Eric Mack On-Line

This has been a busy summer.  After 26 days on the road in July, with very few breaks in between, it feels great to be home at last. I'm even more thankful than before that I get to work from home most of the time. My month began in Ojai with The David Allen Company staff meeting, followed by a week at the NASA Conference on Knowledge Management, back to Ojai to work with David's team again, and then to Long Beach to work with my colleague and Personal KM expert, Steve Barth on our upcoming presentation for KM World. Yes, it's true, I celebrated my birthday with Steve. The folks at The Brain sent me an interesting birthday card in a mind map and Michael smelled cake. Fortunately, I was able to link up with my family at church between locations. My wife kept me going with calls and quick meetings to exchange suitcases. (Thanks, Kathy!) Fortunately, Kathy and the girls were able to join me in Pasadena for the NASA KM Conference and the JPL Tour.

I have no plans to repeat a month like this one anytime soon -- I don't know how road warriors like David Allen or Jason Womack do it. It's certainly not a lifestyle I would want for myself. I'm glad it's over. I have some travel coming up, but no marathons for a while.

I tried to blog the NASA KM conference and managed to get 30 posts. [Click on "Knowledge Management" to see all posts for that category.] I still have about 20 draft posts from the other events during the month along with several podcasts, including Jason Womack, Marc Orchant and Kelly Forrister. (Marc and Kelly celebrated July Birthdays with me, as did Bruce.). I even have a few podcasts and posts from my Boston trip to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. [Click on "Enterprise 2.0" to see all posts for that category.] I'll try to review these and post them in the coming week. So, if it seemed like my blogging was sporadic or that I dropped discussions mid-stream (e.g. a discussion about GTD 2.0), I did.

I look forward to rejoining in the conversation.

It's great to be home again.

PS. Hat tip for fellow productivity blogger, Dwayne Melancon, for his excellent post on the Eagle Creek Pack-it folders. All of my shirts survived, almost wrinkle free.

I saw this sign outside the children's nursery at our church this morning...


Our children are past the nursery stage but this would have been a motivator for Kathy and me to pick up the girls from the nursery promptly following the service.

How about you?

I spent the day today with Knowledge Management expert, Steve Barth. We're preparing for our upcoming KMWorld presentation: Knowledge Worker Productivity: Strategies & Techniques.

Now there's a unique birthday card!
Upon checking my email, I found that Shelley and Harlan had sent me a birthday brain:



Seeing my name misspelled, I Skyped Shelley to ask if she spelled my last name as "Mac" on purpose.

Continue Reading "A new brain and cake for my birthday!" »

After looking at the new version of The Brain 4.0 in greater detail I decided that there were a few colleagues and associates I really wanted to see this product. I know that I would learn as much from their review of the product as they would from my introduction. One of these people was Michael Sampson.  Michael and I set up a web meeting with Shelley Hayduk and Harlan Hugh, founders of The Brain Technologies, Ltd.

In typical Sampson-style, Michael's posted a good review of the product and his thoughts on The Brain.  If you are interested in associative mind mapping or the visualization of information, Michael's review of The Brain 4.0 is worth a read.

You can also listen to my podcasts with Shelley and Harlan on The Brain, here.  (part one and part two)

It's hard to hide from the web.

Thank you, Michael, my friend, for your kind words and birthday greeting.

Latest KM Research Trends & technologies
NASA has an agency-wide initiative to use Persistent Immersive Synthetic Environments for Knowledge Transfer and Collaboration. Four drivers;
1. Mission support (Modelling, simulation, collaboration)
2. Outreach (public engagement)
3. Education
4. Internal Training

Case study of Pratt Whitney-Rocketdyne on Systems Theory in KM. Their successful KM program built on the four phases of KM: Knowledge creation, storage, transfer, and application. Five stages of their KM implementation: Determine state of processes, Identify & classify existing KM systems, and ... oh well, go read my notes from earlier...

Virtual Collaboration, success through failure
Estelle shared best practices in collaboration. (See my write-up) Things to come: Blogging, expert locators, science-based facebook, interoperability and standards.

Creating a learning organization at NASA
1.
You know what? I'm tired. Please read the presentations and see my blog for comments.

The NASA/JPL International Workshop on Managing Knowledge for Space Missions at The California Institute of Technology has just concluded.



It's been a great week with a lot of information and discussion. Personally, I've learned a great deal and I plan to take what I've learned and put it into practice with my clients. A big thank you to the researchers and presenters.

What are the ethical and legal implications related to KM? That's what we are here to discuss. I'll my best to capture salient points.

Knowledge Management needs to be addressed from three perspectives
- Leadership
- Purpose
- Process/Infrastructure

Continue Reading "Legal and ethical issues in Knowledge Management" »

Latest industry estimates are that between 30 and 40 million Americans currently participate in persistent immersive synthetic environments. For comparison, only 26 million Americans golf.

Persistent Immersive Synthetic Environments for Knowledge Transfer and Collaboration.

The next three sessions will focus on the use of virtual worlds, in this case, Second Life, as a tool for knowledge transfer and collaboration. What makes this particularly interesting is that the presenters are not here in the auditorium. They are presenting virtually and these sessions will be presented simultaneously in real life (here, at Caltech) and also in Second Life.



Continue Reading "Second Life for Knowledge Transfer and Collaboration" »

The room is quiet and the panelists have just been introduced, so let's go...


Panelist opening comments:

Continue Reading "Emergent Trends in Academic Research in KM" »

I must have arrived early for today's virtual KM presentations in Second Life. If you want to attend the conference with me, meet me at NASA's explorer island. I'm the guy in jeans and a white shirt. (I know, my wardrobe isn't very imaginative.)



Anyone seen Jet Burns?

Tonight, after the NASA KM conference, many of us went to dinner at Burger Continental, a local hangout for CalTech folks. Wendy joined me, Jeanne Holm, David Pender, and others for dinner.



Later in the evening, Paul Caraccioli, Program manager of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center Propulsion System Department (PSD)* KM System came over and sat down and started to share with Wendy some of the problems his group is facing getting the engines for the Lunar lander to work. Wendy listened attentively, as she's very interested in engineering and space exploration. What a treat, thank you, Paul, for making engineering real and for inspiring a future engineer.

* Long title; they deal with engines - fast ones

We finished early today, so our host, Jeanne Holm is moderating an impromptu Q&A session. I'll blog this, live.

Jeanne has turned off to the digital projector and she's now walking to the front of the lecture hall. An aide has just wheeled an interesting looking device onto the stage and handed Jeanne a white stick. I think she's about to use an analog cognitive capture tool...



Yes, she's using the white stick to leave artifacts on a black surface.

Continue Reading "NASA KM Conf. Day Two. End of day discussion" »

Chris Bunk, Knowledge Systems Engineer for of Ares Corporation, up next; he's presenting on applying semantic technology to the practice of knowledge management.

Disclaimer: Semantic technology is a tool, not a solution. great slide

Continue Reading "Applying Semantic technology to KM" »

We're back from the fire drill. Celeste J. Merryman, a psychologist and usability expert, is presenting a paper describing the evolution of an Intranet at NASA, called Inside NASA..

Continue Reading "Into the future: the evolution of a NASA Intranet" »

Jeanne Holm, Chief Knowledge Architect for NASA/JPL shared the story of Knowledge Management at NASA and gave us an overview of the KM architecture.



NASA has 80,000 people (including  18,00 civil servants) and about 140,000 people involved. NASA Projects can last a very long time. Her first project, Voyager is a 50 - year project. How do you sustain knowledge across a project with that kind of lifetime? That's what KM is all about

A framework for knowledge sharing:
PEOPLE - Enable remote collaboration; support communities of practice; reward and recognize knowledge sharing; encourage storytelling
PROCESS - enhance knowledge capture; manage information
TECHNOLOGY - Enhance system interoperability; Utilize intelligent agents; Exploit expert systems and sematic technologies

NASA KM Strategy

• Sustain knowledge across missions and generations.
• Help people find, organize and share the knowledge we already have
• Increase collaboration and to facilitate knowledge creation and sharing

Continue Reading "NASA's Knowledge Management Architecture" »

Teresa Bailey, Senior Technical Librarian, jet Propulsion Lab, California Institute of Technology. presents:

Prusak on KM:
- You do connection
- Reflect - nothing happens in knowledge without reflection
- Understand that people learn from one another through stories

Stories at JPL originated as a way to get people in the door [to the library; the library, though centrally located at JPL was not easily accessible.]

Teresa was inspired by literature on storytelling (see slide for references)

Criteria for storytelling at JPL
Story must be told by someone sharing personal experience at JPL.
Be creative
make program inclusive to all aspects (or departments) at JPL

"Tell us your story" Story hour at JPL initially began in 2000 as a way to do knowledge capture and transfer. No one knew at the time how big it would become.

Continue Reading "Cultivating an organizational culture of storytelling at JPL" »

KM at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), presented by Hiroaki Tateshita, KM Expert at JAXA.

As JAXA gets ready to send a spacecraft to the moon later this year, there are increased initiatives to capture, share, and reuse knowledge within JAXA.

Continue Reading "Knowledge Management Activity at JAXA" »

[Attendees, if you have information to add or corrections, please post a comment or send me an email.]
Dr. Marcia Gibson, NIA, and Dr. Bob Baxter, CIBER, an adult education and learning expert and a historian are presenting.



Here to discuss NASA Engineering Safety Center (NESC).  NESC stood up after last shuttle disaster and pulled in key experts from 15 disciplines of NASA to work together to determine what they could learn from their mistakes.

NESC Academy was put together to capture knowledge from the top people in each area of discipline. Charter is to take that information and share it with the younger NASA engineers and scientists. target population is folks who have been at NASA from 1-10 years. Currently have 22 disciplines represented.  www.nescacademy.org.

Will share lessons learned in KM at NASA.  A successful KM approach

How do they know their KM program is successful?

Continue Reading "Lessons learned in capturing human knowledge" »

Panel: Emergent Trends in Sharing Knowledge

Today's panelists are all KM practitioners. (Tomorrow, we will cover the same topics but from a researcher perspective.have research
Linda Holmes, CIO, Canadian Space Agency
David Licher, Northrop Grumman
Kiho Sohn, CKO, Pratt Whitney Rocketdyne

First up: Linda Holmes, CIO, Canadian Space Agency

Continue Reading "Panel: Emergent Trends in Sharing Knowledge" »

The NASA Process Based Mission Assurance Knowledge Management System (PBMA-KMS).  Presenter: Christopher Bunk, ARES Corporation,

Christopher gave us an overview of PBMA-KMS.

Notable points:
Technology as an enabler, not a driver.
Video Nuggets as a knowledge capture and sharing tools
Publicly (and freely) available (http://pbma.nasa.gov)
Knowledge Registry (Includes Competency management system)- find out who knows what and how to reach them
Secure workgroups - can host sensitive but not classified information
Real-time remote meeting and conferencing capabilities
[Look at his metrics slide to an example of how one might measure KM success.]

Key lesson learned:
KM Systems do not survive without a heavy does of the human element.
Programmers should not be driving the KM system. (Don't even let programmers suggest the tools. Instead, identify the problems and find the tools to match.)
Subject Matter Experts should be driving the system. (They want to share, but often don't have time. Find a moderator and make it fast and easy for them to do so.)
Don't buy a tool, buy what it does.

Continue Reading "Collaboration in a Global World, Pt 2." »

Emerging Trends in Inter-Firm Collaboration; lessons learned form the literature
First up: David Pender, University of Adelaide, Australia.

Abstract: It is widely accepted that collaboration, whether between individuals, work groups, or, indeed, organizations, plays an important role in the process of knowledge creation and maintenance.

"Knowledge is in the eye of the beholder." Context is such an important part of the knowledge itself. [Collaboration can help provide the contextual structure.]

Technology that supports the people in a KM system is important, but it's the people that makes the whole thing work.

Things like knowledge and innovation doe on have a corporate existence! They exist within the individual.

Alliances
- Complex organizational forms
- Incomplete contracts
- Contingencies cannot be prespecified in contract

Two distinct paths
- Emergent processes (from common interests, environmental changes)
-Engineered (triggered entity)

As the operating environment becomes more discontinuous, the more impossible it is to do everything in-house. (Limerick, Cunnington, & Crowther, 2002)

Continue Reading "Collaboration in a Global World, Pt 1. " »

"NASA has not demonstrated characteristics of a learning organization after investigators observed mistakes being repeated."  - A statement read from the last Space Shuttle disaster report.  (I wonder how many companies would fall into this same group?)



Presenting: Paul Caraccioli, Program manager of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center Propulsion System Department (PSD) KM System. (Long title; they deal with engines - fast ones.)

Paul shared a case study of their KM deployment and the lessons learned.

MSFC PSD KM Strategic Plan

(see slide - sorry; too fast.)

"IT is great, but for our KM strategy to work, what we need to bring about a culture change within NASA."

Continue Reading "Does your organization learn from its mistakes?" »

"When a [space] vehicle blows us, all you have left is the paper." For this reason, we need to think about how we are capturing and organizing our information so that we can learn from it.

Integrated IT Architecture can be leveraged
-To enhance search/data mining capabilities
- Knowledge put to use on new designs

Problem:
Process for retrieving related records and documents is tedious, time consuming, and inaccurate.

The Connect Concept:
Enable the user to retrieve records and documents related to a task or an issue. Context sensitive work.

Continue Reading "Connecting related records and Documents in KMS" »

So did Eric Mack and Charles White, JPL's subject matter expert on virtual collaboration. (Charles presented earlier on NASA's Second Life initiative.) We had a great conversation about his vision for virtual tech as a teaching and learning tool as well as a vew of how we might use these technologies at our desktop. Think presence awareness by avatar.

I wish I had brought my camera to lunch with me. For lunch, we dined on regal gold-trimmed china in a majestic wood paneled banquet hall of the CalTech Athenaeum. Apparently Albert Einstein's apartment was on the floor above.

Inspiring.

PS. In case you are wondering about your tax dollars, we had turkey wraps, potato chips, salad and cookies. Still, it was a nice meal with ample opportunities for discussion on collaboration and knowledge management.

The NASA Engineering Network (NEN)
(Manson yew, Douglas Hughes, Keri Murphy, Gena Henderson, Jeanne Holm of JPL, presenting.)

NEN began as a vision for knowledge sharing:
Capture knowledge
Organize and disseminate knowledge
Enable reuse of knowledge.
Facilitates creation of knowledge

Michael, you will be pleased to know that there are many Macs in use here at the conference. Of course they have the same problems connecting to a projector as PCs. So much for engineering...

NEN Integrates a content management system, a portal, search engine, and engineering community.

Key difference with NEN is that content is authoritative and actionable. Everything's been vetted first.

Key Knowledge Resource: engineering databases.

Shocking discovery: Much of this knowledge is still siloed.

If we are going to get back to the moon, we need to know what we know...

Writing interfaces to legacy databases. Some systems are so old that they have to be exported and then imported into new systems. This to achieve standardized interface to information.

Key Knowledge Resource: Subject Matter Experts
SMEs are our best knowledge resource, but sadly they are often not easily discovered.
We know the people here know what we need to know but we don't know who we need to know to know this.

Continue Reading "Creating a learning organization at NASA - the NEN" »

Estelle Dodson, of NASA Ames Research Center, NASA Astrobiology Institute

NAI has 16 teams spread across NASA, researchers and academia. Started out with PolyCom multipoint video in 1998, It bombed. The technology was not ready. That story has changed now.

Yet another KM definition: Knowledge management is about knowing expertise, who to talk to, what to ask.

Communities of Practice (COP)
It's about the people; technology should enable the people, not the other way around.

New Approached and ideas
Project-based collaboration
Surveys
Needs assessments
Virtual Office Hours (Connect all tools for an hour each week and allow people to come and explore - a safe sandbox to play in.)
One-on-one and group training
Cheat sheets - a great tool, along with IM to connect people and answers
Adoption planning
Virtual seminars and meetings - expected that most folks would watch archived meetings; found that many came for the live experience.
...

Continue Reading "Lessons learned in KM and virtual Collaboration" »

Jeanne Holm, Charles White, and Tom Soderstrom, of JPL, present on the use of Second Life and other immersive worlds for public and educational outreach:

An emergent trend: partners that are even more virtual than ever before. Virtual worlds, avatars, and the like allow us to create new social networks in which to get things done together.

Traditionally, a social network involved friends and family. That's changing. Now, social networks reflect the growing on-line realm of virtual worlds, on-line spaces, [blogs] and virtual friends - people we know because of someone we know.

Cross Generational and Cultural Boundaries
1930-1950s
Focus on society
Friendships forged through adversity
1960-1970s
Focus on community
Friendships forged through identification with a cause
1980s... [I'll come back and update list]

Social networks - why should professionals and their organizations care?
Social networks are critical to organizations retaining and enhancing their critical knowledge yet have been left to grow organically.
Social and intellectual capital is developed through reciprocity.

NASA is moving, in a big way to using virtual worlds as a teaching and learning tool, as a tool to engage with people around the world and to capture knowledge. It's expected to be a key way to engage with the virtual workforce.

Continue Reading "Engaging Partners in a Virtual World" »

Why the push for KM in Aerospace and, to a lesser degree, in business in general?
Let's look just one problem in Aerospace: As of Jan, 2007 50% of aerospace engineers are eligible to retire...  Point made. (There were more excellent points made, I chose this one.)

A common framework used by academics and KM practitioners breaks into four stages:

Knowledge creation
Knowledge Storage and retrieval
Knowledge transfer
Knowledge application

This presentation looks at KM in light of systems theory - a System is an entity which maintains its existence through mutual interaction of its parts. Citation: Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Research presentation focused on case study of Pratt-Whitney Rocketdyne and how they successfully addresses the area of Knowledge Application - founded on Systems Thinking.  KM Initiative founded on systems thinking. $2.5M invested in KM initiative, $25M savings realized.

Continue Reading "Systems Theory and Knowledge Management Systems" »

I'm sitting in a room of rocket scientists and KM experts from around the world. How cool is that? Some of these people are dealing with really big issues: how to track, capture, share, and reuse knowledge gained from the International Space Station. It really is rocket science!

Jeanne Holme shared the genesis for this workshop, how different KM groups and practitioners came together to create this event.

Knowledge Management, while often driven by technology, is as much if not more about people and culture. This workshop will provide a forum for peer-to-peer exchange of KM experience and best practices for knowledge capture and reuse for space missions.

Continue Reading "Opening Keynote and welcome" »

This week, I'll be attending the NASA/JPL International Workshop on Managing Knowledge for Space Missions at The California Institute of Technology. I'm sitting in the main auditorium, wondering what great minds have met in this room. As a young student of computer science, I often thought about attending CalTech when I was younger so it's fun to finally be here. It's inspiring.



The conference theme is Delivering Information for Action, which addresses two of the three areas I focus on at ICA, Information, Communication, and Action.  For this conference, I'll be participating with a different set of lenses - I'll be watching and listening to hear what concepts can be applied to my current area of interest: Personal Knowledge Management. This is an academic conference with a number of papers and topics being presented. Time permitting, I'll summarize the sessions I attend.

I'd like to extend my gratitude to Jeanne Holm, the Chief Knowledge Architect at the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for her efforts in organizing this conference and for allowing me to attend.

One of the neat things about consulting for The David Allen Company is that I get invited to participate in some of the staff meetings and attend some really nice banquets. Tonight, we dined at the Ojai Valley Inn where we got to see a "pink moment."



Situated in an East-West orientation, the Ojai Valley provides for awesome sunsets. Most remarkable is how the low rays of the setting sun paint the tops of the mountains surrounding the valley, causing them to briefly glow purple for about 10 minutes -  the "Pink Moment."

Continue Reading "Ojai Pink Moment" »

To kick off the 2007 summer staff meeting at The David Allen Company, David chartered a motorcoach to take us all to see the new J. Paul Getty museum. One of his clients works at the Getty and invited David and Co. for a private tour of the museum. That was fun in and of itself. Inside the lobby of the museum, I was delighted to see Tim Hawkinson's Uberorgan.



Unfortunately, the organ was out of service, so we did not make as much noise as the title of this post would imply. I did manage to find this video on YouTube to give you an idea of what we did not hear:



Continue Reading "GTD Summer Camp: Making noise at The Getty Museum" »

Having recently returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where it seems everything was something 2.0, I've been thinking a lot about my own tool kit of methodologies and technologies that I use to stay productive accomplish results, personally and for my clients.



As I prepare for my upcoming presentation with Steve Barth at KM World: New Fundamentals of Knowledge Worker Productivity, I realize that while the current iteration of GTD has been a transformative tool for personal productivity for me, it doesn't go far enough for the way I work today...

The business world is a much different place from what it was just 15 years ago, when I was first introduced to GTD. The pace with which decisions are made and the information needed to make those decisions has increased to the point where we are expected to be connected at all times (omnipresent) and aware of all of the information (omniscient) that we need to know. Of course, that's not possible for us mere mortals. Nonetheless, the expectations remain.

Continue Reading "Do we need a GTD 2.0? If so, what would it look like?" »

I've written before that I was disappointed that Lotus Notes wasn't more ink friendly. Well, I'm pleased to report that I'm using Notes on my new Lenovo X61 Tablet PC with Vista. Nothing's changed on the IBM Notes side, but the TIP implementation in Vista makes Notes MUCH easier to use with a stylus. On the flight back from Boston, I processed several hundred emails in Lotus Notes on my X61 Tablet - entirely in slate mode. The improvement and my change in perception about Notes as an ink enabled app is due to two things: first, the ink support and the TIP implementation in Vista are very good. Second, the Lenovo X61 Tablet is a great machine.  Nothing like my other tablet. The pen is like writing in paper and the size and button layout makes it a dream to use. You might even say I'm about to become YABHTU again.

Andre Rieu and his little guest 3yr old Akim.

Recorded live with Johann Strauss Orchestra in the Nederlands.

The Mack Family has finished another year of homeschool!

Hat tip to those web sites that are smart enough to do a ping lookup to determine that I'm buying from North America and to show "United States" when I press "U" for country.

Fellow productivity blogger, Dwayne Melancon, is blogging about how we need to declutter our lives, not only physically, but spiritually. Good points. Have a look.

We're so handsome, it's really hard to tell us apart. People still have a hard time telling us apart, even today.



Happy birthday, Bruce!

The Brain as a networked nonspatial interface to your thoughts: In this second installment of my interview with Harlan and Shelley, Harlan takes us on a tour of his brain and answers many of my questions. He even promises Lotus Notes users a treat before the product launch!

This podcast is an audio tour of a visual product, an interview Harlan Hugh and Shelley Hayduk of The Brain Technologies at their offices in beautiful Marina Del Rey, California. Also joining me, was my colleague and KM expert, Steve Barth.
 
As I've written before, Personal Brain is an amazing tool for mapping your brain. You might even call it a true mind mapping tool. Listen to the podcast and you hear why I think so. I plan to make The Brain a key component to my personal knowledge management toolkit along with Lotus Notes, MindManager, and other excellent tools.

You can listen to or download the second part of this interview with Harlan and Shelley over on my Notes on Productivity site.

Podcast: Part two of my interview with The Brain creator, Harlan Hugh.

I learned a very painful lesson today about sitting on your wallet and I'd like to share it with you and perhaps save you the extreme pain and a visit to the doctor's office.



When I got off the plane in Boston for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, two weeks ago, I was barely able to walk. The pain was almost unbearable - so much so that I even called my wife and mentioned that I might need her to fly to Boston to help me return to California. My roommate, Michael, got me some Motrin and ice packs and I rested for the night. By morning, I was feeling a little better, and I was able to make it through the conference with small recurrences during the week. I was even able to blog the conference with Michael.

Continue Reading "Leg Pain? You may be sitting on the problem!" »