My team is on leave, including my IT support. So, it's my time to do the techy workwhereby my colleague Connie usually does it.

One of the TM called me up and mentioned that she can't "register others" for a course, hmmm what was wrong with the batch registrations. So, I went into the role management module and noticed that the under CanManageOtherRegistration, Add to Roster, Remove from Roster and Edit was not selected. So, I experimented first by selecting Edit but TM cannot do batch registrations. So, then I selected on all three and it works!

Click on the image below to view the settings.

Since the LMS is up, the password problem issue suddenly pops up and I'm feeling like I'm back to square one before the systems is enhanced. Well to comfort myself, I can always say that this is normal as we are still in the enhancement mode and there are bound to be teething problem after we put the application to the real production environment.

Well, I intend to talk about the LMS enhancement later in the blog, strictly from a KM perspective.

Now, back to the password issue, I've been using this tool called keepass since 2 years ago. Keepass is an open source software, which means that it is free to use :)



The security feature that comes with the tool is something that makes me comfortable using it. The database is well encrypted using the using secure encryption algorithms known as AES and Twofish.

Another feature that makes the tool handy is that it is portable and can be run on even a thumbdrive. This is made possible by creating a key file in a thumbdrive and keepass will refer to it for authentication before accessing the stored password.

If you neeed further info on the tool and how to use it, just go on and visit the site at http://keepass.info, and if you are interested to know more about how u can use applications from your thumbdrive, go to http://portableapps.com/

Been bz with a few user acceptance testing (UAT) recently. It has been awhile since I last performed a UAT, come to think of it has been 4 years ago since my last UAT.

Not to say that I was happy to be doing it but I was surprised on the manner the UAT which I'm currently undergoing. It seems like the end users were not directly involved in the UAT. I'm the departmental rep, a coordinator like role who translate the business requirements to the software vendor. The real owner of the requirements are the biz users or as we termed it as process owners.

By right it is them to do the UAT together with me since they are the process owners who knows best their business requirements. So, I argued that I need my business people to test the system together with me, the coordinator, but was received strong objections from our technical unit.

So, I just let it be thinking that perhaps I was wrong. Nonetheless I managed to do some research to suppress my curiosity on the subject as well as to self assure that I was correct in arguing my case on the approach of the UAT

So, here are some of the sources I found on the net on the UAT.

Cheerio.

1. “What is User Acceptance Testing?,” http://www.exforsys.com/tutorials/testing/what-is-user-acceptance-testing.html.
2. “Acceptance testing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acceptance_testing.

Oh yes, we're not alone... what am I mumbling about... A couple of weeks ago, sometime in December 2007, had an opportunity to drop by at the Malaysian Employees' Provident Fund's (EPF) Knowledge Fair. My workplace too had a Knowledge Fair in 2006 and we were supposed to have one in 2007 but couldn't as I was shorthanded and over occupied with other projects at the KM Centre (KMC). Thanks EPF's KM officer, Mr  Farris was kind to show me around the fair.

The setting of the fair was made at their headquarters' ground floor lobby. Based on my observation, there were around 10 to 12 booths exhibiting various aspects on KM in EPF. There was a booth showing the various technology EPF has adopted over the years; one that interest me was how storage technology has changed over the years, from the big-o tape to hardisk, from megabytes to terrabytes. I guess why this is important to EPF is that the number of members contributing to their fund is increasing each single day. Hence a big storage size is really important for them. But not as important their PEOPLE!

This was how the EPF team positioned KM. It all began with people as knowledge is about people.  How true... Kudos to Farris and team. Will put more insight on KM in EPF in contrast to my own organisation soon.

Signing off...

Opps.. the title seems intriguing indeed. Yes, I've been missing for so long... Since I returned from studies it has been a rough ride back to work. Especially when some people my organisation deemed us who went to further our studies as "going on a honeymoon", makes it harder to fit in back. Ah well, though I'm no chameleon, I think I did well so far. Yes, I'm down but that doesn't mean that I'm defeated. Yes, it's a war zone here.

The state of KM in my organisation is also resembles the subject of this writing piece. It's down but I don't really think that it's dead. Not yet. The KM unit in my organisation is really short of staff. 2 lower management is full time on projects and much of the unit's administration and reporting job are under their direct responsibility. A couple of executives like myself is torn apart into multiple projects and ad-hoc assignments with little support and guidance from our supervisors.As a result, many task we done blindly without guidance and support from the lower management causing us to get "shot" when the middle management were to review our progress. It may get worst when our own supervisors also to took the opportunity to "gun" us down too in front of the middle managers.

My own reflection here is that, for the practice of KM to flourish, there should be consistent support from the top and middle management to foster teamwork, collaboration, continuous improvement and etc. The path of punishing and downgrading oneself should not happen at all. If it does happen then this may be one of the first signal of a sick organisation.

A lot of people I met when we talk about KM mostly focused KM in large or big sized organisations. Not many spoke about KM in small business and its relevance. Maybe due to the small size, the organisation could easily manage its knowledge. Yes, if its own tacit knowledge and explicit knowlede, yet to some extent! Usually KM implementations are done by developing a KM system or implementing an IT tool for the organisation. This is usually very expensive and beyond the reach of small businesses. As a result, small businesses do not see KM relevant theme for their business.

KM can hekp small business in many ways that do not require them to implement expensive solutions.  Some of the examples of KM job for small business would be:

1. Knowledge mapping - this would include mapping out of the business operational knowledge and flow, knowledge maps of internal resources and external resources
2. Strategic planning
3. Human development
4. Process management

The list can go on and on. But the most important thing for KM practitioners is to provide a balance view of what KM is all about. Which is more than IT, technology and data. It's all about human. If business fail to recognize this, then they fail to recognize their own valuable assets.