The KIT -- Knowledge and Information Technology -- No. 219

The KIT ─ Knowledge & Information Technology
No. 219 - 2 July 2018

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A Little Piece of KM Advice

We recently provided some "pay it forward" advice to the young and small team at a startup company that helps grocery stores reduce waste by dynamically reducing the price of items that are approaching their sell-by date. After hearing that knowledge management is one of cébé focus areas, one founder wrote:

"We are currently taking the approach of spending a little time each day discussing how the current system is working and how we can improve it, and that has been working really well so far. When we begin to grow, however, I will definitely be reaching out to get your thoughts on how we can structure our KM better."

Note how unusual it is to hear young people, so early in the life of their company, be aware of the need to capture knowledge. Many Fortune 500 companies would do well to be equally concerned about capturing lessons learned. Encouraged by their awareness and attitude, we replied:

"A tiny bit of advice about your daily discussions. It's important to retain those findings for future reuse. To make things simple, one potential way to structure them is to classify them into 4 buckets/quadrants:

things that work well and that you should continue,

things that you don't do and should introduce,

things that you do and should stop doing,

things you don't do (or stopped doing) for good reason and should avoid reintroducing by mistake."

Do you practice this (and, hint, do you need some coaching doing this)? Write back and let us know.

Kubernetes as a Children's Book

Since the emergence of cloud-based services, a whole specialized vocabulary of architecture concepts has emerged: containers, Docker, etc. The main goals of these constructs are to achieve virtualization, portability of applications across clouds, isolation in a multi-tenant environment, and to avoid cloud vendor lock-in. Kubernetes (koo-burr-NET-iz) is an orchestration environment for containers, but what does that exactly mean? Matt Butcher has created a rather corny but effective YouTube video, The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes.

Planning a Studious Summer?

Among the currently most popular ACM SkillSoft online courses, we selected the following ones as most likely to be of interest to the KIT readers:

The above links will take you to the ACM member login page before proceeding to the course page. Non-ACM members can also purchase the courses or get a free trial. Click here and enter some words from the title in the search box.

Seen Recently...

"One business unit president [...] recognized that he did not understand the Internet as well as he should have. [...] Therefore, he found the brightest young person under the age of thirty in the organization, and he asked that employee to serve as his mentor on e-commerce issues. The talented young person spent the next several months schooling the head of the business. When Jack Welch heard about this technique, he asked all the general managers at General Electric to find young mentors who could teach them the ins and outs of the web."

-- Michael Roberto, in "Know What You Don't Know" (Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009),
explaining the "reverse mentoring" concept pioneered by GE in the late 1990s

"Unfortunately with XFINIFY WiFi OnDemand we are limited to the support that we can provide."

-- "ComcastJessie," an employee of the company, stating the obvious

in reply to a user's complaint about poor service, and managing

to misspell the XFINITY product name in the process.