Points of Contexture

Accelerating Decisions and Innovations

Steve Barth and I will be presenting our latest work and thoughts on Sensing and Sense Making at our sesison at the 11th annual KMWorld & Intranets Conference and Exhibition on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 10:30am. We'll be focusing on the practical implications and applications for Innovation with some new ideas on Decision Making:

This session draws on insights from cognitive psychology and complexity science to reconsider how knowledge workers individually and collectively interact with their information environments and share their perceptions and opinions with important implications for how to support knowledge work. Knowledge, information and data are everywhere in business ecosystems, but the challenge of synthesizing fragmentary signals into actionable intelligence is really more about human cognition and organizational culture than business technologies and organizational structures.

The conference and exhibition runs November 6-8, 2007, at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA.

The Other Side of the Board Room

A corporate board’s traditional role has been that of looking at, advising and consenting on a company’s strategic focus and growth. Sub-groups (committees) of the traditional board are usually charged with oversight on compensation, audits, compliance, etc., and are comprised of board members with experience and knowledge of those areas. Rarely, if ever, do these types of boards bother themselves with operating issues, especially those of day-to-day activities.

Relatively recent spectacular corporate failures related to financial issues, governance or both (Enron, HP, WorldCom, et al), have caused boards to become more focused and almost solely concerned with compliance, like Sarbanes Oxley, and other legal issues. At the same time, low priority (or none at all) is placed on strategic focus and growth. This approach has become so pervasive that many boards are losing key members in resignations or choosing not to stand for re-election. HP recently lost two key board members (Tom Perkins and George Keyworth), both of whom cited this very issue as one of their reasons for resigning.

A Reality(?) TV Show I Would Really Like to See!

Through my friend Steve Barth, I have become aware of and interested in the dynamics, sociology and psychology of on-line game environments, especially those of Second Life and World of Warcraft. I have attended two conference sessions now where Steve has compared the environment and design of these games to mainstream business software and IT environment designs (especially knowledge management systems). He has explored reasons why people who really don't like to use the latter spend hours in the former (another post on this later). Thinking about how most folks don't know about these games (or perhaps only heard of them in passing), much less visited them or played them, I began to wonder what a reality TV show based on one of these games (or something close) would look like - the more I thought about it the more I think the TV media folks (not to mention Hollywood) are missing a big opportunity here!

I'm Working as Fast as I Can!!

A compelling thought from Peter Cochrane - people have become the bottleneck in any continuing productivity gains from technology - and he has some very good reasons why. (see Peter's post here). I think we would all agree that simply increasing processing power simply is not going to help, since that's just in the machine and does nothing to help the human side of the process work faster, and just as importantly, better.