Several years ago, I had become introduced to David Snowden's 3 rules of Knowledge Management. I thought for sure that I had posted something on the subject, but all I could find was a brief note about how Snowden seems to always be ahead of the pack where KM is concerned.
At the time, I had read some of Snowden's work (some of it admittedly well over my head), but the 3 rules were easy to grasp and seemed instinctively true. For instance, "we always know more than we can say, and we will always say more than we can write down." It's a very basic truism - previously unstated - which as a defined heuristic provides some insight into Knowledge Management.
All this because my Google Alerts indicated that Claire at Fletchspace had blogged that David Snowden had updated his original 3 rules to 7 principles of KM. I had hoped to see where I noted the 3 and any thoughts I may have had at the time, and then see how things had evolved. Not to be found...but the update is available at this link at Cognitive Edge, and includes the direct straight-forward principle, with a description.
But anyone dealing with Knowledge Management and knowledgeworkers should be familiar with these principles and should bookmark them and refer to them often.
I had the pleasure to run into water&stone a vendor that focuses on web applications and also on installing and customizing Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) for clients. A few weeks back, Cody Burke of Basex, suggested - in their TechWatch newsletter - this very approach of using an Open Source CMS with a vendor capable of customizing it to a company's requirements.
The purpose of the report was to look at 19 of the most well known of the Open Source Content Management Systems. They attempted to assess these CMSs on the basis of Rate of Adoption and Brand Strength. As they disclose in the report, metrics
in the industry are lacking – so the report is very open in its approach, results and any extenuating circumstances, with an end result of attempting to determine the trends and patterns in this marketplace.
Overall, it is a very satisfying report...open in its methodology and replete with necessary footnotes.
The goal of the report as described early on is, "to present a variety of metrics in one easy to
access document and thereby help inform our readers about what is happening in
this dynamic market."
As a part of the study, they included traditional Open Source web content management (WCM)
systems, wikis, and blog-style approaches to publication. The report comments on the blurring of lines between these
three types of applications, so they sought to be inclusive. Hosted and commercial solutions are not included (Ektron, Red Dot, as well as Blogger are among those not included).
With no standard metric in the marketplace, the report's author began by brainstorming methods of tracking popularity and adoption, and all cards are on the table on how they did this.
The report segments each area of Rate of Adoption and Brand Strength, looking for Leaders, Movers and Laggards, this is similar to Aberdeen Group research projects that groups their studies into Best-in-Class, Industry Average Middle, and Laggards, they are both easy ways to look at and evaluate the results.
The report admits that there were challenges, such as b2evolution (blogging
software that I’m familiar with) which badges many of the pages created by
users with their name (effectively skewing results), and MediaWiki, and Open Source Wiki – which is on millions of pages due to its
use as the engine for Wikipedia.
Adoption figures looked at Downloads, Installations and Third Party
Support…and they list the problematic aspects of each category. But where
available (not all applications track this), the total downloads and average weekly download rates were
reported. It was not possible to even try to track live installations. For third party support they looked at Developers using the application and
Publishers (books written).
Brand strength looked at things such as Search engine
visibility, Popularity Metrics, looking for evidence of mind share and evidence of
reputation.
For search engine visibility, they actually include the search
terms used and rated/ranked accordingly, giving a) clues to their methodology, and
b) taking into account a variance in response.
Google Search and Alexa Rankings were employed for Brand
Strength metrics, and the Alexa rankings were done for both February and July
of this year (they checked twice for demo downloads as well to track trends and totals).
Google Trends was also used in the method.
They even used blog mentions to help provide a sense of goodwill, since bloggers do not have to mention these solutions, so they checked Technorati, BlogPulse (from
Neilsen) and IceRocket as well as Google’s new Blog Search. They even pulled out the social networks, tracking fan activity by looking at Facebook, MySpace
and Google Groups looking for collections of like minded individuals on each.
As a part of the results section (that includes the Leaders, Movers and Laggards), they named the 3 top solutions. I won't get into details, but WordPress and Joomla! far exceed the others in the two categories combined....but the report also lists projects they feel may be at risk due to
declining statistics in the areas that they were looking at, and those Open Source solutions whose window of opportunity may also be closing...Oh yeah, and the systems on the rise and worth watching.
The report was done by Ric Shreves, one of the founding partners
of waters&stone. He writes and speaks on Content Management systems and web
applications and has worked with Open Source CMSs since 1999.
I've been thinking a bit about Content Management recently since receiving the Basex newsletter that discussed the benefits of an Open Source Content Management System (CMS) versus a Commercial CMS (of course I blogged my two cents worth).
As I started to get back into things, I noticed that the majority of hits to this site are those coming to check out the CMS Reviews I did on Reddot and Ektron (I reviewed 5 or 6 CMS systems, but these 2 get all the hits), and they were not all that favorable. The posts on my reviews are now three years old, and apparently are still pretty high up on the search results, which leads me to believe that perhaps I should be reviewing and blogging about various CMS systems, but I hate that idea when I think about the different requirements that users have.
The primary force preventing me from writing about CMS systems is that there are already some great resources out there for finding this type of information. CMS Matrix is a good for getting started and finding out key feature availability for each of about 1200 CMSs. From there, CMS Watch kind of owns the review market. But perhaps there's a middle ground.
All of this is leading to the fact that there is a new industry report out that I need to read...a 2008 Market Survey on Open Source CMSs....at 50+ pages, it looks like a properly done research project.
The folks at Eat Media have put together as a part of their blog, the Top 10 Half-Assed Content Marketing Solutions. Actually, it's an old posting from earlier this year, but I'm back thinking about Content Management again, and it caught my attention.
There's not really much preamble to the posting, just the list of 10 bad ideas with some details and an example. The list includes things such as having multiple people responsible for content without management, creating a content strategy without seeing what the competition is doing, and shooting at too wide an audience in one message.
Great list....good advice. Many I have violated such as not blogging often enough and the too broad an audience suggestion. Good things to keep in mind.
The Eat Media folks are very creative, I've mentioned them and their advice here before, and they are also insouciant in their approach, so I'm sure they will not mind me poking a little bit of fun at them....a top ten list?...I think #11 of poor content management and content marketing strategies is resorting to top 10 lists, no matter how good it is.
Hey, everyone has done it...I have definitely done it before. But I think this eleventh lesson learned is to keep lists punchy - and always less than 10 items...maybe prime numbers only.
Groucho Marx (American comedian) was often quoted as saying something like, "I won't belong to any organization that would have me as a member."
Pumacy Technologies AG, a German-based company released this past week the results of an exploratory study that they did of Knowledge Management blogs, and named 50 blogs that are a part of their study.
In a roundabout way, Google Alerts notified me that Mary Abraham's blog, Above and Beyond Knowledge had linked to Jack Vinson's Knowledge Jolt announcing the study. So I eventually get around to the study and YKM (this blog) is listed on it. This is surely the sign of the KM apocalypse.
Of course, I appreciate the attention to the blog...why not....most posts are breadcrumbs for my own future re-use, but what was the selection process?
In fairness, Pumacy is a Knowledge Management vendor. They appear to just be supporting the fact that the KM space is thriving and full of active participants writing about various aspects of KM....which is done here...and Pumacy did locate some prolific bloggers including the 2 mentioned above...but based upon the amount of postings, amount of comments and Google ranking, it just strikes me as a lack of good research (time and/or effort) on Pumacy's part add this blog to the list, instead of going out and finding the really active KM blogs and list them as a part of their study.
Since they studied and printed it once, hopefully Pumacy will continue their study and bring to light some great blogs.
