I like human interest stories and so I was immediately drawn to Chua’s article describing the disparate emergency actions in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Katrina hit New Orleans in August of 2005 and Rita occurred only a few weeks later. This was a great study in knowledge management: knowledge creation, knowledge reuse; and knowledge transfer. The response to Katrina was abysmal and a few weeks later when Rita came barreling towards the gulf coast, immediate and swift action was taken based on what the government had learned in the recent past. Officials learned from Katrina that people should be evacuated when storms were approaching. Houston and surrounding areas were immediately evacuated when Rita was approaching. Unfortunately, those who evacuated Houston were stuck in an epic traffic jam and ran out of gas. They were left stranded on the road in devastating weather conditions without food or water; many people died. Ten years later when Hurricane Harvey was approaching Houston, the knowledge learned was to tell people to shelter in place. I remember the responses on social media blaming people for staying in their homes because society had forgotten that a mass evacuation was not really possible from a big city with few traffic arteries.
I was so engaged by Chua’s article about Hurricanes Katrina and Rita that I read Chua’s article about customer knowledge management (CKM) and Starbucks. Chua says that corporations use three CKM strategies to manage customer knowledge: management of knowledge for customers; management of knowledge from customers; and management of knowledge about customers. Management of knowledge for customers is top down from the company to the customers such as Starbucks online menu. Management of knowledge from customers is from the bottom up and speaks to customers speaking to an organization. Lastly, “management of knowledge about customers refers to CKM strategies that organizations use to manage knowledge flow among customers”. Anecdotally, I don’t drink coffee, but I am always tempted by Starbuck’s winter seasonal beverages such as their Toffee Nut Latte; Chestnut Praline Latte; Peppermint Mocha; Gingerbread Latte; Christmas Cookie Latte; Caramel Brule Latte; and Eggnog Latte. These all sound delicious. Speaking with a coworker, I found out about Starbucks “steamers”. For those not in the know like me, these are simply steamed milk with the flavored syrup (not on the menu in their stores). I don’t drink milk either. But I was intrigued, so I went to their online menu and discovered a bizarre typo regarding their winter drinks. It said, “as the days get longer” drink our delicious winter beverages. In the northern hemisphere, days get shorter during winter. I wrote corporate to point this out and nothing happened. The typo sat there for several weeks before the website was changed.
The last article that I read for this blog post was The Information Society: From Fordism to Gatesism: The 1995 Southam Lecture. The author states that our communications have shifted (and this is a 20+ year old article) from Fordism, an old fashioned idea of how factories communicate information to a more modern idea of how knowledge organizations such as Microsoft communicate knowledge.
Chua, A. (2007). A tale of two hurricanes: Comparing Katrina and Rita through a knowledge management perspective. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58(10), 1518-1528.
Chua, A., & Banerjee, S. (2013). Customer knowledge management via social media: The case of Starbucks. Journal of Knowledge Management, 17(2), 237-249.
Tremblay, G. (1995). The Information Society: From Fordism to Gatesism: The 1995 Southam Lecture. Canadian Journal of Communication, 20(4). doi:https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.1995v20n4a891
J.A. Valentine 
If you think about it, the winter solstice occurs on December 21st. For the northern hemisphere, that is the shortest day of the year. Winter temperatures lag the sunshine by about 2-3 months because of the heating aspects of the sun. So naturally the shortest days lead, later on, to colder temperatures.
I also read Chua’s article about the hurricanes and was struck by the fact that at least some of the lessons from Katrina were incorporated into the checklist – order the evacuation. The lesson from Rita is that the Governor needs to designate some of the highways as one way only, some I touch on in my posts “Bandwidth” and “Adages…”
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One of the interesting things about the Chua and Banerjee article is that it highlights how social media is used not just to manage social media but also to engage with social media users, and that as a result, this results in social media users contributing to the organization’s knowledge about itself. A cynical view might be that although it serves to encompass these users, this also treats users as tools to serve the organization’s bottom line. So, interesting and problematic, perhaps?
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