How Much Information Do You Need Anyway?

If You Build It, Will They Come? At Microsoft's CEO Summit in May, the software giant's own CEO, Steve Ballmer, spoke passionately about the importance of having "digital dashboards": real-time desktop displays of key performance indicators (KPIs) that show critical business ratios such as profit per sales employee per week, customer satisfaction in dispute resolution and the status of outstanding issues with major suppliers. In other words, indicators that CEOs deem critical to running the business. CEOs who really want to take advantage of digital technologies, Ballmer declared, should have their IT folks build them KPI dashboards, empowering them to monitor what matters. On a more personal note, Ballmer observed, KPI tracking has been essential to his transition to chief executive of the world's most profitable software company. For example, Ballmer's KPIs now focus as much on internal "talent tracking" as sales. But Microsoft's CEO was apparently not preaching to the converted. The reception to KPI executive dashboards could best be described more as polite curiosity than genuine interest.

E-Learning Ecosystems: The Future of Learning Technology

An ecosystem is an ecological community that, together with its environment, functions as a unit. Extending the definition to the e-learning environment, we can define an e-learning ecosystem as the learning community, together with the enterprise, united by a learning management system (LMS). If e-learning is truly to provide greater access to education and support educational programs that reflect broader strategic business goals, many believe that the e-learning industry must take the time now to learn key lessons from its early adopters.

'Wikis' Offer Knowledge-Sharing Online

Taran Rampersad didn't complain when he failed to find anything on his hometown in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Instead, he simply wrote his own entry for San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago. Wikipedia is unique for an encyclopedia because anybody can add, edit and even erase. And the Wikipedia is just one - albeit the best known - of a growing breed of Internet knowledge-sharing communities called Wikis.

Knowledge Management Verses Information Management

Denham Grey on knowledge and information. Much of what purports to be knowledge management is in reality information management. Just the other day I heard a rep selling scanners as a core KM technology, "essential for knowledge sharing," without which the organization was doomed to be bypassed by every other firm going down the knowledge track.

What Steve Wozniak Learned From Failure

Failure is the rule rather than the exception, and every failure contains information. One of the most misleading lessons imparted by those who have reached their goal is that the ones who win are the ones who persevere. Not always. If you keep trying without learning why you failed, you'll probably fail again and again. Perseverance must be accompanied by the embrace of failure. Failure is what moves you forward. Listen to failure.