Personal knowledge management (PKM) is something that we all do all the time, but often take for granted. I suppose, in that respect, it’s not unlike the other 2 KMs, Big KM and Little KM. There is always (has always been) some kind of KM going around, but until it was brought into the foreground as a distinct topic we did not approach it intentionally. Intentionally, at a gross level, PKM is about the tools that we use and strategies we employ that make it easier for us to identify, locate, and process knowledge.
“Being unconscious about your tool set is unconscionable.” — Tony Karrer
The idea of personal knowledge management was initially related to personal information management. Perhaps some of you recall the the days when those devices, called PIMs, did not have telephones built in! In 2003-2004, Tom Davenport conducted research with the Information Work Productivity Council to look at the current state of knowledge workers with respect to their handling of personal information and knowledge. (See Thinking for a Living for more detail.) Addressing managers of corporations (for whom productivity is a business issue), Davenport summarized the key learnings as:
Individuals need to recognize how much of their time and productivity is tied up in PKM (the average user in the survey spent 40% of their time each day using technologies to process work-related information)
Companies need to realize that their workers are wasting lots of time trying to manage information and that better personal information management means greater organizational success
However as recently as March 2008, a LexisNexis productivity survey found that “sixty-two percent of professionals report that they spend a lot of time sifting through irrelevant information to find what they need.” What applies to knowledge workers inside corporations applies equally well to the community of independents.
Note that this study just preceded the explosion in the availability of Web 2.0 tools.So we have a lot more tools to manage our information but don’t appear to be much closer to becoming more productive. But productivity isn’t the only benefit of personal KM, especially as our world and our knowledge becomes more social and more fragmented.
I reviewed some of the great work done by colleagues on the topic over the past 5 years, and found some common threads.
Distinguish Skills from Tools
Tools enable us to augment our skills, or (as Steve Barth puts it): “PKM tools help an individual knowledge worker to automate, accelerate, augment, articulate and activate the information and the ideas that he or she works with every day to perform their job.” A critical set of seven skills (catalogued by Paul Dorsey at Milliken and written up by Steve) begins with Accessing Information and Ideas and concludes with Securing Information, and in between describes the skills of organizing, evaluating, analyzing, collaborating around, and conveying information.
So what are KM “tools?” Paper is still the key tool of preference for many; it supported information work for many centuries before the advent of the computer. But today we think more in terms of desktop productivity and personal content management applications (document processing,spreadsheet applications, file folders, desktop search, concept mapping tools, Internet browsers, specialized applications, and so on) and Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, RSS feeds and filters, microblogging, and so on).
(Tony Karrer’s Tool Set 2009 is a great place to start if you want to think from the purpose outward; that is, don’t start with the tool. This link is also the source of the quotation from Tony, above.)
Tool Selection is a Matter of Personal Preference
Tools are only as good as the skills that exist or evolve to make the best use of them. File folders, for example, are an excellent PKM tool, but people who don’t have experience or training in categorization may not find them very useful. These people (or people who can’t always remember their own classification schemes) may rely exclusively on a good desktop search tool to retrieve content when they want it.
People are not Born Knowing How to Use Tools
This is a phrase I use often when I talk with clients who are fretful about the adoption of their collaboration platforms. Training is not the only answer, of course, but the integration of the tool into the knowledge processes, and adequate time for users to become comfortable with the tool is a big step. (I am probably showing my age here, as I should probably say — in light of Gens Y and Z, that “people were not always born knowing how to use tools.” Sigh.)
The more tools we have ready to hand as we work, the more productive and effective we can be. But all of knowledge workers know that we probably use only a fraction of the features of any one of our favorite tools. One of the best PKM practices I know is to set aside even 10 minutes a day to explore a new tool or a new feature of a tool that you already use. The payoff can be huge.
Distinguish the Private from the Social
Harold Jarche has developed a model for thinking about PKM in terms of the internal knowledge activities (sort, categorize, make explicit, retrieve) and the external activities (connect, exchange, and contribute). He goes on to list which social tools support internal activities vs. external activities; for example he aligns the use of social bookmarks (deli.cio.us and Diigo) as follows:
Social
Bookmarks
Delicious
Diigo
Sorting
Categorizing
Making Explicit
Connecting
Exchanging
(It’s a nicely done piece of work. You should go look at the whole thing.)
This idea of connecting and exchanging as part of personal knowledge management has been well developed by another colleague who has been writing about PKM for years, Dave Pollard.In his talk at KMWorld last year, he described the shift in knowledge management as:
from content & collection to context & connection
In this sense, all KM (big and little) needs to think about personal KM at the center. On the content side, everyone manages their own content which (in Dave’s words) is “just-in-time and harvestable.” Another key component is to set mechanisms in place for people to connect. Canvassing for expertise is one mechanism — “old fashioned” Listservs are still good for this; expertise location capabilities in social networking platforms represent a slightly new wave — as are processes and mechanisms for telling and sharing stories about experiences and sense-making methods.
The Leader’s Net Work and Personal Net Work
The great shift in the world of KM has been the recognition that knowledge about people and context can be more important than content knowledge. To ensure that knowledge flows — is created and accessible — across an organization requires work on the part of the organization’s leadership. What I call the leader’s “net work” are those sets of activities that ensure that strong networks will support individuals and ultimately the organization:
Network intentionally and practice network stewardship
Leverage technology
Create the capacity for net work — encourage people to think about “context & connection” and make it easy for them to build their networks (with and without technology)
I will have more to say about “personal net work” at the Boston KM Forum on October 22 (which is all about personal knowledge management). I’ll write about that here as well.
Conclusion: The 3 KMs
Selecting one of the 3 KMs is not an either/or/or. As in economics and practically everything else, it depends. Different purposes, the target audience, and available resources will guide the approach that is used. To recap:
Big KM is about top-down, structured and organizationally distinct “knowledge management”
Little KM is about safe-fail experiments embedded in the organizational structure
Personal KM is about access to tools and methods to ensurethat knowledge, context, bits, fragments, thoughts, ideas are harvestable
In this last, the role of the corporation in supporting KM then becomes facilitating personal content management, providing methods (and training) to support information processing, and providing a rich and integrated infrastructure for employees to use the personal content management and the social tools that make sense for each them, their teams, and their communities.
By now, everyone has probably heard of Google Wave, the innovative communications and collaboration tool that’s been turning heads since it debuted last May. With its rich feature set, it definitely seems to have a promising future, both for consumers and the enterprise. However, the thing that struck me most about Google Wave is that it’s not just an application, but a powerful open platform.
This means that APIs can extend its functionalities even more, in ways faster and more creative than if Google decided to keep it inside a walled garden. Since its launch, thousands of eager developers have been given an access pass for testing, and the company has held events to sustain interest in the platform, as well as showcase what the community has done so far. Here are some of the more enterprise-friendly extensions under development today from the Google Wave gallery:
Twiliobot. This extension uses the Twilio Phone API to recognize phone numbers in a wave, making them clickable links. If the user selects one of these links, the number is dialed (click-to-call). The conversation can be recorded and transcribed automatically, with the text available for pasting back into the wave. Twiliobot can be further enhanced to include a voicemail manager.
Groupy-the-bot. A wave robot for creating and managing groups using Python. It also has a web interface to make management easier. Administrators can add new groups, remove a group, add someone to a group, remove someone from a group, moderate add request, etc. When finished, this should be very useful for project collaboration.
MediaWiki Wave. Enables you to embed Google Waves inside wikis. Part of an initiative to improve the usability of the MediaWiki engine for editors. It adds Wave’s real-time collaboration, unlimited viewable versioning and WYSIWYG editor to an already popular platform.
Checky. A clean and simple checklist gadget. It takes its inspiration from Basecamp’s to-do lists, supporting drag and drop. Checky offers just a glimpse of how PIM (Personal Information Management) can be integrated into Google Wave.
Apart from these, there are even some games and musical extensions being created. It seems the only limit to Google Wave is the developers’ imagination. During the Google I/O Conference, the team behind Google Wave was clear that they wanted to involve the developer community early so that by the time the service is ready for public use, a good number of extensions can go along with it. Perhaps this is part of their learning experience with the Chrome browser, and I think it’s a great decision on their part.
Intranets have been with us for many years now. Stephen Lawton was the first to coin the term in an article he wrote for Digital News & Review in April 24 1995. Essentially, he observed that people were creating small websites inside their organisations to share knowledge and communicate information. Nearly 15 years later, many of us continue to use intranets in this way and have not yet moved beyond the publishing of static information because we assume that this provides sufficient value to the modern knowledge worker.
I think this mentality was born out of a whole generation of workers who have effectively grown up in their professional lives with Microsoft Office styled products — the idea that, much like print publishing, documents are worked on by individuals and then released to others once it is finished and officially approved. KM guru David Gurteen suggests that this “create and publish” behaviour is also likely to be the result of early knowledge management efforts to bring structure to information in the organisation and make it searchable and easily accessible to employees. Unfortunately, as Gurteen highlights, too often employees didn’t see any value in this for themselves and, as a result, such systems failed [1].
The essence of this failure of early intranets to bring true communication value into an organisation and to its employees is perhaps bound with the lack of recognition and understanding of how knowledge is created and information is shared by people. It’s also the factor that underpins Web 2.0’s success where traditional intranets have tended to fail. That is, that information is shared through social networks, from person to person, and that there are a number of roles in that social exchange.
With Web 2.0 tools being assessed for their worth to enhance intranets Forrester’s Social Technographics is a timely reminder of the social exchange — people’s behavioural requirements for sharing information — needed for a successful intranet, and further, a modern digital workplace. Microsoft’s newest offering, SharePoint 2010, which is about to released soon, reflects this trend. We first saw blogs and wikis integrated into this offering a few years ago, helping to meet what Forrester terms “Creator” and “Critic” rolls. While the upcoming version will debut free online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote for the production of all types of content by Creators [2], making a step closer to a truly online, digital workplace, out-of-the-box it is still unlikely to meet the needs of “Joiners” or “Collectors”. [3]
Joiners need to feel they belong, what Maslow would call Social and Esteem needs. As such, Joiners need to be able to maintain their personal profile as it fits with the behavioural and cultural norms displayed by the group. Collectors’ need RSS feeds, to vote for content they feel adds value to the group, and to add to the way in which information is typically classified (by adding tags to a folksonomy) by the group so that its members can more easily find it.
In embracing the move beyond the standard intranet to an enterprise 2.0 world, the world of the digital workplace, more needs to be done to understand the real human reasons why we’ve failed in the past to deliver technology to support people at work. In reality, this requires organisations to come to terms with the ways in which people create knowledge through the social exchange of information. It means embedding the understanding that a one-size-fits-all approach is unlikely to work into the organisation’s IT strategic plan. It demands acknowledgment that embracing technology variety will enable people to be naturally drawn to those tools that best suit their personal communication and interaction needs, based on their Maslow-described motivations, their group’s communication and behavioural norms, and their individual role preferences for creation, joining, critiquing, collecting or just spectating.
M
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1. Gurteen, D. 2008. KM (2.0) goes social. The Gurteen Perspective, Inside Knowledge. 29 Feb, 11, 6. Online at:
2. Marks, O. 2009. Anticipating Sharepoint 2010: Making Enterprise Foundations More Flexible? 13 Aug. Online at: http://blogs.zdnet.com/collaboration/?p=816
3. Not to mention that the user experience inherent in opening up a Word document means that the most logical place for a Critic to read and rate the content is inside the document, but the most useful place for someone else to see that rating is before the document is open
As many of you will know, there’s been a debate going on for some time now about the relative effectiveness and the ROI of formal and informal learning (formal learning being structured-and-scheduled courses and other measurable forms of content delivery, informal learning being the myriad ways people exchange information that becomes incorporated into one’s perspective or ways of doing things).
This debate has been intensified by the growing presence and uptake of collaborative platforms which seek to engage peoples’ social tendencies and mimic the ways they interact with information and each other to get things done.
The points made by these three executives from T Rowe Price, Sun Microsystems and Booz Allen Hamilton aren’t new to those of us who have been following and facilitating the uptake of this new generation of knowledge work tools and methods.
They do, however, underscore how clear it is that the dynamics spawned by a half-decade’s experience with social computing and social networks will undergo a massive migration into the knowledge workplace of the near future.
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Learning Executives Discuss Social Learning at the ASTD 2009 International Conference
I’d saved a wonderful story by Michael Idinopulos of Socialtext about how moving from a shared space to private offices (What my Granddaddy Taught me about Information Flow). In the days before computers, brokers worked in a large open space in which information moved vary rapidly from one end of the floor to another. When the office layout was changed to give more people private offices and people began focusing their attention on their PCs, people “…lost the ability to communicate, and nobody had the slightest idea what was going on.”
You can’t read the story, of course without catching on that the open office floor in which information moves in waves is a lot like Web 2.0. From our PC (and Mac!) silos, we are finally liberated and can catch the breath of new ideas rolling over our shared spaces. This is happening, outside.
Inside, adoption of Web 2.0 tools is not so much of a wave as a trickle. Inside companies, managers think about technologies in terms of security (bring it inside) and cost (it costs money to maintain something inside, so we can’t let people use free tools. [Hat tip to John Bordeaux for pointing to the irony in this story.]).
Inside, we deal with a series of waves, incremental introductions of technology and Web 2.0 services and look for the best way to encourage adoption. I’m guilty myself of responding to clients’ reason for lack of adoption as “the culture” when it can often be the manner in which the new tool was introduced, or a lack of attention to the user interface/experience.
Adoption and culture being very much on my mind, I was interested to see Hutch Carpenter’s post in the Social Computing Journal Enterprise 2.0: Culture is as Culture Does. He argues that most companies are ready for social software at least to the extent that they acknowledge that employees are their most important asset.
He goes on to put together a wonderful graphic illustrating two paths to adoption of social tool pilots. He anchors the flow chart by two decision points.
Defined use case? is the determinant of whether adoption goes in an official or a viral flow. This assumes that a well-defined use case has proven business value and that undefined use cases may not. I agree that for a successful pilot in an organization, the defined “use case” must be centered around teams or groups that are engaged in some joint activity that requires flow of information.
Exceed expectations? is the measurement that occurs when the two flows come back together and employee feedback has been processed. This decision point really implies that there is a funding decision to be made at this point.
Enterprise 2.0: Pilot Deployment Flow
There’s some good stuff in this diagram, and it’s flexible enough for adapting to specific circumstances. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if, at the dawn of the PC era, Michael’s Granddaddy had through to work through the use cases of how PCs would affect the information flow on the trading floor.
Fred Wilson’s “Disruption Talk” begins with the media industry, the changes to which we’ve all watched and experienced as online and empowered individuals have emerged as driving forces and taken power from large institutions.
He proceeds to outline the industries seen as targets for future “disruption”: Consumer Finance, Education, Energy, Health Care and Government.
The presentation is an hour but recommended viewing if you are interested in what’s next.
How does your view of what’s ahead in technology and the industries to be “disrupted” jibe with Fred Wilson’s? Please share your reactions.
Subtitled “Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff” the book is a must read, and especially useful as a primer for those still needing to understand the fundamental changes in doing business as the Internet has matured from Web 1.0 to:
“an entirely new level with Web 3.0- an era that is entirely about innovation and collaboration.” (Foreword page ix)
An excellent overview of the book, in author Clara Shih’s own words, is in 2 parts at the Entrepreneur’s Journeys blog . Not surprizingly the book’s home page is on Facebook and 24 x 5 star Amazon reviews indicate the book’s value.
The book section titles– starting with “A Brief History of Social Media’ through “Transforming the Way We Do Business’ to “Your Step-By-Step Guide to Using Facebook for Business”– reveal the key themes. Reflecting the author’s hands on experience as the developer of FaceConnector and head of Enterprise Social Networking Alliances and Product Strategy for Salesforce, the book is filled with lived experiences of companies using social networking to “build better products, reach new audiences and sell more stuff.”
If there are gaps in the book they reflect the state of the industry. For example, “The ROI of Social” is addressed in half a page (205) beginning:
“Understandably, a large number of you are focused on ROI and might feel frustrated that there has been no clear quantifiable data around ROI”
and concludes suggesting;
“ROI will become much more quantifiable and standardized”.
Have you read “The Facebook Era?” What did you take away?
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