Office Space
Great post on ACT-KM (registration required)about office space by David Week from Assai.
Sample:
Office design issues are often diagnostic indicators of larger organisational or business issues. You can treat office space archaeologically. Archaeologists take a settlement pattern, and a few artefacts, and from that deduce the entire way of life of a city. Office space is much easier -- the people are still there.
Matt Posted this 10/12/04
Indicator Species
An example of a negative indicator of trust within an organisation might be the % of emails containing 'bcc" field entries.
Matt Posted this 6/12/04
Luke's First Post
OK - I'll have a stab at some broad conceptions of "how to determine the nature of the system we are investigating" in order to get a set of framing references for us to explore.
First - there is an underlying assumption that "the system" can be made to be objective - that the system is a rational and logical construct that can be scientifically tested - that is, an assessment of the system by two separate people will yield the same result. If I see the system as X, then Shawn should see the system as X as well. There's lots of assumptions with this and I think that will be a fertile field of enquiry for us. We require a certain level of adequate knowledge (adequatio) to be able to understand the nature of a system. People who see things in an overly reductionist manner often fail to understand interconnections, symbionts, catalysts, indicators and dynamics.
Given that there is adequate knowledge (a relative concept anyway as knowledge is unlimited), how do we investigate the nature of a system. It is often very hard to understand systems as they cannot be broken down easily, they are too interdependent and hard to define. Today's discussion looked at the possibility of indicators. Ecologists use changes in diversity and abundance of forms of biota (birds, frogs, insects, plants) as indicators of the change to ecosystem. A useful metaphor for organisations would be to examine what could be indicators of the nature of the system. Another fertile area of enquiry.
But then, what are our framing references for systems? System could be an organisation (in all its forms of company, department, team, community, SME, CoP, etc), an information system (comprising processes, technology, suppliers, bottlenecks, etc) or a population (city-state, nation, town, globe). We don't seem to be limiting our understanding of system. Given that, are there general characteristics of systems that can help form a gross first-cut analysis? In birdwatching, we use a WWII term called GISS - General Impression of Size and Shape. It's big, looks like that, shaped like this, in this area, flying in circles, up high, in a flock, etc... A third useful field of enquiry to explore. What is the GISS of the nature of systems?
Three fields of enquiry then
1. What adequate knowledge is required to understand the nature of systems?
2. What are the indicators of a system (Shawn's idea of the extent of capitalisation, or perhaps the number of lines in someone's title, or the number of levels in the org chart could be some)
3. What is the GISS of a system (big/small, open/closed, level of interconnectedness, level of dynamism, extent of internal tension, number of nodes/links would be some)?
How does this sound as a framing reference?
Luke
Luke Posted this 3/12/04
Welcome
The ActKM forum is great online group for sparking ideas about knowledge management but the vast numbers discourage small group interaction. This group is a response to this conundrum. By spinning-off a small group of 4 people, we can work in detail on an issue and report back to ActKM with our results, thoughts, observations. This in turn might spark a new thread and more ideas. I think it is a great opportunity to see how we can integrate small and large group dynamics.
This group consists of Kate Andrews, Luke Naismith, Matt Moore and Shawn Callahan
Shawn Posted this 25/11/04