The Knowledge Garden a reality.

I have been reviewing one of the early books that I had on web based information management systems. It is called "Managing Knowledge - A Practical web-Based Approach" published by Addison-wesley in 1999. You can probably only find this now in the seconds stores of Amazon or Alibris.

The was based on the work that was done at JDE to create what they called the "Knowledge Garden"What I love about this book is that it is short, (about 107 pages), practical and puts together the relationship of people, content and technology. Nice to see that people come first, after all it is us who deal with the content to make value.

The two key learning's that I got from this book were:

1. The process they used to determine the key areas to work on, and
2. Breaking everything down into a 90 day action plan.

The first part consisted of choosing a single business cycle that can be improved. Yes, that seems like business process improvement doesn't it. What was interesting in the book was that they narrowed down the business cycle to a manageable chunk, with a rider that you need to understand the objective of that business cycle before you start.

As well as identifying the business process the team at JDE then identified the content key to the success of the business cycle, then they mapped the people that need or use this content. The identification of the content as part of the cycle became their Information leverage points. Identifying the people relative to the content and the process then enabled them to key the key stakeholder requirements in a simple and relevant way.

And what is truly amazing all this was built using web based technologies and therefore in '99 was mostly hand crafted. Great work guys !