Mar 30
Storytelling and Ignorance
In this TED talk, filmwriter Andrew Stanton has an interesting turn of phrase about what makes stories compelling: “A well organized absence of information draws us in.”
Mar 26
Social Media, Empowerment and Serious Research
I had a fantastic time at the AIIM conference in San Francisco last week, and Clay Shirky’s keynote was one of the highlights. This video of a TEDx talk by Ben Heywood of social media sharing site Patientslikeme.com gives a moving example, quoted by Shirky, of the power of social media as a platform for gathering data, and with a research back-end, creating near real-time insight into treatment possibilities as well as empowering patients to deal more effectively with their own conditions. What I think nobody has noticed is the powerful role that a faceted taxonomy plays in this story. Visit the site and see if you can spot what facets are being used to pull data together for deep analysis as well as sharing and self-empowerment.
Underneath this is another emerging trend. We know that social media is being leveraged as a source of data for marketing and market analysis. This case illustrates how powerful it can be in the use of large scale data for new knowledge creation. Crucially, it cannot do this on its own – the formal world of research and the informal world of social media exchanges need to connect. Helping to span these boundaries is where knowledge organization tools like taxonomies play an essential role.
Mar 06
Call for Papers in Technology, Entrepreneurship, Management and Innovation
I’m honoured to be on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Technology, Entrepreneurship and Management published by National-Louis University in Poland. There’s a call for papers now out for three special issues in 2012 – on Technology Entrepreneurship, New Concepts of Management (including KM) and Innovations. If you have some interesting work on the boil, take a look and consider submitting!
Feb 04
Social Internet is the new KM
With great interest I have read Roan Yong’s “Knowledge Management in 2012? Probably Dead”. And yes, I agree to what he has stated: KM got too academic - or always was? And the social web will be what will replace it. Roan’s article triggered more thoughts which are too long to just pack in the article’s comments: there are more problems of today’s KM than to be blown up; and why the social web is KM at it’s core.
Jan 31
The Confluence of Human Resource and Knowledge Management
I will be speaking to a group of HR professionals on the confluence of KM and HR (webpage). I am interested in the intersections of both business disciplines, and how one might support the other in better managing their organisation’s human capital. The choice of topic is motivated by a frequent realisation in KM projects that success is often dependent on engaging - and having engaged - HR colleagues. There are several areas where I think HR and KM can work together.
Jan 25
KM and the Bigger Picture
Waltraut Ritter has a scathing and important critique of KM in general and the MAKE awards in particular, taking some pot shots at some of the participating case studies at KM Asia 2011 in the process (scroll down to the 22 Nov entry).
“Knowledge management practices are often narrowly focusing on internal operations and not addressing larger questions about the nature and sustainability of the knowledge driving the organization. There seems to be a separation of KM from the overall business strategy, a general neglect of addressing the larger questions about an organization’s knowledge and how such knowledge may create societal value beyond a company’s financial gains.” She gives an interesting example from Mars, referring to the ingredients in their product Skittles: “Few of these ingredients have anything to do with real food, and one might argue that the industrial food industry contributes to decreasing knowledge about nutrition and food in society rather than contributing to informed decision-making on food. Could the organization use KM to establish a serious dialogue with customers? Develop ideas and products for a global, sustainable food production?”
Important and difficult questions, connected to the earliest visions of KM back in the 1960s. In 1967 L.K. Caldwell wrote an article for the Public Administration Review in which he asked how knowledge management could help ensure that “all relevant knowledge is brought to bear upon the problems that society needs to solve [...] At the very least, the manager of knowledge needs to discover what science can tell respecting trends or objectives that would be socially harmful.”
Dec 16
How does your organisation think about and share failure?
This talk has so many compelling parallels with KM.
Dec 12
Driving User Adoption for Enterprise Applications
The other day, I talked to a cloud solution provider about their deployment and change management methodologies. From my side, I was curious to see what experiences we can exchange with them, as since 3 years I am strongly involved to drive user adoption for our knowledge sharing platform.
I would like to briefly introduce two methods they have presented. You will see, these are very generic and can be applied in environments of any solutions provider. The first method is looking at how to tackle change and address new user behaviours:
Nov 16
Life As A Knowledge Worker
I was searching for a photo of Peter Drucker when I came across this 14-year-old article by him on the experiences that had shaped him. The third experience, where he talked about learning a new subject every 3 years, resonates with me. It reminds me of what Steve Jobs said about learning calligraphy in college, something that had no practical application at that time but which proved useful later in his life. It seems that not being able to see the usefulness of something should not preclude one from learning it. Last week, a client told me that she was going to attend a change management course in the US. My first reaction was to ask her how the course would be useful in her work. Next time, I shall be asking “What next?”.
Nov 10
Knowledge Sharing Activities in People’s Daily Work
In my previous entries and at many other locations we discussed that it would be significantly beneficial if knowledge sharing activities of people are not an additional task but an integral part of their daily work. Many platforms - digital or not - require that people access another tool or step out of their daily routine. To achieve this, a good am of motivation and personal benefits is needed and we all agree this is not an easy task. Integrating knowledge sharing into people’s daily work would be without doubt a strong driver for user adoption.
How to integrate knowledge sharing in the daily routine? We have asked our users for ideas and I am happy to summarise here what they have came up with.
