9 posts tagged “km”

The International Herald Tribune has a fascinating piece on how social networking sites are ushering in 'ambient awareness' - a general sense of what the people in your network are thinking, feeling and doing.

This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends' and family members' lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like "a type of ESP," as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life."

One of the main ways that facebook enables this is by the news feed that alerts you to postings people have made. I don't remember facebook without the news feed; it has always been there since I first signed up. But it's one of the features that I adore; a couple of years ago I moved away from the city where many of my friends still live, and facebook newsfeed allows me an insight into the tiny, miscellaneous things they're up to that they would never think to tell me via email or phone.

I haven't yet used Twitter but I think this has persuaded me to give it a try. I particularly like the idea that using tools like this can promote mindfulness:

The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you're feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It's like the Greek dictum to "know thyself," or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness."

(via Green Chameleon)

Dave Snowden has a beautifully neat answer to the old KM question how do we get people to share what they know.

If you have to ask the question then you have probably taken the wrong approach.  In my experience people generally do want to share, but they may not want to share in the manner prescribed by the corporate KM department.  If you ask someone for assistance in the context of real and immediate need it will rarely be refused.  As someone to share knowledge in the absence of that need, or in a form or manner determined by a centralised function then it will nearly always be refused."

This feels absolutely right to me; far more so than when people talk about <shudder> knowledge harvesting.

Interesting post on the Fastforward blog reporting on Tom Davenport and Andrew McAfee's disagreement over the scale of impact that Enterprise 2.0 will have.

I think it's true that some organisations are simply not well suited to using these kinds of tools, or at least not yet - but for those that are ready, and have the culture to support it, they can't fail to see the benefits. And frankly, if I worked in an organisation that was happy to empower its employees in this way, I don't think I'd want to then go backwards and work for someone else that didn't.

I also agree with the comments that the next generation of managers, who've grown up using these types of technology, will take these ways of working for granted. My recent experience of working with people who are still at university is that they've no fear at all of new tools, they just want to know 'how can I use this to make my life easier?' - and if there isn't a way, then they'll invent one.

Phew... nearly there... these are the remaining posts that caught my eye in the last couple of months. Starting with the one that made me open my eyes the widest:

•    Dave Snowden on the death of KM? 

•    The Chief Happiness Officer on why the key to getting people to share knowledge is getting them to care; that’s right, he’s talking about Passion Sharing. Does that mean that all the Knowledge Managers out there are going to become Passion Managers instead?

•    Denham Grey sharing his thoughts on top KM principles  

•    Great Fastforward post from Euan on why searching the Intranet isn’t going to give you what you want. I may well be stealing his ‘grumpier days’ response for future use…

•    Patrick Lambe of Green Chameleon with a great post on how to kill a knowledge environment with a taxonomy. 

•    It is a truth universally acknowledged (well, almost) that “Knowledge management projects focused mainly on technology will fail”. So why do so many organisations still routinely fall into the KM technology trap? Don Cohen has some ideas…

•    Fantastic post from Dave Snowden (inspired by Euan Semple's post) on why an idealistic approach to KM is doomed to fail, versus a “naturalising approach” which will actually deliver some benefits. No knowledge management project should be allowed to begin without everyone involved reading this first. 

•    The fabulous Kathy Sierra on the dangers of making your demo system too glossy – because the better it looks, the less people will understand about when it’ll be ready, plus you’ll get far narrower (and therefore less helpful) user feedback.   

Both posts from the Fastforward blog, which is giving me a lot of food for thought. Too bad I won't be able to join them in San Diego...

•    Thought-provoking post from Bill Ives on whether Enterprise 2.0 will transform Enterprise KM. He points out that although the productivity gains are potentially enormous, systems won’t be enthusiastically adopted whilst people fail “to see any benefit for themselves from the transparency” and fear being “spied on”. I think this neatly encapsulates two of the main barriers to people adopting new ways of working – ‘What’s in it for me?’, and the fear factor.

•    Rod Boothby on how using blogs and wikis as ‘worksites’ might increase adoption and solve a raft of business problems. I think the benefit that might hit home most for many CIOs is point 3 – Radically reduce email. It seems to me that more and more ‘corporate knowledge’ is buried deep in people’s email accounts, never to be retrieved or shared. Between that, and the problem of ever-growing email accounts, requiring ever greater amounts of storage, why wouldn’t an organisation want to cut down on email and make people’s information and knowledge more visible?

•    Dave Snowden on why it’s not a great idea for organisations to try and ‘roll out’ communities of practice.  I find this particularly interesting because I think successful communities each have a distinct character, depending on their members and purpose, and by trying to organise them to fit into a corporate model, you run the risk of squashing the life out of them. On the other hand, if you are trying to seed communities in an organisation, you have to start somewhere. I think Dave is right when he says “you need to create an environment in which people can play with multiple tools, moving some of the results to a formal environment, when and if needed.” However, he also says that “With the growth of social computing and familiarity with those tools this [is] easy to achieve” which may be true if you have a user community that’s familiar with those tools – but I’m not sure if it holds true of more traditional user communities who are less assured about using social computing tools.

•    Great post from Kevin Anderson, rounding up Meg Pickard’s comments on the difference between a community and an audience. He then goes on to talk about the difficulties of moderation, and dealing with trolls. Although this is talking about ‘open access’ communities rather than ‘behind the firewall’ communities, I think it perfectly highlights one of the major fears that people – particularly in corporate organisations – have about experimenting with social computing; what if it ‘spirals out of control’?   

One of the reasons that I wanted to blog is to keep track of all the great links I keep collecting (and then losing – in an exemplary piece of personal knowledge management) on a daily basis. Many of these are either related to knowledge, information or social media in one way or another.

I marked a number of thought-provoking posts as new in my bloglines account absolutely ages ago, and then didn’t begin my blog til this month. So here they are, in no particular order, but guaranteed to either inspire, make me go ‘hmmmm’, or make my brain hurt a bit.