Poremba Consulting
Street address
San Francisco, CA Zip
415 819 9660


Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 02:29:32 -0700


Mr. Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net
The Welch Company
440 Davis Court #1602
San Francisco, CA 94111 2496
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Subject:   Notes for initial meeting

Rod:

As usual, I've been up late. Tonight I've been reading through your SDS records on the web, and organizing my questions and comments for our initial meeting later this morning.
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If you have time or interest, here's what I've got so far.

http://www.dynamiclist.com/?list_id=3824

I still plan to meet with you at 10:00a.
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See you then,

Sincerely,



Mike

Michael Poremba
michael_poremba@yahoo.com




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Dynamic List Home

User Lists
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Introduction

Outlining and collaboration
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SDS and POIMS

Updated: May 22, 2002 022847
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Rod Welch's system (SDS) and process (POIMS) for knowledge management.

  1. Questions for understanding SDS and POIMS [5]

    1. Can POIMS be adapted for other tool sets? For example, what would an effective disipline look like if the tools were from MS Office or Groove?
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    2. How much of one's daily communcation is relevant for SDS? With all the communication that people do, some decision must be made as to wether somthing goes into SDS or not. Or is the expectation that everything goes into SDS?
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    3. Can SDS serve as a living record, or only as an environment for managing oneself? Organizational memory contains agreements. Do SDS and POIMS allow maintenance of shared agreements? SDS tracks meeting notes, action items, scheduling, contacts, and what else? Agreements (such as requirements specifications, technical specification, and contracts) are an important part of organization memeory. How do these documents fit in with SDS and POIMS? The OHS/DKR effort is largely about collaborative documents. [2]

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      • How are meeting summaries used in SDS? Summaries serve as concise references about agreements. What would a group do with, say, meeting minutes in SDS?
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      • Agreements change over time This suggests the need to easily modify agreements, perhaps in a collaborative manner. A trail of static information is almost useless to a group of people. The current version must be coherent and easily accessible.


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    4. Is SDS useful for collaboration? Seems geared towards a single user. The records I've seen are all compiled by Rod. True, the records include e-mails from others, by they are posted by Rod. True, Rod send out other e-mails linking people back to the SDS record. But Rod is the only Communication Manager. This is not the type of collaboration the OHS/DKR team is pursuing.
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    5. Have dense SDS entries, like what I've been reading, been created by someone besides Rod? » Who else has produced with this tool the same thing Rod has produced? How important is Rod's personality is accomplishing this type of record keeping? Some degree of personality shift is required to do a good job at this.

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  2. My perspective

    1. in the case of POIMS, the methodology seems more important than the software My own shallow experience with outlining on the web showed me that discipline is essential to pacticing knowledge management. Rod's development of POIMS illustrates this, in a much more sophisticated and mature manner, from his experience using SDS.
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    2. KM tools are merely solutions to usability problems with existing tools used for documentation and communication » Each tools offeres different solutions to usability problems. These solutions are essentially features for structuring, relating, presentating, and editing data.
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    3. What's the size of potential market for products like SDS? If it the job of Communcation Manager is so specialized, then what's the size of the audience for this software. Imagine entering the pencil business in the days of scribes. Scribes would be better off making their own quills than buying.
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    4. A subset of bloggers might be interested » People who write a lot AND have management responsibilities (or, at least, collaborative group interactions) are a target audience for an SDS-like product.
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    5. Value of SDS records My own experience in reading through the SDS records is that a great amount of knowledge is packed into these essays and interconnections. I'm impressed. Perhaps this is due to Rod's personality and skills more than the capabilities of SDS.

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  3. Concerns about establishing wider acceptance of SDS/POIMS

    1. The average user is not looking for SDS and POIMS. They don't currently take the time for planning and reflection, how will they change? I feel people will not be willing to spend the time required for creating such dense records of information. The amount of analysis and reflection put into the writings and links is not affordable to most business people. Meaning, it will not benefit the average manager. Indeed, this is a new management practice that appleals to a narrow audience and requires significant buy-in and investment from the individual user and from their organization.

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    2. Is SDS in regular use by anyone besides Rod? Morris implies that the system has not been successful, except with its devoted creator. Tight, interwoven, knowledge has side-effects [3]

      • Consistency and grounding A huge benefit of a tightly woven record, like SDS, is that there is something to go back to later. A reference.
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      • Bias Viewpoints tend towards those of the authors. Those not contributing may feel outside the group because the record is so skewed.
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      • Inertia Flexibility might be lost, in that new opinions must overcome whatever inertia already exists. How can brilliant sparks of insight be prevented from being lost amidst the noise?

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    3. Marketing POIMS [reference to record on 011213 relating comments from Terry Winograd at Stanford...]

      http://www.welchco.com/sd/08/00101/02/01/12/13/143329.HTM#OF6F

      Simplify, simplify, simplify. Is it fair to say that the software is useless without the methodology? Gotta do a better job of communicating the methodology. Start by simplifying it.
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    4. Takes more than 20 minutes to learn I presume part of this is process-related learning, another part is usability. How much of each?

  4. Curiosities [3]


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    1. What ever happend to Traction? Twisted Systems is still on the web, but there's nothing going on publicly. What happend to their product?

    2. What happened with Jeff Conklin's call for papers on collaboration? Did he receive submissions and review them at the conference? What was the outcome? Where are the resources?
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    3. How did this conversation with Morris end? » Scroll to the bottom of the page.

  5. Usability of SDS [4]

    1. When was the current UI last worked on? When hyperlinking was improved in 1997? It was slightly modified in early 2002.
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    2. What are the major usability problems with the existing system?

    3. What consturctive criticism has been sought or received for improving usability and UI?
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    4. Usability examples [4]

      • Links are hard to follow » What ever happened to the idea of inline content and transclusion?

      • DOS-based application Are there current thoughts on implementing a web-based UI? Or is creating a Windows version the only intention?
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      • Readability of web output in poor Multiple fonts are used on the web output--harder to read. Black numbers on the left are distracting.

      • Searching web output I recon that to make full use of the content, you must be using the DOS application. I've wanted to be able to do full text search. Or does Google index every single page of the web output?


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  6. Questions to self [3]

    • Compare/contrast SDS with other tools How can tools such as blogging systems, MS Office or Groove be used to start applying *some* of the principles in POIMS?
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    • Is using SDS fun? If so, how can this be leveraged to promote its use in advancing KM?

    • Is it ten times better than other techniques? If so, how is that improvement apparent to the user? And at what expense in commitment? Are the personality-sensitive skills needed, or is it just user training?