Greetings from lovely, exotic East Fishkill, New York. I am at IBM’s Knowledge Management Conference; unfortunately, many of the exciting things I’ve learned today are IBM proprietary information and so I can’t share them with you.

But some of the talks were not only interesting but talked about things outside the firewall. Our first talk was by Larry Prusak, author of Working Knowledge, who talked about where knowlege lives in a firm (it’s not just in people’s heads). The concept of knowledge has been around for a long time — as usual, the Greeks had a word for it. In fact, they had three; my note-taking wasn’t good enough to capture the original Greek terms, but one word became “epistematics” (universal knowledge); another word
was “technie”, which represents the difference between reading chemistry books and being a chemist, and the third
is “metis”, which is social
knowledge — “how to win friends and influence people”.

Larry closed with “five little heuristics” about knowledge:

• Connectivity is a much better bet than capture. Show people who knows what.
• The right unit of analysis is a small network of people (50-300), not an individual, a workgroup, or an enterprise.
• If you don’t have a “thick picture” of work, you can’t really affect it.
• People learn through stories and from one another, not from documents.
• Technology doesn’t change behavior by itself.

The second speaker was Tom Boyle of British Telecom (I guess it’s just “BT” these days), talking about the BT Global Challenge and how the crews of the boats are
using computer conferencing to prepare for the race, and some of the lessons that we might be able to take away from their interactions — one interesting one was that crews with a high ratio of “engagement” postings to
“informational” postings tend to have a culture of involvement, and even informational postings tend to get better answers on such crews.

We also had a spectacular thunderstorm; I was inside and missed most of it, and even missed out on the leaks into the building.

Time for dinner!

The team meeting last week was worth the trip (as always); we even got to go out on the boat late Thursday afternoon. Every time I visit, I find that I enjoy boating more — it helps, I’m sure, that I’m not paying for the boat! Or even the refreshments, come to think of it.

Friday morning, I decided I’d leave early so I could get home at a decent hour (6:30pm instead of 10pm or later). And so I bailed out of the meeting before we were quite finished — I’ll find out what I missed one of these days, I’m sure. But I made it to Stewart Airport with just enough time to gulp down lunch before getting on the plane to Chicago (I thought that a pastrami sandwich from the JetSet Deli was likely to be tastier, if not necessarily healthier, than whatever American was serving in coach on a two-hour flight).

On the way to the airport, I stopped at a rest area and picked up a brochure about the reconstruction of the James River Bridge in Richmond, Virginia (where I grew up). This seemed like a strange brochure to be giving out on a rest area on I-84 in Newburgh, NY, about 400 miles away from the construction, but they had a good supply of them, so I guess there’s a reason for it.

The flights home were OK; I got upgraded on the Chicago-San Jose leg, and decided that American gave me more legroom in a coach exit row seat on their reconfigured planes than they did in First Class on an MD-80. But the extra side-to-side space was appreciated anyway, as was the better food.

Landing in San Jose was a bit challenging — I noticed that we seemed to be awfully high as we came over the 280/101/680 interchange…and then we started to go up! A few minutes later, after we’d flown north of the airport, the pilot got on the PA and told us what we’d already figured out — that we’d been told to go around again because there was traffic on the runway. Diane had been watching my flight on thetrip.com and was wondering why the readouts suddenly showed the plane ascending and north of the airport! The second landing attempt went better, and I was home in time for dinner.

The weekend has been pleasant; we went to services yesterday morning (they needed us to make the minyan, and will probably need us again next weekend). Jeffrey’s watched a few movies — Jeffrey watched Invasion of the Neptune Men on MST3K (he says it’s horrible), and then we rented Star Trek: First Contact, which Jeffrey’s already watched twice (even though the movie is rated PG-13, we thought he’d be ready for it; he doesn’t appear to be traumatized yet, so I guess we were right).

I still haven’t heard anything from the doctor about my MRI results; I’ll have to call them this week if they don’t call me first.