February 21st, 2006
Visiting IS456 Knowledge Management Systems
Last night, I had the pleasure of being
a guest speaker/lecturer at DePaul University. My colleague Heather
McClain, who works in IBM’s academic initiative area, introduced me to
Professor
Alan Burns last month. He
teaches a class in Knowledge
Management Systems, and asked
me if I could visit the class and discuss knowledge technology from the
IBM Lotus perspective.
I’ve never spoken in an academic setting
before. This was an incredibly cool experience. We spent two
hours (about 45 minutes longer than I anticipated) looking at the history
of Notes in the marketplace, where things are going in terms of productivity,
collaboration, and knowledge, blogs, wikis, and RSS, and some of the more
advanced research projects going on in this area at IBM. The students
were very interactive and asked great questions. The ability to discuss
some of the trends over the years with a bit of hindsight and some fun
stories was really cool.
We talked a lot about the way the nature
of work has changed. As I’ve mentioned previously here, about 30%
of US IBM employees work from home or mobile offices. Yesterday,
for me, that was a combination of two different coffee shops, a University
classroom, and my home office. It also was in time chunks — with
shifts often taking place between “personal” and “business”
computing. The idea of a 9-to-5 workday is completely extinguished
– the work is done when the work needs to get done.
We talked about differences in the ways
companies employ technology. How some companies try to legislate
things via policy — like “no personal use of the web during business
hours” that are relatively impractical (is cnn.com/business personal
or business use?). How sharing knowledge still requires a cultural
change at many companies. How instant messaging changes cultures.
How voicemail is dead for so many of us — it’s just too asynchronous.
One of the great tangents that both
the evening classroom discussion, as well as my daytime panel
on customer evangelism, is that
transparency is a critical market thought. It’s just simply no longer
possible to make bad products — because of blogs, ebay feedback, or amazon
rankings, google is one click away from exposing bad products or vendors
or whatever. Ben
McConnell was on the customer
evangelism panel, and he’s written extensively on this thought of transparency
in the market. It’s one
of the incredibly empowering aspects of social software,and it will be
incredibly interesting to watch where this goes in the future.
Thank you to Professor Burns and his
class for such a great evening. Hopefully, this won’t be the last
time I talk to a college IT class…it was really a lot of fun.
Originally by Ed Brill from Ed Brill on February 17, 2006, 7:12am
