Knowledge and e-mail: Codification pur sang?

In the OrganiK project we have finished most of the data collection to assess criteria for the new Knowledge Management system we aim to develop. One very interesting factor kept coming up during various visits, the use of Outlook to store work-related knowledge.

Several interviewees send e-mails to themselves with working tasks, snippets of information they picked up on and links to websites they find useful, they also send these mails on to colleagues when they think this is useful.

In essence they are using e-mail as a codification tool, effectively making knowledge available in written down format with the aim of recovering it when appropriate.

This is by no means a new ‘discovery’ MS itself is aware of the potential of Outlook as KM tool, the question then of course is; why do they not exploit that potential further?  And, as a Thunderbird user, why is Mozilla not all over this weakness in Outlook and trying to improve on it?

The interesting player in this respect is Google who, with an ever expanding toolkit, are offering brilliant ways of using Gmail as a codified information repository. Time to steal ideas Mozilla!

Data collection in London

Last week I have visited London city-centre for the first time. The reason of the visit was to collect data for the requirements analysis with one of the SME-partners of the OrganiK project. Obviously I can’t say much about the data collection (confidential, not analysed properly yet) but I can write a bit about London.

My wife is from Northern England, born in Liverpool, raised in Manchester. If you are not English it is perhaps hard to understand how that affects the opinion on London. In one word: A LOT. Oh, that is two words, but you get my drift. I have the same with Amsterdam, which is a horrible city, but only to me it seems. London however was interesting, not in the least because of my colleagues. I went with one of the Greek partners and as he had never been before either, it was a reason to be… touristy. He even had a camera that he normally never has .

Anyway some pictures I took with my HTC 710 phone :

The fact that all these pictures were taken around the same area means two things: We didn’t have a lot of time and it was getting dark and I am not really interested in taking pictures of everything. The South Bank was nice though, and seeing Big Ben, the changing of the guard, Prince Harry and Prince William arrive at the opening of the Quantum of Solace, discovering that there are Wetherspoon pubs with decent prices, Trafalgar and Picadilly squares and the West End… was all rather eventful for a two-three hour visit.

We didn’t find Harrods, we missed Downing Street although we probably crossed it and we never really found any shopping precinct or anything so we must have missed that as well. Altogether it was fun though, as my colleague says: Work is Fun.