Month January 2006

My New Role: Chief Knowledge Officer

Sandro Groganz 2 Comments

I have been appointed Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO) at eZ systems. Some of you might go “Uh, CwtfO???”, so here is what Wikipedia has to say about the CKO role:

A Chief Knowledge Officer is an organizational leader, responsible for ensuring that the organization maximizes the value it achieves through “knowledge”. […] CKO responsibilities include such things as (1) developing an overall framework that guides knowledge management, (2) actively promoting the knowledge agenda within and beyond the company, (3) overseeing the development of the knowledge infrastructure, and (4) facilitating connections, coordination and communications.

That’s quite a nice description. One special thing about eZ systems is, that it is an Open Source company, thus the borders between internal and external communication often do not exist. In fact, an Open Source company is just as much about an open communication as it is about open software.

This is actually the part I am most excited about: to explore the potentials of open knowledge management, which includes the eZ systems team just as much as the developers community, the partners, etc. In an Open Source ecosystem, knowledge management is very much a joint effort of all actors involved and can only follow a bottom-up approach.

With the CKO role, eZ systems is the only Open Source company I know of with a dedicated role for managing its knowledge and that of the whole ecosystem. It shows that eZ systems is serious about its slogan “Share your Information”.

If this all sounds too abstract to you, stay tuned, as I plan to write about concrete KM projects and their results in my Weblog.

James Blunt in Concert

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I have seen and heard several Pop concerts where the CD sounds so much better than the live performance. Quite the opposite with James Blunt live: The concert was even better than his fabulous CD, his voice is simply great Рon CD and live. Although he only played roughly 1h+, he deeply impressed the audience in B̦blingen/Germany at January 21st 2005.

I am really happy that Pop can still be more than Britney Spears!

If there’s a James Blunt concert close to you, go and hear him!

New Community Site ezpublish.de

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The German-speaking eZ publish community teamed up to create http://www.ezpublish.de, where you can find a forum, articles and a weblog.

I wrote a guest tutorial about designing eZ publish which describes for beginners how to customize the CSS and templates.

Those of you speaking German are invited to contribute, e.g. by being active in the forums, writing articles or blog entries. This page describes how to contribute.

Spaghetti with Shrimps, Zucchini, Tomatoes

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If you like seafood, this one is easy to prepare and tastes very well:

  • cook spaghetti
  • cut a half clove of garlic in little pieces
  • put some olive oil in a pan with a lid
  • always make sure that the lid is closed, otherwise you will not get a natural sauce from the shrimp’s and vegetables’ inherent water
  • let the oil become warm at medium heat
  • fry the garlic 1 min
  • add the shrimps to the pan
  • cut a zucchini in little pieces (1×1 cm) and add it to the pan
  • cut the tomatoes in little pieces (1×1 cm) and add them to the pan
  • add some basil to the pan and some lemon juice (no sault, as the shrimps I buy are usually already a bit saulty)
  • serve with the spaghetti
  • put some paremsano on top

LinuxTag with "Information Web" Track (CfP 3 more days)

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The LinuxTag 2006 will have three focus topics, one of them is “Information Web”, which comprises CMSs, Wikis, Weblogs, etc.

If you got something important to say about this topic in English or German: the Call for Papers will end this Sunday, January 15th – only 3 more days!

After organising last year’s OscomTag subconference at LinuxTag 2005 together with Markus Nix, the LinuxTag organizers asked me whether I would like to lead the team preparing the Information Web track this year. After contacting some of the OscomTag 2005 speakers, we got together a great group of 10 people:

I am very much looking forward to enjoying this event from May 3-6!

Winter in Biberach

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I live in a tiny little village called “Bergerhausen”, which is part of Biberach. We had quite some snow lately and here are some freezy cold pictures.

Shadow on the snow: my wife and me.

View from my home office onto almost all of Bergerhausen.

That’s the house we live in, right where the windows in the roof are.

South-eastern view from my home office at the winter morning sun.

Knowledge Commodities

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To understand the difference between commodity products from the industrial and those from the knowledge sector means to understand the main difference between the industrial and the knowledge society – and why Open Source is cutting-edge.

Serving the Mass Market

First of all, when talking about a commodity, I think of a product for the mass market. Many software applications have indeed become commodity products, e.g. a well-known operating system. In respect to Open Source software, being a
commodity has been identified as one of three key factors for success.

Quantity or Quality

Software is a knowledge product, when you compare it to industrial commodities, e.g. doormats, is there any difference? The answer is that industrial commodities are physical goods and each new product will take resources to manufacture it. Hence, you always encounter the trade-off between quality and quantity with industrial commodities.

Quite different with software, as this is a virtual product. Software can be copied for almost zero cost, but developing it is a complex and time-consuming task. There’s actually no trade-off between quality and quantity when talking of software commodities and physical goods. The only trade-off concerning knowledge commodities like software is between quality and time.

Copy/Time vs. Optimization/Time

Concerning industrial commodities, there’s a copy-per-time ratio, because the amount of products you can create, is limited by the time it takes to manufacture each product. On the other hand, knowledge commodities have an optimization-per-time ratio. There, you don’t have to invest time to create copies of the product, instead, you can invest your time into making the product better.

Optimizing the Optimization

Due to the optimization-per-time ratio of knowledge commodities, the key to success for a software company is that it optimizes its optimization processes. Knowledge companies have the fear to become mentally lame and not agile enough to compete. In other words: they should take care of their potential to optimize the optimization-per-time ratio.

One measurable example would be more bug fixes in shorter time, but still, this would not say anything about the quality of the patches. High quality expectations need to be a natural part of every knowledge company and its organizational form and company culture needs to support every single employee to live up to these expectations.

Ecosystem of Optimization

Open Source companies and projects provide an open ecosystem to gain maximum optimization of their software commodity products, e.g. by bug fixes and new features contributed by third parties. In proprietary companies, the ecosystem is rather closed and they need to rely on internal resources mostly.

Now, the next question would be, whether the open or the closed ecosystem of optimization is more efficient and competitive? Let’s deal with it in another blog – this one is already long enough.