentives on KM good enough to stimulate K improvement?

Is BI so far from KM? Where is the real frontier?
Does BI concerns more "weak noises", unknown things, intelligence of outside and KM more known things, inside existing knowledge?
BI tools can be applied inside, e.g. to discover new concept through BI analysis of internal stream of messages! So, what new on BI?

- Good strategy and BI: there is a clear convergence between strategy and BI
- Data mining is the central tool of any BI mechanism...

Do you love processes?

BPM: Processus, toujours un thème central. Ce séminaire a lieu en Europe pendant tout 2007.

Some very nice useful charts, from Gartner, about best of BPM, and a lot of additional charts.
Among these, this one about BPM and SOA relation, or another one...

but... what about HOP (Human and Organizational Performance)?
Must human problems be treated before technological and organizational problems? Old debate.

Is corporate performance depending from good management of management processes?
Sure it is a key necessary condition, but not sufficient!

Projects and processes are closely related:

- What is a process ? many good definitions, but one way is to see it as a never ending project.
So you can apply some of project methodologies to processes.
Why not, for example, prototype a process as we, in agile companies, prototype projects?

- Alignment of projects with strategies is key. To do that, we have to recognize that 90% of projects are created to optimize way of doing, processes. So, project prioritization needs first processes prioritization!

...so what's new about IT projects ?

New world of IT projects, towards globalized agile companies...
and some still alive good laws about conditions of IT projects success (systems integration, databases, IT governance, cost reduction, and delegating work to IT)