How Google News was created ...

This is a story of how breakthrough new products can emerge from the most unlikely of places.

‘After September 11th, one of our researchers, Krishna Bharat would go to 10-15 news sites everyday looking for information about the case. And he thought, why don’t I write a program to do this? So Krishna, who’s an expert in artificial intelligence, used a web crawler to cluster articles. He later emailed it around the company. My office mate and I got it, and we were like, this isn’t just a cool idea for Krishna. We could add more sources and build this into a great product.

That’s how Google News came about.’

Marissa Mayer, VP of Search Products & User Experience (as quoted in Fast Company, March, Page 79).

I like this story for a number of reasons:

1. Breakthrough ideas, insights and products often come about by accident. This is not to say that many stage-gate, formal processes are not useful but their importance is over-rated. What is more important is to have creative, passionate people that are willing to try new things.

2. Creative organisations like Google (rated the world’s most innovative company) are places and spaces where not only great ideas are produced but there is a culture of idea receptivity. In my work with leaders I constantly stress the need to encourage idea production at the same time as idea openness. An open door policy does not always translate to an open mind policy.

3. Google also has a policy of encouraging its engineers to spend 20% of their time on working on things that interest them. The actual percentage is not important nor is how it is implemented of much more value is the notion that people work at their creative best when they are passionate about what they do.

What are you passionate about?

4. Creativity is also found at the most unexpected of places, people and times. The lesson? Don’t make any assumptions about who you should invite to a meeting for example. Have the experts mix with the newcomers and see what happens.

What is Knowledge Management? A definition & KM faq !!!

Knowledge is a tool to achieve strategic objectives of any organization.

Why we should manage our or organization's knowledge?

To identify or define knowledge management we must answer three questions.

1. What is the knowledge in the context of the organization?
2. What are the strategic objectives of the organization?
3. What is required to be done to facilitate learning, innovation and sharing to achieve the above objectives?

Any system, which can address all the above issues we can call it knowledge management. We can't create a platform to address the third question without knowing the strategic objectives of the organization. Similarly we must try to identify the knowledge of the organization and then design the tools to answer the points.

What is the knowledge in the context of the organization?

What knowledge today the organization has in terms of its tacit and explicit knowledge to perform its day today works? We may go for a knowledge audit to identify it. Here care is to be taken that eighty percent of the organization knowledge is tacit. A knowledge audit will identify the knowledge inventory of the organization and a knowledge map can be created. This would facilitate in identifying the future knowledge requirements of the organization to achieve its strategic objectives.

What are the strategic objectives of the organization?

Any knowledge Management system has to address the strategic objectives of the organization. Future knowledge requirements are to be planed to address those goals or objectives. The chief knowledge officer ( CKO ) and his / her team has to create or design tools or platforms to facilitate learning, innovation, sharing to achieve those strategic objectives. The simple question to ask is “What we want to be ( or achieve) in future? What knowledge is required to achieve that? How to acquire that knowledge?

What is required to be done to facilitate learning, innovation and sharing to achieve the above objectives?

What tool to design to create a platform where knowledge can be generated to achieve future objectives of the company. Here it is very common that we end of with a IT solution but any tool must address the above issues. Type of business process, people issue and other environment is to be considered while creating a
platform. Some standard tools like Community of practice (COP) can be deployed in a manufacturing company. COP does not require IT much unless it is a virtual community. IT plays and important role in creating virtual community where members are distributed geographically in a wide area.

Let us now define knowledge management.

Knowledge Management is a system to facilitate learning, innovation and sharing to achieve the strategic objectives of an organization.