3rd Sight, how appropriately named. A program for Ah Geok to invade our privacy
I'm sure those of you in the IT field will know that there is this thing called knowledge management which actually is quite a big word.
It can mean how the organisation wants to harness and retain the knowledge and experience of existing staff so that these will not be lost during staff turnover, and most often than not, this will result in some form of systems to physically capture these electronically.

The difficult part is in determining what constitutes knowledge and what is the best way to store, sort and retrieve these in a way that it makes sense to others.

Sometime ago, Ah Geok decided to implement this and so spent millions on a system that is not really used by anyone. The reason why the initiative fails are listed below, at least the way I se it:

Not user-friendly
To successfully check in a document, we need to have multiple clicks of the mouse. And then we have to either scan our supporting documents or convert them into PDF format before we can check these in as well, additional clicks. Its not hard to see why the usage is low, cuz most of our clerical staff are middle aged aunties who find this whole IT thingy a nightmarish experience.

Seeking approval
Sigh... still need to get approval before we can check in documents. I mean shouldn't we determine what constitutes as knowledge? Simply ridiculous that we need management's approval on what is knowledge. An insult to our intelligence, really...

So then, how is Ah Geok gonna justify the money spent? Oooo, she instigated her minions to boost up the stats by having a competition among various branches on the check in rate. So as usual, no one wants to be in the last position and so people started checking in documents like crazy. We have like over 1,000 documents checked in in like a week!

So after this mad rush, things started to cool off a bit and then some smart ass suggested this stupid thing called 3rd Sight. This is supposed to be some add ons to the existing KM system in that it can store and manipulate emails and establish some relationships on the contents/ contacts etc.

Sounds cool right? Not when Ah Geok now decides that it is compulsory to check in all outgoing mails. So those not work/ knowledge related mails will be checked into our personal folders inside the system, which is made available to only the system adminstrators, which is another way of saying she will have access to everybody's email.

So effectively, what started out as something pure and innocent like retaining knowledge becomes an invasion of privacy. Welcome to the darker ages of Ah Geok's Department.

p.s. I'm crossing my fingers that we will not be msn-less one day.