Knowledge Management is a discipline often accused of running programs whose success is essentially unmeasureable. This then leads to accusations of "not delivering value", and sometimes even the scaling down or elimination of KM programs within the organisation as another "failure".

One of the problems with developing high-fidelity printed content (e.g. in PDF) is that it is not very accessible, despite all the improvements in PDF accessibility.

In fact, it is an Australian Government requirement that websites should never use PDF as the sole means of communicating important information -- for example, a fact sheet.

But if the printed fact sheet is still needed, are there any alternatives to developing the content twice: once in Adobe InDesign, and once for the web?

As anyone who has been around the traps on the Internet knows, comments pages are brutal; as often as not home just to devastating insults rather than insight.

But Eunoia is a new book by Christian Bok in which each chapter only uses one vowel.

I find it amusing that even those in this BBC article who think the book is a bit of a w*nk can't help but be alliterative in their commentary.

1. Design your XML documents so that they are well-suited for processing by your applications today.
2. 1. If your XML is intended to be a transport between relational databases, design your XML to be flat, with easy mappings from XML to (relational) database tables.
   2. If you intend to use and manipulate the XML data directly, design easy XPath access points for XSL transforms and XQuery application.
3. Eliminate nonessential markup (tags). Only use tags that are actually used by your applications today.
4. Identify likely future expansion points to the XML. For example, would new data members be captured by adding a new attribute? A new element? A new namespace?

GuruJ.net is now almost fully back online, complete with a shiny new theme and upgrade to Drupal 5.

The last thing to do is to retrofit my "links" module to work with Drupal 5.

A response I have submitted to the editors of Federal Computer Week:

While not denying the benefits of effective collaboration, calling it "Knowledge Management 2.0" is an unfortunate designator that vastly undersells the scope of Knowledge Management activities.

Yes, KM should include programs that foster collaboration. But KM programs can go far beyond this.

KM can facilitate continuous process improvements through the observation and managed intervention of knowledge exchange patterns within teams and groups. KM can improve /how/ people think about the knowledge they acquire and how they subsequently act upon it.

UPDATE: Fixed some errors which prevented a true vanilla install.

Drupal has a very powerful framework for building Content Management applications, but it's also got some great features for general web application development. In particular, Drupal 6 comes with a very powerful Forms API which greatly simplifies data capture and validation.

I've been working on ways to remove the dependency on core Drupal modules (particularly the 'node' module, which just isn't necessary or useful in some cases) and produced a patch which can be installed using the Drupal "profile" method.

JavaScript has been a feature of browsers since way back in 1995. Often derided as a "toy" language, JavaScript used to be seen as an optional extra -- where turning it off would have no great detrimental effect on the workings of a site.

How times have changed.

Now, after the AJAX revolution, JavaScript is not only vital to the proper functioning of web pages, but the performance of the JavaScript engine is vital.

I'll give you a simple example. Try using the new Google Sites using IE6 and then try again using the Firefox 3 release candidate. The difference is simply astounding.

While any documented, open standard is better than none at all, I have to agree with Rob Weir when he says:

[Does] a standard ... [represent] reasonable engineering decisions, not just for that one application, but for general use? Or in ISO terms, does it represent the "consolidated results of science, technology and experience"? ...

[L]et's take a look at how OOXML and ODF represent a staple of document formats: text color and alignment. I created six documents: word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics, in OOXML and ODF formats. In each case I entered one simple string "This is red text". In each case I made the word "red" red, and right aligned the entire string. The following table shows the representation of this formatting instruction in OOXML and ODF, for each of the three application types:

At a meeting a few weeks ago with Fujitsu representatives, I heard about their BToPPe framework. This is a system that can help to ensure that companies understand all relevant dimensions of investments which are made.

I hadn't heard of this framework before, but found it interesting:

Essentially, it's just a SWOT analysis, but focusing the enterprise on overlapping domains that may impact on the potential success of a project. For complex issues, it may be a good tool to examine possible impacts in a structured way.