Archive for the 'Knowledge Management' Category
June 5, 2006
Customizing for New Members
Michelle Frisque is thinking and writing about how to reinvent the American Library Association as part of a pilot course about inventing Library 2.0. Every association should be so lucky as to have members like Michelle, Michael, Jenny and others who are dedicated to their profession and will blog about how the association could best serve them and their peers.
Michelle also mentioned one of my articles in another post, which made my day!
Michelle recently wrote about how the ALA web site could do a better job of serving new members:
ALA is a huge organization. I remember when I first joined I found it very confusing. How do you get involved? What is ALA doing that affects me? What will my membership in ALA do for me? How do I network? None of this is easy to find on the Web site.
Something I got from Michelle’s post is the idea of customizing your association home page for new members. Help them discover the organization by highlighting information, services and opportunities on the home page when that new member is logged in. Change it every week or every day! You can phase out the special content over time or allow the member to turn it off when they no longer need it. It should be fairly evergreen content, which is great because it is relatively easy to manage once it is developed.
A few other ideas: Provide the same content in an RSS feed! Create a serial e-mail autoresponder for new members that gives them a new tip about the association every day for two week after they join! You get the idea.
(A serial e-mail autoresponder is an e-mail announcement list where all the messages are written and queued up so that a new subscriber gets each message in order at a specified interval. These have been around a long time but I’ve never heard of an association using them, oddly enough. Seems like a natural for a lot of association promotions and content.)
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | 2 Comments
May 26, 2006
Someone You Should be Reading: John Robb
John Robb has been blogging for the past couple of years about “the intersection of terrorism, infrastructure and markets.” I’ve been following John’s stuff since he was the CEO at Userland and was leading discussions about knowledge blogging. Many of the trends he discusses about warfare and terrorism have much applicability to self-forming groups and how they may impact associations. Hopefully that won’t involve a rogue committee bombing the electrical lines to your headquarters, however.
I suggest you add his blog, Global Guerrillas, to your subscription list.
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | Comment
May 8, 2006
One CMS to Rule Them All?
A couple of good posts this month on whether a single CMS can be used to manage both your public and intranet web sites. Short answer: usually, no. For more detail follow the links.
I agree with those authors that more often than not, a single CMS will not be appropriate for your public site and your intranet site. The requirements for each are going to be pretty different once you get past basic authoring and content management features. Even for associations, whose public web sites could be considered more intranet-like than the usual corporate web site, are going to be hard pressed to find a single tool that effectively supports both.
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | 2 Comments
March 27, 2006
RSS for MS CRM
Microsoft just released some sample code with which to create RSS feeds from Microsoft CRM. I think this is a great development and provides a lot of value to users of the product. Being able to subscribe to a feed for a particular person, or class of persons, in a CRM database allows you to track them within your existing tools rather than having to remember to login to a portal page or application.
In fact, I talk about RSS for association management systems in an article I wrote for Forum Magazine that should be out in the April issue. Below is an excerpt of the bit about adding RSS to AMS:
I believe that the potential of RSS as a communication and productivity tool is just beginning to be fully explored. In addition to continuing to use it share and raise awareness of web-based content, I believe that RSS can be put to use in strengthening the relationship between a member and her association.
One use specific to the association market is around increasing member awareness. Take the common scenario of an association staffer who manages a committee or board and serves as an ex officio member of the group. What if your association management system provided an RSS feed for each member, providing updates every time something new happens with that member. You could then subscribe to the feed of each member on the committee and be immediately updated when they register for a conference, renew their membership, buy a product or miss an important continuing education deadline. Imagine the value of being fully aware of your committee members’ individual interactions with the association in a way that comes directly to your desktop rather than you having to mine your AMS on a daily basis to find the same information.
The same kind of feed could be exposed to your members, secured with their user name and password. This feed could alert them when a product they purchased from you ships, deadlines to renew membership or continuing education credits, etc. This would allow them to be much more aware of what your association is doing for them on a daily basis without having to take overt steps to find it out.
This kind of awareness raising could improve the experience for everyone in the association by making better use of the data that flows through your systems on a daily basis to strengthen the relationship between members and the association.
(Via Scoble.)
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | 2 Comments
November 23, 2005
Thank You Phil Murray!
Kevin just thanked his first blog commenter since he started writing as part of Thanksgiving. Great idea!
So, without further ado, thank you Phil Murray for posting the first comment to my blog on August 2nd, 2002! The post Phil commented on was one I wrote questioning whether a KM system had to be deployed enterprise wide in order to be considered a success. Why not just do something locally within a group using free tools for their own benefit? I still think that makes as much sense now as it did to me over 3 years ago. And Phil agreed with me and expanded upon the idea substantively, which is a nice bonus for a first comment. :)
I have truly learned so much from writing this blog and connecting with others who read and write on the same topics. Thanks to all of you for participating in this public conversation.
Update: To continue being a bit meta, this turns out to be my 500th post on this blog. Only took 3 years! :)
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | 3 Comments
August 8, 2005
The Knowledge Sharing Toolkit
David Bartholomew has released a Knowledge Sharing Toolkit that he has developed over the past 2 years.
The ‘Knowledge Sharing Toolkit’ is the result of a two-year DTI-funded project carried out by innovation consultancy David Bartholomew Associates (DBA) and nine of the UK’s leading architectural and engineering practices - Aedas, Arup, Broadway Malyan, Buro Happold, Edward Cullinan Architects, Feilden Clegg Bradley, Penoyre & Prasad, Whitby Bird and WSP.
A concise 49 page how-to manual accompanied by nine detailed case studies, the Toolkit shows building design practices how to develop a knowledge strategy to support their business objectives, and explains the main tools and techniques for learning and sharing knowledge, and how to use them.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet (just spotted it today) but thought I would go ahead and share the link for those of you interested in facilitating knowledge sharing.
(Via James Robertson.)
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | Comment
August 5, 2005
tRuTag: Aggregate Your Tags
Here is a nifty web app: tRuTag
I’ve created tRuTag with Ruby because I wanted to explore tagging. What it does is create an html page of your tags on various sites and then allows you to explore them on other sites.
I use it as my homepage and have just implemented some of it’s functionlity on my Ruby on Rails site. Below is a sample page. Please view the readme or download tRuTag and enjoy!
It requires Ruby on Rails to run. I’ll probably try to get this set up on my laptop this weekend.
(Via O’Reilly Radar.)
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | One Comment
June 15, 2005
Knowledge Abundance
Gerry McGovern opens a recent article with an incredibly clear statement about the current environment for KM:
We are in an era of knowledge abundance. Traditional management theory focuses on knowledge scarcity. We need new management strategies to deal with so much communication and so much knowledge.
This is why blogging, RSS, newsreaders, wikis and similar technologies are coming to the fore now. They are effective tools for communicating in an environment of abundance. Love that quote! This will definitely be making its way into my presentations (with attribution, of course).
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | Comment
June 12, 2005
Movable Tags
SixApart recently released a plugin that adds tagging to Movable Type.
The tagging is only done by the author of the post so you don’t get the benefits of social tagging like you do on delicious. However, I think it is useful for creating simple categories without having to think much about it. If the tag is already used, it gets associated with other posts. If not, voila!, a new category. Much easier interface and probably meets the needs of most bloggers who are casual about their categories.
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | Comment
June 12, 2005
Wiki that Project!
Here is a nice post offering four ways to use wikis for project management. It has suggestions for planning meeting agendas, real-time note taking, brainstorming and easy document maintenance.
Permanent Link | Subscribe via RSS | Subscribe via Email | Comment
+1 (410) 742-9088 | david@highcontext.com
Copyright © 2009 High Context Consulting
Privacy Policy: HCC will never share your information with anyone without your permission.