Huh.  I shall need to get this book. 

KM KISS. From 'Managing Professional Intellect' by James Quinn, Philip Anderson and Sydney Finkelstein, a great definition of Professional Intellect: (I'm paraphrasing here)

• Cognitive Knowledge (Know - What) - basic mastery of a subject
• Advance Skills(Know - How) - ability to apply skills to real world situations
• Systems Understanding (Know - Why) - This is what separates the leaders. It involves the deep knowledge of cause and effect that manifests itself in intuition.
• Self Motivated Creativity (Care-Why) - This the motivation that drives people to be the best.

[How do you know that?]

This reminds of the five levels of knowledge (learning? thinking?) that I learned about in junior high--we had a particularly theoretical teacher named Mr. Wallis who thought understanding what kind of knowledge we had was as important as the things we knew themselves.  As an aside, he was the teacher who got me into computers, teaching me how to program in Basic on a TRS-80.  heh.  heh.  heh. 

Anyway, back on topic.  I don't remember what this system was called, but the levels of thinking were/are Recall, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, and Evaluation.  Everything we did in his class had to be defined by what kind of thinking we were doing and how that showed how well we understood the information.   I wonder how that would relate to Quinn/Anderson/Finkelstein definition of intellectual capital...it sort of sounds like each level of intellect relates to the investment the professional is making in the thinking process.

Nigeria Vote: Peace Through Tech? from [Wired News]

Nigerian officials realized they needed to modernize their system after a trial run of the voter registration process in late September. The trial run resulted in riots when people were told that local officials had run out of registration forms . . . registering to vote will now require each prospective voter to undergo a fingerprint scan, using technology from U.S. security firm BioLink.  The prints will be stored on a BioLink Authenteon server where each will be compared with all previously scanned prints to prevent individual voters from registering more than once and using multiple identities. . . "Our solution was planned long before the riots erupted and INEC experienced the voter registration form shortages," BioLink CEO Gene Chayevsky said. "Our technology does not address the problem of collecting registration forms from all voters. We'll just prevent multiple registrations by (the) same individual under different names."

It is very interesting to me that the voter registration in a place like Nigeria is more high tech than in Virginia.  Not that I'd want to be fingerprinted in order to vote, but still...it's very interesting.

Just saw this article (ITTraining - It's the people) referenced from Serious Instructional Technology.  I'm tempted to quote the entire thing, but instead I'll just say that I'm amused by the progress of "knowledge management" at "Big Media Corp."  It's all just so familiar, and almost reassuring to know that law firms aren't the only places having trouble with the concepts of knowledge management.  A few choice lines from the article, though...

There seem to be four key elements – IT systems, processes, learning and people.  But with knowledge management marketed largely from an IT perspective, this is the starting point for many companies.   And as often happens, the systems-based marketing message set expectations that systems alone could solve all of an organisation’s knowledge management issues.

Problem number 1, by far, is the ordering of these elements...IT systems should be the last item on the list, not the first, and those systems should be responding to the processes used by the people.  Instead, as the author notes, the IT system is often seen as the first (and only!) step, not a logical addition to an existing system. 

Along these lines, I have a great page from Law Technology News pinned to the bulletin board on my office.  It's two articles called The Five Biggest Mistakes by Big Firms, written by Sally Gonzalez and Joe Bookman.  The articles don't relate specifically to KM issues, but are relevant here nonetheless.  My favorite two points are this mistake ("Failing to analyze and understand current problems before developing remedies") from the Gonzalez article and this warning ("Don't enter into technology projects without clear definition of problems") from the Bookman list.  I keep the article in plain view as a constant reminder not to make those types of mistakes; in an in-house IT department, it is unfortunately a regular occurrence for someone to find an amazing application or technology that just isn't going to be used by the attorneys, regardless of how amazing it might be.  I'm trying not go head down that road again.

Microsoft warns of 'critical' flaw in Outlook Express. Vulnerability is 58th security alert issued by Microsoft this year [InfoWorld: Top News]

GRR.  Information about the patch is here.

Oops...a New Zealand student retitled some tracks on a promotional CD using an internet based media player.  His, err, less-than-flattering titles were then distributed to some of the symphony patrons, who were understandably less than pleased.

"He received the NZSO promotional CD, put it into his computer and then he was prompted to put the titles in," said Constable Todd Webley, to whom the student unburdened himself when the titles became news.

"He's on his girlfriend's computer, and he was mucking around being stupid and thinking it's just going into that computer alone and not realizing that it's going to be sent into cyberspace."  

Kiwi Symphony's Errant Scat Music. from [Wired News]

Yeah.  Oops is right.  I'm not familiar with Gracenote, the database service that the student was connected to, but wouldn't any online service like this prevent visitors from altering something as significant as the titles of the music?  By default, and not only when the artist requested it??  Their website homepage had no reference to this story.  I'm not surprised; it would make for rather bad press.