Teblog

Time to stop taking water for granted

Every day in recent months, the water level in our local lake has been dropping. The ducks have less and less water to swim in and find their food. As the water recedes it exposes smelly black mud (for want of a better word), it's probably rotting vegetation. Usually, the lake is fed from a nearby river but the level in that is low too. Some say this is because of abstraction further upstream.

We're lucky, our lake is essentially ornamental. Our lives don't depend on it. But it does make you think about other people in other parts of the world who are watching their own water supplies dwindle. They might be in poor countries, desperate for drinking water or they might be in rich countries, reliant on water flows from glaciers to drive their hydro-electric power plants.

We hear endlessly about emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The accusing finger is pointed at man and his works. We are expected (quite rightly) to live more in harmony with our environment. But you don't hear much about water. Not compared with the noise around GHGs, anyway.

Yet, if there's to be any balance in environmental discussions, they should include pollution of the air, land and water. They should also include the abstraction and use of raw materials, one of which is water. Anyone who pollutes or abstracts clean water should be held to account. And, if it's taken from an aquifer it should be regarded in a more serious light than if it's taken from recent rainfall.

Three cheers then for an announcement from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) that it is to extend its remit to water. The project is called CDP Water Disclosure. It will operate on similar lines to the CDP which gets major companies to report their carbon and related emissions.

Because of rising populations, increasing urbanisation, demand for more 'things' and, yes, climate changes, pressure on remaining water supplies is growing. It's not like GHGs which, because they become part of the earth's atmosphere, can be regarded as a global problem. Water problems are local in their impact, although their causes can often be laid at the doors of multinational organisations. Just as air pollution can be outsourced to China, for example, so can water consumption.

The point of the project, as with CDP before it, is to get companies to declare and monitor their evolving position. This alone should motivate them to take positive action. If not, they can expect pressure from their investors and other stakeholders.

It's not going to be easy. Compared with this, monitoring GHG emissions was a walk in the park. We are going to need to look down our supply chains in detail to figure out what we're responsible for, although I dare say that companies like Trucost (I'm speculating here) will come up with some realistic 'rule of thumb' measures.

CDP is working with a variety of organisations to establish effective standards. It has published a comprehensive report of its ambitions and plans, if you're interested in learning more.

Any reader of this blog is likely to be in possession of all manner of gizmos (from cars to computers), each of which required gallons of water to create. We're very conscious of waste, we're fairly conscious of carbon, but we probably don't think about water that much.

Perhaps it's time we started.

Frighten the kids, or encourage the grown-ups?

Have you seen the Act On CO2 'bedtime stories' advertisement that our dear government has spent £6M on? Although it's a cartoon, the words are real enough. Fundamentally, it tells children that they're victims of grown-ups' actions and, if the grown-ups change their ways, they may (note: only 'may') be saved. According to the advertisement, over forty percent of the emissions of CO2 are caused by 'ordinary things' that grown-ups do, like warming homes and driving cars.

The Advertising Standards Authority has received hundreds of complaints which it plans to investigate. Good luck to it. According to a BBC report, "An ASA spokeswoman said the watchdog would be investigating whether the claims about climate change could be substantiated and whether the ad complied with taste and decency rules."

The ASA hasn't a hope in hell of validating the climate change science. It should concentrate instead on the taste and decency angle. When Sky News wrote about the ASA complaints, it received masses of contradictory comments (I ploughed through 94 of them). Goodness knows who Lisa is, but she made a good point when she said, "Upsetting children can never be right ... Why worry them so young when they can't do anything right now?!" Quite.

What is clear (if you didn't know already) is that climate change has become a religious debate and, if the Sky News commenters are representative of the population at large, the non-believers greatly outweigh the believers. And the powers-that-be are at their wits' end to turn us into believers.

The stupid thing is that the more rabid they become, the more they will turn off even the most reasonable citizen. Somehow the debate needs to become less accusatory and more inclusive. It might want to take into account that not everyone is the same or driven by the same values.

The latest EcoPinion Survey Report from strategic marketing agency EcoAlign parsed the attitudes of 1250 USA citizens and, in the process, identified five different categories of consumer. In terms of motivation to use new technologies and participate in new energy programs, they were: Cost-Conscious Saver (41%), Value Buyer (20%), Environmentalist/Green Consumer (19%), Traditional Consumer (10%) and Tech Enthusiast (10%).

The same messaging can't work with such a disparate set of people. Judging from that list, only 19 percent look as if they might fit in the 'believer' category in the USA. In Europe it may be different, but you can bet that the different categories exist. And it's therefore clear that a single message is going to fall on largely deaf ears, unless it happens to focus on the needs of the Cost-Conscious Saver.

And maybe this is a clue to the answer. Forget global warming, climate change, CO2 or any of that 'big-brotherish' terminology. Talk about simple financial and environmental sustainability through energy and fuel savings, through the avoidance of waste and other pollution and through the minimisation of raw materials.

In this way, instead of negative, frightening stories from those in power, the environmental tale can become a  positive one put out by everyone who is making an effort to improve our collective lot.

On environmental matters, who's at fault?

Compressed digital video works by having occasional reference frames which are updated by changes. It seems to make sense to publish a reference frame on environmental matters from time to time. So here's my first stab. Comments, as ever, are welcome.

Animals go about their business and leave no rubbish. Whatever they do leave becomes nourishment for something else - microbes, plants or other animals. Humans, on the other hand, have become adept at adapting nature's resources to things that are somewhat less naturally recyclable, either because of their semi-permanent nature (plastics for example) or because they are mixed and, therefore, un-recyclable (silicon chips, mixed fibre clothing and so on).

We also pollute the land, the seas and the air, not to mention inland lakes and rivers. I use the generalised 'we' even though some cultures and individuals live more in harmony with nature than others.

Not only this, but we deplete material resources at an unsustainable rate in order to satisfy the perceived 'needs' of an ever-growing population. Oil, coal and gas are the obvious examples - millions of years to lay down, exhausted in a couple of hundred. Known sources of many metals we take for granted (silver, gold, zinc, tin, lead, copper and uranium etc) are all likely to become exhausted in the next thirty years or so. If the glaciers keep melting, then the hope is that new deposits will be discovered. Which will buy a delay, but the end result will be the same. A rising population and widening consumerism will see to that.

In case you were wondering, natural gas, iron, aluminium then coal will last longest. But that will change as we seek alternatives to materials that are being exhausted.

I sometimes watch television advertisements and they drive me nuts. The worst offenders try to get you into a new habit by inventing a problem you never knew existed and then offer you a 'cure' for the condition. Anti-ageing creams and health drinks, for me, are the worst offenders. It amazes me that anyone falls for it. I cringe in anticipation of the "because you're worth it" and "take care" payoff lines. But then I think, "What am I doing sitting in front of a television that cost God-knows-what in material resources and gobbles electricity?" The answer is the same for everyone else who has a television: it's a low-cost source of information, education and entertainment.

Cars are a low cost, comfortable and convenient way of getting from A to B. It's little wonder we're addicted to them. Incandescent bulbs (RIP) were a great way of lighting the home. We haven't got a decent replacement yet, although a 12 volt lighting circuit of LEDs might prove a good idea.

It seems clear that, if the human race is to survive and thrive, it needs to change its ways. It needs to become more in harmony with nature and to put a proper value on the raw materials that remain. And, indeed, to exploit them while we have them in order to build whatever infrastructure we need for the future.

Mostly, what I see is companies jumping on the green or cleantech bandwagons in order to make and sell new stuff which is going to make the world better after these new things have been bought. And, frankly, I'm not sure companies have a great deal of choice unless they are hit by legislation, loss of markets or shareholder revolt. Yet, paradoxically, these same companies are made up of individuals who probably do care about the future of their families. (I'm not even going to try and square that particular circle.) 

And governments, which require the taxes from companies in order to balance the nation's books (ha!), are hardly likely to welcome too much shrinkage of the economy. They could replace taxes with 'fines' but that's probably not an election-winning strategy. They have much to lose were they to put 'growth' into long-term reverse. Encouragement of the right things and the removal of red tape would seem the right way to go.

And consumers, the people who are persuaded to part with their cash for all sorts of nonsense, are not going to be in a hurry to consume less although they might be persuaded to consume more of the right kind of things and less of the wrong. Providing their pockets don't suffer. Or, at least, not suffer too visibly. The recent car scrappage scheme is a good example - with the lure of a £2000 bribe - a lot of old vehicles went into the recycling loop and a lot of new cars were sold at more or less full price: a win for the showrooms, the recyclers, the manufacturers and the UK vehicle maintenance infrastructure. For the consumer, the lure of getting many times the market value of an old car somewhat eclipsed the repayment schedule and the embedded environmental harm in the new cars. I fell for it, eventually, and consoled myself that I'd bought a fuel-sipping recyclable car from a greenish car maker.

We, in the so-called developed world, are all trapped by our desires for a comfortable life whether we're politicians, business people or consumers. We find it difficult to imagine or face up to the scale of change that's needed in order to give future generations a chance. Professor David MacKay (see my Inside Track) has become the government's advisor on energy. His brutal bottom line is that we (in the UK) need to cut our fossil fuel consumption by 90 percent. Can you imagine that? I'm not sure if he's been hired in order to genuinely advise or as a way of gagging him. Time will tell.

But, if we're to achieve that, we need to invest in alternatives energy sources sharpish and his book Sustainable Energy - without the hot air is eminently readable, online (free) or offline (£20 in paperback). Perhaps he could start a 'without the hot air' series, taking a largely impartial look at raw materials and pollution.

The more clearly the facts are laid in front of us, the more wisely we can make our individual choices. In the end though, we will make a single choice: exploit what's left as if there were no tomorrow (our present course) or find ways of living sustainably. The alternative, a sort of in-between approach, will merely delay our tenure on this planet.

Evangelist: beware

Evangelists. Plenty of them hang out in the sustainability and collaboration fields where I work. Some irritate while others are acceptable. And this isn't because they necessarily reflect my views. (In case you were wondering.) The trick is to spot, early on, which variety you're faced with and make your excuses and leave if they're the 'wrong' kind.

Last week, the Free Software Foundation, wrote to the Fortune 500 companies (well, it didn't bother with Microsoft) essentially telling them they'd be mad to upgrade to Windows 7. The story was widely covered but few publications would have ended up with such a rich discussion as the Register. This is a hugely popular online IT publication which takes no prisoners. It has attitude and a healthy disregard for some of the tripe that emanates from the industry it serves. Readers are encouraged to comment on items and, this particular article quickly attracted 145 comments.

The interesting thing is that the article was about an evangelical organisation and it attracted evangelistic commentators, both pro- and anti-, as well as your everyday commenters. The end result is that anyone with the willingness to work through the comments, evangelistic or otherwise, would end up with an independent point of view, providing they read through with an open mind. If they didn't, they'd end up just strengthening their own prejudices.

The sustainability and collaboration folk are no different. The evangelists are noisy, in your face, on conference platforms, lobbying whoever and wherever possible, frequently on the web with their blogs, Tweets and comments. They exist everywhere, and always have. The big difference today is that they can be more readily heard.

You can get positive evangelists who show how life could be better. I have a lot of time for them, even if they turn out to be wrong. At least they're trying to help. Then you have the negative ones who are more intent on tearing down than building up. "This is wrong" or "you shouldn't do that" rather than "try this alternative" or "why not do this?". In pop psychology, the former are the I'm OK, you're not OK brigade - the same mentality, incidentally, as criminals.

A lot of evangelists are so immersed in their blinkered view of the world, that they forget (or ignore) the fact that, if adopted, their wheezes might cause more problems than they solve. We're shutting down coal and nuclear power stations to cheers from the acid rain and nuclear waste storage evangelists. But how deeply have they considered where the energy is going to come from? Or, alternatively, what impact on our lives a profound cut in consumption will cause? I venture to suggest, 'not a lot'. Out here in the real world, we have to find solutions, not just state problems.

In a way, the easiest ones to deal with are those that have 'Evangelist' printed on their business cards. They're being paid by someone to persuade others of the folly of their ways. You'll find these folk in many major IT companies. Others are not so obvious. Perhaps a company has plied them with gifts or other, more subtle, bribes. Recently I was talking with a Toyota (non-employee) iQ evangelist. Turns out she'd 'won' the car for a six month trial, in exchange for blogs and other social media outreach. Others are just total believers in 'the cause' simply because it makes sense to them within their own frame of reference.

The answer has to be to filter them as quickly as possible. Find out who pays for their evangelism in money or in other ways. Ask them what alternatives they know about in detail. And get them to tell you what the long term implications of their advocacy are likely to be. Some will slink away from the interrogation. Some will bluster, so you can take your leave of them. Those that will remain probably have a good and well thought out story to tell.

Audience power and the death of deference

How do you feel if you're addressing a large group of people and some of them are hammering away on laptops and smartphones? Do you use your own kit when you're a conference delegate? If you're peeved at the first and averse to the second, then you are going to become increasingly uncomfortable as this behaviour becomes the norm.

Some would say that acting like this is disrespectful of the speaker. They make their judgements on their interpretation of what the audience is doing online. In short, they think that these delegates cannot possibly be paying attention. In fact, they could be doing a number of things, some of which are enriching their conference experience, some of which are not.

For example, they could be looking up things mentioned by the speaker, participating in the 'back channel', Tweeting what's going on, blogging, playing games, checking emails, or simply taking notes. In general, the speaker hasn't much of a clue which, unless they hear a sudden burst of laughter unconnected with the presentation. This would probably be a reaction to something that’s been said on the back channel.

More than ever, the speaker’s challenge is to capture and keep the audience’s interest and stimulate their thinking. Their ability to do this will largely determine the audience's subsequent behaviour. The audience mix will make a difference too. If they have different levels of understanding, their need to seek clarification online will vary. However, the knowledgeable are likely to be most active in the backchannel. And anyone could be making notes so the behaviour observable from the podium will be similar.

Many people claim to be able to multitask with ease - reading wikipedia while listening to a lecture, for example. With two incoming language streams, this seems an unlikely claim. It's more likely to be a case of rapid task-switching, taking advantages of pauses, dull bits and so on. Back channel activities are highly focused on the event in progress, with pretty terse individual comments. Classically, they're IRC (Internet Relay Chat), although IM (Instant Messaging) or Twitter are probably more common now. They provide a good way for audience members to keep in touch, questioning, commenting and, sometimes, reporting the action to the outside world. And, indeed, picking up feedback from outside.

Occasionally, when members of Freeform Dynamics are on the same conference call, we'll set up a temporary Skype IM group, so that we can raise and answer questions internally without wasting the speakers’ time. We might also comment to each other, “isn't this a rehash of the May announcement?”, or whatever. These things take seconds to say and read and barely ripple our concentration on the speaker. We can align our own understanding and, possibly, elect the most appropriate member of the team to ask the burning question(s) at the end. It works well and we believe that this approach helps us and the speakers get the most out of these briefings.

Some brave conference organisers have tried putting the back-channel on display to the whole audience. It doesn’t always work. While very 'open', it can be a destructive experience. A classic case was when an audience member accused the speaker of spouting bullshit. It provoked fury on the part of the speaker, followed by a massive discussion, which eclipsed the purpose of the presentation itself. Maybe it’s better to do what some others do which is to assign a colleague of the speaker to monitor the back-channel and use it to guide the subsequent Q&A and, maybe, the direction of the presentation itself.

Just as power is moving to the consumer in so many areas of life, so it is moving to the audience in conferences and other gatherings. This is especially true when they have online access to information sources, to each other and to the outside world. If the speakers are engaging and accepting of this new phenomenon, the outcomes can be positive and enriching. If they see it as an affront, then they’re going to find themselves increasingly out of step with our customer-empowered world.

The truth behind the Google/Microsoft/NHS rumours

Before Monday July 6th, did you know that Google and Microsoft had services for storing health records? Thanks to an article in the Times and some related hysteria in other media, just about the whole country discovered that, "David Cameron was going to replace the bloated and expensive NHS computer system with a free one from Google. Or maybe Microsoft."

Except, of course, someone got hold of the wrong end of the stick. Let's face it, whatever we think of the NHS and its evolving computer system, it's not going to be replaced by a packaged service from anyone. Never mind that Google and Microsoft (and maybe BUPA) are supposedly the front runners.

No-one likes overspends on computer projects. And the NHS one due for delivery in 2014 - four years late and at a cost of £12.4bn - presents a wonderful target for the Tories. This seems to have been what caused all the excitement. From £14.2bn to 'free' at the stroke of a pen. Wow!

Who on earth thinks that commercial organisations like Google, Microsoft or BUPA will do anything for free? And who but the most naive will think that moving shedloads of detailed health records from one system to another is going to happen without horrendous cost and risk?

Still, it was a great headline and it, rather unexpectedly, put 'Google Health' in the frame. Whether involved or not, Rachel Whetstone, Google's Vice President, Public Policy and Communications, must be feeling jolly pleased with the outcome. (Incidentally, she's married to Steve Hilton, one of David Cameron's closest advisors. She dropped out of politics after a spell as Michael Howard's chief of staff during his failed election campaign. Oops, wrong horse.)

So what's the reality? The Google (Health) and Microsoft (HealthVault) systems both manage personal health records, or PHRs. They provide somewhere to create, store and share your personal health information and allow you to find related infomation, engage with health professionals and manage your medications. Both put the user in control of content and both are free to the user. This has little to do with the £14.2bn NHS system. At best it would take care of one element of it, the so-called 'Spine' Care Record Service (CRS) but with less information and more restricted access. Medical professionals need access to all manner of detailed information if they're to do their jobs properly and they're simply not going to get that from the personally-filtered subset of a person's medical information that the PHRs represent.

What's on offer smacks of a, "let's get to know your medical issues so we can fire appropriate ads at you". If not, one has to ask what the commercial motivations of Microsoft and Google are. Maybe it's to flog extra services: "Monitor your blood pressure, madam?" or "Remind you to take your pills, sir?"

With the baby boomers reaching retirement age, the market for health-related products and services is exploding. An increasing proportion are computer literate and have their own PCs and internet connections. And nothing is on their minds more than their health. (Okay, maybe their grandchildren and their pets.)

But let's not get carried away by recent newspaper reports. This is not David Cameron single-handedly demolishing the NHS IT budget. Sure, we'd love to enter what the Tories call a "post bureaucratic age", but let's start by getting rid of all the deeply intrusive information that the government already stores about us first.

Is telehealth coming at last?

Yesterday at Cisco's C-Scape analyst briefing, we were treated to a presentation by one James Ferguson. And what a treat that was. Cisco chose wisely. He was a good speaker, passionate about his subject (telemedicine, which he prefers to call telehealth) and a medical practitioner to boot. It was a real person talking about real things, not some propellor-head from technoland or, worse, a marketeer. This background, of course, made him a devastatingly effective salesman, and it wasn't until the Q&A that some of my (Scotch?) mist of enthusiasm started to clear.

His pitch was essentially simple. Because the coverage of the Aberdeen-based Scottish Centre for Telehealth (SCT) includes highlands, islands and oil-rigs, it faces some rather unusual problems. Popping into the local hospital is hardly convenient. And doctors can't easily get to where they're needed. Not always in time, anyway. So SCT's been working on getting diagnoses done remotely in order to a) help people to get the right treatment locally and b) to identify those who need hands-on professional treatment urgently. The filtering questions are: "Is this time dependent?" (urgent), "Is it experience dependent?" (need an expert) and "Is it facilities dependent?" (need particular facilities).

We saw people sticking their tongues out and waggling their tonsils in kiosks while remote experts tried to figure out what's wrong. Apparently ninety percent of diagnoses can be done by looking at someone, listening to their chest and looking in their ears, noses and down their throats. It's a slightly dehumanising way of doing medicine: in the same way that we all like to meet in person rather than through a computer screen or over the phone. The truth is, when you're ill and you're far away from help, anything is better than nothing at all.

Ferguson was not afraid to mention the dangers of turfing up at hospital. He'd rather sit on a telepresence or videoconference consultation than face God-knows-what in person. And patients eliminate the risk of catching hospital-borne infections if they don't have to go near the place.

The benefits are piling up.

The downside, of course, is that this stuff has to be paid for and the bandwidth has to be there. On payment, Cisco has a cash mountain so this, presumably, is why it's happy to consider spreading payments over time, essentially turning the customer's capital expenditure into operating expenditure. It can still recognise its own revenue at point-of-sale. Although it's a different issue, we're also seeing gradual acceptance this pay-as-you-go approach in the various kinds of cloud-based services.

The harder part of the equation is the communications infrastructure. Covering highlands, islands and oil-rigs with high quality broadband connections is a political and economic challenge, given the relatively sparse populations. Oil rigs have, apparently, been trialling a satellite-based facility called OPTESS. And some of the ground-based services have been using ISDN but, of course, the higher the bandwidth and the further the reach, the more services can be provided remotely.

Ferguson pointed out that medicine is now so good at patching us up when we get a major illness, we keep on living only to get more and more illnesses, until we end up with some chronic condition. All of this puts increasing demands on an already overstretched health service much of which, in theory at least, could be alleviated with some kind of home monitoring and self-treatment service, escalating to the professionals as and when needed.

But that's to get ahead of ourselves. Right now, the SCT has run trials inside hospitals running telehealth 'kiosks' in parallel with conventional assessments, in order to compare the quality of results. (It has a clever way of eliminating bias.) It is extending this facility to multiple hospitals and has started home monitoring trials. All of which are testing the principles of telehealth and capturing feedback from users on the experience.

As with so many things in the computer world, the big question is whether it will be able to scale. And that depends largely on either an appropriate infrastructure or a system which can adapt successfully to lower bandwidth connections.

Dan Bricklin (inventor of PC spreadsheet) on technology

A couple of weeks ago, Wiley asked if I'd like a review copy of Dan Bricklin's 'Bricklin on Technology' book. Normally, I'd say "not on your Nelly" because I know what a chore book reviewing can be. However, I was at the West Coast Computer Faire in March 1980 when Bricklin collected his first award for VisiCalc - the pioneering spreadsheet for the PC. I was also a fairly avid user of his 'Demo' program a few years later. Even though I don't think we met, (unless it was in Zaragoza a couple of years ago), I felt connected, not least because I also developed and published PC software for many years, but without his degree of visibility or success.
When the book arrived, I winced because it's more or less 500 pages long. Unless you're a commuter or you don't get much sleep, how do you find time to read that much?
Anyway, the book was enjoyable at a couple of levels and a disappointment at another. Enjoyable because it peeled off and examined the layers of thinking that went into various products and issues. Bricklin leaves no stone unturned in his pursuit of insight. The transcript of an 85-minute interview with wiki inventor Ward Cunningham is a classic in this respect. (It was 37 pages.) I'd rather Bricklin had identified and pulled out the key elements but then, I suspect, this would have been an editorial step too far for him. He would have had to impose his own interpretations on the conversation, rather than laying it out in full in front of his audience.
You will get insight if you read this book. Insight into what brought us to where we are and a few glimmers into how we might get to where we're going.
The other enjoyable bit for me, which you won't all share, is that I've met (albeit fleetingly) many of the people mentioned in the book, worked with many of the products and written about many of the issues. Bricklin and I even started programming at the same time - early 1966, and we've both tried to take the user perspective in our work. The book triggered many long-dormant memories and reawakened many old feelings, especially in the late 70's/early 80's as we all groped our way through the chaos of the emerging microcomputer/PC business. This is not really a reason for buying the book because Bricklin's chosen subjects seem, in the main, to be serendipitous. A comprehensive history book it is not, although it is a useful addition to the history of the IT world of the late 20th century.
The book is a compilation of old blog posts, essays and transcripts of recordings, loosely arranged around topics which Bricklin finds important, all topped and tailed with narrative from the perspective of 2007/8. As he says in the conclusion, "On any topic you can explore deeply and find nuance", which more or less sets the tone for the book. He does dig deep, he records faithfully and, at times you want him to make his point more quickly. But maybe that's not what he's trying to do. Perhaps he's trying to help the reader understand the nuances, so that they can move forward with their own thinking. I don't know.
Most of his topics have some resonance today, although much of the writing has been overtaken by events or absorbed into the mainstream. The chapters will give you a clue: What Will People Pay For?; The Recording Industry and Copying; Leveraging the Crowd; Cooperation; Blogging and Podcasting; What Tools We Should Be Developing?; Tablet and Gestural Computing; The long term; Historical Information about the PC; Interview with the Inventor of the Wiki; and VisiCalc. It's a ramble round the industry and round the inside of Bricklin's head. His invention of VisiCalc gave him a passport to go where he likes when he likes and meet who he likes. And that's what he's done and, in this book, shared it with us.
My approach, if you're thinking of buying it, would be to say "I'm getting a good 300-page book, I'll just need to pick which 300 of the 500 pages are of most relevance to me." It's a bit like his approach to software - give the user the tools and let them choose how best to use them.

Amazon is selling it in the UK for £10.99

Rumours of KM's death exaggerated

Say 'knowledge management' to most people in our business and watch the curl of their lips. It seems to be a 'given' that KM is dead. The usual reason given is that knowledge sits between our ears, so how the heck can it be managed? Even those who are prepared to stretch the definition a little bit into 'information' are still inclined to question the value of the stored information. I mean, what information is readily given up and what's its half-life anyway?
A few months ago, I stumbled across a US/Indian IT services company called MindTree. It has a Chief Knowledge Officer called Raj Datta. Expecting the worst, I spoke to him and was somewhat astonished to learn that he has taken a lifecycle approach to knowledge management. He recognises that it does live between people's ears. But he also recognises that it can be shared through social tools. The result is an organisation which spends a lot of time, energy and money on the most important bit of knowledge management, its creation in the first place.
Staff are introduced to many thinking and idea generation tools - from De Bono's Six Thinking Hats to mind-mapping. Through workshops and discussion groups, they can learn about many thinking concepts, developing their minds and their ability to innovate. Without creation, knowledge/information capture is merely ossifying the past.
Staff, called 'Minds' incidentally, are then given a wide choice of social and collaboration tools, from blogs through wikis to discussion groups, and more. They are also given a physical workplace which encourages planned and serendipitous encounters.
The astonishing thing about this company is that it was implementing these ideas and blending them with its traditional KM/content management systems while most companies were still trying to figure out the relevance of social networking. MindTree turns out to have been something of a pioneer.
By joining the dots and ensuring that the complete knowledge lifecycle is supported: from inception, to storage, to sharing, to reuse, it provides the KM world an intelligent and holistic way forward.

Hoard or share? Your call.

A long time ago, when I was a wage slave in a computer company, I figured out two things.

1) People will always be around and therefore I should work in a field that involved communication and people. (Teaching and writing became important parts of my life subsequently.)

2) I should, as much as possible, do things once and get paid lots of times. (I subsequently entered the publishing world - magazines first, then software.)

These activities have, to varying degrees, determined the trajectory of my life for the past 33 years. And a jolly fine life it's been, thank you for asking.

But, somewhere along the way, things changed. I found myself giving more and more of my stuff away. I (wrongly) bombed the price of my niche software too far. I found myself cheerfully handing out information and opportunity leads to others. At some point I moved from hoarding and dribbling out my knowledge in exchange for largish sums of money to giving away more and receiving something else in return, friendships and business relationships based on trust and transparency.

I'm not totally stupid, I realise I have to sell something and that something tends to be what's between my ears, my native talents or what I can lay my hands on and package more skilfully than others. It makes for a good life in which all the bits join up rather harmoniously. People, fortunately, know about me and are happy to pay me when they think they can get some value out of me.

I was prompted to write this by a tiny, three-minute, interview conducted in a noisy restaurant by one Suw Charman. She, incidentally, was partly responsible - along with Adriana Lukas and Jackie Danicki - for acting as midwives as I entered the world of blogging at the end of 2004. Her interview was with JP Rangaswami, a man who is a paragon of knowledge sharing. He gets hardly any sleep so has a ton of time to do his job (a very important one at BT), to keep up, to engage with all the 'greats' of the social computing world, and to reflect very deeply on our world, much of which ends up in his blog.

To paraphrase the (short) interview, he pointed out that capturing and keeping knowledge is part of the incentive system in many organisations. But the new generations coming through (and the more enlightened of the older generations) have a more sharing attitude. The core question is: do people want to share? And, by implication, he believes the the answer is, increasingly, "yes". It shows in his behaviour. The benefits show in his reach and influence. And little of this could have happened without him deciding to reach out and share.

And, as I've written many times before, inside an organisation, the benefits are potentially huge. Rangaswami believes that the decision (should we implement social software?) that organisations need to make  is akin to deciding whether or not a company should have a telephone exchange. In time, it will become obvious. Like email and mobile phones before, it will take a while to bite (he thinks the transition could be ten years or more) but it will happen without question.